Monday, January 26, 2009
Three Films
An uncharacteristic surge of cultural conscientiousness sent me out to see the three hot films of the moment - Gus Van Sant's Milk (wonderful), Ron Howard's Frost Nixon (very good) and Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire (bad). Milk was wonderful because Van Sant eats celluloid for breakfast, he's all movies and it shows in every shot and every cut. Frost Nixon was good because Howard had Peter Morgan's script, Frank Langella and Michael Sheen and he found a style for the content. Slumdog Millionaire was bad morally and aesthetically. The moral problem was... well, there must be many ways in which one can get from the blinding of a child to improve his begging to a Bollywood mass dance in Mumbai Station but Boyle had not found one and concluding that romantic love conquers all doesn't work too well if you've just spent the previous two hours showing that it emphatically does not. Aesthetically, the film has no style only effect and only two good performances - Anil Kapoor as the Indian Chris Tarrant and Irrfan Kahn as the police inspector. Everybody else is inert, probably immobilised beneath Boyle's frenetic fondness for any effect he can lay his hands on. As with his film Sunshine, one was permanently distracted by noticing random lifts from other movies - I got Billy Wilder's The Apartment once in this, which was odd. I guess it's in the Oscars because Hollywood wants a slice of the Indian action. Pity.
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A blog about, among other things, imaginary ideas - What ifs? and Imagine thats. What if photographs looked nothing like what we see with our eyes? Imagine that the Berlin Wall had never come down. What if we were the punchline of an interminable joke? All contributions welcome.
I really hope you've not got s downer on Danny Boyle because he went to Thornleigh and you went to Bolton School Bryan. Penn is a marvellous actor - especially so in Milk - in spite of political posturing that makes he seem like an American Redgrave.
ReplyDeleteI'm afraid I find it very hard to watch films if Sean Penn is in them.
ReplyDeleteHe acts too much.
Also he has an annoying face and spits like Roy Hattersley.
Which bit of the Apartment did you get in Slumdog??? Weird.
ReplyDeleteJust saw Frost/Nixon and was well impressed. Without wanting to sound too twee, Frost cared for Nixon - in the way one should care, however warped the personality, but especially at the moment some honesty is reached, some denial beaten back. Nixon's cronies didn't care enough to confront him, his enemies only wanted his blood, a ritual humiliation. Frost does tend to care about people, from what I've read elsewhere, for instance from Clive James. It's the Methodist in him (the 10% that's stayed true, not the 90% that's crap). This makes him greater than (though not more gifted than) Peter Cook in the UK media landscape of the second half of the 20th century (for one obvious example). It unlocked Nixon as nothing else would have done. And that did help America (as well as make Frost and his investors an enormous amount of money).
ReplyDeleteHope the story was reasonably true, off which that homily was spun. Corrections on points of fact or too much sentimentality welcome.
I must see Frost/Nixon 'cause I do love Frank Langella. Sean Penn also makes me ill in most movies, though he was great in "Mystic River." I can't believe you don't like "Slumdog Millionaire." It is, hands down, the best movie I've seen in a long time and I am a movie junkie!
ReplyDeleteAnything with Sean Penn instantly becomes a classic, if only because we have the same hair.
ReplyDelete