Tuesday, February 17, 2009

Slumdog Millionaire - Movie Review

SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE (***1/2) - Starring Dev Patel, Anil Kapoor, Irrfan Khan and Madhur Mittal.
Directed by Danny Boyle.

Let's put it this way. Since The Dark Knight or Wall-E aren't there, I'd be okay with this movie winning Best Picture. And with a movie I found to be really good, I feel compelled to lead with my quibble.

I knew before-hand there was a torture scene, but there was an act of violence against a child that took me a good ten minutes to recover from. Time passes and there is eventual retribution, but ugh, if I didn't know the movie had a feel-good ending, I don't know how I would have felt. I would have felt deceived. "Hey, I didn't know I was seeing City of God." But Boyle, to his infinite credit, links the events together in one big tapestry that's part Dickens and part Capra as directed by Paul Greengrass.

We follow Jamal as a kid, as a pre-teen, and as a teen, in love with a girl, going through the hardships of being poor in Mumbai. He goes through many hardships and trials, and it all builds to a triumphant conclusion.

It's very entertaining. I might have been overhyped for it, but not by much.

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