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Slumdog Millionaire
Apr. 18th, 2009 09:35 amMy mom has this habit, which in my view ranges between quirky and annoying, of insisting that I watch movies that she likes.
Her most recent offering along these lines was Slumdog Millionaire. We watched it last night during our supper break, while we ate our Japanese takeout. The basic premise is that the main character, a poor man named Jamal, became a contestant on the Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. He makes it all the way to the final question, but for a large part of the movie, you're not sure if he's going to actually get to answer it because he gets hauled away on suspicion of cheating. This is because no other contestant has ever gotten so far, so how can an uneducated man from the slums do it?
The story weaves two, sometimes three different angles of the story in and out of each other -- Jamal's experiences in the present as he's explaining how he knew the answers, his life from childhood onward, and his time on the show. You see, among other things, the murder of his mother, the multiple bad decisions of his brother, and how he found and lost and found and lost the woman he's loved since boyhood.
The last half hour or so of the movie is really riveting, and there's a musical number in a train station during the end credits which was actually my favorite part of the whole film. But I almost turned it off early on because my initial reaction to the movie was that it was sick. Mind you, I was eating while we watched this, and the first half hour to hour contains some pretty unpleasant stuff. ( Cut for a list of some of the unpleasant things )
Once they stopped trying to put me off my dinner, it was a pretty good movie. I don't think I'd watch it again, but it was better than I thought it would be.
Her most recent offering along these lines was Slumdog Millionaire. We watched it last night during our supper break, while we ate our Japanese takeout. The basic premise is that the main character, a poor man named Jamal, became a contestant on the Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. He makes it all the way to the final question, but for a large part of the movie, you're not sure if he's going to actually get to answer it because he gets hauled away on suspicion of cheating. This is because no other contestant has ever gotten so far, so how can an uneducated man from the slums do it?
The story weaves two, sometimes three different angles of the story in and out of each other -- Jamal's experiences in the present as he's explaining how he knew the answers, his life from childhood onward, and his time on the show. You see, among other things, the murder of his mother, the multiple bad decisions of his brother, and how he found and lost and found and lost the woman he's loved since boyhood.
The last half hour or so of the movie is really riveting, and there's a musical number in a train station during the end credits which was actually my favorite part of the whole film. But I almost turned it off early on because my initial reaction to the movie was that it was sick. Mind you, I was eating while we watched this, and the first half hour to hour contains some pretty unpleasant stuff. ( Cut for a list of some of the unpleasant things )
Once they stopped trying to put me off my dinner, it was a pretty good movie. I don't think I'd watch it again, but it was better than I thought it would be.
