Appreciating Danny Boyle in Wake of Slumdog Millionaire

Peerless

How many distinctive directors pack as much storytelling heft as visual panache? Few if any have the track record of Danny Boyle.

I had considered putting Boyle in the Under Appreciated Page, but I just have so much to say about him I figured he deserved a front page spot.

In film circles Boyle is well known and respected, but to the Average Joe he’s a non-entity.

Slumdog Millionaire may finally make Boyle a household name.

Slumdog Millionaire

A sweeping melodrama–about a Indian kid from the slums who makes it onto the Indian version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire?— drenched with visuals that awaken the vigor and heat of the urban environment in which it is set, Slumdog Millionaire was recently named the best film of the year by the National Board of Review. An Oscar nod for Best Picture is by no means out of the question.

Check out this clip of young Jamal and brother Salim hustling their way to survival. Note the surprising music choice (the same song was featured prominently in trailers for Pineapple Express).

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mV912uiRM_A]

Sunshine

Before Millionaire Boyle made Sunshine, a space odyssey about astronauts on a suicide mission to save the world.

The film is a testament to Boyle’s visual talent, even though the script was a bit jumbled up and less than satisfying, particularly with the random introduction of a serial killer in the third act.

Still, Sunshine is drop dead gorgeous, a visual spectacle worth seeing just for its eerily beautiful shots of space alone.

Here’s a taste.

Millions

And it isn’t as though Boyle is limited in range. He easily dispatched with the darker moods of most of his films with Millions, about some children who find a ton of money.

Boyle made even such a simple story as this whimsical and visually gripping.

The visuals are striking, sweeping, and…playful.

28 Days Later

And credit Boyle for breathing life into the near-dead zombie genre with 28 Days Later, a gripping reimagining of both zombie and disaster movies.

Boyle’s zombies RUN, and this was before the new Dawn of the Dead came out.

And the film was creative enough to leave the zombies behind and give us the even more dangerous opponent of mankind towards the end.

Few good clips are widely available, but Boyle brings a very distinct sense of color and pace to this zombie thriller.

Trainspotting

Boyle has a number of other noteworthy films, included The Beach with Leonardo Dicaprio and A Life Less Ordinary with Cameron Diaz, but the last Boyle film I have seen is Trainspotting.

Relentless and alive, out there and uptempo but sometimes sobering and sad, Trainspotting was a potent anti-drug movie wrapped in a fun drug movie.

If that shot of a baby crawling on the ceiling doing an Excorcist move doesn’t make you think twice about hitting the pipe, you got problems.