Film: just in case you're wondering

Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle really is the best stoner movie ever.

And Kumar is playing Gogol in the adaptation of Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake, directed by Mira Nair, who also directed Monsoon Wedding.

Now, I haven't read Lahiri's Pulitzer Prize-winning collection of short stories, Interpreter of Maladies, but The Namesake was one of the worst novels I've read in recent memory, just a little bit better than The Da Vinci Code. But the novel was bad because Lahiri seemed to take a really good idea for a short story, a disaffected Indian kid, the first son of an MIT SOBer, growing up into the American-Indian crossculture mess that's perfectly interesting and dying for representation in literature, and try to drag it into a terrible novel full of contrived, empty characters, all the unfunny Ivy League Indian stereotypes you could scrape out of a burnt samosa dipped in a turpentine lassi, with just really slow, pisspoor writing over all. But something tells me that any decent director (which Nair has shown herself adequate) could take this missed-dunk of a novel and make a fabulous movie out of it with just a little TLC.

I've never been so excited about a movie from a horrible book.

Well, unless you count The Da Vinci Code movie.