A review or two

I was thinking, it's been a while since I wrote a movie review...so I'll write two.

Slumdog Millionaire=exploitative cheesefest

One down one to go

Last night we watched a movie called Gone Baby Gone. I'm not sure what made me watch it. It's about a guy who finds people. In Boston.

Anyway, despite the fact that it had nothing going for it before it started, It turned out to actually be a pretty good movie. So here's the story. This girl gets kidnapped and her aunt goes to the media, and then hires this private investigator to find her. So he follows all sorts of twists and turns to try to find her. I really want to say how it ends, but I won't because I think it would ruin the suspense of the movie for all of you out there who are going to go out and rent it because I said it was good (Ok, I recognize that that number of people is probably close to zero).

Anyway, here's why I liked it.
1. a good well constructed plot. I could often guess what was going to happen next, but not more than maybe 30 seconds before it actually happened. So it wasn't super suspenseful, but it definitely had lots of unsuspected twists and turns. I don't like predictable movies (like SM).
2. It raised real issues and portrayed people actually struggling to figure out what the right thing to do is. The main issue of the movie is "Is it better for a child to live in poverty with their biological family, or in relative affluence with a family not there own? How about if their family leaves them alone at night, or does drugs? And if it is better, who gets to decide that? Can I as a person who cares about children decide to take a child from another family I judge to be doing a poorer job?" A secondary issue is "If the state isn't doing it's job, do the citizens have to right to do it for them? And are drug dealers bad people?"

Just kidding about that last one.

3. It portrays people making decisions about what is right, and acting on those decisions, and then it shows the consequences of those actions. In movies we don't often get to see consequences of real actions. I mean we get to see what happens if I lay 20 pounds of C4 under this building, but we don't get to see people having to clean up the mess. Hollywood often falls into the trap of skipping from action, to actions, to more actions...and we miss all the messiness. And the thing is, life is messy and dirty and painful.

So let's see how SM stands up:
1. What plot? Two kids grow up poor in India and end up making it in the world. One in a respectable job, the other in crime. Then one of them wins a million dollars because they happen to pick 10 questions he actually knows the answer to. I have to say the only unpredictable part of that movie was him jumping in poop.--cheesefest
2.Here's the exploitative part. It doesn't actually deal with any issues. The message of the movie is--hey look at all the poor people. Nobody has to make any decisions or face any consequences for anything.

All that said. SM was a fun movie. It's not bad to have a predictable story. And it's not bad for the good guy to win. It just doesn't make it a great movie.