Filmiholic

Am very happy to have finally made it to my first India Abroad Person of the Year awards this past Friday night, downtown at the Museum of the American Indian, and my goodness it was wall-to-wall well known folks with connections to the desh: Jagdish Bhagwati, Madhur Jaffrey, Mira Nair, Salman Rushdie, Zarin Mehta, Sant Singh Chatwal, (current NYC resident) Abhay Deol, Nandan Nilekani, and Floyd Cardoz, to name a few.

And then there were this year’s awardees, including Zubin Mehta, Jhumpa Lahiri, and POTY Fareed Zakaria.

Sir Salman was accompanied by a gorgeous, statuesque woman who towered over most of us, and I kept thinking “I know I know her, but from where???”  And then, over the weekend, while watching Will Farrell’s tribute (ha ha) to Dubya, who appears as the hyper-hot Condi, but the very same lady, Ms. Pia Glenn!  You can see her here, around minute 2:20.

It’s a lovely sunny St. Patty’s Day here in New York City, folks are dressed in all sorts of bizarre green gear (Mardi Gras beads?? what the???), and there are men in kilts lugging pipes and drums on public transportation.  Sure I’ve even donned a kurti with a green floral pattern and carried in soda bread to the office for all to enjoy.

On this day, in addition to missing my late Mom, I can’t help but think of some favorite Ireland-themed films that I’d recommend (should anyone ask): 

Excalibur (ok, ok, it’s the King Arthur story, but it was filmed in Ireland and gave Liam Neeson and Gabriel Byrne their film debuts, and introduced Helen Mirren to Liam, who then became her beau), 

Cal (with a vulnerable, young John Lynch and a demure (brunette) Helen Mirren as star-crossed lovers in northern Ireland)

Into the West (Gabriel Byrne as an impoverished distraught widow and father, struggling to raise his kids on his own in the blight of urban Dublin, in pre-Celtic Tiger days)

In the Name of the Father (brilliant soundtrack and another great turn by Daniel Day-Lewis as Gerry Conlon in this story of the wrongfully imprisoned Guildford Four)

and my fave of all time, for its humor and its grit and its tribute to the north side of Dublin (from where my clan hail):

The Commitments (Alan Parker’s wonderful story - again set in the days before the boom of the Celtic Tiger - about a young guy who wants to establish a soul band, reasoning that “The Irish are the Blacks of Europe”.  It’s a great ensemble film, with the 9 or so members of the band being selected (the audition scene is hilarious, especially Colm Meaney’s retort about U2 at the end), rising to local fame, and then falling into all sorts of internal squabbles.

* * * * * * * * *

And for a last bit of merriment, the newly-launched website Irish Central has compiled a list of the 10 Worst Irish Accents on Film.  Good fun there.

Happened to catch part of the latest Celebrity Apprentice this week, and saw this blonde Playboy Playmate who is one of the contestants, and, at first, I mistook her for Gene Simmons’ wife/girlfriend/POSSLQ, Shannon Tweed, but then it hit me: she’s Brande Roderick, the Baywatch girl who played Ritesh Deshmukh’s gori wife in Out of Control.

For anyone who missed it, Out of Control is that awful little 2003 flic set in NY and NJ wherein Ritesh plays a young, innocent, recently arrived taxi driver who is about to be deported until a white girl he knows offers to marry him.  Soon after the nuptials, they fall in love.  Then his father (Amrish Puri) back in the Punjab gets him home to marry a local girl (Hrishtaa Bhatt), and they return to the US.  Of course, it all turns into a big mess, and it has the most ridiculous and unbelievable ending.