Slumdog Millionaire

When a young uneducated man from the slums reaches the the highest question in the Indian "Who wants to be a millionaire", the show organisers take the opportunity afforded by the break between one night's show and the next to ask the police to investigate whether he got so many answers by cheating. 

After an unpromising and gruesome start, the police inspector lays aside his other pressing cases, and listens to the young man's story...and so it is we learn how the events of his childhood conspired, alongside the heartbreak, to give him just the knowledge he needed to answer the questions he was asked.

It is an eventful and moving story. Plenty of chases, on foot rather than car chases, given extra drama by the superb music, against a backdrop of excellent photography of the Indian land and cityscape.  There is racial violence, friendship, exploitation, romance, betrayal, murder, humour and ambition.

A great story, wonderfully told, leading towards.. well I won't tell you what it leads to.  You will have to see the show. 

Australia, the Film

A Good Film, and quite long.

It is a bit like Out of Africa: huge landscapes, he is off on his travels half the time, she gets one drink in an otherwise all male bar,  there is a war coming, and a lot gets destroyed by fire near the end.

There is adventure, romance, murder, lost children, war, it has it all. Although it has no car car chase, there is a stampede of frightened cattle which is just as good.

It claims, by the intruduction and conclusion, to be about the lost generation of aboriginal children who were taken from their families to be brought up in institutions.  I think it rather suffers from 'the Casablanca problem' (it doesn't take much to see that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.) Although it is painted on a large canvas, it is actually the story of three people.

It is still a good and very moving story, and well worth the watching.  The plot is a little like "Once upon a Time in the West" She arrives to be with her husband only to find that he has been murdered for standing in the way of a business rival, and she decides to make a go of the station, except this is a cattle station rather than a railway station.

What makes it a great story is the half-caste aboriginal child.  At times he is the narrator, and it is the tension between whether he is an orphaned child who needs to be protected or an aboriginal man who needs to learn the way of his ancestors from his grandfather that makes the love story amount to slightly more than a hill of beans.