Amy Nicholson... The Problem is You

For the second entry in a row, we're gonna play my favorite game: Completely Unfounded Political Message Extrapolation! Except this time, we're gonna confront something an awful lot of people are saying about Slumdog Millionaire. And it's not actually a political message, but it's close enough.

I didn't like Slumdog as much as most other people, but I certainly liked it a lot better than Amy Nicholson,, who we last found gushing over Bride Wars.

Heavy Slumdog spoilers are abound.

John Carpenter, the first grand prize millionaire of the USA’s Who Wants to be a Millionaire was showered with (momentary) fame. In Danny Boyle and Loveleen Tandan’s noisy fictional drama, India’s parallel 20-million rupee winner Jamal Malik (Dev Patel) was tortured for the implausibility of being a bottom caste brain when his superiors bottomed out at 60K.

This is a noisy intro, but whatever. Ha, dude's name was John Carpenter. More like Big Trouble in Little Millionaire!

Complicating things, Jamal isn’t particularly bright—a credibility deficit screenwriter Simon Beaufoy overcomes by showing precisely which traumatic events etched random facts about movies, religion, and British geography into his mind--

Yes. I'm certain Beaufoy's train of thought was this exactly: "Ah jeez, I really wanna make a story about a slumdog who wins the millionaire game, but how do I do it?? I know! I'll think of the actual premise of the movie!" Yes, it's the premise of the movie, and you're gonna call it a copout. If there's any point to the fact that he does so well, it's simply to show the dichotomy between tuition and experience. It's one of the central themes of the movie. Because it's the premise. Of the movie. Well, half the premise, anyway.

coincidentally, in the chronological order game show host Prem Kumar (Anil Kapoor) will later ask him as questions.

GET OVER IT. Everyone who dislikes the film has used this argument. There has to come a point when you're watching the movie and you realize that the Indian Regis is an evil and cunning villain. It's at this point where you also realize that you're not really supposed to take this movie so seriously. It's a fable. It's a fairy tale set against a modern backdrop. It's not supposed to be believable, just like Cinderella isn't supposed to be believable.

There's also the fact that there were like four or five questions he either didn't know or he used his cleverness to figure out. Jerk.

In these scenes (for which child actors Tanay Chheda and Ayush Mahesh Khedekar play the younger and youngest Jamals), MIA’s “Paper Planes” blasts, adopting the credibility of desperate, money-hungry street living it didn’t get when layered over Seth Rogen toking up in Pineapple Express.

Oh jesus, come on. What?
1. "Paper Planes" never played in Pineapple Express. It was only used in the trailer.
2. Who the fuck cares about the song's credibility? Review the movie you're reviewing.
3. Why is 16% of your review about an MIA song?

This should be a furious story about strata; instead it tries to sell us a bogus romance between Jamal and his childhood love (Freida Pinto), now the mistress of the gangster who employs his brother Salim (Madhur Mittal). When they kiss at the ending, we roll our eyes—that’s not going to solve the problems that now infuriate us. Why, when Boyle has for half a film been such a devastating purveyor of social class suffering, would he turn as glossy as a Disney cartoon?

GAAAAAAAH.

What the hell was with the ending of Cinderella? All that happened was she got to live happily ever after… but there were no new laws passed about stepmother meanness! Nothing!

Amy, and everyone else who argues with this argument, stop it. It's a movie about a guy who faces insurmountable odds to be with the woman he loves. That's his one goal, throughout the entire movie. It's a love story. Remember love stories? And how they're allowed to exist? Bride Wars is somehow plausible, but this… this is an outrage! What should Danny Boyle have done? Change the script so Jamal and Latika become king and queen of India and bring fairness and prosperity to all the land? He actually could've done that, and you still would've hated it, because it's unrealistic enough as it is. We don't roll our eyes, because it DID solve the problem—Jamal and Latika were in love but could not be together. They eventually got together. Along the way, bad things happen, and in the end, Jamal finds a way to overcome the bad things that happen to him, because of his love for Latika and the fact that "it was written," and, you know, everything else about the movie.

This is a real problem in criticism, I think. Critics who just want the movie to be something that's the complete opposite of what the movie is. Slumdog Millionaire is a fairy tale romance set against a violent backdrop. Like Romeo and fucking Juliet. A critic worth their salt would be able to judge it for what it is, and how successful it is at achieving what it sets out to achieve. A bad critic would look at it and say YOU KNOW, I REEEEEALLY WISH IT WAS ABOUT SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT or IT REALLY DIDN'T MAKE ME LAUGH ENOUGH or WHAT WAS WITH THE STRANGE LACK OF TALKING ANIMALS? Amy Nicholson, you are a purveyor of this awfulness, and it's a problem that now infuriates me. Prepare to be solved.