New York Dreamer

Last sunday late afternoon when the city becomes more subdued and ready for another turbulent week, there was a movie screening at the Scandinavia House on Park Avenue.  I didn’t know anything about the movie and it was such a nice surprise. The movie, “Slumdog Millionaire,” is a really cool and interesting movie that you should see in theater.  

The story is about a contestant for the famous TV game show “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” in India. Every question to become a millionaire is bringing powerful and touching flashback memories of this main character’s life story growing up in poverty, turbulent life experience and finding love. Each flash back scene gives important clues to the questions from the show. Its very unique story telling and visuals are very powerful in a sense that when you watch these kids growing up in a very tough and poor environment without any social protection. From the combination of all the vibrant colors and heart-throbbing music sound, you will experience a new level of emotions you rarely experience in usual Hollywood movies.  Maybe, it could be a Bollywood influence, as the director and the writer admitted. When they arrived in India, they were swept off by Bollywood’s dramatic love stories and its vibrant dance/music styles. Those elements are visibly melted into the movie. Especially, the music/sound was amazingly well done. 

Casting was really good, too. Especially, child actors brought all the emotional connections you need to be immersed in the story. Danny Boyle talked about how well the casting process was done and how the international production cooperation was done in the process. It’s spoken in two languages, Indian and English, with occasional subtitles, which Danny Boyle admitted was a bit of a challenge at first, starting from brining out real emotions from child actors to persuading big studio executives about the foreign language uses.  As he also talked about coordinating different work culture and going through the red-tape process to get a permit, international productions are sure to meet certain challenges and obstacles. However, in my opinion, that kind of international/intercultural production efforts brought out fresh elements we would not see elsewhere, creating a cool breeze to the creative work products. Maybe, Bollywood style is coming to the shore. 

Trivia: This film was shot within 84 days (originally scheduled to shoot for 70 days, but they were there early. So they said why not). 80% of the film was shot with a cool digital camera ‘SI-2K’ which is similar to RED but not distributed in the market yet. 5% of the film was shot with a still digital camera with multiple shots that were smoothed over. That still cut images brought out nice colors and memory snap-shot-like images. The music director (who did a wonderful job) did laconically say “oh, it’s like Shaw Shank Redemption” when he first watched the movie clips, on which Boyle jokingly commented that he still doesn’t understand what that means.