In honor of the Academy Awards, here’s a song from the odds-on favorite to win Best Picture: Slumdog Millionaire.
I’ve had somewhat mixed feelings about the movie itself. I enjoyed it immensely while I was watching it (how could you not?). Later I read a bunch of grumpy backlash —it’s manipulative; it romanticizes poverty; the female character is inert; etc.—and found myself revising my original assessment. And later still, I said to myself, you know what? Screw you grumpy backlashers. It was a fairy tale, an effort to marry the exuberance of Bollywood with independent American filmmaking; social realism wasn’t the point. It was a celebration of life and transcendence amidst suffering, and I’m by-god going to trust my gut and love it.
(Yes, I’m extremely neurotic.)
One thing was never in doubt, though: the music is awesome. It is absolutely an essential character in the movie, as much a polyglot, life-affirming mess as the film itself. It’s easily one of the best soundtracks of the last five years, and one of my favorite albums of the year. Incidentally, the producer, A.R. Rahman, is an enormous international celebrity—but no one in America knows his name. Hopefully this album will change that.
While we’re at it, we might as well use this thread for Oscar thoughts and predictions. Who are you rooting for/against? What are your predictions? Did you see any of the movies this year?
Friday music blogging: Here We Go Magic
Comments
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Sean Casten Posted 11:25 pm
20 Feb 2009
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Erik Hoffner Posted 11:36 pm
20 Feb 2009
If Sean Penn does not win best actor for Milk there is no justice in Hollywood.
Erik
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Tom Philpott Posted 2:12 am
21 Feb 2009
I agree that Penn was excellent -- he transformed himself into Harvey Milk, playing a completely different character than his usual. And he has the whole straight-man-plays-gay thing that has scored Oscar before (see Hanks, Tom). But I have to make a brief for Mickey Rourke's equally excellent but quite different performance in The Wrestler. Milk is an important and well-done movie, but in 20 years, it may well be relegated to the fate of other well-done biopics. Anybody still watching Gandhi or Malcolm X? It's quite possible that people will still be marveling at Rourke and the Wrestler in 20 years, just as they are at De Niro's turns in Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, and Raging Bull -- the latter admittedly is a biopic, but not cut from the same great-man cloth as Gandhi and Malcolm X. Milk is cut from that cloth, I think. Rourke for best actor!
Victual Reality
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Kit Stolz Posted 3:28 am
21 Feb 2009
The premise (spoiler alert!) of this film tells us that because this kid from the slums gets on a winning streak, he is abducted, interrogated, tortured, and beaten.
Really? Or is this just a melodramatic framing device that allows us to take an on-the-run tour of the lower depths of Mumbai? I confess I liked the tour, but set this same story in any well-known Western city and the dubiousness of it would be instantly apparent. We only buy it because we want to go on the tour and we figure that somehow in weird India anything goes. The best thing you can say about it is that it's like a Dickens novel for our time, but even Dickens I don't think would resort to cheesy bad guys actually torturing a hero on such a flimsy pretext.
The most important movie of the year, for reasons both artistic and commercial, was "The Dark Knight." And if that movie could have contained an uplifting love story or an obvious moral, probably it too would have been granted a shot at best picture. Surely it's as solid and memorable a movie as "Titanic," which according to the Academy, is one of the best ever, or "Slumdog," which is a virtual lock to win this year.
So then -- isn't it curious that the most popular picture of the year is too harrowing and downbeat to be considered for a big award? Says a lot about our times.
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Erik Hoffner Posted 7:41 am
21 Feb 2009
Erik
The Orion Grassroots Network: supporting grassroots groups working for conservation, justice, & more
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Ted Clayton Posted 11:47 am
21 Feb 2009
Neurotic is good, and extremely so may be better. The key thing is, normies are excessively flattered in mass-everything society.
I didn't do Slumdog, because it appears to be set in contemporary India ... and I really need to replace most of my decades-old video-imagery of India with current stuff ... and I don't want to get it from either Hollywood or Bollywood.
I can also come up with even more neurotic explanations. ;)
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Sean Casten Posted 11:44 pm
04 Mar 2009
"If one party deserves the song to be played during campaigns it is the Congress party because of its image," Manish Tiwari, party spokesperson, said.
I don't even know what that means, but it's hard not to think of Reagan making Born in the USA his theme song...
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