Och-cha!

For supper last night, Fio and Husband had popcorn and Slumdog Millionaire. From the reviews, Fio had expected a heartwarming Bollywood fairy tale--a sweet and charming story to wash down the popcorn on a Sunday evening.

Slumdog Millionaire is anything but. Instead, it's a gritty expose of everything that is awful about India--the hustling, violence, venality, poverty, disgusting living conditions, social snobbery, corruption, and crime, all stitched together through the vehicle of a quiz show contestant.

Jamal Makil is an Everyman of India's downtrodden, literally covered in excrement, but somehow shining with purity, a prince in a social cesspool. And when he meets his princess, it's a forever commitment.

The romance is unbelievable, but so what? The movie has to be tied up somehow, and after all the sh*t Jamal has gone through, no audience would settle for the inevitable ending. Instead, his destiny is to win the quiz show (despite the machinations of the sleazy host) and to win the girl.

The acting was first rate, from the children up through the various types of adult sleazeballs, thugs, and predators Jamal ran into. Fio's only complaint about the movie is that the cuts between "now" and "then" were so abrupt as to be disconcerting. Maybe a little more cinematic finesse would have been appropriate.

Fio remembers that other people had other complaints--that "slumdog" is not an actual term used in India, for instance. A more serious complaint was that the child actors were exploited, not paid enough--although their very exploitive parents seemed to be the primary ones making that charge.

For Fio and Husband, it was an unexpected Sunday night movie, but a good one.