It’s been just over a year since Danny Boyle’s sci fi film Sunshine came out, and it would be hard to imagine a more different film than Slumdog Millionaire, which has just premiered at both the Telluride and Toronto film festivals (and won the People’s Choice award at the latter). It’s an extremely touching love story set amidst the slums of Mumbai, and uses the Indian version of “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire” as a catalytic backdrop.

Boyle definitely continues to mature as a filmmaker, and has somehow learned to be an excellent director of children––the performances he gets out of the young kids in both this movie and Millions are astounding. Despite his punk-rock roots, he claims to have gotten in touch with his innner hippy while shooting Slumdog in India. Read on to find out all about it, and why he might be driving a cab around London.

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Danny Boyle’s latest offering, Slumdog Millionaire, is generating a fair amount of buzz here at Telluride. Not unlike last year’s Juno, the film showed up in one of the mysterious TBA slots, delighting audiences made weary by a slate of good but somewhat depressing films, such as Hunger, Waltz with Bashir and Adam Resurrected. Slumdog Millionaire follows the story of Jamal Malik, an unlikely winner of India’s version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire. Jamal, his brother Samir, and fellow orphan Latika, manage to survive an almost absurd number of scrapes, the memory of each one coincidentally providing Jamal with answers to the game show questions. The film is big, fast, fun, and colorful, but ultimately a mess.

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• Bob at Forward to Yesterday recently braved an evening at an alcohol-free Indian casino in order to try out for the all-movie version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, and at my request, he blogged about it. “So, how do I assess my chances? Not great, just based on my numbers, my lousy handwriting/lackluster questionnaire answers and my lack of extreme chipperosity.”
• Scarecrow Video has compiled a gallery of Klaus Kinski paintings from posters and video boxes. Kinski will not be denied: “Stare into Kinski’s eyes. I dare you! You will get lost in his obsession; you will feel how tortured he is. Rational behavior has been replaced by a primal drive.” Via The House Next Door.
• Henry Jenkins, co-director of MIT’s Comparative Media Studies program, offers up anecdotes from the first week of the semester. “Senior House welcomes new students by dropping thousands of bouncy balls from the roof of our building while “Go Ask Alice” blares from the sound system and strobe lights flash in their faces. It can be a vaguely out of body experience but it captures the unexpected quality of life in this dorm.”
• Tom Hall has an excellent analysis of Anthony Kaufman’s Village Voice piece on the impact of day-and-date releasing amongst New York’s small handful of art theaters, through which he steals my boyfriend’s (admittedly private) fantasy of building an Alamo Drafthouse in Brooklyn. “[T]alk about under-screened and a license to print money; If someone partnered with The Brooklyn Brewery and built an Alamo-style art-house in Williamsburg (go ahead, do a search for 11211 on your favorite on-line ticketing website) and Park Slope, they’d be putting screens where the audience for these films now reside.”
• I’m on this week’s episode of ReelerTV, talking about Frank V. Ross and Kentucker Audley. It’s embedded above.