Word: slumdog
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...past few weeks, Slumdog Millionaire has become nothing short of a worldwide sensation, earning a jaw-dropping 10 Oscar nominations and grossing far more than anyone imagined the movie would. The film has been honored by the Screen Actors Guild, the Golden Globes, and the Producers Guild. On Friday, its director, Danny Boyle, received a prize from the Directors Guild, an honor that usually foreshadows an Oscar for best director...
...First, it must be said that most of those objecting to Slumdog, the immensely wealthy who have shown little concern for India’s poor, have virtually no credibility on this issue. Poverty may be far removed from their Indian experiences, but a different world exists not far from their pampered villas. Indeed, Bombay’s own Dharavi slum, home to one million people, is just miles from the Bollywood studios that so regularly exclude any mention of those who have been left behind...
...criticism of Slumdog, that would be it. It leans too heavily on this time-honored protest model, one summed up by Crash’s director, Paul Haggis, when he said in his 2005 Oscar acceptance speech that, “Art is not a mirror to hold up to society, but a hammer with which to shape...
...While Slumdog does succumb to this weakness, it compares favorably to the average Bollywood flick, which lacks both narrative credibility and discernible substance. The result is that a nation with so many challenges and so vibrant a film culture produces so many movies that feature meaningless plots punctuated only by feel-good song-and-dance routines. Indeed, it’s not that the movies fail to penetrate the surface—it’s that they don’t even capture it. And so it has fallen to talented British producers to make movies that actually bring...
...Apart from the renewed focus on India’s struggling underclasses, I hope that the lasting legacy of Slumdog is that it inspires a new generation of Bollywood producers to produce films that are at once psychologically credible and socially substantive. Decades ago, this happened regularly. The legendary Indian director Raj Kapoor reached his pinnacle by traversing the forbidden lines of religion, class, and sexuality in a movie about the romance between a wealthy Hindu boy and a poor Christian girl...