Sunday, January 18, 2009

What the heck is a "Slumdog Millionaire"...and where can I find one?

I've been hearing about this film for a while it seems. Everyone from my good friends to Meredith Vieira every morning on "The Today Show" have been telling me I need to see it. I resisted for a while as I do with most things that have a lot of hype surrounding them, but as I realized, some things have a lot of hype because they're actually good.

"Slumdog" had an uphill battle to win my affection. For starters, I was less-than-impressed when I first heard the title. Second, I knew that the director was Danny Boyle whose body of work, aside from including Ewan McGregor, is not my cup of tea. Third, it's about "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" in India - WTF? This sounds horrible. No I do not want to spend my disposable income watching an Indian version of Regis Philbin in "Bend it Like Slumdog." Thanks.

But then the movie swept the Golden Globes which can only mean good things for its chances at the Oscars. I hate feeling out of the loop and clips from the film started looking pretty good - it also doesn't hurt that I realized there was a love story involved - it gets chicks every time. So I decided that resistance was futile and my time to see it had come.

The film follows 18-year-old Jamal during his time as a contestant on India's "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" We quickly find out that Jamal has done very well on the game show and is close to winning the grand prize. However, people in charge of the show assume he has cheated and question how he has gotten all the right answers when he is just a "slumdog." The movie takes place in a series of flashbacks to his life starting as a grade-school-aged child. These flashbacks serve the purpose of driving the narrative but also are a very clever way of showing how Jamal has learned the answers to the questions on the show.

The film is, at many times, difficult to watch with its depictions of life in the slums and the by-products of that kind of hardship. The shots of the shacks and trash that make up the slums of Mumbai are grand and sweeping and in direct contrast to what is depicted within them. Jamal grows up and gets by with his brother Salim and Latika, a girl from the slums that he befriends and falls in love with from the time they meet as children. As in any good love story, however, Jamal and Latika are repeatedly pulled apart by outside forces. His mission then becomes not just to survive, but to find Latika again.

Stylistically, this movie is a little MTV-in-the-90s, trying to be very hip and very young. It's in line with Boyle's previous "The Beach" and "Trainspotting." The end of this film is also reminiscent of "Run Lola Run," with a character racing through a city accompanied by a techno music soundtrack and replacing Berlin with Mumbai.

If there's one thing Boyle likes more than the 90s and scatology (see the diving-into-the-toilet scene in "Trainspotting" and an early scene in "Slumdog") it's canted angles. Straight-on angles are very rarely used in the film. I know we should feel a little disoriented in these settings, particularly us as Western viewers, but too much of a canted angle becomes distracting and draws attention to the fact that we are watching a film; it breaks the suspension of disbelief.

The film is emotionally intense and diverse. The ending in particular will have you feeling one emotion and the next shot will completely change that in an abrupt, but profound way. Be sure to stay for the end credits. If you haven't heard about it already, I won't ruin it, but it was the perfect way to end this film.

In the end "Slumdog Millionaire" gets a solid 4.5 out of 5 stars. It is an incredible film whose flaws are so minute you wouldn't notice them if you weren't planning on writing a blog about them later. Go. See it. Thank me later. Oh yeah and you can thank the people who actually, you know, made the film too.

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