In the 10 months I had off from blogging I finally got around to joining the rest of the world and watching Slumdog Millionaire. I didn't like it. All fiction happens in a universe that the story teller creates and it's the job of the story teller to draw us in to the world of the story so everything that happens becomes believable. Dan Brown's the Davinci code does a great job of this, so much so that I was disappointed when I came across the gaps in the story’s theological and historical explanation. Slumdog is built on these premises: If someone just gets lucky enough then they too can get out of their situation. The implication is we're all in control of how are life turns out regardless of the where we are born.
It's classic American dream mythology. The evils that the characters face were not inequality, poverty and disease resulting from the systemic injustice that created the slum (which is really the great evil that slum dwellers face). Instead, the evil was a handful of gangsters. To me it felt like the slum setting was not necessary almost like an elephant in the room. Maybe for me feel good movies are a time to forget about systemic injustice for a while and I just couldn't do it in this one. Not when that injustice isn't being confronted in some way. I can hear my mum saying "for goodness sake, It's just a story!".
In my opinion Kevin Mcloud's documentary Slumming It did a much better job of capturing the beauty and horror of the slum. He walked away wanting to make the slum more sanitary and the work practices safer, but there was a joy and community amongst the people that the first could learn a lot from.
It's classic American dream mythology. The evils that the characters face were not inequality, poverty and disease resulting from the systemic injustice that created the slum (which is really the great evil that slum dwellers face). Instead, the evil was a handful of gangsters. To me it felt like the slum setting was not necessary almost like an elephant in the room. Maybe for me feel good movies are a time to forget about systemic injustice for a while and I just couldn't do it in this one. Not when that injustice isn't being confronted in some way. I can hear my mum saying "for goodness sake, It's just a story!".
In my opinion Kevin Mcloud's documentary Slumming It did a much better job of capturing the beauty and horror of the slum. He walked away wanting to make the slum more sanitary and the work practices safer, but there was a joy and community amongst the people that the first could learn a lot from.
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