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Slumdog Millionaire

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KvP:
Just got back from watching it. I have to agree with Harry here, although I probably liked it less than he did. The movie's actually quite slack up until the point at which flashback meets the movie's present time. Then I felt the "magic", as there were actually stakes, and there was the whole "everybody's rooting for the hero!" thing going, so you feel the same sort of excitement you feel when watching a sports film when the final plays / innings / what have you are about to begin.

Other than that, the love story at the heart of the film felt really, really undercooked. I suppose the problem for me was the imposition of thinly sketched fairy tale characters over a setting of real squalor and poverty. When a child in the movie jumps into a pool of shit, it's played for yuks, but I was bothered by the fact that if a kid were actually to do that they would likely contract many, probably fatal, diseases. Many people have actually died that way. But the kid gets soaped up and is healthy and beautiful well into the future. When a child is blinded so that he will pull in more begging money for his handlers, it's not a real character experiencing that, it's a child being eaten by the big bad witches in the gingerbread house, it's kids being turned into donkeys, it's a real horror but it isn't real, because nothing else in the film is. The real pull of the film for me was the actual game show / interrogation plotline. Everything else was filler.

Scandanavian War Machine:
okay, i stopped reading after Kieffer's post because i don't want to have my opinion skewed before even seeing the film but i will say that i am definitely going to see this movie as soon as possible because i am a huge Danny Boyle fan. i've only seen one trailer for it and i don't even know what it's about but i'm going to see it just because it's Danny Boyle.

i'm actually excited to see it having no idea what it's about. it's like opening presents; you have no idea what to expect.


oh and did i mention that i love Danny Boyle? i'm pretty sure that i didn't.  :-D

Sophos:
I really thought that the torture scenes that opened the film were quite unnecessary in what otherwise would likely have been a PG-13 movie. That aside, I was actually very engrossed throughout. (Though it bugged me that they would slip in and out of English for no given reason.) The characters were incredibly engaging and deep, and every dramatic scene manages to hit hard enough without being overplayed. This fact testifies to the brilliant screenplay and directing, and I felt really added the the film's climax, a culmination of the entire point to the movie, allowing for crowd-pleasing closure and tying up all the right ends to a sublime drama.

Seriously, this movie was great. Movies that take place in foreign places like India often make it hard for American viewers to really understand the background of the given characters, especially if they're native to the land. However, Slumdog Millionaire manages to give just enough a vision into Indian culture without losing focus of the principle characters and plot.

I gotta be honest, I really liked the sequences with the kids. I feel like I would've appreciated them more if I didn't already know how one of them turned out (Salim was actually the best character in my opinion, I love the way he was portrayed; THAT is how you do character development) but they definitely did a great job of setting up the personal connection Latika and Jamal, fleshing out each of their characters, and in and of themselves were very interesting stories.

Now to go see Gran Torino and forget all about it...

Ballard:
I'll third Harry here. It's quite good for what it is but by no means a contemporary masterpiece.

On a petty note, I was a bit thrown off by how the filmmakers chose to mix Indian and English culture and language. The film (somewhat) accurately portrayed Indian life but sacrificed realism to make it comprehensible to western audiences. I appreciate the attempt but in the end it just jumbled shit up unnecessarily. The actors (particularly the WWTBAM? host) switched languages mid-sentence and the TV show was displayed in the American format (questions and answers are in English, etc). I found myself wishing that the producers had firmly decided between accessible and fully accurate rather than compromise.

Also, what was with the Bollywood dance sequence during the credits? It seemed really out of place and cheapened any emotion that the love story and the older brother's sacrifice evoked.

KvP:
I actually think that was the liveliest part of the film! I imagine it was just something that was filmed at the tail end of the shoot, just for fun.

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