Slumdog Millionaire

'Slumdog Millionaire' has been billed as the 'feel good movie of the decade', which, as far as I'm concerned, is the kiss of death. I usually cross to the other side of the street and avoid anything remotely 'feel good'. Doom, gloom and depressing is my thing. The trailers also tried to put me off the film but then trailers usually do but I'd read some great things about the film, so I persevered with my intention to see it.

Jamal Malik is an uneducated young boy from the shanty towns. He works as a chai-wallah in a Indian call centre and he somehow flukes his way onto the Indian version of 'Who Wants To Be a Millionaire?', where despite being patronised by the show's host he gets question after question correct because his real life experiences, shown in flashback, give him the answers. They are also asked, conveniently, in the same order as his life story... which is just one of several liberties the plot takes, such as how did a poor boy from the slums who spoke only Hindi for the first half of the film learn to speak English so well? But we'll gloss over them.



As the show ends for the day, with Jamal one question away from the big prize of 20 million rupees the local police arrest him and accuse him of cheating. The officers don't simply question him though they use various horrific means of torture, suffocating him in water, electrocuting him etc etc, to try and extract the 'truth' from him.

So as you can see, so far, it isn't remotely 'feel good', so it scores heavily with me on that score, and it doesn't get any more upbeat. In fact, at times, it's very disturbing. There's a lot of violence and abuse in the film, most of which is towards children. His mother is bludgeoned to death by anti-Muslim extremists' right in front of his eyes. Jamal tangles with a beggars' racket, whose perpetrators blind and maim young children to increase their begging potential. Amongst all this, he falls for Latika, a girl he is destined to love and lose, several times over. Having escaped the racketeers, he and his brother Salem return to rescue her from the jaws of forced prostitution. Whilst Jamal stays relatively on the straight and narrow, Salem has ventured into the underworld and becomes a gangster. Salem shoots dead the leader of the beggars' racket and rescues Latika. Hurrah. Cheers Bro. Then he tells Jamal to get lost, deflowers Latika himself and then gives her to his boss....



I've never been to India but I'm not sure the tourist board will be terribly happy with this film. It doesn't do the country any favours, showing a country, that has one of the world's most successful economies, as a thoroughly depressing, morally bankrupt place, dominated by corruption, even on quiz shows. Whether this is an accurate reflection or not, and I assume not, it's still a cracking film and of course there are plenty of nasty films about western culture around.



There's humour too and shades of director Danny Boyle's Trainspotting as a young Jamal dives into a public latrine in order to meet a Bollywood actor.

The ending was a little disappointing. Having survived the brutal police interrogation and been reunited with Latika, who in another plot hole has, despite being a 'kept' woman, somehow learned to drive. Jamal should have gone on the show for the final question, stuck two fingers up at the obnoxious host, who even gave him the wrong answers, and said 'F*** you, I'll take the money'.



To sum up. Pure fiction, not at all feel good but right up my street. Oh and I thought everyone knew the names of the Three Musketeers?

OSS 117: Le Caire nid d'espions

'OSS 117: Le Caire nid d'espions (Cairo, Nest Of Spies)' is a French film and it's billed as a comedy/farce, which had me worried. I'm very sceptical about the French nation's capacity for humour. French comedies usually turn out to be, well, not funny.

I needn't have worried, OSS 117 was really amusing, not the out-loud belly laughs of the chap next to me. it wasn't that funny but funny it was. Although there were quite a few French speakers in the cinema and perhaps I missed some of the really funny French only jokes.

It's 1955 and a spy has disappeared while tracking a Russian cargo boat on the Suez Canal. They send his best friend, our hero (!), agent OSS 117 (Jean Dujardin), to find out what has happened. He takes over from the other agent as head of a poultry firm in Cairo, his cover whilst he's investigating. The problem is OSS 117 is in a country he doesn't understand and he proceeds to upset just about everyone with his arrogant and chauvinistic attitude.



What follows is a film that cannot be taken too seriously as it performs a rather clever parody of James Bond and other such characters. Jean Dujardin even looks a bit like Sean Connery and successfully copies many of the mannerisms of Connery's Bond. He's not a suave as Connery, although OSS 117 clearly thinks he is. Excellent stuff.



It all looks low budget but it's based on a series from back in the 1950's and looks just like something from the 50's should, it even has that washed out colouring of films of that era.



It doesn't have a great plot but then it doesn't really need one. Instead, almost every type of spy film is melded into one and we get a host of differing characters. There are Russian spies, former Nazis who don't seem to realise the war is over, then there's the local nationalists/fundamentalists/extremists (delete as applicable) and of course, in true James Bond style there's the local crumpet to bed. Step forward the sublime Bérénice Bejo... or not bed in OSS 117 case. There's a suspicion that he might be more into men, although he does appreciate a wonderful catfight between the two leading women where they tear clothes off each other. I had to avert my eyes obviously.



Agent OSS 117 sleepwalks through the entire investigation without ever beginning to understand anything but in the end solves it almost by accident... and is sent to Iran, to sort them out.

Che Part One: The Argentine

Tonight Steven Soderbergh's epic 'Che'. Well part one anyway; the original four-hour film has been cut into two parts. The first part is known as 'The Argentine'.

'Che: Part One' is probably best described as a 'slow burner'. So don't have a pint before it and one during it, as I did. Also, don't tire yourself out cycling to and from work, as I did, because you might miss vital batches of subtitles if you briefly rest your eyes. Another vital tip is don't choose a cinema that is full of restless folk with weak bladders; apart from the icy draft you get from an ever open door, you are also liable to miss more of those vital subtitles as people block the screen on their way back to their seats. It's certainly a popular film; everyone must have come to find out more about the man on that famous t-shirt. They may well go home disappointed.

The story opens with Ernesto 'Che' Guevara at a dinner party in Mexico where he meets Fidel Castro for the first time. Castro convinces Guevara to turn his back on a career as a doctor and instead join his '26th of July Movement'. Guevara is then heavily involved as Castro's men invade Cuba with the aim of removing the United States backed dictator Fulgencio Batista.



The film is shot a bit like a 'fly on the wall' documentary but there is no narration, the only aid is a few titles flashed on screen indicating the date and the place. As the revolutionaries march across Cuba, reading literature, puffing on cigars and occasionally spouting a bit of revolutionary wisdom, Soderbergh leaves the viewer to fill in the missing bits themselves. It's not a film that educates me about Guevara as I had hoped and it means that you really need a good grasp of the facts before you go. I guess this accounts for a lot of the restlessness in the cinema.



Guevara goes on to play a key role in the two-year guerilla campaign, that eventually achieves its aim. He rises through the ranks and becomes 'Comandante'. The film shows us a lot of battles along the way but never in any great detail and it becomes increasingly difficult to grasp the overall picture. Often I can't quite see what the army are doing, or trying to achieve. Often when the guerilla warfare threatens to get interesting, we skip off to see Guevara years later, at the United Nations. Then when we return, we are some place else but we don't really know why we are there or again, quite what is happening.

Overall, despite the confusion, it's a beautifully shot film and I grow to like Guevara the man. The film paints him as quite a nice guy and as a rebel with a cause. He even gets a bit of eye candy among his revolutionaries with the arrival of Aleida, his future wife.



The film redeems itself in last twenty minutes or so, as it picks up the pace and gets more absorbing. The story stays in the 'present' and concentrates on the battle for 'Santa Clara'. This was the decisive victory of the campaign, after which Batista fled Cuba and Castro's forces claimed overall victory.



I was really looking forward to this film but found it quite unsatisfying. If you know all about Guevara then I imagine you'll love it because you'll be able to follow it, if you don't, then like me, you're in trouble. It did at least inspire me to find out more about Guevara, so I went away and looked up all the details but I'm not sure how many of the audience will be bothered to do that. It will be interesting to see how full the cinema is for part two.

The Reader

It is 1958 in Germany and Hanna Schmitz (Kate Winslet) discovers a fifteen-year-old schoolboy throwing up outside her home. She charitably cleans him up and helps him back home to his family.

The boy is Michael Berg (David Kross), he turns out to have scarlet fever, and is bedridden for three months. Once he is well again, he returns to visit Hanna with a bunch of flowers to thank her. Hanna is a bit offhand about his gratitude and even starts to take a bath in his presence. Michael runs away in embarrassment.

Eventually Michael decides to return, presumably just to catch her in the bath but this time, after a bit of a mishap, it is he who needs the bath and Hanna duly supplies one. Seeing him in the bath gets her thinking. She decides she fancies a bit of that as a thank you and gets her own kit off. In this manner, Michael begins a passionate affair with a mysterious woman more than twice his age.

Hanna tells him that she likes being read to and he discovers that if he reads literature to her, Hanna will be passionately grateful in return. The 'kid', as she calls him, treats her to 'The Odyssey', 'Huckleberry Finn' and 'The Lady with the Little Dog' among others and in return she treats him... to... well plenty.



All the time, Hanna is remote and uncommunicative. He learns little about her, although he does asks her name as early as the third shag, pushy or what. Other than that, she doesn't offer anything to him, other than herself. It is clear she is using Michael, in more ways than one, but he is enjoying it immensely and finds himself hopelessly in love with her. This causes friction at home and with his schoolmates where he passes up on a girl called Sophie, who appears eager for him to read to her.



Hanna works as a glum conductor on the trams but when she is offered promotion to an office job, she disappears and Michael is heartbroken. The story moves on eight years. Michael is now studying law and his class attend a war crimes trial. Which is a pretty cool field trip to have.

He is stunned to see Hanna across the courtroom, standing as a defendant in the trial. Talk about someone popping the bubble of your first love. He learns that his former lover was an SS guard during the war and she is on trial with five other women for allowing several hundred prisoners to burn to death inside a church. The trial traumatises Michael, he has never gotten over his love for Hanna, and now he is guilt ridden for having fallen for her.

He also realises that what he knows about Hanna might influence the trial. He discusses this with his teacher but these conversations aren't elaborated on, which is a shame. In the end, Michael holds his silence and so condemns Hanna to a lifetime in jail. It also begs the question as to what Hanna's lawyer was playing at. Didn't do his research very well, did he?

The film portrays Hanna as a simple person, used to taking orders, someone just doing her job. Hanna herself seem to understand little of what she was accused of and was prepared to take the wrap for the others rather than experience a little embarrassment because of her own inadequacies.

Michael never felt able to visit Hanna in jail, but as a way of erasing some of his guilt he records himself reading the same books he read to her during their love affair and sends them to her in prison. Michael is now played by Ralph Fiennes, whose glum demeanour makes Hanna look positively cheerful. It is such a change from the lively young Michael played by David Kross. Michael now comes across as a weak man, unable to get his head around the two sides of the woman he knew.

As her release draws near, he finally visits her, now played by a cosmetically aged Winslet. However he is as distant to her as she was at first to him, if not more so and he basically condemns Hanna a second time. This time she takes her own life.

At the end of the film, Michael travels to the flat of a Jewish woman who was one of the survivors and wrote a book about it. Her book was used in evidence at the trial. It is Hanna's dying wish that her few savings went to her. Michael makes an embarrassing bodge of dealing with this. What did he hope to achieve? Somehow, he appeared to think he might be welcome.

It’s a good film, full of interesting ideas, but suffers from an uninspiring execution of these idea. There are too many questions, not enough answers. This was surely the intention but it is unsatisfying. The key element of the story became clear to me early on. It may even have been a better film had it been made obvious at the start and therefore elaborated on. I also like a bit of controversy in my films but I'm afraid, on that front, this was a letdown too.

Winslet is good but in trying to play Hanna as moody but comes across as a bit wooden and she's better than that. Perhaps, in trying to push for an Oscar she's pushed too hard. Fiennes part is more of a supporting role, at times it is unnecessary, and undoes a lot of the good work done by David Kross, who is excellent.

The Tale of Despereaux

The film turns out to be rather disturbing...

In the kingdom of Dor they are celebrating Soup Day which is more popular than Christmas. The chef and his bizarre assistant, a creature constructed of floating vegetables, cook up this years recipe but it is spoilt when Roscuro the rat (Dustin Hoffman) falls into the Queen's bowl as she about to taste it. She immediately dies from shock. The King, overwhelmed by this, bans soup, rats and fun. The kingdom becomes a very grey and depressing place, a bit like Nottingham in January.

The rats decamp to the sewers, to somewhere known as Ratworld. Enter a tiny mouse with over-sized ears and puppy dog eyes. Despereaux (Matthew Broderick) is not your usual timid mouse and goes against the grain, constantly seeking adventure. This does not go down well in Mouseworld, where cowardice is compulsory and, despite the fact he's practically a baby, he is exiled to almost certain death in Ratworld. Someone call social services. His family, don't even try to prevent this gross overreaction.



Luckily, he comes across Roscuro, who saves him from the jaws of a cat in the gladiators' arena where he has been sent by the not terribly friendly rats.

An already complicated story then gets even more so with the introduction of Miggory Sow (Tracey Ullman), a girl who is sold by her own father to the King's castle. Nice. I was a bit lost by now; I assume it was even harder for the kids in the cinema to follow.

Miggory Sow seems angry that she's not a princess, well love, most people aren't and seems jealous of the real princess, Princess Pea (Emma Watson). Miggory chunters to herself, steals some of the Princess's possessions and even attacks a painting of the girl with a knife. I think the film's hoping you feel sorry for her but you don't.



The rat then goes to Princess Pea to apologize for the Queen's death but she just throws things at him. The previously nice rat suddenly has a personality change and turns bad. He teams up with the deranged Miggory, who abducts Princess Pea at knife point and forces her down into the dungeon. Where she is tied up and seemingly left to be devoured alive by the rats. Lovely.

Hermione Granger all tied up in a dungeon... Hmmm, bet they had a chuckle about that in the scriptwriters meetings.

The rat then has a change of heart and tees it up for the brave mouse to save the day. Although the princess ends up apologising to him, despite the fact he and the psychopathic servant girl tried to kill her.



It was all so confusing and surely, it's more of the rat's story than the mouse's. At the end, they all live happily ever after of course, the rat sails off on a ship, which is how he arrived and as for the mad servant girl. She gets away with her abduction of the princess and ends up back tending the fields in the country with her Father. Bizarre.

Apparently, it's a good book but you wouldn't have known from this sorry mess.