Friday, February 13, 2009
New Yorker on the Slumdog Millionaire
"Almost every movie, of course, is a fantasy, or a fable, or a fairy tale of one kind or another. In a great movie, though, narrative and technological magic combine to produce heightened intimations of the real, and that ecstatic merging of magic and reality is what imprints the movie on our emotional memory. Besides the children, what I will remember of “Slumdog Millionaire” is a disorderly exploitation of disorder, a kind of visual salad of glowing rotten fruit, constantly tossed." - David Denby of the New Yorker, a week before the Academy Awards 2009.
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Did you see Anthony Lane's take on the film?
"Boyle and his team, headed by the director of photography, Anthony Dod Mantle, clearly believe that a city like Mumbai, with its shifting skyline and a population of more than fifteen million, is as ripe for storytelling as Dickens’s London, and they may be right; hence the need to get their lenses dirty on its clogged streets. At the same time, the story they chose is sheer fantasy, not in its glancing details but in its emotional momentum. How else could Boyle get away with assembling his cast for a Bollywood dance number, at a railroad station, over the closing credits? You can either chide the film, at this point, for relinquishing any claim to realism or you can go with the flow—surely the wiser choice. After all, to make an old-fashioned crowd-pleaser is no mean task, requiring both folly and verve; and right now, I suspect, the crowd is ready to be pleased."
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