Slumdog Millionaire

A Brit-Bollywood remake of the Czech fairytale movie O chytrém Honzovi (= Clever Jack). This could be called Clever Jamal or How a Poor Guy with Common Sense Found Happiness and it is extremely good and enlightening. But didn’t it bend the truth whenever it could (mainly in the live transmissions) for the crude purpose of wringing your heart strings? Yes, but who cares in a fairytale, huh kids? P.S.: And isn’t the book better than the movie? No, it’s not. Because Swarup’s work is something completely different. Some black humor, cynicism and a message that is the exact opposite of Boyle’s ever so sweet, naive candy cane. And I like that kind of thing more than fairytales... (05/01/2009)

A naive, clichéd and predictable fairy tale about how a poor boy came to happiness. Boyle's film captivates with the sweeping realities of contemporary, overpopulated India, but otherwise has little else to offer. The childhood scenes are excellent, full of life and filmmaking passion, but the rest follows the same routine as many other films, without a hint of surprise, suspense or believable emotions. Bollywood came to Hollywood with a bang and everyone sat on their asses. Not me, though, sorry. (03/02/2009)

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. (30/12/2008)

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". (20/02/2011)

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. (28/03/2009)