I was listening to The B.S. Report — the podcast by Bill Simmons, a.k.a. Sports Guy — in my car yesterday. Simmons was talking with “Cousin Sal” about the weekend’s football games, when the talk turned to the recent spate of Oscar-worthy movies they’d seen.
On over-the-air sports radio, which I haven’t listened to in several years, I would get pretty incensed when Mike & the Mad Dog would spend 20 minutes talking about last night’s episode of The Sopranos, John Wayne flicks, or why the remake of Sabrina was much better than the original.
(I’m not making up that last one. It led to the immortal line by Chris “Mad Dog” Russo, “I don’t see why people were so ga-ga over Audrey Hepburn,” confirming my suspicion that a too-excessive interest in sports is clearly a symptom of repressed homosexuality.)
With Simmons and his cousin, on the other hand, I was interested in their opinions and their looser takes on the movies. Also, both of them have worked as comedy writers for Jimmy Kimmel’s show, so I figured they may have funny stories about some of the flicks.
While they praised The Wrestler pretty highly — Sal watched a DVD screener of it with his new pal Roddy Piper — both men considered Slumdog Millionaire the best movie they saw last year.
And that’s when it struck me: I’ve been watching Danny Boyle’s movies for 12 years now, through the ups (Shallow Grave, Trainspotting) and downs (A Life Less Ordinary, The Beach) and a lesser-seen gem (Millions). At no point did I ever think he was headed for some sort of mainstream approval.
And now he’s made a movie that a couple of sports-betting maniacs from Boston consider the best flick of the year. This world is full of wonders.