Welcome to The Auteurs Ravikiran. You didn’t find this forum too late. Personally I hope it never dies. It’s great to get a genuine Indian’s thoughts on the film. I’ve never had such mixed feelings about any film in my life as I have Slumdog. I know the writer truly felt the term Slumdog was a compliment but I can’t believe a person as well educated and traveled as he is unaware of what a degrading term it is to call someone from India or The Middle East a dog. I don’t think there’s a western profanity to compare to it. And although I’m a huge fan of his as he wrote the Full Monty and an even bigger fan of Danny Boyle and never got tired of watching them accepting their many awards personally I just liked to think of it as being for their body of work, not Slumdog per se.
More newsworthy and even more dramatic to me than the film itself or all of it’s hype is the story of the two child actors who still live in a slum to this day. I tried to keep everyone on here up to date as their story progressed but no one seemed interested. If you’d like to read what I wrote on that topic type in “THE REAL LIVES OF THE KIDS IN SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE” in the search box. I’d like to get your thoughts on how the studio reaping hundreds of millions of dollars from the film has turned their backs to these kids.
I saw Slumdog last night and agree with many of the complaints I’ve read here on the forum. I’d like to mention one aspect that some people may be missing, or have just not mentioned. While the “it is written” theme could be a deconstructive element, “the catch-all of a bad fantasy” as Samiracle pointed out, from what I know it is also a Muslim reference. “It is written” is meant to evoke a sort of divine intervention from Allah, a way of situating the lives of people. Slumdog is as much about destiny, in the religious sense, as it is about the implausibility of fantasy. This is something that seems kind of fishy, for a film to be made by a non-Muslim but which seems to preach to its audience with the religion in mind. Boyle is trying to say that for these people, divine intervention straightened out their lives. That to me, contrary to what the Academy thinks, is not universal. This is an innately Muslim film.
With the DVD coming out on Tuesday and me being away from the forum, I thought it’d be nice to resurrect this subject. I chose this one because it is the closest in name to how I feel, I liked it, but didn’t love it.
I think the best part of this movie is its starry eyed idealism, which many people were easily hand-fed after Obama’s great wave of hope and inspiration. I liked the message of the movie. I believe that everyone should hope and that good things will always happen to everyone, this is the nature of life. That being said, this movie REALLY stretched that.
I enjoyed it, my biggest complaint, I suppose is with the material. I don’t blame the writer or director, who both did very well. It just was truly unbelievable stuff. ESPECIALLY that he didn’t know what was on the flag of India, that was added to show that this kid doesn’t know EVERYTHING, but I think they definitely could’ve come up with something more believably wrong. Maybe the coincidences were too many, maybe they were too specific, probably both.
I don’t know how many times people here have seen this, but in NO way does this stand up to multiple views. I saw it 3 times with friends who had not yet seen it, and it just gets more and more boring each time. The love story in particular, once you’ve seen it once and gotten over the “yay!” factor of the final unity, is really, hatefully predictable and more stupidly coincidental than Jamal knowing the answers.
Overall, it was a half on a scale (like 5/10 or 50/100 or 45.5/91). I liked the way it was shot and I liked the soundtrack (Except using Paper Planes twice in a row. Couldn’t they find ANY filler???). I had never really seen much of India and it was cool. I really liked the way the poverty was decidedly mundane to the people who are supposed to have lived in it everyday. In my mind it definitely did NOT deserve 8 Oscars (!?!?!?!) but I felt it was not an utter waste of time.
By the way, that dance number at the end was killer, I don’t believe in anyway it was supposed to even be a tangent to the plot, it was just something to make what I believe are the most entertaining credits I’ve ever seen ;-D
Rahmanalyst
I’m new around here and my first post, being from India, has to be about Slumdog Millionaire. It is written. No, I did not like the movie. But it had more to do with the hype. And the painfully obvious attempts to include elements from Bollywood ( trains, the horrible song and dance at the end, the pathetic over-the-top symbolism). All of this added to my not liking the movie.
Like so many here have mentioned, I liked how it took off. Hit the ground running. One thing which was a little weird to me was how conveniently the kids started talking faultless english the moment they became teenagers somehow did not work for me. It was as if I lost some connection. I know I’m nitpicking, but it was essential for me.
And the moment he became a 20-something, everything was over for me. It went spiralling down into a mish-mash of too much emotion, greed and arrogance. And it just did not work for me. I have had the misfortune of watching way too many movies end in the railway station, so towards the end I was almost tired.
Oh, by the way, extremely mixed reactions for this movie in India. Lot of people calling it a PR disaster coming at the worst possible time when loads of people are looking at India with a lot of interest. Imagine the bad publicity this creates for the movie.
But I’m curious, did any one of you who has never visited India before, felt differently about India after watching this movie. Did this movie do anything to change your perception about the country. This movie had very little to do with the country but still I have had too many people telling me, it “changed” the way they saw India. So I’m curious.
I see long posts are the norm here, so I don’t really have to apologise.
I have found this forum too late. Sigh.