The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

If you enjoyed The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, I have good news for you.  The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel offers another ninety minutes with the first film’s delightful cast.  These ninety minutes are warm, they’re cozy, and they offer more than a few opportunities to wipe your eyes.

The story picks up perhaps a year after the close of the first film.  Your favorite regulars remain at the hotel, and Sonny & Sunaina are preparing for their impending marriage.  There’s a primary story involving a hoped-for acquisition of a second property and the threat of a rival for Sunaina’s affections, but the magic of The Second Exotic Marigold Hotel happens around the periphery of that story, as the hotel’s pensioners and assorted guest stars live their own small dramas.

So, the question to ask yourself is simple:  Did you enjoy spending time with Judy Dench & Bill Nighy, Maggie Smith & Celia Imrie, Ronald Pickup & Diana Hardcastle, and assorted other stars familiar to those who spend a lot of time watching PBS and BBCA during The Exotic Marigold Hotel?  I did, and I thoroughly enjoyed spending another ninety minutes with them.  I look forward to The Third Exotic Marigold Hotel.

21 Jump Street & The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

21 JUMP STREET

Funny, exciting, and kinda sweet, 21 Jump Street is my biggest surprise of the summer.  The story’s nicely constructed and does a fine job of walking the line between schmaltzy and savvy.  Jonah Hill does a fine job, co-star Channing Tatum reveals a surprising gift for comedy, and the Third Act peril and action beats don’t overwhelm the generally light tone.

THE BEST EXOTIC MARIGOLD HOTEL

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is basically BBC porn.  It puts together beloved actors from the British drama scene, gives them arcs that reward our love for them, and pays it all off with a tear-jerking finale that sends us out the door with smiles on our faces.

I mean, look: we’re talking about a feel-good movie starring Bill Nighy, Judi Dench, Tom Wilkinson, Maggie Smith, Penelope Wilton, etc, plus Dev Patel as the eponymous hotel’s part-owner and manager.  These are all people we’re happy to spend time with for an hour and a half, and they’re happy to make us laugh, cry, and feel like we’re getting our money’s worth.  I know I did.

The Last Airbender

I approached The Last Airbender with good will and low expectations.  I’d seen and loved the three-season animated series, and I’d heard that the film was terrible.  Nevertheless, I wanted to give it a shot. 

It was fine.

The film errs in trying retell the entire first season of the animated series in an hour and a half, leaving us with a movie that feels more like a highlight reel than a self-contained narrative.  It also takes itself ever so seriously, eschewing comic relief or any sense of joy in favor of portentiousness.  Further, it tries so hard to make us believe in the tormented nature of its villain that the guy comes off as not particularly villainous at all – that’s no fun!

And yet, hey, I like these characters.  I enjoyed seeing their world presented in live action.  I’d have stuck around for the two sequels, had this film made enough money to justify them.  We don’t get enough kid-friendly action movies in the marketplace, and I was willing to enjoy The Last Airbender for trying to fill that niche.

Yes, it didn’t entirely succeed, but I still found it a pleasant way to spend an hour and a half.  Really, you could do worse.

Slumdog Millionaire

Ok, so I’m the last guy in the world to have seen SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE. I liked it, and I don’t get the backlash.

The film has an interesting structure, both deviating from and underscoring the standard three-act format. It tells its story in flashback, using the protagonist’s run on the Indian version of “Who Wants to be a Millionaire” to give him reason to recall and reflect upon the events of his life. This framework gives filmmaker Danny Boyle freedom to tell his story in near-vignettes, leaving out much connective tissue and sticking to the read meat of his story. While doing so, SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE keeps us moored in the three-act structure by casting different people to play his lead characters during the different periods of their lives that serve as the acts of the narrative. It’s cool, it’s neat, it’s fun, and it gives our analytic selves something to enjoy while our emotional selves get lost in a story of love desperately trying to find a way.

Some folks say that SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE is manipulative. You know what? Fine. So’s a good song. I got caught up in the ride; I fell in love along with the characters; I rooted for them every step of the way. I’m a happy customer.