Word: slumdog
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Watching the arc of Slumdog Millionaire's reception in India - it has moved speedily from obscurity to minor phenom to backlash to major phenom and now backlash again - I thought of all those indignant Indians denouncing the film as real-life versions of Prem the game-show host. India spent several years, and millions of dollars, promoting the story of "Incredible India," a shiny new world of prosperity, innovation and opportunity. That world certainly exists for millions of Indians, and for a while it was nice to believe that the lucky inhabitants of "rising India" would somehow lift...
...Indian cast," he wrote. This is missing the point. Danny Boyle could not have made the film that he did without this cast and crew, and to pretend otherwise is to belittle their contribution. These Oscars ought to be seen as a validation of everyone who made Slumdog possible, particularly Rahman, who might finally take his place among the great film composers of any era or continent. As Pookutty said to the Oscar audience when accepting his statuette: "This is not just a sound award; this is history being handed over...
...influence goes both ways. Slumdog, which is based on a novel by Indian diplomat Vikas Swarup, approaches India and Indians with a new sensibility. Slumdog's central trio aren't victims; they're individuals, and they each manage in different ways to rewrite the lives they've been born into. Jamal, in the film, talks a lot about destiny, but his story is really an argument against it. It's a long way from City of Joy, the 1992 film in which Om Puri's noble rickshaw puller shows Patrick Swayze's disillusioned doctor the path to enlightenment. Slumdog recognizes...
...course, Slumdog Millionaire is not the first to discover this other, more complicated India, as the film's critics correctly point out. It's real for the hundreds of millions of Indians who live in it, the thousands of social workers, nonprofit groups and civil servants who are trying to change it, and those who tell its stories. That includes a handful of young Indian filmmakers who are making movies that are as sharp, challenging and entertaining as the best of Hollywood, although few have been distributed outside India. Let's hope the rest of the world will soon have...
...SLUMDOG kids live it up at Disneyland...