the not so popular, but more sincere views on this pornography of poverty

Rating: 1/10 (19 December 2009)

Sumit Bhattacharya- "I have no problems with the 'West' taking up themes of poverty and highlighting the real India. I can completely understand a foreigner being obsessed with the filth and the poverty -- I too was stunned by the plight of the homeless in New York -- of India. I thought Slumdog is brilliantly shot, and I am willing to forgive Ram dressed as a mix between Shiva and Krishna in a foreign film. But I do have a problem with a story that pretends to be real when in reality it is just a masala film -- the kind we churn out by the dozens in Bollywood.Yes, Slumdog Millionaire is just superficial fluff, mainly because of its gaping plot holes. It should have been much better researched...A R Rahman's music is good, but not the master's best. But -- maybe it's just me -- you never really feel for the adult Jamal. Maybe it has something to do with the acting." Matthew Schneeberger- "I found it impossible to feel emotionally invested with the main characters. All the way up to the final kiss, I truly did not care what happened to Jamal or to Latika. And I'm as sentimental and sappy as the next guy. It's just that this love story didn't work...Yes, despite what the most zealous of naysayers claim, India's problems are real and manifold: extreme poverty, communal violence, child beggary, painful vestiges of the caste system, to name a few. And all of these exist even in modern, urban India, the India of all those Western magazines profiles, the India of business process outsourcing and information technology....
One of the first negative reviews of Slumdog I read was from the blog The Great Bong, who absolutely lacerated it. In it, the blogger wrote, "Well yes these things do happen in India. However the problem is when you show every hellish thing possible all happening to the same person. Then it stretches reason and believability and just looks like you are packing in every negative thing that Westerners perceive about India for the sake of crowd pleasing." He goes on to propose a film about an outlandish string of events happening to an African-American boy in the US, and says, "Even though each of these incidents have actually happened in the United States of America, I would be accused of spinning a fantastic yarn that has no grounding in reality, that has no connection to the 'American experience' and my motivations would be questioned, no matter how cinematically spectacular I made my movie. At the very least, I wouldn't be on 94 percent on Tomatometer and a strong Oscar favorite." He's right. Say an Indian director traveled to New Orleans for a few months to film a movie about Jamal Martin, an impoverished African American who lost his home in Hurricane Katrina, who once had a promising basketball career, but who -- following a drive-by shooting -- now walks with a permanent limp, whose father is in jail for selling drugs, whose mother is addicted to crack cocaine, whose younger sister was killed by gang-violence, whose brother was arrested by corrupt cops, whose first born child has sickle cell anemia, and so on. The movie would be widely panned and laughed out of theaters.
That, to me, is Slumdog Millionaire: contrived, pretentious, absurd, hollow, inauthentic, a pseudo-statement about social justice. And yet today the film stands on the precipice of Hollywood's highest honor, the Academy Award for Best Picture.