MooPig Movie Critics Corner: Slumdog Millionaire has Great Caste

Adventures in Slum-X-ploitation
by Pat Darnell and the SlumPop Gang

There is no canine in Slumdog Millionaire. You will have to go see Marley and Me to get the dog parts. But the Slum flick is sidesplitting comedy, set in abundant happenstance of the toilet of Eurasia.

Regis Philbin must have been consulted, -- not -- but suspense is built with the use of Regis-like persona, in a zoot suit, scruffy beard, great hair, and a serious bad attitude. "Who wants to be a Millionaire?" screams the Bombay Bollywood doppelganger of Regis. Note: to be a millionaire there is a rate of exchange that comes out to be 50,350,200 Indian Rupees to 1 million US Dollars; implied.

Rated: R | Run time: 2 hrs | Genre: Dramas
Theatrical Release:Nov 12, 2008 Limited
Box Office: US$139,341,484 | or ... 7,008,896,155.8 Indian Rupees

Our hero and his heroine, it turns out, do not want to be millionaires. They of course just want to be with each other. Their situational lives as slumdogs makes that improbable. Odds are one in four that the one we follow from childhood to Romeo age -- Jamail -- will get the girl. We won't tell anymore about that, since you might want to go see it, or like us rent it for 89 cents at the Appletree Grocery Store.

So, Who wants to be a Millionaire, a rhetorical question if ever was one... the movie sriters must consider it a gift from the 19th and 20th century: let's take a clue from endearing literature,

On their arrival the cause of this hubbub was apparent to all. It was a young man whose portrait we can sketch in a few lines. Imagine to yourself Don Quixote at eighteen Don Quixote without his corselet his coat of mail and his cuistres.

Don Quixote clothed in a woollen doublet the blue colour of which had faded into a nameless shade between lees of wine and a heavenly azure. Imagine to yourself further a long brown face with high cheek bones a sign of cunning and enormously developed maxillary muscles an infallible sign by which a Gascon may always be known even without his barret cap.

But our young man wore a barret cap set off with a sort of feather He had an open and intelligent eye and a hooked but finely chiselled nose. Too big for a youth too small for a grown man an inexperienced eye might have taken him for a farmer's son upon a journey had it not been for the long sword which dangling from a leathern baldrick hit against the calves of its owner as he walked and against the rough side of his steed when he was on horseback The three musketeers By Alexandre Dumas, Auguste Maquet, William Robson

The Three Musketeers (Les Trois Mousquetaires) is a novel by Alexandre Dumas, père. It recounts the adventures of a young man named d'Artagnan after he leaves home to become a musketeer. d'Artagnan is not one of the musketeers of the title; those are his friends Athos, Porthos, and Aramis—inseparable friends who live by the motto "one for all, all for one" ("un pour tous, tous pour un").

Knowing this fact has the drama-seeking movie patron on the edge of his seat all the way through. This measly multiple choice question, that gives two of the Musketeers' names, only to ask: "who is the third Musketeer?" is all that keeps our swords sheathed, at rest, dangling from our leathern baldricks.

It turns out our controlled prime research, quantitive, costly surveys produced typical movie goers who answered unswervingly that they want to jump on the game show host -- like a Punjabi of the Navy jumps a stowaway on his freighter at midnight, after finishing a fifth of Johnny Walker Black Label -- and remove his nose with a close shave. Yes, it goes all the way, in that genre that no one in the US has a category for, yet.

But MooPig wants to help American Movie Labellings: It's called Caste. OK?

We find skulking in the wings, a whole new psychology in Slumdog Millionaire. For many this will open new portals to misunderstood youth. It will mother inventions of psychological studies and blabber for a century to come. If allowed, there could be extended visits by missionary trained Discovery Channel cinematographers to find the Bumbag secret "Key to your child's heart."

Final note: At this time no 'Gimme the Key' dialogue has been introduced to Slumdog Movie Mill of copious re-do's to follow this very successful movie; but it will come, it will come. WM, Waste Management, the new movie company, look out landfills, here they come.
[pd slummin']