Slumdog Millionaire! It's got everything. Chills, thrills, laughter, tears. Good guys, bad guys, action, adventure, romance. The leads are young, talented, and attractive. The locales are exotic but the cinematography captures them as lived-in, alive, not as post cards or social studies text book illustrations. It doesn't look like any other movie. And it has a great soundtrack!
Plus, there's not much in the way of competition, at least to gauge by NYCweboy's rundown of the nominees over at newcritics, Oscar...By The Light Of Brangelina.
By the way, I knew what the final question was going to be right out of the gate.
Wall-E wuz robbed.
Posted by: Linkmeister | Monday, January 26, 2009 at 01:48 PM
Slumdog Millionare made it onto my personal lifetime top 10. I think it's just brilliant. And AR Rahman is my favorite contemporary Indian composer. I'm so thrilled that more people are being exposed to his brilliance.
Posted by: Shayera | Monday, January 26, 2009 at 03:51 PM
I found Slumdog assaultive and manipulative, and not in a good way. The torture scenes were bad enough, but the little beggar kids being blinded was some kind of last straw. Also, the adult leads were not as half as interesting as the child actors playing their earlier incarnations.
Did love the finale at the train station, where our beleaguered hero turned out to be a wonderful, loose-limbed dancer. In fact, I almost wish the movie had gone full-out Bollywood and included song-and-dance numbers between its atrocities.
Posted by: sfmike | Monday, January 26, 2009 at 10:37 PM