You knew the article was going to be good when up front you saw the Contributors list: "Katherine Boo ("Opening Night" p. 22), a staff writer, has spent the past fourteen months reporting from the Mumbai slums, for a book to be published next year."

If you've kept up with your New Yorkers better than me — easy to do — you've read the piece in the February 23 issue. If you haven't read it, "Opening Night" is what you have to read after you've seen Slumdog Millionaire. The article is based on the night of the movie's premiere in Mumbai, but the setting is across town in the slums where Boo writes reality the way Danny Boyle's movie carried out a script. 

[Thirteen-year-old Sunil looks for good metal.] The ceilings of the garage were low. All the lights were off, including some blue ones that looked like spiders. During the day, sparrows skittered around the garage; but sparrows didn't skitter at night, so he wasn't sure which animals were making sounds. Not rats, he decided; he had never encountered them here before. Guards he had often encountered, but tonight he couldn't hear where they were. He moved carefully to a stairwell, which, instead of exterior walls, had steel slats with spaces in between them. The slats let in the white light from the newly renovated terminal, where families were still waving to departing passengers. The light increased the risk of his being seen by one of the guards, but it was essential to making an appraisal.

Also a must-click: The fiction piece from the same issue, Italo Calvino's "The Daughters of the Moon," where naked girls go chasing the moon as it dies, previously unpublished in English. You reach a certain point in the story, about a page in, where you can't help but run alongside.

Will Calvino's Six Memos for the Next Millennium make it off my counter this week, after sitting there the last few months? We hope and wait.

The good part of today was finding out The Wrestler was robbed. Good for me because I got to see the movie, not good for the movie itself… Walked to 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 Picture. Among other awards, Bruce's song should have received a nomination and beaten Jai Ho, a fine song but not an amazingly placed standout like I saw this afternoon, and I've put Milk now even higher on my watchlist to see if Penn beat what Rourke did.

Going to have to see Vicky Christina Barcelona again to see if Cruz beat Tomei. I equated the Cruz role to Brad Pitt's in Burn After Reading. Have yet to see the other three supporting actress movies. But I like Tomei. If she did more movies I've seen or had a TV show, she'd be on my list.

The less-good part of today was finding out Kinetic Vox had lost in the Knight News Challenge. The idea made it to the final round with about 70 of the original 2,300 applicants, but it didn't make the cut for funds. I knew the idea was a longshot all along, but I probably got my hopes up just a little toward the end. I'm not a big fan of losing. Next year.

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."