So, if you watched the Golden Globes last night, you know that the Danny Boyle movie Slumdog Millionaire took home just about all the top awards. Did you guys see it? I did, and I generally liked it, was on the edge of seat throughout (which doesn’t often happen at the movies for me), liked Boyle’s signature fast paced cinematography, the scenery of Mumbai, etc. But I also had some problems with the unreality of it all and am kind of dumbfounded that it got so much blind praise.
For one thing, I found the romance so over-the-top and unbelievable, it really kind of ruined the whole for me. We’re not really supposed to believe that he could have found his girl, and she’d still be there for him, after all those years, right? And if it is supposed to be a bit of magical realism, then I think it kind of undercuts the rest, which is supposed to be brutally realistic, right? Or is it? Do the police in Mumbai really torture a suspect like that, and over whether he cheated on a game show? I thought initially his torturers were mafia, but, according to the story, they were just plain old police, who became his friends later on. And there was so much suffering — the Christian mobs brutally murdering the Muslims, the gangs of organized kidnappers gouging out the eyes of the children before using them to make money, the selling into slavery. It was all so horrid. But then given the outrageous love-story plot and then