北境漫步-
公主日记2
The story opens with Mia graduating from college (when we last saw her she was in high school) and zipping off to Genovia, which her grandmother, Queen Clarisse Renaldi (Julie Andrews), hopes she will govern someday soon. As in the original ""Princess Diaries,"" much of the putative comedy involves the free-spirited Mia working in gentle, contrapuntal harmony with her veddy, veddy proper grandmother. Because the ugly duckling has already molted into a swan, however, the plot this time around hinges on some minor palace intrigue and romances with two blow-dried suitors who take turns holding the royal hand while keeping a safe distance from the royal chastity. In between the cooing and wooing, the pratfalls and product placements, Ms. Hathaway and Ms. Andrews flash smiles of such dazzling wattage they could carry California through its next energy crisis.
""The Princess Diaries 2"" was directed by Garry Marshall, who has been selling wish-fulfillment fantasies for years, most notably in ""Pretty Woman"" and in the first ""Princess Diaries"" movie. Mr. Marshall, whose place in pop-culture heaven was secured long ago by television comedies like ""The Dick Van Dyke Show,"" on which he served as a writer, is not much of a film director. Depending on the budget, his movies look either cheap (like this one) or studio slick (""Pretty Woman""), and tend to have the same flat, presentational visual style that"s familiar from most sitcoms. (That"s why his movies fit so snugly into airplane monitors.) And as in those sitcoms shot in front of live audiences, Mr. Marshall"s actors often play to the camera and wait for laughs, which can be a serious problem when the screenplay is as deeply unfunny as this one.
Built on vintage and newly minted clichés, Shonda Rhimes"s script combines a classic storybook scenario with the usual self-help uplift. After undergoing a radical makeover in the first ""Princess"" movie, Anne has metamorphosed into a self-possessed young woman. She knows how to walk in high heels, iron the frizz out of her hair and whirl around the dance floor with ineligible partners without making them feel bad. True, her sexuality comes across as weirdly underdeveloped, closer to that of the preadolescents who constitute this G-rated movie"s core audience, than that of most typical college graduates. But that"s in keeping with the character whose appeal is largely predicated on being essentially unremarkable in every respect in looks, intelligence, personality and that most dubious of designated female traits, niceness.
There"s nothing wrong with being nice if it means giving succor to the poor and being kind to animals, but there"s something unsettling about a character as bland, mushy and fiber-free as soggy corn flakes. Once upon a different time, Mia might have found her truest self by hanging out with the soulfully truculent adolescent girls in ""Ghost World."" Instead, Ms. Andrews whisked in with a face frozen in do-re-mi beatitude and carried Mia off to a world where every unruly hair and thought is as smoothed down as the grass on a windswept Bavarian mountain. In the first film, Mia discovered she was to the manner born. Now, the princess who would be queen learns what the rest of us know already: happy movie endings generally come to those women who eat their independence and, in time, a wedding cake too.
《贫民窟的百万富翁》
A gaudy, gorgeous rush of color, sound and motion, “Slumdog Millionaire,” the latest from the British shape-shifter Danny Boyle, doesn"t travel through the lower depths, it giddily bounces from one horror to the next. A modern fairy tale about a pauper angling to become a prince, this sensory blowout largely takes place amid the squalor of Mumbai, India, where lost children and dogs sift through trash so fetid you swear you can smell the discarded mango as well as its peel, or could if the film weren"t already hurtling through another picturesque gutter.
Mr. Boyle, who first stormed the British movie scene in the mid-1990s with flashy entertainments like “Shallow Grave” and “Trainspotting,” has a flair for the outré. Few other directors could turn a heroin addict rummaging inside a rank toilet bowl into a surrealistic underwater reverie, as he does in “Trainspotting,” and fewer still could do so while holding onto the character"s basic humanity. The addict, played by Ewan McGregor, emerges from his repulsive splish-splashing with a near-beatific smile (having successfully retrieved some pills), a terrible if darkly funny image that turns out to have been representative not just of Mr. Boyle"s bent humor but also of his worldview: better to swim than to sink.
Swimming comes naturally to Jamal (the British actor Dev Patel in his feature-film debut), who earns a living as a chai-wallah serving fragrant tea to call-center workers in Mumbai and who, after a series of alternating exhilarating and unnerving adventures, has landed in the hot seat on the television game show “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.” Yet while the story opens with Jamal on the verge of grabbing the big prize, Simon Beaufoy"s cleverly kinked screenplay, adapted from a novel by Vikas Swarup, embraces a fluid view of time and space, effortlessly shuttling between the young contestant"s past and his present, his childhood spaces and grown-up times. Here, narrative doesn"t begin and end: it flows and eddies — just like life.
By all rights the texture of Jamal"s life should have been brutally coarsened by tragedy and poverty by the time he makes a grab for the television jackpot. But because “Slumdog Millionaire” is self-consciously (perhaps commercially) framed as a contemporary fairy tale cum love story, or because Mr. Boyle leans toward the sanguine, this proves to be one of the most upbeat stories about living in hell imaginable. It"s a life that begins in a vast, vibrant, sun-soaked, jampacked ghetto, a kaleidoscopic city of flimsy shacks and struggling humanity and takes an abrupt, cruel turn when Jamal (Ayush Mahesh Khedekar), then an exuberant 7, and his cagier brother, Salim (Azharuddin Mohammed Ismail), witness the murder of their mother (Sanchita Choudhary) by marauding fanatics armed with anti-Muslim epithets and clubs.
Cast into the larger, uncaring world along with another new orphan, a shy beauty named Latika (Rubina Ali plays the child, Freida Pinto the teenager), the three children make their way from one refuge to another before falling prey to a villain whose exploitation pushes the story to the edge of the unspeakable. Although there"s something undeniably fascinating, or at least watchable, about this ghastly interlude — the young actors are very appealing and sympathetic, and the images are invariably pleasing even when they shouldn"t be — it"s unsettling to watch these young characters and, by extension, the young nonprofessionals playing them enact such a pantomime. It doesn"t help even if you remember that Jamal makes it out alive long enough to have his 15 televised minutes.
It"s hard to hold onto any reservations in the face of Mr. Boyle"s resolutely upbeat pitch and seductive visual style. Beautifully shot with great sensitivity to color by the cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle, in both film and digital video, “Slumdog Millionaire” makes for a better viewing experience than it does for a reflective one. It"s an undeniably attractive package, a seamless mixture of thrills and tears, armchair tourism (the Taj Mahal makes a guest appearance during a sprightly interlude) and crackerjack professionalism. Both the reliably great Irrfan Khan (“A Mighty Heart”), as a sadistic detective, and the Bollywood star Anil Kapoor, as the preening game-show host, run circles around the young Mr. Patel, an agreeable enough if vague centerpiece to all this coordinated, insistently happy chaos.
In the end, what gives me reluctant pause about this bright, cheery, hard-to-resist movie is that its joyfulness feels more like a filmmaker"s calculation than an honest cry from the heart about the human spirit (or, better yet, a moral tale). In the past Mr. Boyle has managed to wring giggles out of murder (“Shallow Grave”) and addiction (“Trainspotting”), and invest even the apocalypse with a certain joie de vivre (the excellent zombie flick “28 Days Later”). He"s a blithely glib entertainer who can dazzle you with technique and, on occasion, blindside you with emotion, as he does in his underrated children"s movie, “Millions.” He plucked my heartstrings in “Slumdog Millionaire” with well-practiced dexterity, coaxing laughter and sobs out of each sweet, sour and false note.
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