A movie about troubled people with serious problems doesn't have to be dour. It can, in fact, be funny and cute, like this one. Perhaps, I'm a little disheartened, because cash-strapped English retirees are forced to relocate to dirt-poor Jodhpur, India. Still, director John Madden (Shakespeare in Love, The Debt) ably adapts the light, fluffy book into a quality movie.
Widow Dench finds out her husband left her penniless. Sour couple Nighy and Wilton lost all their money to a daughter's startup scheme. Sour, dour Smith desperately needs a hip replacement and cannot imagine waiting the six months in England. Wilkinson and the rest go to pursue dreams of love and even sex in this scrubby city halfway across the globe, where Patel (Slumdog Millionaire) is trying to keep his hotel from being bulldozed.
I predict this will be very popular stuff. Marigold is chock full of great London actors, and Madden is a wonderful director. The setting is beautiful, and the comedyâ┚¬â€Âthe airy, farcical and often cliché laughsâ┚¬â€Âwill make Marigold a crowd-pleaser.
The jokes almost completely let us forget old people's poverty, India's ugly caste system, and the ostracism of gays by both Indian and English culture. Yet, in those few moments when the movie lets the audience feel characters' painâ┚¬â€Âwhen the story is less adorable and more honestâ┚¬â€Âthe Marigold is the best and most exotic.
The Raven has the seed of a brilliant ideaâ┚¬â€Âliterati have always wondered about Edgar Allen Poe's last daysâ┚¬â€Âand it's obviously written by some huge fans. However, the script is full of jumps of logic, melodrama, and historical anachronisms. It needed a great director to carve out a great film. Instead it got James McTeigue, whose uneven career is mostly marked by his uneven V for Vendetta.
Poe (Cusack) is a drug-addicted dipsomaniac and brilliant author of the macabre. He staggers around 1840s Baltimore besmirching other writers. He's also fallen in love with the beautiful Emily (Eve). At the same time, a maniacal mass murderer has started killing, based on Poe's grisly stories. To save his love and catch the criminal, Poe must team up with inspector Evans.
Cusack does the best he can with the stilted dialogue. It all feels like a keener eye and ear could've saved this with small revisions. Society girl Eve at one point says â┚¬Å”okayâ┚¬Â repeatedly, though the word was only recorded 20 years earlier among the Chocktaw Indians and not widely used as an American idiom until the 20th century. Even the mystery is a chop job because the revelation of the killer a bit too pat.
Director McTeigue has a great sense of style, but that's about it. He didn't fix the problems with the clever script, and he certainly doesn't do much to make this revisionist history concise or emotionally compelling.
Probably, there is very little glamorous about being a real pirate. Somewhere, however, between Robert Lewis Stevenson and Errol Flynn, the life of pillaging, killing, scurvy, and replacing missing limbs with hooks and wood became cool. The next natural progression is to make fun of it.
Aardman Studios rehired Chicken Run director Peter Lord to helm this light, kid-friendly swashbuckler. Pirate Captain (that's his nameâ┚¬â€ÂGrant voices the character) and his band of swarthy goofballs sail the high seas. The captain is obsessed with winning Pirate of the Year, so he will do anything to defy mean Queen Victoria (Staunton) and get the adulation.
Perhaps the arc of this animated yarn is a little too predictable. Yet, within all the silly humor are hidden smaller treasures of real surprise and discovery. The ship's parrot is actually a dodo. Charles Darwin (Tennant) and his silent, manservant-chimpanzee are also fun. Small plot twists are a blast.
The stop-motion animation is so excellent here, my friend David and I argued after the movie over what was claymation and what was digital. The 3D effects are fun, though probably not entirely necessary to enjoy the film. The action sequences are hilarious, and the humor is rightfully irreverent.In all, it's worth the booty you'd spend for the ticket. Or just grab a cutlass and force your way in, really. That's the glamorous thing to do.
