Posts tagged Movie
“The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel” All Right in the End
May 19th
“Everything All Right in the End”
“Hotshots” looks at a movie!
The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is about a hotel in India of that name, but ending in even more words of “For the Elderly & Beautiful,” it is a beautiful, lovely, and funny movie, and it just might be the best movie you will see all year.
Based on the 2004 novel These Foolish Things by Deborah Moggach, the movie follows seven British pensioners who accept the offer from the hotel’s new owner and manager to travel there and kick-start its business.
In fact, the brochure that persuaded the seven strangers to go to India for a new adventure was Photoshopped to look like what the young manager hopes it will look like, and after they arrive, he adds “Now with Guests” to the hotel sign.
The manager’s name is Sonny Kapoor, he is played by Dev Patel of the 2008 Slumdog Millionaire, and when the new arrivals complain about the hotel’s condition, Sonny assures them with his optimistic philosophy, “Everything will be all right in the end. If it’s not all right, then it is not yet the end.”
The most well-known actors playing the pensioners, who are all there for different reasons, are Judi Dench, Tom Wilkinson, Bill Nighy, and Maggie Smith, and although it is difficult at first to keep them and their stories straight, just sit back, relax, and let them all be as wonderful and enjoyable as the sights, sounds, and colors of India itself.
One of the pensioners has been forced to sell her London flat, another one lived happily in India 40 years ago and is returning to settle a matter that has been bothering him all that time, another one doesn’t like foreigners, but requires a cheap hip replacement, one unhappily married couple lost money in a bad investment, one woman is looking for a rich husband, and the final pensioner is a man who is lonely and just looking for some female companionship.
In the meantime, Sonny has his own romantic problems, because his mother doesn’t approve of his girlfriend and has her own plans for his future bride.
And don’t think that the pensioners will find what they are looking for within their own group.
Remember Sonny’s optimistic philosophy?
The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, when it comes to the end, will leave you thinking that everything is all right.
I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”
The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel – Movie Trailer
May 12th
The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel follows a group of British retirees who decide to “outsource” their retirement to less expensive and seemingly exotic India. Enticed by advertisements for the newly restored Marigold Hotel and bolstered with visions of a life of leisure, they arrive to find the palace a shell of its former self. Though the new environment is less luxurious than imagined, they are forever transformed by their shared experiences, discovering that life and love can begin again when you let go of the past.
“Damsels in Distress” Causes the Audience to Be in Pain
May 12th
“Audience in Pain”
“Hotshots” looks at a movie!
Damsels in Distress is the fourth movie written and directed by Whit Stillman, all of them have received favorable reviews, but I thought this was the worst movie I have seen in a very long time.
The story takes place at a school called Seven Oaks University, and it begins during new-student orientation at the start of the school year when three girls approach a new girl attending the school and one of them says to her, “We’d like to help you.”
The three girls are Violet, Heather, and Rose, and the new girl is Lily, who is a sophomore and is transferring into the university.
The leader of the group is Violet, and she does most of the talking, which takes place when they are walking, which takes place when they are dancing, and which even takes place when the girls get into bed at night, where they all sleep in the same room.
Violet, Heather, and Rose volunteer at the Suicide Prevention Center, where they help some students to get over their depression with tap dancing.
Incidentally, when Violet herself gets depressed later in the story over a boy she thinks she is in love with, she doesn’t like to use the word “depressed.” She prefers to say that she “is in a tailspin.”
The university has social fraternities on campus, but they make a point of saying that they aren’t Greek fraternities, as there are on most college campuses. These are Roman-letter fraternities like DU, where the girls all go to a party and make fun of the members of the fraternity, whom they call morons and think of their attending as “youth outreach.”
There is no dramatic arc in this movie, just a dramatic plateau. No, make that a valley with no drama at all, because it never reaches the level of a plateau.
I wondered if all the people making this movie were as bored making it as I was watching it. I kept thinking, “Why don’t they just stop talking and do something?”
Violet’s ambition is to start a new dance craze, and the movie ends with a big musical dance number. No, two of them, but by then it is still too late.
Damsels in Distress is so bad that if I never see it again, it will be too soon.
I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”