When somebody asks me a question, I tell them the answer.
Slumdog Millionaire: What a wonderfully rapturous romance this was! It was just genuinely enjoyable. Danny Boyle can craft some amazing kinetic onscreen action like few others working out there, and got great performances out of every one of his cast members. I'm having a hard time coming up with words for it right now, it was just a great afternoon watching a film. And the ending!
It is realistic? Believable? No, not really, was it trying to be? Does it tackle any difficult issues or make us confront our values? No, not really. And, again, it was trying to. It was just trying to tell us a good romantic story, and, on that level, it succeeded perfectly. I think trying to enforce these complaints of realism or tackling difficult issues is trying to force upon the movie things it doesn't aspire to.
The police numbers are gettin' closer, closer, closer to our soul hero, in his soul mobile, yeah baby!
Vanishing Point: Well, this was kind of a waste of time. The car chase sequences were pretty great, but not so great that it was really worth watching. I liked the opening twenty minutes or so where there was no attempt at trying to make a plot, just a guy racing away from the cops. But, when it tried to flashback and make him a well-rounded character, I think it lost all its momentum. In terms of car chases, I'd put it well below 'The French Connection', 'Bullit', and even 'Dirty Mary and Crazy Larry'.
No one's ever really ready for Paranoid Park
Paranoid Park: Great little film. I mean, if you dig Gus Van Sant's slow, ponderous meandering stuff, you'll enjoy this. It's about a teenage skateboarder who -I'm not sure if this needs to be spoilered or not but...-
. But, really, it's just about being young: wandering lonely hallways during class, hanging out, girls and boys, and skateboarding. Man, if skateboarding videos were always shot by Christopher Doyle, I would watch them. It's enough to make me want to take up skateboarding, except I'm not very good at it, and would get ridiculed by skatepunks.
I'd say that this movie is highly artistic in representing one subculture and individual mood of the teen experience that is much less significant in scope than the universal western culture and dysfunctional familial themes represented in American Teen, despite the lack of minority representation.
I would agree with you about PP representing only one subculture, but I thought it did so with a lot more honesty and sincerity. I think 'American Teen''s suggestions that it was going to teach us how teenagers really behaved was the key thing that put me off. Teenagers are very deceptive little creatures, and the movie never made any attempt to push them and try to get to the truth. The misfit girl one minute is tearfully telling the camera she isn't going to date anyone else until after she moves, then is dating like twenty minutes later and instead of going "What gives? You sure changed your tune quickly" the movie carries on on its own merry way. The supposed geek sure seems to have no trouble finding girls willing to date him despite his repeated insistence that he is a loser. I'll tell you what, most losers don't get any dates, much less as many as this kid did. It just all felt really disingenuous to me and didn't seem to enlighten me to anything I didn't already know from watching 'My Super Sweet 16', or, say, 'The Hills'.
