Sunday, January 25, 2009

The "Slumdog Millionaire" Scandal

How to turn a cheap sentimental melodrama into an International Blockbuster:

The Recipe:
1. The basic ingredient is a cheap sentimental melodrama.
2. Throw in some dollops of Mumbai-slums and cliched stories of Indian beggars.
3. Everybody now likes the taste of communal violence. So add communal violence.
4. Shoot the film in India but no Hindi please. The taste has to be universal to do good business. So punch in English dialogues as much as possible. Hire a British director. Forgot to tell you that the recipe is from Britain but uses Indian ingredients.
5. For the icing on the cake, add A.R. Rahman to the concoction. Stir well. You will hear a cacaphony at the end. The dish is now complete and will need garnishing now.
6. For garnishing add oil so that it does smooth rounds at the International Film Festivals. There will always be film-critics who will write rave reviews if you gift them a pen worth ten rupees and there will always be critics who have long lost their sanity from an overdose of films.
7. Finally place some morons at vantage points with placards "I luv my india".

The dish is complete and ready to serve. Serve it hot.

Needless to say that this is the most over-hyped and overrated movie coming out of the Bollywood or Britain. It intrigues me why the entire newsprint and electronic media would push this particular film so hard, convincing people that this shit actually smells of roses. Is it just for business or is there a more intricate part in their gameplan which we are unaware of? Whatever it be I have never imagined that critics and the so called intellectuals of the world can so well be bought. From Film Festivals to Oscar Nominations the buzz about the film is everywhere. Finally a realization is dawning - I can smell Ayn Rand's "Fountainhead".