Can the Academy stop giving movies like this Best Picture.

Rating: 6/10 (3 June 2010)

Jamal Malik has made it onto the Indian version of Who Wants to Be A Millionaire and he has to recount his very strange and tragic life to explain how he knows so many of the answers.
The structure of Slumdog Millionaire, not the plot itself, is about the only thing I can truly commend this movie for. The way it unfolds with Jamal giving us bits and pieces of his life as he makes his way through the questions on a game show is an extremely clever and original way to have a story play out. This is where my admiration for Slumdog ends.
The acting isn't bad, but it isn't great either. Danny Boyle used actual Mumbai slum children for the roles so I can give the acting a pass. What I can't give a pass to is the obvious attempt to manipulate the audience using sympathy inducing tragedies.
I'm not saying that children in Mumbai slums don't have it bad, I'm sure they do. What I'm saying is that watching a character bumble through tragedy after tragedy just so we will feel sorry for them is neither entertainment nor film. This is an obvious attempt to play on the audience's emotions. You put a poor slum kid through the ringer and then give him a million dollars and the girl of his dreams at the end of the movie and everyone in the theater is supposed to think: "thank god he finally got some happiness." Not Me.
First of all, if the girl meant so much to him he shouldn't have got the million because that is a much more meaningful message: You don't need money if you have love.
Second of all, after enough tragedy happens to one character it becomes meaningless and unrealistic. Every single bad thing in the world is not going to happen to one person, sorry it just doesn't make sense. For true drama to work it has to be at least somewhat rooted in reality, this isn't. They had every tragedy they could think of happen to Jamal just so the audience would feel sorry for him.
That is what truly annoys me about Slumdog; the fact that because of this strategy it has received such critical acclaim and won the best picture Oscar. No one wants to criticize a movie like this or they will feel like they are being cruel to all the poor slum children in the world. It's very frustrating.