Word: slummed
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Boyle says, "Slumdog is just a hybrid of the words underdog and slum. Some people found it insulting, when actually it's a triumph for a kid from that background and a vindication of his resilience...
...rework all the other stories. The structure is the same, but the questions [asked by the game-show host] are different." Beaufoy made four trips to India over 18 months "to get a completely fresh look at India. I spent a long time in the Juhu slum in Mumbai. I was trained as a documentary director, and I just went back to doing that. I listened to people, talked to people." From these wanderings came moments that give the film its pungent life, like the scene in which Jamal jumps into a mound of human waste to get the autograph...
Boyle could have cast the slum kids with English speakers, but he realized he'd get more natural performances from the real thing. "They don't have any inhibitions about acting," he says. "We'd been working in the slums, and we'd ask local people, 'Would you play this part?' 'No problem,' they'd say. 'Do you want me to do my Amitabh look or my Shah Rukh Khan look?' I'd say, 'No, do your own look.'" Having slum children play two of the three 6-year-olds meant shooting their scenes in Hindi. But as Boyle says...
...many Indian movie fans, who seek escape with sentimental tales of the beautiful and the wealthy, Slumdog's subject is both familiar and unappealing. "You can't live in Mumbai without seeing children begging at traffic lights and passing by slums on your way to work," says Shikha Goyal, a public relations executive who left halfway through the film. "But I don't want to be reminded of that on a Saturday evening." There's also a sense of injured national pride, especially for a lot of well-heeled metro dwellers, who say the film peddles "poverty porn" and "slum...
...there. A Jan. 13 blog entry by Bachchan, in which he asked if the film would have generated such hype if it had been made by an Indian director, led to an 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 Anil Kapoor, who plays the Millionaire host in the film. (The actual Indian show's original host was Bachchan, followed by Khan.) The protesters held banners reading I AM NOT A DOG--as in slumdog--and POVERTY FOR SALE. Two days earlier...