Comments on: Rags to Raja

By: Kroms

Kroms — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 18:51:55 +0000

Can I recommend Let the Right One In? It's similar to Slumdog, but at the same time it's very different. No idea if it's still playing over there but it, along with Slumdog Millionaire and In Bruges, were the films of the year (keeping in mind that I haven't seen Benjamin Button, Milk and Revolutionary Road).

By: Chuck

Chuck — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 08:59:22 +0000

Well, I think “crowd-pleaser” fits because the story’s so intentionally melodramatic. And the only complaints that I’ve seen all have a pretty elitist bent to them — they fault the movie for being exploitative (it’s just the opposite) or unrealistic (it’s not trying to be realistic). I’d assume that anybody watching the movie would have enough sense to realize that this isn’t really what it’s like to live in India, and it’s not supposed to be a realistic expose of what life there is like, even for the poor.

And yeah, you’d have to be a robot not to be cheering at the ending.

By: Karla

Karla — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 14:24:03 +0000

Chuck, I saw this last night – even after reading your post it still wasn’t what I expected, but it was really an incredible movie! I definitely don’t think this is a crowd pleaser, though – I think “most” americans would take it way too literally and also generally don’t want to deal with the rest of the world! Really makes you think about how for every person there are seminal moments that absolutely create who you become. On a lighter note, the dance sequence at the end was AWESOME!!!

By: Chuck

Chuck — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 19:49:09 +0000

Yeah, I didn’t describe it well, but the theme of universality in the movie wasn’t like I’ve seen in anything else. The divide isn’t between east/west, like I’d expected, but poverty/wealth. They didn’t really care about western stuff for its own sake; people were interested in “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” not because it was some exotic western import, but because it meant money.

I can’t imagine I’d like the book nearly as much (if at all), because the story does kind of fall apart without the visuals and the music smoothing everything over.

(Congrats on getting settled, btw.)

By: Matthew Dessem

Matthew Dessem — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 04:23:31 +0000

Hey, nice write-up–I hadn’t really thought about how much it owed to fairy tales. Q & A might be a different story, but you’d have to be a complete raw nerve to come away from the movie version thinking it was another example of cultural condescension. Any film with that much M.I.A. on the soundtrack has gotta be post-cultural.

In other news, I have internet access again.