Two movies

( ... )

I have seen two movies during the holidays and I would like to talk about them a bit, except I am a crappy movie critic. My reviews tend to go like this: "I liked it a lot" or "It was so-so." I mean, what do you say? You recap the plot but you can read Rotten Tomatoes for that. And I'm not Pauline Kael and I don't want to be. But these are pretty complex movies, I ought to be able to come up with a few things to say about them!

Movie 1: Slumdog Millionaire - I really did like this a lot. I am not organized enough to come up with things like "Best of 2008" lists - I'd have to know what movies I actually saw, and I don't. But this might rank pretty high. (Now I'm thinking, "Did I like it better than Wall-E?" and actually the answer might be yes.) I wasn't sure I would like this at all, but - I don't know how, but somehow they managed to make the lives of slum kids in India believable without seeming too horribly tragic. I mean, tragic things happen, I don't think it's really a spoiler to say that, but, well...
( big old spoilers!! )

Movie 2: Frost/Nixon - I liked this a lot, too, but it's a very different movie. It's very obvious that it's based on a stage play. The acting is really superb. I remember Watergate and I remember what Nixon was like, and even though Langella didn't look exactly like Nixon, I found myself forgetting from time to time that it wasn't really Nixon. I read up a bit and I gather that Langella and Michael Sheen (who I assume is not related to the American Sheen family of actors) originated the play in London and later took it to New York. It's a must-see if you like politics, really, and I do... but I was also rather fascinated by the entertainment-related side of it - that is, about Frost and how he put his entire fortune on the line to finance the interviews, and so forth. It is a fairly warts-and-all portrayal on both sides, of both Nixon and Frost, that is.