Spring Holiday Abort & The Real Reason Slumdog Millionaire is a Great Movie

The original intent of this post was to give a probably overdue update of my activities in China, specifically what went down on my Spring Festival/Chinese New Year vacay; however, that idea immediately exploded when everyone in my Spring Festival group got sick within the first day of the trip and we cut our holiday short by a couple days. Unless you find cases of food poisoning funny or amusing (and they can be), please believe when I say that I went out west in China, the city was big and dirty and I had KFC for breakfast once.

Before I went on vacation, I watched Slumdog Millionaire and in typical me fashion came away from the movie with a general opinion that differed from everyone else who I saw the movie with. First let me say right off the bat, I liked Slumdog Millionaire, I found it to be an earnest resourceful film that was entertaining even when it was predictable (you knew the musketeer question was going to rear its head at the end). If I was an asshole teacher I'd give it my least favorite grade of all time, an A-/A; i.e. bordering on great, but with a few hiccups. I'm confident that my personal opinion of the film can be accurately summarized by detailing both my favorite and least favorite scenes from the film, because both of them happen at the end anyway.

First, my least favorite scene: the ending (where Jamal and Freida Pinto, a.k.a. Hotty McHotthott, meet in the train station). It was sappy, predictable and something I might've been able to make in a movie (ergo, not very good). For a film that was driven by the "realness" of Jamal's life circumstances, seeing him alone in a train station with a hot chick that he stalker-ishly pursued for his entire life was a little much for my tastes, but I'm sure it made girls cry, so there's that. In much the same way as the death scene with Jamal's brother made me think "what compelled them to put this in the movie?" I came away from Slumdog with the sense that they probably had such little time/money to work with that scenes that should've ended up on the cutting room floor didn't.

This in no way means that I didn't appreciate the periodic breaks from reality that the film made (see: Jamal pushing his brother out a window), in fact, my favorite scene is the strangest one by far: the bhangra dance number at the end. Before anyone scoffs at this notion, first of all, get f-ed for scoffing because I am deadly serious about this being the best part for me. I for one, am a huge fan of irreverant breaks from character in movies and the dance number with every main character and extra in it made me lose my shit. The music was awesome, the dancing was Indian and Freida Pinto was in it, need I say more? My American and British friends poo-pooed the scene; some said it almost ruined the movie for them. To those people, I say you are uncultured phillistines who should be beaten mercilessly until you have flashbacks of life lessons from your parents. As someone who looks at things objectively for their entertainment value, that was easily the best part of the movie, and from what I'm told is something of a tradition in Bollywood, so if you want to be ignorant your whole lives keep telling yourself it wasn't a good scene, you're probably the type of person that doesn't wait around for the outtakes of movies at the ending credits and therefore useless.