"Slumdog Millionaire"...... Worth the Academy Award for Best Picture?

Have you ever seen one of those movies that completely inspires you or stays with you for a long time afterward? ... I'll give you an example, Karate Kid. The first time I saw that movie, many years ago, I came out of the dark theater and my life was transformed. I walked straight up to a nearby fire hydrant and gave it the most brutal and deadly crane kick a nine year old could muster. I think the hydrant came out on top in that first encounter, but I have been planning my revenge since.

Any way, Karate Kid, Hoosiers, Fellowship of the Ring, Matrix, etc... all of them movies that changed the Golden Stallion, made the Stallion who he is today in all of his Goldeness. Well Slumdog Millionaire is one of those type of movies.

I had heard a bit about the movie beforehand, even watched as the filmmakers cleaned up on the Oscars, so I went into the film with high expectations, but not completely sure where the movie was going to take me. The movie starts in a detainee cell as the main character Jamal is being tortured so that he will confess. What are the authorities trying to get him to confess? How he is cheating on "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire"... the Indian version. The powers that be can not believe that a "Slumdog" could ever know the answers to the questions he has been asked. You see in India a "Slumdog" is someone who lives in the poverty stricken neighborhoods of India's cities. Now we have all seen slums, but the slums in the United States and Europe are palatial compared to what the slums are like in India.

The filmmakers actually filmed in the slum areas of India and it was unbelievable to actually see how hundreds of thousands of people live there in India. It is unlike anything I had ever seen before. Anyhow, Jamal begins to "talk" and tell his captors exactly how he knows the answers to all of these questions. He takes us, the viewer, back into his early childhood and walks us through each experience that prepared him to know these answers. Truly a masterful way of telling a story by the screenwriter, as it wove in and out of his life and developed the main character Jamal, his morally vacant brother and Jamal's love of his life.

By far the most impacting movie I have seen in a long time and I couldn't give it a higher recommendation. Yes, it did deserve the Academy Award for Best Picture.

Over and out from El Golden Stallion the Pubfilms.com resident beast of burden.