'Slumdog' celebrations fill Mumbai's crowded slums

Slumdog Millionaire
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MUMBAI, India – In the narrow lanes behind the Mumbai train tracks, the slum's first Oscar party turned into a raucous celebration of two hometown heroes, complete with Bollywood dance moves and squeals of joy from old friends.

Every time the big-eyed girl who calls this slum home appeared on TV, her friends gawked, beamed, shouted — and danced.

Rubina Ali, 9, was plucked from the tin roof shack she shares with her parents and six siblings in this squalid Mumbai slum to star in "Slumdog Millionaire," the darling of this year's Academy Awards.

Her friend and neighbor, Azharuddin Mohammed Ismail, 10, was also chosen for the film, and both were flown to Los Angeles to watch "Slumdog" nab eight Academy Awards, including the Oscars' highest honor for best film.

Crowds gathered around the few television sets in the slum and it took barely a minute for word of each award to spread through the slum's winding lanes.

"It seems like happiness is falling from the sky," said Sohail Qureshi, a neighbor who said he had watched Rubina grow up.

The Bandra slum could not be farther from the Hollywood glitz, stretch limousines and designer dresses of the Oscars.

Azhar lives in a lean-to made of plastic tarpaulins and moldy blankets. Rubina's home is perched above an ocean of trash. Dirty train tracks and a clogged highway form the slum's borders.

Hordes of journalists descended on the neighborhood Monday. TV tripods straddled the thin stream of sewage outside Rubina's home while rows of satellite trucks idled outside a usually sleepy tea stall.

"Normally, no one talks to us and no one comes here, but now everyone is here," Mohammed Ismail, Azhar's father, said before a bouquet of flashing bulbs.

If the Oscar excitement brought a sheen of glamour to the community, it vanished Monday shortly after the final award was announced.

The journalists left, the dancing stopped and life pressed on as always. The sweatshop men hunched over humming sewing machines. Squatting children relieved themselves by the train tracks. Mothers washed their dishes in murky water.

"I am poor," Fakrunissa Sheikh, 40, said inside her lean-to next to Azhar's.

About 65 million Indians — roughly a quarter of the urban population — live in slums, according to government surveys. Health care is often nonexistent, child labor is rampant and inescapable poverty forms the backdrop of everyday life.

Although everyone from the local butcher to the prime minister called the Oscar coup a proud day for the country, "Slumdog Millionaire" was hardly a phenomenon with Indian audiences.

"Hit in the West, flop in the East," read a front page headline in DNA's Sunday newspaper. The film was a tough sell in Indian movie theaters because it was largely in English, featured few giant stars, and skimped on the dance numbers.

Many people here also objected to its gritty portrayal of India, as well as its title, which some took as derogatory. The film sparked protests in Mumbai and at least one north Indian city by slum residents who said the movie demeaned the poor.

"No one can call me a dog," Sheikh said Monday. "I work very hard."

A widow and mother of seven, Sheikh is a housekeeper who said she earns 600 rupees (US$15) a week.

She said the movie has been good for the families of Azhar and Rubina, but that her days are as difficult as ever.

"Look at my house," she said, pointing to the walls made of rags and the mud floor covered with a thin plastic tarp. "What has changed?"

The "Slumdog" filmmakers said they wrestled with the complications of working with children from impoverished families. Danny Boyle — who won the Oscar for best director — and producer Christian Colson decided to help Azhar and Rubina by securing them spots in Aseema, a nonprofit, English-language school in Mumbai.

Rubina's parents were thrilled with Boyle and his team.

"Whatever a parent could have done, they have done much more than that," Rafiq Qureshi said during the run-up to the awards.

Neighbors said they were nothing but happy for the child actors.

"It's Rubina's fate," said Mohammed Muzzammil, 22. "We don't want anything from her success."

Rubina's best friend Saba Qureshi wants something, however — lots of stories and pictures from Los Angeles.

"My eyes couldn't believe that I was seeing Rubina in America," said Saba, who led her sisters in Bollywood dance numbers throughout the morning. "She looked like an angel."

"When she comes back," Saba said, "we will have the biggest party."

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Retrofitting That Hockey Mask

WHEN the filmmakers behind the new “Friday the 13th” began plotting their resurrection of the gore-besotted horror franchise, they understood they were riding the knife edge of a series (and genre) with its own sets of rules. Campers die. People who have sex die. No matter how fast they move, the victims can never get away. And Jason Voorhees, the hockey-mask-wearing killer, never runs. He walks. But the producers knew they could not go wrong with sliding a topless waterskiing scene between the episodes of carnage and mayhem. Because in movies like “Friday the 13th” less is never more, particularly when it comes to showcasing comely teenagers (a k a the victims).
While very little about “Friday the 13th” can be called delicate, there’s a fine line between reinventing such an institution and alienating the people who make up its meat and potatoes. The genre demands those good-looking, feckless young men and beautiful, courageous women; the geysers of blood erupting from the imperiled campers; and Jason in a hockey mask, a machete in hand, slaughtering human livestock until someone drowns him, or feeds him into a wood chipper.
The level of devotion lavished on the films by their hard-core fans means a level of scrutiny that was once the exclusive purview of Kremlinologists and Talmudic scholars. This, despite a mythology-chronology that resists mental organization.
“These films have a ridiculously convoluted history,” said Devin Faraci, of the horror site Chud.com. Jason barely appears in Part 1. “He shows up in Part 2, gets killed in Part 4,” he said. “There’s an impostor in a Jason mask in Part 5. Jason comes back as a zombie in Part 6. Toxic sludge turns him back into a child at the end of Part 8. He gets blown up in the opening minutes of Part 9 and then becomes a body-hopping force of evil that gets sucked into hell. In Part 10 the earth is destroyed, Jason becomes a cyborg and lands on an alien planet. Where could the series possibly go at that point? A reboot is the only sane answer.”
A reboot is exactly what the new “Friday the 13th” is being called by the people behind the film, who have found a nicely profitable niche in taking classics of the genre and overhauling them. With “Friday the 13th” — opening, naturally, this Friday — the filmmakers have brought the franchise back to earth, literally, dropping Jason and some unsuspecting bait in the middle of Camp Crystal Lake. (“Why do people keep going there?” one viewer wondered aloud during a recent screening.) Jason is now a kind of hunter-survivor, traumatized by the death of his mother at the hands of a camp counselor and self-medicating on death. The rest of the characters? The less said the better, because the film takes great pains to derail expectations about who dies and in what order. The hope among the filmmakers is to emulate their successful 2003 “reimagining” of the seminal “Texas Chainsaw Massacre.”
“When we make one of these films, we go in hoping we can elevate it, not just from a production standpoint but with the actors,” said the producer Brad Fuller. In 2001 Mr. Fuller and his partner Andrew Form founded Platinum Dunes Productions with the director Michael Bay (“Pearl Harbor”). The first Platinum production, “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” took in more than $80 million at the domestic box office. It was followed by the reimagined “Amityville Horror” of 2005 ($65 million); the 2006 prequel “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning” (nearly $40 million), and, in 2007, an adaptation of the 1986 thriller “The Hitcher” (the lone disappointment, at $16 million).
While they did produce the current original thriller “The Unborn,” Mr. Form and Mr. Fuller, strategically speaking, are taking an approach as obvious and foolproof as producing can probably get. Rather than risk resources on new story concepts and characters, they exploit the name recognition of an established franchise, and its existing fan base while striving to expand them both. And the movies are inexpensive; none have cost more than $20 million to produce. “There’s a tremendous benefit to staying in the same genre and producing movies for the same amount of money over and over,” said Mr. Fuller, “because you really learn who your key players are and how best to work with them.”

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The film’s writers, Mark Swift and Damian Shannon, said that like many people on the film, they were horror-film devotees long before entering the industry. “We think we know why they’re successful and why they stick around,” he said. “We wanted it to feel fun, maybe a little nostalgic.” Strangely, despite his murderous ways, Jason is a sympathetic character, Mr. Shannon said: “He’s a victim of neglect.” Mr. Swift added that “there’s something about an outsider in a mask who is now going to punish others that works.”
Mr. Faraci of Chud.com said he believes that fans are ready for a new “Friday the 13th.” “I think the slasher genre is back in a big way, largely as a reaction to the last few years’ spate of dreary, serious or meanspirited horror films. People like slasher films, because they tend to be lighter, more fun and more akin to the experience of a funhouse. There are scares, but they’re not the heavy kind that give you nightmares. And there’s blood, but it’s not presented in the anatomically excruciating detail of the ‘torture porn’ genre.”
“Torture porn,” as exemplified by the “Saw” and “Hostel” series, is decidedly not what the makers of “Friday the 13th” were trying to emulate.
But change, while good, can be risky. “Anytime you deviate from the expectation of a genre and a specific franchise, you risk alienating your core,” said Toby Emmerich, the president and chief executive of New Line Cinema, the studio behind the new “Friday the 13th.” “You don’t want to go too far.” Still, he added, “you want them at the same time to say, “Hey, that’s cool.’ ”
How cool they find the new movie will determine whether the new strain of “Friday” starts begetting offspring with roman numerals. And more. “We’re going to try to remake ‘Nightmare on Elm Street,’ ” Mr. Emmerich said.


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