“Slumdog Millionaire” – A discovery from the Telluride Film Festival

Editor’s Note: We are indebted to Mr. Rajeev Mundhe for bringing this story to our attention. Mr. Mundhe, a well-known financial advisor with Smith Barney, is an old friend of this blog.


The Wall Street Journal is not the first place we expect to find a film review. But today we did thanks to our friend, Rajeev Mundhe. The 2008 Telluride Film Festival featured a gem of a movie titled “Slumdog Millionaire”.

According to Joe Morgenstern of the Journal, “Slumdog Millionaire” is set in Mumbai and tells the story of a poor Muslim boy, played by Dev Patel, “who pulls himself by his brains…and gets a shot at becoming a millionaire on an Indian TV quiz show.” Mr. Morgenstern describes this film as “an amalgam of “Oliver Twist”,”The Three Musketeers” and Bollywood extravagance.”

Dev Patel

Mr. Morgenstern seems to have liked this film immensely.  We will let his own words describe his feelings “… I’ll confine myself to only a few effusions now, with more to come. There’s never been anything like this densely detailed phantasmagoria — groundbreaking in substance, damned near earth-shaking in style. Mr. Boyle and his colleagues, including his Indian co-director, Loveleen Tandan, have pulled off a soaring, crowd-pleasing fantasy that’s a tale of unswerving love, a searing depiction of poverty and injustice and a marvelous evocation of multinational media madness.”

Well, He has sold us. We will watch this film when it is released commercially this fall. We encourage readers to read Joe Morgenstern’s article at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122056563373301369.html