| (A viewer's review of Slumdog Millionaire) |
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| Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire has streaked across silver screen like an unexpected meteor. It has already won 6 awards from the London Critics' Circle Film Awards, 3 more from the Chicago Film Critics Association, and there are Oscar-noises being made around it. The movie deserves all the awards and acclaim it has been nominated for, and more. Slumdog Millionaire is quintessential good cinema: |
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| This film will make you laugh out loud, cry in empathy, smile in recognition, scream in triumph, bite nails in anticipation, get you angry, shock you, and ultimately, it will steal your breath away with its sheer sweetness. Based on Vikas Swarup's 2005 novel, Q & A, this film retains the structure of the immensely enjoyable book, in that it is a series of episodes connected to a central event, a quiz show. The central character of the movie, Jamal Malik (very effectively played by Dev Patel), remains true in essence to his literary version, Ram Mohammad Thomas, the bold, unapologetic mongrel, a product of an ethos as sweet, spicy, and hot as a garm-a-garam glass of masala chai, a cup of kadak mitthi that contemporary India is. In the movie, Mumbai becomes the personification of this India. |
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| Mumbai, which forms a live setting to the story of Jamal Malik, is not the glorified, glossy, romanticized dream city often offered by Bollywood for mass consumption. Actually, the focus is on Dharavi, Asia's largest slum, and the cruel, starving, corrupt underbelly of one of the most cosmopolitan cities of the world. This portrayal feels like a breath of fresh air to me, since it resonates more with my memories of what real Mumbai feels like, rather than the air brushed utopias a lot of Hindi movies portray, and coming from a Bollywood junkie like me, this is high praise. |
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Like a serving of street chai, this movie is noisy, gritty, real enough to burn your tongue if you are unprepared, and at the same time, just as sweet and inimitable. All the characters are believable and the audience cares about them, which is quite an achievement for the director (Danny Boyle), considering the central three characters are played by three different actors each. The music by A. R. Rahman is toe-tapping good and provides a wonderful underscore to the pace and spirit of the movie. It is a heartbreakingly triumphant story, a scintillating, intoxicating cocktail of an undying fairytale and grim reality, all the more uplifting because, like a true fairytale, it is not for the faint of heart or for the very young (it is R-rated for violence), and it tells no lies. This movie should on the top of all must-see, must-own lists. Slumdog Millionaire, to borrow a phrase from its award-winning screenplay, is a work of “maximum beauty.” |
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