Slumdog Millionaire (2008)

The standees in Movies@Dundrum describe Slumdog Millionaire as the "The feel-good film of the decade"... so from the get go I'm worried; I'm not usually into "feel-good" films. Add to that the buzz about this film from the US... There's nothing wrong with good buzz... but about a "feel-good" film with no associated buzz about the script or the acting... what are the critics buzzing about exactly? Is this just some great PR machine at work? On the other hand this is a Danny Boyle film and imho Danny Boyle is on of the most interesting directors out there at the moment. So I cast aside my trepidation and decided to bask in the buzz. One ticket for the opening night please.

For those who don't know, Slumdog Millionaire is based on a novel called Q and A by Vikas Swarup. It's about a boy from the slums of Mumbai, Jamal (played by Dev Patel), who goes on the Indian version of Who Want To Be A Millionaire but is suspected of cheating when he reaches the last question; nobody believes that a kid from the slums could possibly do so well without help.

Is it a good film though? For the most part, yes. It is a good film... but it's not really a great film... That said, I really enjoyed it, it's practically impossible not to get caught up in the drama of the story. There's a reason Who Wants To Be A Millionaire is the most internationally popular TV franchise of all time.. the lights, the music, suspense of it all just draws you in. Danny Boyle is very successful in bring that suspense into the film, you need to know what happened to Jamal, how did he get to this point?

It's also a great looking film. The cinematography is brilliant, the slight over-saturation really works and there's some wonderful framing - excellent set pieces in the land and cityscapes. There's a vibrancy to the film that really sets off the story... It really reminds me of City of God. I'm sure I'm not the first nor will I be the last to say that...

Mentioning City of God brings us to the most important question though... City of God was one of the greatest films I've ever seen and it didn't win an Oscar. So is Slumdog Millionaire worthy of the hype? I'm not sure... I'm loath to say that it isn't because I think it's great that a film like this is being brought to a mass audience. I also think it's great for Danny Boyle and his co-director Loveleen Tandan that they are getting recognition for a great film. Danny Boyle should have been nominated for an Oscar for Trainspotting and 28 Days Later...!. Personally I can't say if this film is worthy of the Oscar, I haven't seen the competition so I can't really comment... but I can say that it's not without flaws.

I think the most glaring of them is that, in all the excitment, it's easy to miss that we don't actually know that much about the characters. There are glimpses at what drives them... but we don't actually know them outside what is relevant to the story. We don't know who they are, we just know what they've done. I would have liked to have seen more characterisation. Another is that I felt toward the end that we got a bit mixed in what matters... there's two threads in the story and as they both climax it doesn't quite manage to keep the momentum for both stories but it doesn't quite manage to merge them either... It might just be me but there wasn't the satisfaction in the end that I expected.

The last thing that bothered me about Slumdog Millionaire isn't really a flaw but I do think it stops it from being a really great film. I thought it was forgettable... and maybe that's the problem of the feel-good film. There was nothing there for me to think about afterwards. I like to walk out of a theatre thinking about what I've just experienced - I might be thinking "What would I have done?" or "How could that have happen?" or I might just be thinking "Wow, the effects in that film were incredible", it doesn't matter. What matters is that I'm thinking of it and in this case I wasn't.

So... how to rate it? I would have loved for this film to be a new classic... which is what the marketeers would have us believe... but I really don't think it is. I think it's a good story told well and that might be enough for it to win an Oscar but it's not enough for me.

8.5/10

There Will Be Blood (2007)

I didn't really know what to expect of There Will Be Blood. I didn't really want to see it. It didn't seem like my kind of film... I don't really like Westerns and it seemed a bit "worthy" to me... and I never mean "worthy" in a good way. Also I'd heard that it was very long and I was a bit ambivalent on the director - not that I don't like Paul Thomas Anderson or anything, it's just that after having seen three of his films previously I still didn't really have an opinion on him. I decided I had to though, there was so much talk about it and I just couldn't see how a film that seemed so... linear perhaps? could be garnering so much praise.

Happily, it wasn't really a Western, it doesn't really feel that long and it wasn't overly "worthy" either. I still have no particular opinion on Paul Thomas Anderson though.

So what's it all about? Well, There Will Be Blood is loosely based on the 1927 Upton Sinclair novel Oil!. Since you've probably never read the book though and I gather the association is quite loose, I shall summarise. Basically There Will Be Blood is the story of the life of Daniel Plainview (played by Daniel Day-Lewis). There really isn't much more to it. It opens with Daniel happening upon oil while out on his own in the desert prospecting for silver and follows him as he grows his oil business, eventually becoming one of the most successful oil men in California.

It's a very interesting film. I don't usually enjoy films that just go from A to B but I found this one very interesting. Not storywise, it's fairly mundane in that respect, stuff happens, la la la. Where There Will Be Blood excels is in the characterisation, it paints these people's personalities and motivations so vividly... I know that doesn't really sound like much but to be honest it's something that's very rare in recent films. I thought the acting was great all round and I have to say it eventually, Daniel Day-Lewis completely deserved the Oscar and every other award he's won for this performance. Really, it's an amazing performance. The other characters in the film are peripheral in a sense but I still thought they were very well played and that all the interactions between them were suberb. As an aside, I've noticed on the internet that opinion has been split on Paul Dano's performance as Paul / Eli Sunday. I just wanted to say that I thought he was good.

There was one thing that annoyed me though... I don't want to give anything away but I did think that the film skipped too much time at one point, when it jumped to 1927... I would have liked to know what happened in the years between. It's rare that I'd say that a two and a half hour film should have been longer but in this case I am!

Anyway, I thought it was a good film... I didn't think it was a great film to be honest, but it was an interesting film and Daniel Day-Lewis was very good. I'm glad I saw, if only because I wanted to see what all the fuss was about...

Juno (2007)

You've probably heard of Juno; it's the indie comedy which has been nominated for four Oscars - comparisons abound with Little Miss Sunshine from last year - and like Little Miss Sunshine, it's a cheerful little film, it jaunts along with its clever little offbeat jokes and it's oh so postmodern...

Hmm... I sounded quite negative there... I actually liked this film, I thought it was very good, in fact one of the best films I've seen this year (granted it's only February but I've seen a good few films). I laughed, I almost shed a tear, but I just don't think that I'll be thinking about Juno and her quandary in six months time. It was all just very neat and shiny, it was all very slick and "sorted". It was just all too easy and I felt like I was being played.

I should probably tell you a bit about the film... Juno is a 16-year old girl - smart, independent, given to speaking in ridiculous slang (thankfully that's mostly contained to the first ten or fifteen annoying minutes) and above all pregnant. The father is Bleeker, sweet kid but Juno doesn't seem to appreciate this. Anyway to go any further plotwise would be to give it away but obviously pregnant in high school is not the greatest situation to be in and the film follows the tale of the pregnancy.

What I liked about this film was all the smaller roles, Bleeker (played by Michael Cera) was particularly good, as was J.K. Simmons as her father. It was the cast of characters around Juno that made her more believable, simply because on her own she was too cool, too sure of herself. Looking back at the film we didn't really get much from her, it was the reactions to her that made the film interesting. That said, she was pretty funny - wisecracks don't make a character but they do make you laugh and that's always good.

To be honest, I did think it was a sweet film, I did laugh and I did like it but I think there was an opportunity here to make a really great film and it was lost. I would have liked to see Juno "deal" a bit more. I would have liked it all to be harder *look away if you don't want to know a plot point* - which is not the say that I wanted to see disowned or anything - *you can look again* but I just think don't think that anyone learned anything from the events in the film. Not that people have to learn things the whole time but... I don't know, there just could have been more to it... That said, I'm still giving it 8 out of 10, I still think it was a good laugh and it's well worth seeing.

Anyway, two random points to mention. One, it did quite remind me of Napoleon Dynamite. Two, I can't believe this is the same guy who made Thank You For Smoking. I loved Thank You For Smoking and while this was a good film I do think it was a bit of a safe step back... but then that's just my opinion... What did you think?

8/10

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2008)

I'm a big fan of Tim Burton, the only film of his that I haven't seen is Pee-Wee's Big Adventure, but I would be remiss if I didn't say that I think his output has been somewhat inconsistent. The last film of his that I really loved was Big Fish in 2003 and while I liked Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, I wasn't blown away. Corpse Bride I was really disappointed with.

Which leads us to his latest offering, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. It's not a bad film, it's actually reasonably entertaining but it just didn't quite work for me. It wasn't the musical aspect, I love musicals and I left the cinema thinking that I'd much preferred to have seen it as a stage show... I think the problem was that I just found it so predictable. From practically the moment Johnny Depp's character steps off the boat, you can see how it's going to end (don't worry, I'm not going to tell you!). Now, predictability isn't necessarily a bad thing, I take all films as they come, however if a film is going to be predictable there has to be something else keep you hooked and this film didn't have anything. The songs were decent, the acting was fine, it looked great but it was never enough to tip it into the category of a great film, for me.

There were some positives though. As I mentioned, visually it was brilliant, all the hallmarks of a Tim Burton film and then some. Also I thought the principle characters were perfectly cast, particularly Alan Rickman, when you hear his voice you just know there's something evil about him. Helena Bonham Carter too was spot on and Johnny Depp is never out of place in Tim Burton's shadowy gothic world. It was also pretty funny when it was trying to be, Sacha Baron Cohen certainly did his job on that front.

All in all it was fine, there was nothing really wrong with it to be honest, it just didn't work for me. Perhaps I was expecting too much, though I try not to with Tim Burton. I just can't help thinking that there just wasn't enough of anything to pull it off, it was just lacking in heart or sparkle. That's why I think the stage show would be better, at least on stage there would be the passion of the spectacle, the drama of the theatre if you will...

7/10

No Country For Old Men (2007)

No Country For Old Men is the new film from the Oscar©-winning cult directors Joel and Ethan Coen. Based on the Cormac McCarthy novel of the same name, No Country For Old Men follows the chase as a quiet man is thrown into the path of drug dealers and hired killers by a chance discovery.

On the whole I enjoyed No Country For Old Men. I thought the plot was interesting, the cinematography was excellent and the acting was very accomplished - strong performances all round. However, ultimately I found it somewhat unsatisfying and there were really two reasons for this...

The first of which is mainly a matter of taste. I enjoy a wide range of films however for a film to really stand out for me there has to have been a reason it was a film. I mean this is in the sense that I have to feel like I couldn't have just read the book and felt the same. Now obviously this film was a book adaptation so it was always going to be primarily narrative and possibly this meant that I was never going to feel that it was brilliant... However, I think the best adaptations from books/short stories don't simply tell the tale, they make full use of the added visual and aural elements to connect us to that story - take the scene in The Shawshank Redemption when the music is played out across prison - if you simply read that scene in a book it wouldn't be the same. While the Coen Brothers showed us beautiful landscapes but I'm just not sure that it really added that much to the overall feeling of the film.

The second reason that is that I didn't really feel a connection with the characters and I am firmly of the opinion that it's the film-makers job to make me feel that connection. I was interested in what they were up to but for me it didn't really matter what happened to them. I was engaged by the story, by the the cat and mouse chase, however it was like watching a cat chase a mouse... I didn't care how it ended.

But I'm being overly critical of the film. It was a very good film, it's won awards and it will undoubtedly win some more. It really did have a lot going for it, I appreciated its look at fate, chance and choice - Was the ending inevitable, perhaps? Is Chigurh purely evil? Does he make the choice to... not make the choice as it were? It made it interesting, something different from your usual drama, I suppose those situations are not unfamiliar territory for the Coens however that's a good thing, it sets them apart from other directors. Also as I mentioned earlier, the performances were excellent, as you'd expect from such a lauded cast. I'll give it a 7.5 out of 10 but for me it just wasn't a classic film.