Being a Quarter

What my quarter-of-century nearsighted eyes waking up to first thing  in the morning of 25th

As reality mirrors its own reflection

Accomplished Underdog

Following the high-voltage success of Slumdog Millionaire’s Bolly-goes-Holly-here goes-8 Oscars this year, a newscaster was excitingly reporting its two child stars from the poorest part of Mumbai would be receiving from the Indian Government a couple of hundred millions rupiahs houses with solid bricks and roofs, a stratospheric improvement from one of their current residences of tarpaulin roof set above endless heap of trash. The myriad of their slum neighbours welcomed their return home from the red carpet at the Kodak Theater in Los Angeles, with beatific looks and manic cheers bloomed with proud and dreams they once never dare to imagine. Who says real life cannot be more miraculously Cinderella-like than all the bittersweet things they offer on screen, you can even dance along with the high-spirited soundtrack "Jai Ho" — "Be Victorious.” over the parade. Yet future life is unpredictable and the credit has not yet rolled, the sudden immense financial success can be troublesome and stir deeper cultural shock and its ugly sides as many already happened in the industry to its meteoric stardom. A wiser action from the director, Danny Boyle prefers to enrol the kids to school and set up trust fund that can be drawn once they finish their educations instead of giving a Rags-to-Rajs treatment as the government did.

It was endearing and engorging with pathos and deep respect from the first time you set eyes to these “Slumdog Kids” performing what should be acting as street urchins seemed to share a very thin line with what they are experiencing everyday in the streets. The three musketeers, Jamal, Salim, and Jamal’s love interest, Latika, striving with honest smile and subdued tears against the harshest odds and injustice street life can offer them in order to survive and pursuing true love. In this modern Dickensian world mutates with Bollywood storyline, it involves meeting Amitabh Bachchan, the very God of Bollywood, covered in your own feces; losing your parent amidst racial riots; lured by a bottle of coke into one of the most horrifying child exploiting powerhouse producing organized child beggars with exceptional voices for poetry; to selling your poverty to sympathetic First Worlds against the backdrop of touristic Taj Mahal. And of course, the plot should thicken with missing your genuine love to your treacherous brother, human trafficking attempt and gang arrest and only to win her back by joining Hindi Who Wants to be a Millionaire hosted by Anil Kapoor. All the basic formulas covered yet with visual sincerity not many films conjure these days, that is laughing with all the marginals against social injustice instead of advocating sanctimoniously.

Even in this flatter world with everything is being outsourced to India, it is thought as irksome to some xenophobic groups in India who protested the film as disparagingly commercializing Indian slums despite its economic surge for the past decade is quite a paradox against the whole country mood in glorifying the pipedream of glamorous Bollywood industry which upholding its buffed- apotheosis actors’ next to the holy deities. Both climates that inclined toward brandishing this film as a westernized flick are what Danny Boyle and the film’s screenwriter Simon Beaufoy tried to avoid in the first place (such actions is notably exemplified as not putting any cow wandering around in the picture as Mr. Boyle felt it was so stereotypically what westerner filmmakers would do). Derived from Vikas Swarup's brilliant yet under appreciated debut novel (felt through a professional experience in a bookstore of having it reviewed on prominent display, re-promoted, dusted off from the bin sale to be tagged re-sale only to find the last copy disappeared into obscurity), the tale is revamped with Boylean rushing saturated urban pace that propels a typical love story or even the quotidian aspects of the genre a fresh air and hard knocks on the walls just like when he deconstruct zombie flick on 28 Days Later into primal psychological ride on humanity and survival without losing the sheer  entertaining terror. Mr. Boyle juxtaposed satirically in the course of his interesting filmography from the early days of the raunchy Edinburgh slumdog in Trainspotting with unworldly kid in a very worldly situation in Millions against the backdrop of the successful outsourcing scheme in movie business to India. Yet to believe, he directs the best as underdog telling stories about underdogs who believes on miracles and that makes his films on odd tales of a very even world so miraculously small, warmly amusing yet omnipotent in giving you qualms, that in the end you just want to hug him for making your day and feeling cool on being an underdog.