Monthly Archive for January, 2009

Rating: 92%

Thelonious Monk once said that the trick to great music is not inventing new notes, since that’s impossible, but simply hitting the ones you really mean. Danny Boyle seems to have followed that advice in his directing of “Slumdog Millionaire,” a film built out of well-tread plot devices that nonetheless feels fresh and original because it’s done so damned well. Hard-boiled and life affirming by turns, the script by Simon Beaufoy throws us headlong into a colorful, violent India where our heroes, two orphaned brothers, must fight for survival. There’s very little here that someone familiar with Charles Dickens won’t already know on the way into the theater, but by the time the opening credits wind down you won’t be able to separate yourself from the movie long enough to second-guess it. They should file this thing in the Encyclopedia under “Suspension of Disbelief.”

You know very well, Dear Reader, that I abhor excessive plot details, and I shall not break with that policy here. The movie begins with a young Indian man named Jamal Malek on “Who Wants to be a Millionaire,” inexplicably racking up thousands of dollars. We quickly realize that the show’s producers did not intend this to happen, that they expected a penniless “slumdog” like Jamal to barely sit in his seat correctly, much less best their toughest questions. Suspicions arise, and he is abducted by the Indian police and accused of cheating. His explanation of how he knew the correct answers sends us on a journey across his entire life.

The cast of “Slumdog” is entirely unknowns, or at least unknowns to an American audience, which makes these great performances a neat surprise. Danny Boyle has an eye for good leading men, he discovered Cillian Murphy with “28 Days Later” and now he brings us Dev Patel in the lead role. Patel is scrawny and doe eyed, but he exudes tenacity and the will to survive, and we like him immediately. Even more impressive is the seamless baton-passing required to convincingly portray Jamal and his companions from adolescence into adulthood. The film uses nine actors to portray Jamal, his brother Salim, and the love of his life Latika, but it only feels like three people we’ve known for a very long time. Anil Kapoor also gives a great performance as the quasi-villainous game show host Prem Kumar, a man whose attitudes towards Jamal speak volumes about India’s rigorous social stratification.

Like some of Michael Mann’s best work, “Slumdog Millionaire” makes its setting a tangible character. Even though the story stays on point, we are constantly aware of how India is changing and evolving around our protagonists, and how they must adapt to fit its needs. This is a three-dimensional portrait, highlighting the good and the bad, the impressive and the reprehensible, and destroying many simple assumptions about the country. The director has stated several times that he does not feel pity for the people of India, even those like Jamal, because their lives are as vibrant and rich as anyone’s, and this attitude is what makes his movie work. “Slumdog” does not condescend its characters because they are poor, it simply takes us along for the ride. Danny Boyle, a director known for his wild energy, is the perfect man for this job, and we see in this film his most mature artistic vision yet. There have been times in the past, with films like “A Life Less Ordinary,” where he could not find the balance he desired between narrative focus and experimental technique, but at long last his method is beginning to smooth out and work, instead of fighting with itself. More than any director working today, Danny is unpredictable; he’s got a camera and he knows how to use it. This quality marries perfectly with “Slumdog Millionaire;” a more traditional style would have stifled the story’s energy.

If you really want to appreciate what this movie accomplishes, I suggest you rent “August Rush,” and watch that first. There is a movie so similar to this one in so many ways, and yet it is dead on its feet, uninteresting, and riddled with cliches. “Slumdog Millionaire” avoids this fate because it has no self-pity, no excuses, and absolutely no fear. This is a brave, exciting, life affirming cinematic experience, the kind of adrenaline rush that only really grand storytelling can achieve. These notes have been hit many times before, but “Slumdog Millionaire” means them.

USC is a great school. Let me just point that out before I inch forward with what I’m going to say here. It really is a top-notch institution.

Nonetheless…

Being the first class in the brand-new building is something of a bureacratic nightmare. Let’s face it, these guys do not have the kinks worked out yet, so we kind of have to voyage forward together into a sea of insanity. It’s quite valuable, in a way, because I can already sense in myself and my classmates an instinctive understanding of the fact that we have to work this crap out for ourselves. The “grown ups” cannot be relied on to steer us through, the initiative must constantly be seized. At first, it was terrifying, but I think back then I was refusing to embrace what this school is really offering. I was expecting a study environment more or less like what I’ve been through before, and that’s not what you get in a really good film school.

In part, I think the fact that the professors can’t answer a lot of the questions you have, and the knowledge that the timetables for you to get things done are incredibly truncated, makes what we do at USC feel more like…ours. It’s so plainly obvious all the time that if we aren’t on top of our game, our Project Ones or Project Twos or whatever could just…not happen. And if that day arrived, we’d end up in front of our class with our pockets turned out and our professors shrugging at us. Just because we’re assigned these things doesn’t guarantee they will occur, that’s the part we have to endeavor for ourselves.

In this way, film school is unique, I think, not only from undergraduate study, but from other Master’s Degrees one might receive. You are always fixed on a product, a thing you are trying to fashion into cinematic reality, and most of your semester is an elaborate dance with that goal. This is why grades are such an afterthought, your professors all assume that if you got this far, you’re going to bleed into this thing and they won’t have to be concerned with affixing your performance to some kind of bar graph, whose Y-axis denotes your work. To be honest, our instructors spend much more of their time trying to get us to take it easy, spend less money, aim lower, and commit less. I have never once had anyone at this place tell me, “You’d better work hard or else!” This statement would be hilarious to us. What I witness instead is a group of highly trained professionals trying to gradually unleash a flood of creative energy, little bits at a time.

So yes, I will admit that different teachers tell us contradicting things and we have to sort them out. And certainly, there are bugs in the new facility and wrinkles in the semester’s design. But the experience of navigating this storm, learning who you should listen to, fighting to make sure you’re ahead of things, is incredibly valuable, and I can’t help but suspect that a little bit of pandemonium is built into the program. After all, if your educational experience taught you that film making is a smooth, refined process where you can expect few hiccups and tremendous ease, then your educational experience was worthless.

It’s refreshing, you don’t feel “forced” to do much of anything; you view your professors as delicious means to a better end for your project, and you intend to gobble them up and drain them of whatever precious resources and knowledge they may have. You show up for class because there’s something in it for you, and I don’t just mean the curriculum; these people will give you secrets you desperately want. Only an idiot would skip anything here, you’re learning stuff that is going to be the difference between a student film everyone envies and…a student film

It’s exciting, really. I don’t even think about grades, I think about movies. And every day, I get a little bit closer…

I’ve said many times that “The Dark Knight” is a special movie; for me, for all of us, and no amount of awards has any effect on that. But I am human, Dear Reader, and when I read that this wonderful film had been completely snubbed in the Directing, Adapted Screenplay, and Picture categories for Oscar nominations, I couldn’t help but allow it to get to me. Of course, “The Dark Knight” is nominated for every technical award in the book, which is their way of saying that the film is just a pretty face with no substance behind it.

Stay in your corner, the Academy says, because the really good movies cannot include something as distasteful as a comic book character. No, what would the world be coming to? We’ve got to keep nominating every drama featuring minorities or disabled people, anything where British actors stare at each other and smoke cigarettes for three and a half hours. Those are the real movies. We think it’s just adorable when you people want us to take the cinema you bleed and sweat for seriously, but can’t you see that anything Sean Penn does is just…better? It’s of a higher order, by definition. If Sean Penn starred in a movie, then the director must have done a better job, and the screenplay must have been more adult, and the acting must have been more noteworthy. The man could pull down his pants and do the Macarena until the closing credits, and I’d be weeping in the theater, gushing about the powerful subtext.

What’s that, you say? You say that every single Best Picture nominee was a drama released within the last two months? Well, winter is when the real movies come out. Summer is for the dumb, mindless fare that everyone actually enjoys, but hot damn do I love the winter. That’s when we get our beloved audience-punishing, nihilistic, sex-ridden art house dramas, and normally we just hand those guys Oscars right away. This year, there were too many uplifting, life-affirming movies like “Slumdog Millionaire” and “Milk,” so we had to break even and just nominate whatever came out most recently, because we couldn’t remember the other stuff. It was hard for us to hand nominations to movies that an average person might enjoy, but better that than acknowledge some…other genre or something; ugh, I shiver at the thought. Comedies are inferior. Action films are inferior. I am here to tell you that it’s not physically possible for a movie with a few car chases in it to also have rich character development…unless Scorsese did it. If he did it, I’m sure it’s all…you know…some kind of commentary on…uh…Iraq, or something. Man, I love that guy. I’d like to lick the mud off of his boots and say “thank you sir, may I have another?”

Yes, yes, I know we were forced into giving “Titanic” and “Return of the King” Best Picture. Don’t remind me, it wasn’t pleasant, but too many people liked those movies, and I’m a gigantic coward. The most sensible solution there was just to smatter both of them with so many awards they all lost their meaning, and make everybody stop caring. Those exceptions aside, I don’t see anything keeping us from rolling merrily along, ignoring the people who deserve recognition. If you think I’m kidding, recall the time I gave Judi Dench an Oscar for a ten-second cameo and left Haley Joel Osment in the cold for carrying “The Sixth Sense” on his shoulders before he even hit puberty. Yet again, my point is demonstrated: people in commercial films aren’t as good as we are. If they wanted an Oscar, why didn’t they star in something about a genocide or whatever? There are rules here, people!

I wouldn’t feel too bad for “The Dark Knight.” It’s entering a proud pantheon of deep, meaningful films that had real cultural impact which we have worked very hard to ignore: “Star Wars,” “E.T,” “Taxi Driver,” “Saving Private Ryan,” “Brokeback Mountain,” “The Maltese Falcon,” “The Ten Commandments,” “Jaws,” “Apocalypse Now,”…I think you get the point.

Go look it up. You’re going to find that about eight times out of ten that whatever movie did get the Oscar that year is nowhere near as relevant or talked about today. That’s our proudest accomplishment: we’ve managed to successfully stifle a wide and impressive array of films that have since become cultural landmarks.

Stepping out of character here, let me also say this: “Raging Bull,” which is beloved to this day, was actually pronounced inferior to “Ordinary People,” which I can safely say I have not heard mentioned in a decade. And does anyone sincerely believe that “The Sting” was a more important film than “The Exorcist”? Do we remember “Driving Miss Daisy” anywhere near as much as we cherish “Field of Dreams”? Was some crap film called “The Best Years of Our Lives” really better than “It’s A Wonderful Life”? Which one have you watched more recently? Huh? Tell me!

…

Sorry.

I’m calming down.

Really, I am. You’ll excuse everything above as a deliberate hyperbole designed to make a point, don’t take it too much to heart.

Truth be told, the…grumble..the Academy has also made many wise choices, their track record is not a gigantic failure. But it is spotty, Dear Reader, and as long as this is the case, I must insist that they not be given this high horse we seat them on every year while we scoff at the Golden Globes unfairly. Why is this the award we so cherish? I want to see some decentralization, I want some other awards to begin carrying real weight around this town. Maybe when that happens, this nightmarish power trip will end and we can see some justice.

Honest to goodness, I could cry at the injustice. Mark my words: ten years from now, “The Dark Knight” will be talked about, remember, and most importantly watched. “The Reader” will not. I promise you.

P.s: Despite what I said above, we have many nominations to be extremely proud about. Chris Corbould, Wally Pfister, Nathan Crowley, and Heath Ledger are all being recognized for their work, and deservedly so. Pfister was nominated for his lensing of “Batman Begins” too, so here’s hoping they finally give him the recognition he deserves.

I arrived on campus today with just enough time to be bored before class but not enough to actually do anything substantive, like work out, which I have been trying to do for days. Darn it. I turn to you now, dear reader: entertain me! Say something funny, tell me a story!

…

Right. I guess the idea behind this blog is that I’m supposed to be entertaining you. Good point. Okay, I like a challenge…

Have any of you visited this website Hulu.com? It’s tremendous. You can watch many of the newest, most popular television shows for free with only sparse commercial interruption. I’ve been using it to dabble my feet in “24″ again, a show which I am continually on the fence about. Let me give you the pros and cons of this episodic thriller:

Pros:

-Kiefer Sutherland is pretty ballin’. He is the only man alive who can give Clint Eastwood a run for his money in the gravely voice department. 

-Despite what the show creators may say, “24″ is actually soap opera. If you look at the plot structure–the random deaths, improbable resurrections, wildly divergent loyalties, etc–it’s plain to see that this thing is “Days of Our Lives,” and absolutely no less ridiculous. The genius, therefore, is dressing it up for a completely different demographic, all of whom fall for it hook, line and sinker. Men who would scoff at “General Hospital” will gasp at their friends and cry out, “Tony is back from the dead! They gave him some kind of special government injection!” 

I love it.

-It’s a Republican show, and that takes some balls in the entertainment industry. Just recently I watched the two-hour prequel to “Day 7,” which featured Jack living in Africa with an old army buddy and a guy from the UN. The latter was portrayed as a limp-wristed, Euro-trash pansy who displayed open cowardice and a desire to “stay neutral” (read: run away) while Jack Bauer slaughtered whole truckloads of bad guys. Hint, hint. Normally that might annoy me, but since every other movie and television show ever is overtly liberal, I take it as a breath of fresh air.  

-The whole real-time thing. Clever.

Cons:

-For goodness gracious sake, can we take it easy on the torture? This freaking show has more torture than “Hostel” and “Hostel: Part II” put together, and their ad campaigns make it uncomfortably clear that they’re happy with this fact. Every other episode, either Jack is getting bamboo shoved up his fingernails or he’s doing it someone else, and people who watch this show know that is NOT an exaggeration. And while the regulations of TV only allow for a limited view of the grisly details, we are treated to solid minutes of screaming in agony, writing in pain, etc. It kind of bothers me that the longer the show lasts, the more excuses they find to torture people, because it suggests that the fan base likes this stuff, and that’s just messed up. As long as it persists, “24″ will never have my consistent support.

-They’re out of freaking plots. Every single season is some kind of terrorist cell, they just change the nationality and what the bombs are being hidden in. It gets to the point where I want some characters to start asking each other, “What in the hell is going on here?” I want to see some consequences of all these homeland security skirmishes. “24″ needs to feel real, no matter how absurd it gets, and that reality flickers like a dying candle every time they do yet another season with yet another lone, crazed sleeper cell from France, or Paraguay, or where the hell ever. 

You know what I honestly think should happen? I think “24″ should initiate a world war in its universe, or maybe just some kind of Cold War all over again. We need a persistent enemy on this show, because switching them up all the time and then having everyone look surprised when the bombs go off is beginning to feel stale.

-The actors playing the villains. By and large, these guys are professional scenery chewers who never imbue their characters with real menace. It’s probably not their fault, the script gives them very little to work with, but I’d like to see some truly cunning adversaries. Jack needs an arch-enemy, a Joker to his Batman, someone who calls his whole existence into question. Season One (referred to as “Day One”) was one of the best televised dramas I have ever seen, and a large part of the reason for that was the utterly chilling (SPOILER) Nina Meyers. Here was a cold, brutal villain, one you could hate and fear deeply because she felt so human, and because we really believed she was on our side (SPOILER END). We need more bad guys like that.

…

Right, well I’ve burned some time now, I think class should be starting soon. Thanks for hangin’ out with me, Dear Reader. You’re too good to me.

Oh, dear reader, on a night like this, I can only turn to you. Only you understand me. It’s the night before my first day of class at USC, and I’m so nervous I can’t sleep. Truth be told, I have some cause: my stupid financial aid STILL hasn’t worked its kinks out, and I can’t get on the Cinematic Arts Community web page due to some stupid technical snaffoo that I can’t have addressed on a Sunday night.

But that stuff’s not really why I’m still awake. You know how it is, guys and girls, sometimes the excitement of something new is overwhelming. While stagnating in routine appeals very little to me, new things also carry a kind of amorphous terror which I have dealt with my whole life. I remember my brother, somewhere around sixteen years old, sitting on an idling moped in our driveway, staring at me with expaserated eyes.

“If you’d just get on it, I know you’ll love it!”

Wide-eyed, chewing on my bottom lip, I would stand there frozen and stall.

“Nothing bad is going to happen!”

I shook my head at him, because the possibility of being hurt was not what stayed my hand, nor has it ever been. Newness itself just screws with me, it forces me out of my comfort zone. Truth be told, it’s in exactly these situations, where I stop being comfortable, that I always find the best parts of myself. But I’ll never really enjoy new things, they are my cross to bear. I think the fact that I got married right out of college and moved across the country definitively proves that this fear is in control, that my emotions answer to me and not the other way around, but little things like not being able to sleep still slip through my fingers sometimes.

I know God likes me exactly where I am right now: uncertain. It’s here where He knows I have to trust Him, have to pay more attention, have to push myself. But as Mother Teresa said, sometimes I wish He didn’t trust me so much.

I want few things more than to be a student at USC, and being a little fried the night before doesn’t change that, but still…

It’s scary. This is the beginning of my life. What happens next, dear reader? What happens next?