Word: slumdog
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...Friday, a day after Slumdog Millionaire was nominated for 10 Academy Awards, the movie filled just 25% of the seats for its debut in theaters across India, the country of its setting. Buoyed by the hype the movie has generated in the U.S. - along with its Oscar nods and four Golden Globe awards, Slumdog on Sunday won the "best cast" award from the Screen Actors Guild - Fox Searchlight released 351 prints of the film across India last weekend. But while Indian critics have largely embraced the movie, audiences are not flocking to the film. Theaters showing the movie averaged...
...There have been films about Mumbai slums before - most notably Mira Nair's Salaam Bombay (1988), which enjoyed critical success on the festival and art-house circuit. But many believe the reason that Slumdog has been raking in awards is simply that Western audiences haven't seen many films like it before. "It is a good film, no doubt," says Manpreet Singh, a graphics designer based in the northern Indian city of Chandigarh. "The narrative style and the plot are interesting. But if I speak for Indians like me, there's nothing new in it for us. It's saturated...
...avalanche of Bollywood stars and critics taking positions for and against him. On Jan. 22, some 40 slum dwellers protested outside the Mumbai home of actor Anil Kapoor, who plays a leading role in the film. The protesters held banners reading "I Am Not a Dog" - referring to slumdog in the film's title - and "Poverty for Sale." Two days earlier, a slum leader in the central Indian city of Patna took the Indian cast and crew of the film to court for allegedly offending slum dwellers by the pejorative in the title. He said he didn't expect...
...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...
...differences between black folks and white folks is visibly lamer than it already was. But that's not just because Obama is half-black and half-white; it's because he is neither typically black (he comes out of the immigrant, not the slave, experience) nor typically white. Like Slumdog Millionaire or a mash-up CD, Obama represents a crossing of cultures. His story makes a larger argument: that nothing is as simple as it's made out to be. Black and white is not simply black and white. And neither, therefore, are our eternal us-vs.-them arguments over...