Salman slams Slumdog

Salman Rushdie, writing in The Guardian:

"The problems begin with the work being adapted. Swarup's novel is a corny potboiler, with a plot that defies belief: a boy from the slums somehow manages to get on to the hit Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire and answers all his questions correctly because the random accidents of his life have, in a series of outrageous coincidences, given him the information he needs, and are conveniently asked in the order that allows his flashbacks to occur in chronological sequence. This is a patently ridiculous conceit, the kind of fantasy writing that gives fantasy writing a bad name. It is a plot device faithfully preserved by the film-makers, and lies at the heart of the weirdly renamed Slumdog Millionaire. As a result the film, too, beggars belief.

It used to be the case that western movies about India were about blonde women arriving there to find, almost at once, a maharajah to fall in love with, the supply of such maharajahs being apparently endless and specially provided for English or American blondes; or they were about European women accusing non-maharajah Indians of rape, perhaps because they were so indignant at having being approached by a non-maharajah; or they were about dashing white men galloping about the colonies firing pistols and unsheathing sabres, to varying effect. Now that sort of exoticism has lost its appeal; people want, instead, enough grit and violence to convince themselves that what they are seeing is authentic; but it's still tourism. If the earlier films were raj tourism, maharajah-tourism, then we, today, have slum tourism instead. In an interview conducted at the Telluride film festival last autumn, Boyle, when asked why he had chosen a project so different from his usual material, answered that he had never been to India and knew nothing about it, so he thought this project was a great opportunity. Listening to him, I imagined an Indian film director making a movie about New York low-life and saying that he had done so because he knew nothing about New York and had indeed never been there. He would have been torn limb from limb by critical opinion. But for a first world director to say that about the third world is considered praiseworthy, an indication of his artistic daring. The double standards of post-colonial attitudes have not yet wholly faded away."

Finally. Thanks, S.R. Now, quick--duck!

Coming this Sunday: The Oscars

The 81st Academy Awards will be held on Sunday; as of last night, I caught up on my Best Picture nominee viewing by watching The Reader. That I am a filmmaker and film-lover does not require me to watch the Oscars or care about them, but I am also fascinated by Hollywood history and the film business itself, and that does. I am also curious to see to what extent the "leak" of the Oscar winners turns out to be true. I do not think the leak is real, but I'm curious to see if the author is a good guesser.

The BP nominees are Milk, Slumdog Millionaire, The Reader, Frost/Nixon and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. For me, there is no question that Milk is the best film in this batch. Ideally, we'll see an upset this year - a kind of Revenge of Brokeback Mountain - that will throw over heavy-favorite Slumdog for Gus Van Sant's gay-martyr biopic, but I'm not holding my breath. (Memorably, Brokeback seemed a likely winner at the 78th Awards, only to be upset by the unfathomably stupid Crash, one of the worst BPs in my lifetime.) I also enjoyed Benjamin Button, which was an extraordinary technical achievement and which has stayed with me in ways I would not have expected initially.

I have long had a love/hate relationship with Ron Howard's work. On the one hand, I grew up with him in "Andy Griffith" reruns and on "Happy Days" and with films like Splash and Parenthood. And then there's "Arrested Development," one of the greatest TV shows of the past 30 years, which he was closely involved in producing. On the other hand, I think he's often a terrible director, responsible for awfulness like A Beautiful Mind and The Da Vinci Code. So, I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed Frost/Nixon. Previous to this film, I thought Apollo 13 was his best work, so it all kind of makes sense: when he's working closely with history and has strong source material, I usually like what he does.

F/N, which I illegally downloaded and watched on my television (yep, I'm the enemy), has the benefit of a couple of great impersonations as well as being full of ideas; it's "about something." It's about a great many things, actually. These qualities go a long way to making a film watchable from my point of view, regardless of how well-directed it is; Howard is a competent craftsman, so this film is highly-watchable, involving and thought-provoking, if not particularly emotionally stirring or surprising in its outcome. I happen to really enjoy watching actors playing modern historical figures (that is, real people I have actually seen in another context), so this bias certainly aided my enjoyment of the film. My mind wandered when anyone made a speech longer than 30 seconds or so - such as Nixon's late-night drunken harangue on the phone with Frost - because I was taken out of the film at those moments and reminded that it was based on a play. And I also didn't care about the Nixon character, particularly, and didn't care what the playwright felt he should have said. But these moments were only a minor distraction from the telling of a truly interesting encounter, well-dramatized.

I feel less charitably toward The Reader. I also watched this film from a ripped screener (although, unlike F/N, it did not have Dutch subtitles), but I don't think I'd have felt better about the film if I had seen it in a theater. Kate Winslet is pretty much my favorite female star, and she's perfectly good here (I think it's likely to be her year to finally get an Oscar, too), but this is one of those "prestige" films, those Oscar-bait films, that come out at the end of each year and lull us quickly to sleep. It's a film about makeup, period details, famous-actress nudity and the Holocaust. There are no surprises - even the surprise twist is no surprise - the story just marches onward into the gloom. Every scene of the film is slathered with music to help us understand what to feel moment to moment, a practice I find endlessly irritating. Well, I guess that's Hollywood for you.

I was not a fan of director Stephen Daldry's last prestige film, The Hours, which bored me stupid. Apparently, he is set to remake My Fair Lady in 2010. Sheesh.

Slumdog Millionaire

Slumdog Millionaire might be 2008's most over-praised film, an honor I had thought I would bestow upon The Dark Knight. Audiences and critics seem to love Slumdog. I understand it to a point; it's a feel-good fantasy in an exotic setting about an orphan from a hellish slum who becomes rich and wins the girl of his dreams. I like fantasy, too - but not brutally dishonest fantasy.

Isn't any fantasy dishonest? Or any and every film, for that matter? Okay, but how far do you need to take this? Some films tell you up front that they are fantasies; Slumdog tries to have it both ways. It tries to be grounded in the reality of life in hell and make it flashy and sexy, too. It "corrects" the violence, filth and savage injustices of its characters' lives with coincidence, shallow characterization, all-conquering love and lies upon lies. I am not usually bothered when popular filmmakers use colorful Third World backdrops because they rarely ask us to take their tourism seriously (in The Incredible Hulk, for instance, or the Bourne and Bond films); also, I just don't give a shit about that kind of argument. But, alas, director Danny Boyle seems not to know that he is a tourist here, reminding me of the gullible travelers in his film's Taj Mahal sequence. Yep, it's a film set in India, made by a British director - and it has a Taj Mahal sequence. Of course it does.

To be fair, Boyle's Taj Mahal sequence is not without irony. I've tended to like his work in the past and had some hopes for this film, in spite of what its ad campaign suggested to me. The first half of the film is rather charming, too, when he's following the main character as a child. In spite of the horrors of their lives, children are resilient - to a point. It's just so bleeding unlikely that everything is going to work out so well, fall so neatly into place, for anyone as an adult, let alone someone who reaches adulthood under the circumstances depicted here, that the film just goes off the rails after a certain point.

That is to say, what had been a pleasant fantasy becomes an unpleasant, treacly fantasy that stops making sense even by its own rules. As one absurdity after another piles up, I start checking out.

As for the viewing experience, tonight we sat in the Alameda's balcony for the first time, which was a novel and extremely pleasant vantage. Sadly, in the row behind us was a pair of middle-aged women who seemed to mistake the gigantic, art deco theater for their own living room. They reacted audibly to each twist and turn of the film, including simple sounds and full sentences of advice for the characters, and they occasionally struck up conversation with each other. Perhaps my reaction to the film comes in part from the fact that I was distracted both by their noise and by what I might do about it.

I considered talking to them right in the middle of the film; I also went over several scenarios for talking to them after the film was over. In this situation, if I make it through the film without saying anything, there's about a 50% chance that I will say something afterwards. This time I said, "Ladies, a little too much talking during the movie." They flattened their faces at me and sort of subtly bent back and away. I continued, "This is not your living room."

By now, Kim had practically turned into a gas in her efforts to get out of there. We left.

Look, I don't crave that kind of confrontation. I don't love to embarrass my wife, or be a dick. But if you go to the movies, SHUT THE FUCK UP. Or don't go. Those are your options. If you are too stupid to understand that, you are too stupid to attend the movies.