Feel-good Friday flick

I heart Friday. It is certainly the most celebrated day of the week at our household. The worries of the coming week are 2 full days away and the past week is, well, the past. This week has been a downer, with my car acting out and refusing to start in the morning when I'm ready to go to work and us having to cancel our plans to vacation in Mexico during the long weekend due to S's short notice travel to India. Sometimes the best laid plans bite the dust.

In keeping with our Friday movie-night tradition, I decided to go watch the new John Madden movie - The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. While there are several other new releases that piqued my interest(cant wait to watch the new Tim Burton movie The Dark Shadows), this was the perfect chance to go see Marigold Hotel because it would normally be voted out as a 'soppy chick flick' if S was around. Plus, I'm a fan of John Madden (Shakespeare in Love, The Debt) and Judy Dench, so it was an obvious choice.

Most Hollywood/Brit films about India disappoint me at some level or the other. They all seem to highlight the horrors of life in India: poverty, dirt, traffic congestion, chaos and other related cliches(Salaam Bombay). While reality is reality, I go to the theater for an escape and I don't look forward to watching these dismal facets of Indian life on the big screen. Either that or they are are a complete departure from intelligent movie making and only show actors in ridiculous costumes and exaggerated Indian accents doing Bollywood dances and more cliches. It's always one extreme or the other(Bride and Prejudice, Guru).

A few movies break that mold. Slumdog Millionaire came very close to it, but even acclaimed director Danny Boyle needed to shove in a random Bollywood number at a busy Mumbai train station to round off the movie credits. 

Marigold Hotel was surprisingly different. No, this is not just a movie about oldies and their bucket lists. It's about a group of British seniors that decide to  "outsource their retirement" and migrate to India only to find out on arrival that the majestic palace that was to be their retirement home is actually an old, dilapidated property run by a sweet-talking, day-dreaming, over-energetic hotel keeper played by Dev Patel.

The movie still brings up some of the familiar Indian socioeconomic issues(poverty, racism, the caste system, arranged marriages), but it manages to spin a real story around those problems and does it in a light-hearted manner. It was refreshing to watch something familiar and taken-for-granted like my birth country India through a fresh perspective. The rich culture, food, colors and the simple joys of Indian life (like street cricket, vendor-hawked pineapples and haggling) are so much at the forefront that India seems to be part of the cast almost. And the movie paints that picture without looking like an 'Incredible India' tourism advertisement. Well done, Mr Madden. I promise to complain a little less and savor a little more on my next visit to India.

Judy Dench does a beautiful job as the narrator, calling India "a complete assault on the senses". So while this isn't an Oscar contender by any means, this feel-good Friday movie was the perfect start to a nice long weekend. Highly recommended by a thoroughbred movie buff. :)