Slumdog Millionaire - Review

Slumdog Millionaire moves with the lickety-split pace of the city in which it's set, Mumbai, where slums become high-rises within a decade and even the smallest children are out to make a buck. Danny Boyle, always a lively director, has found his match here, and he, his enormously talented cast and cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle plunge headfirst into their story of love, poverty, ambition and always, energy.

But even more importantly, there's also Boyle's continuing sense of good humor and decency, which buoys both the moments of darkness and the eventual fairy tale ending. Scotsman Boyle has not traveled all the way to India to expose the horrors of the slums or seek some half-baked spiritual awakening. He's here to tell a fantastic, fantastical story, one that could only happen in ever-changing, ever-alive India. The conventional story may not have gone far in an English-language or more familiar setting, but with Boyle's kinetic energy and the wonders of another culture, Slumdog turns sparky and vibrant.

At 18, Jamal (Patel) is an average menial laborer in Mumbai, but he's poised to win a fortune on India's homegrown version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. The host (Anil Kapoor) is suspicious of how this slumdog could know all the answers, and during an overnight lull in production, Jamal is taken into custody and tortured by some tough cops (among them Indian legend Irfan Khan) to find out how he cheated. Turns out he knows the answers, all of which lie in a series of flashbacks to his past, from the race riot that left him and his brother Samir orphans to their childhood spent as street hustlers, organized by a Fagin type who is willing to burn out the eyes of the best singers so they'll earn double.

Thankfully, Simon Beaufoy's satisfying and twisty script is smarter than the strict Q&A format-- questions posed early in the film aren't answered until the end, and the story movies fluidly between past and present and locations all over India. It's aided by the zippy camera, a Boyle trademark, which turns the tight corners of the slums and flies at the speed of the train on which Jamal and Salim hitchhike. Jamal and Salim's story intersects early on with Latika's, a fellow orphan who meets up with them at various points in their lives. As maturity brings out the violent and ambitious side of Salim, and Latika's beauty drafts her as a kind of courtesan to the wealthiest gangsters, Jamal is left alone to pursue a more mainstream life. But Latika, and to a lesser extent Salim, never fully leave him, and Jamal's TV appearance is his last-ditch chance to bring them all together.

The movie ends so happily there's actually a dance sequence involved, but everything before it has been so consistent that the brief dip into fantasy isn't a problem. The performances are uniformly exceptional, from veterans Kapoor and Khan to the seven-year-old children, speaking only Hindi, who play the young Jamal, Latika and Salim. The actors' enthusiasm, couple with Boyle's energy behind the screen, make magic out of Slumdog Millionaire's songs and sorrow, its bursts of energy and carefully selected moments of reflection. A story of coincidences and luck and eventually fate, it's a classic, perhaps cliched tale-- but one that has rarely felt or looked so alive.

The Dark Knight - Review

Forget the great things you’ve heard about The Dark Knight. No matter how lavish the praise or how determined the hyperbole, it’s all understatement. The Dark Knight is I suppose the greatest superhero movie ever made, but it’s so far beyond the limited men in tights genre that attempting to compare it with movies like Spider-Man, Superman, or even Batman Begins is almost laughable. Director Christopher Nolan’s film trumps everything and everyone, including himself. It’s not just the best superhero movie ever made, it’s one of the best movies ever to show up in a theater.

More than a film about a man in a mask trying to stop the bad guy or save the innocent, it’s the story of a city and its people trapped between an unstoppable force and an immovable object. Gotham City is at the center of everything while two men, each mad in their own way, fight to control the hearts and minds of its populace. The Joker (Heath Ledger) bursts onto the scene, and correctly pronounces himself the living embodiment of chaos. This is a man who cares for nothing and wants nothing, except to watch the world crumble around him. Nolan wastes no time explaining Joker’s origin, he is a force of nature and as such has always existed. Faced with pure chaos given form, the people of Gotham turn to selfish terror, and the Joker laughs gleefully as we watch them dance to his tune. Opposing him is Batman (Christian Bale), embodying the pursuit of single-minded justice and, hoping for the best in mankind, he seeks to inspire them to something better through living symbols like Gotham’s new District Attorney Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart), or top cop Lt. James Gordon (Gary Oldman). In the end it doesn’t matter whether Batman captures Joker or Joker takes out Batman. What matters is which of them wins the battle for Gotham City’s soul.

The genius of Heath Ledger’s performance as Joker is that in a way, you’ll almost find yourself rooting for him to win. Let him burn it down, if only so we can see how he’ll make it happen. Ledger’s Joker is easily the best on screen villain since Star Trek II’s Khan, a performance unlike anything else you’ve seen. He is at once funny and terrifying. He’ll make you laugh at all the wrong moments, and then cringe in unspeakable terror at all the others. His peals of laughter bounce through the film, echoing long after the credits roll and leaving Joker’s mark not just on this movie, but on cinema. He’s an instant icon. The Oscar buzz for what Ledger has done is not premature. He drives the entire movie with his performance, embodying something so out of control and his own way so true, that the whirlwind of his mere presence destroys all comers.

What I’m getting at here is that most of what’s going on in The Dark Knight is mental. It’s not that there isn’t action, there’s plenty of it, but even when Batman is running around punching people in the head or racing through the streets on his incredible, visually stunning gadgets, it’s the psychology of what’s happening pushes the story. Because of that, the problems Nolan had directing some of the action sequences in Batman Begins, are utterly erased here. Batman lurks in the shadows dispatching bad guys with a single punch. There are no extended, complicated fight scenes for him to botch because quite frankly the movie doesn’t need them. There’s plenty of fighting, but it happens in quick encounters staged one after another with a kind of lyrical precision I haven’t seen in anything outside of the action-poetry in last year’s The Bourne Ultimatum. When Batman is forced into an extended showdown, it takes the form of a brutal, economical beating, with punches landed with vicious force and battles being waged by men who have made themselves blunt instruments. What makes the action so arresting is the force of will behind it, the philosophical battle driving it. You’ll be on the edge of your seat for every single moment, whether it’s a simple conversation at Bruce Wayne’s office, or a balls to the wall brawl inside a gangster-infested Hong Kong skyscraper.

Nothing is wasted, there’s not a minute in the film that doesn’t fit into a bigger, broader, deeper picture. That goes for everything, right down to the way Nolan filmed it. When you see it (and you will), settle for nothing less than IMAX. Portions of the film were shot in specifically in IMAX, but not as some gimmick. They play a key role in setting the tone of the story. Most interior scenes are shot using normal film, and when displayed in an IMAX theater, they use only a portion of the total, massive screen, thus conveying an intimate setting. Exterior shots, flyovers of the city and amazing, breathtaking chases are done using IMAX, stretching out to cover the entire, enormous IMAX canvas, conveying a tremendous sense of scope by rote of contrast. Gorgeous, dark, city flyovers are used to hammer home the size of the world Batman and Joker are operating in, and pummel the audience with the scale of this place and hopelessness of Batman’s task in guarding it. None of that will be quite so evident seen anywhere but in IMAX, and you owe it to yourself, perhaps more with this film than with any other in the history of the format, to see it in the best way possible.

The Dark Knight is both entertainment and art, slipped into a dark, gritty package. It marks a completely new direction for that which we’ve come to know as the superhero genre, here’s hoping others have the sense to follow it. Whether or not they do it’s unlikely anyone, including Nolan himself, will ever top what’s been accomplished here. It works on every level and no matter what I’ve said about it in this review, believe me when I tell you that I’m underselling it. Movies rarely get better than this. Check your gut before you go in, The Dark Knight is going to land a punch right in the middle of it. You won’t soon forget it.

I Am Legend - Review

I’ve never been prouder of Hollywood. They’ve taken a dark, eerie, and emotionally shattering post-apocalyptic script and turned it into a big budget blockbuster starring Will Smith, without compromising any of the challenging, gut-wrenching content that made the whole thing so tragically beautifully haunting in the first place. I Am Legend is an absolutely uncompromising film, the solitary and hopeless story of one man, staying alive and refusing to surrender even when there’s no longer any reason to continue. It sticks with that too, not as a setup to some big action set piece, but as a genuinely moving, horrifying, and thrilling journey into one man’s lonely, desperate hell.

That man, the last man, is Will Smith as military scientist Robert Neville. I guess he’s also technically speaking, mayor of New York and president of the United States, since there’s no one else left to fill the jobs. Three years ago, the population of planet Earth was wiped out by a plague, and as far as Robert can tell he’s all that’s left. Except that is, for the mindless, vicious, vampire-like, sunlight allergic creatures which scream, hunt, and bloodlust just outside his front door each and every night.

Robert has survived for two reasons, and neither of them have anything to do with his natural immunity to a world-killing disease. That only helped him survive the first wave of dying. He’s lived this long because he’s smart and because he’s utterly focused, unwavering in his determination, no matter how ludicrous or far-fetched, to “fix this”. Each day he follows the same, specific, carefully thought out routine. He gets up, he eats, he hunts, he looks futilely for other survivors, and he looks for a cure. When the sun goes down, he bars the windows and hides in his bathtub with his only companion, a German Shepherd named Sam, praying that tonight won’t be the night that his carefully planned precautions fail, and the monsters find him.

Much of the film is spent watching Robert toil under these conditions, as the already dead world around him starts to crumble even further. The monsters he’s been avoiding are getting worse, he’s no closer to finding a cure, and he’s long since run out of hope. It soon becomes clear that Robert keeps working and living not because he really thinks he’ll succeed, but because there is quite simply nothing else for him to do. It is what’s kept him sane and strong so far, but soon what little strength he has left is put to the test.

Will Smith is quite simply commanding as Robert Neville. Unlike his other big-budget efforts, he’s calm and restrained as Neville, remaining not only catchphrase free, but also managing to be utterly broken and vulnerable beneath a complicated veneer of determination and strength. We knew Will Smith could act, we just haven’t seen him do it in anything with a major Hollywood budget. Finally though, he’s fully cast off the Big Willie persona that earns him all those paychecks and turned in something deep and mesmerizing. And he has to, because the movie rests entirely on his shoulders. For most of its running time, there are no other characters. Will simply is the movie, his only sounding board an expectedly silent canine companion.

Meanwhile, this is still a big-budget, Hollywood action movie… of sorts. It’s full of all the usual, splashy (and sometimes bad/unnecessary... what ever happened to animal trainers and prosthetics?) CGI and eye-popping set pieces. The film would be worth seeing just for its opening scene alone, in which Will Smith pops a rifle out the window of his “borrowed” Ford Mustang and goes high-speed deer hunting through downtown New York. Warner Brothers got their money’s worth. Except where other action movies would be loud and jittery, I Am Legend is still and quiet. It looks glossy, but director Francis Lawrence makes his movie zig when all the big money behind it might normally urge him towards zag. The movie takes chances, assuming its audience is up for more than ear-splitting explosions, zombie retreads, and happy, catchphrase laden endings; even if this is an effects heavy, tentpole Holiday pic. I can't however, help wishing the film's final script had taken it even further. It ends almost too abruptly, where earlier drafts of the script went even further in putting Neville through the wringer. But perhaps that's asking too much. Even as it is, it's hard to say if it’ll pay off, smart and downbeat rarely plays mainstream (just look at the fast disappearance of Frank Darabont’s The Mist), but if you’re up for melancholy and contemplation in an action-thriller; then it just doesn’t get much better than I Am Legend.