Carrying on from the previous post and speaking of films I couldn’t sit through….

Slumdog Millionaire. The rest of the world (and our media) may be raving about it and showering Danny Boyle with Golden Globes but I think Indian audiences will find it hackneyed in the extreme. A westerner’s film from a western point of view for a western audience.

I gave up on the film when the street kids from Mumbai started giving tours of the Taj Mahal to a German couple while making wisecracks in American accented English. Really?

Is this how first world dwellers think slum kids talk in a third world country? Every film asks you to suspend your disbelief to some extent but it then has to engage you and make that suspension worth your while. This one is just insults your intelligence.

Of course, no one in the media has the balls to say that the emperor has his man bits gently swaying in the wind. Everyone has the exact same opinion. The papers are all too busy going into a swoon about how super and fantastic everything about the film is. It won so many Golden Globes! Danny Boyle may give his first AD a million dollars! It might win Oscars! It goes on and on.

Geez…

P.S. I also love how every year the media stridently insists that some Indian film or the other is going to make it to the Oscars (the Holy Grail!) with huge articles and photos and confident sound bytes….

Only to cut a sorry figure later. (There was a tiny, tiny article in the ToI today that said ‘Tare Zameen Par’ hasn’t made it to the short-list. Tough-titties )