Short circuits

The marketing for "Slumdog Millionaire" might have given prospective viewers the impression that it's "the feel-good movie of the year!" While this year's Oscar-winning heavyweight certainly has its uplifting moments, there's a lot of strife along the way. It's not as if you're going to find inspiration in orphans being exploited, police torturing an innocent man or a boy diving into human excrement -- even if director Danny Boyle and company manage to turn the latter into one of the movie's sweetest scenes. But watching "Slumdog Millionaire" is like taking an often-harrowing journey, and the destination becomes that much more meaningful and rewarding thanks to the daunting obstacles along the way.

The movie takes place in Mumbai (formerly Bombay), India, where a man (Dev Patel) who grew up in the slums has become a TV sensation on the game show "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" But how could someone with such a depressingly poor background know so much and keep winning? Is he cheating? Through a series of flashbacks, we learn the answers to those and other questions on his quest to find the love of his life. The result is a not-to-be-missed movie whose R rating -- mostly for disturbing images and violence involving children -- shouldn't keep most parents from allowing their teens to watch it. (If the PG-13-rated "Dark Knight" was fine for them, "Slumdog" should be, too.)

Today's DVD (Fox, $30) could contain nothing more than the film and still be one of the year's best. Happily, it has a decent array of extras, including commentary by Boyle, Patel and others, as well as 12 deleted scenes totaling more than half an hour, a 23-minute making-of featurette and a 5-minute montage set to music. The Blu-ray ($40) adds a script-to-screen look at a key scene, a music video, a related short film and a digital copy for portable devices.

RANDY A. SALAS