When you're recommended a film by someone for a reason such as "I've never been so attached to characters before," your expectations immediately shoot through the roof and it's difficult from that point on to come back down. The more I read about Slumdog Millionaire, the more I expected ("movie of the year" and all those titles people love to hand out).
But this movie met my expectations, introduced itself kindly, conversed for a little, and then kept going on with its life.
It went beyond because it is one of the better (regardlessly fictional) life stories I've learnt about in a movie. It made me wish it really was fact, but then it helped me realize that although this story is fiction, there are a million different stories around me, filled with just as much life, love, and death as this one.
Any sort of plot summary I try to concoct for people just dumbs it down ("A kid goes through countless hardships to be on Who Wants To Be a Millionaire.. but that's not the main.. nevermind"). So believe me that it's more than just WWTBAM.
The characters are beautiful and captivating; those evil are unforgivable, those good are right even if they do wrong, and those in between are lost from the start. They don't make it easy on us. Latika (Freida Pinto) is the never-dying love of Jamal (Dev Patel), and her beauty makes it easy for any viewer to fall into Jamal's point of view.
The music is done by A.R. Rahman (Collaborating also with M.I.A.) and it is just one of the many spectacles of Slumdog (and one of the many soundtracks Rahman's composed this year [eight to be exact]). M.I.A.'s notorious "Paper Planes" begins to play in a scene where the poor children are hustling in whatever way they can to make money and you realize the real home of this billboard hit. It's going to feel weird hearing that song now blaring from someone's car downtown when I know what and who M.I.A. is really singing for.
This movie is being lined up with WALL-E by people on a few imdb forums for best romance of the year, for some the best picture of the year. Whether these are overstatements or not is completely up to the academy, the average viewer, and the internet trolls, but the fact that Slumdog is being placed with WALL-E is telling me that I'm going to need to watch a certain robot-romance very soon.
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