The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

Here are my notes for this week's screening.  As the film is set in India we'll be serving a selection of Indian snacks and beer to get the punters in the mood.

Despite some of the UK reviews the film seems to have been a sleeper hit, and we have had many requests to screen it, so hopefully we will have a good audience. 

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

UK 2011                      118 minutes

Director:                      John Madden

Starring:                        Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, Bill Nighy, Penelope Wilton, Tom Wilkinson, Ronald Pickup and Dev Patel

 “How can I suggest what a delight this film is? Let me try a little shorthand. Recall some of the wonderful performances you've seen from Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, Tom Wilkinson, Bill Nighy and the others, and believe me when I say that this movie finds rich opportunities for all of them.  Director John Madden ("Shakespeare in Love") has to juggle to keep his subplots in the air, but these actors are so distinctive, they do much of the work for him.”

Roger Ebert

A group of seven British ex-pats leave the UK to travel to the Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, a retirement destination for “the elderly and beautiful”, in India.  All the characters have their own reason for making the move, but the most urgent is that local prices make retirement possible for all of them.

In the first half of the 1980s there was a cycle of films and television productions about Britain’s preoccupation with India and its imperial history, ranging from the early Merchant Ivory film Heat and Dust (1983), the TV series The Jewel in the Crown (1982) to David Lean’s epic version of A Passage to India (1984), all based on novels that explored aspects of the Anglo-Indian experience and life in the Raj.  The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is also based on a novel (by Deborah Moggach), but one that explores the English experience of India in the twenty-first century, as a place of off-shoring, outsourcing and call centres.

John Madden made his name with the TV film Mrs Brown (1997) and the Oscar-winning Shakespeare in Love (1998), of which starred Judi Dench and Tom Wilkinson, before moving to Hollywood where his subsequent films have included Captain Corelli’s Mandolin (2001) and more recently a thriller called The Debt (2011), which starred Tom Wilkinson with Helen Mirren.  He had originally cast Peter O’Toole and Julie Christie to play Norman and Madge before replacing them by Ronald Pickup and Celia Imrie, and subsequently confirmed that he had also considered Eileen Atkins and John Hurt for roles in the film.

 The film has not yet won any awards but there are rumours in the US of a likely nomination for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for Maggie Smith.

Here's the trailer:

 

The Artist

It's the beginning of the new season for our film club, and each year we try to start the programme with a screening that will pull in the punters.

This year we chose The Artist: it had long been on my "must see" list and I was not in the least disappointed.

Here are my notes:

The Artist

France 2011                 100 minutes

Director:                      Michel Hazanavicius

Starring:                        Berenice Bejo, Jean Dujardin, John Goodman, Malcolm McDowell, Penelope Anne Miller

 Awards and Nominations

• Won five Oscars including Best Film, Best Director, Best Actor (Jean Dujardin), Best Original Score and Best Costume Design.
• Nominated for five more Oscars including Best Supporting Actress (Berenice Bejo) and Best Original Screenplay (Michel Hazanavicius)
• A further 109 wins (including Best Actor for Jean Dujardin at the Cannes Film Festival) and 68 further nominations.

“The Artist is a formally daring and sublimely funny movie about the end of silent movies in 1920s Hollywood.  It is itself silent and in black and white, with inter-titles and a full, continuous orchestral score.  Endlessly inventive, packed with clever sight gags and rich in stunningly achieved detail The Artist is a pastiche and passionate love affair to the silent age; it takes the silent movie seriously as a specific form, rather than as an obsolete technology, and sets out to create a new movie within the genre.”

Peter Bradshaw

In 1927 George Valentin (Jean Dujardin), a silent movie star insists on casting Peppy (Berenice Bejo), an unknown dancer, in his next film.  Peppy becomes a huge star as talking pictures arrive in Holly wood, but George continues to make silent films and his career is ruined.  Eventually Peppy comes to his rescue and persuades the studio to allow her to make a musical with him.

Michel Hazanavicius had wanted to make a silent film for many years as a tribute to his heroes of the silent era, but he was only able to secure funding after the financial success of two spoof spy films that he directed.  He studied silent films to identify techniques to make his screenplay comprehensible without using too many intertitles and also calibrated lighting, lenses and camera moves to get the period look right.  The film was actually shot in colour and then converted to black and white, with a slightly lower frame rate than usual to mirror the slightly speeded up look of 1920s silent films. 

The film received its first screening at the Cannes Film Festival, initially out of competition but then moved to the competition a week before the Festival opened.  Subsequent to its success here the film won many awards around the world and also appeared near the top of many critics’ lists of the best films of 2011.

 Here's the trailer: