If you haven't seen 'Slumdog Millionaire'
Please do. The movie is as good as all the reviews say. And as a friend noted Wednesday after the sad breaking coverage wound down, short of traveling to India, you can hardly get closer to Mumbai right now.
Even Slumdog cuts outside the film are worth your time. Take M.I.A., raised in Sri Lanka, India and England, talking about her soundtrack contributions: "If I was painting a picture of that part of the world, it's not that I'd make it more glum, but I would try not to involve all the positive stuff from it, like the singing and dancing and easy stuff. I think we're already used to that, and comfortable with that part." Gawker is right about how well Paper Planes fits in the mix. I can't stand the song on the car radio. But I love it in the movie.
A.V. Club's talk with director Danny Boyle works as well. On Mumbai:
AVC: In one interview, you talked about the vibrancy of the East, and how we have insulated ourselves from realism in the West. Do you have a theory about why that's the case?
DB: I think it's not so much East-West; I noticed it because Simon [Beaufoy, Slumdog Millionaire's screenwriter] said that the way it was written felt Dickensian. One of Dickens' biggest influences was the growth of London as a Victorian city, and the extremes being created as it expanded. The poverty and enormous wealth–it felt like a city in fast-forward, and that's what Mumbai felt like when I was working there. The extremes are available, and you can still tell melodramatic stories, and they feel realistic. In the West, those extremities, which we still want to see, are placed in fantasy movies. I'm sure that's one of the reasons superheroes and fantasy have become so dominant in the last 10 or 15 years, culturally. The more realistic stories tend to be gentler and softer-edged. Not so extreme in the sense of melodrama. You can exploit it, as a storyteller, for quite extreme subject matter. People say about Slumdog, "Did you imagine that the horrific scene of a kid being blinded and the happy dancing scene would blend together?" You don't think like that. You imagine they will go together because they both feel realistic in that city. You imagine they will gel, and you don't realize the contrast until afterward, when you try to analyze it in interviews.
Beyond what he gives you of the city, Boyle hits a mark familar from the last of his movies I saw. Previously here: Millions takes its young minds and allows in what most tellings ignore — sadness and faith.
Update the next day: Ann Hornaday writes on the feeling in today's Post. "Sometimes, when movies coincide with current events, it's not the message that proves eerily prescient. It's the medium — especially how it looks and feels."
November 28th, 2008 at 5:51 PM
I'm seeing it this weekend. Can't wait!
November 28th, 2008 at 6:09 PM
Hope you enjoy it! For the rest of you all, another friend just tweeted me about the trailer. Yes, it looks cliched, especially if you were any degree of culturally cognizant during the four-nights-a-week Millionaire overkill year with Regis. Ignore that feeling. It may not seem possible to come fresh to the show, even now eight years later, but this movie makes it work.
November 30th, 2008 at 11:49 PM
I just wish the movie hadn't been so damn manipulative … that EVERY turn the brothers made over their lives hadn't led them straight into the gaping maw of disaster. The idea that you could grow up in a place even as destitute as Mumbai and still not experience a moment of genuine kindness or grace until you appear on a game show just strikes me as completely phony.
That said, it's an unsettling and memorable film, with plenty of hard-to-forget images.
December 1st, 2008 at 6:30 AM
Maybe that could be a whole other movie. "Seven-year-old Jamal, I would like to give you this washer-dryer combination and jetski, worth $1126.75 American…." Or the time he was taken in by a kindly banker who taught him the art of negotiation between calls with unseen clients. Or the time he asked all sorts of people — maybe 100! — about the quickest way to the train station. He was able to pick up his mother promptly. Or the time he had a shopping list after a market's diverse signage had suffered storm damage. Or, in a twist, how Double Dare got him his first job.
December 1st, 2008 at 11:00 PM
Just a little balance would have been nice, is all.
March 11th, 2009 at 5:56 PM
[...] Georgetown under the big midday sun, went to the theater beneath the Whitehurst and loved the film. As much as I liked Slumdog and thought it was deserving of cinematography awards, The Wrestler should've won Best [...]