Perception can be deceptive, and when it so happens that you open your mouth and people take you at your word, this tendency becomes dangerous in this Imperial Information Age of ours. The wide-sweeping wins of Slumdog Millionaire from one critics' group to the next and the recent exposure (I can't bring myself to say "prestige") of its Golden Globe trophy have exposed it to more backlash, both realized and potential, than ever before. Before I can address my general grievance with the piling-on of hate for this beguiling "little" big film, I must clear up some misconceptions being slung in the interest only of the continuance of news for sake of news.
The multitude of directions in which the comments go on Jeff's recent post of a reader's thoughts on Slumdog's inferred mediocrity is an interesting case study of the American (or US-influenced) perspective on the film, where some will defend it as more deserving than standard-issue Oscar Bait and others will shitcan it for not being as beloved to them personally as WALL-E or The Dark Knight, going so far as to invoke the classic "I'll be damned if X movie gets attention and Y movie, which is truly one of the greatest ever made, is ignored. Hollywood elitism at its finest!" flavor of vitriol.
The plain truth of the matter is that this is why creative types are in their nature adverse to any sort of awards though secretly love them. Asserting that there is one (movie, actor, script, etc.) specific, objective "Best" anything is inherently ridiculous, since the nature of drama is that it affects everyone differently and quite subjectively. Drama for drama's sake!
It makes as much sense as the Bowl Championship Series determining who competes against whom in the NCAA football playoffs. I never thought I'd compare the cinema to American football, so help me.
Creatives get all this (minus the football), but they are just as subjectively biased toward this or that not deserving just as they love one thing more or less than someone else. It's all about personal causes and selfish ethnocentricity and prejudice and the whole ball of wax.
This is why the internet is such a fascinating and maddening place full of hypocrites, Judases, gods and samaritans depending on who is reading what. This is why the ever-more-mind-numbing series of year-end lists you see is so much preferred by creative types as their judgment on each Year As It Was.
So why am I going on about perspective in the same way you sat through a discussion of it stoned or otherwise aloof in high school or college?
Nirpal Dhaliwal, a writer for the Guardian wrote up a piece that was linked in the aforementioned Elsewhere post, championing Slumdog Millionaire as a film that could have only been made from a Western perspective and that Amitabh Bachchan was backlashing away on his personal blog.
Be as it may that Boyle made a movie that no pioneering Indian-native visionary with his relative clout would (or could) have and it receive the acclaim that it has, a crucial error is overlooked here. I read Amitabh Bachchan's blog semi-regularly, and his comments in this entry seem to have been misinterpreted intentionally to prove a point on both sides of the Slumdog argument. Bachchan addressed this two days later. As far as I've seen, Bachchan hasn't even seen Slumdog Millionaire or directly commented about his thoughts of the film itself.
In the original post, he's presenting a couple things that he's seen relentlessly bandied about in his own comments section and adding the slightest bit of commentary. He notes that there are plenty of comments from Indian readers who are that country's equivalent of the States' Nationalist Fanatics who are tens times as "over-sensitive" as they accuse their hated liberal brethren of being. Bachchan adds that every developed country in the world has a Slumdog underbelly, and it's true! Argue all you want that focusing on the slums and the poor is some sort of exploitation, but isn't that what cinema is all about? Voyeurism and exploitation are key ingredients or there wouldn't be a camera recording everything and you wouldn't be watching! Show me where in this movie someone staresinto the camera and tells you "India is a shithole slum where everyone is murdered and robbed" in the style of Reefer Madness. Mumbai Madness, it should have been called, yes?
As to why I use the word "beguiling" so many paragraphs ago, one of the reasons I was particularly taken by the film is that it a deceptive beast, really. I watched it first in October at the Austin Film Festival, and afterward said to a friend "if there were justice in the world, movies like this would actually get awards exposure more often than stuffy period dramas primarily spoken in english-accented english." It's from the director of 28 Days Later, Shallow Grave, and Trainspotting, set in India with a great deal of non-English being spoken, and has no recognizable American stars. Described to a friend, it would sound like arthouse, elitist preachapalooza, but turns out more easy to watch than a gameshow itself (even making gameshows like the one at its center seem half-enjoyable again). I'm still trying to wrap my head around the fact Slumdog is an odds-on favorite for not only Best Picture nomination, but to win the prize according to the odds.
There are those who allege that it would take them multiple viewings to "catch everything" but the same could be said of The Dark Knight, which people I know had seen four times by the time I saw it once. There are also those that would say the Academy's out of touch and "elitist" for whatever reason for possibly nominating this movie instead of WALL-E or The Dark Knight. It would be wonderful if the Academy defied all expectation and put out a list like the following to knock everyone on their ass because this year's Oscar Bait didn't get everyone biting:
The Dark Knight
Man on Wire
Slumdog Millionaire
WALL-E
Waltz With Bashir
...but they just won't. Slumdog is a very universally appealing and different kind of thing than much of its competition, and I can't see why either of those qualities is a bad thing.
What I wonder now is why people are assailing this film for "taking up a spot" and not even touching Frost/Nixon, which, while admirably put together and interesting on its own, really is in a different tier of what I would call memorable. Very good, yes...but one of the five best films of the year...I don't think so.
You see, I've tricked myself into getting tied up in all this crap. Enough. The nominations will be out in a few days and I'll have some more things to say then. As for tomorrow, I'm working on a response to some hilarious things I read about Che (mostly the movie and little about the person) on Big Hollywood.