Word: hollywoodization
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...Both Morel movies were produced and co-written by Luc Besson, who's a one-man French film industry. He earned his early rep as a writer-director with Subway, a vivacious crime melodrama, then made the Hollywood-influenced thrillers La Femme Nikita and The Professional (which introduced Natalie Portman) and the Bruce Willis sci-fi hit The Fifth Element. Rarely directing movies anymore, he's produced nearly 70 of them this decade, most set in Paris, many in English, including the Transporter series and a couple of Jet Li action adventures. Besson is Hollywood in another...
...because it strikes universal chords about personal fulfillment, romantic obsession and the chance to rise from the bottom of the slag heap to the top of the Taj Mahal--and because it whirls through its rags-to-riches tale with a speed and energy that would put a Hollywood action film to shame. For these qualities, you can thank Simon Beaufoy, who wrote the script from Vikas Swarup's novel Q&A, and director Danny Boyle. Eleven years ago, Beaufoy was Oscar-nominated for another screenplay about underdogs going public, The Full Monty. Boyle has often dealt with the plight...
...North America doesn't guarantee the same reaction in India. Slumdog opened in 350 theaters Jan. 23 and did fairly well--the third largest non-Bollywood debut, after Spider-Man 3 and Casino Royale. But India is one of the few nations to prefer local product to Hollywood blockbusters, and so far it has proved a tougher sell to the mass public than to U.S. audiences...
Festivalgoers empathized in Telluride and Toronto. Critics, then art-house fans, then the mall rats, cheered it throughout North America. The title has entered pop culture, with Jon Stewart on The Daily Show referring to Rod Blagojevich, the mop-top governor of Illinois, as "Scumdog Million-hairs." Now Hollywood's élite has joined the chorus. And our industry savant doesn't believe the negative press from India will hurt Slumdog's Oscar chances. Slumdog, he says, "will win everything of substance...
...young did fill two slots, with a brace of movies that should duke it out for Best Picture: the Anglo-Indian Slumdog Millionaire, with 10 nominations, and the all-Hollywood The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, with 13. One film cost $15 million, the other 10 times that. Slumdog is about kids who grow into teenagers amid the civil and class chaos of modern Mumbai; Benjamin Button, about someone (Brad Pitt, no less) who's born an old man and ages backward, reaching adolescence when most people are hitting senility. Both pictures have social agendas, but they are more vigorous...