{"id":457,"date":"2007-04-29T21:56:57","date_gmt":"2007-04-30T01:56:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bugfox.net\/fun\/2007\/04\/29\/the-namesake\/"},"modified":"2008-06-15T21:58:42","modified_gmt":"2008-06-16T02:58:42","slug":"the-namesake","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bugfox.net\/fun\/2007\/04\/29\/the-namesake\/","title":{"rendered":"The Namesake"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/image\/stars\/25o5.gif\" alt=\"2.5 Stars\" \/><br \/>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/www.imdb.com\/title\/tt0433416\/\">This<\/a> is an earnest, heartfelt and well-intentioned movie, and I really wish that I liked it more than I do. It&#8217;s basically about some immigrants from India who name their son &#8220;Gogol&#8221; after the Russian writer, and when he grows up he isn&#8217;t happy about that.<\/p>\n<p>More specifically, it&#8217;s about an upper-middle class couple from India who move to the United States, work hard and prosper. They send their children to elite universities. The children are a little bit rebellious, but not very. The children seem a bit shallow, but probably they will outgrow that. They all seem pretty well-adjusted. Sometimes they are unhappy but mostly they are happy. Nothing particularly unusual seems to happen to any of them.<\/p>\n<p>This is all very admirable but it doesn&#8217;t make much of a movie. A movie needs to show us something dramatic, or something absurd or something exotic; something that we haven&#8217;t seen before. There are a few nice scenes set in India that give us a glimpse of the culture, but there isn&#8217;t very much of this. For the most part these people don&#8217;t seem very different from people whose ancestors have lived in America for a dozen generations. I suppose that might be an interesting insight in itself, but the filmmakers themselves don&#8217;t seem to be aware of it, and even if they were I&#8217;m not sure that it would be enough to sustain a two-hour movie.<\/p>\n<p>There have been countless movies made about the American immigrant experience. Unfortunately almost all of them have been more interesting than this one.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This is an earnest, heartfelt and well-intentioned movie, and I really wish that I liked it more than I do. It&#8217;s basically about some immigrants from India who name their&#8230; <a href=\"https:\/\/bugfox.net\/fun\/2007\/04\/29\/the-namesake\/\">Read more &raquo;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[139],"class_list":["post-457","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movies","tag-the-namesake"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugfox.net\/fun\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/457","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugfox.net\/fun\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugfox.net\/fun\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugfox.net\/fun\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugfox.net\/fun\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=457"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bugfox.net\/fun\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/457\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugfox.net\/fun\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=457"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugfox.net\/fun\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=457"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugfox.net\/fun\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=457"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}