Slumdog Millionaire

I finally got around to watching Slumdog Millionaire. I wasn't in too much of a hurry to see this movie being that it won the Academy Award for Best Picture. In my mind this usually means that the movie sucked. Funny how my stereotypes continue to be accurate in my own mind.

Slumdog Millionaire is about a young man named Jamal Malik (Dev Patel) who is retelling the story of his life and how he knew the answers as a contestant on India's Who Wants to be a Millionaire. The movie traces his life from his early childhood growing up in the slums of India, meeting a young girl (Freida Pinto - a very attractive young lady!), a girl who's love will forever be in his heart, to the struggles with his brother and his keeper.

If you've never seen anything about India you will most likely be struck by the hopelessness and poverty that lie across the country. However, there are signs of life and a desire to do good that can overcome the evil that seems to have penetrated everything.

Throughout the movie Jamal is being held in a police station and being grilled about correctly answering so many questions on the game show. How can a slumdog know so much?

Many will find the movie inspiring, while others, like me, see this as a movie which exploits a formerly popular game show which just connects the dots in the contestants life to get the answers. I find this to be a more convenient storyline than intriguing.

The movie is 2 hours long and was directed by Danny Boyle, also known for his independent movie Trainspotting. Slumdog Millionaire is rated R for violence, disturbing images, especially of children, and some language. They also made us watch a cricket match or football (soccer) game, also worthy of an R-Rating.

Not a big fan of this movie. I give it 2 stars.

No Country For Old Men

WARNING: THIS REVIEW CONTAINS A SPOILER

I usually write reviews to just provide enough information to give the reader a taste for the movie without revealing how it ends. However, for this movie, I must change my style.

What do you call a movie that ends without any conflict resolution? No Country For Old Men. What do you call a movie that kills off the protagonist a half an hour before the movie ends? No Country For Old Men. What movie leaves you thinking, "What the hell just happened?" No Country For Old Men.

I must admit that the first hour and 45 minutes of the movie had me on the edge of my seat. The premise of the movie is that Josh Brolin finds a field of cars and dead bodies. He had come across the results of a drug deal gone bad. He finds a bag with $1.5 million in it and decides to keep it. However, he soon learns that he is being chased and begins to run.

What we learn is that he is being pursued by Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), a Hispanic hit-man hired by the Mexican mafia to retrieve the money. This guy is an absolute psychopath and deserves the award for best supporting actor. Also chasing Brolin is Carson Wells (Woody Harrelson), a hit man and apparent former collegue of Chigurh. Finally, Sherrif Tommy Lee Jones, an older soon-to-be retiring police officer with a great wit, is searching for both. This trail of dead bodies across the state gave him an interest in the case.

Without giving away the good part, we culminate in El Paso, Texas. Brolin is trying to get the money to his wife so that she can escape. He's been running from Chigurh and think's he may have escaped him. What he is not ware of is that the Mexican mafia has not lost him. The next thing you know almost everyone is dead. Tommy Lee Jones returns to the crime scene later that evening and the viewer knows that Chigurh is there, however he is hiding and there is no interaction between the two and Jones leaves.

We then go to Chigurh who's sitting in a chair in the bedroom of Brolin's mother-in-law's house and Brolin's wife returns from the funeral. After a short maniacal conversation, we see him leave the house wiping off his shoes. We assume he killed her.

Then, here's where the movie takes a big poop on your desk and the movie doesn't feel bad about it. The movie's last scene shows Tommy Lee Jones talking to his wife. Apparently he retired. He's talking about two dreams he had about his father. After the second dream he woke up. And the movie ends.

What the hell???? I had to check the DVD player. I thought it accidentally skipped to the end. What did I miss? Did I fall asleep for 30 minutes? How can a movie end like this. I need conclusions. No loose ends. Now my mental imagination thinks this Chigurh dude is still out there and, quite honestly, I'm scared. What if he knows that I hated the ending of the movie? Is he going to come looking for me?

How do I rate this movie? I don't know. How about this - the first hour and 45 minutes of the movie deserves a solid 5 stars. The tension, the drama, the action - it's all worth it. The final 15 minutes - 2 stars. Were the Coen brothers expressing their artistic side? The self-recognizing Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences seems to think so. They gave this big piece of poo the award for best movie. Boo!!!!

If you like movies with hugely dissappointing endings, then this movie is for you. If you like logical endings, skip it. You'll be so irritated you won't be able to sleep and you'll have to eat a bag of Doritoes and watch Letterman until you can calm down. (At least that's why I had to do!)

The Best Years of Our Lives

I picked up this movie at the library solely for the purpose that it won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1946. I had never heard of the movie. I did not know any of the actors in the movie. And the DVD cover looked more like a soap opera cover.

The basic premise of the movie is 3 men are returning home from World War II and they must readjust to the world they left. All 3 hitch a ride on a B-17 as it crosses the country. One man, Harold Russell, is from the Navy. He had his hands blown off in a non-combat incident. Originally written as a seaman who lost his hands in a combat mission, the part was rewritten for Russell who really did lose his hands to a non-combat incident. Another is a captain, Dana Andrews, in the Army and the third, Fredric March, is a Sergeant.

Ironically, the high ranking captain returns to the drugstore where he worked only to find his position gone, but does get a job working at the perfume counter. The Sergeant, on the other hand, is a high ranking banker who easily gets his job back. The seaman, however, spends little time on his career, if at all, but focuses on his girlfriend and the challenges of being in a world without hands.

In another subplot, Andrews returns to his wife that he married just before he shipped off. He doesn't seem to love her as much as he thought he did. On the other hand, he met the Sergeant's daughter, Peggy Stevenson, who's probably in her 20's, and they think may be falling in love with each other.

In typical 1940's post-World War II fashion, in the end everything is all hunky-dory. However, the movie was the first to deal with the problems that many soldiers faced after the war. The movie was met with much acclimation and after the Korean War in the early 1950's it was re-released.

The movie itself, in my opinion, was not that great. However, it was very relevant for the time and often that is what makes a movie important. I gave this movie 3 stars from a movie viewing perspective. If you are searching for movies of importance, then I would view this as a 5 star movie.

It Happened One Night

Every now and then I sneak a classic into my movie viewing. This time it was It Happened One Night, the 1934 winner of the Academy Awards Best Picture. In fact, according to the ever reliable Wikipedia, the movie won all 5 major categories (Best Picture, Director, Actor, Actress, and Screenplay), the first movie ever to do so, a feat that would not be repeated until 1975's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

It Happened One Night is a sort of romantic comedy. It stars Clark Gable (Gone With the Wind, and who would have turned 107 years old in February) as Peter Warne, a charming reporter, and Claudette Colbert (Cleopatra) as Ellie Andrews, the eccentric daugher of a Wall Street banker.

Despite it's name, It Happened One Night spans several days. Colbert is fleeing New York to escape a wedding that she does not want to face. On the way she meets Gable on a bus. They butt heads at first, but because she's on the run, she has to keep a low profile and he helps her along the way. What she didn't expect to happen is to fall in love with him.

The relationship is a typical love-hate relationship. The humor is a bit dated, but still funny for its time. I enjoyed watching the old bus, the cars, and even the passing train (an old steam locomotive).

One thing Colbert did not know is that Gable is a reporter and he knows who she is and he knows he has a story to tell. Will be turn her in for the reward? Will he sell his story for the money? Or will he give it all up to be with her? These are the questions I was asking myself during the movie.

I gave this movie 4 stars. This is truely a classic, be it a lesser known classic. Many movies have followed this same plot, but they didn't star Clark Gable. The movie is a little over an hour and a half, so it's a good one to slip in to you movie viewing.

Going My Way

The war-time winner of the Oscar for Best Picture in 1944, Going My Way stars Bing Crosby as Father O'Malley who was sent to an older parish that is in financial disarray. The movie won 7 Oscars total, including Best Actor (Bing Crosby) and Best Supporting Actor (Barry Fitzgerald) and was nominated for 10.

Crosby shows an uncanny knack for handling difficult situations and inspires the neighborhood hoodlums into joining the Church choir. In the end, Crosby saves the Church only to see disaster strike. The movie is filled with singing and includes Crosby's famous "White Christmas".

The movie is not without a great supporting cast. Black and white movie aficionados will recognize the mortgage lender as the judge from Miracle on 34th Street (whose famous line was "if the United States Post Office recognizes this man as Santa Claus, then so does this court!", and William Frawly, who was made famous as Fred Mertz on "I Love Lucy".

Additionally, the movie contains the famous saying that is something to the effect of, "At 18 I thought my father was the dumbest man in the world. By the time I was 21, I was amazed at how much he had learned in that short period of time."

Overall, I give this movie 4 stars. I love the old movies, and best of all, this movie put my son to sleep the other night when he refused to go to bed. He's not as much of a fan of "gray movies" as I am.