pizzazzman2000

Ever since we jumped onto the Boyle-Rahman bandwagon 2 years ago with Slumdog Millionaire, even back then, at least for me, it was hard to fathom the combined strength of this duo. Which brings me back to an amazing concept pointed out by Napoleon Hill called the "mastermind group"....which literally states that the combined mind powers of a group can generate enough energy and force which is greater than the individual strengths of any single mind. And this is one work by the master duo of Boyle and Rahman which establishes a vibrant and dominant punch,just like Slumdog. The directorial ingenuity of Boyle, added to the musical grace of Rahman, throws them into the ring of other brilliant contemporary directors.

A nicely directed film with a prefect plot which reverts close to the actual reality. Sure, Boyle by himself is a maestro in his entirety, and for the heck of it I'm being repetitive here, but Rahman has also always been worth more than his salt, but a killer combination or fusion of the Boyle-ian and Rahman-ian elements generated a power worth more than the common mind could fathom. As far as I was affected, I haven't come across a movie like this which not only grabs you by the throat right into its heart, but dials-up your emotions that you begin to experience something on the likes of anxiety, panic attacks, fear, and all those essential feelings which make it almost impossible for you to stick to your seats and watch with the normal relaxation you would expect. Definitely I would not recommend this movie for the weak-hearted.

But how does the Boyle-Rahman formula actually come into play? Sure, we could have removed Rahman and had still a gripping tale which makes our eyes pop out when we see the challenging and grueling battle against the natural elements of isolation, heat , plus the addition of a dwindling water supply and food supply, which Aron has to play out. But the brilliance of the genius in a director combo is truly evaluated by its ability to hide your mind from the reality - the reality that this is acting and not fact. The true brilliance is felt when it draws you under its covers so much, that you begin to feel the powerful emotions which the main protagonist goes through. So much so, that the viewer is drawn into a totally new "reality", a reality non-existent. In other words, for those few minutes, the mind cannot even realise that none of this is real. I, for starters, during those "gory" moments, found myself unable to keep still, and kept moving around in my seat, wondering how anyone could actually carry that out! Of course, on closer analysis, it's evident that it's not just what is projected on the screen which triggers this adrenalin rush, and makes one register on the emotional richter scale, but also the music eclat which really helps manifest the true plight, emotions, agony, challenge, despair,faced by Aron Ralston, and even more, bring all these beyond the big screen and actually inject these feelings into us! A brilliant job by Rahman........kudos to you!All it takes is your musical genius to give this movie a white-knuckle finish and make us actually "live" it!

A truly daedal killer scheme for direction and music.

Of course, the 127 Hours effect wouldn't be complete without giving true commendation to James Franco's brilliant acting. Thorughout the film, his professional brilliance and dexterous acting never let up which themselves contribute to creating a riveting appeal for the film. This becomes particularly eminent when the climax of the film begins to surface, that is, from the moment Aron gets trapped in the canyon unable to free his arm. The novelty of the portrayal of his flashback memories becomes clear when it becomes hard to decipher exactly the points when Aron drifts from reality into flashback and back. Being part of the audience, it was very difficult for my mind to get a handle on what was reality and what was hallucination. This is the combined work of the direction and cinematography which go hand in hand to create such an effect on the mind that the line between the reality and imagination on the screen gets totally blurred!

I can positively say, beyond the shadow of doubt, that Boyle and Rahman provide a holistic approach towards their own creation or rather genre which helps stir up those emotions that put our minds right in the heart of the film and make us live those powerful moments. And nice work, which has generated enough Oscar buzz that it remains to be seen how well it can compete against the other potential candidates. This is one film which speaks of novelty on all fronts - direction, cinematography, music, and last but not least, star acting!

And if we thought Slumdog Millionaire was gung-ho enough, we now realise that Boyle and Rahman are crossing over towards the pinnacle of their success as a duo.

The Hangover was surely some shameless advertising for Todd Williams way back in 2009....

That was one flick which surely rooted his DNA-cum signature into the minds of audiences across the globe last year...........so much so, that all that was needed was to see the line "from the director of The hangover", and in New York Minute, there you are, staring at the big screen, in time for "Due Date'. If you want to compare it with the Hangover, the first is, that this film is in no way different from The Hangover, in that the key to both their plots comes from the recipe unexpected + crazy. Sure, Due Date does take you again down a seemingly familiar road of laughs, just like The Hangover, but this is somewhat funnier and crazier. For starters,we the real humour comes from the conflict of characters, or shall i say, personalities. Peter Highman, played by Robert Downey Jr. is of a serious nature, which becomes engaged with the goofy, crazy nature of Ethan Chase , played by Zach Galifianakis

To start, one flaw which plagues this movie, is the shallowness of plot. A storyline which of course didn't take too much thinking, and after a while, especially after both Peter and Ethan end up in the car together, it's predictably obvious what's going to come. But then again, one can undoubtedly say, that any comedy flick can get away with such aspects as shallowness of plot, low-star acting, as long as they keep the audience stocked with a bellyful of laughs! A sure test of the market's appetite!

Now that I've shared the mistakes, here's the next piece of the puzzle: This director surely knows how to create a record of sorts by making two successive films which both share their common element, namely humour And what really drives the show is Ethans goofiness.....The actual character is the soul of true comedy....sure, even in real life, Ethan is a comedian, and those who are already familiar with him, tend to find most things which he does as comic, simply because of the image he has projected in their minds....in other words, his prior-created impression in the minds of so many viewers itself perpetuates the humour we see......and that is one major area this movie plays on. In fact, evident it is that this movie paints Ethan in exactly the same colours he puts himself in in real life. So should we say that Zack fits the bill of Ethan, or Ethan fits the bill of Zack?

And best of all, what really draws its strands together, and keeps it from plummeting down to the bottom of the scale is Ethans simplicity perpetuating his folly, giving rise to a killer recipe for humorous disaster....which we clearly get to taste throughout. And you can clearly see that even though they have run out of ideas, it still provides room for a bellyfull of laughs... This film hits all the right comedy beats!

Ethans side, intertwined with Peter's frustration and desperation gives the plot its real foothold, and hence allowing the director to lace the plot with some brilliant ideas he comes up with.

Stripping it down to its bare elements, we see Ethan as a major contributor.....Ethan, standing alone, contributes no solid value to the storyline...interestingly enough, he is one comedian in this film who, without a character as the object of his comedy, would simply stagnate, and create a quagmire of some sort. Peter becomes the "unfortunate" victim of Ethan, and the duo make for a killer subject-object combination. This is the true appeal of the show.....the fact that the comic person has an object for all his foolish contrivances......which we really get a taste of on two occasions: At the Western Union counter (the money-transfer incident) when the wheelchair-bound Western Union employee attacks Peter, and later on when we see that in such a massive car crash, Ethan not only escapes unhurt, but he manages to sleep through it. What we witness is what the director really wants us to know: that foolish and wacky he may be, but Ethan is really the "driving star" of the show. Escapes he, unhurt, and in fact, he only wakes up after the car is turned to shambles, while his guest has a broken arm and three cracked ribs.

It is this star duo which prevents Due Date from completely misfiring. Sure it doesn't achieve the same status and appeal as The Hangover, but it injects enough adrenalin into Peter, and enough innocent folly into Ethan, to create a mojo effect which leaves us jonesing for more from the director Todd Williams.

We could combine a wonderful mix of fantasy, illusions, alluding to what we've seen in fairy tales, and what we used to be told when we were young by our grannies to get us to sleep..... But none....I mean nothing, which the common man could conjure up, would be a parallel to this 4 part series. Sure there have been many fiction works on the big screen which live up to the expectations of the masses, and The Chronicles of Narnia seems to go beyond that. For one, C.S.Lewis seems, in a bid to accommodate the various facets of imagination and fantasy, has spread the various faces of them across four parts. Sure, imagination is truly potent, for imagination has no reins to slow it down, or pull it to a standstill. And true, fantasy has a bazillion ways of finding its way into the outside, and I can find many authors, movie directors, and the like, try to exploit its true potential.

But the true potential of fantasy is hard to fathom, for I can see, that whenever we come across a work which seems to have finally reached the edge, another truly eye-opening image of fantasy springs up, waiting in the wings, to take us further to another realm and spatter our minds with the instant awe.

I digress, but back to the chorus: C.S. Lewis takes us into another dimension of illusions, spiced up with his own fantasy. Following these three parts released so far, the story unfolds slowly, slow enough so that our imaginations are given a breath of fresh air. His imagination deviates from the imagination which comes to our minds naturally, for if we see all three parts, it's amazing how in each part, the pevensie children find a different way back to the magical land of Narnia.

Another interesting perspective is how in the first part (The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe), we see an equal mix of good and bad protagonists. Equal, in terms of the combined strengths of good and evil, or to make things clearer, we have the four "good" children, against the powerful "evil" white witch. And although we always expect the good to prevail, for those of us who already have not read the book, we are left wondering how much derring-do it'll take to really bring the Witch down. And the talking animals, which seems to go along with what we ourselves imagined when we were small. And sure, we all imagined princes, kings, queens, which Lewis nicely covered in the first part.

In the second part, Lewis focuses on a different but related plot. The talking animals, evil witches, and so on, seem to have faded into the background. Or we can say that Lewis has already given them their share of importance, and seems to want to incorporate a different "less magic-intensive" storyline, while still adding a touch of fantasy which he gave in his first part. Sure, there are talking animals, and magic, but not so much this time.

This third part, we can clearly see, was born to handover the reins from the last of the Pevensie children, to Eustace. Along that note, we get to see a laudable performance of a new protagonist, who enters as a stuck-up brat-cum-cousin, and as the third part unrolls, he gets plummeted into full focus with his dragon role, which accelerates his role to paladin. Sure, we get to have a performance which solidly engraved itself into our memories, and paved the way for our next hero, which will become evident in another couple of years with the next installment, which will hopefully set the cash registers ringing. The performance of Eustace smacks of the "I'm-the-next-in-line", and keeps alive the captivating spell which was woven and cast by the first part. Or better still, he blows away the dust which was slowly descending on the plot. For with the same Pevensies, and Caspian fighting evil, things would ideally have taken a very predictable pattern, if Eustace had not come along. Hats off to him!

But as a whole, as the story gradually unfolds, on a sad note, as it passes from one phase to another, or, to be more precise, from one plot to another, we get the distinct feeling of the plot becoming drier, similar to the phenomenon of trade winds which, are moisture-laden when they hit the shore, but gradually lose their potential as they travel across land, until there is nothing left in them when they reach the desert. Still, as I watched it, and even reminisced the very first part, I could not but help feel relieved that the long wait ( after the second part) was finally over. The Chronicles of Narnia is one series which, no matter what, manages to slip you under its captivating spell, for it is all about the evocative transformational power of fantasy and imagination. The same way we sit with a rubix cube for hours, and get absorbed with its many faces, fantasy is able to absorb us into it. I personally believe that the entire series so far, just takes advantage of the charged-up-with-imagination mind of the audience,and then just takes it into another realm. That is its true power. And now let's wait another couple of years for "The Silver Chair".