Desultory thoughts on why I didn’t like Slumdog Millionaire

For one, it comes a little too close to the voyeurism of “slum tours” to me. Of course, I myself am a bit torn about this since photojournalism and documentary photography, crudely put, often partake in this kind of dynamic. most photographers and filmmakers try to justify, at least to themselves, their actions with some principle of moral concern, whereas the slum tours are more experientially akin to the one night stand.
You could argue that this film isn’t like that, and is above that, and again, this is not meant to be a full condemnation—but I think it appropriate to discuss the relation of the film to the sociological backdrop of which it partakes.

People in the film industry are quite utilitarian: they are investing what for most people is an astronomical sum of money, and they hope to make as much as possible on it. Someone like Danny Boyle, an established filmmaker, operates within these parameters as much as anyone else. So they pick these exotic backgrounds and make these feelgood stories so that middle classes of the developed world will fork over their money. Of course, most movies are like that. That’s what they are—mass entertainment. A chance to forget the world for two hours.

So they go there and scout locations, and learn about their characters by staying there. Again, this is standard operating procedure, and its no doubt educational for someone.

But that’s at the microlevel, and what bothers me is that at the macro-level, nothing changes. They come in and shoot their movie and go out. The slums don’t change. Poverty is not eliminated. They couldn’t find a suitable boy in the slums for this role—because as we know, the main actor is everything and has to be vetted by the suits before the movie is a go. So they get an English Indian kid to play the lead. So they exploit the area and the social reality for the backdrop, but when push comes to shove and there’s money on the line, they go with something a bit more safe. Dev Patel isn’t a bad person, but honestly, he does, no matter what, look a lot more London than Mumbai.

And now, Danny Boyle, Dev Patel, et al. get their statues, and DVD sales go through the roof.
They make f*ckloads of money and get more gigs, sustaining or in Patel’s case, launching a career. He was just a somewhat well-known TV actor in England before all of this. And now, in some sense, he belongs in a rarefied elite of actors who played leads in Best Picture films. So his life, no doubt, has been changed, and drastically so.

And yet the slums remain. Of course, the slums aren’t all misery—there is real human community there, and, at least according to Dev Patel on the Jon Stewart show, there is a real joie de vivre there as well. Which is a nice and uplifting thing to say, and which no doubt assuages the conscience of the popcorn munchers around the world. All I know is that the amount of money that Dev Patel and Danny Boyle and them are worth is more than most of those slumdogs will make in their entire lives. I bet Danny Boyle himself is worth more than the aggregate wealth of at least 100 slumdogs.

Of course, I am not better: the whole reason why my conscience is troubled is because I belong to that same global middle class of popcorn munching voyeurs. But I stand by the point that the meta-discussion of the relation of the movie business to the social realities they depict—be it war-torn Iraq, Israeli vets, Japanese orphans, what have you—is something we ought to continue, or, in the case of many people, begin. Movies—what are they? No one is naive enough to dream that they could ever be vehicles of human liberation. How about make them mildly educational, give us isolated, navel-gazers a glimpse of a world we might not ever see. Saturated and vibrant images, great camera work is much appreciated, thanks. We can do that. Yes we can. But of course, I hope for more. I hope for art to somehow trump business, and I hope that egalitarian distributions of income, around the world, will become normative, will become something that human civilization aspires to, because of the basic dignity it could afford us.

So, then, what about the relation of global capitalism to the global South then? That’s a huge can of worms, and one that I, ill-educated in economics of any sort, am not able to answer. I can say that capitalism can create jobs and thus alleviate poverty. But I can also say that this should never be used as a means of justifying the status quo, that is, actually existing capitalism. There can be a better capitalism, I believe. A more humane one. Right now, capitalism seems to do more for the greedy CEOs and elites of the developing countries than it does for the bottom fifth dwelling in the slums of the South. Sometimes we middle-class people get some tax breaks. Sometimes Republicans and Democrats pretend to care about people in the US working minimum wage, even while their overriding goal is to keep the system runnign smoothly and not rock the boat.

The movie business is no different, and no number of George Clooneys or movie star UN ambassadors is going to change the fact that it is still a huge for-profit machine, one that generates huge sums of money for its stars and one that, for the most part, doesn’t mind its role as an opiate for the masses. Art brings liberation. Revolution can bring liberation. Is it naive to believe in these? Of course it is, and I know better—but in my heart of hearts, I will go on believing these, maybe just to spite those who are better adjusted to reality than I am. Or maybe because not only am I an idealist, but also because I believe there are too few of those out there, especially among that demographic that can afford a bit of extra idealism here and there. But they refuse, for the most part, and keep reading their business and financial news and keep caring about companies and people who do things that neither illuminate nor change something about the human condition, in the most fulsome sense of that phrase—but where’s the surprise there? These traits are rampant. But let’s not that call them traits. They are, ahem, the discreet charms of the global bourgeoisie.

Movies I’m Watching: Outlander

I hadn’t really heard of this film prior to dling it, and i didnt have any high expectations from it. It’s based on a fantasy novel about a future man that travels back in time to Earth circa the 8th century CE, in Norway during the time of the Vikings. So there’s many typical elements of time travel stories in it; the guy from the future somehow has to win the trust of the simple folk of an earlier age, has to fret about whether or not to go back, has to decide whether or not his emotional baggage is worth keeping or must be chucked in order to save the universe or get laid with the woman we all know he is going to get the very first moment we see them on the screen together.

It wasn’t terrible though, there wasn’t anything too cheesy. Although John Hurt is in the movie, there aren’t that many super famous people in the film, which to me is always a good thing b/c it means we don’t see the entire repertoire of media images of the actor when we see them in the role. You don’t know these actors, so, seeing them for the first time, you can almost believe that what you are seeing is something “real.”

The morwin, the creature that wreaks havoc on the Vikings, is quite creepy: it’s very Alien-esque, not as scary, but it does manage to pluck people up and away in the darkness in that same ninja way. The books form a series, so naturally one expects that if this movie is successful that there might be another in the future.

Usually these medieval costume type films make you want to retch, so cliche they are: but again, I found this film to be entertaining and fairly inoffensive. Worth a watch on a lazy Sunday, if nothing else.

Movies I’m Watching: Paris Nous Appartient

Well, after taking a look at the blurb on the DVd cover and feeling in the mood for some black and white Nouvelle Vague classics, i decided to get this one…and was quite disappointed. The themes treated in the movie, including the worldwide conspiracy against disaffected lefty artists in Paris, made me roll my eyes more than once. But that’s part of what makes it charming, in another sense–the refusal to do conspiracy in the conventional manner. I have to say that one of the highlights of film, like with any others of this period, is the visual delight of taking in 1960s Paris in black and white. Everything about it tickles my fancy, and in a way that i would be at a loss to explain, at least in rational terms.

The other highlight of the film would have to be Jean-Luc Godard’s cameo in the movie, which is quite funny…he’s so iconic that i didn’t have a hard time knowing when it was him, but it seems, even in that very brief scene, that the man has some comic chops and that, had he applied himself in that direction, might not have been an entirely shabby actor.

Reverse Shot has an article about this film, which i think places it in context, both with respect to Rivette’s ongoing ouevre as well as his place among the pantheon of nouvelle vague greats:

To end at the beginning, then, comparing Paris Belongs to Us to New Wave debuts might seem unfair, but it ultimately vindicates its director. Those other films (and that’s not including Cleo from 5 to 7 and Le Beau serge) immediately displayed their creator’s talent in what turned out to be—to borrow a phrase—instant classics, whereas Paris displayed Rivette’s arguably richer potential (and definitely his greater difficulty) at the expense of solidified “quality.” That’s the way it is sometimes. Artists develop in their own way, at their own rhythm and by their own logic. Fortunately, though, if Pericles is to Paris Belongs to Us as Gerard is to Rivette, then at least Rivette went on to master his craft—at least we can see and evaluate this fascinating disappointment with its future payoffs excitedly in mind.—MICHAEL JOSHUA ROWIN”

Movies I’m watching: Oliver Stone’s W.

Someone please tell me what the point of this movie is. If it’s meant to be satirical, which it is in spades, couldn’t it have been more LOL funny like SNL? If it’s meant to be some kind of historical political biopic, then all i can say is too soon, too soon. The gags, the famous Bushisms—they are still cringeworthy but somehow contrived to the point that they don’t make for much of a punch-line. Of course, much of this has to do with where this particular viewer is situated in time and history—no doubt that future generations won’t “get it” the same way that we do.

The placement of the famous lines are a bit awkward: consider the “rarely is the question asked: is our children learning?” Bushism–though I am not sure, it seems to have been placed at the wrong time: when Bush was running for governor, instead of president. The other one is “i read, i smoke, I admire”–which is supposedly what Laura said to her future mother in law, Barb Bush, but in the movie she says it to W. when they first meet.

I’m not a stickler for historical accuracy in these matters, but as mentioned before, it comes off, as someone who’s watched this history first-hand, as being contrived.

There were some other annoying and/or intriguing parts to this movie: Thandie Newton as Condi Rice. HEr first lines are terrible, mostly because she’s trying really hard to emulate an American accent, but her high-pitched voice just grates. And I honestly don’t know or care to remember what the real Condi sounds like, but Newton is just too affected. However, it gets better as the movie goes on. The other thing that is terrible is that they make her so homely, which is perhaps accurate, but which is painful for any devotee of Newton’s hotness to stomach. I just saw her in Rock N Rolla not too long ago, and the memories of her hotness remain fresh to this very day.

The other bit that is interesting is Jeffrey Wright as Colin Powell. I love Wright but he just completely *lacks the gravitas* to be Colin Powell. He’s of a more slight build, not quite as stout and solid seeming as the General, and simply adding some fake white hairs doesn’t improve the situation a whole lot. Furthermore, he’s always talking in some kind of low, guttural voice which sounds every bit as painful and affected as Newton’s accent.

And how about that ongoing philosophical spat between Powell, the military man who knows the realities of fighting, versus Rummy and Cheney, the hawks that have never killed anything with two legs. The ongoing debates are a bit tedious, I have to say. I have no doubt that such debates went on in real life, but in the dialogue in the script is incredibly trite, with Powell going so far as to mention Cheney’s deferments from Vietnam, and the diabolical Cheney trying to use Powell’s military experience to his rhetorical advantage. They come across as two schoolboys in debate tournament. Then there’s a bit where they have a slideshow showing a map of Iraq and Iran with American flags covering the neighboring countries–illustrating the American-friendly sphere of influence in the mideast–and again, it just comes off as being too satirical, very much Wag the Dog or War, Inc. or Starship Troopers-esque.

Another strange portrayal was that of Tony Blair, whom we see on a visit to Crawford before the start of the Iraq invasion. He looks too young and acts a bit too naive to be the real Tony Blair, and just comes across as a total boob. I never liked the man but the portrayal here is just plain weird.

Then there was the whole thing with W. and his father, the whole you’ll never be good enough, Jeb is my favorite son dynamic which just, whatever its relation to the real life people, just comes across as a monumental cliche. James Cromwell—you can’t help but think of him in 24, so I guess he’s been type-cast as the creepy father. However, he comes across as a much more normal and smooth George Senior than the real life one, who always seemed to me, like, well, a wimp. In any case, this dynamic runs throughout the whole movie, and gets a bit tendentious after a short while. In a movie where there is little care for psychological realism, what is the point of showing this whole dynamic. Is it to offer some kind of theory for why W., the perennial underachiever, ended up as president? Is it to somehow humanize him? In any case, being a Bush-hater, i don’t think the film helped his case any, and I doubt that it was Stone’s intention to in the first place.

Mediocre.

Movies I’m Watching: The Wrestler

I’m glad that Mickey Rourke won a Golden Globe for his performance in The Wrestler, because although the movie tends to be fairly predictable overall, this was one of the most honest performances I’ve seen in a while. Now everyone is talking about the Mickey Rourke comeback tour, which made me curious enough about the actor (I haven’t seen his other films) to get 9 1/2 weeks when i came across it at the DVD store. I don’t have anything particularly new or interesting to add to what’s been said about The Wrestler, but i think there are some interesting tidbits about how the movie has been received in other quarters: the Iranian government considers it insulting, after a fictional wrestler in the movie named The Ayatollah gets his Iranian flag smashed by Rourke’s character, while the folks at the WWE, a professional wrestling organization, aren’t too happy with what they considered the stereotyped and negative portrayals of certain wrestling circuits.

Director Aronofsky thinks that professional wrestlers do get shafted when it comes to their working conditions: he considers them actors and entertainers — and believes that they ought to be unionized and eligible for the same types of benefits that SAG members receive. Yet in reality, many wrestlers exist in some kind of legal limbo, not quite athletes, and not quite actors — and when things go awry, or when they simply exhaust their youth, bodies, and 15 minutes of fame, they are left, like Randy the Ram Robinson, out in the cold — oftentimes in desolate places, like New Jersey, the setting for this film.

Anyhow, that’s quite an interesting issue that i would not have ever been aware of otherwise. But good on Mickey Rourke – I’m glad that his career is picking up and that he is being given a second chance to share his talents with the world.

A final note: Marisa Tomei — yowzer, does that woman just get hotter with age?

Movies I’m Watching:Defiance

This is one of the few Daniel Craig movies that didn’t immediately ratchet my inferiority complex up to a new level. The movie stars Craig and Liev Schreiber as Jewish brothers living in Byelorussia during the time of the Nazis. They end up rescuing many Jews from the area and staking and decamping from the cities and ghettos to the forest, where they could live relatively freely.

They struggle with the ethical issues you’d expect: whether or not to brutally murder a captured Nazi for revenge, and whether or not by doing so they become as bad as them. Of course such quandaries are at the heart of debates regarding the Israeli-Palestinian issue, though of course as everyone has already pointed out, the Jews invading Gaza today are not the ones that escaped the Shoah.

Back to the movie: fairly good combination of action and drama. The love story parts are fairly boilerplate. The scenes with Schreiber as a Red Army soldier facing anti-Semitism from his Russian comrades are interesting. The Abel-Cain split between the brothers and their philosophies is a common trope, but the filmmakers made it fairly interesting. Of course, in the end, one of them comes riding out of nowhere to save the ass of the other just when all seems to be lost, and then they hug and make up.

There are few typical Biblical moments of truth, which are not quite trite, but are so expected by anyone conversant in Hollywood conventions that its effect cannot be but dampened, somewhat.
On the other hand there was one moment, during a funeral, where the Rabbi says something interesting about asking God to take back the covenant he offered the Jews. The Rabbi was saying something about not wanting to be the chosen people, and all the baggage that came with it. Interesting but they cut from it fairly quickly, and I wasn’t sure what to make of it.

All in all: not a fantastic, movie, but not bad. Some gritty action scenes. And of course, Daniel Craig and Liev Schreiber kicking ass with their faux-Slavic accents is always cool. It’s harder to be smitten with Daniel Craig when he’s not speaking that posh British English. And it’s a bit of change to, which is nice, after Bond and Confessions.

Movies I’m Watching: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

I’d heard a lot about this one before actually watching it. It wasn’t a bad movie, all in all, but there wasn’t anything particularly moving about it. It’s based off a F. Scott Fitzgerald movie, which explains some of the richness with which the period–the people, places, zeitgeist of the early 20th century–is depicted. The effects that made the transformation of Benjamin Button from wrinkled and gnarled looking baby to a newborn old man was quite interesting. There is one scene where he leaves home, and although the old on the outside Benjamin already faintly looks like Brad Pitt, his body is still hunched and shriveled, which makes you wonder how they did it, how they grafted Brad Pitt’s face and expressions onto this wizened little body. It must have been similar to what they did for the Hobbits…

In any case, charming fable, but nothing particularly moving, despite the film being about love, life, loss, and the wonders of the human condition, vagaries of destiny, fate, love, all of that.

Performance by Brad Pitt was reasonably good, nothing extraordinary. Cate Blanchett seems to me to excel at whatever role she is given, and this one is no exception, though after seeing her in movies like “No One’s There” or whatever the Dylan fictional biopic was called, where she set a new bar for herself (if not the art of acting in general), this kind of role can only be disappointing in comparison.

Movies I’m Watching：Doubt

I think i read the play a number of years ago … it was good but didn’t leave a huge impression on me. The movie retains that “theatrical” feeling in the way that it’s staged, in the particular rhythm of the shots and the plot as well as in the very even and articulate dialogue. I didn’t mind this too much, but it certainly was quite noticeable. The best thing about this movie were the performances by Philip Seymour Hoffman and Meryl Streep: it wasn’t the best work that either has done, but you can at least say watching said performances, that these are consummate professionals at work, and are among the best working in Hollywood today.

As for the philosophical business regarding doubt, faith, social progress, etc. Well, that was fairly boilerplate, in a way. The debate is materialized or realized in the conflict between Father Flynn and Sister Aloysius. He smokes, drinks, is socially progressive, wants to put a more human face on the church. The sister is all about discipline, authority, and puritanic rigor in thought and action–and they don’t really like each other. Of course, she wins, in a manner of speaking, because she is able to squeeze all vestiges of doubt from her when necessary. Her convictions seem unshakeable, whereas the Father, despite being a man of God, knows all too well, the wages of sin. He knows human foibles, he knows the weakness of human nature. And thus we are lead to believe that he might have, in fact, taken advantage of a young boy in that way that Catholics priests are wont to do.

However, in the end, he has made his peace with doubt and sin. He knows the limits of human striving, and knows that god doesn’t expect humans to be perfect and he is dubious of the sister’s demands of her charges and peers, because he knows that to be her is to stunt something vital at the heart of oneself. And that’s not realistic for the clergy, much less for their parishioners.

In the end, Sister Aloysius admits that she suffers from doubts–such doubts. After seeing a movie where she seems utterly in control for 99% of her screen time, it’s a bit hard to believe that she would start confessing her doubts out of the blue, much less to Sister James, who she was always so supercilious and patronizing towards–but that’s what she does, and that’s the end of the movie.

Why does she doubt? Because Father Flynn “got away with it” and even ended up with a better assignment than he had with them? Or because after her husband died in the war, she repressed something vital in her, and became a dessicated version of herself–a defense against the more than fair share of sadness, grief, and darkness that she had experienced while still relatively young?

Technorati Tags: doubt, john patrick shanley, phillip seymour hoffman, meryl streep, catholic, catholicism, religion, doubt, 1960s, movies, cinema, plays, theater

Movies I’m Watching:It’s a Free World

I’ve always like Ken Loach movies because i’m a lefty symp and a sucker for women with British accents. The last one I saw from him was, if memory serves, My Name is Joe, i know that he’s done a few since then, like the well-received Wind That blows through the barley (or whatever it was called). This one is about Angela (Angie), a single mother in London who gets laid off and then decides to start her own recruiting business, where she finds jobs for low-wage proles from Eastern Europe and beyond. Of course, all the ethical and social problems facing contemporary England with regard to low-wage labor, the urban poor, and immigration are somehow distilled into the characters, which throws everything into relief and makes the movie fairly easy to understand. The lead performance is great, she’s quite attractive, plucky, at times a tender mom trying to what’s best for her son and yet at other times can stoop so low as to lie and cheat desperate foreign workers just so she can get ahead. Everything rattles on at a good pace, and while the first part of the movie is dedicated to their can-do spirit in starting a business, the movie veers in the last act somewhat, throwing in a few plot twists and turns. The ending is a bit ambiguous–you see that she has to go on with this morally questionable vocation of hers, but this time because she’s been forced, under threat of violence to her and her son–to repay money that she owes the workers. At the end, she hesitates when she takes the precious euro cash from an aging Ukrainian woman. Angie knows that this is how her racket works–the eastern europeans are eager and optimistic, and she plays along, peddling sometimes false hope to these people. She rationalizes this as “giving them a chance,” but it becomes obvious throughout the movie that this system is built on exploitation. People refuse to pay money, skim corners at the expense of others. People are fleeced, their fates put in the hands of some unscrupulous if not outright evil factory owners and recruiters. Of course, I don’t know the sociological truth of this, because i don’t know much about social realities in London or Britain except from what friends and the media tell me, but i think it’s a fine film, and would definitely recommend it, if not highly, at least as an entertaining and thought-provoking movie, which already makes it better than most of the crap out there.

Technorati Tags: ken loach, uk, britain, england, movies, lefty, immigration, politics,

Movies I’m Watching: The Equation of Love and Death (李米的猜想）

Zhou Xun plays Li Mi, a plucky Kunming cab driver secretly nursing a broken heart and obsession—the man she loved disappeared
four years ago and their one-way line of communication are the letters that he writes to her, which she religiously stores and memorizes. Caught between faith and desperation, nothing, it seems, will reunite Li Mi with her old flame.

Then Li Mi takes on a fateful fare: two shifty migrants that have something to hide. Many convenient coincidences later, in a plot invovling hostage-taking, extortion, drug mules, mistaken identities, and changed identities, and Li Mi just might be close to finding her missing lover and closing the door on that part of her life.

It is in the nature of these films to rely on coincidences and other deus-ex-machina elements to move the plot forward—it doesn’t matter that they aren’t realistic, because movies aren’t based on probability theory in the first place. However, you sometimes wish that there could be a bit more judgment exercised as to when enough is enough and it’s time for you to sober up and go home. The tangled skein of the plot does get unraveled by the end, but as enjoyable as it is to know (almost) everything that transpired in this movie universe, there in a sense in which presenting all the facts makes the film seem too pat, too clever. It would have been better to leave the audience some unsettling loose-ends to quibble over.

As far as performances go, Zhou Xun, as Li Mi, is obviously the center of the film. She has plenty of good moments and a few maudlin ones, but otherwise manages to carry the film. Variety seems to concur:

Pic is motored by another saturated perf from the remarkable, throaty-voiced Zhou, who’s ably partnered from the halfway mark by Zhang (the lead in the big-budget war drama “Assembly”) as the tough but fair cop. Deng, also from “Assembly,” is fine as the slippery Ma/Fang.

However, there was one performance bothered us a bit, which was that of Wang Baoqiang’s, the young actor that has become quite popular in China for his small but often memorable roles in films, ranging from A World Without Thieves to Li Yang’s Blind Shaft, as well as
the main role in the hit TV series Soldier Sortie. What tends to grate is the fact that he plays similar roles in so many of the movies:the innocent, hapless migrant worker. It was, in his earlier films, somewhat endearing. No matter what side of the law he was on, he was always the victim and the hero—he represented the pure heart of inner China, the migrants who can no longer make (or want to make) a living off the land and are forced to the move to seamy underbelly of Chinese cities, a moral vacuums where dodgy characters operate and manipulate them. Wang’s performance is not bad as it goes, but you wonder whether or not the guy, barely twenty-five years old, has already been typecast.

Final verdict: nothing life-changing, but not a bad yarn. This is a step in the right direction.
We wouldn’t mind seeing a few more Memento-esque films come out of China. Missing
people, mistaken identities, desire, obsession—take these ingredients and give it a dark spin.