Slumdog Millionaire

Finally, I have got round to watching Slumdog Millionaire thanks to Channel 4 broadcasting it this evening. I have been meaning to watch it for about six months now but just never got round to it. It's one of those films that doesn't really work on paper if you know what I mean? Reading the blurb doesn't excite you or make you think that the film is anything special and I think the only reason why it attracted such a huge audience was because of the publicity it received from the critics. If I had seen a list of the films on at the cinema without having heard the hype surrounding it, I would never in a million years have considered going to see it and probably wouldn't even have bothered watching it on the TV when it finally came round.

Now that I've watched it however, I can kinda see the attraction. Its one of those feel good rags to riches, fall in love movies and I'm not sure what genre that's actually classified as, drama or romance maybe? Either way, I don;t quite understand what all of the fuss was about and to me at least it was just another movie. I guess that's why I can never be a film critic because otherwise I would be seeing the merit in the fantastic new production methods used or captivating storylines drawing influence from some famous person or some really old film or book. I don't have the cultural references to draw on for comparisons, I just go and see it for what it is now. It's something that always annoyed me when studying books for English because you couldn't just read them without delving into the depths of why the author chose certain names or included certain events. Has it never occurred to them that perhaps they just wanted to call the character Annie for example? Especially with the old books where there are no interviews with the authors to confirm or deny the reasoning behind their choices, all of these things that we are supposedly 'learning' are basically made up - albeit with some educational merit to their assumptions.

So yes, it was a reasonably good film but not really worth the hype in my opinion and I'd probably give it 6.5/10.