Slumdog piles impossibility on impossibility - Rushdie

The world might be lauding Dev Patel-Freida Pinto starrer Slumdog Millionaire at the moment but India-born Salman Rushdie isn"t impressed. The 'Satanic Verses' author has said at the 81st Academy Awards that the movie 'piles impossibility on impossibility'.

In a speech at Atlanta's Emory University, Rushdie blatantly called the book and movie nothing more than 'feel-good'. He also complained about the narrative and said that the characters managing to acquire a gun in India and mysteriously winding up at the Taj Mahal, 1,000 miles away from the previous scene was unreal.

Examiner.com reported that he had lashed out against the film earlier too. In January he had 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."

Rushdie also slammed The Reader and The Curious Case of Benjamin Butto. In the same speech he called The Reader 'a leaden, lifeless movie killed by respectability', and said that The Curious Case of Benjamin Button 'doesn't finally have anything to say'.

When he was asked if he was simply suffering from an unacknowledged book-to-film aversion, he said: “Actually, no. In 2004 I was a vocal supporter of The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King and I adored The Dark Knight."

Well, the world will get a clear picture soon and The Examiner too talked about this final test. After all, Rushdie's award-winning 'Midnight's Children' is in the process of being made into a movie by director Deepa Mehta. Let"s see if Rushdie can turn so harsh and be such a critic when his own time comes.