Review: Slumdog Millionaire (4.5/5)

‘Slumdog Millionaire’ is the second great movie from Danny Boyle - the exhilarating story of an Indian boy from the slums of Bombay

Slumdog Millionaire
(Danny Boyle and Loveleen Tandan)
Dev Patel, Anil Kapoor, Saurabh Shukla,
Freida Pinto.
Running time: 120 minutes. (15A)

Slumdog Millionaire is the second great movie from British director Danny Boyle. And in both his great films, you can watch a lead character dive into a toilet pool of excrement. Are you sensing a pattern here? You think of Ewan McGregor’s bursting bowels in Trainspotting, a junkie in such a rush for relief he forgets his stash of heroin is hidden up his backside. So he dives in after it, a deep-sea swim in Scotland’s stickiest toilet.
And then there’s Jamal in Slumdog Millionaire, orphaned Bombay urchin and early contender for this year’s award for filthiest scene at the movies. He jumps through the hole of a locked public crapper into a huge pit of poo just to get an autograph of a Bollywood movie star. He emerges like Swamp Thing, perfumed with eau de toilette No 2. The crowd parts. He gets the signature. This is typical Danny Boyle: he likes to measure desperation and then reward it with ecstasy.
Slumdog Millionaire is the exhilarating epic story of Jamal Malik, a kid from the slums, a child of India, who finds himself, at 18, one question away from winning 20 million rupees on India’s version of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire. It also marks the culmination for Boyle of a decade of travel down the by-ways of cinema’s many genres. For Slumdog is a marriage of Hollywood with Bollywood. It’s a high pitch of melodrama shot with a realist lens; a coming-of-age comedy that tangos with tragedy; a heart-thumping romance locking fingers with a thriller. You could call it Boyle’s Bombay mix.
The story is told by Jamal, played by Dev Patel, with a face caught someplace between dumbstruck and defiant. He can’t believe he’s got this far on the quiz show. We first meet him in between filming. He has just been taken away by police, suspected of being a cheat. Major Charles Ingram, you’d imagine, was given his lawyer, and perhaps a cup of tea. Jamal gets a beating and his nipples zapped with electricity. The police inspector (Irrfan Khan) can’t understand how an ignorant tea boy could get this far. The answers, Jamal explains, are tied up with his life story – a saga involving his brother Salim (Madhur Mittal) and the love of his life Latika (Freida Pinto).
Trainspotting was about how not to live your life. Slumdog Millionaire is about how not to grow up. It’s a world where Muslim mothers are clubbed to death; where orphans live on ziggurats of rubbish, or on top of trains, or in the company of shady characters who maim or blind kids to earn extra money as beggars.
The young Jamal and his older brother Salim, filthy, bright-eyed moppets, form a trio of musketeers with feisty orphan Latika. They run into the unctuous figure of Mamon (Ankur Vikal), a man who could be the evil descendent of Fagin. The story is certainly a descendant of Charles Dickens (though it’s adapted liberally from the book Q and A by Indian author Vikas Swarup). And yet, amidst the withering misfortune, it finds time for sweetness and fun – whether that be hanging upside down off trains or stuffing chillies down the private parts of an annoying brother.
The format is fresh and clever: we jump back and forth between the drama of Jamal’s early life and the tension of the gameshow. They bond into a knot in your gut. It is rushed along by kinetic, fluent camerawork, all diagonal compositions and close-ups. Sometimes, it is in danger of its own grandiosity – if this were music, it would be heavy-metal opera. There are pre-emptive edits that show you portentous glimpses of the future. A sign, perhaps, that the editor Chris Dickens was afraid he couldn’t hold our attention. But from early on, when the drums start pounding and the young brothers are chased by police through choking slum streets, the film has us under its spell.
That scene gets the measure of Slumdog. Boyle, and Indian co-director Loveleen Tandan, shoot the sequence with one eye on the chase and another on what it’s like to live there: sleeping dogs, crowded rooms, clucking chickens, scissoring hairdressers. You can smell this place. It’s an exotic tapestry, a blaze of primary colours. Like Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Jamal’s ascent into adulthood could be an allegory for India’s rush into the 21st century: a country where office blocks mushroom out of slums and call centres funnel the world’s telecommuni-problems. (Close your eyes, and those helpful voices sound uncannily Welsh).
But it is India’s poverty that gives the story heft. “Why does everyone here watch this programme?” asks Jamal, before he gets on the show. “It’s a chance to escape. To walk into another life,” says Latika. The whole country comes to a stop to watch Jamal answer the last question. Can a slumdog buck pre-ordained fate?
Slumdog Millionaire is a gushing confluence of sweet and sorrow, beauty and horror, fate and free will. It’s part art-house yet unashamed crowd-pleaser. Few other movies could get away with the contrived tailoring of its melodrama. And still, I was out of my seat shouting for Jamal. Answer the question! Guess the bloody question, then! Get the girl! For Jamal really deserves to win. And he doesn’t even want the money. He really is one in a million.

Review: Defiance (2/5)

Defiance
(Edward Zwick)
Daniel Craig, Liev Schreiber,Jamie Bell,
Running time: 136 minutes. (15A)

Defiance stars Daniel Craig, Liev Schreiber, Jamie Bell and 116 bottles of vodka as the real-life Bielski brothers, a Jewish trio who, in wartime Poland, led a successful resistance against the Nazis. They retreat deep into the chilly pine forest, glug vodka, take hundreds of Jews into their care, glug vodka, and fight a bloody partisan struggle. They also free some 1,200 Jews from the Polish ghetto.
Daniel Craig, with his Slavic steel eyes, becomes the reluctant noble hero. His ox-like younger brother Zus (Liev Schreiber) joins the Soviet army. Jews do not fight, someone offers. These guys do – and brutally. The film gets stuck in with a moral righteousness. Craig’s Tuvia executes an entire family of Nazi collaborators in cold blood.
It is interesting to see a Holocaust film offer Jewish empowerment against the Nazis. The movie, however, is decidedly old-fashioned and needs pruning. Director Edward Zwick (The Last Samurai, Blood Diamond) just can’t resist the tropes of the triumph-over-adversity yarn. He even starts pairing couples off. “I want protection,” says one bedraggled lady to Zus. So he gives it to her.

Review: Bride Wars (2/5)

Bride Wars
(Gary Winick):
Kate Hudson, Anne Hathaway, Kristen Johnston, Candice Bergen.
Running time: 90 minutes. (PG)


Many of the golden screwball comedies of the 1930s and ’40s were comedies of remarriage – couple divorce, drive each other nuts, and get married again.
Bride Wars is a twist on the recent trend of comedies of pre-marriage: engaged couples who are engaged break up and then decide to marry. This time, best friends Liv (Kate Hudson) and Emma (Anne Hathaway) turn into brawling bridezillas when a clerical error sets them up to be married on the same day, in the same hotel, and no one will cancel. Hathaway, with barely enough room on her head for her bulging eyeballs, looks like a Sphynx cat. Hudson purrs and scratches. Saucer of milk for the ladies.
The squealing clichés almost drown out the squealing women. Hathaway looks like she’s biding her time for a good script. She’s sweet and prim, but can’t resist, as usual, getting saucy, which says more about Hathaway than her character Emma.
Unlike the old screwballs, the laughs are tepid and the film is afraid of life. Men are two-dimensional. When Emma fights with her fiancé, you would imagine they had been dating for about four days. Watch Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn scrap it out at the start of Philadelphia Story and you’ll know what I mean.

Review: Brideshead Revisted (2/5)

Brideshead Revisited
(Julian Jarrold)
Matthew Goode, Ben Whishaw, Hayley Atwell, Emma Thompson, Michael Gambon.
Running time: 134 minutes. (12A)

“The avalanche was down, the hillside swept bare behind it.” So wrote Evelyn Waugh about the impending disaster felt by Charles Ryder in Brideshead Revisited. Imagine the novel as a china shop on that same hillside and Julian Jarrold’s adaptation as the impending avalanche.
Waugh’s great novel is not so much revisited as reconstituted. It’s a chicken burger movie. Screenwriters Jeremy Brock and Andrew Davies take it upon themselves to chop it up and add some new filling. It’s now pat, blunt and over-salted. You can’t fault the performances: Ben Whishaw’s Sebastian is a fey flower, while Emma Thompson turns Lady Marchmain into a patrician Windsor. But the movie is a lumbering trudge. It leaves you yearning for Waugh’s ineffable nostalgia.
Perhaps only one director could have nailed it. Sadly Luchino Visconti died 32 years ago. In The Leopard and Death in Venice, he took two great novels about time and decay, honoured them, and produced two masterpieces in the process. Oh well.

Review: Love and Honour (4/5)

Love and Honour
(Yoji Yamada)
Takuya Kimura, Takashi Sasano, Rei Dan.
Running time: 121 minutes.
(IFI Club)


Love and Honour marks the final instalment of beloved Japanese director Yoji Yamada’s samurai trilogy.
This is a fine film: a touching love story borne of treachery and bound up within the samurai honour code – imagine touches of Zatôichi and Indecent Proposal filmed by the great Ozu, with a sprinkling of good humour. It’s the story of Shinnojo (Takuya Kimura), a samurai whose job is to taste the food of the clan’s lord. When he goes blind after food poisoning he gets depressed. His beautiful, loyal wife (Rei Dan), afraid they won’t be able to survive, goes to a ruling samurai officer for help with unsavoury results.
Love and Honour is shot approaching classical Japanese stillness. Yet it’s full of vibrant, lively characters. Takuya Kimura transforms from a jackass into a depressive blind man, to a warrior ridden with vengeance but blessed with humility. Truly, there is nothing more exciting than watching a blind man wield a sword in a samurai duel.

2008: The Films of The Year

Daniel Day Lewis’s moustache, bristling oil and blood. Heath Ledger’s lizard tongue-flick, eyes manic with dripping make-up; the lonely whirr of Wall-E, caterpillaring through the rust and dust of toppled cities; Javier Bardem flipping a coin as if your life depended on it; Sally Hawkins’ dangling earrings like demented grins; Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson cursing their way through Belgium. These are some of the images that prick the mind after another year at the cinema. Just in case you have been bunkered underground during the year, 2008 was an extraordinary time for the movies in Ireland. The biggest box-office draw of the year, Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, was a cinematic and cerebral tour-de-force; the best family film of the year, Andrew Stanton’s Wall-E, opened up the possibilities for animation in the way Orson Welles changed the rulebook for cinema in Citizen Kane. And then there was Paul Thomas Anderson, who, with There Will Be Blood, showed the world he is the Francis Ford Coppola of his generation. At the arthouse, two artists-turned-filmmakers, Julian Schnabel and Steve McQueen, tore up the rules about how to make a film; the directors of Couscous and Gomorrah both took a fresh take on neo-realism, while the Romanians reminded us why they have some of the most exciting filmmakers in the world. As a rule, we don’t like to give out five stars to films. Very few movies have the cinematic originality, artistic beauty, formal accomplishment and hair-raising watch-ability to be designated classics. But this year, with seven five-star films in the Sunday Tribune, it seems we couldn’t stop. In 1980, the famous critic Pauline Kael decried the end of the movies. She got that one wrong. The movies are here and they are as creative, potent, mind-bending, life-affirming, voracious, outrageous and indignant as they ever were. Here’s looking forward to 2009.

Best film of 2008:
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
(Julian Schnabel)
Breathtakingly sad, unsentimental and uplifting, Julian Schnabel’s transformational film about life and death has a spiritual charge that pulses through you, transporting you to the kind of height that leaves you exhilarated and appreciative for your own ordinary life. Staggeringly inventive, with a profound moral sense, it is one of the few genuine masterpieces of the new century’s cinema.

Runner up:
There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson)
Its greatness gnaws at you, long after you’ve seen it. Paul Thomas Anderson’s juggernaut is about oil and it is about America and it is one of the most cynical films about human nature ever made. It also added a great character to the film canon – Daniel Plainview, a perversely hilarious and monstrously amoral oilman unforgettably played by Daniel Day Lewis.

Five other five-star films:
Hunger (Steve McQueen)
A film about Bobby Sands and a work of stunning originality and dazzling cinematic expression. Its sheer visceral thump left viewers hobbling into the light broken, beaten and scarred. With just one film, McQueen has shown he is a major cinematic artist.

4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days
(Cristian Mungiu).
The pinnacle of the Romanian new wave, Cristian Mungiu’s film is a harrowing drama and a stunning thriller about one student’s plight while trying to help her roommate get an abortion.

Wall-E (Andrew Stanton)
The Citizen Kane of animation. A masterwork of visual, almost silent, poetry and a gentle love story between two robots set on earth and in space. And it does all this within the constraints of the family movie. Genius.

No Country For Old Men
(The Coen Brothers)
The Coen Brothers refashion Cormac McCarthy’s flinty, spare prose into images of spiritual simplicity – a serio-comic neo-western that is lament for modern times. It’s beautifully shot, acted and edited – a superior genre movie marks not just a return to form, but the best film of the Coens’ career.

Couscous (Abdel Kechiche)
There is something timeless about Couscous in its depiction of a man who just wants to do good for his family. But it is its richness that astounds. Abdel Kechiche invisibly, and very beautifully, knits a complex social portrait of this immigrant community – a stunning reimagining of neo-realism.

The next best 10
(in no particular order)

The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan)
Caramel (Nadine Labaki)
You, The Living (Roy Andersson)
Happy-Go-Lucky (Mike Leigh)
The Edge of Heaven (Fatih Akin)
Be Kind Rewind (Michel Gondry)
Still Life (Jia Zhangke)
Gomorrah (Matteo Garrone)
My Winnipeg (Guy Madden)
Silent Light (Carlos Reygadas)

Worst film of the year:
Speed Racer
(The Wachowski Brothers)

Best Irish film:
Saviours (Ross Whitaker and Liam Nolan)
Runner up: Kisses (Lance Daly)

Best Nearly-Irish Film:
Hunger (Steve McQueen)
Runner up: In Bruges (Martin McDonagh)

Most over-rated film of year:
Changeling (Clint Eastwood)

Most underrated film of the year:
The Mist (Frank Darabont)

Best Director:
Julian Schnabel (The Diving Bell and The Butterfly)
Runner up: Paul Thomas Anderson (There Will Be Blood)

Best new director:
Nadine Labaki (Caramel)

Best cinematographer:
Roger Deakins
(No Country For Old Men):

Best male performance:
Daniel Day Lewis (There Will be Blood)
Runner up: Heath Ledger (The Dark Knight)

Best female performance:
Kristin Scott Thomas (I Loved You So Long)
Runner up: Sally Hawkins (Happy-go-Lucky)

Best Documentary:
Man On Wire (James Marsh)

Best animation:
Wall-E (Andrew Stanton).

Most embarrassing cinematic moment:
Any moment of Al Pacino in 88 minutes.

Most spine-tingling cinematic moment:
Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight

The ‘please make it never happen again’ award goes to:
Summer of the Flying Saucer (Martin Duffy)

Reviews: Australia (3/5); Bedtime Stories (2/5)

Australia
(Baz Luhrman):
Nicole Kidman, Hugh Jackman,
Brandon Walters.
Running time: 165 minutes. (12A)

Baz Luhrman’s Australia is a huge gamble – a jaunty pub-brawling soap-operatic camp epic. It’s got wobbly Rolf Harris music and a blast of ‘Waltzing Matilda’. It’s also got Nicole Kidman as Lady Sarah Ashley, a shrill British aristocrat who comes over to Oz to run a cattle ranch. And there’s Hugh Jackman’s Drover, a beefy local who reluctantly agrees to help her fight the local cattle baron. They drive 10,000 cattle through the territories, drive each other nuts, and run into a bit of trouble with the Japanese during the second World War. And then there’s Nullah (Brandon Walters), a charming half-caste Aboriginal who narrates the story and earns their protection from the Australian authorities.
Drover is lewd. Lady Ashley a prude. Jackman is half Popeye, half Bluto. There is an audible gasp among women in the audience when he rips his shirt off. Jackman looks like he wants to pick Kidman up and twist her into a balloon dog. Instead, he presses her with his lips up against a tree. Their kiss would melt concrete. Kidman mines Katharine Hepburn’s pernickety prig in The Philadelphia Story and she’s terrific. She’s mercurial and game for anything, winning many laughs by allowing us to laugh at her.
Luhrman singlehandedly wants to make amends for Australia’s treatment of the Aboriginals. The story is full of wonder and respect for their ways. He’s also full of respect for the epic movies of old. He finds a way to work in ‘Over The Rainbow’, with a cheesy emphasis on Oz. There is a cattle drive straight from Red River. The romantic banter is To Have and Have Not. Australia is the film Howard Hawks never made in the 1950s. Indeed, Australia wants to be a 1950s epic, by way of Gone With The Wind. Luhurman and his movie are nostalgic for the uninhibited artifice of old Hollywood. It’s meant to be old-fashioned: there are glaring studio sets, a plot with more peaks and troughs than a cardiogram, murderous villains whose sneers get zooming close-ups, and charitable supporting characters who get sacrificed for good causes. The pace is a gallop and it hasn’t a clue when to end. Yet it’s shot with such verve and such panache, it’s hard not to go along with it. Australia is pure camp, a celebration of unoriginality. It plays on a sensibility that might not exist in the younger cinema viewer, who prizes dearly an ever-increasing realism. Viewers over a certain age, who grew up with these kinds of movies, will get it instantly. It’s utterly daft, but it’s also a loving homage to the way we used to watch movies.

Bedtime Stories
(Adam Shankman):
Adam Sandler, Keri Russell, Courteney Cox, Russell Brand, Richard Griffiths.
Running time: 100 minutes. (PG)

Adam Sandler is the Christmas pudding of movie stars. You either like the fruitcake or you don’t. Sandler is at his least irritating in this cheap children’s comedy served with a slice of fantasy. Perhaps he’s toned down the manic man-child act so as not to scare the kids. Bedtime Stories is another addition to Sandler’s cynical obsession with the American dream. Skeeter Bronson (Sandler) is a put-upon hotel handyman who has to look after his niece and nephew for a week. Each day, the outlandish bedtime stories he makes up start to come true. He quickly releases the benefits of this: he dreams of running the hotel, owning a Ferrari and winning the boss’s Paris Hilton-esque daughter. Only fate has other plans for him, in the form of nice teacher Keri Russell, if he can save her school from demolition.
Sandler eats a toothpaste sandwich, but otherwise plays it gently. Even Russell Brand, normally out to shock your grandmother, and here playing Skeeter’s best friend, seems cowed by the presence of children. Director Adam (Hairspray) Shankman uses some cheap CGI sequences for each story – trips into the Wild West, a space station, a mediaeval castle and a gladiatorial ring. But the story conjures little magic.
It’s lazy hokum and instantly forgettable, thrown together for the easy tastes of young kids.

We're back in business...

Happy new year. After a few months in which the blog had to take a backseat, The Vast Picture Show is back in business. I'll try to get around soon to filing those missing reviews. In the meantime, you can dig all my work over at the Sunday Tribune website here.