Slumdog Millionaire
April 2009 Reviewed by: Charlotte Meyer Format: DVD	(all ratings out of 5): Overall Enjoyment Picture Quality Packaged Extras Sound Quality

Slumdog Millionaire was the right movie at the right time. Just when Americans were watching their own fortunes sink, along comes this melodrama about an orphan boy who rises from the slums against brutal odds to win both love and money. We were ready for this film. We needed some cheering up. Add in that the boy’s situation was far more desperate than ours. It’s always comforting to see that things could be worse. Then there are the chase scenes, the bouncy upbeat music, the hijinks of slum children, a couple of really evil villains, a beautiful maid in distress, and finally love victorious -- all the ingredients of Bollywood. In India this film would be called masala, a spicy mixture. We ate it up. Or a paisa vasool film, your "money’s worth." We paid it back with four Golden Globes and eight Oscars.

Funny that we should even have considered it a candidate for an Oscar among such quintessentially American films as Milk or Frost/Nixon or The Wrestler. Two of its eight Oscars, for Best Song and Best Score, went to India’s premier film composer, A.H. Rahman. The director Danny Boyle is British, the cast is entirely Indian, and the setting is Mumbai. It might have competed as Best Foreign Film. But we are deep in a bona-fide recession. Even though there’s not much American about it but the funding, we wanted -- needed -- to claim this film.

Others took a different view. One Indian blogger who calls himself "lekhni" wrote this: "Many of us believe there are many Bollywood movies that are far better than Slumdog Millionaire, yet none of these received any Oscars. Obviously, this was because all these movies competed in the ‘Best Foreign Film’ category, and not in the mainstream category, where you can compete for many more Oscars. The lesson for Indian filmmakers should be -- sell the North American distribution rights to a US studio that will make a push for the movie at the Oscars."

If it is true that Bollywood=Bombay+Hollywood, it is the Hollywood of the past -- the big productions of the ‘40s and ‘50s with song and dance and sweet romance. Maybe that’s another appeal of Slumdog Millionaire, its return to a time when American films also were hopeful, uplifting and innocently entertaining.

In one of the interviews on this DVD, director Danny Boyle is full of enthusiasm for the cameras he used, a portable German-made digital system called Silicon Imaging 2K. It requires a gyro to keep it from trembling and a backpack for power, but it allowed the crew to follow on foot after the boys running through the cramped, crowded alleyways of the Mumbai slum. It won Slumdog an Oscar for cinematography. Boyle concedes that the resulting image is "not as beautiful as film" nor as "liquid." It tends to "snatch" at the image and is "unreliable," but it’s a quality he preferred. For me, the camera work didn’t transfer so well onto the DVD. The focus often seemed soft, and often I couldn’t see into the blacks. I didn’t see, or perhaps didn’t appreciate, the rich colors he praised the digital system for capturing. The music on the soundtrack seemed too dominant, at times overpowering the dialogue.

There are five special features: the interview, two commentaries over the film by director and producer, an extended deleted-scene section, and a "countdown," which runs quickly through the film’s key sequences. There are subtitles available in Spanish, French, and English.

No doubt this DVD will sell well, even during -- especially during -- a recession.

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