Slumdog Millionaire is a rich film and worthy of Oscar

I'm glad to see that Slumdog Millionaire won so many Academy Awards last night. It was an awesome film.

From direction to story to editing to music, this was most definitely not Bollywood fare. British director Danny Boyle told the Times of India:

I’m truly happy that every Indian I meet is beaming, and it is the ultimate compliment for me that people in India see Slumdog Millionaire as an Indian film. However, in reality it is a British film. It is a very gritty in the beginning and very realistic because our film culture is based on that kind of realism which in Hollywood and Bollywood isn’t quite there.

From my (notably limited) experience with Indian films, I can't help but agree that Slumdog lacks the songs, dancing, and melodrama typical of Bollywood. But it's good to see that Indians are excited about the success of this film, because it is still an amazing portrayal of an amazing country. It's completely filmed in India (Agra and Mumbai) and filled with significant amounts of subtitled Hindi. (Side note: I loved the styling of the English subtitles.) Slumdog also has an almost entirely Indian cast. The lead actor, Dev Patel, is a British Indian. And the score comes from the extremely popular composer A. R. Rahman.

Speaking of music, I thought this was some of Rahman's best work. Unlike his usual repertoire, we are treated to more Western-style songs: there are a lot of hip hop beats and English (rather than Hindi, Tamil, or mixed) lyrics. But I thoroughly enjoyed the tunes whenever they came to the forefront.

The story was at times dramatic and coincidental, but present and past were interleaved well to provide full character development and a climactic build-up. I was wrapped inside the story of Jamal Malik, a child of the slums who grew into a young man with definitive character and persistence despite all the horrible things he saw and survived.

If you haven't gotten the point yet, you should see Slumdog Millionaire. And congratulations to all those involved who won awards!

In other news, I want to see Smile Pinki, winner of the best documentary short. It's another film about Indians, particularly about a girl born with a cleft lip who gets it fixed up.

Last but not least: Happy Shivratri!