Lost Best Picture to Ghandi

I think films like "Gandhi", "Slumdog Millionaire", "The Last Emperor" or "Memoirs of a Geisha" capture the imagination very powerfully at the time of their release. But they don't get much repeat viewing over the years because they're based on cultures that are too alien to us. If there had been one lead actor from our background/culture as in "The King and I" or "The Killing Fields" we would have been more invested in the experience.

A couple of different comments about this:

1) I think that you may be somewhat overgeneralizing the need for an Anglo-American point-of-view character. Your immediate circle of acquaintances may well prefer it. However, there is also an audience out there that actively prefers being transported to different "worlds" via the movies; and the more completely immersed they can be, the better.

2) There are a host of other variables that go into how "re-watchable" a movie is. Gandhi is the kind of big, prestige bio-pic that the Academy has always loved (going back to the 1930s), and that has almost always felt a bit ponderous to me (regardless of whether or not it was set in my own culture). Slumdog, by contrast, is an entirely different animal, and one that I am far more likely stop and watch for a while if I stumble across it again on cable.

3) All of the movies that you mentioned (on both sides of that POV character divide) are made by and primarily for people from the Anglo-American culture. None of them really represent those foreign cultures as seen from the inside. As with many things, they often tell you more about the storyteller than about the subject. The King and I is considered so completely off base by the Thais that (as of the last time that I checked) it is *still* completely banned in Thailand. I generally (you can always find exceptions to such things) find it much more interesting to see Japan through the eyes of Kurosawa or Mizoguchi; India through the eyes of someone such as Satyajit Ray; Russia through the eyes of Eisenstein or Tarkovsky; etc. (Side note: I also find that pointing out the background behind certain references, the cultural meaning / implications of certain gestures, etc. in those sorts of foreign movies to be about as good of a use of DVD commentary tracks as I have seen. They can be immensely helpful for some of those kinds of details.)

This may relate back to why you prefer foreign set movies to have a Western POV character. If you are sticking to movies made by Western directors (and screenwriters), *they* relate more to stories that are actually about people like themselves who are encountering strange (to them) conditions.

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