Wednesday, June 15, 2011

Slumdog Millionaire (2008)


Jamal Gump

- Slumdog Millionaire: An 8-time Oscar winner, a world-wide box-office smash, and, most of all, an incredibly overrrated movie.

British director Danny Boyle creates an oppressively saccharine tale for the modern age in Slumdog Millionaire; one could not find a fragment of subtly in the film with Mount Graham's Large Binocular Telescope. Focused around a young Indian's journey from a hard life as a young boy to his current "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire" dilemma as a young man, the entire film is one big pathetic attempt to yank on the heart strings with the most sappy, weepy, and unbearable fluff that is exhausting long before it even becomes annoying.

I doubt if Lewis and Clark could even discover where anything worth such strong Oscar acclaim exists in the film. Dev Patel gives a very good performance in the film as lead character Jamal Malik and I would love to see more of him in future films.... And.... Well... That is about it for Slumdog.... The supporting performances are nonexistent, the music is nothing but a lot of noise set to techno music, the cinematography is not the excellence in lighting that many have claimed, and the story is cheesy drivel that we have all seen time and time again. So what warrants all of the hub-bub over Slumdog Millionaire, anyway?

Meditating at the apex of mediocre, Slumdog Millionaire really just arrived at the right place at the right time. The next logical step in the Academy's ever-growing desire to be multi-cultural (the likes of La Vie En Rose (2007), Babel (2006), Pan's Labyrinth (2006) receiving acute Academy attention in years past), would be to give overwhelming praise, attention, and a coveted Best Picture Oscar to an almost completely foreign film. The Bollywood-styled Slumdog fit the bill perfectly - whether it deserved the boat-load of praise or not - and I would say that the film definitely did not deserve all of the praise and attention it received.

You know, I saw the movie that featured the story (told in flashback mode) of an endearing character in love with a childhood female friend while experiencing a lot of hardships in an ever-changing nation.... And I liked it better when it was called Forrest Gump (1994).


CBC Rating: 5/10

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