Slumdog Millionaire(SM)

DIRECTED BY DANNY BOYLE

4 globe awards...10 nominations for the oscars...super hype...extensive over the top publicity... but at the bottom of it all...a 2 and a half hours film...

As with the passage of each day the hype surrounding SM mounted i made a deliberate attempt to stay immune to it. I wanted to see and judge the film the way i would judge any other film i watched. However I will admit that i was not completely untouched by the craze that the film was garnering for if ever i had managed to duck it everywhere else i could not escape the excitement amongst the queue at the ticket counter and the buzz before the movie began!

But thats what MEDIA PERCEPTION does...the idea behind it is to make people believe what they are told to believe and hence the media publicist had done a fine job with SM.

The first thing that struck me about the film was its concept and the screenplay. As i believe these are the two primary elements that determine the films quality i liked the film.

As your backdrop you have the most popular show in recent time on Indian television- "Kaun banega Krorepati" or "Who Wants to be a Millioanire"- hosted by a superstar Prem (Anil Kapoor) add to that the dirt-drama-tension of the slums along with the journey of the protogonists- Jamal(Dev Patel), his love Latika (Frieda Pinto) and Jamal's bro- Salim(Madhur Mital) from the innocense of childhood to the wisdom, fire and corruption of youth.

Jamal is being interrogated throughout the film by the police Inspector(Irfan Khan) for he has been accused of cheating on the show 'Who wants to be a Millionaire' since it is not possible for a slumboy to with so much money on the show. Through the interrogation Jamal reveals his life story so far...the story of a boy who gets his wisdom from the filth and trauma of life all around...his school has been the world he lives in and his playground is this world itself. He has learnt through circumstances wierd and wild and most importantly is putting all of that to use to get to his goal...of finding Latika!

I enjoyed the film.

However, one of the very prominent glitches i felt was that the makers have not been able to decide on the language of the film. Ideally if all the characters had spoken english uniformly than that would have been the language of the film and would have been alright seeing the slum kids speaking the same...however what has happened is even the grown up characters converse at times in hindi and at times in english makiing one seem as if they know english so fluently which is not actually the case! I can uderstand the kids could not have been taught english but care should have been taken with the grown up characters.

Dev Patel in his portrayal of Jamal mallick has done a fine job but why did he have to be cast with such a heavy accented english and hindi for such a vital role of a character whose born and bread in the slums and your story's credibility revolves around his ruralised character?

Apart from these two ponts mentioned above...the film has a whole is nice...I'll definately recommend it.