I'm not really one for properly mixing my interests and my location.  You obviously know I'm a huge lover of movies.  My tastes run the gamut from arthouse movies to Hollywood blockbusters and exploitation flicks.  And I love foreign films too.  And this is where I'm having a problem today.  If you run in movie lover circles and mention Slumdog Millionaire, you're going to get a lively discussion going.  But if you live in a heavily rural area populated largely by contractors and farmers, in other words a pretty conservative and mainstream group, and you mention Slumdog Millionaire, they will just stare at you with eyes filled with incomprehension.

I finally saw Slumdog last night and I have been dying to talk to anyone about it and all I get is that blank stare.  I like the peaceful easy going nature of living in the sticks but somedays it drives me straight up a wall.  This is such a day.  Complicating this is that I'm fairly smitten with Slumdog's music and have been playing the album all day.  This has led to one compliment and a lot of "what the hell is that?" comments.  Sigh.

So I guess you dear reader are the person I get to gush at.  Slumdog Millionaire is a wonderful movie.  It starts at a dead run and never lets the energy sag at all.  It's a classic rags to riches movie, coupled with romantic destiny story and all bound up in non-linear style that keeps us wondering the whole time.  And the entire thing revolves around the game show Who Wants To Be A Millionaire.  No Regis Philbin though.  Sorry.

Dev Patel plays young Jamal, a contestant on the gameshow who has come from the slums of Mumbai.  He is in possession of no formal education, just whatever he could pick up growing up on the streets.  And as fate would have it, those are pretty useful facts.  The movie shuttles back and forth between Jamal playing the game and earlier points in his life, demonstrating how he came to know the answers to the questions in the game.  It is considered so remarkable that he could know the answers that he ends up in police custody, tortured to extract a confession of cheating.  And just to make the whole thing that much more remarkable, Jamal isn't playing to win money.  He knows the love of his life watches the show and gets on it just to get her attention.  Now that's love.

It's a fairy tale of sorts but Jamal's youth is anything but.  He grows up in the most horrifying squalor imaginable.  Strangely, the poverty stricken residents of Mumbai's slums are not as crushed and bitter as you would expect.  Their city is vibrant with life and color, making just about anything possible.  It is definitely a life that favors the entrepreneurial spirit, something Jamal and his brother have in great quantities.  The pair were orphaned early in a burst of sectarian violence and spend the years coming up with unique ways to earn a buck, pretty much all of which are of dubious legality.  No matter, when the choice is starvation or breaking the law, it's an easy choice.

I'm always fond of movies that show me a part of the world I previously knew nothing or little about.  Writer Simon Beaufoy (The Full Monty) and director Danny Boyle show us a world hard to imagine here in America.  Such stunning poverty is unknown in this country and  the hand wringing it would produce if it did exist would make it hard to imagine the sort of community we see in Mumbai.  The closest thing I can compare it to is the slums we saw in Gangs of New York.  I'm very curious to see if Mumbai could make the same sort of explosive leap forward.

Oddly, early on in the film I was thinking it doesn't have much of an emotional punch.  Perhaps the enormous hype around this movie had my expectations a bit off.  But it doesn't matter because by the end it had sucked me in so thoroughly that I was reduced to making strange gasping sorts of noises at the climax.  No sex jokes, please.  It is simply a brilliant film that works so well, you might be caught off guard by it.  Then again, it moves with such exuberance that you're more likely to wonder what the hell my problem was with the beginning.  It has been nominated for several Oscars, including best picture, director, writer and score.  It is the second of the best picture nominees I've seen now and it has become the early favorite in my mind, ahead of Frost/Nixon.  We'll see how that holds up as I catch up to the rest of them.