Do you know what a mash-up is? It’s this weird sub-genre of music that takes parts of two (or more) songs and puts them together – mashing them up, if you will – usually lifting the vocal track from one and laying it over the music track from the other. Some of them are pretty ambitious, combining radically different types of music – industrial metal and American Idol pop, Beyoncé backed by the theme to The Andy Griffith Show – that in spite or of perhaps because of their extreme opposition manage to end up sounding pretty interesting, creating a completely original sound distinct from its origins. That’s the goal with all kinds of fusion-based art, to some extent, whether it’s music or food or filmmaking – take two familiar things and combine them to make a new thing.
But not all things combine well, so there are unlistenable mash-ups, unpalatable recipies, and films like Slumdog Millionaire.
Jamal (Dev Patel), an orphan from the slums of Mumbai, is a single question away from winning Who Wants To Be a Millionaire?‘s highest cash prize. Accused of cheating, he explains the series of extraordinary circumstances that led him to knowing the correct answers from his climb out of poverty on his quest to be reunited with his childhood love Latika (Freida Pinto). The film takes Dickensean coincidence and turns it up to 11 (with all the dim-wittedness that comes with that phrase), and while I’d be willing to suspend disbelief for a love story where the two leads are destined to be together and the universe will all align correctly for that to happen, it’s very difficult to maintain that illusion when you’re being constantly interrupted by underworld gangs and children being blinded to make better beggars. Is this meant to be a feel-good film? How do you feel good knowing that just two people made it out of the population-19-million cesspool Slumdog Millionaire shows Mumbai to be? It’s certainly not meant to be a realistic depiction of… well, anything, since even if you ignore the whole scenario being implausible, to put it lightly, the film still attracted criticism for its depiction of the poorer parts of India. It doesn’t even manage to be an especially good romance, seeing as how Jamal is kind of dull, painfully ignorant of almost literally everything that doesn’t concern Latika in some way. You’re looking at a completely fantastical story set against the backdrop of the ugly unforgiving real world, and it’s a dissonant mixture that refuses to combine.
sarcasmbeast 