I stumbled on an absolute brilliant piece of homespun animation a couple days ago, ‘Sita Sings the Blues’. Inspiring animation, funny dialogue, interesting bits of culture, and brilliant storytelling.
And, it’s free and legal.
And, I heard it was made on a Mac with Final Cut Pro.
After watching ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ last night, I wanted to see if I could formulate a set of coherent thoughts about the movie. I knew I had some opinions about the movie, but when it came time to express them, I didn’t quite know what they were.
The first question that popped in my head was, should ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ have won Best Picture? Was it really better than ‘Benjamin Button’, ‘Frost/Nixon’, ‘Milk’, and ‘The Reader’? That was a difficult question because I had seen none of the other movies.
The most striking thing about the movie was the conceit, the whole movie was structured around an episode of ‘Who wants to be a millionaire?’ ‘Who wants to be a millionaire?’ is a mediocre T.V. show. Why should it be made into a movie?
The second most striking thing about the movie was the poop dive and the acid blinding. I was unenthused to see a small child cannonball into feces.
The criticism that I was most familiar with was that it portrayed India in too negative a light. ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ was not the movie some Indians wanted to inform westerners about their country. I wasn’t persuaded. If you think India is nothing more than a jumble of Ambassadors and rickshaws, you probably went into this movie uninformed anyway.
But, did it deserve Best Picture? It wasn’t engaging like I think a Best Picture movie should be. The plot was too structured and not terribly organic. The production values weren’t extraordinary. It was a movie worth watching, but it’s impossible to argue that this movie was demonstrably better than ‘Frost/Nixon’.
And that was the answer I came up with. What a stupid question to begin with: ‘Did it deserve Best Picture?’ There’s no such thing. There’s movies you should see, and there’s movies you should skip. End of story.
Finally, something good on T.V. Something worth putting the laptop away and devoting your full attention to. “The Story of India” doesn’t argue that India is important; it assumes it is. It follows the path of language, religion, culture, and people across time to try to get a fix on how India became India, and how that made the rest of the world what the rest of the world is.
The pictures are amazing. The presentation is first class. But the information is so dense, it’s impossible to catch everything.
