Slumdog Millionaire

[Josh]

Danny Boyle has made a career out of complete disdain for expectations. His calling card as a filmmaker is his creative restlessness, and his relatively short career has burned brightly as he’s blazed from genre to genre, turning a zombie pic into an apocalyptic nightmare (28 Days Later), lending his own philosophical stamp to tipsy sci-fi (Sunshine), even turning on the fireworks for a joyful family film (Millions).

His latest is something altogether other. A surreal quiz-show thriller, a family movie of bone-crunching violence, a romance as starry-eyed as any melodrama, Slumdog Millionaire is a movie of such unexpected creativity, unfettered joy, and unabashed romance, it’s a rare film that hurtles past mere admiration and inspires mad love. Yes, it’s a delirious swirl of color and motion. Yes, it’s a masterpiece of editing. Yes, the soundtrack is practically a character unto itself, and yes, Boyle makes use of the cinematic form in some inspired and thrilling ways.

Yet for all its intellectual merits, this film, more than any other in recent memory, hits at a visceral level. At its heart it’s a movie about star-crossed love, a ravishing romance that drops spectacularly naive and idealistic lines about love and destiny and somehow gets away with it. But since it’s set against the backdrop of filth– both literal and moral– that is India’s slumlands, it becomes something that falls between a parable, an epic, and a fairy tale: A bold testament to the redeeming, restoring power of love and the necessity of hope, seeming to pour out of the heart of the film itself in a way that makes it a disarmingly pure and joyful motion picture.

And so it ends up being something very strange indeed: A film so brimming with humor and heartbreak and life that it woos you almost immediately, and then begs to be remembered, lived with, cherished. It’s an achievement that Boyle is almost sure to never match, but even if he never makes another movie in his life, his legacy is ensured with this tiny miracle of a film.

[latinchic]

Other points:

It's also a sad film.  And the ending is over the top, dramatic, and bittersweet.

However, the children in the film are just...phenomenal.

Great film.  I love India (I have friends out there) and supporting orphanages over there, so extra bonus points from me for the reminder of how so many meagerly live.

[spacebrat311]

The ending is Bollywood, and I mean that in a good way.

That said, while I liked this film quite a bit, I don't think it will be a looked back on classic for me, even out of the films released this year.

[murlough23]

So let's see - brutal thug violence, kids crawling through excrement, and a Bollywood dance number?

I'm sure it's a fine film, but none of these are things I want to see on screen.

[latinchic]

Mhm, I don't think I'll see this again anytime soon.

[spacebrat311]

brutal thug violence, kids crawling through excrement...

I don't know, I've always thought that the hardest things to watch are often the most important. Art seeks to display truth, whether literal or just the figurative truth of aesthetic beauty and I think its dangerous to only engage with things that entertain us where we are. I think we do something dangerous to ourselves when we avoid things that are hard to watch, and seek to only enjoy art. I think that the artistic experiences that make us uncomfortable by exposing us to the ugliness of the fallen world in a way that forces us to upset the emotional and lifestyle stability that we tend to build for ourselves are often the most important of all.

[bethany]

I thought it was a really good movie, but not a truly great one. I find it hard to believe it was the best movie of the year (though I will allow it was perhaps the best of the ones nominated for an Oscar).

[murlough23]

I don't know, I've always thought that the hardest things to watch are often the most important. Art seeks to display truth, whether literal or just the figurative truth of aesthetic beauty and I think its dangerous to only engage with things that entertain us where we are. I think we do something dangerous to ourselves when we avoid things that are hard to watch, and seek to only enjoy art. I think that the artistic experiences that make us uncomfortable by exposing us to the ugliness of the fallen world in a way that forces us to upset the emotional and lifestyle stability that we tend to build for ourselves are often the most important of all.

That's nice, I just don't want to barf in my popcorn bag. I passed on Saving Private Ryan and The Passion of the Christ for the same reason.

[spacebrat311]

I wouldn't say its at all on a similar level to those as far as level of detail. I would also say that there's a difference between being shown the truth of ugliness and being forced to revel in it. While I thought that Saving Private Ryan was very effective in using gore to show the horror that is actual warfare (tellingly, the only gore at a level that makes the movie different from other war movies is only in the first 5 minutes during the beach scene) I thought that The Passion was gratuitous and unnecessary. It did not even make sense in context, given that Christ in the film loses hundreds of times the amount of blood that a human body carries.

[murlough23]

I wouldn't say its at all on a similar level to those as far as level of detail. I would also say that there's a difference between being shown the truth of ugliness and being forced to revel in it. While I thought that Saving Private Ryan was very effective in using gore to show the horror that is actual warfare (tellingly, the only gore at a level that makes the movie different from other war movies is only in the first 5 minutes during the beach scene) I thought that The Passion was gratuitous and unnecessary. It did not even make sense in context, given that Christ in the film loses hundreds of times the amount of blood that a human body carries.

The point of bringing those movies up was that I admired what they were trying to communicate, but I didn't feel that I needed to see it myself in order to get the message.

Similarly, I already find it sickening that children live in filth in many third-world countries (and some first-world!) on this Earth. I know that some of them get brutally beaten and gang raped and even conscripted to fight in someone else's wars. I think it's absolutely useful for some folks to see a cinematic re-enactment of this horror that many children live out everyday. But I already know that something needs to be done about it. I don't become and more callous or less sensitized to this overwhelming need just because I choose to pass on a movie that is too graphic for my tastes.

And I don't go to see movies only to be "entertained". Well, maybe that part's not true. Because being made to think about a difficult subject or morally grey quandary or an injustice that really happened in history, to ask myself what's right and wrong in the absence of being explicitly told that by a film, is actually a very interesting thing to me. That thought process is "entertaining", I suppose. I also think it's beneficial. In the long run it gives me something more to remember a movie by than just "It made me laugh" or "It made me feel happy".

Be careful what you assume just because I pass up on a single movie.