Daily Plastic: Slumdog Millionaire

Movie	Our Take	Other Takes
Slumdog Millionaire Trailer . IMDB	Slumdog feels like a Westerner’s superficial version of India, as the ludicrous script trots out cliche after cliche. The Taj Mahal? Check. Gritty slum teeming with street children on huge trash heaps? Check. J. Robert Parks Daily Plastic	A goofy picaresque to rival Forrest Gump, Slumdog Millionaire has a similar power to please, shell-gaming the audience into emotionally investing in and celebrating its protagonist's dumb romanticism. Eric Hynes Reverse Shot A gaudy, gorgeous rush of color, sound and motion, Slumdog Millionaire, the latest from the British shape-shifter Danny Boyle, doesn’t travel through the lower depths, it giddily bounces from one horror to the next. Manohla Dargis New York Times And you'd think that... By all rights the texture of Jamal’s life should have been brutally coarsened by tragedy and poverty by the time he makes a grab for the television jackpot. But because Slumdog Millionaire is self-consciously (perhaps commercially) framed as a contemporary fairy tale cum love story, or because Mr. Boyle leans toward the sanguine, this proves to be one of the most upbeat stories about living in hell imaginable. Manohla Dargis New York Times What is surprising is the unembarrassed energy that Boyle devotes to his pursuit of the obvious; there’s nothing wrong with the formulaic, it would appear, so long as you bring the formula to the boil.... [T]o make an old-fashioned crowd-pleaser is no mean task, requiring both folly and verve; and right now, I suspect, the crowd is ready to be pleased. Anthony Lane The New Yorker Frankly, I don’t trust Boyle; I feel the need to defend myself against a director for whom brutality and slickness are so inextricable. But he’s brilliant at what he does, at the kind of hyperkinetic, every-shot-a-grabber filmmaking that many attempt and few bring off. David Edelstein The Projectionist ... an almost ridiculously ebullient Bollywood-meets-Hollywood concoction — and one of the rare "feel-good" movies that actually makes you feel good, as opposed to merely jerked around. Scott Foundas Village Voice

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