Reactions from the Western world Slumdog Millionaire has been critically acclaimed in the Western world. As of 21 February 2009, Rotten Tomatoes has given the film a 94% rating with a 186 fresh and twelve rotten reviews. The average score is 8.2/10.[50] At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the film has received an average score of 86, based on 36 reviews.[51] Movie City News shows that the film appeared in 123 different top ten lists, out of 286 different critics lists surveyed, the 3rd most mentions on a top ten list of any film released in 2008.[52]
Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun Times gave the film four out of four stars, stating that it is, "a breathless, exciting story, heartbreaking and exhilarating."[53] Wall Street Journal critic Joe Morgenstern refers to Slumdog Millionaire as, "the film world's first globalized masterpiece."[54] Ty Burr of the Boston Globe describes the film as a "sprawling, madly romantic fairy-tale epic is the kind of deep-dish audience-rouser we've long given up hoping for from Hollywood."[55] Ann Hornaday of The Washington Post argues that, "this modern-day "rags-to-rajah" fable won the audience award at the Toronto International Film Festival earlier this year, and it's easy to see why. With its timely setting of a swiftly globalizing India and, more specifically, the country's own version of the "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" TV show, combined with timeless melodrama and a hardworking orphan who withstands all manner of setbacks, "Slumdog Millionaire" plays like Charles Dickens for the 21st century."[56] Todd McCarthy of Variety, praises the script as "intricate and cleverly structured", the cinematography by Anthony Dod Mantle's, and Chris Dickens' editing as "breathless" He concludes that, "as drama and as a look at a country increasingly entering the world spotlight, Slumdog Millionaire is a vital piece of work by an outsider who's clearly connected with the place."[57] Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times describes the film as "a Hollywood-style romantic melodrama that delivers major studio satisfactions in an ultra-modern way", and the "hard-to-resist 'Slumdog Millionaire,' with director Danny Boyle adding independent film touches to a story of star-crossed romance that the original Warner brothers would have embraced, shamelessly pulling out stops that you wouldn't think anyone would have the nerve to attempt anymore."[58] Manohla Dargis of The New York Times, calls the film "a modern fairy tale," a "sensory blowout," and "one of the most upbeat stories about living in hell imaginable." She concludes that "In the end, what gives me reluctant pause about this bright, cheery, hard-to-resist movie is that its joyfulness feels more like a filmmaker's calculation than an honest cry from the heart about the human spirit."[59] Peter Brunette of the Hollywood Reporter, while giving it a positive review, states the film is "a high-octane hybrid of Danny Boyle's patented cinematic overkill and Bollywood's ultra-energetic genre conventions that is a little less good than the hype would have it."[60] Several other reviewers have described Slumdog Millionaire as a Bollywood-style "Masala" movie,[61] due to the way the film combines "familiar raw ingredients into a feverish masala"[62] and culminates in "the romantic leads finding each other."[63] Other critics offered mixed reviews. Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian gave the film three out of five stars, stating that "despite the extravagant drama and some demonstrations of the savagery meted out to India's street children, this is a cheerfully undemanding and unreflective film with a vision of India that, if not touristy exactly, is certainly an outsider's view; it depends for its full enjoyment on not being taken too seriously."[64] Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle states that, "Slumdog Millionaire has a problem in its storytelling. The movie unfolds in a start-and-stop way that kills suspense, leans heavily on flashbacks and robs the movie of most of its velocity. The filmmakers' motives are sincere. The story is interesting enough. Yet the whole construction is tied to a gimmicky narrative strategy that keeps Slumdog Millionaire from really hitting its stride until the last 30 minutes. By then, it's just a little too late."[65] Eric Hynes of IndieWIRE panned the film and wrote it is "bombastic" and "a noisy, sub-Dickens update on the romantic tramp's tale" and faulted the film's glossy and sentimental portrayal of societal poverty, and described it as "a goofy picaresque to rival Forrest Gump" in its morality and romanticism.[66] Armond White of the New York Press called the film "decadently over-hyped" and "Gitmo for guilty liberals", also stating that "over-stimulation crushes feeling [and] only evokes sentimentality" and that "Boyle trades exploitation for schmaltz".[67] Matthew Schneeberger speculates as to why the film has angered some Indians stating: "Say an Indian director travelled to New Orleans for a few months to film a movie about Jamal Martin, an impoverished African American who lost his home in Hurricane Katrina, who once had a promising basketball career, but who -- following a drive-by shooting -- now walks with a permanent limp, whose father is in jail for selling drugs, whose mother is addicted to crack cocaine, whose younger sister was killed by gang-violence, whose brother was arrested by corrupt cops, whose first born child has sickle cell anaemia, and so on. The movie would be widely panned and laughed out of theatres."[68] Reactions from India and Indian diaspora The film has been a subject of discussion among a variety of people in India and the Indian diaspora. Indian film critics have "largely embraced the movie."[46] Nikhat Kazmi of the Times of India calls it "a piece of riveting cinema, meant to be savoured as a Cinderella-like fairy tale, with the edge of a thriller and the vision of an artist." He also argues against criticism of the film stating that, "it was never meant to be a documentary on the down and out in Dharavi. And it isn't."[69] Renuka Vyavahare of Indiatimes suggests that, "the film is indeed very Indian" and that it is "one of the best English films set in India and revolving around the country's most popular metropolis Mumbai."[70] Kaveree Bamzai of India Today calls the film "feisty" and argues that it is "Indian at its core and Western in its technical flourish."[71] Anand Giridharadas argues in The New York Times that the film has a "freshness" which "portrays a changing India, with great realism, as something India long resisted being: a land of self-makers, where a scruffy son of the slums can, solely of his own effort, hoist himself up, flout his origins, break with fate." Giridharadas also calls the film "a tribute to the irrepressible self."[72] Poorna Shetty states in the The Guardian that "Boyle's depiction of Mumbai is spot on." She further states that the film displays the "human aspect of the slums and the irrepressible energy and life force of the place" and "a breathing snapshot of the city that is always stripped of its warmth when depicted in the news."[73] On the other hand, Mukul Kesavan of The Telegraph (Kolkata) states that the film is "a hybrid so odd" (due to the decision to have the first third in Hindi and the remainder in English) "that it becomes hard for the Indian viewer to do the thing that he so effortlessly does with Ghajini or Om Shanti Om — namely, suspend disbelief." Kesavan further states that, "the transition from child actors who in real life are slum children to young actors who are, just as clearly, middle-class anglophones is so abrupt and inexplicable that it subverts the 'realism' of the brilliantly shot squalor in which their lives play out."[74] Film critic Gautaman Bhaskaran questioned the "euphoria in India" in a review for The Seoul Times after the film's release there, arguing that with a few exceptions, "there is nothing Indian about this film." Bhaskaran questions inconsistencies in the plot and concludes that it is a film of "very little substance" as well as "superficial and insensitive."[75] Another film critic (author of The Essential Guide to Bollywood), Subhash K. Jha, also states in Bollywood Hungama that he found the film "over-hyped and disappointing" and also suggests that the territory has already been covered by Indian filmmakers (Mira Nair in Salaam Bombay and Satyajit Ray in the Apu Trilogy).[76] Soutik Biswas of the BBC further argues that Slumdog Millionaire is an imitation of Indian films that have been "routinely ignored" and suggests that, "if you are looking for gritty realism set in the badlands of Mumbai, order a DVD of a film called Satya by Ramgopal Verma. The 1998 feature on an immigrant who is sucked into Mumbai's colourful underworld makes Slumdog look like a slick, uplifting MTV docu-drama."[77] In addition, filmmakers have commented on the film. Bollywood director and superstar Aamir Khan (whose film Taare Zameen Par was India's submission to the Academy Awards but was not chosen as a finalist for Best Foreign Film) [78][79] stated in an interview with NDTV that he doesn't "see 'Slumdog...' as an Indian film. I think it is a film about India like Gandhi (that) was made by Sir Richard Attenborough. Similarly, 'Slumdog...' is about India but it is not an Indian film. I hope it does well in (the) Academy (awards). I don't think it's got to do anything with India or abroad. Filmmakers are creative people and they are storytellers. They are telling us a story. I don't think 'Slumdog...' is making an attempt to show the underbelly of India or that may be its selling point."[78][79] Director and filmmaker Priyadarshan criticized Slumdog Millionaire as a film which is a "mediocre version of those commercial films about estranged brothers and childhood sweethearts that Salim-Javed used to write so brilliantly in the 1970s." He also stated that he viewed the film at the Toronto Film Festival and that, "The Westerners loved it. All the Indian[s] hated it. The West loves to see us as a wasteland, filled with horror stories of exploitation and degradation. But is that all there's to our beautiful city of Mumbai?"[80]Similarly, filmmaker Aadesh Shrivastava expressed outrage the stereotyping portrayals of Indians in the film. He has observed ethnic slurs being hurled at Indians in the United States following the distribution of the film in the country, and criticized the positive reaction by some Indians towards to what he sees as a film that directly attacks and insults India[81] Authors and scholars have responded more critically to the film. Salman Rushdie stated in an interview with the New York Times that he is "not a very big fan" of Slumdog Millionaire. He further commented: "I think it's visually brilliant. But I have problems with the story line. I find the storyline unconvincing. It just couldn't happen. I'm not adverse to magic realism but there has to be a level of plausibility, and I felt there were three or four moments in the film where the storyline breached that rule."[82]Radha Chadha, co-author of The Cult of the Luxury Brand: Inside Asia's Love Affair with Luxury (with Paul Husband), offers an analysis of the film in Livemint. She argues that while Slumdog Millionaire is entertaining, it is still a "masala film," the kind of Bollywood product which Indians grow up watching. As to its popularity in the West, she further suggests that what is "ordinary" (in terms of film genre) for an Indian audience, "is extraordinary for the world" and that "the mesmerizing soft power of Bollywood which has kept a billion Indians enthralled for decades is touching the rest of the world."[83] Priya Joshi, Associate Professor of English at Temple University, argues that the film's indebtedness to Bollywood film runs much deeper than the happy ending, "In the same way that Cinema Paradiso paid homage to the transformative power of Hollywood movies of the 1940s, Slumdog testifies to the power of Bollywood's blockbusters from the 1970s, and it's no accident that the first question on the quiz show is about the 1973 hit Zanzeer."[84] Asst. Professor of sociology (Wellesley College), Smitha Radhakrishnan, states in UCLA's Asia Pacific Arts journal that the film offers "an action-packed, devastating, intriguing, and oddly beautiful world." Radhakrishnan also argues that while its "outsider's" view offers an "unexpected advantage," there were notable "slip-ups" of which the "most glaring was the language. Despite the plausible explanation that Jamal and Salim picked up English, posing as tour guides at the Taj Mahal, it is highly implausible that they would come out of that experience speaking perfect British English, as Dev Patel does in portraying the grown-up Jamal. It's highly implausible that he would speak to Latika and Salim in English as an adult too."[85] Professor Vrinda Nabar, the former Chair of English at the University of Mumbai, argues that the film ignores the "complexity" of Mumbai as "a city in which sensitivity coexists with despair, commitment with indifference, activism with inaction, and humanism with the inhumane."[86] Shyamal Sengupta, a professor of film studies at the Whistling Woods International Institute for Films, Media, Animationa and Media Arts in Mumbai, criticized the film for its stereotypical portrayals of Indians by calling it a "white man's imagined India. It's not quite snake charmers, but it's close. It's a poverty tour."[87][88] .... CONTROVERSIES.... Longinus Fernandes Bollywood dance choreographer Longinus Fernandes (aka Longi), who choreographed the closing dance scene in Slumdog Millionaire[114], was not duly mentioned in the ending movie credits. In his accepance speech at the 81st Academy Awards, the film's director Danny Boyle admitted he discovered the mistake only two weeks earlier and said: "There's one guy I should mention, we've mentioned a lot of people, I forgot the guy who choreographed the dance at the end of the film, he's called Longinus [Fernandes] and I forgot him off the credits, and I only found out about it two weeks ago. I'm an idiot... and I apologize from the bottom of my heart Longinus"[115] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slumdog_Millionaire
