Utkarsh Ambudkar is not Siddharth Dhananjay

Is it racist if I say I confused the two American actors of Indian descent who can both rap?

The incredible performance by Utkarsh Ambudkar at the Oscars – he not only wrote his rap as the show was running, but also memorized it – reminded me of the other times I have enjoyed Ambudkar on screen, including Brittany Runs a Marathon and Patti Cake$. (Not so much Game Over, Man!, which was my least favorite movie of 2018.)

Only Ambudkar is not in Patti Cake$. That’s Siddharth Dhananjay.

My confusion came when I watched Brittany, actually. I was trying to place Ambudkar and I thought “Ah yes, that’s the guy in Patti Cake$.” When in fact I was probably remembering him from Game Over, Man!, if from anything at all.

Plus, they both rap, so there’s that. I didn’t know that when I saw Brittany, as rapping is not part of the character Ambudkar plays in that film. It is, however, the central part of Dhananjay’s character in Patti Cake$, so when I saw Ambudkar rapping at the Oscars, it only increased my certainty that they were the same person.

Before you go saying “What, all people of Indian descent look the same?”, let me show you a picture of them side by side. You have to admit the physical similarity. That’s Ambudkar on the left and Dhananjay on the right.

Okay, they’re not identical twins or anything. But they have a similar build and I do think there are similarities in their faces.

The scarcity of American actors of Indian descent also helps with the confusion. You’ve got Aziz Ansari, Kal Penn and (no, not Kumail Nanjiani, he’s of Pakistani descent). Internationally, you’ve got Dev Patel. In other words, there are few enough guys out there that if two of them look similar and they both have the ability to rap, it’s easy enough to assume they are probably the same guy, without committing a hate crime or anything. (Plus, Dhananjay wears a durag for most of Cake$) 

I really enjoyed Dhananjay in Patti Cake$ so I’m kind of disappointed his career hasn’t really taken off. Then again, I guess that’s not fair to say – he’s continued working, it’s just I haven’t seen anything else he’s done.

Maybe after the Oscars, Ambudkar’s career will take off.

In either case, now that I’ve done this little exercise, I won’t confuse them again.

Movies that seem like passwords

In scanning down the list of movies I've seen with my critics card -- a list I have no purpose in keeping other than obsessiveness -- I couldn't help but notice that consecutive slots were taken up by Mother! (or is it mother!?) and Patti Cake$.

And I thought "Those would make good passwords."

For those of you who don't know, I reset passwords. It's one of a hundred things I do in my job working on a service desk, but it's one of my most regularly recurring tasks, something I do as many as five times on an average day. I've even got my personally developed script down exactly:

"Okay, I'm going to give you the password in upper and lower case letters and numbers and symbols, and I'm going to use the military alphabet, so for example if it's the letter 'A' I'm going to say 'alpha.'"

I say these exact words as many as five times a day, and then I get a password that looks something like this -- D!7*(xB -- and give it to the end user.

(And yeah, I've got my military alphabet down cold, because I'm a hard-ass muthafucka.)

Don't know where that came from. Maybe it's all this talk about Patti Cake$. Or, the talk I'm about to launch into.

Setting aside all discussions of the quality of the movie, which I liked a lot (it's a bit like Hustle & Flow meets 8 Mile), its title makes for a valid password in my organization's complex 7 password criteria. In order to set a valid password, it has to be at least seven characters long and contain three of the following four: an upper case letter, a lower case letter, a number and a special symbol. (What makes them so "special," I don't know.)

Patti Cake$ certainly qualifies. It's 10 characters long, has two upper case letters, seven lower case letters, and a valid "special symbol," which is no guarantee -- it won't accept just any old weird symbol you can find on your average keyboard. In part to avoid conflicts with coding, I assume, the [ and the { and even the & are right out. You can't even use a ~, but I suspect that's because it's a major pain in the ass to have to explain to your average person what a "tilde" is, especially when most of them don't know the difference between a colon and a semi-colon. (Making matters more complicated, in Australia the parenthesis is referred to as a "bracket," while [ is called a "square bracket" and { is called a "fancy bracket.") Strangely, you can select either < or >, but for some odd reason, when these characters come up as part of a system-generated password, they prevent you from successfully setting a preferred password, which begs the question why they appear among the eligible characters in the first place.

The one area Patti Cake$ falls short is by containing a space, so you can just knock that right out. Oddly, though, the space is recognized as part of password if you are cutting and pasting and accidentally cut a space either before or after the password. The system will reject the password under those circumstances. Don't ask me. I don't understand these things.

The other thing that makes this a good password is that a common method of setting a complex 7 password is to type a real word that's easy to remember, only replace certain letters with symbols or numbers that look like them. The most common are things replacing an "a" with @, an "i" with 1, an "e" with 3 or, yes, an "s" with $.

Now Mother! is a slightly different story. Let's again set aside discussion of the film's quality (I liked it, it's like ... well, I'm not even going to get into what two or maybe 50 movies "meet" each other in this movie). If this were your password, it would perfectly qualify by being exactly seven characters, containing no spaces, having both upper and lower case letters and using a valid special symbol (the exclamation mark is also sometimes referred to as a "bang," but only among IT geeks, never to the general public).

Lately, though, I'm seeing the title written as mother!, lower case, and damn sex, lies and videotape for making other films think they can come along and do this. If that is indeed how Darren Aronofsky intended the title to be, it's no longer a valid password as it is missing the upper case letter, giving it only two of the four necessary content criteria.

Now if you want a valid administrator password, then you need to opt for the movie I'm seeing on Thursday night: Blade Runner 2049 (again excising the spaces). Administrator passwords have the stricter standard of a complex 13 requirement, which still permits you to use only three of the four (there are no numbers in my current administrator password) but requires it to be at least 13 characters. Blade Runner 2049 clocks in at 15 characters, even without the spaces.

I gotta stop taking work home with me.

A concentrated dose of Bridget Everett

When I first saw Bridget Everett, she was wearing an outfit something like this. It wasn't this one, exactly -- in fact, it was a red dress that left as little to the imagination as this, but I couldn't find any stills I liked of that online so I went with this one instead.

It was as the closing act on an episode of Inside Amy Schumer, or possibly a Schumer concert movie, and it had what I'm sure was the intended effect on me. Bridget Everett is a confronting person. Her comedy is raunchy, her confidence is off the charts, and she's in on the joke. If Amy Schumer is supposed to be a knowing variation on the way women sell themselves as sex objects -- but one that shows she still has a fair bit of vanity and still wants to be considered sexy -- then Bridget Everett is the utterly vanity-free version of that. Oh, I'm sure Bridget Everett considers herself sexy -- with that kind of confidence, how could you not? -- but her very persona is about eschewing vanity. She's not "ladylike." She's not "a size six." She doesn't care if a dress makes her look good or if it functions purely as a prop in her in-your-face brand of do-anything-for-a-laugh comedy.

This discomfited me a bit. I didn't know what to make of her. We're used to being able to see someone perform and instantly categorize them as some version of a known commodity. And I'd like to say this was a good thing; the ideal me would definitely say that. The real me left with a funny taste in my mouth, one I couldn't quite reconcile.

This was maybe as long as a year ago -- heck, maybe longer. I didn't think of Bridget Everett again until I saw her in two movies this past weekend.

The first came Friday night. It was Eli Craig's follow-up to a favorite of mine from a few years back, Tucker and Dale vs. Evil. Little Evil, as this one's called, is a Netflix original horror-comedy that looks at an antichrist child -- think Damien in The Omen -- from the perspective of the boy's well-meaning stepdad. Adam Scott is that guy, Evangeline Lilly is his wife, and Bridget Everett is a fellow "stepdad" -- a lesbian woman playing the father role, so to speak, in the relationship with her new wife and her wife's daughter (or was it son? I can't remember).

When I saw Everett come on screen, I thought "I know that woman from somewhere." And then, after not too much longer: "Oh yeah, that was that woman gyrating and pulsating around in a red dress on Amy Schumer." Because I think the dress warrants some attention, here, I'll include one of those less-than-ideal pictures:

Although I'd not known what to make of Everett the first time around, a positive impression formed more quickly and more concretely this time. In Little Evil Everett makes for a truly distinctive entry in the age-old "funny best friend" trope. She constantly calls Scott's character "bro" and acts basically like a douchy guy for most of the movie -- a douche with a heart of gold, though. I wasn't sure I liked Everett on Amy Schumer but she was super likable here. She pulls that off without resorting to any of the usual softening tactics that make you like an edgy character. Everett gets to be likable on her own terms, without losing any of that edge. Her character's dialogue and actions are a constant surprise, and a good one at that.

The rehabilitation of Bridget Everett -- or rather, my comprehension of her value -- took another big step forward when I saw her turn up in Patti Cake$ on Sunday night. Here she plays the alcoholic train wreck of a mother to the title character, an oversized New Jersey girl named Patricia who wants to become a rapper (Danielle Macdonald). She's perfectly cast as the bawdy former singer who spends her evenings trying to relive past glories by drinking herself into oblivion and singing karaoke at the local bar.

What impressed me so much this time is not that she has great comic timing and can give turns of phrase her own distinctive spin, but that she can play drama, too. You wouldn't necessarily expect dramatic nuance from a woman who goes on stage and pulls her dress over her head, revealing her underwear, and knowing that this will be funny rather than sexy. But it's really there. There's real pain in this woman who didn't become a great rock 'n roll singer like she hoped, and now must try to get by on the meager support offered her by her 23-year-old daughter who tends that bar and does odd catering jobs. But there's also a bit of hidden menace, a bit of spiteful superiority, that suggests this woman could knock your block off too.

I'd say there's probably not a wide range of options for a comic actress who looks like Bridget Everett does, and Rebel Wilson has already kind of given us a template for the type of career a woman like this can have -- funny, but possessing sexuality that's the subject of slapstick humor more often that it is anything else.

But in these two very different roles, Everett has already given us a glimpse of her possible range. Sure, she can play a comedy sidekick MVP in a broad comedy, as Wilson would. But indie drama, which requires getting in touch with a real inner anguish, is also something she does with distinction.

More than anything she's memorable, which is becoming increasingly uncommon even with "pretty faces." You may not be sure what you think of Bridget Everett from one performance. But then watch another one, and you will be.