Looks like it won best picture. What a joke. I haven’t paid attention to the Oscars since that hackjob Crash won a few years ago anyway, so I shouldn’t be surprised.
I didn’t mean to sound so harsh in my previous post. Like I said, I didn’t hate the movie. I thought it was decent and had its moments, but it was just unbelievably overrated in my opinion.
I’m not too sure how I feel about this film, but a general gist of my thoughts are something like “If this film were set anywhere else, nobody would care.” It’s a film where the setting is the story. Just ask the OP:
Like Crash, it also seemed like a film designed to hit on all the Western Liberal* Guilt tropes. And, because it hit so many buttons (Oh, those poor kids, living on the trash-heap! Oh, the evils of religious/sectarian violence! Oh, the brutality of government!), it is seen as a “great”, “deep” film. And while “great” is a matter of personal judgment, it certainly isn’t “deep” by any stretch of the imagination.
(BTW, I thought Crash to be a much better film, which I’m sure just completely discounted my opinion in Cisco’s eyes). 
*I mean this in the 19th-century manner of “liberal”, not “American Democratic Party” liberal.
Excellent points.
I saw something at IMDb that would SEEM to suggest that the hype (Oscar and otherwise) around this film is at least partially responsible for all the love it’s getting. A review from back in November mentions that the movie is rated at a 7, whereas today it’s an 8.7. That’s a HUGE difference on IMDb, and ratings usually go in the opposite direction (start artifically high and get lower as the movie ages.) The timescale is too large for a messageboard discussion, but I’m very interested to see how this film is remembered in 10 or 20 years. Does anybody think it will ever be taught in college film classes?
Hey, nobody’s perfect :p:D. I did think Slumdog was quite a sight better than Crash, FWIW.
Maybe it’s not hype, maybe it’s because more people are seeing it and actually liking it? Or do you think all of us in this thread who say we liked it are just blinded by hype? Many of us saw it 2 months before the Academy Award nominations came out. Check the dates on the posts.
There is a reasonable explanation for that: the movie was a platform release. It opened in a few theaters in a few cities, and slowly expanded over the last few weeks. It played at the Telluride Film Festival in August, the Austin Film Festival and the Chicago International Film Festival in October. It played at the Toronto Film Festival and opened limited (10 theaters) on November 12, 2008. Limited was probably New York, and Los Angeles, then it added theaters from there, as you can see from the beginning of this thread. It opened wider (614 theaters) December 26, 2008. Then, it opened really wide (2,244 theaters) in the United States on January 23, 2009, the day after the Academy Award nominations came out.
Here is a week-by-week listing of the money Slumdog Millionaire has made. It corresponds with a rising viewership and therefore a rising IMDB rating as more and more people see it and like it.
Probably. I would imagine its use of editing and music and child actors will always be of interest to aspiring filmmakers.
I didn’t say anything at all about the members of this board, and I’m not delusional enough to think we’re going to swing an international wide release 1.7 points on IMDb.
Actually that’s not an explanation at all. Nothing here explains why most movies go down in rating and this one went up.
Because most movies open wide then lose theaters into their run. People turn their attention elsewhere as new movies open and the old ones get forgotten. This one has been building up as more theaters are added and it hasn’t peaked yet, especially now with all the Oscars.
Am I being whooshed?
Am I? A LOT of movies open similarly to the way Slumdog did, and if anything, more people seeing it usually means the rating goes DOWN, not up.
Brokeback Mountain opened the same way Slumdog did and it had an 8.5 in the beginning. Now that a lot more people have seen it, it has a 7.8.
Are many Oscar winners taught in college film classes? I was a college film major, and we did a lot of genre work (entire semesters of Film Noir), a lot of auteur theory (Bergman, Hitchcock, Wells), some art house film (both art film and foreign film) and almost no “lets look at this movie that won an Oscar ten or twenty years ago.” But perhaps its changed - my film degree is twenty years old when we’d have to rent the 16mm print to show in class - so some of our choices were limited by availability and affordability.
Unless this is a good example of something specific - which, although I thought it an excellent film - it isn’t. Or its taught in as part of a body of work (if someone does Indian cinema this might be a selection to talk about crossover - Bollywood tropes going Hollywood - and why this isn’t a Bollywood movie) there isn’t any reason to teach it.
I think it’s interesting that the whole film cost less than Brad Pitt gets for a single movie, but has made a tenfold return at the box office. The lesson, to me, is that it’s still possible to make a really great, entertaining movie without spending a fortune.
I took a class in college called “American Film” that started with Buster Keaton, hit a lot of the big American film canon titles (Citizen Kane of course, Stagecoach, Psycho, Bonnie & Clyde, The Godfather, etc.), and wrapped up with Being John Malkovich. A lot of the movies we covered had won at least one Oscar, but while a lot were Best Picture nominees few were winners. The Godfather may have been the only one.
I’d been wanting to see SM for months, and finally had the chance to go with a friend tonight. I really enjoyed it, for all of the reasons stated upthread. As harrowing and depressing as much of its depiction of the underside of contemporary Indian life is, it really was an uplifting movie and the happy ending was just right. The lead actress was a knockout. I laughed out loud at the dance scene over the final credits - that’s Bollywood for you!
I checked the rupee conversion function on Google. The big prize of 20m rupees? Worth about US$400k today. Not exactly a king’s ransom.
SM earned its Oscars… but I confess I enjoyed Iron Man more.
I said, on December 20, regarding Slumdog getting an Oscar nomination…
For those who have never paid attention to precursors before, take note of post 19. Even though nobody knows who the National Board of Review are, as I said they’re considered by some as the official kickoff of the awards season. Check it out. On December 5, a month and a half before the Oscar nominations came out, NBR chose Slumdog as the best film of the year. 3 of the 4 other eventual nominees were listed in the best of the year. Only The Reader was missing.
Only one of the 5 Foreign Language nominees was listed (Waltz With Bashir) but the eventual Oscar winner in the Documentary category also won the NBR (Man On Wire), while two more eventual nominees were listed in the Best of.
Five of their Top Independent films went on to get Oscar nominations (Frozen River, In Bruge, Rachel Getting Married, Vicky Cristina Barcelona and The Visitor).
They missed on their Best Actor (Clint) but their Best Actress was nominated (Anne Hathaway), as were their Supporting winners (Josh Brolin and Penelope Cruz) and Ensemble cast (Doubt, which got 4 acting Oscar nominations) and Breakthrough Actress (Viola Davis).
Their Best Director was nominated (David Fincher), as was their Adapted Screenplay (Benjamin Button) and Animated Feature (WALL-E).
Check out the NBR Spotlight Award:
Both unknown to the general public, both nominated for Oscars a month and a half later.
I love Precursors. You really do get a sense of what to expect, yet there are always surprises that keep things interesting, like The Reader coming from out of nowhere.
Oscar voters tend to discount the notion that precursors influence them, but of course they do. With hundreds of movies released every year, no one in the industry has time to see even a fraction of them. They’re too busy working on their own projects. Whether they’ll admit it or not, pre-Guild precursors are a heads-up, a “hey, you might want to check this movie/that performance out” and I believe they’re vitally important to the awards season process.
So? Check back a year from now and Slumdog will probably have gone down as well. It’s only been open a few months.
How do I --err,–uhh, I–ummm—hrrmm. You got me there, guy. I really don’t know how to reply to this non sequitur.
I think Eyebrows point is…
Movie opens - with little buzz (which is what a movie like Slumdog is) and a small sample size (with a small opening and little buzz) it develops a set of numbers. Since people don’t know what to expect, some people find the movie to be not what they were looking for - and rank it low not because it wasn’t a good movie, but because it wasn’t what they thought it would be. Some rank it high. The crowd that sees it tends to be an art house crowd, which can be a harsher set of critics than the general population.
Movie gets buzz. Lots of people see it. Lots of people see it who are told its wonderful and use other people’s opinion to weight theirs. Score goes up. To balance a little, but not enough - there are always those people who don’t like a movie just to be contrary. Or because - had they gone in with reasonable expectations they’d be fine - but it had been built up as the BEST MOVIE EVER and their disappointment affects their rating. The sample size is now a lot bigger, but the results ARE skewed by the buzz.
As a movie has been out a few years more people see it, but they see it removed from buzz, in their homes in front of a DVD player, with their best friend’s husband getting up for more chips and beer every three minutes and coming back to talk about football. Now the crowd that sees it are the completely casual ‘lets rent a movie’ set. Score goes down.
Two other indie movies with similar trajectories - My Big Fat Greek Wedding and Bend It Like Beckham. Both good indie movies (neither Oscar quality) that far exceeded box office expectations due to buzz - and far exceeded what they would have done at the box office had they started life as mainstream films.
If this was his point, then why did it seem like he was disagreeing with me? This completely jibes with what I said in post #164 that started this discussion:
To those who believe that this movie succeeded only because of hype, please read this excerpt from a New York Times article on it: “[Nancy Utley, chief operating officer at Fox Searchlight] added that the studio specialty division knew it had a winner on its hands when it screen-tested the film in Orange County, Calif. — sort of a ground zero of a conventional American audience — without any marketing or explanation, and the room loved it.”
I haven’t seen or heard anybody say this movie succeeded only because of hype.
And not for the sake of being argumentative, but just for the sake of humor - Orange County, CA a “ground zero of a convential American audience”? Oh boy. The day is young, but I can almost guarantee that will be the funniest thing I hear today. I literally lol’ed when I read that.
I was wholly underwhelmed. It was beautiful and well-edited, but the story just failed me on so many levels.
The City of God stuff bothered me because it was so relentless and repetitive. I stopped caring when something good happened, because I knew two second later it’d just be taken away. Even Jamal’s one shining moment was literally covered in shit. It felt like those people who take the slum tours in Kenya- a kind of voyeurism designed to make yourself feel better because looking at something painful kind of feels the same as caring about real people.
I didn’t like the “tour of India” moments. The use of the riots felt like the director was like “Oh hey, we need his mother to die for the story- wouldn’t it be extra meaningful if it was in a riot?” And then they never really come back to it. Just a cheap way to make the movie feel deeper. They really hit all of the “poverty sucks” greatest hits- beggar gangs, mafia, prostitution, police brutality, etc. If they had managed to get someone dying of AIDS in there, they’d have had it all. On a literal level, the Taj Mahal sequences felt like the director was like “Hey, we can’t make a movie about India without the Taj Mahal in it!” or maybe “Hey, if it’s set in India, Americans are gonna expect the Taj Mahal, we gotta fit it in somewhere!”
And the characters. Can anyone find a single personality trait in Latika? I couldn’t find anything except “pretty” and “there.” Other than that, she is an utterly blank character. Jamal’s personality wasn’t much better- his personality seems to be pretty much “100% pure hearted” and “very earnest.” I’m all for silly love stories. But a silly love story between two utterly personalityless constructs is too much for me. I didn’t feel it at all.
Anyway, it was pretty enough to pass the time, but it was nowhere near great or even good storytelling.