Swompdonkey

Slumdog Instant Millionaire

Slumdog Millionaire is coming out on DVD, and I'm really curious to see what the fuss is about. I have always been a fan of Danny Boyle, who seems to have a knack for crafting nifty genre pictures that always seem slightly askew to me. Trainspotting was not quite a black comedy, and 28 Days Later was not quite a zombie flick, but both were quite excellent.



After all the hype about the explosion of India's vibrant film industry, it is rather startling to read something like this, that really brings the gulf between Bollywood and Hollywood into sharp focus. In some ways, Bollywood is still small potatoes.

The woman who has vaulted ahead of the Aishwaryas, Bipashas, and every other female Indian superstar to become the highest earning female actor in the country is a neophyte actress with exactly one movie credit under her belt so far. How that must irk the Bollywood divas.

In fact, Freida Pinto is not technically a "Bollywood star" since almost everyone agrees that what Danny Boyle has made is not a Bollywood movie, although it does offer a tip of the hat to the genre here and there. Some in Bollywood have actually criticized Boyle's flick as exploitive, calling it a cheap trashy mediocre version of erstwhile Bollywood hits, although that criticism seems a bit rich to me, considering that countless western films have been shamelessly mined, plagiarized, and ripped off by Bollywood.

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Plus:

David Brooks provides us with some hope for Afghanistan. It isn't much, but it's more than we've had for a while.