Sulmoney’s #2 – Slumdog Millionaire

Oh Hans, how juvenile is the Cookie Monster. Don’t force me to call Bert and Ernie to yapp you. Wait, too late.

The Dark Knight is a masterpiece. There is no other way to put it. For me though, I had gotten The Dark Knight overdose, having seen it 3 (and a half) times during its theatrical release, and its overly long running time really started to take away from the film, and the negatives that you pointed out started to stick out more and more, and is why I ultimately ranked it at #4 instead of higher. Having recently seen The Reader, I can see why it got the Best Picture nomination over The Dark Knight, as it is pure Oscar bait, while The Dark Knight is still in that taboo category of “comic book movie”. This was the film that would have shattered that boundary, and the members of the Academy fumbled this one.

My #2 is something that I feel more than pretty confident that will be showing up as your #1, and like every other time we have agreed on a top 10 pick, I beat you to it. Slow poke.

 

Slumdog Millionaire

The destined to be Academy Award winner for Best Picture comes in at my #2 film of 2008. Danny Boyle travels to India to bring the slums of Mumbai to life for all the world to see in what is his best film since Trainspotting. Unlike what the above poster and what the media will have you believe, this is hardly a Bollywood film that is a rousing piece of life affirming cinema. There is extreme poverty. There are men who handicap children so that they can bring in more money as beggars. There is underage prostitution. There is murder committed by individuals who would not be allowed to drive in many countries. This is the third world hidden in the shadows of what people are hyping as the next big world superpower. 

 

Can't a boy drop a deuce in peace?

Running alongside all these horrible conditions is an absolutely remarkable and wholly original piece of storytelling, based on the acclaimed Q&A by Vikas Swarup. Swarup’s, and consequently Boyle’s, greatest success is tying the love of reality television to the story of a man’s life, and how one gets to the place they get to. The main character, Jamal, sums it up perfectly when he is ridiculed for not knowing something so basic as who is on India’s currency. “Do you know how much pani puri is so and so corner?” We grow up and we learn what we are exposed to. All of our life experiences form who we are and what we know. From this, we all can dream about what our own version of Jamal’s miracle run on Who Wants to be a Millionaire would be like. 

 

Anil Kapoor needs the money to buy a razor

That is the film’s great strength; it makes us believe in Jamal, and in the end, get the girl as well. Though the ending may be pure Bollywood, it is still something that makes us go home happy. Performances from the ensemble cast are knockouts, especially from the young actors who you miss the instant Jamal and Salim tumble off the train in front of the Taj Mahal. But in the end, it all comes back to Danny Boyle, who has an eye for seeing the horrible sides of life, but at the same, seeing a glimmer of hope and happiness in those rough times. With such varied previous works as the aforementioned Trainspotting, the family film Millions, and the modern zombie classic 28 Days Later, Boyle establishes himself as one of the great directors, and he should soon add a Best Director Academy Award to his resume.

Read Full Post »

Hans’s #2 – The Dark Knight

Even though I enjoyed Pineapple Express, I’d be remiss if I didn’t scold Sulmoney for ranking a stoner comedy higher than modern classics on his list like Wall-E, The Wrestler, and RocknRolla. BAM! See what I did there? No? Maybe cookie monster can explain it for you:

I’m actually glad that at least one big summer comedy made it onto Sulmoney’s list, though, because otherwise I wouldn’t have had a chance to discuss them. I’m a notoriously harsh critic of movie comedies, and trips to the cinema have often started with my (so-called) friends arguing over who has to sit next to me because I hardly ever laugh out loud. That said, we got some pretty decent stuff this summer with Pineapple Express (good), Tropic Thunder (better), and Forgetting Sarah Marshall (best). Unlike Sulmoney, I don’t think Pineapple Express succeeded as much as a genre-bending action-comedy, especially because a lot of the action in the last act fell flat for me, but James Franco, Danny McBride and, my personal favorite, Craig Robinson did some hilarious work that at least held up the comedy end. Even though I enjoyed Tropic Thunder more in the theater, I think Pineapple Express will age better.

Shout out also to Role Models, which I still haven’t seen, but expect I’ll really dig. Here’s big #2:

The Dark Knight

This list of my top 10 films of 2008 doesn’t necessarily include the best movies, in order, of last year. It’s simply a list of those films that for whatever reason appealed to my personal tastes more than the rest. The Dark Knight is a flawed film in many ways. It’s too long, it’s a bit too ambitious, it rushes the Two Face storyline, and some of the story elements (particularly the cell-phone mapping at the end) are just a bit too preposterous for the universe it establishes. For all of those reasons, I’m not too upset that The Dark Knight failed to snag a nomination for Best Picture at the 81st Academy Awards, but it’s a complete and utter travesty that director and co-writer Christopher Nolan was not even nominated for the Best Director trophy. If you want a review of The Dark Knight, you have thousands to choose from. Instead, here’s my case for Christopher Nolan as one of the best directors of 2008.

There’s so much to talk about that I won’t be able to really do the man justice without taking up the entire page. The stellar performances across the board, the moody music, the breathtaking scope, the unbearable tension, the bold choice to shoot in Chicago over New York, the emphasis on practical effects vs. CGI and the groundbreaking use of IMAX cameras all deserve to be mentioned, so there, I just mentioned them. What I find most impressive, though, is the uncompromising vision of the man behind the camera.

I wonder how awesome my hair looks right now...

I attribute every last dollar of The Dark Knight’s nearly $1 billion box office gross to the directorial vision of Christopher Nolan in translating the epic story of Gotham City to the big screen. The film’s title may refer to Batman himself, but it may as well have been titled “Gotham City,” since the first thing that struck me when the credits started to roll was just how much of the film was not even about Batman. Brothers Christopher and Jonathan Nolan had a monumental task before them in trying to adapt the story of one of pop culture’s most recognizable heroes with 70 years and thousands of stories of history. And just to make it a little bit harder, they had to somehow capture the essence of not one, but two of the character’s most iconic villains in a way that both honored the source material and communicated ideas that strike a chord even with today’s audiences.

Didn't I have a really cool tower with a train through it last time? And before that everything glowed-in-the-dark?

But to get back to the point, it’s not the writing that’s important, because it’s a mistake to think that The Dark Knight is an original story. Like the classic Homeric poems, the story of Gotham City, its heroes and its villains has been retold for decades through many generations. The genius of the director, then, is not that he saw something in these characters that no one else had seen before, it’s in the way he was able to sift through the excess and boil down so many of these unfathomably dense and disparate elements in a way that made sense for his own medium. You think the Joker was scary? So did Alan Moore (writer of the upcoming mega-blockbuster Watchmen) when he wrote The Killing Joke back in 1988, which Christopher Nolan hand-delivered to Heath Ledger in preparation for his role. Felt for the plight of Commissioner Gordon, who had to choose between working with Batman (implicitly condoning vigilante justice) or risk letting the city fall into the hands of the mob? What about the tragic story of Harvey Dent, the man who believed so strongly in the goodness of the system that seeing it ultimately fail drove him to complete madness? Then check out Batman: Year One, Gotham Central, or The Long Halloween. Chris Nolan did.

In Japan, the Joker says, "Hai! Cheeeezu," and somehow it's still scary.

These are ideas that say an enormous amount about so many universal themes:  the greyness of right and wrong, the limits of the human psyche, our capacity to find hope in a sea of despair, and, of course, the true nature of villainy and heroism. Now try telling your friends that you learned about these things in a comic book. “Ha! You mean those kids’ books with the silly pictures and the big words that say SMASH and POW?” But tell them that you saw all of those same things in The Dark Knight, and I suspect you’ll be met with a little more respect.

Christopher Nolan has made it socially acceptable for people to argue in public over the motivations of the guy with green hair and white face-paint, the justifications of the man with a melted face and a split-personality, and the iconography of the dude in the cape and rubber suit. That deserves a trophy in my book.

Read Full Post »