FLAVORS A film review by Steve Rhodes Copyright 2004 Steve Rhodes RATING (0 TO ****): * 1/2
A MONSOON WEDDING wannabe, FLAVORS is an absolutely flavorless film about the love lives of a group of Indian and Indian-American software geeks. A bland concoction, it features unconvincing acting and exceedingly trite dialog. ("What is life without love?" asks one engineer. "What is life without a job?" another replies.) A lame sitcom masquerading as a movie, it doesn't have a coherent narrative but is just a bunch of idle chitchat that isn't believable, interesting or funny.
When the mother (Bharati Achrekar) of one of the characters asks her husband (Anjan Srivastava) whether it is okay that their son is about to marry a woman who is slightly taller, the husband reassures her than it is okay. After all, he argues with a non sequitur, "It's twenty-first century -- Computer Age."
The women are all anal-retentives with spotless homes they vacuum incessantly while many of the bachelor men are slobs. What these young adults share in common is the use of technology to communicate. In a typical scene, Rachna (Pooja Kumar) and Kartik (Reef Karim), using the Internet and cell phones, share a romantic dinner even though one is on the west coast and the other is on the east coast. But like the rest of the characters in the story, they don't have anything worth saying to each other or to us.
FLAVORS runs a very long 1:58. The film is in English and in Hindi with English subtitles. It is not rated but would be PG for some language and would be acceptable for kids around 8 and up.
The film is playing as part of this year's San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival, which runs March 4-11 in San Francisco and March 19-21 in San Jose.
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