Actors

Decent Gogol

In celebration of the first installment of the Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows movie, these past two weeks I have been rereading the last book. It is somewhat a tradition of mine to read a novel right before the release of its movie so I can fully criticize how much it strays from the book. I can get quite unreasonable about this sometimes, analyzing the movie down to the most finite detail that differs from the author's representation. So naturally, watching the movie adaption of The Namesake caused me great distress on Friday. For the most part, the director's arrangement of the scenes did not bother me too much; in fact, I liked the way the movie began with Ashoke's accident and followed the story chronologically. My main criticism comes from the director's interpretation of the characters, Gogol in particular. Kal Penn does not match up with my mental representation of Gogol at all, so that immediately messed up my initial perceptions of the movie. And that was only aggravated by the fact the director thought a thirty-ish Kal Penn with long hair could accurately portray a high schooler. I feel that the casting director should have taken into consideration some of Penn's past roles, such as Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle or Malibu's Most Wanted, before casting him in such a serious, realistic role since naturally it influences the viewer's perceptions of the actor. However, when I tried to think of another Indian actor to play the part of Gogol, I came up depressingly short. Indian characters are simply not very prevalent in American media, but after some serious contemplation I thought of a perfect actor for Gogol: Sendhil Ramamurthy, the actor who played Mohinder Suresh on the show Heroes. For your viewing pleasure, I have also included a photo of Mr. Ramamurthy:

Better Gogol