Increasing the number of tourists taking flights to Mumbai might help to raise the profile of the atrocious conditions in the slums and help them to become a thing of the past.

It even got “best sound effects”...the kids were there, at least. No announcement of royalties

Neo-liberals love this crap because it makes them think that they “feel their pain”.

Like “City Of God” before it, Slumdog relies on a new kind of third-world hokum. Of course, the love-conquers-all story is a fairy tale, but so is its characterization of the depravity of the Mombai underclass, and the lawlessness of the police. This is not the romanticized Dickensian world of the Artful Dodger. Just a grimy, pedestrian scrim, void of meaning and metaphorical dimension - a drab rat’s maze through which our would-be lovers scurry and huddle for the viewer’s amusement. In the end, it’s the film’s upbeat M.I.A.-meets-Bhangra soundtrack that does most of the hard work of clueing us in to the film’s aspirations as a fairly straightforward curry-flavored pop fantasy.

Apparently, we are extremely susceptible to these jejune depictions of strange and exotic lands. Just look how eagerly we bought into the neocon tableau vivant of Iraq and Iran as the wellspring of all things evil. No doubt it is the reptilian fear of the “other” at work here.

I saw—somewhere on MSM—that these kids’ families havent seen a penny of the $100 million that the film had made. What bullshit.