SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE
SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE
November 27 2010, DVD, home living room, from Netflix
Yeah, finally saw last year's Oscar Best Picture, just because I think I wanted to watch something upbeat and uplifting. Maybe the latter is true, but the story isn't really all that upbeat. I thought it would have more dancing and silliness or whatever; there's not much dancing, and the silliness is mostly restricted to a single very intense poop joke and a couple of rakish grins from the child actors in the first third of the film. More than anything, this is a story about crushing poverty, hopeless idealism, and coincidences so extreme that one starts thinking in terms of deities making sport out of the puny humans. On the other hand, SLUMDOG is a very good movie in the sense of Movie™, all outsized emotions, high stakes, intense emotions, and improbable triumphs (as well as a kickass score by my man A.R. Rahman, the most talented pop-music thinker in India - so good that it now lives on my iPod).
All of the actors are genius - of course Dev Patel as the adult Jamal is superb, and as the concluding dance sequence (yes there is some dancing eventually) can not only cut a rug, but looks like a billion rupees while he does it. His love interest, Frieda Pinto, has much less to do, mostly being transcendently beautiful, but the girl can act, and I'd love to see her in a role where she's allowed to do so. The child actors - two age-groupings' worth - are actually even better, especially seeing as they aren't trained actors, and were famously picked kind of out of the slums in which the story is set (and whatever happened to the fashionable outrage of 2009, wherein the child actors weren't adequately compensated and went back to their slummy malnourished uneducated lives?). Everyone's go-to swarthy gentleman Anil Kapoor, who has played so many dark-skinned Others that I've lost track of them all, is excellent as the host of "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?" (or "millinare", as he pronounces it, much to my hilarity). I kind of love this guy.
Still, the greatest character in the story is India itself - its slums, its narrow alleyways, its glittering Mumbai streets, its incessant flies and astonishing range of colors. And yet it's Movie India, and as grim as the conditions are made to seem, I know good and well that this isn't reality. Reality is much darker and more awful. It's closer to the real thing than in the shinier Bollywood froth that has dancing all the way through, but still, this is the chawl as seen through Danny Boyle's digital-video lens and set to a propulsive tabla-techno beat. It's just as much of a fantasy as DEVDAS. I don't know how much the adoring Westerners realize that.
Still, very worthwhile, and I'd easily watch it again.
November 27 2010, DVD, home living room, from Netflix
Yeah, finally saw last year's Oscar Best Picture, just because I think I wanted to watch something upbeat and uplifting. Maybe the latter is true, but the story isn't really all that upbeat. I thought it would have more dancing and silliness or whatever; there's not much dancing, and the silliness is mostly restricted to a single very intense poop joke and a couple of rakish grins from the child actors in the first third of the film. More than anything, this is a story about crushing poverty, hopeless idealism, and coincidences so extreme that one starts thinking in terms of deities making sport out of the puny humans. On the other hand, SLUMDOG is a very good movie in the sense of Movie™, all outsized emotions, high stakes, intense emotions, and improbable triumphs (as well as a kickass score by my man A.R. Rahman, the most talented pop-music thinker in India - so good that it now lives on my iPod).
All of the actors are genius - of course Dev Patel as the adult Jamal is superb, and as the concluding dance sequence (yes there is some dancing eventually) can not only cut a rug, but looks like a billion rupees while he does it. His love interest, Frieda Pinto, has much less to do, mostly being transcendently beautiful, but the girl can act, and I'd love to see her in a role where she's allowed to do so. The child actors - two age-groupings' worth - are actually even better, especially seeing as they aren't trained actors, and were famously picked kind of out of the slums in which the story is set (and whatever happened to the fashionable outrage of 2009, wherein the child actors weren't adequately compensated and went back to their slummy malnourished uneducated lives?). Everyone's go-to swarthy gentleman Anil Kapoor, who has played so many dark-skinned Others that I've lost track of them all, is excellent as the host of "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?" (or "millinare", as he pronounces it, much to my hilarity). I kind of love this guy.
Still, the greatest character in the story is India itself - its slums, its narrow alleyways, its glittering Mumbai streets, its incessant flies and astonishing range of colors. And yet it's Movie India, and as grim as the conditions are made to seem, I know good and well that this isn't reality. Reality is much darker and more awful. It's closer to the real thing than in the shinier Bollywood froth that has dancing all the way through, but still, this is the chawl as seen through Danny Boyle's digital-video lens and set to a propulsive tabla-techno beat. It's just as much of a fantasy as DEVDAS. I don't know how much the adoring Westerners realize that.
Still, very worthwhile, and I'd easily watch it again.