- Listen to the entire program<\/a><\/li><\/ul><\/p>\n
![\"Rethink](\"\/home\/graphics\/rethink_reviews_small.jpg\")
<\/a>Taking a deeper look at current and past films and how they relate to the world today. <\/strong> <\/p>\nJonathan Kim is an independent film critic who writes and produces film reviews for Uprising and other outlets. He is a former co-producer at Brave New Films. <\/em> <\/p>\n
Read his reviews online at ReThinkReviews.net<\/a>. Watch his videos at www.youtube.com\/user\/jsjkim<\/a>, and follow him on Twitter at twitter.com\/ReThinkReviews<\/a>. ReThink Reviews’ theme song is by Restavrant<\/a>. <\/p>\n
The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel<\/strong><\/p>\n
This weekend, movie theaters will be dominated by the megabudget mother of all superhero films, \u2018The Avengers\u2019. But if you\u2019re an adult, especially over a certain age, a nearly two and a half hour action movie might not be your thing. So some studios have gone the opposite direction with a strategy generally known as counterprogramming, and few movies seem more counter to \u2018The Avengers\u2019 than \u2018The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel\u2019, a dramedy about a group of British senior citizens who travel to India, lured by the dream of spending their golden years at a lavish resort in an exotic country with a favorable exchange rate, only to find that the most important trip for them to take is leaving their comfort zones. <\/p>\n
The ensemble cast sounds like the faculty of a top-ranked British acting academy. Judi Dench plays the newly widowed Evelyn, who needs to cut her expenses and get her first job after her husband\u2019s death reveals decades of fiscal irresponsibility. Tom Wilkerson plays Graham, a high court judge who grew up in India and decides to return to resolve unfinished personal business. Maggie Smith is Muriel, a closed-minded, openly racist former housekeeper who only wants to be in India as long as it takes to get a discounted hip surgery. Bill Nighy and Penelope Wilton are Douglas and Jean, a dissatisfied couple who realize that their pensions won\u2019t provide them with the retirement they\u2019d envisioned, and Ronald Pickup and Celia Imrie play Norman and Madge, two singles hoping that India will provide one last chance at love. <\/p>\n
The group arrives in Jaipur, but instead of the palatial resort seen in the brochures and website, they find the Exotic Marigold Hotel to be a crumbling, dusty mess managed by the overambitious but eager-to-please Sonny, played by \u2018Slumdog Millionaire\u2019\u2019s Dev Patel, a young go-getter whose desire to rehabilitate the hotel in accordance with his departed father\u2019s dreams and start a business based on the concept of outsourcing retirement seems beyond his ability to do either. <\/p>\n
India has long held a special place in the hearts of the West, first as the source of valuable and exotic exports like spices and silk, and more recently as a place of spiritual purity and renewal for new age yoga tourists. So it seems the greatest risk of a movie like \u2018The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel\u2019 would be the one-dimensional fetishizing of the country, where India is held up as a magical bazaar whose inhabitants, with their spirituality and simple lives, possess profound and timeless wisdom that heals the souls of jaded, lost westerners.<\/p>\n
Thankfully, \u2018The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel\u2019 doesn\u2019t do that, and Sonny\u2019s one piece of wisdom \u2014 that everything will be all right in the end, so if it\u2019s not all right, it is not yet the end \u2014 seems more of an affirmation for himself than his guests. While the film doesn\u2019t do justice to the poverty, pollution, inequality, and unsanitary conditions that make India such a difficult destination for inexperienced and squeamish travelers, it rightly paints India as a place of contrasts undergoing rapid changes. <\/p>\n
This is best exemplified through Sonny\u2019s relationship with Sunaina, played by Tena Desae, who works in a call center where Evelyn gets her first job coaching operators on how to better deal with elderly overseas customers. Sunaina is a product of modern India, which doesn\u2019t sit well with Sonny\u2019s conservative mother, played by Lillete Dubey, whose disapproval of Sunaina is more a critique of India\u2019s shifting culture than Sunaina\u2019s personal attributes. <\/p>\n
But what\u2019s nice is that Sonny is given as much screentime as his British guests, instead of just being relegated to the kinds of grinning locals and gurus found in the \u2018Eat, Pray, Love\u2019 variety of self-discovery travel porn. It\u2019s refreshing to see a smart, witty, often poignant film that addresses the challenge of making a dignified transition into one\u2019s twilight years, where the answer isn\u2019t found in the ancient wisdom of a foreign land, but through our ability to overcome our fears, reconcile our pasts, and start our lives anew, no matter how old we are.<\/p>\n
\u2018The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel\u2019 is rated PG-13 and opens today in select theaters. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Taking a deeper look at current and past films and how they relate to the world today. Jonathan Kim is an independent film critic who writes and produces film reviews for Uprising and other outlets. He is a former co-producer at Brave New Films. Read his reviews online at ReThinkReviews.net. Watch his videos at www.youtube.com\/user\/jsjkim, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-29447","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daily-program"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29447","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29447"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29447\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29447"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29447"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29447"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}