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Let’s start the day with some good news, FOR ONCE. From the AP:
MUMBAI, India – “Slumdog Millionaire” child star Rubina Ali played a poverty-stricken child in the Oscar-winning film, but the real-life daughter of India’s shantytowns now has a small fortune in book and movie deals.
The 10-year-old’s publisher and a producer say she is already committed to projects worth more than $145,000, and her family will could soon move out of the slums and into a new apartment paid for by a trust set up by the film’s director, Danny Boyle.
She and her family will could soon move out of the slums! Good! I’m not sure why she and her family will could has not yet move out of the slums, since you would think that it would take far less than $145,000 to get the F out of T, but that is great news! Because it is still sounding pretty grim:
Her family now lives in an illegal shanty pieced together of bubble-gum pink corrugated metal in the Mumbai slum of Garib Nagar, “City of the Poor.” The shack was torn down by civic authorities on December 30 for the second time in eight months — though the family quickly pieced it back together.
Of course, regardless of the fate of Rubina Alli, or the other two Mumbai children plucked from the slums to star in Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire, there are still thousands (millions?) of children living in the same horrifyingly abject poverty that Danny Boyle* aestheticized into a colorful backdrop against which to project his “fantasy.” But they weren’t cute enough to be in the movie, so forget them! Remember how cute those poor kids were? So cute. It’s weird how cute kids can be poor. They are the Susan Boyles of the world, which is a sensitive and respectful comparison to draw. I bet almost all the cute poor kids of the world end up in movies, and then they aren’t poor anymore (but are still very cute), so it all works out. Sorry, ugly kids.
Of course, there are more than a couple instances in the same article in which it is suggested, quite strongly actually, that Rubina Ali may never escape from her life of poverty. And the same goes for her co-stars. But they might! But maybe not! But maybe! Yay?!
It’s just nice to start the day off with such GREAT NEWS.
*Boo!
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Gabe, it’s like you don’t even think the cute kids have earned it, by virtue of being cute. Evolution made them cute in order that our heart strings would be plucked. Stop making us feel bad for hating on the fuglies.
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Downvotegum.
You’ve had a couple foulmouthed melt downs and you tuned out all right
Yeah, I’ve learned to tune you out nicely
huh?
Read your comment, find the spelling error, read my comment, joke success?
um, leave mangum alone. i apologized and… i mean, he/she apologized and backed out gracefully. mistake was made. but there was never a foul mouthed meltdown. be nice.
Slumdog Millionaire 2: City Of The Poor
I believe the working title is Slumdog Billionare
I prefer Boyle’s older works, like Hotdog Millionaire : The Joey Chestnut Story
Danny Boyle is such a jerk for not ending poverty!
I mean… sort of…
but also the backlash is more about what he has done… that is, exploit, sugarcoat and understate a horrible situation in order for privileged folks like us who have things like food and computers and cars and dollars can watch it for two hours on the blueray players in our hovercars and shed a tear and feel good that we shed a tear and that we are so educated about the world’s problems and that we are so sensitive to how hard it is to be from Mumbai where insurance for your hovercar is so expensive that no one has any hovercars at all
I hear the argument, but how many versions of Rachel at the Wedding can they make? Am I not allowed to watch movie about other people? Or poverty? Can I not watch a documentary about Mumbai? It’s not like it was all rainbows and lollipops in the movie. It was a shitty place where bad things happened to a lot of people. And it’s based on a book. It’s not like Danny Boyle was like, ‘let me glam up the shanty towns and then laugh all the way to the bank.’ He found an interesting story and made it into a movie. He shot it in Mumbai because that is where it happened and he hired actors from the area and he paid them. What is the difference between this and District 9? Bad things happen to most of the people in the shanty towns, but good things happen to one of the main characters.
Well put. Also: When was the last time we saw poor people in India get as much attention as they did after the release of Slumdog? Do you think everyone watched this movie and said “Oh thank god poverty is over since that fictional kid won all that money?” It was a good movie, a fun fairy tale, but what really stuck with me after I watched it was the misery and suffering that the film revealed. We can and should complain that the filmmakers failed to help their stars escape that suffering (it’s true?how much money would it take, really?) but I think we can stop blaming them for making a movie about impoverished Moslems that dared to (gasp!) have a Bollywood ending.
Slumgum.
Yes, but also no. I don’t understand the standard to which Videogum is constantly holding Danny Boyle. He is not a volunteer aid. He is an “artist.” Yes, the subject matter of the film is delicate and there is most definitely a responsibility for him, or the rest of the people involved in the film, to make sure the child actors are fairly compensated and/or protected. Whether he succeeded on this point is debatable, and has been discussed to death on this website, but Boyle made his statement and you can either agree or disagree with his reasoning. The issue seems complex enough, and we can only hope that everybody has the best intentions.
These arguments about sugarcoating and glamorizing poverty, however… Give me a break? I mean, duh, but this is a Hollywood movie from a person whose job is to make Hollywood movies. This film has still done more to “raise awareness,” so to speak, than you or I have done to raise awareness. I don’t understand how a mishandled effort makes Danny Boyle a terrible person. I didn’t even make an effort! Believe it or not, I have made zero films about the struggle of children in poverty. (Romanticized or not.)
I understand the argument that most people will cry, feel awesome about being so compassionate because they saw a film, and move on. This cannot be pinned on Danny Boyle, as well. He told a story, as directors are occasionally known to do, and we consumed it. If any extra awareness rises out of this process, that’s fantastic, but this does not mean that Danny Boyle must immediately become a dedicated humanitarian and champion for the cause. So what are we expecting of him?
I put like eight line breaks between these paragraphs, but alas… Sorry.
I wrote approx. the same thing while you were writing this, and it took away all my (double) line breaks too!
You pretty much said a lot of what I wanted to say. Ultimately, I have a real problem with the fact that I’ve been seeing Videogum throwing Danny Boyle into the same pit as Roman Polanski. Both are great directors (in my opinion, anyway) and both have made contributions to the art form. But while Polanski’s crime is very clear cut and horrible, all Danny Boyle is said to have done is not to have done enough to combat a very rigidly defined class structure and socio-economic barrier created in a country halfway across the world. How arrogant are we that we assume that by nature of being a Western upper class white male, he can solve a problem with roots in the caste system of the world’s oldest religion?
Hold on a second, please. I am not going to get into the specifics of how aestheticizing poverty for the colorful backdrop of a “fairy tale” (cool fairy tale!) on your millionaire’s path to an Oscar is not only morally suspect but also quite possibly dangerous in its anesthetizing of viewers to the ACTUALITY of poverty (people who leave the theater thinking that they have been exposed, even in some small part, to the plight of Indian children in the slums of Mumbai have no idea what the FUCK they are talking about). I’ve written about this before.
But at no point has Videogum ever “[thrown] Danny Boyle into the same pit as Roman Polanski.” They are in separate pits! The only pit you could be referring to is the pit of the Worst People of 2009 post, but Bravo’s Andy Cohen was in that pit, and so was Jon Gosselin. I mean, come on. I do think that Danny Boyle made a bullshit movie, but I never claimed that he drugged and sodomized (in that order) a 13-year-old girl and then spent the next 40 years making millions of dollars in exile as he fled international law. Show me where anyone said that.
everytime you have written about it before i have thought, gabe must obvsiously be seeing soemthing im not becasue that movie did not glorify poverty in any way in my mind.
because the colors were pretty? and the music was sometimes fun?
eh, it still pretty much showed life to be pretty shitty there – so….
idk – you know more about movies than me, but it didnt twist living in the slums into some wonderful thing – to me at least.
I really can’t imagine anyone felt good about shedding a tear about a fictional representation of horrible poverty. If they did they are tools.
The movie is a fairytale nothing more nothing less. At least it can lay claim to drawing western attention to the dire situation of the poor in India.
Here is the problem with Slumdog, it reinforces the (in my opinion arrogant) idea that we can just dump ass-loads of cash into these situations and fix them.
The plot of the movie itself kind of reinforced this idea but all the subsequent events as well. Everyone has kind of taken the attitude of “well those kids were given a bunch of money so they’ll be okay” or “once they get their money they’ll be okay.” Boyle isn’t a bad person for any of this, he is just seems to me like a naive person who at the end of the day has benefited with lots of fame and success which, understandably, makes a lot of people angry. Really though , its not like HE created this mess. Its something we all buy into. “If we text $10 to Haiti, they can buy a bulldozer and fix their country” or “If we give kids living in poverty a bunch of money to buy nice (read: actual) houses, India will be a better place.” These are oversimplifications but its essentially what’s at play here.
Ok, everyone brings up very valid points! None of us are right! None of us are Danny Boyle and understand his motivations, and none of us are from Mumbai and know what it’s like to be very very poor and very very uncomfortable and oppressed. But what this reinforces for me is that this situation, the situation of poverty in Mumbai and these child actor’s fragile lives and our view of them and our sympathy and our lack of desire to help and our lack of ability to help, is complex. It is difficult and it is not easily fixed and it is not fixed by our collective reasoning. And Danny Boyle (and maybe the Indian author, I don’t know! I haven’t read the book) simplified this complexity in the interest of telling a good yarn… A good story, which translates more as a weak, empty and untrue parable and an emotional experience designed to numb our consciences somehow. That is my feeling! It is not necessarily true or untrue. I feel that our view into the broken and ridiculous and sad lives of the child actors makes the contrast of the film’s wonderful fairytale and harsh reality very apparent. Thank you! God bless American and Mumbai!
My problem with Danny Boyle isn’t that he hasn’t ended poverty, it’s that he hasn’t ended poverty for the child stars that helped him make millions and millions of dollars/pounds. Seriously, why the fuck are these kids still living in the slums?
Look, don’t feel to bad for her… Danny Boyle made sure she got a copy of Slumdog Millionaire on Blu-Ray, and assuming she didn’t have anything to play it in, he got her a Blu-Ray player… It streams Netflix.
When you look at it in terms of how many Blu-ray players she has, she’s wealthier than most of the people in the USA.
“The shack was torn down by civic authorities on December 30 for the second time in eight months — though the family quickly pieced it back together.”
You’d think they would get the hint…
I like that the slum’s name translates to “City of the Poor.” I wonder if Detroit means “Shithole” in a Native American language.
Things could be worse, right?
I mean, shit has a knack for getting mo’ real.
And less we forget the words of the great rap mogul:
“Mo money, mo problems.” Diddy, every time he see a one dollar bill in his wad of 100s.
ENHANCE
As far as it being Danny Boye’s “fantasy,” wasn’t he just adapting a novel? By an Indian guy? Named Vikus Swarup?
But yes, it is pretty awful that Rubina Alli wasn’t just left in the slum in the first place and never given the chance or hope of having a career in India’s huge film industry and making a little money later in life. He should have used professional child actors! Because they already have all the advantages!
(But that said, I don’t get why this “trust” is taking so long to kick in.)
I don’t get the these Slumdog Posts…
You can take a child-star out of the slums but you can’t take the slums away… unless you’re the local municpality of Mumbai and then you repeatedly take the slums away.
Everytime I see these anti-Slumdog posts (or more like, “Boo!, Danny” posts) I get pretty miffed. I mean, I understand your point Gabe, when compared to the reality of the situation in Mumbai, Danny Boyle’s version makes it seem like a harrowing but ultimately exciting and character building place to grow up (also a ‘cool’ place to grow up, which seems sad but in the movies case I think true).
But ultimately what do you expect? It takes time for the moviegoing public, which is essentially a ‘Hollywood’ movie driven place, to warm up to stories about real life, actual devastation that don’t end with winning a million dollars and the girl of your dreams. Slumdog Millionaire might be a heart-warnming fantasy about abject poverty, but it is literally the only type of story about abject poverty the general public will be interested in hearing at first. Now, while its unlikely still, the stage has at least been set for someone else to make a more realistic movie about a place that people at least have some prior familiarity with. So while its easy to hate Danny for profiting off these kids, if the movie had been made closer to the real life thing, the movie wouldn’t have been successful and even these small press pieces about the movie’s stars continued poverty wouldn’t be reported. A little bit of a weak argument on the last one, sure, but ultimately it isn’t Danny’s fault people wanted to see a fantasy and can only be blamed (possibly at best) for the long way it seems its taking for the poor kids to get their cash.
Look: we all know that there isn’t anything that Boyle can do to help India’s poor because of the pact they made with the devil in 1964. Pretty much all historians and math professors agree on this–duh. So there is no need to sweat it–cursed is cursed, yo.
Great, now I feel bad for being poor.
NOT POOR. I FEEL BAD FOR BEING NOT POOR.
the real-life daughter of India’s shantytowns
rather than giving her book deals and whatnot shouldn’t science be sticking needles in her and peeping her DNA to figure out how, exactly, shantytowns made sweet love and created such an adorable human baby?
you guys, I dont get it. Why is everyone talking about Rubina Ali’s chance at getting out of poverty and not Wes anderson’s?