Slumdog Millionaire.

Ever since I read about its success at the Toronto Film Festival, I've wanted to watch Slumdog Millionaire. So I did. And it has stuck with me the past couple days, and that's a rare, but welcome aspect of good movies.

So Jamal is this dude from the slums of Mumbai, India, who somehow gets pretty far on India's Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. (It's unlikely, despite the protestations of the masses, that I'll regale you with my own failed pursuit of eternal happiness in this blog, but I will say that Jamal's cinematic pursuit is much, much cooler.)

It's a fairytale--something that critics I usually admire--recognize. But then at the same time they recognize the form of the story, they lambaste the same for plasticizing what should shock us (the movie in no way "ennobles poverty," Owen). It seems to me that when a movie takes on a specific form of storytelling, and either successfully reinvents it or just executes it really well, then that's a good thing. Here, Danny Boyle has done the latter. The fairytale before us makes us--forces us--to dive headlong into the poverty of the slums. That we know it turns out okay doesn't gloss over the horror, it provides us with the bannister to hold while we descend into what we otherwise wouldn't want to go: the life of a slumdog.

A couple of side notes that aren't worth mentioning, but I will anyway. First, it struck me that the movie feels dated by anchoring to such a huge phenomenon like WWTBAM. I wonder if that was intentional. And second, I totally guessed a key part of the ending. Something I've done before (see, e.g., Ender's Game and Saw). You'd think that a geek like me would think that's an awesome skill to have. I don't.