MOVIE REVIEW #1: past due but Slumdog was pshhh...ugh...
Actually not awful but average. Perhaps because everyone had lived up its hype for me that when I finally saw it I felt completely dissatisfied. The beginning was vibrant and cute but then Danny Boyle completely dropped the plot. Maybe not the plot exactly but he definitely forgot about his characters. He threw in gimmicky, sympathetic drama, and so much cheese I thought I was going to puke by the time the brother killed himself in a tub full of money. Bitch please...Maybe it's just me but if I'm promised a drama for which love is the main theme, I better feel for the characters. That means I better feel like the characters are real, believable, quirky, each with their identifiable idiosyncrasies, people who have distinct personalities. If it's going to be about love then focus on the nuances that draw people together, focus on the details which make someone attractive, focus on why the protagonist is head over heals in love with Latika. I didn't get any of that. Both the protagonist and Latika felt like flat, one dimensional characters who were drawn together simply because they were both slumdogs. That's not enough to carry a movie that's supposed to be about love. Maybe they were just bad actors but that simple act of letting the audience sympathize with the characters was lost on me. In fact, there wasn't even any empathy at all and throwing in lines like 'Love saves us' or 'Latika is the most beautiful woman in India' makes it worse because a movie that has to spell things out for me always kills the movie for me. Love shouldn't be spelled out. If a director resorts to gimmicks to carry the characters through the plot then to me the director has failed his job as a director completely. The second half of the movie revolves around him trying to save Latika but if there's no substance behind his idealism, then the search is futile and uninspiring and I squirm in my seat for the next 30 minutes while I watch the naive, nice guy spew cheesy lines on Millionaire. I guess while Danny Boyle succeeded in his characterization of slum life, he forgot everything else. Perhaps he was trying to do too many things at once: slum life at its worst, its best, love, life, zest! but the truth is if you want to focus on a way of life, then focus on a way of life. If you want to focus on a love story, then focus on a love story. If you want to combine the two, it's definitely been done but Boyle failed at it miserably. The culture of the movie definitely came across but I think for Boyle, it would have been better had he incorporated character portrayal from City of God. That director took on a completely objective lens toward his characters in order for the mob life of Rio De Jainero slums to come across, yet the characters still felt real. They still felt believable. They didn't throw out gimmicky phrases to earn the audience's respect. You simply knew who these people were from the way they moved, their faces, their expressions.