THE BEST EXOTIC MARIGOLD HOTEL: The Film Babble Blog Review

THE BEST EXOTIC MARIGOLD HOTEL (Dir. John Madden, 2012)

Last weekend, this geriatric crowd-pleaser really packed ‘em in at the Rialto Theater in Raleigh. The hype had been building for months - promos run in conjunction with Downton Abbey on PBS certainly helped – so folks (not all seniors, but mostly) came in great numbers to see the film.

From the laughter and applause I heard (I work part-time at the Rialto), they were not disappointed.

THE BEST EXOTIC MARIGOLD HOTEL (tagline: “for the elderly and the beautiful”) concerns a group of British retirees (Judi Dench, Bill Nighy, Maggie Smith, Penelope Wilton, Celia Imrie, Ronald Pickup, and Tom Wilkinson) who travel to India to take up residence at a hotel run by Dev Patel (SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE).

They were expecting a luxury retirement development, but what they find is a crumbling, dusty, run-down dwelling in the center of Jaipur, India. But Patel’s sunny enthusiasm - mainly because these are his first guests – attempts to smooth things over: “In India we have a saying ‘everything will be alright in the end – so if it is not alright, it’s not yet the end.’”

Each of the pensioners has obvious issues with their living arrangements, but to most of them it’s preferable to their life back in the Western world.

You see, Dench is a highly in debt widower, the acerbic (and racist though that's something she all too easily gets over) Smith (not expanding much on her Downton Abbey character) is in need of hip replacement surgery that is less expensive in India, Wilkinson is a retired judge who had been raised in Jaipur so he returns to make peace with his past, Pickup is, well, an aging pick-up artist hoping to score better than back home, Imrie is also looking for love, and Nighy and Wilton (also a Downton Abbey cast member) are a miserable married couple who lost their savings investing in their daughter’s internet company.

Patel’s problems are that his mother (Lillete Dubey) wants to shut down the hotel, and she doesn’t approve of his girlfriend (Tena Desae), so there’s an excuse to break out the rom com third act standard: the mad dash to get one’s love back.

Well shot with a lot of colorful cinematography, this film is breezy and spirited, but it’s way too tidy, and overly cutesy. It’s not cloying however, and the cast is so appealing that they often transcend that their characters aren’t very fleshed-out and the simple-mindedness of Ol Parker’s screenplay (based on the book “These Foolish Things” by Deborah Moggach), and there’s a wealth of good one-liners.

THE BEST EXOTIC MARIGOLD HOTEL should entertain undemanding movie-goers and mildly amuse most others. It’s a fluffy yet fine time. Expect it to play all summer long at an indie art house theater near you.

More later...

The Intouchables (Tuesday, May 15, 2012) (49)

Toward the end of last year, I kept hearing about a French movie called The Intouchables (which, as far as I understood means "The Untouchables"... I don't understand the weird semi-translation... because of the De Plama movie? What about the two Crash movies?) that was setting all sorts of box office records in Europe. Today it is the highest-grossing film not in English of all time. This has to be a brilliant and amazing film, right?! Well, no so much.

The Intouchables, directed by Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano (from their script), is based on a true story (a concept that always makes me gag for its worthlessness) and is filled with all sorts of post-neoliberal racism and bizarrely blind classism. I would hope that white people who go to see this movie feel really proud of themselves for witnessing the assistance of a single African immigrant, who lives in the housing projects. Clearly such magnanimity is the key to moving our world forward in a peaceful and beautiful way where all children are loved regardless of their color... just like The Help.

Philippe (Francois Cluzet) is a billionaire living in an amazing house in Paris (it seems to be on Ile St. Louis... or maybe that's just where it should be). He is a quadriplegic and has a gigantic staff of helpers and attendants who look after him at all times. One morning, he and one of his assistants are interviewing new caretakers who will wash, dress and chauffeur him around all the time. In walks Driss (Omar Sy) a tall and dark black man who is clearly not taking the interview process seriously, but simply is looking for a signature on his unemployment form (in France you have to prove that you're applying for jobs and not getting them before you can get your unemployment benefit). 

He proceeds to give incredibly rude and unprofessional answers to basic questions, and hits on Philippe's hot assistant (Audrey Fleurot). This has the opposite result than he was hoping, of course, and Philippe hires him, seeing his unpolished and direct style as a welcome change from the sycophantic treatment he gets from most people in the world. Naturally, Philippe and Driss become best friends, each one helping the other see the world in a different light and each one showing the other that friendship can be filled with real emotions and real connections. 

Also, naturally, there's lots of stuff about Driss being a hoodrat who has never heard opera music, only listens to Earth, Wind & Fire (Really? A contemporary black dude who only listens to '70s funk/disco? Not Jay-Z?) and is the world's best dancer. We are aghast that Philippe's friends react to Driss in such a callous, superficial way ("because he's black," we whisper) -- even though his behavior really is mostly  unpredictable and sometimes offensive. 

But then there's a scene when, for Philippe's birthday, everyone gets dressed in black tie for a concert and Driss looks amazing (insert house-slave stereotype here) and that aforementioned hot assistant says that he looks "just like Obama". Let's be absolutely crystal clear: Omar Sy looks NOTHING like Barack Obama, aside from the fact that both of them have skin that's not lily white. This is not played as a comment designed to make us see Philippe's world as unchangeable and eternally racist; this is a scene to show us that a black man in a suit is an object of sexual desire (again, house-slave theme) and the assistant's comment is supposed to be what we are all thinking -- that is if we were all living in 1952 Mississippi. ("They all look alike to me."l

The third act is a total structural mess, with Driss being sent away to his aunt in the projects for some bizarre and unexplainable reason, and then being brought back for equally unclear motivations. We understand that Philippe and Driss are two halves of a pair and that they complete one another like a black and white cookie (look to the cookie!). And then we all sit back in our seats an groan because it's such a hackneyed idea (when it's not being totally offensive). Meanwhile, Philippe does nothing to help Driss' family or anyone not inside the walls of his urban chateau -- because Marxism is a terrible thing and that would be punishing Philippe for working hard... or something. 

This is such a silly trifle of a film, and so offensively post-racial it's shocking anyone has said anything mildly kind about it. It should be looked at with contempt. Sure, there are some brief, sweet moments between the two guys... and Sy is a really fantastic dancer, if you can put your "magical negro dance number" glasses on the top of your head... but it's overall message, that we should all get along better -- but only on the terms of the white guy and the billionaires -- is deeply disgusting. 

Stars: 1 of 4

Dark Shadows (Saturday, May 12, 2012) (48)

I have absolutely no connection the the TV show "Dark Shadows" that ran in the late 1960s and early 1970s. I have no context for the tone of the show, the relative merits of the acting or writing of the show and no hangups about excavating some remote and sacred part of my past and my psyche. So I went into Tim Burton's new film Dark Shadows (based on the TV Show) as a totally blank slate... except for the fact that it's a Tim Burton movie and features Johnny Depp and Mrs. Burton, Helena Bonham-Carter, whom he works with always.

Regardless of what one might think of the television show, this is a generally enjoyable, pointless movie. There is really nothing terrible about it and it falls in line with much of the very average Burton has put out for much of the past 20 years. He has taken "weird" to such an extreme that the style and concept has folded back on itself, making the uncanny and strange become banal in his universe. What saves this film (if only slightly) is the very bright acting of Depp and the generally snappy writing of his character here.

Barnabas Collins (Depp) is a colonial-era rich man living in a town his family owns in Maine. One day, as he's chasing his girlfriend, the witch Angelique (Eva Green) turns him into a vampire, ultimately leading to his burial in the town graveyard for safekeeping. Flash forward 200 years to the 1970s and Barnabas' coffin is exhumed (by mistake) and he gets out. His family still owns his mansion, but has lost a lot of their status in town, particularly their cannery. His rival Angelique is now the king (er... queen) fisher in town.

He is introduced to his family members, including Elizabeth (Michelle Pfeiffer), the head of the household, Dr. Julia Hoffman (HBC), a live-in shrink and Victoria Winters (Bella Heathcote), the kids' tutor, who bears a striking resemblance to Barnabas' old girlfriend from way back when. It seems Angelique hopes to ruin the family (again) as long as Barnabas doesn't fall in love with her.

The story is a bit convoluted, and, frankly, unmemorable... though it is pretty fun as it rolls along. Depp has a great sense of comic timing (and a strange resistance to playing characters who don't have English accents) and the script (by Seth Graham-Smith) showers him with great moments and lines to ham up. That the the film is so forgettable is probably the main factor in saying it's not really all that great. It's not that it's really bad, the good stuff is pretty good, but the rest doesn't really any connections and slides away into the ether.

Stars: 2 of 4

Cabin in the Woods (Friday, May 11, 2012) (47)

We've reached a point where sarcastic horror movies (like the Scream franchise) are no longer interesting and gonzo sick ones (like the Saw movies) are no longer serious enough to gain much traction. Now we're into a world of post-modern horror movies -- thinking man's films that are deconstructionist (like Derrida with crayons) and meta and self-referential. The Cabin in the Woods is such a movie. It's fun and funny and silly, with as many jokes about the horror process and rules of the game as it is a spectacle. 

As the film opens we see two office everymen (Bradley Whitford and Richard Jenkins) at their job. They're talking with one another and with their colleagues about seemingly innocuous stuff, something about the failures of the Japanese office and something with needing to close their deals today. We then cut to the typical prologue to your average slasher flick: a bunch of college kids (a cute virgin girl, a beefy jock, another guy and girl couple and a weirdo) are going to the cabin in the woods owned by one of their cousins. 

On the way to the place, they stop to get directions and a creepy gas station where they're scared by the creepy old man who works there. As they leave (having not been killed) we cut back to the desk jockeys once again, this time upset that the group of kids got away. It seems these guys in the office have some control over the world of the kids. 

From here forward we see a clever interplay between the office guys laying traps for the kids and the kids falling into them (and dying in ever more exotic bloody ways, natch) or narrowly escaping through their wiles. The stakes seem to get higher and higher as the office clerks seem to have pressure from "their boss" to end the charade and kill all the kids with their available resources (zombies and madmen with cleavers and meat hooks). As we start to worry for the lives of the kids in the cabin, we also worry that the office dudes will get in trouble if they don't succeed in their task. This split interest is rather ingenious and fresh in this, or any other, genre. 

I like this movie, though after all the very elegant twisting and turning, the pay-off is a bit medium. I feel writers Joss Whedon (yes, that guy again) and Drew Goddard (who also directs here) get a bit lost in the weeds and don't deliver as strong a finale as the build-up requires. What we get at the end is a bit cheesy and random, rather than arch and self-aware like the tone in the rest of the film. Ultimately the film devolves into mediocre explosions and blood, a disappointing conclusion to an otherwise smart movie.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

First Position (Wednesday, May 9, 2012) (46)

Yet another documentary about amazing things cute kids do... Oy vey! Yes, First Position shows how teens (and pre-teens) from around the world compete in an annual New-York-based ballet competition to get scholarships to some of the premiere ballet theaters of the world. 

You have your high-strung girl from California who is pushed harder and further by her Japanese mother, your young American boy, the son of an American Naval officer based in Italy, who now trains in Milan, your affable teen adopted by Philadelphians from her home in war-torn West Africa who is fighting to disprove the industry concept that black women don't have the body shape to be ballerinas. It's all very sweet with tons of built-in drama based on the inevitable falls, injuries and egos. 

Most annoying about the film is that what director Bess Kargman shows us is mostly what she has access to. The fact that she focuses on these kids is because they are the best in their relative age groups and divisions, so their success is relatively guaranteed. That we only see one competition is simply a matter of it being the one that she was allowed to shoot. That the competition we see seems to jump around through the various rounds in an inconsistent and sometimes confusing way, is only a matter of the end (their ultimate success) being more important than their stories.

It's all a bit too banal for my taste. This really isn't an examination of kids who do ballet or the weird world of junior ballet (the crazy schedule, the weird diets, the psychological trips the kids must go through), but rather an small glimpse of these few, hand-selected dancers for this short period of time. 

This is a nice movie, but nothing really special. It's probably more worth it for dancers to watch and reminisce about their youth than it is for dancing novices like me.

Stars: 2 of 4

MEN IN BLACK III: Meh

MEN IN BLACK III (Dir. Barry Sonnenfeld, 2012)

Despite a few good ideas - Josh Brolin cast as a young Tommy Lee Jones; a cameo by SNL’s Bill Hader as Andy Warhol – the third installment of the MEN IN BLACK series is exactly what I expected. Every joke and plot point of this series of CGI-saturated set-pieces is mechanically in place in this standard-issue sequel right off the formulaic franchise assembly-line.

It’s been 10 years since MiBII (and 15 years since MiB), and not much has changed.

Will Smith and partner Jones are still up to their top-secret agency’s alien neutral zone policing, only Rip Torn doesn’t return to play their boss Agent Z. Instead they’ve got Emma Thompson, severly underwritten as Agent O, who figures out that there’s been a fracture in the time-space continuum because Smith came to work craving chocolate milk (that’s right). This is after Smith wakes up in a world in which Jones has been dead for 40 years.

You see, when the evil intergalactic criminal Boris the Animal (Flight of the Conchords’ Jermaine Clement) escaped from a Lunar prision (the film’s big opening scene), he traveled back in time to 1969 (via a time-jump device obtained in a pawn shop) and killed Jones, so Smith has got to go back to the past and save his gruff partner. Then they can save the world from, I dunno, alien jellyfish descending on the planet?

This is where Brolin comes in with a pitch-perfect impersonation of Jones. This central gimmick works well initially (Brolin does Jones so much better than he did Dubya), and helps carry the film from half-chuckle to half-chuckle.

Jones really made out well in this outting - he only has to appear in the beginning and end of the film, but still gets his name above the title while a young hot actor embodies his persona for the rest of the picture.

There are a lot of possibilities for larger-than-life laughs here, such as retro aliens a la late ‘60s sci-fi (think Star Trek and Lost in Space), Clement’s bickering with his younger dumber double, andMichael Stuhlberg (A SERIOUS MAN, Boardwalk Empire) as a quirky visionary alien, but as big as the spectacle gets (and with its Cape Canaveral climax it gets pretty big), the attempts at creating actual comedy are few and futile.

It feels as if the film is so slickly streamlined that any notion of inventive wit would only get in the way. A throwaway one-liner spoutin’ Smith kickin’ extraterrestrial ass is always a surefire summer movie-going audience pleasing scenario, so why mess with success?

Basically, MiBIII isn’t a great movie, but it’s a sturdy franchise entry.

More later...

The Avengers (3D) (Sunday, May 6, 2012) (45)

The most important component in the dumb Summer blockbuster movie is escape. That is to say, I don't expect much intelligence -- and quite the opposite -- I'm looking for dumb visceral fun. Loud explosions, big settings, maybe some good ol' T&A. They are more spectacles than pure cinema, having more in common with a circus, a freak show, a sight seeing trip to an unknown land where I can turn my brain off and enjoy the experience washing over me. The Avengers is nothing like that. It is a slow, dull, dialogue-heavy Russian novel of a film that is so complicated in its detail that I was unable to just "sit back and enjoy" because I was trying to figure out and interpret what was going on -- mostly because it was so goddamn stupid!

It seems Disney and Marvel have been anticipating this film for a few years now, releasing individual monograph films relating to many of the prominent characters. Last year there was Thor, Captain American and Iron Man 2. There was also a re-boot of the Hulk story (though that featured a different guy playing him). I thought that Thor movie was a horrible abortion of storytelling and excitement and only saw the first Iron Man (which was pretty fun). So at the beginning of The Avengers the idea is that we understand who all the characters are and what they are doing in the world.

It seems Thor's (Chris Hemsworth) little brother, Loki (Tom Hiddleston), is upset that his big bro is all godlike and living in America, so he steals some blue rock that has magic powers (though I didn't catch what kind... something about connecting beings from his world to our world... or something). A guy named Nick Fury (Sam Jackson), who has an eye patch and who I only sorta remember from the first Iron Man movie, rounds up all the super heroes, Thor, Cap America (Chris Evans), Iron Man (RDJ), Hulk (Ruffalo), some lady who's good at kickboxing (ScarJo) and a dude who's a really good archer (that dude from that Iraq movie that lady won the Oscar for), and makes them work on an invisible flying aircraft carrier. Seriously, I'm all about fiscal responsibility and I think that's the first thing the Republicans should cut from the Pentagon budget next year. It seems... too much.

They are all individuals and firmly believe in doing things on their own. Cap likes working with others, but he's from the 1940s and is prolly a Red. Bruce Banner doesn't like being the Hulk because it fucks up his clothes, but is generally an amiable guy. Tony Stark is too rich to give a shit about working with others... so he should prolly just become mayor of New York and break FAA helicopter laws on the weekend. So all these people proceed to sit around tables talking about the rules their drawers have given to them about what they can and can't do (Hulk can't be controlled; Thor has issues with his magic and sometimes can't lift his awesome hammer). Oh - and these two norms, ScarJo and HurtLocker, waste time and screen space trying to be interesting, but failing badly.

Let me say this again: in a world where you have a Norse god (even if he's from another planet), a billionaire who builds unbreakable rocket suits, a green super beast and a dude who represents all that is great with America (that's a lot to represent!), why do you need a lady who's a super spy who doesn't dress in revealing clothes and a dude who's really good at archery? (Also - as this is the second movie with archery prominently in it in recent months, what does that say for America's chances at the Olympics later this year? Why can't Gina Davis get work, people?!) Hawkeye and Black Widow (oooh - such scary names!) are as lame on screen as their names suggest. Neither actor is very talented, they're given terrible, boring lines to read (by director/writer Joss Whedon) and they have no powers or traits that the remaining team couldn't live without. If you're going to give me a useless woman, at least make her show me some skin and sex.

Aside from all this on-screen dramaturgy, there are basically two big action sequences, one at the beginning as all the heroes are fighting not together and one at the end, when they realize that they should work together (again, they're all fucking commies... Stark is clearly a Randian fundamentalist and should be ashamed of himself for working with less-than-capable teammates). This movie basically has two enormous acts and crumbles under the weight of this structure. This is not a fun movie to watch because you're mostly waiting for the next thing to happen... but it never really seems to come. And, no, I don't think this is some Marxist film theory that Whedon is getting into. I think this is just a misfire of a script and film.

This movie is not particularly loud or big. The second battle sequence destroys most of midtown Manhattan (thank god!) but isn't really memorable and just feels like the similar sequence in the third Transformers movie (I think that was Chicago they were blowing up there). The 3D I saw the film in added nothing to the experience for me.

Mostly this feels like a story forced together by its constituent parts. There had to be an Avengers movie because there was a Hulk movie and a Cap America movie, etc. This is clearly setting up a franchise now, but I have no interest in it. What is coming next? Loki is going to come back with a bigger bluer rock? Whedon will cast Wally Shawn and Andre Gregory to discuss the relative merits of gamma ray poisoning around an Upper West Side dinner table? Actually, that sounds a lot more appealing!

Stars: .5 of 4