Mindblowing cinema

Rating: 10/10 (8 April 2009)

The first time i heard about this movie, i was in London watching an advertisement on TV and this movie came up, and it was just sort of out of the blue. Next thing you know I am going on websites and everybody was talking about this film and how great it was and everything like that. So i decided to go to the cinema and see it and what an amazing experience it was, truly mindblowing cinema, it reminded me so much of City of God. The fast camera movement, crazy camera angles, hand held sort of look, slow motion, split screen, texts appearing on the screen randomly, film clips being shown. The direction is truly mindblowing and the screenplay is fantastic. Simon Beaufoy did a great job of bringing Vikas Swarup's novel to life and even though quite a number of things are different from the book, the essential story structure, that of the game show providing a narrative device for switching between past and present was kept faithfully. Note to all filmmakers, this is how an adaptation is supposed to be done unlike Watchmen which i saw the other day which was very very average. The problem with that movie was that Snyder didn't realise that adapting a book to a film medium doesn't mean playing it safe and keeping everything in the novel , including all the dialogue and everything with no sense of direction and pacing and all that. That is why Boyle is a master of visuals and adaptation and Snyder is not. The acting is superbly impressive from the child actors to the teenage actors and Dev Patel is fantastic,also Anil Kapoor pulls off a difficult role, a sort of a role that is an unlikeable character but yet he manages to do a great job. Anyways this is just outstanding cinema and India is a beautiful complex country.