OK maybe this Slumdog thing has gone too far.
I really enjoyed it when I first saw it when no one knew anything about it. It was a kind of underdog. Now with 8 Oscars, it's a super duper masala hotdog and the puppy love is wearing off a bit.
Especially when I just saw this on MSN Health & Fitness:
Get a Bollywood Body. It begins thus...
Chances are, if you watched Oscar contender Slumdog Millionaire, you were moved. And if you enjoyed the dancing at the end of the film, you probably felt the urge to move yourself.
Come on already. Weren't the slum tours of Mumbai bad enough? Now the movie is being used to peddle Masala Bhangra aerobics workouts?
Everyone it seems is cashing in on the Slumdog. Mind you, fifteen years ago getting a Bollywood body meant slightly paunchy men with furry chests, pulling up their collars to hide the necklines, romancing buxom women half their age.
Now it's a new Bollywood with 40-plus year old actors ripping their shirts off to show off their six packs that are so alarmingly ripped they look like they have been Photoshopped onto their bodies. And the 40-year-olds are out-packing each other. If you have a six pack in Om Shanti Om, I'll get an eight-pack for Ghajini. Steroids are the new gods. The open button hairy chest, once the ultimate symbol of rakish bad-boy masculinity (along with the never-shaved-since-it-started-growing mustache) are disappearing. The Bollywood body is now more in line with western (gay porn) standards of masculinity -- buff, waxed, gym-toned. The women all look like international models -- curves and "thunderthighs" replaced by slim figures and cleavage, come-hither sexiness that could work well on screen and on multinational cosmetics ad campaigns for Revlon.
Things have come to such a pass that Indian actor Ruslaan Mumtaz originally slated on to play Jamal in Slumdog was nixed at the last moment. The producer felt he was too buff, too pretty to pass for someone growing up in Mumbai slums.
Umm, of course it's another matter that he was replaced by a British actor with Indian genes, whose Hinglish can't quite shake off the British accent. And who is several shades lighter than his young slum kid self.
No matter, Slumdog still does something that a lot of Bollywood has stopped doing. It tells a story, no matter how unbelievably fantastic, that's set in the slums. Slums and village India have long disappeared from six-pack Bollywood.
For those who complain that Slumdog is one in a long line of films about foreigners who only see the poverty in India, a sort of "poverty porn," movie critic Anupama Chopra has the perfect retort.
The films that do well overseas are about fabulously rich people who live in mansions and take helicopters to work," says Chopra. "I call that luxury porn."
Sure, she says it's got its loopholes. Why is that TV host so obnoxious? In India real life TV hosts are so anxious not to show class bias, they are unctuously friendly. In fact, she says, Shahrukh Khan, megastar host of the Indian Who Wants to be a Millionaire, was rebuked for hugging the contestants!
But hey it's a movie. It has a few plot loopholes. But Slumdog Millionaire has done India one great service. In it the good guys are Indian, the bad guys are Indian, the lovers are Indian, the little kids are Indian. It's not about some American coming to India to rediscover himself whether its in the Marabar caves or Calcutta's City of Joy. Westerners might have made it but Indians get to star in their own fairy tale instead of being the exotic 12-step program for some lost English miss or American babu. That's a reason to rejoice.
The other reason to rejoice is A. R. Rahman will finally really get his due on the international stage for the superbly talented composer he is.
And those little kids, some of whom had never been on an airplane, got to climb up on that Kodak theater stage and have their grins light up Hollywood. That was a Kodak moment if ever there was one. (Too bad Danny Boyle, though he's talked about how he made Loveleen Tandan co-director because of her work with the kids, didn't choose to acknowledge her when he reeled off his thank yous.)
Once the hoopla dies down who knows what impact Slumdog will have on the movies? Will it be a flash in the pan? Will it make Hollywood less afraid of movies with subtitles, dark-skinned people and no blonde American to save them? Will it make Bollywood look for stories in the teeming slums and hovels that jostle against the penthouses in Mumbai?
Probably not. Maybe it will just be business as usual. But for one night at least a new wind was blowing through Hollywood's sanctum santorum. We heard a bit of Spanish, a bit of Japanese and a bit of Tamil from the stage. When was the last time that happened? As the Oscar presenters stumbled over the name A. R. Rahman I am sure they were just thanking their lucky stars it wasn't A. R. Ramalingasundaram.