Heck, in the monster Bollywood hit Om Shanti Om, the entire crew got a dance number over the end credits.
Saw it. Loved it.
And am I crazy or did I “find Waldo” at the Taj Mahal? 
He didn’t pull himself out of the slums. He was working as a teaboy at a callcentre. Sure, he was wearing a white shirt, but he was still a slumdog. I wouldn’t know this if I hadn’t read a newspaper report about ‘real slumdogs,’ of course. 
They even interviewed a boy who does do a similar job. Most of the slumdogs with families, or the older children/adults do have proper paying jobs (like Jamal and Salim’s mum probably did - she would have been paid for those clothes she was washing), just not paying nearly enough to leave the slums.
The rest, well, to be honest, it was a completely unrealistic fairy story - a Grimm’s Fairy Tale complete with beautiful princess, faithful prince, wicked stepmother (the fagin character was called Mother) boo hiss villains, one much darker than the other (the gangster and the host), and a brother (like a Buttons character but really dark - that’s for Brits reading this post) who eventually sacrifices himself so that the One True Love can succeed. Plus the ‘magic’ element. The details were meant to be realistic, but the big picture, not so much.
I can’t wait till my daughter’s old enough to watch this.
I teach in an area with a high number of Bangladeshi second and third generation kids, fwiw, and they have all LOVED this film. Teenage boys going out of their way to see a film that’s not about car chases, and then talking about it in detail - that’s an achievement in itself.
She did, however, leave to be with him twice, including before he was ever on Millionnaire, risking her life to do so.
This too. But her leaving to be with him (the first time) was still a pretty big deal. OK, so she was leaving a violent man that she didn’t love - but she was going to a man with little means of support, living in the slums (after living in riches), knowing that she’d probably still be in danger from said violent man. That’s a pretty big deal.
I just saw this last night and have to ask. How in the world could you have made it through the entire movie and NOT realize that these were the same characters throughout just at different ages? How could you possibly follow the story? Did you think these were 3 different sets of Salim, Latika and Jamels?
At first I thought you meant the young boys were played by triplets or something so I checked before I posted this.
I think what he meant was that the three actors did such a good job that they really seemed like the same person at three different ages, rather than just three different actors playing the same character.
I saw it and enjoyed it very much.
I have to say though, that I was aware, as it progressed, that it was hitting every cliche stereotype you hear/see in India. Ethnic slaughter in the streets, beggarmaster’s maiming child beggars, forced child prostitution, police brutality, and on and on.
Having visited India, they did a remarkable job of capturing the contrasts, the beauty and the brutality, the high culture and base reality, of it all. The direction was very good, I thought, at portraying the chaotic nature of Indian culture/life. And, of course, I loved the sound track!
Great movie, definitely worth seeing!
The older Jamal was a zombie compared to the younger Jamals.
Which isn’t exactly unrealistic. Few of us have the same personality as our kindegarten selves. But still, it kind of took me out of the film.
I saw it last night.
I spent one month in India a year ago and it certainly captured what India looks like, slums nothing that’s just what everywhere looks like. Missing from the experience is the suffocating humid heat and fresh earth and gym locker scent, but the movie reminded me of a few of the smaller charming aspects of the place and I miss the place all over again.
I thought the Benjamin Franklin question was a bit of a stretch, and there are people watching out for your shoes at the Taj Mahal…which you need money to get into anyway (native or not). Central Mumbai allows only cars, but cows chickens and children crowd just about every other street, I wished they would have shown that more.
Overall, I thought it was great. And if anyone else feels the same they should see City of God also.
Saw it last night and not much to add other than loved it. It’s almost like watching a SCI-FI/Fantasy movie until you realize “no, there are millions and millions of people who really do live like that”.
Here’s alow quality bootleg on YouTube(while it lasts) of the closing credits dance number (Jai Ho, which I hope gets Oscar for best song).
I shouldn’t mention, but you can also see Dev Patel naked (backal only) if you’ve a desire to if you google for it (won’t link, but omgblog is in the URL).
Wow, that one sets a new low in “low quality”. It’s not a camera shooting the screen in a theater. No, this goober is using a camera to shoot his computer screen! The video on the computer screen appears to be a very high quality, widescreen copy of the film, but this particular chucklehead couldn’t figure out how to either rip the DVD or edit the AVI file to extract the clip. What a maroon!
I’d be happy with that, but I would much rather “O Saya” win. I’m still knocked out and flattened with amazement that it was NOMINATED FOR A FRICKIN’ OSCAR!! Either one of them, but especially “O Saya.”
Just in case anyone wants a refresher…
I always hated big Oscar production numbers, but for the first time, I desperately want one.
*gets down on knees and prays to a god I don’t believe in, but just in case"
Oh please dear lord, please let there be full production numbers featuring professional Bollywood dancers, guided by professional Bollywood choreographers, and let MIA be up there live on stage. It has the potential to be so fucking cool I won’t be able to stand it.
Oh by the way, Danny Boyle won the Directors Guild of America award. Whoo! SAG Ensemble, PGA and now DGA. Next up, the Writers Guild of America (WGA) on Saturday, and the BAFTAs on Sunday. The BAFTAs don’t have any bearing on the Oscars, but I love them anyway.
Over the next two weeks Slumdog could also win the Cinema Audio Society (CAS), American Cinema Editors (ACE, the Eddies), and the American Society of Cinematographers (ASC) awards. It’s also up for a Costume Designers Guild (CDG) award but I don’t expect it to win, considering it’s up against Sex and the City in the Contemporary category (other nominees in that category are Iron Man, Mamma Mia! and The Wrestler, none of which stand a chance). I’m sure if the Visual Effect Society (VES) had found a way to nominate SM for one of their dozens of categories, they would have. Hollywood loves this movie, which really is amazing when you consider its outsider status.
Ditto this. I gotta hear what was going on in that poster’s head while watching that movie, if s/he didn’t realize that the flashbacks were, well, flashbacks.
-FrL-
I thought the lack of emotion from Latika was just that she was resigned to her fate and also ashamed. The last time she’d met him she’d been a rescued virgin, now she’s basically a sex slave. Also, however bad her life with the crime lord was, at least she ate well and didn’t have to beg; I’ve never known anything remotely like the poverty of that movie, but I know that I’d have to love somebody with the intensity of a million suns to live in the slums of the U.S. with them, and our slums aren’t on par with the tin shacks/open sewage/flies on teh children/mountain of trash in the movie.
Something that was almost shocking was that even the gated mansion of the crime lord in the movie wasn’t what you’d call luxurious. Basically, at most, an upper middle class apartment by our standards. (Middle class apartments I’ve lived in have had much nicer kitchens.)
Speaking of Latika as sex-slave,
QUESTIONS ABOUT THE MOVIE - UNBOXED SPOILERS (don’t read three pages of a thread if you don’t want spoilers).
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When Jamal leaves as a teenager do you think that Salim had sex with Latika, or that he took her to his boss? (It seemed he was going to rape her, but it was also established she was still a virgin, so it may be that a virgin sex toy was part of his joining the crime boss’s organization.)
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Was the scene in which Salim & Jamal’s mother was killed based on a historical event or was it a depiction of a random violent incident?
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The child Rama- any idea what that was about? Was it a devotee or part of a ritual or…?
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Does the movie take place modern day or a few years ago? Sometimes the cell phones and other things imply the way America was 10 years ago.
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Are call center personnel really given crash courses in the geography of where their calls are coming from? (The U.S. would be difficult since a caller from Wetumpka, AL or NYC or Spokane would be about as diverse as Indians from Mumbai v. New Delhi v. ‘never heard of it’ village.)
Hm. I recall what I thought was a statue of Rama during the communal violence, but it looks like people think it wasn’t a statue…
I enjoyed sitting through the movie, while I was there, but I had a nagging part of me that just couldn’t accept it and get into it. There’s a few things, but I think the worst was the love story thing. We are shown almost nothing that allows us to buy into the relationship. The boys’ mother is killed and they hang out in shipping container for one night. Then they are at a dump, but Jamal and Latika aren’t even hanging out together (Latika is scavenging, the boys are sleeping a distance away). Then they are at the orphanage and Latika plays a prank on Jamal. And that’s it. We’re just asked to accept that they are crazy about each other, and that’s that.
Sampiro,
1/ I took it that she wasn’t so much a virgin, necessarily, as a “virgin”.
2/ there was a lot of muslim/hindu rioting in India at that time, and it wouldn’t be surprising but I don’t know if there was a specific event most similar to the movie depiction
3/ I saw this as a vision rather than a real child. The fact that the Hindu god Rama always carries a bow and arrow is something that has stuck in his mind because he believes it is an indication of how fundamentally violent Hinduism is, which jells with his prejudices based on what happened to his mother. (I’m not saying Hinduism is that violent, just that that is how he sees it).
4/ Dunno. It has to be quite recent given the cars and cellphones
5/ Yes
Eh, that’s just the way India is. The movie was very definitely set in the modern day (except, of course, for the flashbacks… you know what I mean).
Hm, thinking about it, I guess it might be set just a few years ago. Those riots in the kid’s childhood occurred around 92 or 93, and the reference to Bombay becoming Mumbai would’ve been in 96. Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, the explosion of the call center industry, flat-panel TVs, and so on, move things well into the 2000s. I think they said the kid was 18 or 19 at the end, so, triangulating from the riots if nothing else, I’d peg it at around 2006ish. Though I can’t see why they would set it so recent and not just set it in the present day. So… I dunno. But, that’s the math.