iLife

Film: Steve Jobs
Format: DVD from Sycamore Public Library on laptop.

I have a mixed marriage in the sense that I am and have long been a PC guy and my wife is a dedicated Mac user and has been since before we were married. I’ve certainly used my share of Macs—you don’t work in publishing without spending time on a Mac, or at least you didn’t years ago—but my original connection to computers was gaming, and that was all about the PC. Because of this, I was never really that interested in the Steve Jobs cult of personality. My wife and kids all have iPhones; I have a Galaxy. Steve Jobs is a pseudo biography of Jobs. It’s more a trio of memoirs, seeing Jobs in the moments before three product launches: the Macintosh, the NeXT, and the iMac.

What this isn’t is a nice picture of Jobs as a person. While this may not be a “warts-and-all” biography, it is one where at least some of the warts are not merely included, but are featured. These include his tremendous ego and his evident need for complete control over everything he touched. The film doesn’t really explore the technology or the innovation; instead, it explores a set of relationships that Jobs had over the course of his career.

Saw: Extreme Sports Edition

Film: 127 Hours
Format: DVD from Sycamore Public Library on laptop.

Writing about 127 Hours is going to be difficult for me for a couple of reasons. The first is that I have a real problem with films that involve physical confinement, and since our main character gets trapped 17 minutes in to a film that is just over 90 minutes long, there’s going to be a long part of this film that will make me uncomfortable. The second is that, while it’s impossible not to be impressed by the will to live and the ingenuity displayed by Aron Ralston (played by James Franco), there’s a part of me that thinks 127 Hours is a great advertisement for why it’s a bad idea to tempt fate in this specific way.

I talked with old podcasting partner Nick Jobe about this movie this morning, telling him that I intended to watch it today. He said that the truth of 127 Hours is that you go into the movie knowing what is going to happen and you spend the entire movie waiting for it to happen. When it does, it lasts a couple of minutes and then it’s over. That’s pretty accurate.

Off Script: Shallow Grave

Format: DVD from Rockford Public Library on laptop.

So yesterday I watched Marvin’s Room. Because of that, I decided that today I needed something with a bit more…guts. So, despite have recently put up a review of something from my horror lists, I felt like I needed something along those lines today. Thus it is that I watched Shallow Grave, Danny Boyle’s first full-length theatrical release. This is not a horror movie by any legitimate measure. What it is is a very violent neo-noir and one of the first films in the more modern breed of ultraviolent British crime films. Shallow Grave lacks the fun of a film like Snatch, opting instead for intrigue, mistrust, and pure evil.

The plot is ridiculously simple. Three roommates are looking for a fourth to share their apartment. The three are young professionals, all with decent careers and prospects. Alex Law (Ewan McGregor) works for an Edinburgh newspaper as a reporter. Juliet Miller (Kerry Fox) is a doctor. David Stephens (Christopher Eccleston) is a chartered accountant. The search for a new roommate is more of a chance for them to make fun of people and put them through a terrible interview process, but eventually they settle on Hugo (Keith Allen), who claims to be working on a novel.

Off Script: 28 Days Later

Film: 28 Days Later
Format: DVD from personal collection on big ol’ television.

The first time I looked through the 1001 Movies book, I was surprised to see that Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later didn’t make the cut or had been eliminated in a previous edit. I was slightly more perturbed when I realized it was the former, not the latter. People there are who complain of the third act in this film (not me), but it remains as an innovative and exciting horror film, a possible genre rewrite, and an exercise in truly virtuoso filmmaking.

First, let’s get this out of the way right now: depending on your point of view, 28 Days Later either definably is or is not a zombie movie. I know the arguments on both sides, and I do have an opinion on it, but I’m not going to offer it here. There are solid arguments on both sides. Be warned, gentle reader—any comments below that address this question, either is they is or is they ain’t some zombies, will be deleted. I’m not turning my comments section into a war zone.

I Never Thought You'd Be a Junkie Because Heroin is so Passe

Film: Trainspotting
Format: DVD from personal collection on kick-ass portable DVD player.

It’s an admission of mine to say that I was never really a part of the drug culture. Oh, I certainly saw my share of it, but I wasn’t much of a participator. My drug of choice in my college days was alcohol, and thus most of my drug-related stories involve booze instead of anything else. I don’t say this from a place of superiority (moral or otherwise) but from a place of fact. Drugs didn’t interest me that much, and I got my drinking out early. These days I don’t drink much. All of this makes it more difficult for me to really grok stories that center around drug culture.

This brings us to Trainspotting, a film that I’ve certainly heard out almost since it came out but have to this point managed to avoid seeing. I’ve even owned a copy for a year but still haven’t seen it until today. What I expected (at least from what I had been told about this film) was something akin to a Guy Ritchie film, something like Snatch or Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. Except for the sometimes impenetrable accents, though, there’s not a lot of commonality here. The person or people who told me this film was funny lied to me.

It's Not About the Money

Film: Slumdog Millionaire
Format: DVD from personal collection on big ol’ television.

For a short couple of years, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? was the hottest damn thing on television. I have no idea if it’s still on. First of all, I never watched it, and second, the only way we have television in Case de Honeywell is online or the Roku. Evidently it’s still on, at least according to my Google-fu. Slumdog Millionaire centers on this television show and one particular contestant playing the Indian version for 20 million rupees.

The player is Jamal Malik (Dev Patel, and Tanay Chheda as an adolescent, and Ayush Mahesh Khedekar as a child), a tea boy and former slum dweller and criminal. But we don’t start in the studio. Instead, we start in a police station where Jamal is being beaten and electrocuted to get him to confess. It seems that at the end of his first day run, he’s managed to get to 10 million rupees, one question away from the jackpot, and everyone connected with the show is convinced that he must have cheated some way.

The bulk of the film is told in flashback, with Jamal going through his life to explain how he knew the answers to the various questions. As we progress, it becomes more and more obvious to us that he did really know most of his answers (if not quite all), but many of these answers are equally suspicious. I’m not justifying the torture, mind you; I’m just saying that I understand where the host of the show (Anil Kapoor) was coming from.

What we learn, for instance, is that he doesn’t know the motto of India—an early question—and needs to use one of his lifelines for it. We learn that he knows about the Hindu god Rama because his mother was killed by Hindus on in an anti-Muslim riot. Slowly, his story comes out, and each point in the story explains one part of his life growing up in the slums, following his older brother Salim (Azharuddin Mohammad Ismail as a child, Ashutosh Lobo Gajiwala as an adolescent and Madhur Mittal as an adult) around India, and surviving.

It’s impossible to tell this story without including Latika (Rubina Ali/Tanvi Ganesh Lonkar/Freida Pinto as child/adolescent/adult). A slum girl, Jamal takes her in when they are children, and she becomes part of their family, a third Musketeer in a real sense, since this is a book the boys had been reading at school before their mother died. Salim is dead set against Latika, but accepts her, and so begins Jamal’s infatuation for the girl, and to some extent, hers for him. Much of the rest of the film centers around Jamal and Latika being separated, finding each other, and being forced apart.

More than anything, it is the squalor that astounds. The Indian footage was filmed by Loveleen Tandan, and it looks like she might have enough to make a documentary at some point. The poverty is incredible, as is the aforementioned squalor. These kids live on trash heaps, and in fact the child actors came from the trash heaps, and there are some reports that suggest that some of them are still living there. These are slums like the Grand Canyon is a hole in the ground.

I don’t really know about that, so let’s stick to the film. The relationship between Jamal and Latika is an interesting one. I bought it for the length of the film, but now I’m having some second thoughts about it. Does it work? It sort of does. There’s a sense that Jamal wants to protect Latika from everything, but is unable to do so—in fact, he says that he went on the show specifically because he knew that she’d be watching. It comes across more as obsession than love, at least in terms of Jamal. I think that’s okay. It works for the characters. Jamal’s relationship with his brother is far less complicated in that respect. Jamal lives under Salim’s thumb until he finally breaks with him, over Latika, naturally. That relationship I buy without question.

Slumdog Millionaire won a shit-ton of Oscars, and it certainly deserved some of them. I’ve been told by several people that the film takes real liberties with the book, and not all of them in a positive way, but I can’t speak to that on personal experience. I can say that the film is visually fantastic; it’s a textbook on cinematography.

The ending, though. Eventually, after Jamal has pled his case with the police, they let him back on the show for the final question. And as with the previous questions he has gotten, it is one that has a connection with his life. He’s told that in the book The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas (it’s spelled wrong in the film, incidentally), two of the Musketeers are Athos and Porthos. His question is to name the third. If you are familiar with the book or one of the multiple adaptations, you know whether or not he is right the moment he gives his answer. (Here’s a hint for you: it’s not D’Artagnan.)

Why to watch Slumdog Millionaire: Because Horatio Alger ain’t dead in spirit.
Why not to watch: If you know your literature, you know the end before it happens.