Slumdog Millionaire

[Caprice]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...rds_and_honors

i think the Academy has made some fairly wise choices

[grady]

Originally Posted by Caprice

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...rds_and_honors

i think the Academy has made some fairly wise choices

Eh, everything feels very safe and pedestrian this year to me. No love for Wall-E in the best picture category despite the animation nomination? The Dark Who?

At this point Slumdog seems like a safe, easy bet and a sure lock. But I could be wrong and quite often am.

[viddy]

Academy Awards = Marketing, nothing more.

[Dirty0900]

Brilliant film, directed so well in terms of some of the shots that lasted just a few seconds but had thousands of extras. Little touches like that make it a little bit better and showed not only the main characters rise to fortune important, but also one for the community which can relate to the situation he was in.

I liked M.I.A before she was used on the soundtrack

[King of Snake]

Saw this yesterday. I was kinda expecting to be blown away by it, but instead I found it pretty good on some aspects, and kinda dissapointing on others.

SPOILERS AHEAD



What I liked about it:
the whole gameshow angle was quite entertaining, mostly thanks to the great performance and presence of the guy who plays the gameshow host (loved the way he says "Who wants to be a MILONAIRE" )
The visuals and locations were very engaging. Just the sheer scope of the slums and the grittiness of it was portrayed very well (of course you would expect this of Danny Boyle).
The soundtrack was very good and fitting (again, no surprise from Danny Boyle).

I enjoyed the first part of the movie a lot more than the second half, where it seemed to turn into this quite unbelievable and formulaic love story. I mean the central focus of the whole plot was this love between Jamal and Latika but at no point is it ever shown or told why they should be together. Apart from the fact that they spent some time together as kids in the slums and then got seperated, I don't think they had any really developed scenes where you could sense that they loved eachother (or would love eachother in the future) or that they were the soulmates that were "destined" to be together.
It just didn't seem believable to me at all and made me not really care for the characters in the later parts of the film. The characters also seemed really 2 dimensional. We have Jamal, the kinda introverted hero who's only purpose in life seems to be chasing after this girl for no apparent reason (or at least nothing that's really explained).
The girl on the other hand never is shown to take any real initiative to find Jamal, and has to be literally pushed out the door to actually try and find him in the end. Then we have the brother who for most of the film seems to just be a criminal dickhead and suddenly at the end turns around to help his brother and lost love get together (very conveniently).

Anyway, this all didn't detract so much from the movie that it became unlikeable, but it was kinda dissapointing in that respect. But the structure of the movie with all the vignettes of Jamals past as relating to the questions on the show was fun and interesting enough to counter some of the cheesyness later on.

[holden]

Saw it finally last night. Very poignant film. Yes, a bit predictable in spots, but very entertaining.

And also: i left the film feeling pretty disgusted in myself for all that i have and all that i take for granted. Yeah, this is just a film and the story dramaticized, but, hundreds of millions of people do live in subhuman conditions. And here i am, wasting things and playing around on a computer.

holden

[den]

I saw this movie last week, and liked it pretty good. I know it's based on a book, but certain parts seemed like another certain Danny Boyle film. There's scenes of people running down the street chased by cops, characters get covered in shit, and the whole plot hinges on a life-changing moment involving large sums of money. Add some heroin and an Underworld song and you have Indian Trainspotting. (Extra bonus with the train station setting.)

[Rog]

check out the real lifes of the extras in the press...........

[jOHN rODRIGUEZ]

[QUOTE=King of Snake;108360]
...(1) The girl on the other hand never is shown to take any real initiative to find Jamal, and has to be literally pushed out the door to actually try and find him in the end.

(2) Then we have the brother who for most of the film seems to just be a criminal dickhead and suddenly at the end turns around to help his brother and lost love get together (very conveniently)...

QUOTE]


I hate doing the double quote thing, so sorry for editing your words.

(1) To be true to cultural context for that region of the world, I doubt in reality she'd even have done what was done in the film.

(2) Criminals love too. Esp. their little brothers. Well, I guess sometimes.

[Deckard]

Saw this last night.

Superby directed by Boyle, as expected.

Superb soundtrack, very appropriate, again, as expected.

Thought the child actors were incredibly talented - more impressed by the youngest Jamal than Dev Patel's performance, though on reflection, Patel had surprisingly little to work with.

Anil Kapoor was amusing but at times a bit too villainous to be credible.

The temptation to sink to stereotype and distortion is inevitable for this kind of story (kind of Scorsese meets Capra) but it wasn't too bad in that department. I've had to sit through no shortage of bad Bollywood films over the last 10 years which stereotype and distort themselves to a much greater degree.

Nice that the main lead was from a Muslim background, yet this fact was largely incidental to the film as a whole. A lesser writer would have shoe-horned terrorism into the story of poverty.

I recommend it. And very glad this beat Milk, which I thought was a mess.