As the World Stearns

It seems a foregone conclusion that Slumdog Millionaire will win Best Picture at the Academy Awards tonight. Well, okay. I haven’t even bothered to see all of the competition, but Boyle’s movie was certainly the liveliest, most consistently entertaining of the nominated films I have seen. Not as moving, complex, and real as Milk, no, but …it is fun here and there. It does have that going for it. And yet I hope it doesn’t win much of anything.

Don’t get me wrong. I like overheated melodrama. I love dancing on train platforms. I am even fond of completely outlandish story structures like the Q&A one at the heart of this movie. I like me my crazy storylines in service of a good time. But there is so much that is deeply wrong with Slumdog Millionaire that I can’t let go and enjoy the frippery of the story. That it has been embraced so feverishly by so many Westerners I find deeply suspect, because no way no how not in a million years would this story fly with US audiences if it had been set in, say, New York. Read the rest of this entry »