Slumdog Millionaire

"Slumdog Millionaire" is a must-see movie that is bound to garner at least one Academy Award. It centers on 18 year-old Jamal Malik, an orphan from the slums of Mumbai who winds up on India's version of "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?"

He is so good at zeroing in on the answers that the producers and emcee believe he is cheating and have him arrested and tortured where the secret to his success is revealed. It is not in any extra-ordinary intelligence, he believes, but in his life, which relates to each question and is revealed through a series of flashbacks involving his brother and archrival, Salim, and the love of his life, another orphan named Latika.

We go from the afternoon he escapes from the outhouse his brother has locked him into so he can get an actor's autograph, which the brother later sells, to the murder of their mother by a mob and their escape on a freight train where they meet Latika, another orphan, who becomes the love of Jamal's life, to the Taj Mahal, the open air markets and the gangs and brothels of India.

It is about fate and destiny, making your own fate and destiny and love and life and perseverance.

After nine years of longing, he finally gets the girl, but rather than telling him she loves him, she says something deeper and more profound, which led one reviewer to reach for a hankie.

Usually an audience will get up and leave the theatre at the end of a movie or sometimes a little before, but they were so transfixed that they stayed until the last credit rolled.

It is just that darned good.