MUBI

Jika saya jadi Amitabh Bachchan, saya juga pasti tercengang-cengang dan loncat dari kursi ketika menonton Slumdog Millionaire (2008). Saya, eh, Amitabh punya alasan yang kuat untuk itu. Selama ini dalam film- film Bollywood ia begitu heroik dan selalu berperan sebagai jagoan, orang kaya yang tinggal di rumah mewah, dan menampilkan kehebatan-kehebatan negerinya, serta terkenal seantero dunia.

Namun, tiba-tiba pria asal Inggris itu (baca: Danny Boyle) membuat manuver tajam yang sama sekali tidak diduga banyak orang. Ia dengan vulgar menggambarkan kehidupan masyarakat paling bawah dalam masyarakat India; potret anak-anak jalanan ala Charles Dickens, yang hidup dalam lingkungan yang kumuh, penuh kekerasan dan minus pendidikan yang layak. Saya, jika jadi Amitabh, juga pasti emosi melihat anak-anak India, yang mengidolakan saya, dijadikan ‘binatang’ dan ‘diburu’, dan dicaci maki karena nasib mereka. Dalam blog-nya, Amitabh mengatakan:

“If [Slumdog Millionaire] projects India as [a] Third World dirty underbelly developing nation and causes pain and disgust among nationalists and patriots, let it be known that a murky underbelly exists and thrives even in the most developed nations.”

Sepanjang film kita disuguhi tur gratis kehidupan jelata orang India. Dan barangkali, yang paling membuat Amitabh geram, hal tersebut disaksikan jutaan orang di seluruh dunia. Itulah yang dibuat oleh Boyle dalam film yang membawa pulang delapan piala Oscar, yang di antaranya untuk Best Motion Picture ini.

The Power of Coincidence
Slumdog Millionaire diangkat dari novel best-selling India berjudul Q & A karya Vikash Swarup. Diadaptasi ke dalam skrip oleh Simon Beaufoy, film ini bercerita tentang seorang pelayan yang mendapat kesempatan untuk ikut kuis Who Wants to Be a Millionaire yang pernah begitu booming pada periode 2003– 2006.

Semua orang suka kuis Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. Boyle sendiri mengakui bahwa salah satu dasar pembuatan film ini adalah karena ia menggemari kuis tersebut. Nasib film ini sepenuhnya terletak di bahu Jamal Malik (Dev Patel) yang sedang duduk di kursi panas berhadapan dengan Prem Kumar (Anil Kapoor), sang pembawa acara kuis. Selangkah lagi Jamal akan memecahkan rekor dengan memenangkan 20 juta Rupee. Namun sang pembawa acara dan polisi tidak percaya: bagaimana pula seorang yatim piatu, yang tidak bersekolah dan tinggal di daerah kumuh itu bisa menjawab seluruh pertanyaan dengan benar? Skeptisisme yang wajar dan masuk akal. Lalu, Boyle membawa kita ke tiap suspense, flash back, klimaks, dan detil kejadian yang memberikan jawaban untuk setiap pertanyaan kuis. Plot yang unik.

Tapi apakah semua itu bukan merupakan kebetulan belaka? Kebetulan saja setiap pertanyaan yang diajukan dalam kuis adalah representasi hidupnya. Kebetulan saja, misalnya, ketika Jamal diberitahu temannya bahwa foto dalam lembaran US$100 adalah Benjamin Franklin. Namun, “cinta akan menemukan jalannya” dan Boyle mengeksplorasi tema itu dalam setiap bingkai kilas balik kehidupan Jamal. Jika tidak percaya pada probabilitas dan peluang, silakan saja menganggap Slumdog Millionaire film yang mengada-ada.

Tapi seperti yang kita ketahui, tujuan Jamal bukanlah uang, tetapi cinta. Jamal benar-benar merepresentasikan lirik lagu “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” (1956) yang dulu pernah dinyanyikan oleh Cole Porter: “Who wants to be a millionaire? I don’t, and I don’t, cause all I want is you…” Dalam setiap detil kejadian dalam hidupnya, Jamal berusaha mencari Latika (Freida Pinto), teman masa kecilnya yang sangat ia rindukan. Walaupun pada akhirnya ia tahu bahwa Latika telah dijadikan gundik seorang kepala preman, ia tetap mencintai Latika. Dialah jawaban semua pertanyaan yang diajukan kepada Jamal. Jamal hanya ingin ‘memenangkan’ Latika.

Anomali tahun 2008
Menurut saya, Boyle sangat berani membuat film seperti Slumdog Millionaire. Padahal ia tahu akan memiliki risiko gagal total. Dan kita semua tahu bahwa pada akhirnya film Boyle memperoleh delapan piala Oscar. Hal ini bukanlah prestasi sembarangan. Namun, Amitabh yakin bahwa Slumdog Millionaire terkenal hanya karena dibuat, disutradarai dan ditonton dari perspektif Barat. Amitabh merasa nasionalismenya ditelanjangi (memang dalam beberapa adegan Boyle menunjukkan superioritas Barat, seperti ketika dua orang turis Amerika ‘mengajari’ orang hitam India agar memperlakukan anak-anak dengan pantas. Boyle sedikit ‘gagal’ menghindari stereotip negatif yang mungkin muncul dari adegan tersebut). Salah seorang teman saya bergurau dengan mengatakan, “Coba kalau pembawa acara kuis itu diperankan oleh bung Amitabh Bachchan, pasti reaksinya akan lain.” Terlepas dari praduga teman saya, Amitabh punya poin sendiri yang dapat ia perdebatkan.

Namun film ini tetaplah sebuah anomali pada tahun 2008; berbudjet rendah namun sangat menghibur, dibangun dengan tema sederhana bahwa “uang tak dapat membeli cinta” namun memiliki pesan yang sangat dalam. Film ini juga diperkuat oleh tiga karakter (Jamal, Salim dan Latika) yang diperankan oleh sembilan orang dalam tiga fase. Semuanya begitu personal dan ‘individualistik’, sehingga kita tidak pernah salah mengetahui mana Jamal kecil, Salim remaja, atau Latika dewasa. Selain itu, Anil Kapoor yang memang merupakan superstar di India, juga memberikan karakter yang kuat kepada tokoh Prem, si Pembawa Acara kuis yang pongah itu. Sedangkan latar yang diambil begitu jujur dan nyata menggambarkan sisi lain kota Mumbai. Ditambah aransemen yang menggetarkan dari A.R. Rahman, Slumdog Millionaire rules!

Ok, so this very poor Indian teen is on the game-show. He’s doing pretty well. He must be cheating right? Poor people can’t know answers to trivia questions! But you’re not so sure he’s cheating that you kill him, you’re just sure enough to beat him, drown him, and torture him with electricity until he tells you how he knew all the answers. Looks like all that torture has loosened his tongue. What’s that? He tells you he didn’t cheat. Hmmm… but… then… how did he know trivial information?

La caméra survolté de Danny Boyle a bien du mal à masquer les lourdeurs d’un scénario lacrimal et ne réussit qu’à accomplir un sommet de kitcherie et de simplisme.

Emotions primaires et artificielles pour gogos vulgaires. Slumdog Millionaire est Simpliste et racoleur. En singeant les procédés à deux balles de la télévision, Danny Boyle a réussi à faire de la soupe télévisuelle ! Quelle découverte !

So I just sat down with Slumdog Millionaire for the first time. Even if I adore the cinematic medium, I avoid the Academy Awards like the plague, and when that time came I decided to watch this film instead which happens to have won in 2009’s major categories. As the film came out, I was into the thick of travel, and moreover the film didn’t seem to me like a good fit for Danny Boyle’s style. No less, it is one of those films about foreign poverty, with a grand conscience, and those can turn out just awful. My perception is that, inevitably, people patronized (and then patronized) the film with work-righteous emotions fit for the occasion, and its distributors piled onto that package with the moniker that it was the “feel-good movie of the year.” No thanks.

But I watched it anyway, because it was just remastered onto Blu-Ray and I became an admirer of Danny Boyle’s wild directorial style from his science fiction masterpiece Sunshine, which ranks with Kubrick’s 2001 and Tarkovsky’s Solaris as perfected speculative fiction, lacking any mess of cowboys and indians in space with noises magically permeating vacuums.

Something surprised me about Slumdog Millionaire, though I ultimately found it flawed from its failure to resist utter sappiness with a hyper-romantic disregard of reality (too many perfect coincidences; it might as well have tried to be a Greek drama about gods and fates). The surprise for me was in its brash, stylistic disregard for the culture. Boyle shot the film with agitated camera movements, super-wide-angle lenses (practically fish-eyed), avant-garde compositions, skewed framings, and so forth — in other words, idiomatic to Boyle’s modernist style. (His cinematographer is the genius who shot Lars von Trier’s brilliant prelude to Antichrist.) Yet, if the original vision were that of the typical Birkenstock-armored documentarian, all of these stylistic measures would be a violation. It is in fact only at the end of the film (train station dancing sequence) where the Hindi cultural sensibility of Bollywood bridges the gap, and it becomes a merged work of cinema.

And that is the whole point. A Westerner visiting India arrives a Westerner and leaves a Westerner — show me exceptions and I’ll show you a skeptic. The pretense of all filmmakers, composers, authors and visual artists who immerse themselves for the purpose of divining native art is perfectly inauthentic. (Notably, my favorite living composer, Philip Glass, “invented” the last major movement in serious contemporary music — Minimalism — under the guidance of Ravi Shankar when tasked with transcribing microtonal indigenous ragas into Western notation. Minimalism, and Glass’s Minimalism, does not sound Indian, yet those Eastern fingerprints are all over the place.)

It only increased my otherwise simple affection for the film when I surfed around a bit only to find significant mass criticism against it for failing (in one fell swoop?) to “capture” the spirit and the desolation of Mumbai. I also find it comical as well as hypocritical that many are quite furious to know that the untrained child actors are still living amidst the depicted poverty. Surely they can only be prosperous and happy in comparison to Western standards of heavyweight wealth! And surely, snatching them from that “slumdog” environment will solve it all. Yet in truth, actors are merely work-for-hire, and it could only be an organized labor force with the full faith and credit of an adoring pop culture (I’ll say it: the Hollywood Establishment) who could twist that vocation into something of hocus-pocus and when-you-wish-upon-a-star. One wonders whether, for example, any particular A-list actress complainant regularly follows up on the well-being of her immigrant gardener who, ahem, trims her bushes at her Malibu home.

In short, this is a subversive film — and on that level, I rather enjoyed it.

Overly sentimental, anything but credible and ridiculously over-hyped, this petty excuse of a movie managed to reel in a multitude of Oscars. I have to admit I wasn’t exactly bored while watching it, but a second viewing just isn’t going to happen.

The storyline’s a wash – to name just one inconsistency, as Salman Rushdie pointed out: from Bombay to the Taj Mahal by jumping a train? Really? -, the actors don’t bring anything truly endearing or sympathetic to their characters, and the ‘award-winning’ music is more often a nuisance than an extra to the whole movie-going experience. Don’t get me wrong: I love M.I.A., for instance, but for the biggest part it just didn’t work for me.

In fact, the only virtues of this film are the often astonishing landscapes, the energetic, yet dynamic camera work and the rhythmic, punctual direction. But you simply cannot make a good movie out of those three elements – except if you wanna go all ‘Koyaanisqatsi’, which I love. But they didn’t.

Hence: two out of ten.

P.S.: To be completely honest, I would probably rate this a six (tops) if it weren’t for the suffocating hype surrounding the film, but I feel like bringing the overall score down a notch in my own humble way, because ‘Slumdog’ simply doesn’t deserve such a high rating. I mean: in the IMDb Top 250? No.

Let’s just wait and see who will remember this film in three to five years’ time.

I came to watch Slumdog Millionaire expecting a masterpiece after all the Oscars hype and gushing reviews from my friends. Although I wasn’t completely and utterly disappointed, I couldn’t help but feel slightly cheated. This film views like an excitable Bollywood come adventure film come biopic but doesn’t really pull off any of them successfully. Dev Patel gives a convincing performance as Jamal, and Freida Pinto is unquestionably stunning in her role as Latika. Ultimately, however, this film is entertaining but forgettable.

Seeing that this film has won basically every accolade known to humankind in 2008, I’m actually underwhelmed, especially considering how this is from the man who directed “Shallow Grave” and “Trainspotting”. This time, he covers the life of a boy in India, one who competes for several million rupees in a TV game-show. His life flashes before our eyes as he is apprehended post-show, suspected of cheating, while we witness him growing up. Love, loyalty and the despicable caste-system is in focus here. I think the film was coherent, at times nearly made me cry (which isn’t hard, though) but sorely missed any type of avant-garde and even – I think – a fresh view on love between the main character and his girl, which was quite supernatural in a bad way. As a collection of entertainment, this film is good, yet slightly disappointing. Including M.I.A.’s “Paper Planes” into the soundtrack helped, though.

It is a good film, undeniably, and the music is just perfect.
However, having read the book over a year before the movie was shown, I must admit I was a little disappointed: the book is brilliant, the story is complex and perfectly constructed, and the film results a little poor compared to it. The end is too simple and the last question easy to guess. Which is absolutely not the case in the novel by Vikas Swarup.
I strongly recommend that you read the book, and consider the movie as a pretty version of it. Nothing more.

Well, I guess I’m one of the few people who liked this film… I thought it was a beautiful jumble of colors and the actors were very appealing. The plot is predictable, yes; you can pretty much narrate the entire movie from the tagline, but that’s the point. And yes, it is sentimental, but it’s supposed to show how miracles happen to good deserving people. Yes that sounds just as gallingly sentimental, I know, but there is some truth behind it. The film is split between flashbacks, to Jamal’s childhood, the recent past, the gameshow, and the time after winning where he is being interrogated, when he is telling his whole story. Some of his stories are brutal and hard to watch, while others are endearing. The directing style is admirable, the sequences of shots mirroring the feeling of the scenes they’re capturing. It’s colorful, chaotic, wrenching, edgy, and yes predictable. And the dance number at the end is the best part.

How can one man be that good at picking projects to direct? Danny Boyle has yet to write one himself—granted, though, he has worked with the same people multiple times—but he can adapt his vision and style to anything. From musical, to drug induced frenzy, to children’s fantasy, to science fiction, to horror. No one does it like him, except for maybe Marc Forster; I like to think of him as the American Boyle. With this new film, Slumdog Millionaire, the Brit treats us to a touching love story, backdropped into a world of crime and poverty in Mumbai, India. It is such a simple tale, yet told in gorgeous flashback, peeling back layers when necessary and enhancing the relationships between our lead Jamal and those around him; those on his “friends and family” plan. Here is a young man from the streets, a boy who witnessed his own mother’s murder, living only to be reunited with the one person he truly loves, Latika. His bond to her leads him on an adventurous life full of violence and cruelty, events so harrowing that one would be hard-pressed to forget even the smallest detail about them. This is a great fact for Jamal as it will soon be shown how his life was lived with a destiny to be achieved. When he becomes a contestant on “Who Wants to be a Millionaire”, it’s as though the questions were written especially for him.

You are probably asking yourself how a film about a game show contestant having questions read as chapters in his life can be good. I know, it sounds like the most contrived piece of drivel, I agree. But trust me, it is far from that. Accused of cheating and arrested by the police, (talk about rights violations, at least we have rights in America), he is tortured to discover how he was able to trick the system. Only when nothing yields results does the Inspector, (the great Irfan Khan), decide to hear Jamal out and find the truth. What transpires is the film we have come to watch—a story told from a police chair, one of how the rough and tumble life of a slumdog gave him the exact right experiences to keep going towards a purse of twenty million rupees. Boyle, never one to go conventional, cuts between flashbacks of childhood, (the actual event being remembered), with Jamal in the hotseat on television, thinking of his past tragedies to continue the game as long as he can, in hopes that his love is watching, wherever she may be. With gorgeous cuts at the start—flashes of memories jumbled together as he is submerged in water or electrocuted—the structured chaos soon calms down to a normal pathway of three converging timelines: childhood, the previous night’s game show, and the present incarceration. We are shown exactly what we need at exactly the right time. The film couldn’t have been shot any other way and be nearly as successful as it is.

It all began in the slums with Jamal and his brother Salim. The two were inseparable no matter how much the older sibling would wreck the younger’s joy for his own laughter. They always believed in each other, even though they took diverging paths in life, the bond was never broken. These two Musketeers did what they needed to survive, looking out for one another and also for their surrogate third “brother” Lakita. Separated often, the three had a knack for finding one another through the years, until an event risks shattering any love between the brothers … an event that proves crucial to what characters do once the final trivia question is asked. Only when the bottom drops and one sees the monster they have become can he finally try to make amends. It’s a journey through time that proves how strong love is. Money is meaningless unless there is a life to live spending it. Who knows, if you live your life correctly, without regret, good things can happen. One doesn’t necessarily need to seek fortune in order to earn it and that fortune doesn’t always have to be monetary.

Boyle orchestrates it all with a steady hand, creating stunning visuals with composition, editing, (especially the numerous chase scenes on foot), and tempo changes; adding mood with a stellar soundtrack, (I’m enjoying it as I write); and allowing his actors to breathe free and give some powerfully natural performances. You have to give all those involved, (perhaps a little more to Loveleen Tandan who helped direct the Indian sequences) credit, for controlling three different actors as each of our three leads, all of which stay true to each other, never allowing you to believe they aren’t the same person just at different stages of their lives. Straight across the board, Jamal, Salim, and Latika are three-dimensional people trying to survive, no matter what they must do. I really enjoyed the youngest Salim, Azharuddin Mohammed Ismail, with his infectious and mischievous smile when he tricks his brother, and also the middle incarnation by Ashutosh Lobo Gajiwala, a boy at the crossroads of a path towards salvation or a descent ending with an eternity in the slum. Freida Pinto’s oldest Latika is wonderful as the troubled girl knowing only the kindness of one man, a man that she pushes away in fear of his death should they run away. However, it is Dev Patel’s Jamal that steals the show. With his blank stare and unceasing drive to find his love, Patel pushes on through it all. Severing ties and mending others to get closer to his dream, this young man never strays from his quest and you can see the wheels turning behind his eyes, calculating his next step.

A tale of destiny and striving to be good, Slumdog Millionaire is an uplifting parable showing how karma works. Everything happens for a reason, nothing is left to chance. Perhaps it is all written, but that doesn’t make the journey any tougher to endure. Jamal could have, understandably, given up at many times in his life, but his drive would not allow him that convenience. Conquering all odds, coming from the streets, to the point he didn’t even know Ghandi’s face was on his own country’s currency, Jamal gets the chance at a fortune and an opportunity to finally be free. I seriously found myself hoping he’d get the final question correct; it engrossed me that much. You’ll have to watch yourself to find out.

i hate who wants to be a millionare. i hate that this hot chick ends up hooking up with jumbo dumbo ears supreme. and i hate how coincidentally every question keyed into his life (chronologically none the less). in other words: TRASH! what the fuck is everyone smoking.

to be fair, i didn’t hate this movie when i watched it. the beginning was strong with nitty gritty angles and little brown kids running away from things. and then… it crept up on me. like a wicked hangover. the movie turned to shit in my mouth. i went from watching some edgy cinema to pure bolly wood bullshit. vomit! don’t get me wrong. i love me some bollywood. but not in a movie that’s sposed to be so “real” and “authentic” and “soul molesting” … or whatever. you know what i mean.

so the bottom line is. i was like a frog being slowly boiled in water. i didn’t hate it at first. then it got shittier through out the movie and i was kind of left scratching my head. then i found out it was directed by danny boyle and i went off the deep end.

THIS IS HIS WORST MOVIE EVER. (even worse than a life less than ordinary)