The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

Posted on March 5, 2015 at 5:55 pm

A documentary called “Young @ Heart” had a choir of singers in their 80’s performing contemporary rock songs. The very fact of their age and experience gave an unexpectedly profound meaning to the words. And in “The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel,” a plot that ranges from silly to very silly still resonates, because the people in the silly situations are running out of time. And because they are played by actors of such superb skill that they give power even to fortune-cookie aphorisms like “There is no present like the time.” The characters in this film have more romantic complications and far more opportunities than the average teen sex comedy — and a lot more sex, too. But their situation gives it all grace and poignance.

You could give Maggie Smith “Mary Had a Little Lamb” and she would make it sound like repartee written by Oscar Wilde. Here, she has a couple of very good insults and delivers them with wit as dry as a martini made of gin over which the word “vermouth” has just been whispered. Just listen to her crisply explain that tea is an HERB requiring boiling water to release its flavor. No tea bags limply dipped in lukewarm temperatures for her. “How was America?” she is asked on her return. “It made death more tempting. I went with low expectations and came back disappointed.”

In the original The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, a group of expatriate Brits came to India, mostly because they could no longer afford to live in the UK. The energetic and eternally optimistic young owner of a dilapidated hotel decided to “outsource old age.” Just as he saw the beauty of the ancient, crumbling building, he saw the grace, and the revenue stream, of people no longer valued in the place they had lived their lives.

This sequel, with all of the surviving main characters returning, takes us from Sonny’s engagement party to the family party, and then the wedding.

As it begins, Sonny (Dev Patel) and Mrs. Donnelly (Smith) are driving through California (in a convertible!) to make a pitch for financing to Ty Burley (David Strathairn), so the hotel can expand. Burley promises to send an undercover inspector to check out the hotel. When an American named Guy Chambers (Richard Gere) arrives, Sonny assumes that he is the inspector and lavishes attention on him, ignoring another recent arrival, Lavinia Beech (Tamsin Greig of “Episodes”), who says she is checking out the place for her mother.

Meanwhile, Sonny is frothing with jealousy over another arrival, a friend of his fiancee’s brother who is handsome, wealthy, and very attentive to Sunaina (Tina Desai). Evelyn (Judi Dench), who has not quite managed to move things ahead with Douglas (Bill Nighy), is so successful in her free-lance work as a scout for textiles that she is offered a big promotion. Madge (Celia Imbrie, whose lush figure prompted Helen Mirren’s call for “bigger buns” in “Calendar Girls”), is happily “dating” two wealthy men and having trouble deciding between them. And in the silliest of all of these flyweight storylines, Norman (Ronald Pickup), who is trying out monogamy for the first time, thinks he may have accidentally put out a hit on his lady friend Carol (Diana Hardcastle). There are some nice, quiet touches, though, as we see our friends more at home in India, including interacting more with the locals for friendship, business, and romance.

The movie gently disrupts all of the happy endings of the first film just enough to allow for some minor misunderstandings, some pithy and pointed commentary, and another round of even happier endings, leaving, I hope, the possibility of a third chapter. Fans of the first film will arrive with high expectations and come home happy.

Parents should know that this film include brief mild language and many sexual references including infidelity and multiple partners.

Family discussion: Why was it difficult for Evelyn and Douglas to reach an understanding about their relationship? What was Sonny’s biggest mistake?

If you like this, try: the original “Best Exotic Marigold Hotel” and “The Lunchbox”

The DUFF

Posted on February 19, 2015 at 5:43 pm

Lowest Recommended Age:	Middle School
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG-13 for crude and sexual material throughout, some language and teen partying
Profanity:	Some strong and crude language, one and a half f-words
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Teen drinking
Violence/ Scariness:	Bullying
Diversity Issues:	A theme of the movie
Date Released to Theaters:	February 20, 2015
Date Released to DVD:	June 8, 2015
Amazon.com ASIN:	B00WAEEG7M

A haiku has 17 syllables. A limerick has five lines. An omelet is made from eggs. And a teen romantic comedy will have our characters visit the mall, a locker room, a classroom, and the school bathroom. There will be a trying-on-clothes montage, a makeover, a house party, and a big school dress-up dance. Nothing wrong with that. We’d be disappointed if they skipped any of these essentials. But because we see those same elements over and over, it can be tough to get it right. For every “Mean Girls” or “10 Things I Hate About You” there are dozens of duds like “Drive Me Crazy” or “Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen.”

“The DUFF,” based on the book by Kody Keplinger, mostly gets it right, thanks to witty performances and great chemistry from the wonderful Mae Whitman and Robbie Amell (“The Flash”), though they are both too old to play teenagers.

Bianca Piper (Whitman) has two best friends , fashionista Jess (Skyler Samuels), and hacker/jock Casey (Bianca A. Santos), both gorgeous and talented and loyal. She does not mind too much that she is socially awkward, except when it comes to her inability to say more than two words (literally) to her soulful, acoustic guitar-playing crush, Toby (Nick Eversman). And then Wes, the handsome boy next door, who happens to be the star of the school football team (Amell), tells her that she is the DUFF (designated ugly fat friend), the accessible gateway between her hot friends and the rest of the world. She is hurt. She is humiliated. She is furious. She un-friends Jess and Casey in a funny encounter that involves almost a dozen different kinds of social media entanglements. With no one else to rely on, she decides to ask Wes for advice, in exchange for helping him with his chemistry test. Cue the trip to the mall with the makeover/trying on clothes montage.

Wes has a “strobe light” (off and on) relationship with the school’s uber-mean girl, named, of course, Madison (Bella Thorne, an actual teenager). Madison’s greatest goal in life is to become a reality TV star and she has her own DUFF/acolyte, constantly following her around to film her for her YouTube channel.

Seeing Wes with Bianca makes Madison determined to get him back in time for (of course) the big homecoming dance, where the homecoming king and queen will be announced. Her friend spots Bianca and Wes at the mall, and secretly films Bianca joking about her crush on Toby. Madison edits and uploads the humiliating video, which quickly spreads throughout the school.

Bianca is crushed.

But with the support of Wes, she decides to own it, deciding that the experience is like the acid bath that created Batman villain, The Joker. In a nice touch, even though they are hurt by Bianca’s accusations, Jess and Casey decide to help out behind the scenes by taking the video down. They really are her friends. But Bianca is so colossally embarrassed that what had seemed insurmountable humiliations like saying three or more words to Toby seem trivial. Soon, they have a date for dinner. And she has a beautiful new LBD to wear, courtesy of Wes.

The adults in the story are played by underused top talent (Allison Janney, Ken Jeong, Romany Malco), but the focus here is on the kids and they deliver their lines with a nice confidence and snap. It is not as endlessly quotable as “Mean Girls” but it feels fresh and resilient. There is even a suggestion that a makeover may not be right for Bianca, or, at least, that any makeover should leave her more like herself, in the world of high school movies, positively revolutionary. Whitman makes Bianca so thoroughly herself throughout that anyone would be glad to have her for a BFF.

Parents should know that this movie includes crude sexual references and some strong language, including one and a half f-words. There is a party with some teen drinking.

Family discussion: How does this compare to your school experience? Why did Bianca believe she was a DUFF, even though her friends really loved her?

If you like this, try: “Nick and Nora’s Infinite Playlist,” “Sydney White,” and “Mean Girls.”

Kingsman: The Secret Service

Posted on February 12, 2015 at 5:55 pm

“James Bond? Jason Bourne?” Our hero is being asked for the inspiration for naming his dog JB. “No,” he explains, “Jack Bauer.”

This is a cheeky, nasty, meta, po-mo update of the spy genre, self-aware enough to name-check not just Bond, Bourne, and “24,” but also “Nikita,” “Trading Places,” “Pretty Woman,” and “My Fair Lady.” I also caught a reference to the 60’s television show “The Man from UNCLE,” about to get its own big-screen reboot later this year.

Some of the core elements of the sophisticated spy story are here, from the elegant suits to the very specific cocktail order, as well as the super-cool weapons and gadgets we will have the fun of seeing deployed later on. And the villain has an assassin/sidekick who goes one, or maybe two better than iconic characters like Oddjob and Jaws. Spanish dancer Sofia Boutella plays the acrobatic Gazelle, who runs on Oscar Pistorius-style blades as sharp as scalpels. She can slice a man in half lengthwise with one slash of her leg. And does.

Other aspects of the usual spy story are tweaked or outright upended. That old favorite, the talking villain, who has such a profound need to explain the genius of his nefarious plan that it gives Our Hero time to thwart him, is explicitly disposed of. The look of the film is as sleek and sophisticated as the score from Henry Jackman and Matthew Margeson.

Colin Firth is sleekly perfect as Harry, also known as Galahad, part of an elegant, upper-class cadre of international gentleman spies operating in total secrecy and using pseudonyms based on King Arthur and his knights. Their made to order suits are both exquisitely tailored and bulletproof.

He points to a wall of framed newspaper headlines about triviality — political squabbles and celebrity scandals — explaining that while these things were going on, he and his fellow Kingsmen were repeatedly saving the world. The person he is explaining it to is Eggsy (Taron Egerton), a possible new recruit. Eggsy is a smart, tough, brash kid who grew up in what the British call council houses and we call the projects, the son of a widow whose second husband is an abusive thug. Eggsy’s late father sacrificed himself to save Harry and other members of the team, so Harry feels a sense of responsibility — and a suspicion that Eggsy might have inherited his father’s courage and sense of honor.

While they had previously limited themselves to the wealthy upper class, Harry persuades the Kingsman’s leader (Michael Caine as Arthur) to allow Eggsy to compete for a spot on the team. The competition is tough and the tasks are tougher, the most imaginative and entertaining section of the movie. Then of course comes our supervillain, Samuel L. Jackson as Valentine, a lisping technology billionaire whose frustration with the failure of the world to reckon with global warming has led him to devise some drastic plans. Once he gets involved, the self-aware air quotes get less interesting and so does the storyline. “Bond films are only as good as the villain,” he says. True, and he is no Goldfinger.

In the last half hour, things really go off the rails. The carnage is balletic and portrayed as darkly comic but it is still disturbing, particularly the involvement of a specific real-life world leader. The humor is not just dark; it is crude for the sake of being crude and seems rather desperate. A film that began with a confident sense of sophistication, wit, and edge knows what it is not (“This is not that kind of movie”) but not what it is.

Parents should know that this movie is extremely violent, with hundreds of characters injured and killed and many exploding heads. Characters use very strong language and drink alcohol. There are explicit and crude sexual references and brief nudity.

Family discussion: Which of the tests would have been the hardest for you? What did they prove about the candidates?

If you like this, try: the James Bond films

Eugene Levy and Catherine O’Hara Reunite in a New TV Sitcom

Posted on February 11, 2015 at 2:37 pm

Comedy stars Eugene Levy and Catherine O’Hara, who have worked together for decades in SCTV and the Christopher Guest films “Waiting for Guffman,” “For Your Consideration,” and “A Mighty Wind,” are back together again in a new series for the Pop Channel (formerly the TV Guide Channel). The name of the show is “Schitt’s Creek” and it is the story of a vastly wealthy family suddenly vastly poor. Kind of “Beverly Hillbillies” in reverse.

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Comedy Television

Trailer: “Spy” from “Bridesmaid’s” Paul Feig, Melissa McCarthy, and Rose Byrne

Posted on February 7, 2015 at 7:50 am