Movie of the Week: The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

[jacey]

I can probably sum up this movie in one word: delightful!

With a cast of venerable English actors of a certain age including: Bill Nighy, Maggie Smith, Judi Dench, Tom Wilkinson, Penelope Wilton, Ronald Pickup and Celia Imrie it has everything going for it right from the start, but add Dev Patel as the wildly overoptimistic manager of the crumbling, but also venerable, Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (catering for elderly and beautiful) and you have a winning mixture.

Gentle, funny and serious all in one package this really is a feelgood movie where the new residents of the hotel seem to get what they need, if not what they expected. Some tie up the loose ends of their lives while others undergo a sea-change or make new beginnings.

And it's sure to leave us with a new catchphrase: 'Everything will be all right in the end, and if it's not all right, it isn't the end.'

Highly recommended.

Comments

[cmcmck.livejournal.com]

Part of me wonders how far this film is influenced by the wartime Emeric Pressburger (my cinematographic hero) film set in a rural hotel (the title escapes me) in the course of which the characters get what they want/need?

[birdsedge.livejournal.com]

I don't know the hotel film you mean, and I'm not an expert in Powell and Pressburger movies, but I adore the David Niven one 'A Matter of Life and Death'. It's one of my favourite films of all time.

[cmcmck.livejournal.com]

'A Canterbury Tale' is my fave although it got butchered by the editors/censors in the cutting room and the outtakes sadly didn't survive to make a director's cut. :o(

I was an undergrad at UKC in Canterbury so it struck chords :o)