EDITORIAL: Slumdog Millionaire for Oscar!

EDITORIAL

Slumdog Millionaire for Oscar!

David Denby, the New Yorker‘s movie critic, says that not only should the movie Slumdog Millionaire not win this year’s Academy Award for best film, it did not even deserve to be nominated.

Denby is, of course, one of the world’s great pompous irrelevancies, and apparently moron to boot.  After all, not too many people take their movie-going advice from the New Yorker, and for good reason.  This dolt hasn’t got the first clue what he’s talking about.

Denby calls dismisses Slumdog a “fairy tale for adults” and states:  “What I will remember of ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ is a disorderly exploitation of disorder, a kind of visual salad of glowing rotten fruit, constantly tossed. I object to the way that the director, Danny Boyle, orchestrates Jamal’s life.  Boyle has created what looks like a jumpy, hyper-edited commercial for poverty—he uses the squalor and violence touristically, as an aspect of the fabulous.  The envelope, please—I guess.”

He just doesn’t get it.  Boyle has captured the rich tapestry of Indian life, expressed how a country so mired in such extreme poverty can manage to triumph as one of the world’s great democracies nonetheless.  The Bollywood dance number that finishes the picture shows there heroic people thumbing their nose at tragedy and daring to be happy despite their circumstances.  Rather than turning into bleak, morose devils yearning to bring forth a dictator like Stalin, the people of India choose hope and defiance.

Russians could learn an invaluable lesson from this fantastic bit of cinema genius and its brilliant insights into human nature and Indian culture.   It’s Oscar who should be worried that Slumdog won’t accept him.  And it’s clear that Denby — quite possibly a shameless racist — really ought to be flipping hamburgers.

Russians are constantly moaning and wailing about how their harsh circumstances prevent them from acting in a civilized manner, how the struggle for survival prevents them from embracing the luxury of democarcy.

Tell that to the people of India!  Bravo we say to Slumdog Millionaire; its selection for an Oscar would be a minor victory for those who struggle for democracy throughout the world, its nomination alone a reminder that the Russian’s way of viewing things is not the only way.