Christmas is about love, family, warmth and the birth of James Caviezel. Christmas is also about coffeemakers, booze and movie theater gift cards. I've already mentioned my previous two gifts before, but I just got around to using the gift card the other night. I went to go see Slumdog Millionaire. What's awesome about the movie theater I went to is that they allow you to use the gift card to buy your ticket at the automated kiosks in front of the place. Automated kiosks don't care if you're really 60+ years old or not, you dig? Hey, times are tough, baby and I gots to get my Slumdog on.
It must be a slow night at the theater because there's only one staff member tearing tickets and when I get to him, his head is down and his eyes are closed. He's also got his finger stuck inside his ear. I say "Hello" and he doesn't respond. I say "Excuse me, sir?" and he's still out of it, like a heroin addict taking a nod. Now I fear that something is really wrong with him, like maybe he had some kind of stroke or something, and I don't want to touch him, so I start freaking out a little. Or maybe he was having such a good time with his finger in his ear that he managed to find the ear equivalent of the G-spot and was in ear-picking ecstasy. I've had some pretty intense ear-picking sessions myself, where I'm sure I'm doing some damage in there but it feels so good, I can't stop. I have a similar problem rubbing my eyes.
Anyway, I look around for someone else to help and I see a female staff member approaching us. I give her the hands-up-and-shrug look of distress and then I motion towards possibly-post-seizure-ticket-taker to my right, so she calls out his name. His head bolts up, eyes wide open, and he pulls his finger out of his ear and notices me standing right next to him. He goes "Awwww maaan, I'm sorry dude" then he takes my ticket and points me in the right direction. I'm just glad he was okay.
Slumdog Millionaire starts with this dude named Jamal getting smacked around by the fucking pigs. Turns out that earlier that night, Jamal won ten million rupees on the Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire and since he's just a poor low-class "slumdog", there's no way he could've known all the answers unless he was cheating, right? That's fucked up. But that's how shit is over there, apparently. So this asshole cop and his fat fuck deputy give our boy Jamal some good old fashioned interrogation techniques to find out how he was able to get all the questions right. The rest of the movie cuts back and forth between Jamal's current situation and flashbacks to Jamal's childhood. It's kinda like The Usual Suspects, where we begin with an important event, and then we're told by one guy about everything that led up to that shit -- except instead of Kevin Spacey and Chazz Palmenteri, we have young Indian dude and asshole Indian cop.
We flashback to Jamal as a little Slumdog, playing cricket with his homies in the FUCKED UP slums of India. I'm telling you man, the hoods here in the good ol' USA are nothing compared to the places these dudes live in. I bet no one there suffers from claustrophobia, because if they did, then they would've died two minutes after they were born from shock. Goddamn, no fuckin' privacy and everyone lined up like sardines it seems. My studio apartment is a fuckin' university compared to the classroom these kids have to learn in. It seems like the only place you can have some alone time is in the shitter, which is basically a wooden shack on stilts with an opening in the center where you squat over and shit into the riverside. And even then, there's some fat guy farting and banging on the door demanding you hurry up. Damn, I don't know how some of you who grew up in large families were able to get through life.
Jamal has this older brother, Salim, and he's kind of a dick, like most older brothers. As a kid, Salim's already got his eyes on the prize. Get rich or die tryin'. This little dude is all about the Ghandis, looking to make a rupee wherever and whenever. Depending on their background and upbringing, people with Salim's kind of mentality usually wind up as either Richard Branson or Tony Montana. Now there's nothing wrong with that, but the problem with Salim is that he can be kind of a hater too. Like there's this chick that Jamal has a thing for named Latika, and fuckin' Salim always has to pull some shit to get in the middle of it. It's like Salim supposedly loves his bro so much, but yet he can't stand the idea of this chick who's a genuinely good person and would bring a lot of happiness to Jamal. He'd rather break that shit up. Salim takes "Bros Before Hoes" way too fucking far and that ain't cool.
So as older Jamal tries to explain how he was able to know all the answers to the questions, we also follow along as young Jamal and Salim get into various misadventures and shit. Except "misadventures" sounds way too light and fun. I guess a more appropriate term would be "horrible fucked-up shit". Yeah, that sounds more like it. You know, a lot of people keep going on about what a happy fun movie this is, and I just want to warn you that while that's most likely the feeling you'll walk out with, it's sure as fuck not the feeling you'll have during the flick.
If Slumdog didn't have such an energetic style and if it wasn't so fast-paced, and had instead lingered on some of the shit that happens to the people in this flick, you'd be depressed like a muthafucka. Hell, I'm thinking of some moments right now and Jesus Christ...GodDAMN...holy shit...ay dios mio. It's kinda like watching City of God on fast forward, and suddenly near the end, the DVD shuts off and now you're watching the ending of It's a Wonderful Life on NBC. Kinda like that.
Also, in addition to Jamal at the police station and the flashbacks to his youth, the movie also cuts to moments of him at the game show. You have Jamal sitting there in the hotseat, across from the host of the show. I don't remember the name of the host, so I'm just going to call him Smug Dick, because that's what he fuckin' is -- a Smug Dick. This asshole keeps mocking our boy Jamal, like when he finds out that Jamal is currently working as an assistant for a cell phone company (mostly getting tea for everyone), Smug Dick keeps making stupid-ass snide remarks about it. Must feel great to be rich and make fucking jokes about people who are working their ass off in this ugly fucking world just trying to get by. Wow, like being a game show host is such a fuckin' honorable position to hold in the first place.
At least that fuckin' asshole's a fictional character. Real life assholes like Jerry Seinfeld or that douche Carlos Mencia have no excuse. They have bits in their stand-up that remind me of this cocksucker, like making fun of McDonald's workers and movie theater ushers. I wanna grab these cunts by the collar and scream "Dude do you know how much of an asshole you look like being a multi-millionaire making fun of minimum wage earners?! Wow, big fuckin' men, you are. Fuckin' assholes. If I had the powers of JESUS CHRIST HIMSELF, I'd take all the AIDS and Cancer being suffered from every other human being in the world and transplant it to you two." And Osama bin Laden. And probably a couple of dudes too that you don't know about.
It's been about four hours since I wrote that last paragraph. I'd gotten a call from my father asking me to help him with one of the houses he rented out. It seems the Korean man who lived there failed at the American Dream and went back to the motherland, leaving behind some brand-new furniture in the process. And that's where the unemployed loser son comes in. So I stopped writing this and went along and met my dad and we took off in the old shitkicker Ford truck he keeps for these kinds of missions. When we had everything on the truck and tied up afterwards, all that was left was for me to activate the automatic garage door from the inside and run out of there before it closed. I hit the button and ran. As I reached the door, I decided to pull some kind of Indiana Jones type of shit and dropped to the ground and rolled under the door into the driveway. As I did this, three things occurred:
1) I scraped my arm.
2) I realized as I felt the pain of the concrete tearing off tiny pieces of my flesh just how stupid I looked, and that I was a lot closer to the age of 30 than to the age of say, 15. Yet here I was, trying to regress to some kind of childish enjoyment, when in fact what I was was some asshole with a fat gut and skinny T-Rex arms doing a slow wobble roll under a closing garage door. Grow up, douche.
3) I found out this was one of those garage doors with a sensor that automatically stops the garage door from closing when someone crosses it, making my rush and roll move completely unnecessary.
My father was amused by this. Then we took the stuff and left. But it felt good to ride on that old beat-up truck with the cool breeze coming in from the window after having finished doing some actual man-type work and then to have a beer with the old man afterwards. Anyway, I'm back home now, so where were we?
Yeah, like I said earlier, there's a lot of messed up stuff that happens in the movie but you do walk out of it feeling good. That's not a fuckin' spoiler, because if you have ears then you have probably heard how people love this movie and how it cures diseases and is a genuine miracle of God and that on Inauguration Day, Obama is going to walk on water carrying a film print of Slumdog Millionaire with him -- and audiences don't come out feeling all Gump about a movie that makes you feel like shit, so how do you possibly think a movie like this is going to end?
That's the only problem with this movie, by the way -- the audience, particularly anyone who has seen this movie before you. There's a good chance that if you go see this movie, you'll find sobbing mothers carrying their blind or crippled kids in the audience. I would suggest that it's your duty as a fellow human being to go break it to them gently that Slumdog Millionaire is not going to cure them of their ailments, because while it's a very very good movie, it isn't THE GREATEST MOVIE EVER MADE.
You see, there's a lot of hype going on, both from moviegoers and critics, and you always have to take that kind of stuff with a king size carton of salt. Hype is a motherfucker. Hype is created by people and when other people are hyped up by this hype and come out of the movie not as hyped up as the other people who were really hyped up, they blame the movie, not the hype. That's bullshit. It's not the movie's fault, it's that asshole Hype's doing, and he's been around forever. But it wasn't until the internet got more popular, and movie websites like Ain't It Cool popped up, that the destructive power of Hype grew exponentially.
And just like Thunder has Lightning, and Peanut Butter has Jelly, Hype doesn't work alone. Oh no, he has his tag team partner Backlash waiting in the wings to go to work after Hype has finished doing his thing. Backlash will come in and bitchslap all the poor souls who fell victim to Hype and say in a Death Metal growl, "You think this was a good movie? You're a bunch of FAAAAAGGGGGGSSSSS!!!!".
Then Backlash will flex his 'roided-up muscles and grab the mic and start going off on the many reasons why the hyped up shit you love so much isn't worth your love. And the sad part is some of these people who fell victim to the hype, the same people who loved the movie, they actually become one with Backlash then go around trying to make other motherfuckers feel bad for genuinely enjoying that shit. It's really fucked up, and it happens every year, usually during the summer and right after the Oscars. And it looks like Hype & Backlash have chosen Slumdog as this year's bitch.
Fuck. I had a whole lot more to say about this movie, but I'm wiped out after helping my dad move all that stuff. I'm tired and I wanna go to bed. So I'll just wrap this one up now.
Is it a very entertaining time? Is it worth your money? Is it one of the better films to come out of 2008? Absolutely. I enjoyed it very much and I think it's worth the time and money. It's emotionally involving and some scenes even got to me a little bit. I'm gay. Check it out. The movie, not my gayness. There's also a love story too, so if your chick wants to see some bullshit like Bride Wars, try to talk up all the lovey-dovey stuff in Slumdog to persuade her otherwise. Just don't mention to her that there's a scene where a little boy runs around covered in shit. Let her discover that shit on her own. Serves her right for trying to make you see Bride Wars, the cunt.
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