The underdog

Hurrah, my fave underdog movie slumdog won for best picture at the oscars!

Slumdog was not as gritty as I'd liked it to be, I found the movie to be unrealistically sweet and it tries, it tries to tell a story, not many movies of today try to tell a story anymore, they just rip off the life of someone usually an unspoken politician ie. Milk, Frost/Nixon, put a little twist into it and make it into a movie, whatever happened to movies? What point is there when we already know what happened? Whatever happened to story telling, classics like Casablanca, It Happened One Night, Arabian Nights, Gone with The Wind, whatever happened to the Garbos, the Gables, the Poitiers? Talking about whatever happened, you should catch a movie by Robert DeNiro called "What Just Happened" it was quirky and funny and relatable!

So I was pleasantly surprised when I watched Slumdog about a month back, of course some parts were really very unsettling, but overall it tries to tell a story, a story of a boy, a story about kids living in the slums who doesn't know about what's on the outside of their world, a story of true love that conquers all even in the face constant adversity.

It was refreshing! It got abit of trashing though, even from Big B (Amitabh Bachan) who felt that it took slum life and turned it into a joke, a circus; that it should not be that way, that it was wrong singling India out as a centre of slum life, when they're slums everywhere. Yup no doubt there's slums everywhere, and children are preyed on and mistreated almost anywhere in the world, but I reckon Big B was more worried about how India will look in the face of the world or was trying to "save face" for India, since Bollywood is churning out dream like movies most of the times where everything appears nice, rosy and dandy. We too, have been lulled into a false believe in Bollywood, frankly what goes through your mind when you think about Bollywood movies? To me, it's singing heroes and damsels in distress, nifty choreographed dance and singing sequence interspeed with love triangles, conniving villains and comedians. They have forgotten to portray the real India, about the racial disharmony that exists, the poverty level, the slums, the lives of real Indians who live in reality.

So let's not close our eyes any longer, sometimes our eyes are open, but do they really see? So, let's open our eyes and look around us to finally "see"

And hopefully this will open up a new genre for Hollywood, Bollywood and Kollywood to go against the grain, to be courageous and start telling compelling stories, to go forward and not look for the easy way out!