After all the furor that Stephen King sparked by dissing Stephenie Meyer's writing, you might have expected Salman Rushdie to think twice before hammering the movie "Slumdog Millionaire." Nope -- not even on the night it was winning eight Academy Awards.
Speaking at Emory University about adaptations, Rushdie said Slumdog "piles impossibility on impossibility,” according to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Lambasting the “feel-good movie” and the book it was based on, his complaints stretched from how characters acquire a gun to how they wind up at the Taj Mahal, 1,000 miles from the previous scene.
Rushdie was not sparing in his criticism. The AJC said he also knocked "The Reader" —- “[a] leaden, lifeless movie killed by respectability” —- and "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" —- “It doesn’t finally have anything to say.”
I haven't read Vikas Swarup's book, which formed the basis for the movie. (Originally called Q&A, it is being released with the Slumdog Millionaire name -- book publishers are no dummies.) But I loved the movie, and find it hard to go along with Rushdie's criticism.
It's fiction, remember? I do expect realistic fiction to be grounded -- I wouldn't want Puff the Magic Dragon to appear in Slumdog. But movie adapters get some license to keep the story moving. The criticisms leveled by Rushdie (at least those noted by the AJC) are so minor that they don't bother me -- not nearly as much as the depiction of Mumbai's sprawling slums.
Source: http://weblogs.baltimoresun.com/entertainment/books/blog/2009/02/slumdog_millionaire_blasted_by_1.html
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