Slumdog Millionaire

My niece mentioned briefly this movie in her blog and shortly after I read her blog a colleague of mine asked out of the blue if I had watched this movie, he said it was nice. So I was curious, and thus borrowed the dvd from my niece.

It's a British film, set and filmed in India, it tells a story of a young man froms the slums who appeared in an the India version of "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire". Being uneducated, he exceeds people's expectation when he answered all of the question correctly and thus raised suspicions of the game show hosts (Anil Kapoor) that he somehow was cheating. The host handed him over to the police to be interrogated when the show was over for the night and to be continued on the next day.

In police custody, where he is tortured as the police attempt to learn how Jamal, a simple "slumdog", could know the answers to so many questions. Jamal tells his whole story, explaining how his life experiences coincidentally enabled him to know the answer to each question. Haha... the scene afterwards below is the time I had to close my eyes and don't want to think in my head....

Anyway, it tells the story of growing up in poverty for the two suddenly-orphaned brothers, Jamal (Dev Patel) and Salim. Their mother was bludgeon to death infront their eyes during the Hindu-Muslim riots in the slums. Then, they met Latika, also another lone child survivor from the riot. It is a depressing movie really - if you think about the horror lives that children in some of these kind of countries really faced - but if we only takes it just another movie, it is kinda ok... merits those awards at the Academy? I don't know, hehe... since almost all of those movies that won those awards before bored me to sleep!

Well, the hero of the story might be Jamal, but I think the character of Salim is more interesting. Why did he let go of Latika's hand when they chase the train? He don't want the added responsibility? Or he don't want to share his brother? Why he hurt Jamal then, when they finally found Latika again?