Reuben Hart St#10562787 MWP ASS2 Part 2

GenY Guide to Film

Review: The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

Aka: Worst. Movie. Ever.

I want to prefix this review with a disclaimer: this movie is shit. Like, truly awful. The kind of pap people develop agoraphobia to avoid. I didnt want to start the review with my conclusion, but on the off-chance that you are reading this as you walk into the cinema: STOP. Go back. Back past the oily alabaster skinned ticket stub collector in his unedifying candy striped uniform. Go back to your car, drive home and thank the various gods that you didnt see this movie. Now, Ive been told by bleeding heart do-gooders that if I couldnt say anything nice, I shouldnt say anything at all I invite these Samaritans to go and see this movie, it could be the cure to your preachy self-righteous smugness. The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (TBEMH) is not your gardenvariety shit movie. Oh no, its next level bad. Let me explain:

Reuben Hart St#10562787 MWP ASS2 Part 2 TBEMH follows the story of a group of misfit British pensioners who are enticed to retire to a fabulous hotel in Jaipur, India. The poor saps, promised luxury on the cheap, all shelf their British lives and decide to move. Predictably (get used to this word) upon their arrival, they discover that the hotel is third world (go figure?), and India is uncomfortable and poor. Groundbreaking stuff right? The movies premise similar to pretty well every episode of Golden Girls, As Time Goes By and every other TV show pitched at an older audience - is that old people can be young too. And thats fine, Power-to-them. The message might be wholly unoriginal but it is not offensive. However unlike an episode of Golden Girls, TEBMH has a running time of 140 minutes. The film has some big named older talent. Bill Nighy and Penelope Wilton play a couple that lent too much money to their deadbeat GenY daughter and now could only afford to retire in India. Its sad, but I found myself relating more to the daughter than either of them. Being a sponge is hard and I would have liked to see how she dealt with the responsibility of mooching. Nighys character is likeable enough; though I couldnt help but wish he would just revert a character he played in one of the good films he was in. Penelope Wilton is his bitchy wife, a role she was born to play. Every excruciating moment she was on-screen the urge to stab myself in the eye with my straw grew. If this movie gets any awards, and I doubt it will, it will be an Oscar for her performance. She has the likeability of a komodo dragon. Ronald Pickup and Celia Imrie both play ageing nymphomaniacs who are clinging desperately to stay in the game. This predictably leads to several horrible wrinkled sex scenes. Sitting in the cinema, it felt like I had walked in on parents mid-copulation, wait, scratch that Grand parents. What has been seen cannot be unseen. Maggie Smith plays a wise cracking racist, who for a short desperate moment I thought was divinely placed to stop me from offing myself right there in the cinema. However, an emotional arc towards the end of the film put a stop to that. Luckily, by then I had

Reuben Hart St#10562787 MWP ASS2 Part 2 drunk so much syrupy frozen Coke, I had lapsed into a diabetes-induced coma. Phew. Dev Patal (hotel Judas), Judi Dench (the widow) and Tom Wilkenson (the gay guy) all play stronger characters and for small pockets of time provide sunshine on an otherwise cloudy day. As you can probably imagine, the plot sticks to the formula of multiple love interests, sad catharsis and eventual happy ending. You could have picked the ending at minute 25 and saved yourself those 115 minutes. Predictable. You might ask why I didnt just leave? And youre right, I should have, but one last hope lingered deep inside me. Something that told me: Wait, dont give up something beautiful is coming. Obviously I was waiting for the Bollywood spectacular that ends every clichd western film taking a paternal look at the subcontinent (see: Slumdog Millionaire, The Guru and Bride and Prejudice). I sat there waiting - past the cathartic moment, past the credits - until the lights came on and people started to leave. Still I sat there, trying to keep my dream alive. Finally the greasy usher with the alabaster skin told me it was over. There it was, TBEMH disguised behind a thick veil of incongruous adjectives and colourful words had lured me in, and in a final act of Jacobean tragedy took from me the solitary predicable convention I didnt hate. Look, I accept that I may not be the target audience. This movie isnt pitched at GenY (evidenced by the notable absence of any sort of explosion, 10 foot robot or Ashten Kutcher) but the formulaic plot and banal shoot-the-shit scripting makes this a bad film in any language even ye-old-timey. John Madden, when Im as old and tired as the crappy characters you created Im coming for my 140 minutes. The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel: 0 STARS

Reuben Hart St#10562787 MWP ASS2 Part 2

Brief Explanation.
This piece is intended as light-hearted entertainment. It uses sarcasm and irony as devices to amuse an audience. The target public is younger readers and hence the use of informal and otherwise inappropriate language (cussing etc.) is justified. The conventions of a review are subverted in the piece to both engage and entertain. This changes the purpose of the review from simply providing a reflection on the actual film to a piece of stand-alone entertainment. My intent was to write a review that could be read and enjoyed irrespective of whether there was an actual interest in the film. It is a piece of light relief and would be found in a youth relevant general interest newsletter. Sites such as Fairfax Digital the Vine are good examples of this type of publication. Their target demographic is Generation Y and they use humour consistently as part of their content mix. This style of article provides contrast to the more serious articles within a publication. The satirical style and use of first person narrative is also suitable for an online environment. This is important given the target public are most active online.