‘Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?’… ummm maybe a better question would be ‘Who doesn’t?’ I think the idea of winning a tonne of cash is probably appealing to a vast majority of the world’s population. The truly independently wealthy aside, I think most of us would probably consider it a life changing event to be handed one (or several) million dollars in one hit…. and gaining the sum by winning a quiz show as compared to earning or inheriting it a rather exciting appeal. When Millionaire first started in Australia I used to watch it occasionally… it’s always interestng to see how your own knowledge base differs from what the producers may consider ‘general knowledge’.
For example Mr K would kick ass at news, current events, politics, finance, sports and entertainment… whereas I on the other hand would totally bomb out on the first $1000 question if they were to ask me something like : ‘Who is the captain of the Australian Cricket team?’ This is a perfect example of a question I am totally unabe to even make an educated guess at, because I quite frankly couldn’t give a shit. I’m more music, literature, history, arts, travel, culture, geography and science. Mr K just summed it up by saying that he’s ‘the outside 20 pages of the newspaper and i’m the rest of the inside pages’ – which I thought was an interesting way of looking at it.
Anyway I was just wondering who hasn’t at some point thought about what it would be like to get on one of those game shows and then speculated as to what they’d do if they somehow managed to win a small fortune? Last night we watched the movie ‘Slumdog Millionaire‘ which I think it may well be the best movie I’ve seen since ‘Juno‘. The trailer doesn’t really show much of what the film is about but it’s basically the story of two brothers who lose their mother when they are quite young (about 5 and 7) and follows them as they pretty much raise themselves in amongst the depressing landscape of Mumbai’s slums.
They manage to survive a number of awful poverty related adversities and a young girl, Latika, also becomes intrinsically involved in their story until they become separated. The main character Jamal, having survived his tragic childhood to be a young man who works as a lowly assistant (tea trolley guy) in an Indian call centre. In an attempt to find Latika – his lost childhood friend whom he has never forgotten – he manages to get himself on the Indian version of ‘Who Wants To Be A Millionaire’.
I won’t spoil the story for anyone as I highly recommend going out to see it if you haven’t already. It’s been nominated for Best Picture at this year’s Oscars along with a swag of other nominations so it’ll be interesting to see if it gets the nod. The story was engaging with characters full of depth and emotion and the actors (even the children) were impressive. I’m not normally one for being overly empathetic with fictional characters in movies but this film had me sucked right in to every dramatic step of their story. I absolutely loved this film and will definitely be buying it when it’s released on DVD.. so that every time I start to feel that my pain filled life is just shite – I can watch this movie and remember just how wrong I am.
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