By David Topping

Before Slumdog Millionaire won the Best Picture Oscar, Susan Cole wrote an article for NOW saying that it’d be “the most violent film to do so ever” if it did, in spite of overwhelming evidence otherwise. And idiots like us actually read and understood her argument based on the words she used! Today, Cole backpedals—she meant to say the most unnecessarily violent Best Picture ever: “Yes, I left out the word ‘unnecessarily’ which messed with my meaning, but for the record, my point is that this film could have been as exhilarating as it had to be, without sustaining its one-note edgy tone and without the hero oozing snot and dripping blood during a torture scene in the first two minutes.” “Thanks for the responses,” she adds, “from those who think I don’t know what movies have won Academy Awards,” before defending previous winners’ violence as justifiable based on their subjects (“Movies about war and battle…need the violence to be authentic”; “No Country For Old Men…is about drug wars and thus need to convey dealers’ violent ethos to be convincing”). If we were in a scrappier mood, we might mention that Indian slums are not exactly havens free from violence and that not representing that violence would mark a movie like Slumdog as inauthentic and unconvincing. But that point’s so obvious it’s probably unnecessary.