Heydon Prowse's "Slumdog and Billionaires" at Don't Panic:
"Danny Boyle’s latest film, Slumdog Millionaire, about an orphan from the Mumbai slums who reaches the final of the Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? is winning awards all over the place (including Best Film and Best Director at BIFA). We should all go to see it, but perhaps not because of the superlatives that it is consistently squeezing from the pens of critics, but because of what it tells us about Mumbai’s social inequality in the wake of the recent attacks.
"Who exactly does want to be a millionaire in Mumbai? The answer is, pretty much everyone. And how many will actually become one? The answer to that – very, very few indeed.
"India is fast becoming a hypercapitalist 21st-century superpower and has developed incredible wealth very quickly for a tiny minority – particularly in Mumbai. The top 10 percent of India’s population owns between 33 to 50 percent of the country’s wealth. And they are not afraid to flaunt it – some 1.8 million households earning $100,000 or more a year spend a tenth of that on luxury goods. India’s media also have a lot to answer for – waving such grotesque over consumption in the faces of the very poor with ‘lifestyle’ magazines such as the Hindustan Times' Splurge and Outlook's Envy advising the very rich on how to spend their millions."
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See also "India still suffers from huge income gap"
Slumdog Millionaire was much better than I expected. Some people said it was overated. I thought it was really, really good. Maybe not the best movie of the year, but a really good movie that most people will enjoy.
LOVE THE MOViE SO MUCH! SLUMDOG MiLLiONAiRE ALL THE WAY TO THE GOLDEN GLOBES AND OSCARS! i REALLY WiSH THAT SLUMDOG MiLLiONAiRE WOULD WiN ALL OF THE NOMiNATiONS! THE MOViE AND EVERYTHiNG ABOUT iT DESERVES TO WiN! SUCH AN iNSPiRiNG STORY! iT REALLY LOOKED LiKE A TRUE-TO-LiFE STORY.. 11/10! :)
This was such a beautiful film and it really gave me a good idea about the inequalities of India. Even though this was fiction, I felt like it played like a documentary.
We were so inspired that we made an American Redneck version of the film called
Redneck Slumdog Millionaire.
You can see the trailer at the link on youtube.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmdH3SnBKXc