Showing posts with label 2008. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 2008. Show all posts

Sunday, December 30, 2012

The Dark Knight




The Dark Knight
2008
Director: The inimitable Christopher Nolan
Starring: Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Aaron Eckhardt

Yes, I love Christopher Nolan.  I think the man has managed to find a way to produce intense, dramatic, and intellectually thought-provoking films within the current Hollywood system, all while still making movies with mass appeal.  The Dark Knight is, perhaps, his best example of this.

The second in Nolan’s Batman trilogy, following 2005’s Batman Begins, we see Bruce Wayne/Batman (Bale) in full crime-fighting mode.  This time, though, he’s up against a new kind of enemy – the Joker (Ledger), a mad criminal who follows no rules and worships no false idols.  The Joker gets under Batman’s skin most when he starts going after Gotham’s new white knight, district attorney Harvey Dent (Eckhardt), a man so idealistic that Bruce Wayne can’t help but idolize him, and Dent’s girlfriend Rachel (Gyllenhaal), who just so happens to be the love of Wayne’s life. 

I’m not really a huge superhero movie fan.  Sure, they are a diverting couple of hours at the cineplex, but I find most to be middling at best, and that’s what I think about the ones I like.  When I heard that a new Batman movie was coming out (Batman Begins) I rolled my eyes in recollection of the putrescence that is Batman and Robin.  I needed convincing from multiple people that this new Batman film was unlike others, and eventually, after being coerced into watching it, I agreed.  I actually liked Batman Begins!  I actually think it’s a good movie!  Shocking!  By the time its sequel came out, I had gotten to know Christopher Nolan more as a director, I had started to appreciate his body of work as a whole, and I was looking forward to it. 

Thursday, July 5, 2012

Slumdog Millionaire


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Slumdog Millionaire
2008
Director: Danny Boyle, Loveleen Tandan
Starring: Dev Patel, Freida Pinto, Anil Kapoor

The year that Slumdog Millionaire won Best Picture was a scant Oscar year for me. I was deeply entrenched in viewing older films and rarely came up for air by actually going to a current movie theater. The only nominated film for Best Picture that I had seen was Frost/Nixon, which I still think is a good film, if not a little lacking, and I was wincing over the exclusion of The Dark Knight from the nominations list. For some reason, I sort of mentally wrote off a lot of films from that year. For some reason, I was anticipating not enjoying Slumdog Millionaire.

I honestly don’t know why.

Because I enjoyed the heck out of it as I watched it just now.

Jamal Malik (Patel as an adult, Ayush Mahesh Khedekar and Tanay Chheda in flashbacks) is one question away from winning India’s Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? The police, however, are convinced that an uneducated boy from the slums has to be cheating in order to get so far. Jamal walks through every question he was asked on the show, flashing back to episodes in his life that explain how he knew the answer. All this is a pretext, however, for the real story, the grand opera of family, love, and betrayal involving Jamal’s brother Salim (Madhur Mittal, Azharuddin Mohammed Ismail, and Ashutosh Lobo Gajiwala) and his childhood friend Latika (Pinto, Rubina Ali, and Tanvi Ganesh Lonkar).