Look Both Ways (Kino International, PG-13)
As much as I like big, Hollywood-player heavy films, sometimes a small movie is just right. The director is an unknown property. The stars might as well be people you run into at the gas station. And, when the end product is as good as Look Both Ways, you quickly realize those things couldn't matter less.
Meryl Lee (Justine Clarke) and Nick (William McInnes) are having a crappy day. She just got home from her dad's funeral, he just found out he has cancer, and they meet at the site of a horrible accident. Take that, rom-com-meet-cute.
Look Both Ways is a study in sudden change and how people deal with it. For Nick, this means obsessively going over everything he's ever done that may have lead to his cancer. While Meryl Lee is besieged by images of impending doom: sharks in the community pool, careless drivers that run her over and masked intruders who attack her at home with knives and guns.
Writer/director Sarah Watt has filled her film with simple characters in the midst of life-changing events that stick with you. It also strikes a perfect balance between moments of real-life comedy and pain. Watt realizes that personal experience can turn a character's anguish into the audience's amusement.
Clarke and McInnes are perfect as the mix-matched leads who meet at the perfect time in their lives. Clarke's Meryl Lee is believably lonely and dissatisfied. So often when Hollywood films pick actresses to portray women like her, they are unrealistically gorgeous. Clarke is perfectly pretty, but we have no trouble seeing her as someone with a small, solitary life.
McInnes is ideal as a man with a once exciting, globe-trotting life. He's all rugged-handsomeness and new-found vulnerability. Someone who wouldn't have given Meryl Lee the time of day before the exact time they crossed paths.
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
Foreignocity: Slumdog Millionaire
Slumdog Millionaire (Fox Searchlight Pictures, R)
If films like Trainspotting and 28 Days Later didn't convince you that director Danny Boyle knows what he's doing, then Slumdog Millionaire certainly will.
Indian street kid Jamal (Dev Patel) gets the chance of a lifetime when he appears on his country's version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire. But, after making it through with only two questions to go, the authorities figure no "slumdog" could know all the answers without somehow cheating. Jamal then has to explain to his interrogator how a poor kid from the slums managed to learn so much.
Boyle, along with writers Simon Beaufoy and Vikas Swarup, use flashbacks to tell Jamal's story, and every one is vivid. Diving into a dung heap to get an actor's autograph, living with his older brother in a city dump, making easy money from tourists at the Taj Mahal...All leading to his triumphs on the popular game show.
Slumdog Millionaire takes the hard, run-down living of street life and constantly contrasts it with the small moments of splendor in his short life. Jamal's memories, for instance, are usually filled with the dusty, fast-paced images of someone lying, stealing and begging just to survive. But, his most recent memory of the girl he longs for, Latika (Freida Pinto), is a bright picture fixed in glorious slow motion.
It would be easy for me to say that Patel and Pinto make this movie great and leave it at that. The truth, though, is that literally every performance is amazing. From the children who portray the street kids at various ages, to the cop (Irrfan Khan) who listens to Jamal's stories and the doubtful game show host (Anil Kapoor).
There are several new-comers to film populating this movie, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if we see many of them for years to come.
If films like Trainspotting and 28 Days Later didn't convince you that director Danny Boyle knows what he's doing, then Slumdog Millionaire certainly will.
Indian street kid Jamal (Dev Patel) gets the chance of a lifetime when he appears on his country's version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire. But, after making it through with only two questions to go, the authorities figure no "slumdog" could know all the answers without somehow cheating. Jamal then has to explain to his interrogator how a poor kid from the slums managed to learn so much.
Boyle, along with writers Simon Beaufoy and Vikas Swarup, use flashbacks to tell Jamal's story, and every one is vivid. Diving into a dung heap to get an actor's autograph, living with his older brother in a city dump, making easy money from tourists at the Taj Mahal...All leading to his triumphs on the popular game show.
Slumdog Millionaire takes the hard, run-down living of street life and constantly contrasts it with the small moments of splendor in his short life. Jamal's memories, for instance, are usually filled with the dusty, fast-paced images of someone lying, stealing and begging just to survive. But, his most recent memory of the girl he longs for, Latika (Freida Pinto), is a bright picture fixed in glorious slow motion.
It would be easy for me to say that Patel and Pinto make this movie great and leave it at that. The truth, though, is that literally every performance is amazing. From the children who portray the street kids at various ages, to the cop (Irrfan Khan) who listens to Jamal's stories and the doubtful game show host (Anil Kapoor).
There are several new-comers to film populating this movie, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if we see many of them for years to come.
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