The Slumdog Bubble

During the two years I spent in Gujarat, my friend Nishant taught me the Golden Rule of movie watching- 'The only way to watch a bad movie is under the influence of alchohol.'

If you are not tanked up sufficiently, your brain will actually try to make sense of the nonsense and the experience will leave you with a feeling of disgust and might even leave you feeling that your intelligence has been insulted by Karan Johar/Suraj Barja-whatsisname/Yash Chopra/any other intelligence insulter.

I watched 'Slumdog Millionaire' a few days ago and to sum it up in one sentence, I really missed my Smirnoff.

The high point of the movie for me was when one of the cops really drags out the word 'ma**&&&&chod'. He really drags it out and makes it sound really mean and nasty. (Note to self: when cussing in Hindi, drag out the words and relish every syllable when you say it. Adds to the effect.) Watch out for this moment in the movie and then get out of the movie-hall/switch off your DVD player/close the window on your computer because after this invaluable little pointer on diction and pronounciation of unmentionable abuses, the movie was all downhill from there.

It was a ghastly masala movie without any real masala. Danny Boyle has loosely cobbled a few scenes together and has made a dreadful hash of telling a fairly predictable, rather boring story.
Boyle could not make up his mind on whether he wanted to tell us a dark, this-is-real-life kind of story, or just a corny, cheesy flick where boy meets girl, loses girl, finds girl again, gets past bad guys and gets girl again. In the end, he tries to achieve both, ends up achieving neither and pisses me off in the process.

That this effort won Golden Globes and Oscar nominations must surely be a travesty of justice because several eminently more enjoyable masala-movies have been sent from India for the Oscars and none of them has come even close to a final award nomination. So obviously, this film was not nominated for the masala quotient.

It is neither insightful or original in its story-line (an underdog winning- what a surprise! When was the last time the 'overdog' won in a movie?). Besides if you really want to see a good masala underdog movie, I would strongly recommend a Rocky marathon - six movies which will numb your brain but leave you with a warm glow and a vague desire to start boxing.

Even Slumdog's depiction of the dirty side of slum life in Mumbai was largely stereotypical. We have seen movies like Nayakan, Company, Salaam Bombay and D to name a few which provide a more insightful and poignant mental picture of the dark side of Mumbai.

I have thought long and hard about it and the only justification for this film being the most over--rated movie since James Cameron thought it might be a good idea to make a movie about a sinking ship is that the jury, press and public who watched the movie paid heed to Nishant's Golden Rule and were comfortably cruising through Happy-Land, sloshing joyously under the influence of Smirnoff when they saw it.

What shocks me is not that a poor effort has been nominated for awards. It happens regularly enough. What shocks me is the fact that people are finding fault with the movie for the wrong reasons. They say that the movie is bad because it 'celebrates Mumbai's poverty'. Thats just ridiculous.

The movie is bad because the script is weak. The movie is bad because the plot is predictable. The movie is bad because it makes you wish you had done something more interesting with your time (like watching paint dry). The movie is bad because it does not have the masti quotient of a good Indian masti movie (like Sivaji - The Boss or Om Shanti Om) nor does it suceed in being dark like Company, Nayakan, D and the rest.

However the one thing you cannot blame Boyle for (and this is probably the only thing) is for 'celebrating poverty'. Poverty exists in Mumbai. Whether you like it or not. Boyle is not trying to say that all Indians live in slums. Boyle does not say that wretchedness and poverty are typically Indian and ingrained in our culture. Boyle's problem is that his movie doesnt really say anything.