Slumdog Millionaire

An exploitative film... a selectively filmed and sounded demonstration of colonial fantasy with added value in the form of purifying catharsis. Slumdog Millionaire doesn't say anything about India, it's just borrowing it as padding in sympathetic shrapnel aimed at Western audiences. The essence of contemporary ideological escapism, however riveting technically. I don't believe anything about that movie. Boyle's obsession with the invisible hand of fate is typical from this point of view - just garish colors on an empty concrete block of a "guaranteed hit". (2011-02-20)

Slumdog Millionaire is essentially the new Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. It will be just as influential. It is a love story from an exotic corner of the world, which the ordinary viewer would otherwise never see, told in a universal language. And the Indians will try to convince you (as the Chinese tried to do at the time) that they have been making such films for decades. No, they haven’t. Someone had to come from abroad and take out their Western European lens. Slumdog Millionaire is not a Bollywood film, but a firework-like celebration of Bollywood as a film culture with all its romanticism. In its beautiful love story, Slumdog Millionaire fully utilizes the splendors and miseries of the Indian microcosm, thus making it attractive for the audience in an imaginative and fresh way. It is a small and unobtrusive film gem that shines more than any Los Angeles jewelry store where Benjamin Button goes shopping. Slumdog Millionaire is a movie celebrating life, faith and positive thinking; a movie that wasn’t made to become the award-winning film of the year... and that is why it deserves it. Nowadays this film is a small miracle. And Danny Boyle is a god. P.S: Jen Lopez and Rosario Dawson might have Freida Pinto’s features but not her eyes. No Hollywood actress has Freida Pinto’s eyes... (2009-02-20)

A cleverly told fairy tale about a) luck, b) faith, c) life, d) Who Wants to be a Millionaire, which can catch a person’s attention even though they don’t particularly like this kind of sob story. This is a story about a tiny squirt Jamal whose life led him on the journey of answers, which Danny Boyle managed to capture to the very last detail. He managed beautifully to portray the ludicrousness of the civilized world, where, for instance, after one drastic scene from childhood, the show host cracks a cheap joke. The actors are well cast too, both the small ones, and Dev Patel himself, with the beautiful Frida Pinto. P.S.: Did you notice those questions aimed at an English-speaking audience at the end of the contest? (2009-03-21)

So here we have it. Bollywood has been on the rise for a long time, India has improved economically in the last ten years and the country has created a large middle class with quality education and therefore higher demands on the quality of film stories. At the same time, thanks to globalization, Bollywood producers have started to feel the need to break into foreign markets and it was necessary to come up with more sophisticated plots than the original Bollywood kitschy romances with songs and dances, which were completely indigestible for the Euro-American viewer. The film Slumdog Millionaire combines classic Bollywood motifs including romance, action, and melodrama, but at the same time brings them to the Western viewer in a very attractive way thanks to top-notch editing, excellent camerawork, casting, acting performances, and music. In terms of content, it's just a kitschy fairy tale for me, against which I could raise many legitimate objections, but considering the technical aspects, it deserves three stars. Slumdog Millionaire is not about current India and the life of its inhabitants, but about how the director and consequently the viewer want to see it. I like certain types of fairy tales, like Forrest Gump or Amelie, but Slumdog Millionaire takes itself too seriously for my taste and tries to evoke emotions where irony would be appropriate. I am not the first to notice the obvious contrivance of the plot, where the screenwriter and director interpret the rules of the game, which must have the same format globally, as it suits them, and strongly violates logic. Overall impression: 60%. The success of Boyle's film shows that the audience still wants to be moved and that the stories that the screenwriters and filmmakers came up with in the 1930s-1950s can be recycled in modified exotic settings. I have no problem with it receiving technical Oscar awards, but Slumdog Millionaire is definitely not the best film of the year. It certainly has decent craftsmanship, but art should look different. The much more justified Oscar went to last year's masterpiece by the Coen brothers No Country for Old Men. (2009-03-28)

Inexact celluloid carousel of life. Crime, fate, tension and personal drama. And above all, a cautious love story, which is precisely the decisive factor that separates Millionaire from other biographical stories. Accompanied by a soundtrack on the verge of dynamic Boyle style and a fascinating orchestra, it becomes clear that the audience needs "human stories". Thank goodness for that. (2008-12-30)