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Screen grab from The Leopard: The Prince and his family have a picnic.

We haven’t seen any posters or trailers for Slumdog Millionaire. Will it be shown in Manila at all? (You can watch whatever you like; I prefer to see movies on a screen at least 20 feet high.) Naturally this set off another conspiracy theory (compounded by disgruntlement because the only movie that opened in my neighborhood yesterday was the Jonas Brothers Concert Experience): distributors won’t show it here because they perceive Pinoys as racists who will not watch a movie about “Bumbay” (The local word for Indian, derived from Bombay/Mumbai. The notion of race itself is racist; as my dictionary puts it, “Scientifically it is accepted as obvious that there are subdivisions of the human species, but it is also clear that genetic variation between individuals of the same race can be as great as that between members of different races.”)

So much for conspiracy theories: Turns out Slumdog opens in Manila in late April. The word is that there are no available prints as its theatrical run in the US was extended. (They can’t make more prints for a hit?)

Salman Rushdie recently drew a lot of flak, which must’ve been his intention, with his disparaging comments on outright dismissal of Slumdog Millionaire. Not content with having incensed fans of Danny Boyle’s very popular movie, Rushdie now takes on ALL film adaptations in this essay in the Guardian. You have to hand it to the object of the long fatwa from the Ayatollah Khomeini: he has no fear of being disliked. Say what you will about his possible motives—territoriality (India is his), envy (Where’s the movie of Midnight’s Children?), publicity-seeking—he throws down a strong argument. Plus he gets readers interested in half-forgotten works: I’m now looking for Jan Potocki’s The Manuscript Found At Saragossa.

Film adaptations Salman Rushdie approves of:
The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien, filmed by Peter Jackson (Rushdie says the movies are better; no doubt Tolkienites will have their say)
No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy, filmed by the Coen Brothers
Oil! by Upton Sinclair, filmed by Paul Thomas Anderson as There Will Be Blood
The Leopard by Giuseppe di Lampedusa, filmed by Luchino Visconti
The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass, filmed by Volker Schlondorff
Contempt by Alberto Moravia, filmed by Jean-Luc Godard
Jules and Jim by Henri-Pierre Roché, filmed by Francois Truffaut
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton, filmed by Martin Scorsese
Wise Blood by Flannery O’Connor, filmed by John Huston
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, filmed by David Lean

In his Front Row blog Richard Brody notes that Godard’s Masculin-Feminin was adapted from two stories by Maupassant. When the finished movie was screened for the copyright owner, he found the material unrecognizable so no credit was necessary. I’m pretty sure that brilliant scene in which Jean-Pierre Leaud makes a recording for his girlfriend does not appear in Maupassant.