The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

Posted on May 3, 2012 at 6:00 pm

A dream team ensemble cast of British acting superstars gives a predictable story of displaced retirees spark and depth in this cozy tale based on the novel These Foolish Things, by Deborah Moggach.

A group of British retirees come to India for one last adventure. Or, they come because they have nowhere else to go. Some have not let themselves think about which it is, or whether it is both. Easy-going Douglas (Bill Nighy) and the perpetually disappointed Jean (“Downton Abbey’s” Penelope Wilton) come because their limited resources cannot cover the life Jean sees for herself. “Would it help if I apologize again?” he asks. “No, but do it anyway,” she replies.

Muriel (Maggie Smith) is appalled by having to leave “proper” Britain to live among foreigners but it is the only way she can get the operation she needs without long delays from the National Health Service. Evelyn (Judi Dench), a recent widow in reduced circumstances, must learn to take care of herself — and finds that she likes it. Madge (Celia Imrie, the “we’re going to need bigger buns” “Calendar Girl”) hopes to find romance. Norman (Ronald Pickup) wants something a bit more carnal. Graham (a courtly Tom Wilkinson) wants to reconnect with his past. They each find The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel “for the elderly and beautiful” in Jaipur via a website. When they arrive, they learn the description of “a luxury development for residents in their golden years” was more aspirational than accurate. “You Photoshopped it!” one new resident accuses. “I offered a vision of the future,” Sonny explains. He tells them that everything will be all right in the end and “if it is not all right, it is not the end.”

The young proprietor is Sonny (“Slumdog Millionaire’s Dev Patel), whose grand plans and grander hopes for the hotel are so vivid he seems a bit surprised when it is pointed out that the the place is falling down and lacking some of the most basic of amenities, like doors with locks and reliable water. There are the expected culture clashes. The Brits are not used to chaotic riot of noise and color on the streets and the spicy food. But it is worth it to see Maggie Smith’s disdainful expression as she nibbles defiantly on the chocolate biscuits she brought from home, pronouncing, “I won’t eat anything I can’t pronounce!”

Seeing the impeccable performances of this magnificent cast is reason enough to see the film as these actors transform the most conventional of situations by making us care about the characters and their hopes. Wilton’s portrayal of Jean, the bitter wife, shows us how she cannot seem to find her way out of a labyrinth of disappointment. Dench as Evelyn, sitting on the phone listening to an endless recording telling her that her call is very important, knows that she has never really been very important. But there is something more than the kind of bittersweet but cozy story of plucky septuagenarians. Perhaps the reason they stay in the rundown hotel is that they understand how superficial appearances are. Perhaps the idea of restoring its grandeur to what it once was means something to them in a world where old age is “outsourced.” It is encouraging for some of them to learn that “like Darwin’s finches, we are slowly adapting to our environment.”

Parents should know that this film includes some strong language (f-word), sexual references (gay and straight) and partial nudity, sad death, and drinking.

Family discussion: Who gets the biggest surprise? Who changes the most?

If you like this, try: “Enchanted April,” “Monsoon Wedding,” “Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont,” and “A Room With a View”

The Five-Year Engagement

Posted on April 26, 2012 at 6:00 pm

Jason Segal co-wrote and stars in the latest in a genre he helped to pioneer — the raunchy but sweet-natured romantic comedy. Films like “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” and “I Love You Man” put the misunderstandings and complications of the kind of “marriage plot” comedies over hundreds of years with a more modern casual and generous earthiness. You can’t imagine Doris Day and Rock Hudson laughing at an engagement party audio-visual presentation about all of the girls the groom has had sex with or talking affectionately but frankly about how a gesture of support from him should lead to some major sexual special favors from her. “Do you want me to wear a cape or something?” she asks gamely (the characters in Segal movies are always GGG). “You’ll get the Cirque du Soleil of shows,” she promises with a smile, showing off some impressive mime skills.

Tom (Segal) proposes to Violet (Emily Blunt) on New Year’s Eve, exactly one year from the night they met. They are very compatible, loving, and happy together, and excited about getting married. But he has a job opportunity near their home in San Francisco and she has one at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. His skill as a chef seems more portable and the Michigan job is just two years, so they decide to move. She flourishes in the post-doc program in social psychology and he has poor results in looking for a job, finding friends, and scraping snow and the strain begins to wear on their relationship.

At just over two hours, the movie at times feels as though it is dragging. I know it has to cover five years, but a section where Tom goes kind of feral and ends up hunting deer with a cross-bow is much too long, especially when Tom goes all Grizzly Adams and starts serving mead made from his own honey from an antlered stand. There are too many flashbacks to the night they met. Supporting characters played by Chris Parnell as a stay-at-home-dad who knits, and Kevin Hart and Mindy Kaling as Violet’s colleagues are never as funny as they are intended to be. And it feels like Segal and co-screenwriter/director Nicholas Stoller ran out of ideas near the end as the obstacles to the wedding get less believable, less interesting, and more out of character.

The family interactions work better. Violet’s father gets up at the engagement party to propose a toast to the importance of commitment — awkwardly standing next to his young second wife. Then Violet’s mother gets up to explain that you may think your relationship is a Tom Hanks romantic comedy but “in reality, it’s more like ‘Saving Private Ryan.'” The combination of mystification and jealousy Tom and Violet feel towards another couple they are close to is sharply observed. They genuinely do want her sister and his best friend to be happy together, but they know they are smarter and have a better relationship so it is maddening that the other couple seems to be lapping them. Twice.

The movie is also nicely even-handed in its portrayal of most of the conflicts Tom and Violet face and their genuine good spirits in trying to resolve their issues. When they have a “bird in the hand” argument about delayed gratification (the subject of Violet’s academic work), they are both allowed to make good points.

One reason romantic comedies are so difficult to get right these days is that it is harder and harder to find a reason to keep the couple apart for the two hour running time. The conventions of the pre-sexual revolution era made possible all kinds of humorous and spicy near misses in movies and our knowing that the couple could not have sex until marriage set the stakes high. Couples had to find other ways for establishing their compatibility to each other and the audience. Today’s movies and television shows portray endless omni-sexual cuddle puddles, with encounters that are zipless but never really intimate. Lena Dunham’s “Girls” and its anti-“Sex and the City” is called “authentic” for showing sex that is joyless at best and degrading at worst. It is intriguing to see Segal and his contemporaries reconsidering the implications of this approach on the romantic as well as the comic side.

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Related Tags:

Comedy Romance

The Lucky One

Posted on April 19, 2012 at 6:31 pm

Director Scott Hicks pours enough syrup over this film to supply an IHOP. Every shot of the golden sunlight on the Louisiana bayou or the perfectly tousled angelic curls of the perfectly precocious angelic boy or the perfect smile of the beautiful kennel owner and substitute teacher played by Taylor Schilling or the perfect muscles of the beautiful former Marine who seems to be channeling “as you wish” Westley from “The Princess Bride” all but drips with syrupy sweetness. Then there is the aural candy of the many pop songs on the soundtrack. This is outdone by the storyline, which matches the sugar content of the visuals with a synthetic and coincidence-heavy plot. But that doesn’t mean it it not a pleasant movie-watching experience in a greeting card commercial sort of way.

It helps that Zac Efron and Schilling are talented and attractive performers with good chemistry. Efron plays Logan, a Marine on his third tour who finds a picture of a beautiful girl half-buried in the sand. It becomes his lucky talisman. When he finds himself back at home, not sure who he is or where he belongs without his team and traumatized by loss, he decides to find the girl in the picture and thank her. He walks from Colorado to Louisiana with his dog, Zeus. Instead of telling her why he is there, he ends up working for her, helping to care for the dogs and also looking very handsome as he lifts things and fixes things. Schilling is Beth, who lives with her grandmother (Blythe Danner) and her 7-year-old son Ben (Riley Thomas Stewart), a violinist and chess whiz. Beth’s ex-husband Keith (Jay R. Ferguson) is a bully of a cop who is volatile, possessive, and jealous. As Logan and Beth are more drawn to one another, Keith threatens to sue for custody of Ben to keep him away from them.

“The questions are complicated but the answers are simple,” Logan says when Beth challenges him to quote his favorite philosopher. “Voltaire?” she asks. “Dr. Seuss,” he answers. Logan, who has accepted a job cleaning up after dogs because it is “peaceful” may understand that simple does not mean superficial better than Nicholas Sparks, author of the book and director Hicks, who seem determined to keep things safely formulaic.

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Related Tags:

Based on a book Drama Romance

Think Like a Man

Posted on April 19, 2012 at 6:17 pm

A gimmicky best-selling book about love, sex, and marriage has been made into a high-concept romantic comedy with an all-star cast. “He’s Just Not That Into You”? No, that was so 2009. This time the inspiration is the book by stand-up comic and talk show star Steve Harvey, Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man: What Men Really Think About Love, Relationships, Intimacy, and Commitment. The advice is the same — the stunningly obvious and yet too often ignored principle that people will treat you the way you insist on being treated. If you expect a man to open the car door for you, he will — and he will recognize that you are a woman who deserves respect and courtesy. If you give it up within an hour of meeting him or continue to live with him without any prospect of building a real home and family together, he will think you do not honor yourself and he will not honor you. And some women need to learn to choose their men by their hearts, not their resumés. Both men and women need to learn that lesson in this ensemble story about a group of friends and what happens when the ladies take Harvey’s advice — and then when the men find out what is going on and try to turn the tables.

At the most superficial level, the movie is suitably entertaining, with beautiful and talented performers coping with a range of romantic challenges. There’s a player named Zeke (Romany Malco) and Mya (Meagan Good) who wants commitment. There’s Lauren (Taraji P. Henson), a very successful female executive who wants a “suitable” consort. An aspiring chef (Michael Ealy as Dominic) does not fit her PowerPoint-worthy strategic plan.

A “mama’s boy” who brings his mother along on a Valentine’s Day dinner (Terrence J) has to decide if he can allow another woman (Regina Hall as single mom Candace) to come first in his life. And Kristen (Gabrielle Union), who feels as though the place she shares with her boyfriend (Kevin Ferrara as Jeremy) is a frat house, wants a home that looks like grown-ups live there — starting with getting rid of the disgusting old sofa. The group is rounded out with a happily married guy and pepper pot Cedric (Kevin Hart) who is in the midst of a miserable divorce and self-medicating his hurt feelings with visits to strip clubs.

The cast gives the usual rom-com banter as much sizzle as they can, and there is a whole second level of pleasure just in seeing these stars get a chance to play romantic leads. Malco, terrific as a doorman in “Baby Mama” and a sidekick in “The 40 Year Old Virgin” makes an assured transition to leading man and Ealy has an enormously appealing screen presence. King, Union, and Hall should all be doing the roles that get sent to Katherine Heigel. It is good to see an almost all-black cast get a chance to make a glossy romantic comedy but it would be great to see them do something more than the usual multiplex formula. A few Tyler Perry jokes (however welcome) are not enough to make this feel anything other than disappointingly generic.

Related Tags:

Based on a book Comedy Romance

Blue Like Jazz

Posted on April 19, 2012 at 6:05 pm

B+

Lowest Recommended Age:	Mature High Schooler
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG-13 for mature thematic material, sexuality, drug and alcohol content, and some language
Profanity:	Some strong language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking and drugs
Violence/ Scariness:	References to tragic world situations, family stress
Diversity Issues:	A theme of the movie
Date Released to Theaters:	April 20, 2012
Date Released to DVD:	August 6, 2012
Amazon.com ASIN:	0785263705

Donald Miller’s best-selling collection of essays, Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality has become a crowd-financed and lightly fictionalized film about a Texas teenager from a sheltered Baptist community who goes to the famously free-thinking Reed College in Portland, Oregon.

Marshall Allman of “True Blood” plays Miller, whose Alice in Wonderland-style immersion in a world where everything is questioned and debated is disturbing the way jazz music is disturbing — it never resolves. In Texas, the answers were always laid out in nice straight lines. Everything resolves. Miller’s estranged father, an intellectual who listens to jazz and lives in a trailer, tells him it is time to improvise, to challenge his ideas. His father has arranged for him to be admitted to Reed. When Miller begins to suspect for the first time that not everyone practices what they preach, even at church, he decides to give it a try.

“Forget everything you think you know,” he is told when he arrives. “Sexual identity is social construct,” explains a girl who is using the urinal next to him in the men’s room. One student is handing out free bottles of water and another is handing out literature explaining why bottled water is a scourge and a fraud. Students get credit for civil disobedience. Even his most mundane beliefs are challenged: no one in Oregon carries an umbrella when it rains. Why separate yourself from the elements?

The script by Miller, director Steve Taylor, and co-producer Ben Pearson, smooths out the story (the real Miller did not arrive at Reed until he was 30 and he audited some classes but did not enroll). They wisely avoid the easy and obvious “fish out of water” confrontations. Refreshingly, Miller and his classmate heretics are from the beginning almost always very tolerant of each other’s ways of approaching the world. Indeed, while Miller is warned that the other students may not accept his faith, the most intolerant behavior comes from Miller when he feels betrayed in a very personal way by his church (the film’s only disappointing departure from the real story for the sake of narrative tidiness).

This is a very strong movie in its own terms, a thoughtful, smart, sensitive coming-of-age story. Reedies will enjoy familiar sights from Powell’s bookstore (the site of a debate about the existence of God) to the scroungers’ table in the cafeteria. Most important is that just as Miller’s book explores an expansive, golden-rule-based version of Christianity, the film itself takes sincere, faith-based story-telling out of the narrow confines of what is currently classified as “Christian entertainment.” The real divide is not between believers and non-believers but between those who believe that questioning and tolerance bring them closer to God and those who prefer constant reinforcement of what they think they already know. The vocabulary of faith should not be the exclusive property of one small subset of believers, and it is heartening to watch a movie that makes that point with such grace.

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