"There's sadness and tragedy within Slumdog Millionaire -- starvation, genocide, child prostitution and overwhelming oppression -- but there's humor, humanity and dignity as well. [Director] Danny Boyle, stepping outside the UK to focus his lens on India, seems to have freed himself here to bring his brilliance as a director to its fullest fruition.

"Slumdog Millionaire is Boyle's best film to date, which is saying quite a lot; He's made a joyous, fun, and wonderfully accessible film that should play well in Toronto before moving on to wider release." -- from Kim Voynar's Cinematical review, posted this evening at 8:03 pm.

9.1 Update: The Sarah Palin "Babygate" thing is over. It turns out that Bristol Palin, the 17-year-old daughter of the Republican vice presidential candidate, is five months pregnant. It was certainly legitimate to ask questions given the reportedly curious circumstances of Trig Palin's birth last April plus the photos that provided no obvious indication that Sarah Palin was in a late-term pregnancy state prior to delivery. But it's over now so forget it.

Every time I see a massive, shape-shifting dark gray storm cloud -- a really big one, I mean -- my mind always recalls those swirling God clouds above Charlton Heston during the red-sea parting in Cecil D. Demille's The Ten Commandments. What a grotesque hypocrite DeMille was, and yet he had a great eye and the diligence and exactitude to make his films look just so.

This Getty images photo from N.Y. Times was removed before I could copy the photographer's name.

The counter-current 's against Burn After Reading continues in this filing from the Venice Film Festival by Time's Richard Corliss: "The viewer's fun, such as it is, comes from guessing where the movie is headed and why it's going there. The ultimate question, from this admirer of virtually all the brothers' work, from the early Blood Simple and Miller's Crossing to their previous Clooney collaborations O, Brother, Where Art Thou? and Intolerable Cruelty, is a plaintive 'what the heck kind of film is this?'

"As close to an answer as you'll get here is that Burn After Reading is an essay...Read More

Which sexually frank Toronto Film Festival drama seems like the rougher sit --- (a) Borderline (d: Lynne Charlebois), about a sexually active Quebec writer (Isabelle Blais) featuring "numerous scenes of full-frontal nudity by both genders, various sexual positions gay and straight, coarse language and wrist slashing" or (b) Cloud 9 (d: Andreas Dresen), which is about geezer infidelity and hot sex? The answer, of course, is the latter.

I don't want to even begin to imagine 70- or 80-somethings doing it, much less submit to the sight of same during a film. All power...Read More

Mark Olsen has written an L.A. Times piece listing the Best L.A. Films of the Last 25 Years. Fine, but you know what? The last 25 years (1983 to the present) have been cool, interesting, diverting, etc., but nowhere near as soul-stirring as the '50s, '60s and '70s -- the true glory days of L.A. cinema.

And so Olsen's list leaves off Kiss Me Deadly, The Long Goodbye, Sunset Boulevard, In a Lonely Place, Point Blank, Bob, Carol, Ted and Alice, Play It As It Lays, Bloom in Love, No...Read More

Whenever I'm thinking of buying something smallish and electronic (phone, laptop, digital camera), I always tend to favor devices that (a) weigh a bit more than the other units and (b) are either black or dark grey. (As I tend to hate silver except for Mac Powerbooks.) I realize it's illogical, but there's a little man inside who doesn't like to pay money for anything that feels too lacking in molecular density. That's why if were a high-tech manufacturer I would put tiny little weights inside my devices to make them seem more "substantial"...heh-heh.

Toronto Star critic Peter Howell yesterday posted the results of the eighth annual "Chasing the Buzz" poll surrounding the Toronto Film Festival, which runs 9.4 to 9.13.

The poll respondents include USA Today's Suzie Woz, Cinematical's James Rocchi and Kim Voynar, Movie City News' David Poland, Reel Views' James Berardinelli, Variety and CinemaScope's Robert Koehler, UC Santa Cruz film prof B. Ruby Rich, Monsters and Critics reviewer and MSN columnist Anne Brodie, Variety's Anne Thompson and myself.

Expressing interest in seeing Steven Soderbergh's Che epic, Brodie writes that it'll be "keen to see how...Read More

Variety's Jay Weissberg, filing from the Venice Film Festival, has given the equivalent of a four-star review to Clair Denis' 35 Shots of Rum, which will begin to screen 5 days hence at the Toronto Film Festival.

Mati Diop (l.), Alex Descas (r.) in Claire Denis' 35 Shots of Rum.

"The warmth radiating from 35 Shots of Rum smoother than the finest liquor, reminds viewers how rarely movies capture the easygoing love embodied in a functional family," Weissberg writes, "with all its support and tenderness. Denis' latest may appear whisper-thin on the surface,...Read More

The former Sarah Heath -- now Gov. Sarah Palin -- doing sports reporting on Channel 2, KTUU-TV in Anchorage, in 1988. Watch this and you won't hear a word -- all you can do is look at her grotesque '80s hair. Wasn't this kind of thing passe by this point? Palin is wearing a late '70s-early '80s coif...no?

And by the way: yesterday afternoon Daily Kos writer Arc XIS (what's that name supposed to mean?) posted a longish, circumstantially-supported, far-from-conclusive and yet intriguing piece postulating that Trig Paxson Van Palin,...Read More

Those poor people in New Orleans and nearby areas are about to receive their second super-thrashing in three years. And Katrina, remember, was a category 3 hurricane when it hit New Orleans on the morning of 8.29.05, and so is Hurricane Gustav. The latest news is that it may be weakening somewhat, and may perhaps even be down to a level 2 by the time it goes over land. Maybe.

That "mother of all Hurricanes" line from New Orleans mayor C. Ray Nagin may be an exaggeration, according to a conversation I had a...Read More

Peter Howell's rave review of Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker, which will show at the Toronto Film Festival early next week, raises an obvious question: why doesn't this Iraq War film have a distributor? The answer, of course, is that all Iraq War pics are thought to be box-office poison. But if a film kicks serious combat ass (along the lines of, say, the last 25% of Full Metal Jacket), there should be a market for it, no?

"Just when you think the battle of Iraq war dramas has been fought and lost, along comes one...Read More

Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire is "a huge crowd pleaser," a friend in Telluride wrote me late last night. "The ending pays off big time. The audience went wild. It reminded me of the audience reaction to Juno here last year." Are you getting this, John Horn?

Fox Searchlight will open Slumdog Millionaire, which is based on Vikas Swarup's novel "Q & A," on 11.28. The film is slated to show at the soon-to-begin Toronto Film Festival on 11.28.

A Fox Searchlight synopsis reads as follows: "Jamal Malik, an 18 year-old orphan from the slums of...Read More

In telling a story about a distinguished middle-aged man who has a reckless affair with his son's fiance, you might expect a brief scene or two early on explaining why the older man might be hungry or unsettled or desperate enough to do such a thing. But in Damage ('93), director Louis Malle explained it all in a brief silent moment, which can be found between 3:36 and 4:03. Home from work, Jeremy Irons sips his drink and looks around his living room, and you can just see it in his face.