Xixax Film Forum

Danny Boyle to direct 'Slumdog'
Celador, Film4 greenlight Mumbai-set pic
Source: Variety

Celador Films and Film4 have greenlit Danny Boyle's "Slumdog Millionaire," with Warner Independent Pictures and Pathe in advanced negotiations to take domestic and international rights, respectively.

Based on true events, script by Simon Beaufoy ("The Full Monty") concerns an illiterate street kid from Mumbai who wins the jackpot on the Indian version of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?"

Brit newcomer Dev Patel, who appeared in the Channel 4 teen series "Skins," has been cast in the lead role.

Pic will shoot in Mumbai beginning Nov. 5, fully financed by Celador and Film4. Celador's co-managing director Christian Colson is producing, with Celador founder Paul Smith and Film4 topper Tessa Ross as exec producers.

Boyle will work with regular collaborators, including cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle, alongside an Indian crew.

Boyle's previous films with Film4 include "A Life Less Ordinary," "Trainspotting" and "Shallow Grave."

Celador was the original TV production company behind "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?"

Smith subsequently launched the film arm, run by Colson, with the resources to co-finance its own projects. "Slumdog Millionaire" will be its fourth move, following "Dirty Pretty Things," "The Descent" and "Separate Lies."

Quote from: MacGuffin on August 31, 2007, 12:45:02 AM
Danny Boyle to direct 'Slumdog'

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http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/7615211.stm

Slumdog wins film festival prize

British director Danny Boyle has won the Toronto Film Festival's main prize for Slumdog Millionaire.

The People's Choice Award, voted for by film fans, is regarded as an early indicator of success at the Oscars.

The film, starring Dev Patel, charts the life of a poor boy's rise to fortune living in the Indian slums.

Boyle, 51, received critical acclaim for previous gritty works such as Shallow Grave, Trainspotting and the zombie-horror film 28 Days Later.

Cash prize

Previous winners of the Canadian award include the London gangster film Eastern Promises by acclaimed director David Cronenberg.

Patel plays orphan Jamal, who appears on the Indian version of the hit TV game show Who Wants to be a Millionaire.

Originally, Boyle said he had hoped for an all Bollywood cast.

However, that was not possible as local Indian actors "didn't look enough like losers" for the main role of poor Jamal.

"It's a great underdog story," he said.

"In Bollywood if you want to be a young actor breaking into the system, you have to go to the gym for six hours a day to bulk up. I needed a very average-looking guy."

Bollywood star Anil Kapoor also stars in the movie, along with newcomer Freida Pinto.

Winners of the award are also presented with $15,000 (about £8,400).

London Film Festival teaser (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9VBofFZPsM)

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Trailer here. (http://movies.yahoo.com/premieres/10454480/standardformat/)


Release Date: November 12th, 2008 (limited)

Starring: Dev Patel, Anil Kapoor, Irrfan Khan, Madhur Mittal, Freida Pinto 

Directed by: Danny Boyle, Loveleen Tandan 

Premise: The story of Jamal Malik, an 18 year-old orphan from the slums of Mumbai, who is about to experience the biggest day of his life. With the whole nation watching, he is just one question away from winning a staggering 20 million rupees on India's "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?"

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Danny Boyle rises to challenges of 'Slumdog Millionaire'
The director's well-regarded film, made in Mumbai, India, features Dev Patel and Irfan Khan.
By John Horn; Los Angeles Times

Danny Boyle wasn't yet done with the Taj Mahal, but the Taj Mahal was done with him.

The British director needed to grab a few more shots inside the Indian landmark for his new movie "Slumdog Millionaire," a drama about the remarkable life story of an orphan from Mumbai's slums. Yet the production was no longer welcome. "The people who were helping us there," Boyle says, "didn't help us."

Some directors would have moved on and made do with what they had in the can. Others might have scouted another location. A few might have called up a special effects house to re-create the palace in a computer. Yet Boyle rarely has followed custom, and the outside-the-box thinking that has yielded his eclectic filmography also helped Boyle and his "Slumdog Millionaire" team conjure up a novel solution -- they sent in a fake documentary crew to get the footage.

"I can't remember if they posed as Indian or German or a mixture of both," Boyle says of the "Slumdog Millionaire" team sent to the Taj Mahal. The trick was picking production members who hadn't been there the first time so they wouldn't be recognized by security. "We had to do a little bit of stealth," Boyle says.

Boyle ultimately got what he needed, yet that was hardly the only impediment he faced in making the movie for half a year in and around Mumbai, India, one of the world's most populous cities.

While casting the film, Boyle and his Indian co-director, Loveleen Tandan, decided that the movie's first third should be in Hindi, rather than mostly English, jarring news for his French and American backers who knew that foreign-language films don't usually perform very well at the box office. Later, running low on funds, he had to abandon a planned monsoon sequence. And then, just as filming wrapped, U.S. distributor Warner Independent Pictures was shut down by Warner Bros., and the parent studio briefly considered releasing "Slumdog Millionaire" straight to video before Fox Searchlight came to the film's rescue.

At its heart, the film is a story of fate, and just as Boyle and his crew were swept up by Mumbai's whatever-it-takes spirit, the film's optimistic story line somehow altered "Slumdog Millionaire's" destiny. "If you trust it," Boyle is fond of saying about working in Mumbai, "it will come back to you."

And that's exactly what has happened to the movie. "Slumdog Millionaire" not only found a new distributor (Fox Searchlight, which is releasing the film Wednesday, is sharing costs and proceeds with Warner Bros.) but also is one of the holiday movie period's best-reviewed titles.

After premiering at the Telluride Film Festival over Labor Day, "Slumdog Millionaire" also played at the Toronto International Film Festival, where it won the festival's People's Choice Award, an honor previously bestowed on "American Beauty" and "Chariots of Fire."

For those familiar with Boyle's filmography, it's not an entirely surprising outcome, given the 52-year-old director's remarkable artistic range. He has made a zombie flick ("28 Days Later"), a children's fantasy ("Millions"), a sci-fi thriller ("Sunshine"), two big star vehicles (Leonardo DiCaprio's "The Beach" and Cameron Diaz's "A Life Less Ordinary") and an often horrific, often hilarious, sad, sick and ultimately impossible-to-categorize drug story ("Trainspotting").

As varied as all of those films have been, they are inherently united by Boyle's fanciful vision, unexpected images in unexpected places: babies crawling on ceilings, houses materializing out of thin air, flesh-eating monsters running like Olympic sprinters.

"I always try to make films intense -- intensely pleasurable or intensely frightening or intensely joyful," Boyle says. "Intensity is something I go for. That's how I judge things."

There's plenty of intensity in the R-rated "Slumdog Millionaire," too, including a few brief but troubling scenes of torture, a glimpse of teenage prostitution and some terrible cruelty to homeless children. But amid the heartache there's something else that's not always so obvious in Boyle's other movies: naturalism.

Even though "Slumdog Millionaire" is a work of fiction, it feels so consistently real that some early audience members are convinced it's based on a true story.

Freely adapted by Simon Beaufoy ("The Full Monty") from Vikas Swarup's novel "Q & A," "Slumdog Millionaire" tracks the life of Jamal Malik, an impoverished orphan living in Mumbai's sprawling slums, in which half of the city's 16 million residents live. As a child, Jamal (played as a teen by Dev Patel) meets Latika (played as a teen by Freida Pinto), a fellow Indian street urchin.

Jamal's childhood travels are filled with memorable encounters, not all of them pleasant. Those experiences shape Jamal into a romantic dreamer determined to be reunited with Latika and a savant possessing a wealth of seemingly inconsequential pop culture knowledge.

When Jamal appears as a contestant on the Indian version of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire," his trivia database helps him last much longer than anyone -- including a police interrogator (Irfan Khan) and the show's host (Anil Kapoor) -- can believe.

Soon after Boyle contemplated directing the movie, he traveled to Mumbai to consider filming there. "I thought very early after I arrived, 'You have to do this,' " Boyle says of how he was transformed by the city's manic liveliness.

"Some people find that appalling and rush back to the hotel and book the first flight they can out of there. It's an assault. The whole thing -- people, smell, temperature, dirt, atmosphere, the air, the water, the danger -- 'Don't drink that! Don't touch that! Don't eat there.' It's exciting. Everybody is contributing an energy to the place, everybody is throwing something into the pot."

To appreciate the area's essence and to capture it on cameras were, of course, very different challenges. But Boyle had a plan.

Rather than arrive as an imperialist interloper, Boyle brought along just a few British department heads, and made a point of hiring heavily from Indian's filmmaking ranks. Largely because the film's characters are children, most of its actors were local neophytes.

But it wasn't just in casting (or in having the youngest actors speak Hindi, or in sneaking into the Taj Mahal) that Boyle achieved a distinctive realism.

Where Swarup's novel was episodic, Beaufoy's screenplay created what Boyle calls "fluid time," in which the divisions between present and past -- the film cuts back across more than a decade in time -- are almost indistinct. That same compression between now and then is evident in "Slumdog Millionaire's" contemporary scenes, which cut between the game show stage and a police interrogation room. Even though Jamal is in both places, it almost feels as if the scenes are unfolding simultaneously.

"The experience that I wanted to have was that everything would feel present day, even though some of it is 10 years ago," Boyle says. "The most important thing was that you were living it right now."

So when the game show's host asks Latika on the phone what her name is, Boyle cuts back to when she introduced herself to Jamal at age 7. "And you get this feeling of destiny," Boyle says. "Normally, in a film, you can never do that. I've certainly never been as free, editing-wise, as I've been on this, to go back in time."

When Boyle does travel to the past, he doesn't give the audience the usual clues: There aren't period cars or different clothes. "I didn't want them to have a different look, because I thought that would just be too tiresome."

Boyle and his team also realized it would be impossible. "There's not a lot of nostalgia," Boyle says, "because India is very hard to control. To do a proper period film in India, to obey the details of the period, would be an absolute nightmare. So we ignored all that."

As much for authenticity as for budget (the film cost $15 million), Boyle populated his film's backgrounds with local non-actors. When a young Jamal and his friends are chased by police through Mumbai's slums, the frame is filled with its real residents, not hired extras.

To capture the city's dynamism, Boyle often filmed with three different types of cameras, including a Canon still camera that can shoot 11 frames per second and deliver incredibly high-resolution pictures that are blended into the film.

"A lot of our film is about memory, recalling things, the way images are burned on your mind," Boyle says. "So we would use that camera for key moments, like the image of Latika, when Jamal loses her at a train station, because the image is burned on his mind."

Boyle's last film, the critical and commercial washout "Sunshine," was as austere a movie as Boyle has made. For a year of post-production, Boyle often worked with just a handful of special effects technicians and editors, working toward something he called "very exact and precise." His new film, Boyle says, couldn't be more different.

"India is the exact opposite of exact and precise," he says. "And none of the filming is very exact or precise. It's a dash, really. And by doing it that way, you might be lucky enough to get a bit of genuine India, or genuine Mumbai. I'd be surprised if I saw a very controlled film about Mumbai that really caught the city. It just doesn't work that way."

Quote from: MacGuffin on August 31, 2007, 12:45:02 AM
Based on true events, script by Simon Beaufoy ("The Full Monty") concerns an illiterate street kid from Mumbai who wins the jackpot on the Indian version of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?"

this is not based on true events. 

SPOILERS!
the little kid is really really cute.

END SPOILERS

city of millions

i went tonight at the angelika to a sold out show with an audience that seemed to love it. i walked out with about 40 minutes to go to see the paris hilton musical instead. my friends that stayed in slumdog told me how it ended. i'm confident that i made the right decision.

its pretty bad.

I didn't think it was terrible but it's clearly not worthy of half the praise it is receiving. I would have probably enjoyed it to a greater degree if people hadn't been shoving it's merits down my throat for months now.

Quote from: bonanzataz on November 17, 2008, 03:38:21 AM
i went tonight at the angelika to a sold out show with an audience that seemed to love it. i walked out with about 40 minutes to go to see the paris hilton musical instead. my friends that stayed in slumdog told me how it ended. i'm confident that i made the right decision.

hahah we might have crossed paths. i tried to go to the 5:20 but it was sold out.

Got to attend a free screening last night where Danny Boyle spoke afterwards.

I'm getting bored with how hard it is to impress a lot of you, but if I posted here enough, you guys would probably get bored with how easy it is to impress me. So, oh well. That said, I was pretty impressed by this film. Yeah, it has a pretty typical story with a pretty typical ending where the guy gets the girl, but it's told in a such an interesting and engrossing way.Of course you know how it's going to end. It doesn't matter.

Someone last night asked Boyle about his decision to shoot on a small video format instead of film, and Boyle talked about how he didn't just want to "stare at India," he wanted to be in India and to show us India, and that's one thing that this film accomplishes very well.

Quote from: elpablo on November 20, 2008, 04:20:22 PM
Got to attend a free screening last night where Danny Boyle spoke afterwards.

I'm getting bored with how hard it is to impress a lot of you, but if I posted here enough, you guys would probably get bored with how easy it is to impress me. So, oh well. That said, I was pretty impressed by this film. Yeah, it has a pretty typical story with a pretty typical ending where the guy gets the girl, but it's told in a such an interesting and engrossing way.Of course you know how it's going to end. It doesn't matter.

Someone last night asked Boyle about his decision to shoot on a small video format instead of film, and Boyle talked about how he didn't just want to "stare at India," he wanted to be in India and to show us India, and that's one thing that this film accomplishes very well.

I agree that Boyle's direction ratchets this film up quite a few notches but the script was so lackluster that there just wasn't so far for it to go.

that this is such a celebrated movie is confusing and disconcerting.  i'm taking it as a sign of the apocalypse. 

Quote from: samsong on December 21, 2008, 03:56:09 AM
that this is such a celebrated movie is confusing and disconcerting.  i'm taking it as a sign of the apocalypse. 

Nah, Juno was a sign of the apocalypse...this is just a shitty movie year. Not to say that there aren't droves of better movies than this one out there.

you guys are fucking out of touch with reality at this point... i read this board and i dont know what the hell people will say... this is shit but then everyone is fucking excited for harold and kumar... who the fuck understands you all.

anyways this is an amazing film. its fucking great. you can argue how thousands of films have the same storylines, but they can still be different. love stories are different because of how they are told, and everything else around it. the music here is terrific, the editing too, and the performances are amazing considering that nobody knows any of the actors... it shows how you dont need fucking phil hoffman or cate blanchet to have a great film, you need vision and an unbelievably good script. 

Quote from: kal on December 22, 2008, 09:33:43 AM
you guys are fucking out of touch with reality at this point... i read this board and i dont know what the hell people will say... this is shit but then everyone is fucking excited for harold and kumar... who the fuck understands you all.

anyways this is an amazing film. its fucking great. you can argue how thousands of films have the same storylines, but they can still be different. love stories are different because of how they are told, and everything else around it. the music here is terrific, the editing too, and the performances are amazing considering that nobody knows any of the actors... it shows how you dont need fucking phil hoffman or cate blanchet to have a great film, you need vision and an unbelievably good script. 

Just because you loved a movie we didn't doesn't make us out of touch. You are totally correct about there only being a couple stories to tell and how it basically boils down to how the story is told but in this case I didn't feel the story was told in a way that brought anything new or interesting to the table. On top of that, for being a love story I felt zero connection between the two leads and by the end I just didn't care. That Bollywood dance number also seemed really out of place and tacky.

who was excited for harold and kumar?

EDIT: the correct answer is NOBODY (http://xixax.com/index.php?topic=9823.0).

Quote from: Hedwig on December 22, 2008, 12:04:20 PM
who was excited for harold and kumar?

probably pubrick and stefen.

You're the one who DVR's Grey's Anatomy and thought Godard was dead, but sure, I guess Pubrick and I are the ones who are out of touch and don't know good/intelligent/hard to comprehend shit if it hit us on the head.

Also, I haven't even posted in this thread and Pubrick hasn't even posted this year, so stop calling is out.

Also, nice Sopranos av, dude. Quality and difficult to grasp entertainment right dere.

andykal, i'm gonna buy you a punching bag for hanukkah.

Good or bad, still not interested.

And I like Danny Boyle, too.

I'd go as far as to say, I'd much rather see Bedtime Stories, than this - if only given those two options. Seems equally self congratulatory and somehow less shameless about it's feel good intentions.

Not that I'm saying there is ANYTHING wrong with you intentions being wholly to make an audience feel good.

Nevermind... I'll probably end up recanting all of this when I actually see it.

Point is: Sandler makes candy rain. What the fuck can this kid do?

Quote from: john on December 22, 2008, 07:44:44 PM
Point is: Sandler makes candy rain. What the fuck can this kid do?

win lots of prestigious awards and great reviews.

Sandler has worked with PTA, though.......

but i'm talking about bedtime stories, which looks on par with click. not sandler's career.

SPOILER






This was a good film more for the feel of the city than anything else.  The story itself isn't all that great, but man is there some serious atmosphere.  If you've ever been to India, this is what its like.  Its how this story is told that made this film entertaining.  However, the second half was not as good as the first half, where it settled into a groove and even got ridiculous, with the game show host having the kid tortured.

I want an American remake with Regis whacking some kid in the nuts ala Casino Royale.

Quote from: Ravi on December 26, 2008, 12:23:28 AM
This was a good film more for the feel of the city than anything else.  The story itself isn't all that great, but man is there some serious atmosphere. 

yeah, i appreciated the movie for that, but by the time the atmosphere had been established, what i really wanted was a story that made me feel like sitting there for another 45 minutes. if you want to do a movie that's about establishing place and aesthetic instead of character and story, make a short and save me an hour.

i think Kal sucks.

that is all.

It was pretty good. Any other year and I don't think it would have gotten as much mileage, but this year has been mad shitty for flicks.

When I first started watching it and saw the rating was R, I was kind of caught off guard. I thought it was going to be something light and kind hearted, and it was I guess. Boyle did a good job juggling violent situations and characters with the kind hearted stuff. In a lesser filmmakers hands it would have been a mess unable to find it's identity.

I really liked the way the story was told through how he learned the answers to each question. That was very creative and really kept the movie fresh as I started to get restless. It was very atmospheric as others have mentioned.

Good film, but not great. Jamal was kind of a pussy and you'd think the years of living on the streets would have hardened him. You can be a hardass with a conscience. Look at D'Angelo Barksdale. I also didn't think Latika and Jamal had any kind of connection. Jamal seemed to care about her only because she was really hot. At least that's the impression I got.

7.1/10.

Saw this today...

Really just echoing the sentiments already shared, but the first hour is pretty terrific, if not at all revelatory.  Boyle shoots everything with such vibrancy and enthusiasm that it's so easy to fall in love with it all. It's truly alive, and it's had not to appreciate that.

Then everything just stops. All motion, everything, just gets weighed down by the need to conclude and connect every contrivance they've established.

Still, I was more invested in this than in Boyle's last two efforts. Maybe he should do something with John Hodge again.

spoils

this was sooo disappointing. it boggles my mind that this is tipped for best picture in the same year as the wrestler and so many other far more gripping films.. i found boyle's style too scattered/messy (and far too dutched). jamal was terrrrrible. one of the most self-conscious, immature performances i've seen this year. (probably just behind thandie.) the millionaire host jealousy sub plot was RIDICULOUS. the fact that all these answers came in the chronological order of his life was RIDICULOUS. the romance was RIDICULOUS. the decision to end it all on a goofy celebratory dance took the wind out of any dramatic momentum. (though i do support goofy celebratory end credit dances in general.) it's not a bad movie. it has its moments. but this is just a couple of shades above mediocre. c'mon people.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123059568693241001.html

One Movie Composer Who Knows the Score
By BRIAN WISE

When British director Danny Boyle needed a composer to capture the frantic and violent hustle and bustle of Mumbai for his film "Slumdog Millionaire," he turned to A.R. Rahman, Bollywood's best-known composer, whose dozens of film scores span romantic symphonic themes, classical Indian music, and catchy pop confections. In India, Mr. Rahman is a megastar, having sold an estimated 100 million albums, or roughly the same number as Madonna or Billy Joel. Not only has he scored such Bollywood film classics as "Roja" and "Lagaan," but he has a growing slate of international credits, including the 2002 Andrew Lloyd Webber-produced London stage musical "Bombay Dreams" and last year's film "Elizabeth: The Golden Age."

Mr. Boyle's exuberantly paced story -- about an orphan from the Mumbai slums who gets a shot at winning a fortune on India's version of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" -- is a distant cry from Bollywood, where Mr. Rahman has worked for nearly two decades. "He didn't want any sentimental or sad stuff. He wanted only throbbing and edgy and pulsating sounds," Mr. Rahman said of Mr. Boyle's request to avoid emotion-tugging themes and maudlin arrangements.

"The music came as a kind of counterpoint actually," added the soft-spoken 42-year-old composer. "When there's something really serious happening on screen there was a fun soundtrack underneath. It would make the movie more enjoyable."

With its intoxicating Indian rhythms blended with Western hip-hop beats, the "Slumdog Millionaire" soundtrack has received a Golden Globe nomination for Best Original Score, making Mr. Rahman the first Indian composer to receive such an honor. (Music from the film is collected on a new soundtrack release.)

Mr. Rahman said that after receiving Mr. Boyle's commission, he had just three weeks to study early DVD cuts of the film and compose the cues (the musical themes that correspond to moments in the plot). On two tracks, he quotes well-known Bollywood tunes, while in one of the film's most talked-about sequences -- the rousing chorus "Jai Ho" -- he pays homage to splashy Bollywood song-and-dance routines. Mr. Rahman also worked with M.I.A., the British-born, Sri Lankan-reared rapper to create "O . . . Saya," which is heard in a pivotal scene. "She speaks my language, but her sensibility is completely different," noted Mr. Rahman, who grew up speaking Tamil.

While a typical Bollywood music director may score up to 150 movies a year, Mr. Rahman limits his annual commissions to between five and 10 films (still a considerable number by Hollywood standards). In popular films like "Kadhalan," "Rangeela," "Dil Se," "Taal" and "Rang de Basanti," Mr. Rahman introduced styles relatively foreign to Bollywood -- including dancehall reggae, hip-hop, hard rock and Baroque counterpoint. Even so, he acknowledges that experimentation often bows to commercial pressures.

"The demand in India is to have a hit, which becomes a promotion for the movie and makes people come to the theater," Mr. Rahman said. "You have five songs and different promotions based on those. But when I do Western films, the need for originality is greater. Then I become very conscious about the writing. However, the good thing about Indian cinema is because there are so many ragas in it, you can take a raga and make it a little bit funkier and people can relate to it. Half of the stuff I get away with is like that."

Mr. Rahman identifies with the rags-to-riches tale of "Slumdog Millionaire." "A lot of people write you off when you have an idea or something good to say," he said. "This is to give hope to those kind of people. Take the right road and you will definitely be there."

Mr. Rahman was born into a middle-class Hindu family that fell on hard times after his father, the film arranger and conductor R.K. Sekhar, died when he was 9. The young Rahman, who began studying the piano at the age of 4, began helping to support his family as a keyboardist for television productions. As a teenager he performed with Indian musical luminaries like tabla maestro Zakir Hussain and violinist and singer L. Shankar. These gigs led to a scholarship to Trinity College, Oxford, where he earned a degree in Western classical music.

Returning to Madras (now Chennai), Mr. Rahman worked as a jingle writer for an ad agency. A turning point came in 1991, when at age 25, he was hired to write and direct music for the Mani Ratnam film "Roja." The film and soundtrack became smash hits, and Time magazine listed it as one of the top 10 movie soundtracks of all time. Today, Mr. Rahman remains based in Chennai, although he considers Mumbai his second home -- feelings that intensified after the November terrorist attacks.

"We were all affected by that," he said, noting the many press events that he's attended at the Taj Mahal hotel, the site of one of the attacks. "For me, it was a shock. I could have been there with my family. Some of my friends had a dinner reservation there. Then 10 minutes before they heard the news they stopped going. They could have been victims."

Even as the Mumbai attacks signaled growing religious and ethnic strife, Mr. Rahman, whose family converted to Islam in 1989, sees music as having the power to cut across class and religious divisions. "When I listen to Bach or Beethoven, I don't see them as Christians," he explained. "And when people listen to my music, or that of [the late Qawwali singer] Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, they don't see the religious element in it; they just see the spiritual element. At this chaotic time in the world, music can play a very important role as a spiritual force."

Mr. Rahman said that despite Hollywood's allure, he has no plans to leave the Indian film industry, although he's ready to work with any director who appreciates his music. In 2002, Sony Pictures hired him to write the score for "Warriors of Heaven and Earth," a costume epic by Chinese director He Ping that included songs in Chinese, English and Hindi. Coming to movie theaters are his scores for "Paani" (Water), by "Elizabeth" director Shekhar Kapur, and "19 Steps," an English-language martial-arts film co-produced by Walt Disney and starring a Japanese actor.

"It's very difficult to get a director who understands what you're capable of," said Mr. Rahman. "Danny Boyle was definitely good luck for me. He could get what I was trying to do, and in my own little way I could get what he wanted. So if I can get another director like that I would definitely love to work in Hollywood."

Mr. Wise is a writer living in New York and a producer at WNYC Radio.

Danny Boyle Q&A
Director discusses the brilliant Slumdog Millionaire.
by Chris Tilly, IGN UK

Danny Boyle discusses directing his critically acclaimed new film Slumdog Millionaire, the rags-to-riches tale of an orphan's efforts to win back his lost love by appearing on the Indian Who Wants to be a Millionaire?.

IGN: When you initially heard about the project, were you put off by the Who Wants to be a Millionaire hook?

Danny Boyle: They didn't really pitch it. I don't think the agent was very interested, he said "It's a film about Who Wants to be a Millionaire?." But it was written by Simon Beaufoy, who had written The Full Monty, so you have to read a bit of that, at least, but I didn't want to make a film about a gameshow. But they didn't mention it was set in India, and they certainly didn't mention the way the gameshow was used in the story, so I was in after about 10 or 15 pages of it. I remember thinking, this is it!

And it's weird, it only happens occasionally that you get kidnapped by a script. You don't wait till you get to the end or anything, you can feel it happening to you. And when I look back at my decision, it's not based on the full story - the unravelling of why he's on the show - so I think it's based on the city. It's the set-up - meeting the kid, seeing him on the show, seeing him in the slum, and the city - those ingredients made me do it.

IGN: What was it like shooting in the city - did you feel out of your comfort zone?

Boyle: Yes, absolutely. But you do it for that reason, because your comfort zone is not a good place to make a film in, in my opinion. You should get out of your comfort zone as much as possible, you shouldn't have a clue what you're doing, ideally, and yet be able to make sense of it somehow. That's the kind of equation you want.

With a film in India, you have to hire people. I made a mistake on The Beach. I took hundreds of people from here who knew how to do it theoretically, and it's not the right way to do those films, especially nowadays. You have to try and build a film from the inside. So we took virtually no one, and got a Bollywood crew. They are the people to deal with, and they are the people that make the film feel like it starts to belong. Now it doesn't quite belong there, because the culture is different, and there is a Britishness about the film - I think its realism - that gives it its British flavour.

Because our bedrock, mine and Simon's, is always realism. That's what we start with. That's how we judge everthing - do you believe that person would be doing that job at that moment? You judge everything like that as a British director - that's the culture we come out of. But then it kind of moves on and picks up more of the culture of Bombay, which is coincidence; which is melodrama; which is this extraordinary passion for life; which is violence and beauty at one and the same time.

IGN: Did you have to be careful of striking a balance between plundering the culture, and yet remaining respectful towards it?

Boyle: Yes, and you have to work your way through that, it's a really good way of putting it. Because you are an outsider, and you've really got to get people to trust you, and you have to build that trust over a long period of time as you prepare. There are certain key people that you make that relationship with and they basically become your co-directors.

And I can only credit one as co-director, which is the casting director Loveleen Tanden, because the first assistant director, for Guild reasons, you can't credit him as the co-director, nor the sound guy, but those three people made the biggest difference for the film. Normally, it's your cinematographer, or your designer, or your lead actor, or your writer - that key relationship. But for me on this one it was those three people, local people on the crew from Bombay.

IGN: What's the reaction been like from people in India?

Boyle: It hasn't been released there - it's released on January 23 in an English-language version and a version dubbed fully into Hindi, which they're preparing at the moment. So far the reactions have been very good, which is amazing really because you're very nervous about it. But it's a very generous place.

It's like America - they're much more open-hearted than we are here, everything's on the front foot. The violence as well, when it comes, which is scary. But it's a much more open place, we are much more careful and considered about things. There it's all about the heart - if you feel it, you say it, and it's out. They see their city depicted and they love it, so we've had a very good response so far.

IGN: The film is receiving incredible critical acclaim wherever it has screened - are you able to enjoy that?

Boyle: Well it's better that it being the other way round! The problem with being British... I don't know if it's me being British or being raised a strict Catholic, but you never really enjoy success. You never relish it and I think that I'm quite happy that I don't relish it, because I don't feel that comfortable. It's not something that I settle into at all.

And I've had it a couple of times, with Trainspotting, and with 28 Days Later, they were big successes, in different ways. I always think, when there's stuff that people don't like, I always say that if I have another success, I'll enjoy it more, but you don't really.

It's wonderful for the film. The great thing with film is that it doesn't have an ego. It's just a film. Everybody that makes them has an ego, and the problem with awards and stuff like that is that it always affects the egos, and everyone gets stained by it in some way. And that can be fine and very innocent, but it can be horrible as well. So I don't feel that relaxed about it, but it's very nice.

IGN: Finally, with the year ending, what have been your favourite films of 2008?

Boyle: I'll tell you a couple I've seen recently that have just been extraordinary. I saw the Swedish vampire film, Let the right One In, and it's fantastic. Sometimes you see film and you get really jealous, and that one was just fantastic. I also saw Waltz With Bashir, and that was excellent. I saw Hunger, which was brutal. I saw two films virtually back-to-back, Hunger and The Wrestler, and they were both brutal films about the human body, but in weird, different ways, and both of them were amazing. So that's what I've liked recently.

I wouldn't call the coincidences in this film RIDICULOUS. I see this film as the indian Oliver! and it has plot twists and characters similar to any Dickens story. It's like the Carol Reed Oliver meets the David Lean one.

I suppose the brutality and cruelty in the first half of the film kind of sets it up to be taken more seriously than where it was headed, though. The romance stretched it for me a little but it wasnt so bad.

They're marketing it like Mama Mia in the UK - the film whose box office receipts and dvd sales have shamed my nation.

This was good, but it's not worth a Best Picture or anything. I had never seen anything about Mumbai, so this revealed a lot to me, and it was beautifully shot at times, sloppy at others, and overall really predictable. And it's about ten minutes too long. It's just Juno all over again, but it's going to win.

Other than employment, free movies and popcorn, the best part of working at a movie theater is hearing people stumble through movie titles or otherwise just make them up.  Synecdoche, NY obviously had the most butcherings pronunciationwise, but Slumdog Millionaire has yielded some of the most confusing/hilarious alternate titles by patrons who it seems go to movies to eat popcorn in the dark for two hours.

What makes these titles so great is the starkly unique premise that each of them presents.  I really wish I was making these up:

Scumbag Landlord

Millionaire Dog

Slim Millionaire

Slumlord Billionaire

Rich Slumlord

A Million Slumdogs

LOL those are great

Scumbag Landlord... some people really project what they want haha

Quote from: Walrus on January 21, 2009, 01:47:26 AM
Millionaire Dog

(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.personal.psu.edu%2Fusers%2Fs%2Fr%2Fsrr120%2Fpoochie.gif&hash=90249a364df54fd74643dbbcf24467ca421cb786)

Quote from: Walrus on January 21, 2009, 01:47:26 AMSlim Millionaire

(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fupload.wikimedia.org%2Fwikipedia%2Fen%2F5%2F56%2FMr_Burns.png&hash=d81e5d3943e414157e44d6c45d2d727455d7c529)

Indians don't feel good about 'Slumdog Millionaire'
The story of an impoverished street child in Mumbai, which has won 10 Oscar nods, is a stereotypical Western portrayal, Indians say, that ignores the wealth and progress their country has seen.
By Mark Magnier; Los Angeles Times

Reporting from Mumbai, India -- Even as American audiences gush over "Slumdog Millionaire," some Indians are groaning over what they see as yet another stereotypical foreign depiction of their nation, accentuating squalor, corruption and impoverished-if-resilient natives.

"Slumdog," which earned 10 Oscar nominations this week, including one for best picture, is set in Mumbai, is based on an Indian novel and features many Indian actors. Yet the sensibility is anything but Indian, some critics argue. They attribute the film's sweeping international success in large part to its timing and themes that touch a chord with Western audiences.

"It's a white man's imagined India," said Shyamal Sengupta, a film professor at the Whistling Woods International institute in Mumbai. "It's not quite snake charmers, but it's close. It's a poverty tour."

The story of an orphaned street urchin, Jamal Malik, overcoming hardship to win a fortune on a game show and walk away with his childhood sweetheart -- capped by a Bollywood ending of dance, song, love and fame -- provides a salve for a world beset by collapsing banks, jobs and nest eggs, some here say.

The film, which bagged four Golden Globe awards this month, was released in the United States days before Mumbai came under attack by a team of militants. That may have strengthened its connection with foreign viewers, analysts said.

Mumbai was an ideal backdrop for the international production, wrote Vikram Doctor, a columnist in India's Economic Times, since it is a "cutting-edge, if rather crummy, place" that has slums along with the sort of posh restaurants favored by the global glitterati. "Who, after all, is interested in unremitting squalor, sameness and sadness?" the column said.

"Slumdog's" mix of Indian and foreign talent, and English and Hindi dialogue, has sparked a debate here over whether it's an Indian or foreign film. It was based on a novel by Indian diplomat Vikas Swarup, directed by Briton Danny Boyle, best known for "Trainspotting," adapted by British screenwriter Simon Beaufoy of "Full Monty" fame, and acted by Indians and foreigners of Indian descent. Fox Searchlight and Warner Bros. are handling distribution in India.

"These ideas, that there are still moments of joy in the slum, appeal to Western critics," said Aseem Chhabra, an Asia Foundation associate fellow and culture critic.

Others, such as Shekhar Kapur, who directed "Elizabeth" (1998), argue that for all intents and purposes it's Indian. "What's most relevant is that 'Slumdog' is the most successful Indian film ever," he said. "It was directed by a British director and funded by a European company, but so what?. . . . Foreign crews are very common in Indian films now."

"Slumdog" cost $15 million to produce but has already earned more than $50 million in the U.S. and elsewhere. It saw its Indian premiere Thursday, in Mumbai, and began screening with the original soundtrack or completely in Hindi on Friday in 400 theaters in 81 cities.

At the star-studded premiere, Boyle responded to criticism here that the film focused too much on prostitution, crime and organized begging rackets, saying that he sought to depict the "breathtaking resilience" of Mumbai and the "joy of people despite their circumstances, that lust for life."

For some, the underdog theme is not so much irrelevant as passe. Rags-to-riches tales dominated Bollywood from the late 1950s through the early 1980s as India worked to lift itself from hunger and poverty.

With the nation's rising standard of living and greater exposure to foreign culture, Bollywood has increasingly turned its attention to relationships and other middle-class concerns.

"Within the film world, there's a desire to move beyond the working class and lower sectors of society," said Tejaswini Ganti, an anthropologist and Bollywood expert at New York University.

The ambivalence some Indians feel toward the movie doesn't preclude it from becoming a roaring commercial success in India, experts said. "There is still a fascination with seeing how we are perceived by white Westerners," said Sengupta, the Mumbai film professor. "It's a kind of voyeurism."

Many in Bollywood also have transferred onto "Slumdog" their hopes for an "Indian" Oscar after homegrown favorite "Taare Zameen Par" failed to garner a nomination. "Taare," about a dyslexic child who finds an outlet through art, was the latest in a string of Oscar letdowns dating to 2002.

Between rolls of their eyes, critics here point to other foreign depictions over the years that they consider inaccurate, distorted or obsessed with poverty and squalor, including "Phantom India," "Salaam Bombay" and "City of Joy," in which a Western doctor played by Patrick Swayze arrives to save India.

Some add that the criticism of "Slumdog" may be less about getting it wrong than its focus on issues some in India would rather downplay.

The world's second-most populous country after China has seen enormous benefits from globalization. But "Slumdog" raises questions about the price paid by those left behind and the cost in eroding morality, seen in the portrayal of Salim, Jamal's gangster-in-training brother. For India, this hits a nerve, after a top Indian IT outsourcing firm, Satyam, reported this month that it had faked profits.

"A lot of people felt it was bashing India, but I disagree," said Rochona Majumdar, an Indian film expert at the University of Chicago. "We're too quick to celebrate 'Incredible India,' she said, referring to an Indian tourism slogan. "But there is an underbelly. To say we don't have problems is absurd."

Salman Ali, 12, lives those problems. He's been on his own as long as he can remember, he said. Dressed in a ragged T-shirt, filthy pants and bare feet, he sleeps under Mumbai's Mahim pipeline, a local landmark featured in "Slumdog" amid the Technicolor water, toxic electronic waste and petroleum sludge. He earns a few dollars a week recycling garbage or begging on the nearby overpass.

Sometimes police beat him up, he said. And several times gangs have attacked him and stolen what little he has. Sure, he'd love to appear on a game show like Jamal did in the film and become a millionaire.

But however hard he tries to make money, Salman said, he never gets ahead. His dream is to become a Bollywood star one day. And whenever a film crew shows up to shoot amid the squalor, he tries to get their attention. But he said they never pick him. "Who wouldn't want to be a millionaire?" he said.

A few miles away, in the maze of alleys that make up Dharavi, Asia's largest slum and another backdrop for the film, some said the plot sounded too close to real life and therefore not interesting, whereas others said they wanted to see how it depicted their neighborhood.

Homemaker Lakshmi Nagaraj Iyer, 26, said she had trouble with the get-rich-quick premise. "I feel it's a wrong route," she declared. "We barely get by, but the answer is education and hard work, not a quick fix."

India's reaction helps reaffirm that this movie was not a documentary for me.

This was really really good but still I felt a bit underwhelmed. Not boyle's best.

Wake up Xixax, I think you're becoming less critical and it grinds my gears!

This was really really bad.

Pretty good movie, I had a good time at it but definitely not picture of the year. 
Did anyone else think the gameshow host looked quite a bit like Luis Guzman??  I can't find a good image of the host to post but it made me laugh throughout the film.  Also the main cop interrogator looked like an Indian Jeff Goldblum, just sayin.

Quote from: GoneSavage on January 25, 2009, 08:16:25 PM
Did anyone else think the gameshow host looked quite a bit like Luis Guzman?? 

why? because he was brown and had a funny accent? fucking racist...

A nice coincidence I watched this while reading Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children. Both works deal with growing up in India, but both also have similar types of stories. Midnight's Children deals with larger ideas of India's independence, but the novel is mainly superficial. Rushdie's ability to craft and weave such an intricate story that brings together so many familiar story archetypes into something that feels creative and whole is the main reward.

Slumdog Millionaire has a similar reward. The story is recognizable and if dissected from a plot only viewpoint, is completely predictable. Someone could say the fact Jamal's life goes in chronological order according to the questions on the game show is a gimmick, but the film doesn't make this great coincidence a true theme at all. Magnolia made all the coincidences of 82 into something more and drove the film to look for meaning out of it, but Slumdog Millionaire just focuses on the chance and fate that Jamal and Lapika were meant to be together. It's a simple theme and the film expands on it enough to make the whole film feel organic and complete.

The films seems to be purposely superficial. The meaning lies in the care and interest you take from the filmmaking and how it elicits the story and very simple theme. But other great films are superficial and make you concentrate just on the filmmaking. 8 1/2 is one of the best films ever, but has an empty story with even emptier themes and obvious symbolism. It's just the filmmaking creates an experience that is pretty masterful. Slumdog Millionaire isn't 8 1/2, but it hits all the right buttons for what it wants to do.

Quote from: ©brad on January 22, 2009, 11:24:44 AMi was really excited about slumdog until the backlash came, and then there was the inevitable backlash against the backlash and i got excited again, but now i'm pretty sure that, judging by what many of you and some friends i trust have concluded, it's going to be manipulative and contrived and fun but ultimately not worthy.

I LOVED IT. take that, stupid cbrad from a few days ago!

remember kids, it's okay to like something that's popular.

I didn't like this that much. It starts kind of great, and it's a very good idea, but not a moment too late, the screenplay opens the Great Book of the Cliché and it all downhill from there. I mean, look at those villains: the first is dark and sinister and the second one is a fat buffoon who watches criquet (?!) on TV and acts like Archie Bunker without being even remotely funny. The romance between Jamal and the girl never feels strong enough to make me care, and only Jamal's brother had a good treatment, character wise. There's also a lot of fluff with the visuals, but they didn't distract me from a poor and banal story. The darker scenes were good, not overplayed, but the rest is very underwhelming.

Quote from: ©brad on January 29, 2009, 08:41:22 PM
remember kids, it's okay to like something that's popular.

And it's also equally ok to dislike something that's popular but not because it's popular.

Quote from: ElPandaRoyal on January 30, 2009, 09:33:37 AM
The romance between Jamal and the girl never feels strong enough to make me care

This was pretty much my biggest beef with the film. I think I would have liked it a lot more if there was a reason that Jamal searched for Latika other than the fact that she's really hot. You ask Jamal why he's so obseseed with her and he'd say, "Because she's fucking hot!"

Quote from: Stefen on January 30, 2009, 10:36:17 AM

Quote from: ElPandaRoyal on January 30, 2009, 09:33:37 AM
The romance between Jamal and the girl never feels strong enough to make me care

This was pretty much my biggest beef with the film. I think I would have liked it a lot more if there was a reason that Jamal searched for Latika other than the fact that she's really hot. You ask Jamal why he's so obseseed with her and he'd say, "Because she's fucking hot!"

I think there may have been a longer version of the film where they bond as kids was a bit more established. As hot as she is when we see her all grown up, the fucker had been searching for her for many years. At least when he found her she was hot, imagine after 10 years of looking for the girl if she was fucking ugly he would kill himself.

this has become my Crash. the more love people show for it the more i find myself hating it for all its shallowness. elpanda sums it up pretty well.

Quote from: kal on January 30, 2009, 10:51:02 AM

Quote from: Stefen on January 30, 2009, 10:36:17 AM

Quote from: ElPandaRoyal on January 30, 2009, 09:33:37 AM
The romance between Jamal and the girl never feels strong enough to make me care

This was pretty much my biggest beef with the film. I think I would have liked it a lot more if there was a reason that Jamal searched for Latika other than the fact that she's really hot. You ask Jamal why he's so obseseed with her and he'd say, "Because she's fucking hot!"

I think there may have been a longer version of the film where they bond as kids was a bit more established. As hot as she is when we see her all grown up, the fucker had been searching for her for many years. At least when he found her she was hot, imagine after 10 years of looking for the girl if she was fucking ugly he would kill himself.

I never qualified the relationship between Latika and Jamal as a standard romance. The inherent need for Jamal to find her seems to be his instinct to find a surrogate member of his family. His relationship with his older brother was strained from the beginning and while he trusts him somewhat, he sees the ideal more in Latika. She has no bad intensions and he feels protective about her because he took her in from the rain when no one else would. Then Jamal's actions is what brought her to that manager of children and he also feels responsible for leaving her with him alone. Considering he has no one else but his brother I find the need within him to find her again to be quite natural.

The film develops the story by showing each brother find their own interest and ambition. With the older brother it is power and fame, but with Jamal it is to just find someone he felt responsible for. As both grew older they had to develop interests and ambitions for something. What happens in the film was to be expected. And the bond Jamal developed with Latika came before hormones, but it's natural after a lot of time for romantic urges to develop. I just don't think romance was ever the basis of Jamal's interest in Latika. It just became the result of everything.

Quote from: picolas on January 30, 2009, 04:30:23 PM
this has become my Crash. the more love people show for it the more i find myself hating it for all its shallowness. elpanda sums it up pretty well.

Thank you picolas.
Thank you ElPandaRoyal.
Thank you Gamblour.

You revived some hope for Xixax.

Quote from: Gamblour. on January 30, 2009, 10:09:37 AM

Quote from: ©brad on January 29, 2009, 08:41:22 PM
remember kids, it's okay to like something that's popular.

And it's also equally ok to dislike something that's popular but not because it's popular.

of course. but you have to admit, when a film reaches a certain point of popularity, the cynic in you goes in wanting it to fail. the film starts 2 touchdowns down before it even starts (forgive the poor football metaphor) because your immediate instinct is to not want to like it. i'm not saying any of the criticisms presented in this thread aren't without merit. there certainly were parts in slumdog that i could label as "oh come on" but i don't know, i was in a good mood, and it made me feel good. maybe it's impossible to do, but ideally, one should watch a film without any preconceived notions or agendas.

the story is so cliche argument is kind of weak, because the wrestler is equally if not more cliche, and yet we're lauding that film as a masterpiece. from a story/structure perspective, i thought slumdog was far more original. character development wise, well that's something else. i just think we (myself included b/c i'm guilty of all of this) unfairly apply different standards of critique for different films based on things that shouldn't matter. 

what separates the wrestler from slumdog is the genuine motivation, the genuine characters, the genuine performances among other things. dev patel STUNK. i couldn't root for him because he made the character so bloody infantile. another actor could've made that role ten times more interesting. instead it's sooo labored and hoing and humming.. slumdog reminds you of its clichedness constantly by throwing in extraneous shit like "it is written." the whole destiny theme is so tacked-on and not uplifting at all. fuck fate. jamal won because he was cunning, good-hearted etc. but don't give me the 'destiny' message. like, anyone could say that about anything. if anything the idea of destiny in this movie detracts from jamal's good points as a character. the millionaire host also turned in a shit performance but he had very little to work with. he's written like a mustache-stroking evil guy with such unbelievable motivation so that's what we get. (the more money jamal wins, the more successful the show. have you never considered the possibility of someone winning?? wtf??). i didn't want this to fail. i wanted to like it. but i didn't for the above and several other reasons.

Quote from: picolas on January 30, 2009, 08:36:12 PM
slumdog reminds you of its clichedness constantly

This is exactly what I predicted I would take from this film if I sat through it.  Thanks for taking one for the team and giving me all the warning I need to never watch this melodrama.

Quote from: picolas on January 30, 2009, 08:36:12 PM
what separates the wrestler from slumdog is the genuine motivation, the genuine characters, the genuine performances among other things. dev patel STUNK. i couldn't root for him because he made the character so bloody infantile. another actor could've made that role ten times more interesting.

His character was meant to be infantile. If he was filled with any sense of bravado or toughness he would have gotten Lakita back earlier in other ways. He goes on the game show to attract her attention because he feels that is the only thing he can even do. He tries other measures and fails when it seems like an ounce of courage in certain situations would have gotten her back. Like the moment when his brother is pointing a gun at him in the doorway. The gun was close to his head he could have ducked out of the way and fought his brother off, but he didn't have that physical courage. Lakita recognized that so stepped in to save the situation by relenting herself.

Quote from: picolas on January 30, 2009, 08:36:12 PM
slumdog reminds you of its clichedness constantly by throwing in extraneous shit like "it is written." the whole destiny theme is so tacked-on and not uplifting at all. fuck fate. jamal won because he was cunning, good-hearted etc. but don't give me the 'destiny' message. like, anyone could say that about anything. if anything the idea of destiny in this movie detracts from jamal's good points as a character.

I have no idea how being good hearted had anything to do with him answering the questions, but Jamal certainly wasn't very smart. I think the point of the film is that he had a short lifetime to think about certain events he had experienced over and over again. His main life events were tied to how he found Lakita and continuously lost her. And because he went on the show just to get Lakita's attention, doesn't the fact the questions measure up to his experiences of her so well speak to some purpose of fate?

I understand if you just didn't buy into the scenario. That's fine. The film is driven by a first person perspective and either you identify with the events of Jamal or you don't. The film never takes on anyone else's experience in the story so belief in the integrity and redeemability of the main character is vital. I also think the first person aspect of the narrative is what makes the film destroy a lot of its story cliches. The energy of the style is florescent through out the film. Images appear and then evaporate so quickly it feels like we are privy to Jamal's conscious mind during a strenuous situation. The constant use of this style of storytelling through out is provocative.

I had no idea what to expect from the film. As soon as I noticed the high energy of the style I was afraid I would hate it because at the time I was battling a huge headache, but everything the film intended me to feel and care about washed over me.

Quote from: ©brad on January 30, 2009, 08:07:07 PM

Quote from: Gamblour. on January 30, 2009, 10:09:37 AM

Quote from: ©brad on January 29, 2009, 08:41:22 PM
remember kids, it's okay to like something that's popular.

And it's also equally ok to dislike something that's popular but not because it's popular.

of course. but you have to admit, when a film reaches a certain point of popularity, the cynic in you goes in wanting it to fail. the film starts 2 touchdowns down before it even starts (forgive the poor football metaphor) because your immediate instinct is to not want to like it. i'm not saying any of the criticisms presented in this thread aren't without merit. there certainly were parts in slumdog that i could label as "oh come on" but i don't know, i was in a good mood, and it made me feel good. maybe it's impossible to do, but ideally, one should watch a film without any preconceived notions or agendas.

No, see, the optimist in me went in wanting the film to be good. The great thing about this board is that we sort of are our own sociological experiement, where we can observe shifts in opinion based on a film's popularity, so I'm aware of the backlash backlash. We all saw it with Juno. What we can't have now is backlash backlash backlash. Umm...

My point is that, yes, this film is incredibly popular. Yes, popularity makes a lot of people want to hate the film more. But for those of you who like it (and I'm not trying to rain shit on your parade, I know a bunch of people who want to fight me, their words, over not absolutely loving this movie. I know it made them feel really really good inside), you can't apply its own popularity as the reason why we don't like it. pic and others have done a good job of enumerating their complaints, none of which include the fact that the film is simply popular.

I think it's not going in to the movie that brings out one's inner cynic, it's coming out of the movie and wondering what movie everyone else saw. I'm glad, really glad, that people here both love and dislike the film, because it means that we're all right. The people who love it aren't crazy and the people who hate aren't crazy either.

I had a huge conversation with my wife's coworker about this film. He loved the film, was one of the one's who said he wanted to fight me. And we got to the point in discussing it that we realized the film is a union of social realism and fabulist storytelling. And for some people, a lot of people, this combination works. You get this gritty perspective mixed with heart-strings-tugging narrative, and people seem to love it. We thought maybe it had to do with the Obama win, an underdog in his own right getting this big win, it's given people an optimism and this movie helps them relive it. That's a bit of pedestrian generalization and analysis, but I think the idea fits. However, if that article about Indian audiences not liking the film for what it ignores about reality there, there's where the fabulism fails. I was telling him that the film made me want to see the Indian "Battle of Algiers" or their "Umberto D." The social realism intrigued me, not the bullshit Millionaire story.

SPOILERS!!

I can't compare it to the wrestler because it hasn't come out in Portugal yet so I haven't seen it. And I didn't have any problems with Slumdog before I saw it: I like some Danny Boyle stuff, and contrary to what happens in the US, early reviews around here (it only opens theatrically next week) aren't being very good. So I didn't want it to fail or anything. I just didn't like it.

It's not the cliché in itself that's bad, it's the way it's presented to the viewer. As I said before, I liked some of the characters, like the guy who kidnapped children, because he was genuinely scary, and Jamal's brother, who was really complex. And I don't think the acting was bad, but most of the characters were very badly written (I mean, the host was very one-dimentional, and the cop who interrogated Jamal was a laugh: first, I electrocute you, then I don't believe that you know the name of the most famous indian actor, then I believe when you tell me a story about how you went across the whole country and know stuff like who is on the 100 dollar bill or the name of the guy who invented the revolver - by the way, at the moment I can't even remember in what scene he does know that last information). I kind of liked the point The God Trumpet made about Jamal and Latika's relationship, but I just couldn't care about watching the movie. I also have problems with that whole destiny situation. It's overplayed, it's always talked mentioned, and even if it's a part of the indian culture, it doesn't work dramatically. And by the time the movie ended, and we all got the point, the words "D) It was written" come in to hammer us a little bit more with that idea.

EDIT: I thought it was better to put a Spoiler warning, because the ending is talked about, even though we know how it end in the first seconds.

Quote from: Gamblour. on January 31, 2009, 09:09:46 AMpic and others have done a good job of enumerating their complaints, none of which include the fact that the film is simply popular.

agreed. my beef wasn't aimed at them. i said pic's and some other critiques had merit and i even agreed with some of them. i was speaking about stupid comments like this:

Quote from: private witt on January 30, 2009, 08:43:53 PMThis is exactly what I predicted I would take from this film if I sat through it.  Thanks for taking one for the team and giving me all the warning I need to never watch this melodrama.

and for the record, i wasn't saying that slumdog was better than the wrestler. the wrestler remains my favorite film of the year. i could have been wrong, but it seemed like some ppl were attacking slumdog for being cliche without any substantiation but had no problem with the wrestler's undeniably cliched story. we've already covered why the wrestler is great anyway so we need not go there again.

anyway, let the loving/hating continue.

I'm sick of this fucking Wrestler comparisons, they are two complete different films in every way. There is no comparison. You don't have to like one or the other. They are both wonderful films in their own way.

It's like saying that you hate Lost because you love 30 Rock. What the fuck!

Jamal tried his entire life to find Lakita, so what I don't understand is that wouldn't it be logical for him to finally achieve what he had been meaning to do his entire life? Especially when it's something like appearing on her favorite television show? The movie even goes further to tell us that Jamal knew exactly when to call the show's hotline so he can connect to the receptionists.

Allow me to draw your attention to the poster for this film:

(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fupload.wikimedia.org%2Fwikipedia%2Fen%2F1%2F16%2FSlumdog_Millionaire_poster.jpg&hash=273022c544fce82480785754d7388c256bc9d367)

What does it take to find a lost love?

A. Money
B. Luck
C. Smarts
D. Destiny

Ummm... how about: Perseverance? Because if there was anything I got from this film, it's just that. Not with just Jamal continuously trying to get hold of Lakita, but also with his brother. As one of you mentioned; his brother was interested in money and power, but he also went to great lengths to achieve those goals. There was nothing written about that, he made his choices as clear as they were and that's why he ended his life the way he did.

The only thing that was "written" was Jamal being asked (yes, in chronological order...) questions on 'Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?' that were conveniently "no-so-apparent" in his own life. Oh and of course, his miraculous answer to the last question on the show (who was the third Musketeer) which he never knew at all, even though it proves itself to be the one question he SHOULD have had the answer to. And by "not-so-apparent" I mean what ElPandaRoyal briefly mentioned about the revolver. Or another would be God Rama holding the bow. The film readily puts us in this onslaught of Muslims with Jamal suddenly stopping to see a figure holding a bow with his right hand. It doesn't go to explain a logical means of how he even knew it was God Rama. Much like the scenario of the gun. Or the poem they kept reciting as beggars. The only logical explanation to these events would be that he either hit a library after each encounter to the events or an internet cafe to Google.

I'm quite lazy, I don't like to go into details about why I don't like a movie especially when those details have been brought up already. There wasn't much I thought I could bring in to justify why this was a shallow film full of ridiculousness then topped off with Danny Boyle's gritty and fast paced stylistic fart.

It's been awhile since we've had such a dividing film.

Fuck, was the bitches name Latika or Lakita? I thought it was Latika but I spelt it Lakita because I didn't think The Gold Trumpet would get that wrong. Though I do think he happens to be rambling about nothingness in regards to this film.

Quote from: omuy on January 31, 2009, 11:38:26 AM
Fuck, was the bitches name Latika or Lakita? I thought it was Latika but I spelt it Lakita because I didn't think The Gold Trumpet would get that wrong. Though I do think he happens to be rambling about nothingness in regards to this film.

I was just copying how others in the thread were spelling it. I wasn't sure myself.

Quote from: ElPandaRoyal on January 31, 2009, 09:19:53 AM
I just couldn't care about watching the movie. I also have problems with that whole destiny situation. It's overplayed, it's always talked mentioned, and even if it's a part of the indian culture, it doesn't work dramatically. And by the time the movie ended, and we all got the point, the words "D) It was written" come in to hammer us a little bit more with that idea.

I think that sums up the difference of opinion with the film. I don't think the filmmakers intended for the themes to be overbearing and nauseating, but people who don't believe in the interest of the characters will feel that way as a story likes this elevates and starts to become more serious and emotional. I didn't find the themes ever to be too much, but I was also sucked into the heartstrings of the film immediately.

Quote from: kal on January 31, 2009, 10:55:10 AM
It's like saying that you hate Lost because you love 30 Rock.

Good point.  There are so many better reasons to hate 'Lost'.

Quote from: private witt on January 31, 2009, 08:42:06 PM

Quote from: kal on January 31, 2009, 10:55:10 AM
It's like saying that you hate Lost because you love 30 Rock.

Good point.  There are so many better reasons to hate 'Lost'.

Ok brother now you are really starting to piss me off.

Quote from: kal on January 31, 2009, 08:49:37 PM

Quote from: private witt on January 31, 2009, 08:42:06 PM

Quote from: kal on January 31, 2009, 10:55:10 AM
It's like saying that you hate Lost because you love 30 Rock.

Good point.  There are so many better reasons to hate 'Lost'.

Ok brother now you are really starting to piss me off.

Maybe this guy is Pubrick then.

Quote from: kal on January 31, 2009, 08:49:37 PM
Good point.  There are so many better reasons to hate 'Lost'.

Ok brother now you are really starting to piss me off.
[/quote]

Why, because I don't like the exact same things you like?  You must get pissed off at a lot of people here then.

Quote from: kal on January 31, 2009, 10:55:10 AM
It's like saying that you hate Lost because you love 30 Rock. What the fuck!

Worst analogy ever.

this was nothing mind-blowing, but it was really good. i don't get the complaints about the acting and the cliches given that most of you loved the dark knight, which was terribly acted (outside of ledger) and featured the most ridiculous scene in what is considered a good movie maybe ever (the two boat bullshit).

i think more of you would be just indifferent to it if it wasn't getting all these rave reviews/awards.

Quote from: abuck1220 on February 16, 2009, 09:38:36 AM


i think more of you would be just indifferent to it if it wasn't getting all these rave reviews/awards.

I don't think that's even debatable. I know I'd like it a lot more if it wasn't being heralded as the best movie of the year. Granted, it was a shitty year, but there were still better things that came out than Slumdog.

Well, in my defense, I was the first one here to love this and it was before the frenzy started. Take that, Stefen  :splat:

Yeah, and you have some of the safest taste on this whole site. If this had subtitles, you would have hated it.

On the flipside, if it had subs, the rest of us would have loved it.  :bravo:

Quote from: Stefen on February 16, 2009, 09:54:31 AM

Quote from: abuck1220 on February 16, 2009, 09:38:36 AM


i think more of you would be just indifferent to it if it wasn't getting all these rave reviews/awards.

I don't think that's even debatable. I know I'd like it a lot more if it wasn't being heralded as the best movie of the year. Granted, it was a shitty year, but there were still better things that came out than Slumdog.

yeah, but at least it's good (in my opinion). juno was this movie last year except juno is an awful, awful piece of shit. i didn't love no country for old men by any means, but i still think it's at least decent, so it didn't bother me to see it rack up a bunch of awards. 

Quote from: Stefen on February 16, 2009, 11:41:45 AM
Yeah, and you have some of the safest taste on this whole site. If this had subtitles, you would have hated it.

On the flipside, if it had subs, the rest of us would have loved it.  :bravo:

That was a bad one dude, you know MY MOVIE has subtitles? :)

Any other year and this is a just a nice little film that would a pleasant surprise for a best director nom or something. But since 2008 sucked for great films i'm almost positive this will clean up at the oscars. But it's not like if it does win it's a complete travesty. I've only seen Benjamin Button and Revolutionary Road, and while i like these films much more and can't honestly say they are flat out deserving for best picture. My only complaint is that Revolutionary Road and Benjamin Button both have moments of greatness, while slumdog is just good, at best, throughout. It's an okay story done pretty well, but that's it. It has an interesting structure, and the child actors are pretty impressive, but the whole film relies on the love story and that's where it's really weak. Not once did i believe they were in love, it felt more like a guy obsessed with a really hot chick. There weren't enough moments as kids where it looked as though they really liked each other. Imo, the brother relationship could've been very interesting, but they didn't expand enough on stuff like where Salim sells Jamal's autograph. I though Dev Patel was pretty weak too.

The ending and the train station scene were cool though. Very Bollywood. But i'm glad the whole movie wasn't done that way.

why does everyone keep saying he only liked her because she was hot? he met her when he was like six.

Quote from: OrHowILearnedTo on February 19, 2009, 02:23:44 AM
But since 2008 sucked for great films i'm almost positive this will clean up at the oscars.

Are you choosing to ignore all the masterpieces that weren't nominated for anything at all?  2008 was a pretty fucking great year for movies, man.

Quote from: Walrus on February 23, 2009, 02:53:42 AM

Quote from: OrHowILearnedTo on February 19, 2009, 02:23:44 AM
But since 2008 sucked for great films i'm almost positive this will clean up at the oscars.

Are you choosing to ignore all the masterpieces that weren't nominated for anything at all?  2008 was a pretty fucking great year for movies, man.

Ballast and Revolutionary Road was the only films close to masterpieces that i saw this year. Pretty much everything else was underwhelming (Wrestler, Button, Synechdoche, etc.). But i still havn't seen Wall-E  :oops:

what a boring, predictable movie.

to think that in Trainspotting, Boyle used a quiz show and his parents response to it while watching it on the tube as part of Renton's descent into madness and as a way to expose the boring, lazy comfy lives of middle class life everywhere in the world, and now the fuck makes a whole film ABOUT one, which by the way looks a lot like the one in Trainspotting and even has the same line of "it's the right answer!!"..I just find it depressing.

The whole film is one big "I saw THAT coming" after another. Ten minutes in...shit, two minutes in you know the whole story. You know the brother will be a problem, you know the girl will end up being kind of a whore (but a nice, warm hearted confused victim of the circumstances whore, of course), and you know he will win.

Boyle steals the visual intensity of City of God but without any of the substance, poverty and slums are used solely as a narrative gimmick being there with the only porpoise of make you feel better about that fuck when he finally gets the money.

I am baffled out of my fucking mind, even knowing that the oscars are useless pieces of shit that this and Benjamin Button are the ones winning everything. Best screenplay? Best director? Really, wow. The nail in the coffin for me to consider awards completely irrelevant forever.

Quote from: Alexandro on February 23, 2009, 12:16:57 PM
to think that in Trainspotting, Boyle used a quiz show and his parents response to it while watching it on the tube as part of Renton's descent into madness and as a way to expose the boring, lazy comfy lives of middle class life everywhere in the world, and now the fuck makes a whole film ABOUT one, which by the way looks a lot like the one in Trainspotting and even has the same line of "it's the right answer!!"..I just find it depressing.

:bravo:

Quote from: OrHowILearnedTo on February 23, 2009, 11:03:47 AM

Quote from: Walrus on February 23, 2009, 02:53:42 AM

Quote from: OrHowILearnedTo on February 19, 2009, 02:23:44 AM
But since 2008 sucked for great films i'm almost positive this will clean up at the oscars.

Are you choosing to ignore all the masterpieces that weren't nominated for anything at all?  2008 was a pretty fucking great year for movies, man.

Ballast and Revolutionary Road was the only films close to masterpieces that i saw this year. Pretty much everything else was underwhelming (Wrestler, Button, Synechdoche, etc.). But i still havn't seen Wall-E  :oops:

If you thought that Revolutionary Road was a masterpiece, let alone one of the only ones in 2008, then for you, I can see 2008 being a completely dry season.

Also: what is a masterpiece to you and what underwhelms you if Revolutionary Road outperforms Synecdoche or the Wrestler?

Quote from: Walrus on February 23, 2009, 10:50:13 PM

Quote from: OrHowILearnedTo on February 23, 2009, 11:03:47 AM

Quote from: Walrus on February 23, 2009, 02:53:42 AM

Quote from: OrHowILearnedTo on February 19, 2009, 02:23:44 AM
But since 2008 sucked for great films i'm almost positive this will clean up at the oscars.

Are you choosing to ignore all the masterpieces that weren't nominated for anything at all?  2008 was a pretty fucking great year for movies, man.

Ballast and Revolutionary Road was the only films close to masterpieces that i saw this year. Pretty much everything else was underwhelming (Wrestler, Button, Synechdoche, etc.). But i still havn't seen Wall-E  :oops:

If you thought that Revolutionary Road was a masterpiece, let alone one of the only ones in 2008, then for you, I can see 2008 being a completely dry season.

Also: what is a masterpiece to you and what underwhelms you if Revolutionary Road outperforms Synecdoche or the Wrestler?

That's obviously a pretty difficult question to answer. I didn't say that Revolutionary Road was a masterpiece, I would have to see it again to confirm this, but It was probably to closest thing to a great film this year, imo. My film prof. used to (and i assume still does) say that film, and art in general, should tell us something about about life that we already knew, but had forgotten (or something along those lines, I'm paraphrasing). While I don't always agree with that statement, I do believe that Revolutionary Road did this better than any other film this year. The Wrestler does this too, but has major flaws especially surrounding Marrisa Tomei's character. All her scenes weren't written well at all, or a least not on a level with the rest of the film. This is why i was totally surprised with her nomination (not that i really care though). I loved The Wrestler, it's definitely in my top five this year, but it wasn't as good as i thought it was going to be. Maybe underwhelmed wasn't the best word for it, because it's still damn good, but it was a slight disappointment. Synecdoche is a different story, I loved and hated that movie at the same time, and i'll try to write something half decent in it's own thread once i see it again.

But yeah, i didn't really like 2008 that much.

I'm with you. I wasn't feeling 2008 very much either. There were some good movies, but I don't think anything that will go down as an all-time great.

So, does anyone else think that this is utter bullshit?  Yeah, nice for these kids I guess, but the entire motivation and justification for it is barf-worthy.  There were outcries from images of slum-life and the response was to give 2 kids an apartment each for being in a movie?  What are people supposed to take from this?  Or will it actually succeed as the slight-of-hand that it so badly wants to be?

And they're receiving these homes from "the authorities," according to the article.  What The Fuck.  Thanks, Authorities!

--------------------------------------

'Slumdog' child actors to get new homes

MUMBAI (Reuters Life!) – The two main child actors from "Slumdog Millionaire" are to receive new homes from the authorities after the small-budget movie swept the Oscars, winning eight Academy Awards.

The Mumbai homes will go to Rubina Ali and Azharuddin Ismail, who played the young roles of the movie's central characters, Latika and Salim, in the rags-to-riches romance about a poor Indian boy competing for love and money on a TV game show.

"These two children have brought laurels to the country, and we have been told that they live in slums, which cannot even be classified as housing," said Gautam Chatterjee, head of the state-run Maharashtra Housing and Area Development Authority.

Authorities did not say where the home would be only that there would be apartments and near a "prime location."

Ali, 8, currently lives in a tiny hovel in a rubbish strewn slum near railway tracks in India's financial hub. Ismail sleeps under a polythene sheet-covered roof in the same slum. Open sewers run nearby and both homes have no running water.

The movie, based in Mumbai, took home eight awards from the Oscars including best picture and best director for Britain's Danny Boyle.

But in the leadup to Sunday's Oscars, the movie's success around the globe was overshadowed by objections in India to its name which some Indians find offensive, its depiction of the lives of impoverished Indians, and the treatment of the cast.

There was an outcry after pictures emerged of the child stars living in squalor despite the $15 million movie earning about $100 million since its North American release last November.

But since the Oscars, India's media has been caught in a patriotic frenzy and politicians have jumped on the bandwagon to praise Indians involved in the film.

Boyle and producer Christian Colson have flatly rejected claims of exploiting children for the movie.

They said the children were paid above local Indian wages and enrolled in school for the first time with a fund set up to pay for their education, medical emergencies and "basic living costs."

Fox Searchlight Pictures, the 20th Century Film Fox studio behind the film, paid for visas, travel and accommodation for nine children to fly to Los Angeles for the Oscars.

lol.

(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fsananda.tripod.com%2Fhomeless%2Fahshomeless1.jpg&hash=b46e94a6f96815aa4f44c50e280dd96945890795)"wtf!"

Slumdog Millionaire star falls ill

Slumdog Millionaire child star Azharuddin Ismail has fallen ill as fears grow about the psychological state of the two young Indian actors.

Azhar, 10, spent the weekend vomiting and has developed a temperature of 103 degrees since returning home last week after travelling to the Oscars with co-star Rubina Ali, 9.

He has been prescribed antibiotics by doctors, who said he is suffering from fever and exhaustion, but his condition has continued to worsen.

Azhar's neighbours have also rallied round to build an 8ft by 5ft metal structure for him to sleep under out of the sun.

The families of the two child stars have said their children are not readjusting to life back in the slums after five days of glitz and glamour in Los Angeles.

Mother Shameem Ismail said: "It has all become too much for him. He is very ill and has not recovered from going to America and all the media interest since we got back."

Rubina's father Rafiq Qureshi said. "Getting used to life back here in the slum again is proving tough for her and she has not wanted to see her friends since she got back. She just wants to spend all her time away from the slum now and I just hope we get the flat that has been promised to us.":

Both the Mumbai housing authority and Slumdog's producer Christian Colson have said they are going to provide proper flats for the two families. However, as yet the families have been told nothing and remain in the deprived slum.

Azhar, cuddling his new pet guinea pig, said: "I am very sad. I feel sleepy, hot and sick all the time. I can't get to sleep here – there are too many mosquitoes and it is so hot. I just wish I was in America still."

Having flown in a plane, slept in a soft bed and used a clean and functioning bathroom for the first time in their lives at a five-star hotel, the kids say they have now realised what life is like on the other side of the coin and the reality of being back in the slum is hitting them hard.

"I don't want to live here in the slum anymore," Rubina said, wearing the dirt stained ball gown that she has not wanted to take off since Oscars night. "I don't want to sleep on the floor anymore. I want a proper bed and live where the air does not smell of poo. I have seen what it is like in America. Here, there is garbage everywhere, people get angry, swear and shout. I have realised how bad life is here. I just want to get out."

Social workers have called for the children to be placed in care and state that they need to be given protection – either from Danny Boyle and the film production company or the Indian authorities.

"I cannot believe these kids have just been left like this after being taken to Hollywood. It is bound to affect them psychologically," said social worker Sanjay Bhatia, who works in the slum.

India's Women and Child Development Minister Renuka Chowdhary is "appalled" at the beating that Azhar took at the hands of his father on Friday. Azhar was thrashed for saying he wanted to sleep rather than talk to a journalist who had offered money to his father.

haha, there is no way that article is real!

This movie was the worst thing to ever happen EVER.

that article is crazy. It sounds made up. where'd it come from? The girl's still wearing the gown she wore at the oscars? The boy's father beats him for not talking to journalists? WTF?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/celebritynews/4902847/Slumdog-Millionaire-star-falls-ill.html

Oh yes, I should have linked to the source.  Sorry.  This article is not the only one that mentions the boy being hit for not speaking to journalists, though.

Apple interview with composer AR Rahman (http://www.apple.com/logicstudio/action/arrahman/?sr=hotnews)

'Slumdog Millionaire' DVD Arrives with Major Problems

We've been receiving a ton of emails here at Cinematical from folks who bought bad copies of the Slumdog Millionaire DVD. What happened was that some DVDs entered the marketplace without any of the special features on them; one Cinematical reader wrote in to say that all he got was the movie and a few trailers. Over on Amazon, their review wall is packed with folks complaining about receiving a botched DVD, and good news is the retailer has finally issued an alert for those of you who got screwed. See below:

DVD Alert: We are aware that special features were missing from a number of Slumdog Millionaire DVDs. Fox has set up a hotline telephone number (1-888-223-4FOX) for those consumers who may have purchased a version that does not contain special features. Upon calling the hotline, these consumers will be able to have their disc replaced for one containing special features. Fox regrets any inconvenience this has caused.

Do you think it was an april fools joke that fox pulled? hehe

FOX is such a screw-up nowadays, if they had been trying to pull an April Fools prank, they would have accidentally shipped all the DVDs perfectly and there would have been no problems.

Slumdog Millionare: even the trailer was unwatchable.