Slumdog Millionaire

And it just won the Bafta for best film, alongside Best Director for Danny Boyle.
I agree, excellent film. I haven’t seen the other two yet…

I was in Germany when Baadar and Meinhoff were finally captured. The official story was that in less than 24 hours both committed suicide while in captivity. The sick feeling I had then is a memory now, but it reminds me of what the state will do if a person or in this case two people upset the established order.

Oh, come on.
The lead character is a blank, the female lead is a prize without any will of her own, the brother is a cliche, and the holes in the plot… the less said the better.
You know that scene where the American tourists want to see ‘the real India’ and get ripped off? The cinema audience is laughing at itself.

Crocodile Dundee? I cried at Corcodile Dundee 2, but only because I paid full price.

I enjoyed it, I thought it was a good film, but the fact that it’s in the running for so many awards makes me wonder if this is just a slow year… The cinematography etc was excellent, but the story was corny, the love interest very cheesy (i.e., in that regard alone a typical action film in which the heroine displays no particular romantic interest in the protagonist until he saves her, at which point she obligingly opts for him), there were a lot of one-dimensional characters, and I wasn’t surprised to see that the major actors were not in the running for any awards. But the cinematic depiction of India is often rather less than one-dimensional, so it was good to see a film that avoided many of the cliches, if not all of them.

Here’s an enlightening piece on the film by David Bordwell, that stands out because it’s analytical rather than judgmental.

Laughing at itself unwittingly

http://culture11.com/article/34079?page_view=1

Desperation and tediousness? An oxymoron, surely?

Slumdog’s critics make the perfect the enemy of the good.
In this case however it’s clear what the enemy of the good is.

Down with Forrest Gump 2!
Down with lumpen dimwit Brad Pitt!
Down with Brad Pitt’s lolling tongue!
Down, down, down with Benjamin bleedin Button!!

Agree with those who enjoyed the movie. Agree that it may indeed be the best movie of 2008, but if so that is a reproach to the industry. Agree with 19, in spades, about Benjamin goddamn Button.

The leads were indeed dim, but Anil Kapoor should have been nominated for an Oscar. I gather he is a big big star. I can certainly see why.

Sentimental but enjoyable — I can see why it’s been overhyped.

Agree it’s a poor Oscar field. Lots of disappointing movies. Just got around to seeing Revolutionary Road, which I was halfway to deciding was an okay job when they absolutely butchered the ending. Apparently they had no clue what the damn book was about.

perhaps it is doing something with English/American cinema I did not catch, which is why everyone likes it so very much?

Not so much cinema, as costume drama: Slumdog Millionaire = Dickens in Mumbai. Since a lot of Indian films take their formal inspiration from Victorian triple-deckers, that’s not a bad fit, but you could give the street kids cloth caps and Sylvia Young cockernee accents and turn it into a recognisable period piece.

The Reader, on the other hand, is clearly going for a different synthesis of two proven Oscar-procuring techniques: the one involving the Holocaust, the other Kate Winslet with her kit off.

Good film, it is on the whole, however a positive and feel-good film. Salaam Bombay is a bleaker, if still melodramatic look at slum life in Mumbai.

I agree w/ the original post and comment #28. People who say this is a ‘feel-good movie’ don’t share my understanding of the phrase. A feel-good movie, as I understand it, is a gooey, treacly bunch of fluff that avoids all or most depictions of unpleasant or unsettling realities. The typical feel-good movie, Hollywood-style, has a narrow if not claustrophobic setting and concentrates closely on a few characters at the expense of any social context. This is not that kind of movie (and Dickens for that matter was not that kind of novelist).

Charu, above, doesn’t get ‘the fuss’ the film has made w UK/American audiences. Some of us (or maybe I should just speak for myself) know something about the subcontinent, may even have lived and/or traveled there, but haven’t necessarily seen many Bollywood or other Hindi (or Kannada, or Bengali, or etc) films. So I can’t read Slumdog against the genre background in the way Charu does. Rather I compare it mostly to the run of American films, even good ones, that I’ve seen as an occasional moviegoer over the years. And if that’s the reference point, it begins to become clearer why this movie has made a splash in the U.S.

Couldn’t let comment #3 go by without calling ‘bullshit’. Baader was in jail for five years before he and his gang topped themselves. Yes, there are iffy elements to the ‘official’ story. But your version is pure crap.

Virtue is rewarded and evil is punished. How is this any less ‘feel-good’ than Star Wars?

“… doesn’t qualify in my book …”

Don’t judge a book by its cover. The early marketing (in the UK at least) played up this aspect. At one stage, they pushed the tagline “feel-good movie of the year”, and one of their flacks talked publicly about pitching to the same market that had gone to see Mamma Mia.

Danny Boyle made clear his unhappiness in several interviews, and the approach has changed somewhat since.

Well, if you feel good after having seen a good movie I guess all good movies qualify as feel-good moviers ;-)

Virtue rewarded? Being tortured, split from girlfriend, see girlfriend raped by brother, who is ending up getting killed by saving girl friend by being treated as sex slave, …

Evil punished? The torturing cop walks way, the game show host remains popular, the maffioso gets to keep the money and most of the girls, …

Virtue rewarded – the hero goes through all these trials, and at the end he wins the game and gets the girl. ‘Virtue rewarded’ doesn’t mean the hero doesn’t suffer during the story, it means his suffering is not in vain and he wins in the end.
Evil punished – the gangster dies, the brother dies, the Fagin guy dies…

‘Virtue rewarded’ doesn’t mean the hero doesn’t suffer during the story, it means his suffering is not in vain and he wins in the end.

Hmm, by that measure an awful lot of movies would qualify as feel-good movies. Triumphing over obstacles, emerging as a stronger person and achieving some sort of closure – those are all very common narrative devices. Conversely it is quite rare that the protagonist fails across the board, regresses emotionally or faces utter hopelessness in the end.

Slumdog has a classical happy end, sure, but the suffering along the way is so graphic and it is depicted as the result of widespread social problems, that I think most viewers will have mixed, rather than unequivocally good feelings.

Even in the big dance scene the object of desire has a large scar on her face.

You’re right, she’s totally ugly now.

Not the point, Mr. Arbiter of Meaning.

No, it is not a rom-com, you’re right there. But really, how high are you putting the bar for ‘feel-good movie’? Are there more than two movies in the universe that count?

The hero wins the prizes* and then they all have a big dance at the end. Schindler’s List it isn’t.

*yeah, one of the prizes has a scar. Does anyone in the movie seem bothered by this?

(you can tell I have work I should be doing, right?)

Hit #1 for “feel good movie”
http://www.realbuzz.com/articles/top-10-feel-good-movies/
“Sometimes there are days when you need to lift your spirits – perhaps after a hard day at work – and watching an uplifting film can give you just such a boost. A movie doesn’t necessarily have to be a comedy to make you feel good – in fact, any movie that leaves you with a great feeling as the credits roll at the end will be a good one to watch. Always inspiring, ‘feel-good’ movies often take you down a road of sadness only to bring you back up with a triumphant ending, ultimately leaving you feeling great. ”

The first two films they list are “It’s a Wonderful Life” and Dead Poets Society

A visual reminder of the suffering that we saw earlier in the movie.

That was my point.

Whatever suffering there was is washed away in the happy ending.

Obviously it wasn’t. The scar is a device for the audience to see: the relevant characters in the film know what the deal was.

In any case I liked it, you liked it, it made you cheerful, it made me glad I saw a good movie. That’s nice.

Ray, maybe you crossed into that territory because you were looking for flaws (seeing that the others were enjoying themselves and thinking ‘I’ll sound very intelligent if I say I didn’t like it’) because the mob boss is alive, the torturer is alive, the game show host is alive and the mother’s well and truely death, as is the child beggar well and truely blind (but not as blind as you having fun though, LOL).

In fact, the scar functions as even more of a feel-good factor — see, it’s True Love, not just infatuation.

Of course it’s a bloody feel-good film*; that’s the point. Quite what difference that makes to judging the film is beyond me. It is possible for a feel-good flick to be a good film.

* Unless you have an unusable over strict definition of fell-good.

the point that ray circles, in my mind, is less that the movie is a ‘feel-good film’, and more that it is a bad film masquerading as a good film, by means of a lot of sleight of hand.

the characters are flat, undeveloped and one-dimensional. the film goes from scene to scene with no real pace, each scene has more or less the same (monotonous) tempo and more or less the same structure – build-up, tension, pat resolution, end. what’s annoying is that it hides these flaws under good cinematograpgy and faux-naturalism. the pesudo-grittiness of each vignette is expected to make up for the lack of real characters and the lack of real story.

the film takes adavantage of an interest in bollywood that’s been growing for a while to represent itself as more than it is and is basically dishonest. the films makes (visual) claims to being more than merely cardboard rubbish – makes claims on the audience, that is – but doesn’t deliver. despite liking it, i felt cheated after watching it, like i’d been palmed off with junk food after being promised a meal.

if you don’t believe this, consider that you could replace the two indian leads with brendan fraser and anne hathaway, without any significant rewrite and the movie would proceed exactly as it currently does, without a hitch.

would you still think it was brilliant then?

Ray, I didn’t want to make you feel less good & I kinda side with Keir: the movie made me feel good and I don’t see what that has to do with nog being a good movie (unless you are somehow masochistic on the cinema front).

The reason you keep me going on this is that you kinda side with daelm here:

it is a bad film masquerading as a good film,

which puzzles me immensely. Is there a ‘deep structure’ to movies that movies need to have for them to be ‘good’? If so, how can you know whether that ‘deep structure’ is there as, assumably, any direct evidence could be just a question of ‘masquerading’?

PS: we can go on & on with factoids, your original claim was absurd

I think Ray makes some reasonable points. But still, I found the film charming and enjoyable – and well, not shit. That’s still a reasonable response to a film, isn’t it? The film is what it is. It’s not *intended* to – for instance – ’embody an… original theory of the art of cinema.’ If that’s one of your criteria for a good movie, I imagine very few indeed live up to it.

Actually, when I was watching it I was thinking of the things I’d say if I was going to trash it, and they were much in the vein of your comments. Does anyone else find this – I find it much more with film than TV – I sort of make a decision at some point whether I like it or not…?

In the end though, it just seemed churlish to hate it. It’s got a real energy to it. And though for sure there are inconsistencies in the central character (how does a slumdog end up working in a call centre?) it certainly seemed to me he *was* a character, who grew.

Ray, fair enough but ‘It’s a rags-to-riches story where the hero gets the money and the girl at the end.’ is a similar line to ‘a feel-good movie’. Many good stories are re-runs of prototypical ones – so my puzzle remains: what ‘deep structure’ is required for you since clearly stuff on the surface is never good enough.

anthony lane, at the new yorker, also has his doubts. excerpts below from his review, here

“Strictly speaking, there are no surprises in this movie, and most people will be able to predict, within the first ten minutes, roughly how the last ten will pan out. What is surprising is the unembarrassed energy that Boyle devotes to his pursuit of the obvious; there’s nothing wrong with the formulaic, it would appear, so long as you bring the formula to the boil.”

everyone else just seems to have got excited that there’s finally a bollywood movie they can enjoy without nhaving to contend with the embarassment of a fat guy in a turban singing while floating on clouds. this movie is gritty!! real!! tough!!

the trainspotting ambience of the vignettes serves a couple of purposes – first, it gives free ‘cool’ to a story that could just as easily have been told through the medium of a large, carboard book with VERY. BIG. LETTERS, and and second, it disguises the fact that even the narrative within each vignette never rises above the level of dickens at his worst.

i may just be a total misanthrope, and incapable of the finer human sentiments, but it seems to be a very cheap trick to serve up the kind of junk that’s on display in this film, and take cover behind the overwhelming suffering imputed to the characters, to avoid criticism of the superificality with which their story is told.

basically, the discussions online (not just here) seem to consist of:

how can you not like it??? poor people!!!! indians!!!!! suffering!!!! don’t you want them to be happy? etc

another thing, before i address the work i’m avoiding :).

there’s a feeling in general, and certainly one that’s come up on this thread, that being a ‘feel-good film’ buys a movie a certain amount of slack, that we have lowered expectations of a feel-good film.

but feel-good films needn’t be bad – it’s not an either/or situation. there are a whole lot of films that make me feel good, and (less subjectively put) which follow an uplifting arc, that are very very good as films overall. ‘Kolya’, for example, is a complete ‘feel-good’ film, by every definition and it manages to inhabit similar kinds of terrain to that which Slumdog Millionaire merely uses as a set – that of societies in transition, the decisions people make when faced with poverty, loyalty to family clashing with brute survival, the effects of political upheaval and so on.

anyway.

d