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Jyothi TM
Mar 4, 2009, 8:39:57 AM3/4/09
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why slumdog milllionaire should have been called Slumdog Nobel laureate...and though i have nt seen the movie or read the book..i feel the argument is strong....whats ur opinion?
Bobby Kunhu
Mar 4, 2009, 7:15:38 PM3/4/09
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I saw the movei and sort of share arundhati's opinion that was published in Dawn. Though a huge fan of Rahman's, I thought the music was also mediocre
http://dawn.net/wps/wcm/connect/Dawn%20Content%20Library/dawn/news/entertainment/caught-on-film-india-not-shining-ss
Caught on film: India ‘not shining’ Arundhati Roy – Exclusive for
Dawn.com
Monday, 02 Mar, 2009 | 11:05 AM PST |
( A pic here )
'Slumdog Millionaire' child actor Azharuddin Mohammed Ismail is served
his dinner by his mother Shamim Begum, right, in his home in a slum in
Bandra, suburban Mumbai, India, Thursday, Feb. 26, 2009. The child
stars of the Oscar-winning “Slumdog Millionaire” have returned to
India to a chaotic, but rousing, heroes' welcome, following their
appearance on the red carpet at the recent Oscar ceremony, where the
movie “Slumdog Millionaire,” a tale of hope amid adversity set in
Mumbai, was awarded eight Oscars, including best picture and best
director for Danny Boyle. – AP Photo The night before the Oscars, in
India, we were re-enacting the last few scenes of Slumdog Millionaire.
The ones in which vast crowds of people – poor people – who have
nothing to do with the game show, gather in the thousands in their
slums and shanty towns to see if Jamal Malik will win. Oh, and he did.
He did. So now everyone, including the Congress Party, is taking
credit for the Oscars that the film won!
The party claims that instead of India Shining it has presided over
India 'Achieving'. Achieving what? In the case of Slumdog, India's
greatest contribution, certainly our political parties’ greatest
contribution is providing an authentic, magnificent backdrop of epic
poverty, brutality and violence for an Oscar-winning film to be shot
in. So now that too has become an achievement? Something to be
celebrated? Something for us all to feel good about? Honestly, it's
beyond farce.
And here’s the rub: Slumdog Millionaire allows real-life villains to
take credit for its cinematic achievements because it lets them off
the hook. It points no fingers, it holds nobody responsible. Everyone
can feel good. And that’s what I feel bad about.
So that’s about what’s not in the film. About what’s in it: I thought
it was nicely shot. But beyond that, what can I say other than that it
is a wonderful illustration of the old adage, ‘there's a lot of money
in poverty’.
The debate around the film has been framed – and this helps the film
in its multi-million-dollar promotion drive – in absurd terms. On the
one hand we have the old 'patriots' parroting the line that "it
doesn't show India in a Proper Light' (by now, even they’ve been won
over thanks to the Viagra of success). On the other hand, there are
those who say that Slumdog is a brave film that is not scared to plum
the depths of India 'not-shining'.
Slumdog Millionaire does not puncture the myth of ‘India shining'— far
from it. It just turns India 'not-shining' into another glitzy item in
the supermarket. As a film, it has none of the panache, the politics,
the texture, the humour, and the confidence that both the director and
the writer bring to their other work. It really doesn’t deserve the
passion and attention we are lavishing on it. It's a silly screenplay
and the dialogue was embarrassing, which surprised me because I loved
The Full Monty (written by the same script writer). The stockpiling of
standard, clichéd, horrors in Slumdog are, I think, meant to be a sort
of version of Alice in Wonderland – ‘Jamal in Horrorland’. It doesn't
work except to trivialize what really goes on here. The villains who
kidnap and maim children and sell them into brothels reminded me of
Glenn Close in 101 Dalmatians.
Politically, the film de-contextualises poverty – by making poverty an
epic prop, it disassociates poverty from the poor. It makes India’s
poverty a landscape, like a desert or a mountain range, an exotic
beach, god-given, not man-made. So while the camera swoops around in
it lovingly, the filmmakers are more picky 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, malnutritioned, marked by
what they’d been through, wouldn't have been attractive enough. So
they cast an Indian model and a British boy. The torture scene in the
cop station was insulting. The cultural confidence emanating from the
obviously British 'slumdog' completely cowed the obviously Indian cop,
even though the cop was supposedly torturing the slumdog. The brown
skin that two share is too thin to hide a lot of other things that
push through it. It wasn’t a case of bad acting – it was a case of the
PH balance being wrong. It was like watching black kids in a Chicago
slum speaking in Yale accents.
Many of the signals the film sent out were similarly scrambled. It
made many Indians feel as though they were speeding on a highway full
of potholes. I am not making a case for verisimilitude, or arguing
that it should not have been in English, or suggesting anything as
absurd as 'outsiders can never understand India.' I think plenty of
Indian filmmakers fall into the same trap. I also think that plenty of
Indian filmmakers have done this story much, much better. It's not
surprising that Christian Colson – head of Celedor, producers of ‘Who
Wants to be a Millionaire?’ – won the Oscar for the best film
producer. That's what Slumdog Millionaire is selling: the cheapest
version of the Great Capitalist dream in which politics is replaced by
a game show, a lottery in which the dreams of one person come true
while, in the process, the dreams of millions of others are usurped,
immobilizing them with the drug of impossible hope (work hard, be
good, with a little bit of luck you could be a millionaire).
The pundits say that the appeal of the film lies in the fact that
while in the West for many people riches are turning to rags, the rags
to riches story is giving people something to hold on to. Scary
thought. Hope, surely, should be made of tougher stuff. Poor Oscars.
Still, I guess it could have been worse. What if the film that won had
been like Guru – that chilling film celebrating the rise of the
Ambanis. That would have taught us whiners and complainers a lesson or
two. No
--
Bobby Kunhu http://community.eldis.org/myshkin/Blog/
http://dawn.net/wps/wcm/connect/Dawn%20Content%20Library/dawn/news/entertainment/caught-on-film-india-not-shining-ss
Caught on film: India ‘not shining’ Arundhati Roy – Exclusive for
Dawn.com
Monday, 02 Mar, 2009 | 11:05 AM PST |
( A pic here )
'Slumdog Millionaire' child actor Azharuddin Mohammed Ismail is served
his dinner by his mother Shamim Begum, right, in his home in a slum in
Bandra, suburban Mumbai, India, Thursday, Feb. 26, 2009. The child
stars of the Oscar-winning “Slumdog Millionaire” have returned to
India to a chaotic, but rousing, heroes' welcome, following their
appearance on the red carpet at the recent Oscar ceremony, where the
movie “Slumdog Millionaire,” a tale of hope amid adversity set in
Mumbai, was awarded eight Oscars, including best picture and best
director for Danny Boyle. – AP Photo The night before the Oscars, in
India, we were re-enacting the last few scenes of Slumdog Millionaire.
The ones in which vast crowds of people – poor people – who have
nothing to do with the game show, gather in the thousands in their
slums and shanty towns to see if Jamal Malik will win. Oh, and he did.
He did. So now everyone, including the Congress Party, is taking
credit for the Oscars that the film won!
The party claims that instead of India Shining it has presided over
India 'Achieving'. Achieving what? In the case of Slumdog, India's
greatest contribution, certainly our political parties’ greatest
contribution is providing an authentic, magnificent backdrop of epic
poverty, brutality and violence for an Oscar-winning film to be shot
in. So now that too has become an achievement? Something to be
celebrated? Something for us all to feel good about? Honestly, it's
beyond farce.
And here’s the rub: Slumdog Millionaire allows real-life villains to
take credit for its cinematic achievements because it lets them off
the hook. It points no fingers, it holds nobody responsible. Everyone
can feel good. And that’s what I feel bad about.
So that’s about what’s not in the film. About what’s in it: I thought
it was nicely shot. But beyond that, what can I say other than that it
is a wonderful illustration of the old adage, ‘there's a lot of money
in poverty’.
The debate around the film has been framed – and this helps the film
in its multi-million-dollar promotion drive – in absurd terms. On the
one hand we have the old 'patriots' parroting the line that "it
doesn't show India in a Proper Light' (by now, even they’ve been won
over thanks to the Viagra of success). On the other hand, there are
those who say that Slumdog is a brave film that is not scared to plum
the depths of India 'not-shining'.
Slumdog Millionaire does not puncture the myth of ‘India shining'— far
from it. It just turns India 'not-shining' into another glitzy item in
the supermarket. As a film, it has none of the panache, the politics,
the texture, the humour, and the confidence that both the director and
the writer bring to their other work. It really doesn’t deserve the
passion and attention we are lavishing on it. It's a silly screenplay
and the dialogue was embarrassing, which surprised me because I loved
The Full Monty (written by the same script writer). The stockpiling of
standard, clichéd, horrors in Slumdog are, I think, meant to be a sort
of version of Alice in Wonderland – ‘Jamal in Horrorland’. It doesn't
work except to trivialize what really goes on here. The villains who
kidnap and maim children and sell them into brothels reminded me of
Glenn Close in 101 Dalmatians.
Politically, the film de-contextualises poverty – by making poverty an
epic prop, it disassociates poverty from the poor. It makes India’s
poverty a landscape, like a desert or a mountain range, an exotic
beach, god-given, not man-made. So while the camera swoops around in
it lovingly, the filmmakers are more picky 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, malnutritioned, marked by
what they’d been through, wouldn't have been attractive enough. So
they cast an Indian model and a British boy. The torture scene in the
cop station was insulting. The cultural confidence emanating from the
obviously British 'slumdog' completely cowed the obviously Indian cop,
even though the cop was supposedly torturing the slumdog. The brown
skin that two share is too thin to hide a lot of other things that
push through it. It wasn’t a case of bad acting – it was a case of the
PH balance being wrong. It was like watching black kids in a Chicago
slum speaking in Yale accents.
Many of the signals the film sent out were similarly scrambled. It
made many Indians feel as though they were speeding on a highway full
of potholes. I am not making a case for verisimilitude, or arguing
that it should not have been in English, or suggesting anything as
absurd as 'outsiders can never understand India.' I think plenty of
Indian filmmakers fall into the same trap. I also think that plenty of
Indian filmmakers have done this story much, much better. It's not
surprising that Christian Colson – head of Celedor, producers of ‘Who
Wants to be a Millionaire?’ – won the Oscar for the best film
producer. That's what Slumdog Millionaire is selling: the cheapest
version of the Great Capitalist dream in which politics is replaced by
a game show, a lottery in which the dreams of one person come true
while, in the process, the dreams of millions of others are usurped,
immobilizing them with the drug of impossible hope (work hard, be
good, with a little bit of luck you could be a millionaire).
The pundits say that the appeal of the film lies in the fact that
while in the West for many people riches are turning to rags, the rags
to riches story is giving people something to hold on to. Scary
thought. Hope, surely, should be made of tougher stuff. Poor Oscars.
Still, I guess it could have been worse. What if the film that won had
been like Guru – that chilling film celebrating the rise of the
Ambanis. That would have taught us whiners and complainers a lesson or
two. No
2009/3/4 Jyothi TM <jyothi.tm@gmail.com>
why slumdog milllionaire should have been called Slumdog Nobel laureate...and though i have nt seen the movie or read the book..i feel the argument is strong....whats ur opinion?
Bobby Kunhu http://community.eldis.org/myshkin/Blog/
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