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Sunday, March 01, 2009

Slumdog Millionaire

Alright, Slumdog Millionaire was an entertaining film. The children were cute, the music was great, and everything looked very pretty. The story was suitably engaging and held my interest for the duration of the film.

I don't understand why everyone is going ape shit for this movie. It's good, but it's not that good. The story is riddled with cliches, and the ending wraps up so easily and neatly that I feel it cheapens everything that comes before it. I do think it's nice that the next time I feel like writing something contrived I can justify it by saying "it's fate", and people will think it's inspired. I just didn't buy it, and that made it very difficult for me to connect with this movie.

I've now seen two of the Best Picture nominees, and I feel this was easily the weaker of the two. I was trying to understand why this was everyone's favorite movie, including the Academy's. The best I can come up with is that it's uplifting. Okay, that's fair. But compared to Milk, a movie that's inspiring, uplifting, and true? No comparison.

Slumdog Millionaire is a very nice story, and I'm glad so many people liked it. I certainly enjoyed it, but I don't think I'll ever have a strong urge to watch it again. Now can someone please tell me when Freida Pinto's next movie is coming out?

4 comments:

Adrienne said...

Thank you!!! I was definitely far less impressed than I wanted to be with Slumdog. My boyfriend even got up about 2/3 through and went to bed. I usually measure the greatness of a movie by how quickly I start talking about it, researching related things, losing hours on imdb, etc...

I did none of that with Slumdog.

But Milk certainly moved me.

Doctor Lao said...

A-men! MILK was stunning. SLUMDOG felt like a story I'd seen many times before, just baked (perhaps a bit too long) in a tandoor.

Sharkbear said...

I enjoyed the movie, but I don't think it would make it into my top five from last year. Maybe not even the top ten.

Treegreen said...

I thought the first half about kids growing up in the slums was an absolutely fascinating social commentary. The second half love story moved the movie in a completely different direction that had me more or less uninterested until the Bollywood dance number at the end.