India-born "Satanic Verses" author Salman Rushdie is not impressed by the triumph of "Slumdog Millionaire" at the 81st Academy Awards and says the movie "piles impossibility on impossibility".
In a speech at Atlanta’s Emory University, Rushdie called the book and movie nothing more than "feel-good".
He also complained about various portions of the narrative, from how characters manage to acquire a gun in India to how they mysteriously wind up at the Taj Mahal, 1,000 miles away from the previous scene.
This isn’t the first time that "Slumdog Millionaire" has felt the lash of Rushdie’s tongue. In January he told the New York Times: "I’m not a very big fan of ‘Slumdog Millionaire’."
"I think it’s visually brilliant. But I have problems with the storyline. I find the storyline unconvincing. It just couldn’t happen. I’m not adverse to magic realism but there has to be a level of plausibility, and I felt there were three or four moments in the film where the storyline breached that rule," he said.
But for Rushdie, the ultimate test is yet to come as his award-winning "Midnight’s Children" is in the process of being made into a movie by director Deepa Mehta.
It will be interesting to see if Rushdie’s own bookish film lives up to his high standards.
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