hi all, its amazing how fast hollywood moves. "slumdog millionaire" only a few months ago was the news-du-jour and now it seems to have vanished already from the collective consciousness.

finally got around to viewing it yesterday. I rented it from "redbox", a great service. its movies in vending machines. check out their web site if you're curious. I believe this is only in the US as far as I know. its had a big effect on the movie industry. netflix is now citing it as a major potential competitor. Ive had a netflix subscription for several years now, highly recommend it for anyone who likes movies. I also have the roku player since end of last year. the netflix movie streaming service is proving to be really well valued, even if you cant get big hits on it. esp for kids movies.

but, Im meandering again as usual. I wanted to write something about slum dog millionaire while its still fresh in my brain.

I could tell from reviews of this movie that it was not going to be one of those that would be easy viewing. it reminds me of the movie about "blood diamonds" which I have been putting off from viewing for a long time. both reveal unpleasant, dark sides of the world, politics, and humanity. I can tell from the previews when these movies are going to kick me in the gut. I think some movies are a good measurement of people's empathy. if you have a lot of empathy, there are various movies that are just not going to be very viewable. watching them is like eating something bitter, to say the least. I had the same feeling many years ago from "pulp fiction" even though it was supposed to be funny. I just couldnt laugh about violence, and I think, nor can civilized people. 

maybe someday, a more civilized race will look back at the movies we view, and regard them as something the same way we look back and view the dark ages. violent, cruel, inhumane. unconscionable. the word that means, "without a conscience".

slumdog millionaire, I could write a lot about this movie. it deserves a long analysis. every scene seemed to have multiple meanings. I think people would look at all the scenes differently and find a lot of variation in reaction. I would like to look up all the names of the characters and mention them in this review. maybe someday when open salon starts paying for writing, wink :p .. the movie really deserves it. I wish I could easily have captured all the link of great web articles Ive run across in the past few months on the subject. a real kaleidescope.

great movies cause massive ripples in the collective (un)consciousness, reverberating continually, sometimes for decades. slumdog millionaire may be one such movie.

the protagonist I take as someone who has had very bad karma in his life, but also, very positive karma. a striking, extreme mix. one of my favorite japanese aphorisms, "fortune and misfortune is like a rope twisted". this saying is highly realized with the protagonist.

the cinemetography is fantastic. its intense in a way that grips you without you realizing it. the details in the background are not so noticeable. they creep up on you. the movie plays a lot with very vivid scenes, such as when they are in the building/skyscraper being constructed, versus lots of ambiguity, at night, or in the slums, where the chaotic visual backgrounds of trash, huts, etc reflect the sheer chaos of the lives of the characters.

I think everything in the movie is very real. that is to say, I am sure it all happened in similar forms to different people. I cannot imagine a single person being so unlucky as to have suffered as much as the protagonist. except possibly those that have been caught up in wars. how could anyone suffer so much outside of a war? his life seems like the most possible that could ever be suffered by a civilian. in fact the movie has a very warlike aspect. the scenes where the friend of the protagonist starts to play with his gun, and aims it at the protagonist, counting 5,4,3,...

it was done inside of an apparently abandoned hotel. [the only unbelievable detail-- it seems to have perfectly running water!! bizarre!! his gf takes a hot shower, doesnt she??] .. anyway, the hotel has the visual quality of a war zone. their lives are like a war zone, except expressed within a sort of globalist virulent capitalism that has overtaken the world. it could be India [which it is..]  it could be China, it could be anywhere. and anyone who worships at the altar of capitalism or globalization needs to watch this movie, and see if you still have the stomach to be a vapid, mindless cheerleader afterwards.

the movie scars you psychologically. that is, if you have a conscience, if you are not a sociopath. you dont want to think that "these things happen" but it makes the unreal real. its all so plausible, it fits together perfectly, it has no quality of "that is just so unbelievable, it could never have happened that way". it feels like it is happening as you are watching it. eerie. creepy. deadly. its about, "stuff that happens outside of the glossy magazines, outside of the tv show reality". it shows how the fake reality of hollywood can interweave with the violence of everyday life. it has an intense, schizophrenic quality. as if the movie itself has multiple personality disorder. we see the protagonist being tortured in one scene, and on the tv show in the next. its beyond jarring, its scarring.

the movie is highly nonlinear with its flashbacks. it has a very strong postmodern feeling in this way. a lot of really great movies tend to be very nonlinear in their timing.

speaking of timing, the director has excellent timing.  no scene goes too short or too long. the music/sound is excellent.

overall, I dont think the movie didnt deserve any of its oscars. ie, every one was well deserved. but the directing and editing was masterful, and its easy to see how that really was the crux/lynchpin in its winning all the awards. some of the awards followed from the directing and editing, if the editing/directing had not been so good, people would not have paid as much attn to the music or story.

the movie captures hollywood's guilt, its "cognitive dissonance" over its profession and operation. hollywood pays its actors ungodly, almost "sinful" amounts of money for their "services". and it all seems so fantastical at best, fraudulent at worst at times. the movie brutally satirizes this fraudulence, this sham. in a word, "exploitive". all the characters in the movie seem to exploit each other, arguably even the protagonist exploits the tv show to move ahead in the world. the exploitation always seems to degenerate into physical violence.

and yes, the news is that the young actors in the movie are REAL denizens of the slums of india. news reports have documented some of their plight. focusing the lens on them, limiting the view, "framing" the picture, just as hollywood does.

the slums of the movie exist, they are real, they are all over the planet, and we in our psychologically/intellectually sanitized "mall-world" rarely come face to face with the true, unbelievably vast, ugly nature of our reality, our world. its like that moment from the matrix, when neo takes the red pill & wakes up coated in goo.

its what we feel like when we see the reality of the slums, the inhumanity. there are 9B people on the planet, how did you think they lived, anyway? yes, some of them live like human rats, foraging on the trash & detritus of the rest of humanity.. I think joseph conrads famous book, "heart of darkness" is very much evoked by this movie. I never did read that whole book in english classes. just the 2ndary details of it by my teachers were almost enough to give me nightmares.

so I have been banging out this review for 30minutes now, going longer than I had intended.

the last thing I wanted to mention was the torture in the movie. it takes many forms. but anyone who favors so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques" needs to watch this movie & see if they change their mind on the topic. I suppose many people will not change their views, but at least consider watching the movie. maybe it will not change your mind at all, in which case, consider it "entertainment". I say that with irony. wink. [see other posts in my blog on politics of torture]

so, yes, I would like to write more about this movie. I think it deserves a lot of academic analysis, like the way that Matrix has gotten. quite a few various philosphy books have been written about the Matrix, and quite deservedly so. its like a complicated pattern that requires deconstruction, unravelling, to find the implications. the implications are profound. the implications say something about our world that we would not ordinarily want to face.

there are hidden messages and meanings, and they are not immediately clear or obvious. it could take a lifetime to figure out. and indeed, in the protagonists short lifetime, it is clear that he has only scratched the surface. there are not heroes and villains, there are no really one dimensional characters in the movie, overall. where does the black stop and the white start? and vice versa?