Read the related article… Why Indian directors don’t dare to make a movie like Slumdog Millionaire?
Ranjit said…
All I can imagine when I think about SD is… A nation of a billion ppl trying to regain long lost glory by tirelessly rebuilding image and suddenly someone from our target audience comes in, looks underneath the belly & screams…Naah, that’s not the reality, this one is.
Josh Tyler said…
Slumdog Millionaire is only a magnificent celebration of Indian culture if your view of Indian culture is one of inhumanity and evil. It’s as if we’re saying we don’t expect any better from “those people”.
Subba Muthurangan (Naperville, United States) said…
Movie making is an art; it is free speech hence anybody can take any subject for his/her movie. But this case Danny took something which west like to see India as is. If we take any movie that could release worldwide, might not expose this much raw about one country’s image. Danny is famous for this, he has a tendency to expose everything about east countries to west as is (The Beach is great example about Thailand’s corrupted cops and Thai’s low quality life style).
Parashar (Guwahati, India) said…
Mr. Boyle has done his best to distort the image of India...he is a cunning pervert who believes in hate and racism. And also the fact as many critics agree that it has been tailored for awards.
Sadanand Dhume said…
The critic Meenakshi Shedde dismissed the film as “a laundry list of India’s miseries.” Interviewed in the Los Angeles Times, film professor Shyamal Sengupta called the film “a white man’s imagined India.”
Ninja Nurse said…
Slumdog Millionaire is not a feel-good movie, but it’s too simple to call it poverty porn. It seems to me like a slick blend of reality and movie cliché, with the reality so heavy and compelling that it gives the film more credibility than it deserves.
Anonymous (US) said…
The fact that a movie like this has to incorporate all of these elements to be sold to a Western audience not accustomed to seeing brown people on their movie screens.
Anshuman Kher (India) said…
I don’t love my country I admire it greatly though and am proud to be born on this soil, but Slumdog contradicts all that once a foreigner watches that movie he will say to himself am I glad I am not and Indian.
Aadesh Shrivastava
Mumbai has given me everything. To see the city being shown as a place of dirt filth and crime only is very humiliating. Even I can make a film on child prostitution and pedophilia. But it won't get Oscars because I am not a gora."
Arundhati Roy
Politically the movie de-contextualizes poverty and by making poverty an epic prop, it dissociates poverty from the poor. It makes India’s poverty a landscape, like a desert, or a mountain range, or an exotic beach god-given, not manmade. So while the camera swoops around in it lovingly, the filmmakers are more pickly about the creatures that inhabit this landscape.
To have cast a poor man and a poor girl, who looked remotely as though they had grown up in the slums, battered, malnourished, marked by what they’d been through, wouldn’t have been attractive enough. So they cast an Indian model and a British boy.
Vrinda Nabar said…
After the twists and turns of Boyle's passage to India, Slumdog's eventual victory comes at a price. When the selective manipulation of Third World squalor can make for a feel-good movie in a dismal year, the global village has a long way to go.
Priyadarshan(India) said…
Slumdog Millionaire is nothing but a cheap trashy mediocre version of those commercial films about estranged brothers and childhood sweethearts that Salim-Javed used to write so brilliantly in the 1970s.
Virgil (Brisbane, Australia) said…
It was that we humans are not up to witnessing such depictions of cruelty without it seriously affecting us. I could barely look at some scenes. Please filmmakers, don't inflict this on anybody.
Sadanand Dhume said…
Despite a wave of publicity and an ambitious nationwide rollout, “Slumdog” is showing in half-empty theaters. It trails the box-office receipts of an obscure Hindi horror movie released the same day.
Arindam Chaudhuri (India) said…
Had this film been made by an Indian director, it would’ve been trashed as a rotting old hat, which literally stands out only because of its stench, but since the man making it happens to be from the West, we’re all left celebrating the emperor’s new clothes.
Amit said…
In any case, if Western audiences genuinely like this movie and not just because it is “poverty porn”, I hope both Hollywood and Bollywood studios can get into the act and start producing more such movies.
Niranjan (Reston,VA, USA) said..
There are good things which Danny Boyle could have showed about India, keep in mind that he is catering to western audience. I have been asked in US at least 10 times by the people who saw this movie that I lived in a slum when I lived in India. Now it looks like all Indians should move in to slums.
Anonymous (US) said…
The visually cluttered style of filmmaking that always seems to accompany Western-produced films about the Third World. I call this style Overheated Ethnic Frenzy, where the Gravity of The Situation has to be conveyed through shaky camera and grainy film stock and far too many cuts that became far too distracting to pay attention to any actual story.
Rakesh Kumar (Bangalore, India) said…
The director did not know what to make of the movie in the end and in trying to be everything but it fell flat just near the end. It was sad to see the 'end' of the movie as a parody on the serious issues shown in the movie.
Peter Adams (Neenah, Wisconsin) said…
Don't forget the atrocious storytelling. Only a single line was given to how the main character even got on the game show. And then at the end, after all the listed horrors all Mumbai ends up dancing in the train station. It's like they started filming "Shindler's List" and edited it into "Grease.
Senthil Raja said…
Isn’t there any other movie better than SD taken in Bollywood or any other Indian film industry in the past... Films are made for the society they are part of... and we cannot set western benchmark for Indian films...
JD said…
80% of normal Bollywood potboilers- similar to Hollywood are pure fantasy stories. But there do exist movies which show a more realistic view and in a better manner than the much acclaimed slumdog.
Veena Mithare (Bangalore, India) said…
How come do we let some foreign director portray the eccentricities of India and get celebrated because he showed all the negative eccentricities?? . What I am concerned about is that, people who have no idea on slums will end up thinking that slums in general are as dirty as that - Which is NOT TRUE! Or the foreign audience may end up thinking that India is about Dirty Slums, beggars and mafia - Which is again NOT TRUE!
On a positive note - If this is what it takes for a movie to win an Oscar, then I am proud to say that Bollywood movies are of a much better quality and taste.
Sumit Bhattacharya said…
But I do have a problem with a story that pretends to be real when in reality it is just a masala film -- the kind we churn out by the dozens in Bollywood.
Maybe the makers -- and half the world, apparently -- believe they have married Bollywood escapism with Western sensibilities, but it is not a match made in cinema heaven. It is more along the lines of 1970s Bollywood tear-jerkers, the kind where the hero transforms from street urchin to gang lord in one running shot and where long-lost brothers are reunited by tattoos.
B.H.Harsh said…
If this is the kind of Movie that Goras like and see something as capable of winning international awards, I must say Rakeysh Omprakash and Vishal Bharadwaj are capable of much more.
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