Is the new Julia Roberts film a celebration of the assassination of Indira Gandhi?
04/03/2012
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Economist / blogger Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution has long admired my reviews of movies like Inglourious Basterds and District 9 that point out the overlooked intentions of the director. Now, he's come up with an iSteveian interpretation of his own of the new fairy tale movie Mirror Mirror, Tarsem Singh's big budget retelling of Snow White with Julia Roberts as the Wicked Stepmother Queen. 

Tyler thinks that the Sikh director has made up Julia to look like his people's historic enemy, Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, whom her Sikh bodyguards assassinated in 1984 following her violent crackdown on Sikh separatists holed up in the Golden Temple in the tank in Amritsar. 

I haven't seen the movie, but the idea that a Sikh director would make an allegory about Indira Gandhi as the Evil Queen seems plausible to me. They've made her up to look rather Kashmiri and the castle looks a lot like the Golden Temple, and the dance number is Bollywood.

If you've seen it and know something about Sikhs, what do you think?

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