Salman Rushdie: Thumbs down on "Slumdog Millionaire"

Speaking at Emory University on Sunday night, famed Indian novelist Salman Rushdie had few kind words for either Oscar-winning film "Slumdog Millionaire" or the novel from which it was drawn. According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Rushdie "lambasted" both the "feel-good movie" and the book.

“The movie piles impossibility on impossibility,”  Rushdie told the audience. "Q&A" by Vikas Swarup, the novel from which the movie was adapted, was the source of the film's problems, he opined.

Rushdie didn't have much positive to say about other Oscar contenders either. He called “The Reader” a "leaden, lifeless movie killed by respectability” and criticized “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” complaining that, “It doesn’t finally have anything to say.”

Rushdie is Distinguished Writer in Residence at Emory and will be giving occasional lectures there over a period of five years. He may eventually have the chance to discuss a movie of his own with the Emory community. A film version of his novel "Midnight's Children" is scheduled for release in 2010.