Slumdog Millionaire

This is one of the best-reviewed movies of the year, and the odds-on favorite to win Best Picture after its several wins at the Globes on Sunday. Is it as good as everyone's saying? Well, yes and no.
There's a lot to like about this movie. Danny Boyle's (Trainspotting) direction is as strong and assured as anything I've seen this year. Relative unknown Dev Patel gives an amazing leading performance. The editing is masterful. The picture is wonderfully photographed by the always inventive Boyle and his DP Anthony Dod Mantle (in no less than five formats - 16mm, 35mm, analog and digital video, and still photography). The movie is always watchable, mostly entertaining, and sometimes enthralling. So what's my beef with it, then?
Listen, guys... I love Danny Boyle. Trainspotting's one of the best movies of the 90's. I like almost everything he's done. But you have to admit, he's really a style-over-substance sort of filmmaker. And this screenplay doesn't really help matters. I mean, we have a GREAT framework for a story here. The whole gameshow thing, discovering how he knows each of the answers through his life experiences... all good stuff. But mostly everything else in the story... I don't know, man. I've just seen it all before. Nearly half the picture involves a love story/long-lost girl situation... and I'm really sorry to say... I just didn't care. I didn't give a shit. I'm not sure what it was. I was usually totally into the rest of the picture, but whenever that storyline picked up again, I just tuned out. Like I said, I've seen it all before, but what really matters - I've seen it done better. Perhaps most people will come out of this movie feeling a different way. But I've seen City of God (dangerous childhood in impoverished area) and Cinema Paradiso (adult looking back on long-lost love) and this felt like a stylized melding of those two stories.
I know that by now this seems like an attack of some sort, but it's really not. This is a very solid movie. Easily one of the best of the year, and I really did enjoy about 80% of it. It's both exhilarating and beautiful, with some wonderful sequences (a scene set to "Paper Planes" by M.I.A. is particularly good). It just never hit home for me in the way that it seems to for most people. It gets a solid recommendation from me, even though I only have lukewarm feelings about it right now. Although I do want to see it again... perhaps that means something.