Slumdog Millionaire

Slumdog millionaire is one of those movies that you would be hard pressed to dislike. Enough has been said about the central theme of hope and determination and a single minded pursuit of the objective to survive being so redemptive for the audience that they cannot help themselves feeling optimistic most of the screen-time. I think the music had the most important contribution to that effect the movie has had. The music soars and leaps and segues off here and there, there are powerful heart warming beats strewn throughout the picture and a certain anthem like quality to most of the songs. That is hard to dislike and when the musician is A.R.Rehman, you aren't really left in doubt. Afterall this is a man who has given us the transcendental time and time again. 

If you ask me, the movie wouldn't have felt half as good if it weren't for the absolutely riveting score.

Before going to the theaters, I was certain that the movie would be instructive in its vantage view point of what India looks like. I expected to not like the movie storyline too much. I was pleasantly surprised and might I add that even though Dev Patel's characterisation of Jamal Malik, although not true to how such a character would carry himself, talk or react, he was adequate to the requirements of the movie, which, although it was focussed on the travails of three kids, is about much more than just a tragic, docu sob story. It is essentially about hope and survival. It tells you that even in the most despicable settings imaginable, people do not just wait to die. They fight and they labor. Everyone wants to climb the ladder and India is a country where there aren't enough ladders to climb.

So, from a documentary movie perspective what did Slumdog show:

1) Sanitation and Public Health is non-existent in the sloven settings at the slums. People use makeshift toilets that are excruciatingly unhygienic and have to pay to visit the loo.

2) The poor in this country are madly in love with Amitabh Bachchan.

3) Hindu Muslim riots in the winters of 1992 destroyed a lot of lives and drove thousands of kids onto the streets.

4) There are gangs that operate a whole begging business wherein small kids are let lose on the streets of Mumbai, where they beg for money. Because beggars with deformity are considered an especially high earning category, there are some ruffians who actually blind healthy kids to secure good money.

5) Child prostitution and Paedophilia is rampant in the country. Girls are forced into the business as soon as they hit puberty and its a cesspool which they literally never escape from.

This movie, as I said earlier, is about survival. These are three kids with very little going for them. Yet they make it to adult life, which in itself seems an accomplishment given their harsh environs and total lack of any support mechanism. They first lose their families, next they are forced into the beggar world, the girl is forced into prostitution and Salim even murders. Yet they survive.

Kramer vs Kramer

I just finished watching this 1980 movie called Kramer vs Kramer which won the best picture oscar that year over competition from the Martin Scorsese classic, Scarface. This is a movie about how a man comes to terms with his sudden status as the lone parent of a seven year old child. Starring Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep, its an intimate look into the life of a young and rising advertising executive and how his life takes a turn when one evening his wife leaves him, also leaving behind their son.
For the most part, the movie focusses on the relationship between father and son. The day after the wife leaves home, when dropping his son at school, the father asks the son what grade he was in, he didn't know and at breakfast that day he cannot make french toast. But as time passes, the father and the son grow ever more closer to each other. The father's priorities gradually change and he comes to appreciate things he didn't know existed.
There are several moments in this part where you could sigh or experience moist eyes if you are the weepy kind.


Where the movie scores however is the fact that it shows real people and real problems. In the second half we discover that the mother is probably not as bad as she earlier seemed. Itt seems like maybe she has a point as well, You begin to appreciate the point that maybe at the point where she was, when the movie got started, she had very little options and that probably on making that bold decision of walking out with absolutely nothing to look forward to was the correct move for her and for the son and even the husband.

The acting is all fantastic. Another thing I have to note here, The Aamir khaan starrer, Akele Hum Akele Tum is a total rip-off right down to the last scene. Except ofcourse in that movie, in true bombai style, the hero and the heroine come together at the end.

Shootout at Lokhandwala

The last few weeks, we have seen relentless promotion of this so-called 'based on true rumors' cinema trumpeted as a film that will uncover a lot that the public does not know and should, about the six hour gore fest that occured at a Lokhandwala building complex in the summers of 1990.
Scenes from the horrendous encounter interspersed with Tusshar Kapoor serenading a bar dancer with a now standard 'beedi jalaile' item song have been flashing on our television screens with almost no respite these few days.
For me, the presence of so many bollywood bigwigs in the movie was a sureshot indicator that it would be anything but real. Come on, when you a multistarrer, its bound to be a masala pot boiler with a lot of histrionics and cliched schmaltz of sentimentality that I have grown up with. I was right, entirely right but as it turned out, it wasn't as bad as I thought the above factors would make it to be.
It sure is no groundbreaking cinema. It most probably is not even close to what actually transpired, notwithstanding the fervent claims of its makers. What I like about the movie, is that it almost does not take sides, that is, right until the end, when the ticker rolling before the credits boast that subsequent to the inception of the Anti-Terror-Squad, crime rates in Mumbai fell by 70% year on year. But even this, leaves you with a dilemma, if you care about taking sides that is.
On one hand, you have a group of policemen, a breed constantly ridiculed and upbraided for its impotency in the wake of spiralling crime rates, who decide that they have had enough with the political corruption and debauchery that stymies them and take matters into their own hand.
Their claim is that the only thing that can deter the gangsters is a police-force that also terrorises them and the encounter on that eventful day did send a chill through the ranks of the undercover. You could argue here that the correct solution to the issue here would have been a robust law and order machinery where justice is assured and swift. But tell that to a man on the streets of Mumbai and even the most naive of them would snigger at you. 'It is not practical' a wiser man would bellow. And isn't that actually true ? The time it would take us to overhaul our criminal justice system is really indeterminate. When he haven't done it in the last 60 years what says we would manage to do it now ? Is it fair, to have an entire generation of people live in terror until then ? We want solutions and we want it now. And as the statistics indicate, the problem WAS solved to a large extent.
On the flip side, clinical execution of the anti-social elements in so called encounters threatens the whole fabric of civil society. In a civil society, everyone has a right to defend himself, people have a right to life, a right to mend ways, to undo their sins against humanity. This is the mechanism that actually ultimately protects the innocent. You give the police too much power and you risk warping their minds, elevating them to demi-god status with nobody pulling their strings whatsoever. A civil society survives on a system of checks and balances and what you do when you give your protectors a free whip is that you make them accountable to none. And in a real world, there always will be bad apples in a group and if their is no mechanism to pluck that out, you are inviting chaos.

My point here is that the movie successfully depicts this paradox and that is why I liked it. Its not a battle between good and evil. The distinction gets blurry when you see the police henchmen ruthlessly kill one gangster after another after you have seen them repenting their sins in their last moments.

That's how I saw the film on the philosophical level.
On the technical level, the movie does not let you down. The screenplay is tacky for the most part. The dialogues are exactly that. Each line an actor utters is a typical masala dialogue meant for the lower stalls. Most of the songs are soporific except the rap song. The acting of the policemen and Vivek Oberoi are good, the rest are disappointing.

There is however one thing, that for me atleast has become a sore issue now. The lack of originality in style. Its easy to see that the style is new for Indian cinema but standard staple in Hollywood movies. The camera work, some of the scenes, some of the relationships are direct lifts from the myriad Hollywood gangster flicks.

In the final analysis, I would say you might like this movie if you havent watched too many Hollywood movies like I have.

P.S. - There is one scene where Vivek Oberoi playing Maya Dolas makes a man support himself on his teeth on a ledge laying on his stomach and then crushes him down. Its brutal gut wrenching scene and I saw it executed in exactly the same fashion in a recent episode of that great gangster tv series, Sopranos. Season 6, episode 19.

, in the process becoming something that at times is very difficult to separate from the gangsters themselves

The last king of Scotland

I went into the theatres quite sure that the movie would have a towering performance, a predictable(dare say, cliched ?) storyline, would start with a fascinated eye on the vibrant culture of the country of Uganda and end with the country in shambles.
I scored brownies on all of the above and there is no 'yet,it' moments to speak off. So am I disappointed ? yes I am. I have a feeling this movie was created as much as a vehicle for Forrest Whitaker to make a legitimate claim to the academy awards as as a human interest picture.

Dr. Nicholas Gellergan, is a young blue eyed Scottish physician, who, deciding he wants more adventures in his life than the idyllic Scotland can offer, lands up in Uganda. Complete with good intentions of desiring to make a difference in the world, he joins a doctor and his wife in the countryside in tendering to the people in desperate need of healthcare. A chance meeting with the President of Uganda leads to an unusual camaraderie between the two mostly owing to the scottish origins of the doctor and the fact that he shows initiative and boldness in killing an injured cow in pain in front of atleast a couple of scores of armed military men who cannot take a decision. The doctor invites him to join him as his personal physician in the capital city of Kampala and after an initial refusal he accepts the offer, partly owing to the awkwardness he now has with the wife of the 'great' doctor after he tries to kiss her.

Once in Kampala, the president plies him with expensive gifts, invites him to state dinners and introduces him to his large family of four wives and 10 children, slowly ingratiating him until he becomes a personal adviser to the president. All through these events, we get to see what Idi Amin is really like. There are allusions to him being an epilectic, he clearly is forgetful, he calls himself the saviour of Africa, the king of all men among other fancy titles. But he has charm and he works the crowd with it. Quite like Hitler some may say.

We are never witness to the genocide that is raging across the country meanwhile. If you observe closely, all that you see of the dictator is a personality that is etched based on what people said the man was, a murderous buffon. There are not many real life events that are enacted here, all fictional stories directed at projecting him as a not so smart, but charming and obsessive megalomaniac

The ending is the most disappointing of all because they chose to make it a thriller ending probably with the box office in eye.
it is in traditions with films like Blood Diamond in this sense.

A constant gardener and
Hotel Rwanda are in comparison much better movies and Don Cheadle deserved an Oscar as much if not more than, Forrest Whittaker did for this movie. His 5 months of research, accent and the random swahili proverbs notwithstanding.
Method acting is fantastic but prone to misuse. I think this is a valid case of that situation here.
Somehow something jarrs.