As long as we are still picking nits(or at least I am)…
[spoiler]1)The Indian version of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire is not filmed live.
2)The host handing over Jamal to the police for “questioning”, given that Jamal’s expected back on the show the next night, seems implausible. The only way I can justify it is that the host was confident to the point of arrogance that Jamal would be discovered to be a cheat.[/spoiler]
Purely anecdotally, I get the impression from my visit there that Indian middle- and upper-classes simply don’t know, or can’t acknowledge, the harshness of the poverty. To do so would make it very difficult to function, because it is so incredibly horrible.
In the middle of a rainy December night, temperature in the low 50s, in a friend-of-a-friend’s BMW in the middle of Delhi, a tear-stained barefoot loincloth-clad girl of about seven, looking like the young Latika, threw herself on the hood of the car and wouldn’t get off. The driver had to get out of the car and move her to the side of the street, but she kept coming back, eventually prostrating herself beneath the car’s wheels, seemingly inviting us to drive over her body. We ended up handed her off to some other homeless people in order to carry on driving. Our Indian hosts seemed to be as deeply disturbed by the incident as we were. My expatriant friend said afterwards “and that’s not even the lowest of the poverty. If you want to see that, see the people in the wide suburb slums, who are too poor even to beg.” I observed this on the train out of the city, and it was truly shocking.
While it didn’t come to pass, I saw several people listing Dev Patel as a likely Oscar nominee for best supporting actor.
Supporting?
Who is he supporting? While he is one of 3 people portraying the same character, he has a lot more screen time than the youngest version. And everyone else is less than that.
Supporting? What are the rules here?
Our take on the film: “Now that’s a movie.”
Indeed. Here’s an article about the reality of the “beggar mafia.” If anything, the movie was toning it down.
And here is an interesting article on how the film was received in India.
I do apologise. Either not enough, or too much, coffee.
So SD wins a SAG award for Best Ensemble. And I see several different articles saying that this gives it the lead for Oscars. Umm, it’s not nominated for any acting awards. SAG awards are a poor indicator for non-acting awards.
Not true. There are more actors in the voting Academy than any other bloc, by a large margin. The SAGs are an excellent predictor.
What’s interesting to me about the SAGs is that they gave Sean Penn Best Actor over Mickey Rourke. I think that’s a strong indication of where the Oscar where go.
Except keep in mind that Penn had never won a SAG before (Johnny Depp won for Pirates the year that Penn won the Oscar for Mystic River). The SAG awards are young enough (less than 2 decades) that they routinely use the award to honor lifetime achievements through “individual performance” (witness the inexplicable award to Ruby Dee last year). That’s also why Meryl won last night–she’d never won a SAG for her film work yet, and they probably saw her as quite overdue. I think it’s still a toss-up between Penn & Rourke, with Winslet a likely winner in lead with Cruz (who lost to Winslet last night) likely to take Supporting Actress. But because of the unique dynamics involved with SAG, it’s sometimes tough to take these as genuine precursors.
That said, the SAG ensemble is no guarantee of a Picture win at the Oscars either, but it is telling that they picked the one nominee of the group with no recognizable American stars at all. That does show the deep affection the film has in the industry, particularly amongst the actors who (like Cervaise says), has the single strongest voting block in the Academy. Having also taken the Producers’ Guild award a few days ago (over Batman and the other Pic nominees), Slumdog is definitely the favorite at this point. If it wins the Director’s Guild, you can probably lock that puppy up for good.
I liked the movie a lot as well.
The thing that stood out to me above all else was the colorful subtitles. I’ve never seen a film do something that creative with subtitles.
Like the others I enjoyed the film a lot.
One critique though: the love between (the adult) Jamal and Latika seemed one-sided to me. I don’t know if this was the fault of the actors, the director, the story itself, or my own perceptions, but it seemed as if Jamal was much more into Latika than she was into him. She seemed way too eager to push him out of the bosses house, and almost looked annoyed by him, not lovestruck and emotionally torn. And earlier, after being rescued from the brothel by the brothers, she didn’t put up much of a fight when Salim threw him out of the hotel room to do God knew what to her.
Now I understand that a girl of her circumstances probably picks up a passive and resigned attitude that doesn’t permit a whole lot of emotional attachment to people, but I just never got the sense that she strongly cared about Jamal. It made me wonder: did she see Jamal purely as a way out of her bad circumstance, or was she drawn to him because she loved him? I don’t know. We didn’t get a lot of insight into her heart and mind.
But I liked the movie.
One minor complaint is that Dev Patel appears too fair-skinned, much more so than the boys who played the character at a younger age.
I think it might be partly the actress not clearly conveying her emotions, but I believe her motivation in both the scenes you mention was primarily to protect Jamal. She didn’t want him to get killed either by Salim or the mob boss for her sake, and she was willing to sacrifice her own freedom in both cases to keep Jamal safe.
Thematically, the movie is about risking it all…when to be pragmatic to survive, when you just need to react, and when to bet a million dollars that you can guess the correct answer.
Until the end of the movie, no one was ready to bet it all…
She’d barely seen Jamal since they were children. In real life, there would be no reason for her to have feelings for him at all. You just have to accept the “love story” aspect of the film as another part of its being a fable.
I agree think that’s what we are supposed to infer, but these intentions didn’t come across well. For instance, there was no passion in her pleas for teenage Jamal to leave when Salim told him to, no tears of anguish, no hands reached out in desperation. I felt sorry for Jamal in that scene because it seemed like he was being rejected by both she and his brother.
So why did he have feelings for her? It’s not unreasonable to expect mutual attraction.
Just saw the movie today (I had to see what the hype was about) and I very much enjoyed it.
The music was PERFECT for the movie, the use of the “Millionaire” music for parts was great too.
Aside from thinking most Indian women are beautiful, Latika brings this to a whole 'nother level
Am I the only one who thought the end credit dance off was kinda pointless? I loved the way the credits did the actors, but the whole dance thing I thought was just enjoyable, but pointless and kinda stupid.
You might be lol. Dance numbers are a traditional trope of Indian movies, but even here in America you see things like the cast singing along to a song or outtakes during the credits. It serves the same purpose as an encore.