Squidoo Movie Review

It is not often that a story about boy-meets-girl begins with boy-loses-girl. So when I began watching (500) Days of Summer, the first five hundred seconds of a distraught Joseph Gordon-Lewitt in a grief-induced haze methodically breaking crockery had me hooked. Gordon-Lewitt plays Tom Hansen, a trained architect working as a greeting card lyricist who falls in love with Summer Finn (Zooey Deschanel, perfectly cast). Its a bummer that she doesn't believe in love (because she says she has never been in love) and instead wants them to be just friends (with benefits).

So like Tom, the audience is confused when they find out half-way through the movie that not only has Summer broken up with our hero, but that she is engaged and getting married to the next guy she met in a restaurant. Is she as shallow as she appears? Did she just take advantage of Tom? Or is Tom delusional and there is more to this story than we are told?

In a style not the norm for chick-flicks, the plot goes back and forth through time showing us snippets of the highs and lows of Tom and Summer's relationship so that we are taken through the process of Tom figuring out what went wrong and dealing with grief. One of the best movies on love I have seen in a while. My rating: 5/5

"Slumdog" has become the new watchword, epitomising the true underdog, one who has nothing to lose and nothing to recommend him. This movie by British director Danny Boyle (of Trainspotting fame) adapted by Simon Beaufoy (who wrote the screenplay for The Full Monty) from a novel by Vikas Swarup has swept across the awards season in true slumdog fashion -- a lot of heart, plenty of guts, and a dash of genius.

The story is essentially a typical Bollywood plot -- boy meets girl, boy falls in love with girl, they are forced apart, and everything they do to try and get back together again. Of course, with Hollywood production values, located in the glorious chaos of India, especially Mumbai and scored with the magic of A. R. Rahman's music, what you have is a spectacular feast of the senses.

Not to be missed.

Batman and the Joker -- Watching Christian Bale and the (late, great) Heath Ledger play these characters is like watching a duel, a boxing match, a swordfight (you get my drift...). At one point, the Joker dishes out to Batman the cliche "You complete me" and The Dark Knight is rightly about the lengths that a vigilante do-gooder might need to go to stop pure evil. What are the boundaries of morality? Who decides what these are? Should a person be labelled based on his mistakes or his good deeds? Director Christopher Nolan (who also directed the prequel Batman Begins) seeks answers to these timeless questions in an explosion of exhilarating action sequences and awe-inspiring shots that stay with you long after the reel has stopped rolling.

The plot focuses on the efforts of Harvey Dent the "White Knight" district attorney of Gotham (Aaron Eckhart in a superb performance), Lt. Jim Gordon (Gary Oldman) and Rachel Dawes (played by Maggie Gyllenhall) to bring the mob to justice and the unexpected consequence of these efforts in the rise of a villain who has no goal but chaos for its own sake. This is one movie that you need to watch on the full screen to fully experience the sheer magic of the action sequences and the nail biting drama between good, evil, and everything in between. My only problem with the script (spoiler alert!) is that the eventual transformation of Harvey Dent seems contrived and the resolution a bit trite. But otherwise this is the perfect movie not just to have a fun evening out but also an interesting conversation over dinner afterwards. My rating: 4.5/5

You can't help but fall in love with Wall-e, the protagonist of the title. His expressive eyes, the care and concern he shows towards his only living friend, his undeterred devotion to his miserable job, and finally, his single-minded pursuit of his love, Eve even in the face of earth-shattering obstacles. Did I mention that Wall-e is a robot, that his friend is a cockroach, the only surviving creature on Earth that has been destroyed by a consumerist culture and global atmospheric degradation and whose inhabitants have taken refuge on a space cruiser for the last 700 millennia and have turned into obese couch potatoes who drink food out of a cup and live a life of mindless routine? Definitely, not a movie to take kids to... but one that they should see when they are of age. My rating: 5/5