Those Hunger Now Kids Made a Movie!

I went to see Slumdog Millionaire this afternoon. The movie deals with a variety of subjects, life in poverty riddled India, destiny, redemption, all framed by a televised episode of the Indian version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire? Think Quiz Show with a splash of City of God and a lot of heart.

The film centers on three homeless orphans living in the slums of Bombay (now Mumbai) who grow up throughout the course of the film. The seamless way the back story ties into the game show is just one of the many great things about the movie.

The film has an epic scope that can be agonizingly intimate, broad sweeping shots of sprawling shanty towns and garbage juxtaposed with a microscopic view of the harsh realities facing the abandoned and orphaned children of the world.

There has been some grumbling in the critical community over the film's R rating, and while I would consider the range of emotional tension the viewer experiences to be something for mature audiences, I don't think it deserves the limitations that an R rating puts on a film. The Dark Knight was rated PG-13 as was Quantum of Solace, both which had much more violence than this film.

The film is wrought with emotional tension, and no, I did not use the expression "wrought with emotional tension" just because I wanted to sound like a movie critic. Okay, maybe I did. But trust me, the movie is oozing with, uh...pathos.

Allow me to digress for a moment, one poster for the film has a blurb that says "A Soaring Hymn To Life". Big issue movies like Babel, Crash, The Cider House Rules, or Little Children need to be described with hyperbolic language to manipulate viewer's preconceptions. This movie doesn't need any of that, critic's quotes should be simpler, like "Excellent" or "Exceeded Expectations" or "*****". If I were to contribute a blurb it would read "Epically Intimate".

Back to Slumdog, the movie is subtitled, sort of, the subtitles aren't done in the traditional style and half the movie is in English. I only mention this because I wonder what the Academy will do with it when awards season comes around, the critical praise for this film has been so overwhelmingly positive I can't imagine it not being nominated. The only question remains whether it be Best Picture or Best Foreign Language Film.

The production, cinematography, and music all combine in the best possible way, which is to say that they draw the viewer into the story while still standing out as being fresh without being distracting, confusing, or overdone (Michael Bay, Tony Scott take notice).

The bottom line is this is meaty bit of escapism you can breathlessly enjoy in the moment and dissect at length later, something that doesn't happen very often at the movies.