Movies

Terror masala

SEETHA NARAYAN — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 22:51:19 GMT

Bollywood’s colorful, multi-genre musicals serve up their most interesting character yet: the singing, dancing terrorist.
After living in fear of terrorism for more than half a decade, it’s something of a relief to sit in the dark at the Somerville Theatre and . . . laugh at it.

BURNING DESIRE: In the 1998 film Dil Se, lovebirds Meghna and Amar sing, dance, and fall in love — never mind that terrorist are trying to destroy the world.

This story was planned and written several weeks before its publication date. It was a coincidence that it arrived on the newsstands the day of the Mumbai terrorist attacks. The author is a native of Mumbai and knows it well. Though coverage of the Mumbai attacks here in the States has been grave, certainly as seen through the prism of our own experience of 9/11, Mumbaiites and Indians have seen such violence before in train bombings, riots, and Hindu-Muslim strife dating back to India's independence. Bollywood's take on terrorism is testimony to the acknowledged role it has played in India's history and culture. Finding stories, even music and dance, in the terrorist theme is one way we deal with its presence in Indian life.

After living in fear of terrorism for more than half a decade, it’s something of a relief to sit in the dark at the Somerville Theatre and . . . laugh at it. In the 2006 action/comedy Kabul Express, two improbably hunky Indian journalists ham and yuk their way through Afghanistan in search of Taliban to interview. By movie’s end, the duo, with an American and an Afghani in tow, rattle around the barren landscape in a jeep, cracking wise about their narrow escapes. Then they brake with a start. “Look!” says one in a stage whisper, pointing with overacted horror into the wasteland. “Osama bin Laden!”

It is absurd to think of bin Laden lolling amid the rocks of Afghanistan, waiting to be stumbled upon by rookie journalists. Ditto the idea that terrorism could be a handy backdrop for the classic road-trip/bad-vacation/buddy-movie plotline. But the only surprise to those familiar with Bollywood (as Mumbai’s thriving film industry is affectionately named), and its recent offerings of terrorist-themed films, is that the movie doesn’t likewise contain a romantic element and several musical numbers, with jihadists and journalists bursting into song and gyrating their hips in moments of high emotion, as do many of the films in this new terror subgenre.

Is that trend unreal? Sure. Careless, immature, and rash, in this post 9/11 age? Not necessarily. Bollywood films, given license to be exuberant and over-the-top, offer a bracing contrast to the painfully sincere and humorless (with the possible exception of Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo) treatment of terrorism in Hollywood films. And those willing to be swept along by Bollywood’s three-hour extravaganzas with patchy subtitles might even find them edifying.

Four Christmases

BRETT MICHEL — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 23:56:54 GMT

Tests the audiences' tolerance of grim cheer
Rather than the typical snowstorm that strands characters in a Holiday-themed comedy, it's heavy cloud cover that keeps San Francisco couple Brad and Kate from catching their flight to Fiji.

Review: Milk

PETER KEOUGH — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 12:21:21 GMT

Van Sant's gay of reckoning
Van Sant's Milk of human kindness

VIDEO: The trailer for Milk

Interview: Cleve Jones. By Peter Keough.

Few films have caught the zeitgeist as serendipitously as Gus Van Sant's trenchant, teary Milk, a bio-pic of San Francisco city supervisor Harvey Milk. The first openly gay man elected to public office in the United States, Milk (Sean Penn) was murdered on November 27, 1978, along with the city's mayor, George Moscone (Victor Garber), by Dan White (Josh Brolin) after Moscone refused to let White rescind his resignation from the city's board of supervisors. The film resonates not only because the release coincides with the anniversary of Milk's death but because of an unfortunate repetition of history.

In 1978 Californians voted on Proposition 6, which would have banned gays from government jobs. Earlier this month, they voted on Proposition 8, which forbids same-sex marriages. Milk's campaigning helped defeat the former. So why did the latter win? Perhaps this movie might prod some into reconsidering why they voted for Prop 8 and inspire others into renewed efforts to campaign against it.

For that reason alone Milk demands to be seen. More important, in its first 40 minutes or so, it provides a textbook description of how to create a grassroots movement. Most likely, however, the reason the film will seduce audiences and woo Oscar voters is that it's a juicy and manipulative melodrama and a powerful tearjerker.

Van Sant starts off conventionally enough, with Milk taping an autobiographical statement to be listened to in the event of his death; that's followed by archival news footage of the shootings. Then we flash back to his pre-activist days as a closeted New York office drone who, on his 40th birthday, in the arms of new-found love Scott Smith (James Franco), decides to move to San Francisco to do something in his life "to be proud of."

Newly bearded and long-haired, Milk and Smith open a camera shop in the fledgling gay enclave of Castro Street. But it's not quite the promised land: the established businesses and the police force are virulently homophobic. Milk organizes the gay community, and boycotts and unlikely alliances with the Teamsters and others produce the powerful political movement that puts him in office and defeats Proposition 6.

Patti Smith: Dream of Life

GERALD PEARY — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 00:04:12 GMT

An intimate, affectionate, non-linear visit
This collage of a documentary emanates from an 11-year collaboration between punk poet/rocker Patti Smith and her filmmaker friend Steven Sebring.

Andy Warhol: Denied

GERALD PEARY — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 00:02:47 GMT

A wry, amusing bit of art-world sleuthing
Andy himself would love the to-do concerning his mountains of left-over work.

Vampire lust

BRYAN MASTERGEORGE — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 21:49:47 GMT

Photos from the Boston premiere of Twilight
Photos from the Boston premier of Twilight

Kellan Lutz signs autographs at the Boston premiere of Twilight, November 21, 2008
All photos by Bryan Mastergeorge

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Kellan Lutz signs autographs at the Boston premiere of Twilight, November 21, 2008
All photos by Bryan Mastergeorge

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Kellan Lutz signs autographs at the Boston premiere of Twilight, November 21, 2008
All photos by Bryan Mastergeorge

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Edi Gathegi looks on, as Kellan Lutz poses for a photo with fans at the Boston premiere of Twilight, November 21, 2008
All photos by Bryan Mastergeorge

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Kellan Lutz signs autographs at the Boston premiere of Twilight, November 21, 2008
All photos by Bryan Mastergeorge

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Kellan Lutz hugs a fan at the Boston premiere of Twilight, November 21, 2008
All photos by Bryan Mastergeorge

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Phoenix staff writer Chris Faraone interviews Edi Gathegi and Kellan Lutz, at the Boston premiere of Twilight, November 21, 2008
All photos by Bryan Mastergeorge

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Phoenix reporter Maddy Myers interviews Edi Gathegi and Kellan Lutz, at the Boston premiere of Twilight, November 21, 2008
All photos by Bryan Mastergeorge

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Edi Gathegi and Kellan Lutz pose for a photo, at the Boston premiere of Twilight, November 21, 2008
All photos by Bryan Mastergeorge

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The Boston premiere of Twilight, November 21, 2008
All photos by Bryan Mastergeorge

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Excited fans swarmed the Fenway movie theatre, at the Boston premiere of Twilight, November 21, 2008
All photos by Bryan Mastergeorge

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Fans visually (and vocally, we assume) express excitement, at the Boston premiere of Twilight, November 21, 2008
All photos by Bryan Mastergeorge

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More excited fans, at the Boston premiere of Twilight, November 21, 2008
All photos by Bryan Mastergeorge

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Edi Gathegi and Kellan Lutz speak with reporters, at the Boston premiere of Twilight, November 21, 2008
All photos by Bryan Mastergeorge

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A poster advertising Twilight at the Fenway theatre, at the Boston premiere for the film, November 21, 2008
All photos by Bryan Mastergeorge

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Transporter 3

TOM MEEK — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 12:23:11 GMT

A poor man’s version of the latest James Bond outing
The new Transporter spills out in a jumble of frenetic action vignettes.

Review: Australia

PETER KEOUGH — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 20:41:29 GMT

Baz Luhrmann's Oz and ends
Baz Luhrmann's incontinent Australia

VIDEO: The trailer for Australia

Australia | Directed by Baz Luhrmann | Written by Baz Luhrmann, Stuart Beattie, Ronald Harwood, and Richard Flanagan | with Nicole Kidman, Hugh Jackman, Brandon Walters, Bryan Brown, Jack Thompson, David Gulpilil, David Ngoombujarra, and Lillian Crombie | Twentieth Century Fox | 165 minutes

If the cows had just gotten on the boat, I'd have been satisfied. But that wasn't enough for Baz Luhrmann. He has at least another hour to go in his motley epic Australia, and we hadn't even made it to World War II yet. I guess Baz must have said to himself, the movie's named after a continent, there's got to be more to it than that. So bring on contrived plot complications and the Japanese Imperial Navy.

A pity, because had he showed some restraint, he might have made his best movie yet. Of course, if he'd showed some restraint, he wouldn't be Baz Luhrmann. At its best, Australia is an epic farce, like The Sundowners with CGI effects and the goofy tone of Luhrmann's own Strictly Ballroom. Or a cross between Red River and The Wizard of Oz.

Which is kind of what you'd expect from a screenwriting combination that includes Stuart Beattie (Pirates of the Caribbean), Ronald Harwood (The Pianist), and Aussie novelist Richard Flanagan. Just don't take this film too seriously and it's a rollicking good time. Give it a little thought and the result is the endless catastrophe that is the last third.

The part I enjoyed starts out with the most engaging and animated performance from Nicole Kidman since To Die For (1995). Her Lady Sarah Ashley struts about in her jodhpurs with Kate Hepburn authority, plucky and proper and a bit absurd. Brewing war clouds be damned (it's 1939), she's heading Down Under to retrieve her dawdling husband from his cattle ranch, Faraway Downs. Once there she finds Lord Ashley with a spear in his back, the ranch near ruin, and ruthless cattle baron King Carney (Bryan Brown) ready to buy it all up wholesale. Her only recourse is to drive a herd of cattle across the wastelands to the western port of Darwin. Alone.

Unless that mad dingo, "The Drover" (Hugh Jackman), will help her out. At home only on the Outback mingling with Aboriginals, the Drover despises the hoity-toity lady, and the feeling is mutual — though her expression when he pulls off his shirt suggests what direction this relationship will take. They come to an agreement and put together a misfit squad of riders that includes a lovable drunk (Jack Thompson), a matronly Aboriginal woman (Lillian Crombie), Drover's sidekick (David Ngoombujarra), and Nullah (the adorable Brandon Walters), a magical, mixed-race waif who does double duty as a voiceover narrator.

Dream catcher

MICHAEL ATKINSON — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 18:24:00 GMT

Karen Shakhnazarov at the MFA
Karen Shakhnazarov at the MFA

ZERO CITY: If Buñuel had done time in a Communist country, this might well have been the result.

“The Films Of Karen Shakhnazarov” | Museum of Fine Arts | December 3-6

We take Russian films as we can find them these days, one at a time, whether they be the sand-blasting pulp epics of Timur Bekmambetov, the brooding melodramas of Andrei Zvyagintsev, or the annual beautiful but often frustrating offering by master enigmatist Aleksandr Sokurov. Vodkal driblets of psychotronica and metaphor and dreaminess, respectively, but no "Russian cinema" per se. Given the nation's current state of being — tugged into irritation by a corrupt and overbearing government, run in actuality by trade "oligarchs," and permanently confused about its renascent nationalism and new economic growth — one could hardly expect anything like a cohesive film culture, especially since the once-mighty state-supported industry has had to rebound from its post-Soviet crisis by way of private funds and scraps of government funding.

Significant figures do loom, though mostly out of our stateside view — Aleksei German Sr. and Jr. are both making vital and extraordinary films, though nothing of their work has been released here. The same goes for famed cinema-of-cruelty doyenne Kira Muratova, who at 72 released her 18th film last year. A less ostentatious, and far more audience-friendly, Russian film mill is Karen Shakhnazarov, whose career stretches back to the '70s but who only now, in the Putin years, is being recognized as one of Russia's signature voices.

Perhaps his makeover began with ZERO CITY (1988; December 6 at 1:30 pm), something of a perestroika landmark that also stands in sharp relief to his usual thematic terrain. It's an absurdist, Kafka-esque comedy-without-laughs in which a Moscow engineer (Leonid Filatov) arrives in a small town to modify a tiny air-conditioner part, cannot get a straight answer, is met with all manner of surreal non-sequiturs (a naked secretary, a restaurant cake in the shape of the hero's head, a bolero of hyper-paranoid suspicions), and in the end realizes he can never leave. If Buñuel had done time in a Communist country amid his many exiles, this might well have been the result. But it also makes you wonder how any such scenario could ever have found textual roots without the enriching benefit of a psychotic totalitarian bureaucracy — or perhaps how such a social context adds ferocious weight and size to any symbolic narrative idea. Whatever: Zero City is a low-key, deliberately methodical walk through the subconscious life of the Soviet quotidian, and having watched it you walk away with a genuine sense of a cultural reality.

Interview: Cleve Jones

PETER KEOUGH — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 13:12:58 GMT

Retro active
Harvey Milk's protege Cleve Jones on the movie, Obama, and Prop8.

VIDEO: Peter Keough interviews Cleve Jones

Few of us get a chance to relive our youth, let alone with Gus Van Sant directing and Emile Hirsch as our stand-in. That's one reason Cleve Jones is happy, as Milk — the bio-pic about the San Francisco city supervisor who was the first openly gay man elected to public office — opens today (November 26), one day short of the 30th anniversary of Harvey Milk's murder. As you'll see in the movie, Milk turned the young Jones onto politics back in the '70s, and the protûgû has since kept up the good fight, as one of the founding creators of the AIDS Memorial Quilt in the '80s, and more recently in the campaign against California's Proposition 8, which calls for a ban on same-sex marriage. But that last is one reason Jones isn't happy: unlike Proposition 6, a ban on gays in government jobs that Milk helped defeat in 1978, Proposition 8 passed, along with similar initiatives in three other states.

You played a role in the film?
I have three cameos. I played Don Amador [an activist friend of Milk] calling with the news of winning in LA [to defeat Proposition 6], and then I'm slumped over a cocktail in a bar when Emile Hirsch bursts in and says, "Out of the bars and into the streets!" And then I'm also on stage clapping when Sean as Harvey gives his speech at City Hall.

Is that a beginning of a movie career for you?
Oh God, I hope not.

What's it like in the scene when your younger self comes in and confronts who you are 30 years later?
It was poignant and eerie and odd, but it was also great fun because all of our cast and all of our crew were so excited to be part of this project, and there was this great sense of family. We all became friends, and we've remained friends. Everyone was so respectful of Harvey, of the neighborhood, and of the movement. I'm 54, and this is the most wonderful year of my life — truly, it's just great.

Did your first meeting with Harvey happen as it did in the movie? [Young Cleve dismisses Milk as too old and square.]
It is very accurate. I didn't take Harvey seriously at first. He was this character always running for office, and he had a ponytail, and I wasn't that interested in electoral politics. I thought we needed a revolution. I'm more hopeful today. I'm excited and inspired by Obama's victory.

All's well that is Welles

A.S. HAMRAH — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 19:31:20 GMT

Some of the best of the last at the HFA
Some of the best of the last Orson Welles flicks at the HFA

CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT: The swiftest and most unconventional of Shakespeare adaptations.

“Orson Welles the Unknown” | Harvard Film Archive | November 29-December 1

The late work of Orson Welles — some of which is screening this weekend at the Harvard Film Archive — really means everything he did after 1950 or so, the post-Hollywood period that began less than a decade after Citizen Kane. In other words, it begins when many other artists are just getting started, when he's in his mid 30s. Maybe that's the cost of precocity. Or maybe, as Falstaff says in Part One of Henry IV, "Rebellion lay in his way, and he found it." Most of this work is scattered; much of it is incomplete. Welles went his own way, and he's still paying the price.

Welles plays Falstaff in CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT (1965; November 29 at 7 pm), the magisterial yet ever-youthful film he created by combining and cutting down five of Shakespeare's plays plus texts from Holinshed's Chronicles. He made it well into his late period, but he was only middle-aged when it came out. Chimes is a great work by a man concerned only with youth and old age. Keith Baxter's Prince Hal and Welles's Falstaff are like the young Kane and the old Kane Welles played himself 25 years earlier.

In Germany, they treat their great filmmakers right. There is a foundation dedicated to preserving and distributing Rainer Werner Fassbinder's films. The Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Stiftung preserves work by the director of Nosferatu and Sunrise and also films by other great directors of the classic period. In the US, there is no foundation doing this for Welles. The scattered fragments and the hard-to-find works, in all their various cuts and versions, should be collected and preserved in one place. What is the NEA for if not to fund this?

Under the auspices of the Harvard Film Archive and the Goethe-Institute Boston, Stefan Drössler, director of the Munich Film Museum, is bringing "Orson Welles the Unknown" to the HFA. The line-up includes three of Welles's least-available features and two evenings of fragments from unfinished works and rare programs he made for TV.

Simple blood

PETER KEOUGH — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 14:56:07 GMT

Twilight puts the life back into the undead
Twilight puts the life back into the undead

VIDEO: The trailer for Twilight

Twilight | Directed by Catherine Hardwicke | Written by Melissa Rosenberg based on the novel by Stephenie Meyer | with Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, Billy Burke, Ashley Greene, Nikki Reed, Jackson Rathbone, Kellan Lutz, Peter Facinelli, and Cam Gigandet | Summit Entertainment | 122 minutes

As far as the undead are concerned, zombies are out and vampires are back in. The animated carcasses of the lumpen proletariat rising up to devour their oppressors have given way to the gorgeous, invincible revenants who live on the blood of the masses. As in the last election, Joe the Plumber loses out to the elitists.

You could also say that Twilight, Catherine Hardwicke's adaptation of the first of Stephenie Meyer's series of four YA bestsellers, triumphs because girls are turned on by boys who are bad for them. Or because all outsider adolescents want to believe they're not really losers, they're of superior breed. Mainly, though, the movie works because Hardwicke and her soon-to-be-iconic leads take the sex and death and immortality hokum that's as old as Bram Stoker and make the undead live again.

The ultraviolet-like lighting, so eerie with pale faces, does help. It flatters Bella (Kristen Stewart, like a younger, sadder Winona Ryder), a smart and lonely 17-year-old depressed about moving from Phoenix to live with her divorced dad (Billy Burke), the sheriff of tiny Forks, Washington — which is probably just down the highway from Twin Peaks. It's clear she doesn't get outdoors much, and her deadly-nightshade appearance might be what attracts the unwanted attention of the goofball cliques at her new school. Outdoing her in pallor, though, if not in their arrogant good looks, are the Cullen clan: superjock Emmet (Kellan Lutz), haughty blonde Amazon Rosalie (Nikki Reed), Cesare the Somnabulist look-alike Jasper (Jackson Rathbone), goth pixie Alice (Ashley Greene), and haunted demigod Edward (Robert Pattinson), five model-perfect stunners whose heads lift from their table like those of a pride of killer cats as she enters the cafeteria.

Her eyes lock only with Edward's, however, and well they might. His are ink-black and thirsty, fringed by semaphore eyebrows. Pattinson is as close as we'll ever come to a bloodless reincarnation of James Dean. Edward plays hard to get, and he finds Bella hard to get, but after a rocky start, they realize they can't stay away from each other. For Edward is indeed a catch. In addition to his beauty, grace, and intelligence, he and his siblings are scions of Dr. Carlisle (Data look-alike Peter Facinelli), their "dad," who is saintly and appears to be rich as Croesus. And what does this beast see in Bella? He finds her . . . delicious.

Whiz kid

PETER KEOUGH — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 14:57:40 GMT

Slumdog Millionaire is a magical misery tour
Slumdog Millionaire is a magical misery tour

VIDEO: The trailer for Slumdog Millionaire

Interview: Danny Boyle. By Peter Keough.

Maybe Danny Boyle's previous film, Sunshine, bombed because even though it took place on a spaceship hurtling toward the sun at mind-boggling speed, nothing really moved. No such problem with his latest, which is set in a grubby Mumbai police station over the course of an hours-long, sometimes brutal interrogation but spins off like a fireworks display across years of history in one of the world's most densely populated and flamboyant cities from the point of view of one of its most downtrodden and irresistible denizens. Like Boyle's best film, Trainspotting, motion is everything — a compulsive flux of image, chronology, point of view, editing, and sound. Slumdog Millionaire doesn't allow for much comprehension along the way, and in retrospect it remains implausible and manipulative while still making elegant sense.

The young man getting the third degree is 18-year-old Jamal Malik (Dev Patel), the slumdog of the title and the unlikely winner of the top 20-million-rupee prize in the Indian version of Who Wants To Be a Millionaire. The host of the show (Anil Kapoor), no Regis Philbin, wonders how an uneducated ragamuffin could achieve what PhDs have failed to do; he may also fear that the contestant was getting more popular than the host. In any case, he turns Jamal over to the cops. After rougher treatment fails to produce a confession of cheating, the police inspector (Irrfan Khan) just asks Jamal to explain how he arrived at each answer.

And so a simple but exhilarating structure falls into place as each question proves a talisman that whirls the film into Jamal's sometimes hideous, sometimes wondrous, always photogenic past. It's like an MTV version of The Arabian Nights by way of Mira Nair's Salaam Bombay. The first question (about the star of a popular Bollywood movie) sets off a raucous chase scene with potbellied cops pursuing an army of urchins through the parti-colored squalor of Mumbai's Dharavi slum. It includes an astounding aerial shot of the tiny figures sprinting through the endless vista of hovels (Boyle has a knack for urban desolation, as in 28 Days Later), and it culminates in a slapsticky immersion of the hero in a cesspit.

A Christmas Tale

PETER KEOUGH — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 15:02:23 GMT

A twisted Christmas stocking
Maybe Charles, who died of leukemia three decades ago, at the age of six, knew what he was doing.

Bolt

CHRIS WANGLER — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 14:59:21 GMT

Pixarian technical wizardry and Disney schmaltz
The celebs are okay under the direction of Chris Williams and Byron Howard, but the best lines belong to animator Mark Walton as Rhino, a fanboy hamster who fogs up his plastic ball when excited.

No Eden

GERALD PEARY — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 00:08:14 GMT

The story is too familiar
There's a utopian pastoral painting on the wall of Billy and Breda Farrell's bedroom, but their actual marriage is no Eden.

Harvard Beats Yale 29-29

JEFFREY GANTZ — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 15:03:19 GMT

Scores in nearly every department
Kevin Rafferty's 40th-anniversary documentary about the fabled Game of 1968 — when both teams were unbeaten and Harvard, after being completely outplayed by the 16th-ranked Elis, scored 16 points in the final 42 seconds to "win" — has no designs on being innovative: contemporary interviews with the players are intercut with slightly fuzzy but quite acceptable footage of the game.

Tiger by the tail

STEVE VINEBERG — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 22:39:02 GMT

The wild and woolly cinema of John Boorman
The wild and woolly cinema of John Boorman

POINT BLANK: This Lee Marvin revenge thriller is so flamboyantly well assembled, you have to marvel at it.

“John Boorman’s Primeval Screen” | Brattle Theatre + Harvard Film Archive: November 20-24

John Boorman's most recent film, The Tiger's Tail, still doesn't have a US distributor, so there's an irony to the impressive four-day festival of Boorman films that the Harvard Film Archive and the Brattle Theatre are hosting this weekend. Everyone knows the Boorman hits — Deliverance, Excalibur, and Hope and Glory — but fine pictures like his neo-Shakespearean comedy Where the Heart Is (1990) and the political adventure Beyond Rangoon (1995) opened and closed without leaving a trace. Boorman has a distinctive visual style — he loves wide, wondrous, prismatic landscapes — and he's drawn to material that interrogates institutions; in his early career he also loved mythology and pop philosophy. But his instinct for subversive visions has made him risky and usually kept him far from the mainstream.

The series includes neither Where the Heart Is nor Beyond Rangoon, and it's also lacking another memorable Boorman, The Tailor of Panama (2001), which improves on the John le Carrû novel from which it's derived. (The one other omission is his 2004 disappointment In My Country.) But it does provide a rare opportunity to see one of his least-known gems, his 1965 debut, CATCH US IF YOU CAN (HFA: November 23 at 9:15 pm), which was released in America as Having a Wild Weekend. This was a fitting introduction to his career: it came out in the wake of the success of the Beatles' A Hard Day's Night, but it wasn't the picture anyone was anticipating from the Dave Clark Five. Instead of showcasing the band, Boorman, working from a melancholy script by Peter Nichols, cast them as stunt men, one of whom (Clark) runs away with a famous model (Barbara Ferris) in the middle of a shoot. They're looking for escape from the sewn-up, commercialized city world, but the farther they venture from the heart of London, the more they discover that everything's been co-opted, and the only alternative appears to be competing forms of desperation. The movie is utterly remarkable — a eulogy for the '60s when they've barely begun that's lyrical and haunting.

Interview: Danny Boyle

PETER KEOUGH — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 15:04:09 GMT

Slumdog slumming?
Danny Boyle goes to extremes in Millionaire

Whiz kid: Slumdog Millionaire is a magical misery tour. By Peter Keough.

Talk about Jeopardy. After Jamal, a teenage orphan from the Mumbai streets, starts winning it big on India's version of Who Wants To Be a Millionaire, the cops grab him and work him over with waterboarding and electrodes to find out how he knew the answers. And you thought Anne Robinson on The Weakest Link was tough.

Nonetheless, Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire aspires to be a feel-good film while remaining graphically honest about the corruption, poverty, and injustices of its setting. Maybe after the enraged flesh-eating zombies in 28 Days Later and the feral junkies in Trainspotting, Boyle found the mobsters and beggars in the sprawling shanty town of Dharavi downright life-affirming. Or maybe he just brings a kinetic rush to whatever subject he chooses, and a mordant humor that somehow stays upbeat. Whatever, you still have to ask, is he himself slumming by touring Third World misery for our amusement?

THE FILM STARTS WITH POLICE TORTURE, AND IT HAS A SCENE WHERE A KID'S EYES ARE PUT OUT. ARE YOU SURPRISED IT'S SUCH A CROWD PLEASER?
I do these Q&As and people say, "I nearly walked out when the kid was blinded." Yet they clearly forgive it by the end of the story. It's not like the movie avoids letting you know what it's like there, what things go on there, but still, people forgive. I think it's like India, because though some of it is unforgivable, yet you do forgive it.

There are some extraordinary things going on there: the police are corrupt, the infrastructure is inadequate, there's lot of things for them to tackle. There are these terrible extremes, and it's one of the reasons that good storytelling can go on there. But they are connected, not separate. We tend to separate our extremes. If they build a tower block [in India], at the bottom of it is a slum, where the people live who built it, and the people who live in the tower block don't try to chase them away, they feel connected to those people who live underneath. This idea they have, of destiny, can to our eyes look really passive and very accepting, but it doesn't actually work like that. You see kids who have had their hands chopped off to make them better beggars — you actually see people like that, people come up and knock on the car windows, and you can see that their hands have been cut off! But by accepting that, you are connected with that person. It's quite difficult to explain; you sense it when you're there, really.

Quantum mechanic

PETER KEOUGH — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 19:24:45 GMT

Little Solace for Bond fans
Little Solace for Bond fans

VIDEO: The trailer for Quantum of Solace

Quantum Of Solace | Directed by Marc Forster | Written By Paul Haggis, Neal Purvis, and Robert Wade based on a story by Ian Fleming | With Daniel Craig, Olga Kurylenko, Mathieu Amalric, Giancarlo Giannini, Gemma Arterton, Jeffrey Wright, and Judi Dench | Columbia Pictures | 106 minutes

When a chase sequence near the beginning of this latest Bond film arouses less excitement than the horse race it's intercut with, you know something is missing. Likewise when it seems Bond (Daniel Craig) himself wouldn't make as hot a date as a mechanic waiting back at the shop to work on his bullet-riddled Aston Martin. Fans of 007 expect two things from their product: an appealing hero and satisfying action sequences. Quantum of Solace, inexplicably entrusted to Marc Forster (The Kite Runner), fails to deliver either.

Take the opening sequence. The film follows up last year's far superior Casino Royale with Bond, still pissed over the death of the seemingly treacherous Vesper, zooming off to Siena with a fleet of Uzi-sprouting BMWs (Quantum may have cost more per frame than any film ever, but it compensates by challenging the product-placement record) in pursuit. Later, another chase springs up on foot involving repeated leaps across red-tiled rooftops, and it just can't compete with the traditional Palio that's being run at the same time.

The reason? Like nearly every filmmaker these days (one exception: Paul Greengrass last year in The Bourne Ultimatum), Forster confuses meaningless cutting and shaky camera work with excitement. The result is action wallpaper that blurs what's actually happening, an assault of kinetic visual noise devoid of the physical logic and wit that engage an audience's intelligence and not just its viscera. Maybe directors should look back at how previous filmmakers handled elaborate action sequences — say, Buster Keaton.

As for Craig's Bond, last time out he was muscular, rough, brooding, and deep. Now he's just muscular. His motivation is revenge, the conflict is with duty, but the expression is vacant. His heart was broken moments before in film time but a year ago for those of us watching, and I, for one, couldn't connect the dots, probably because Forster was more interested in obliterating them in the hail of the 200,000 blank rounds of ammunition used in the making of the movie.