Danny Boyle's “Slumdog Millionaire” has won the top prize at the Producers Guild of America (PGA) ceremony and is now considered as the top favorite for the Oscars. For example, last year "No Country for Old Men" won both the PGA Award and the Oscar for Best Movie.“Slumdog Millionaire” has already won four Golden Globes and movie received 10 Oscar nominations, including best movie.
”Slumdog Millionaire” has already been the surprise success of the season - in both box office and awards. Still in limited release in the US, it has already racked up more than $45 million at the box office. The movie tells the story of an orphan from Mumbai's slums who makes it to the final of an Indian game show.
Enter Jamal (Dev Patel). He is a teenager who serves tea for a living and who, following several flashing invigorating and frightening quests, ends up in the moneymaking seat of the popular television show “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.” And although “Slumdog Millionaire’s” first scenes show Jamal just one question away from getting his hands on the top prize, Simon Beaufoy’s ingeniously twisted screenplay, adapted from the bestselling novel “Q and A” by Vikas Swarup, involves a flowing examination of time and space, smoothly swimming between the kid’s first days and the present times.
Thus, we are revealed Jamal’s intricate road from childhood to pre-adulthood without having to make forced and unnatural stops. The story flies from feeling to feeling, without expressing artificiality or stiffness, and begins in a huge, pulsating, crowded district of fragile sheds and careworn people. We then meet a 7-year-old Jamal (Ayush Mahesh Khedekar) and his brother, Salim (Azharuddin Mohammed Ismail), who shockingly see how their mother (Sanchita Choudhary) is killed by prowling anti-Muslim extremists.
Therefore, the two children and another orphan, a timid and beautiful girl named Latika (played by Rubina Ali as a child and by Freida Pinto as an adolescent), are unwillingly thrown into the harsh world and fall victims to a criminal whose abuses take the plot to the border of horror.
Slumdog Millionaire started a debate in India after some news channels and film critics said the film hyped poverty and dubbed it "poverty porn."
"Squalor never appeared more designed than it does in Slumdog Millionaire ... This over-hyped and disappointing film that insults Mumbai, culminates with a Bollywood-styled item song on a railway platform," film critic Subhash Jha wrote.
But non-governmental organizations said the film does not glamourize poverty and was a reflection of the realities challenging millions of Indian children.
Other winners at the Los Angeles ceremony included “Wall-E”, which won best animated film, while the top prize for Best documentary went to “Man on Wire”, which depicts the story of theFrenchman, who wire-walked between the Twin Towers in New York in 1974. HBO’s “John Adams” took the award for long-form TV and “Mad Men” picked up the drama prize.
