Slumdog Millionaire

What happens when a director doesn't trust his audience (e.g. cartoonish villains-- Regis would have done a better job as the Indian Who Wants To Be A Millionaire host, as would Apu; explanatory flashback sequences; ideas like "destiny" ill-defined)? He treats them like short-attention-spanned children in need of tricks and cinematic acrobatics. If the first viewing revealed unearned sentimentality, Slothrop suspects a second viewing might reveal that the only good thing about it is M.I.A.'s music. 

Ass-Headed Bottom: Don'tcha worry, Anonymous Comment Contributer, Slothrop's just being grumpy about this one, which is strange, since his New Year's resolutions were all about being uncankered this year, snapping snapshots of happy-go-lucky peeps happily going luckily down South Congress, sniffing the glories of life, and apparently thinking about pussy a lot. Me, my only New Year's resolution--after much meditation about this world and my role in it--is to become better at doing things in the dark, without switching on the light every time I need to pee. Aim low and you just might surprise yourself.

   As for Slumdog Millionaire, I went in prepared to hate it, since I had heard from shall we say untrustworthy quarters that it was the best movie of the year. And I tried, all the way through, to despise it. Stop tweaking my heart, I would try to say, but it would drown me out with some high-energy, carefully prefabbed scene. Stop bouncing between slum and shit and torture on the one hand and love and kisses and snuggles on the other, I would silently scream! But the movie only bounced louder and more rapidly. Let me have that comfortable middle-ground I expect from films, that strange quiet-hour of "intellectual stimulation," I cried!! I wanted to feel superior to "Who Wants to be a Millionaire," since Regis always reminded me of George W. Bush (except without the effrontery to play president), and since his show was so low-brow and insulting to my chosen profession of professor, and in any case rather easier than the average pub-quiz. But as I watched Slumdog Millionaire it occurred to me that an entire subcontinent might fall in love with such a show, with its Herbert Stemples and Charles van Dorens. After all, I've never known how to account for popular taste, which is why so often I end up dismissing it, as I sip my sherry, alone. And the idea that such shows are not about entertainment but about class and caste, that's plausible too. If I prefer to pretend they're about entertainment alone, then maybe I'm not as in tune with my own society as I should be.

   In any case, I gradually realized as I watched Slumdog Millionaire that I tend to like my movies either cruel or merciful, but rarely both. That is to say that I am comfortable with a certain kind of cinematic illusion, which makes me think I'm thinking, but which is in fact just making me not feel anything. It's the same attitude I bring to literature sometimes, and it's always bullshit. Thus I was prepared to despise sentimental novels when they came around on the English-major lazy-susan. "I prefer my novels cold, hard, slicing-n-dicing, like A Hero of Our Time," I declared, not remembering anything about A Hero of our Time except for the fact that it is not sentimental. And I expected sentimental novels to be the opposite, novels that always pull back, but never harm their heroes, never bring any real and lasting suffering, and always make it all good in the end, so the reader will cheer up and re-subscribe. And what I found was that nobody suffers quite as much as the vicar of Wakefield, even if it is also true that nobody ends up luckier. What I found were complete works of fiction: innocent characters swatted around by the author like abused puppies, children starving, parents weeping, friends betraying and then hating themselves for that betrayal, and all the various ills of life. Such literary disasters seemed all the more realistic for their exaggeration

[Still in progress]