5 Films That Might Clue Us Into Danny Boyle's Olympic Opening Ceremony

Word on the street is that Danny Boyle is the front-runner to direct the opening ceremony of London's 2012 Summer Olympics. Such an endeavor would easily be the most ambitious undertaking of the 53-year-old Oscar-winner's career -- but that's not to say he's not qualified. With the help of 2012's weird little mascots Wenlock and Mandeville, let's have a look at five Boyle films that might inform his imminent world-class effort.

· Trainspotting (1996)

Boyle's second feature brought the insanity, humor, hallucinations and horror of Irvine Welsh's novel of heroin addiction to vivid life. But it also demonstrated the filmmaker's grasp of dramatic exits and entrances -- such as Mark Renton's (Ewan McGregor) suppository-rescuing detour into the Worst Toilet in Scotland. Such visualization on a budget will go a long way toward surpassing Zhang Yimou's lavish (if overpriced) spectacle in Beijing in 2008.

· The Beach (2000)

Boyle's half-impressionistic, half-incomprehensible studio breakthrough proved he could play well with egos, too. But the real legacies of his Leonardo Di Caprio-in-island hell opus might be the years' worth of lawsuits accusing Fox of irreparably destroying Thailand's beach setting, not to mention the government's attempts to ban the film for its depiction of the country as a drug hotbed. Expect a Thai team boycott, or at least some stadium sabotage of some kind.

Pages: 1 2