Kumar comes home from White Castle

Dana Stevens seems convinced that the film adaptation of Jhumpa Lahiri's really shitty novel The Namesake won't suck nearly as bad as the book did. Is there nothing that a little bit of Kal Penn idiocy can't save?

To be clear, there are very few books that I love, and very few books that I loathe. Any book within two standard deviations of my personal mean, I generally like a lot, even if I don't love it. The Namesake, I loathed. Maybe it's just from hanging around with too many Indian kids in high school. Maybe it's how Lahiri managed to create a stock character from second generation Indian-Americans, when no stock character really existed to my knowledge. Besides an interesting name, Gogol (whom Kal Penn must desperately save from lameness) is completely uninteresting. If you've ever met a single person whose parents immigrated from India, no matter how boring a person that person might be, that person is more interesting than Gogol.