Best Marigold Hotel Note
1
Film notes 1st November 2012 www. peterboroughartscinema. co.uk T HE B EST E XOTIC M ARIGOLD H OTEL 2011 : UK Cert (UK): 12A 118 mins Director: John Madden Cast: Bill Nighy, Celia Imrie, Dame Judi Dench, Dame Maggie Smith, Dev Patel, Lillete Dubey, Liza Tarbuck, Penelope Wil- ton. There are seven charac- ters, each with a single dominant characteristic like figures in Jacobean or Restoration comedy, and played by a seasoned vet- eran of the British theatre: Judi Dench and Celia Im- rie as contrasted widows; Maggie Smith in her cockney Downstairs mode; Bill Nighy and Penelope Wilton as a bickering couple; Ronald Pickup as a Viagra- fuelled common-or- garden rake; Tom Wilkin- son as a gay high-court judge in search of his lost Indian love of his far-off schooldays. The hotel is a dilapidated mansion run by the timid Indian son of an overbearing mother who refuses to counte- nance her son's affair with a gorgeous girl from a local call centre. became an acceptable academic sub- ject and film courses burgeoned in universities and high schools, old movies would be protected from ob- solescence. And, to be sure, there is still a legion of young movie fanatics who appreciate and even love the films of Hawks, Hitchcock, Ford, Capra, Welles, Truffaut and others. But among many rank-and-file mil- lennials, the attitude doesn't seem to be so generous. They find old movies hopelessly passé — technically primi- tive, politically incorrect, narratively dull, slowly paced. In short, old- fashioned. Even Tobey Maguire's Spider-Man is a Model T next to An- drew Garfield's rocket ship of a movie. And Model Ts get thrown on the junk heap. What makes it even worse is that unlike classic literature, around which a whole apparatus has been built so that J.K. Rowling can't supplant Shakespeare, movies are relative new- comers and the classics are vulnerable to changing taste. As taste goes, mil- lennials seem to have a hard time re- lating to movies that are only a few years old. A friend of mine who teaches in the New York University Cinema Studies graduate program told me he was appalled at how little interest his students — future critics and film scholars, no less — had in old movies. For them, "classics" are movies made in the last five years, and Scorsese is like Washington or Lincoln: ancient. Another friend who teaches at a pres- tigious university told me that while a good number of his self-selected class of undergraduates studying film his- tory did respond to many of the old films he showed, for example Hitch- cock movies, they expressed only cold admiration for many other classic films, including "Citizen Kane,"which they found antiquated. And yet an- other friend, this one a high school teacher in California heading a film class, said his students were bored by "The Godfather." He won't be teach- ing the course again because there wasn't sufficient interest. There are, unfortunately, no studies of which I am aware that examine the relationship of millennials to old movies. At best we have dated surveys about the antipathy of young people to black-and-white films. But MTV did conduct a study recently of how young peo- ple relate to contemporary films, which found that movies are deeply embedded in the social net- working process. Young people begin tweeting about films in an- ticipation of their release and con- tinue discussing them after the re- lease so that the buzz is now more sustained than it has been. In ef- fect, movies, new movies at least, create an occasion for an ongoing conversation. Even the ways in which movies are watched tend to de-contextualize them — to pry them from an ex- perience and plop them into instant gratification. The film historian Charles Maland at the University of Tennessee told me that he wasn't sure his students had contempt for old movies, but he was sure that by watching films on computers, smartphones, PlayStations and iPads, they were diminishing the films' effect. Old movies with sub- tle, sustained narratives fare less well than new movies with a blun- derbuss phenomenological attack. In addition, this kind of viewing undermines continuity, which is the basis of history. When Maland asks his students if they have seen a particular great old American film, he is often told, "I've seen parts of it." That's the impact of YouTube, which among young people at least, seems to be greater than the impact of Netflix, revival houses and TCM, FMC and other cable outlets that show old movies in their entirety. Old movies are now like dino- saurs, and like dinosaurs, they are threatened with extinction. Perspective: Millennials seem to have little use for old movies LA Times, July 2012 Young people, so-called millennials, don't seem to think of movies as art the way so many boomers did. They think of them as fashion, and like fashion, movies have to be new and cool to war- rant attention. Living in a world of the here-and-now, obsessed with whatever is current, kids seem no more interested in seeing their parents' movies than they are in wearing their parents' clothes. Indeed, novelty may be the new narcis- sism. It obliterates the past in the fasci- nation with the present. One has to acknowledge that part of this cinematic ageism is the natural cycle of culture. Every generation not only has its own movies, it has its own aesthetics, and the contemporary aes- thetic might be labeled "bigger, faster, louder" because our blockbuster movies are all about sensory overload — quick- ening the audience's pulse. It is the same force that drives video games. Still, the difference between the attitude of boomers and that of the millennials is that boomer audiences didn't neces- sarily believe their aesthetics were an advance over those that had preceded them. Indeed, the most ardent movie enthusi- asts of the past generation were rever- ential of old movies. Andrew Sarris, who died last month and who was among the nation's most influential film critics in the '70s and '80s, made his reputation not just by importing the auteur theory from France that cele- brated the authorial role of the director but by disinterring many of those old directors from film history. For Sarris and his acolytes, love of movie history was indispensable to a love of the mov- ies generally. One loved both old and new. One might have thought that as film
description
The making of this funny and poignant film.
Transcript of Best Marigold Hotel Note
Film notes 1s t November 2012
www.peterboroughartsc inema.co .uk
T H E B E S T E X O T I C M A R I G O L D H O T E L
2011 : UK Cert (UK): 12A 118 mins Director: John Madden Cast: Bill Nighy, Celia Imrie, Dame Judi Dench, Dame Maggie Smith, Dev Patel, Lillete Dubey, Liza Tarbuck, Penelope Wil-ton. There are seven charac-ters, each with a single dominant characteristic like figures in Jacobean or Restoration comedy, and played by a seasoned vet-eran of the British theatre: Judi Dench and Celia Im-rie as contrasted widows; Maggie Smith in her cockney Downstairs mode; Bill Nighy and Penelope Wilton as a bickering couple; Ronald Pickup as a Viagra-fuelled common-or-garden rake; Tom Wilkin-son as a gay high-court judge in search of his lost Indian love of his far-off schooldays. The hotel is a dilapidated mansion run by the timid Indian son of an overbearing mother who refuses to counte-nance her son's affair with a gorgeous girl from a local call centre.
became an acceptable academic sub-ject and film courses burgeoned in universities and high schools, old movies would be protected from ob-solescence. And, to be sure, there is still a legion of young movie fanatics who appreciate and even love the films of Hawks, Hitchcock, Ford, Capra, Welles, Truffaut and others. But among many rank-and-file mil-lennials, the attitude doesn't seem to be so generous. They find old movies hopelessly passé — technically primi-tive, politically incorrect, narratively dull, slowly paced. In short, old-fashioned. Even Tobey Maguire's Spider-Man is a Model T next to An-drew Garfield's rocket ship of a movie. And Model Ts get thrown on the junk heap. What makes it even worse is that unlike classic literature, around which a whole apparatus has been built so that J.K. Rowling can't supplant Shakespeare, movies are relative new-comers and the classics are vulnerable to changing taste. As taste goes, mil-lennials seem to have a hard time re-lating to movies that are only a few years old. A friend of mine who teaches in the New York University Cinema Studies graduate program told me he was appalled at how little interest his students — future critics and film scholars, no less — had in old movies. For them, "classics" are movies made in the last five years, and Scorsese is like Washington or Lincoln: ancient. Another friend who teaches at a pres-tigious university told me that while a good number of his self-selected class of undergraduates studying film his-tory did respond to many of the old films he showed, for example Hitch-cock movies, they expressed only cold admiration for many other classic films, including "Citizen Kane,"which they found antiquated. And yet an-other friend, this one a high school teacher in California heading a film class, said his students were bored by "The Godfather." He won't be teach-ing the course again because there wasn't sufficient interest.
There are, unfortunately, no studies of which I am aware that examine the relationship of millennials to old movies. At best we have dated surveys about the antipathy of young people to black-and-white films. But MTV did conduct a study recently of how young peo-ple relate to contemporary films, which found that movies are deeply embedded in the social net-working process. Young people begin tweeting about films in an-ticipation of their release and con-tinue discussing them after the re-lease so that the buzz is now more sustained than it has been. In ef-fect, movies, new movies at least, create an occasion for an ongoing conversation. Even the ways in which movies are watched tend to de-contextualize them — to pry them from an ex-perience and plop them into instant gratification. The film historian Charles Maland at the University of Tennessee told me that he wasn't sure his students had contempt for old movies, but he was sure that by watching films on computers, smartphones, PlayStations and iPads, they were diminishing the films' effect. Old movies with sub-tle, sustained narratives fare less well than new movies with a blun-derbuss phenomenological attack. In addition, this kind of viewing undermines continuity, which is the basis of history. When Maland asks his students if they have seen a particular great old American film, he is often told, "I've seen parts of it." That's the impact of YouTube, which among young people at least, seems to be greater than the impact of Netflix, revival houses and TCM, FMC and other cable outlets that show old movies in their entirety. Old movies are now like dino-saurs, and like dinosaurs, they are threatened with extinction.
Perspective: Millennials seem to have little use for old movies LA Times, July 2012 Young people, so-called millennials, don't seem to think of movies as art the way so many boomers did. They think of them as fashion, and like fashion, movies have to be new and cool to war-rant attention. Living in a world of the here-and-now, obsessed with whatever is current, kids seem no more interested in seeing their parents' movies than they are in wearing their parents' clothes. Indeed, novelty may be the new narcis-sism. It obliterates the past in the fasci-nation with the present. One has to acknowledge that part of this cinematic ageism is the natural cycle of culture. Every generation not only has its own movies, it has its own aesthetics, and the contemporary aes-thetic might be labeled "bigger, faster, louder" because our blockbuster movies are all about sensory overload — quick-ening the audience's pulse. It is the same force that drives video games. Still, the difference between the attitude of boomers and that of the millennials is that boomer audiences didn't neces-sarily believe their aesthetics were an advance over those that had preceded them. Indeed, the most ardent movie enthusi-asts of the past generation were rever-ential of old movies. Andrew Sarris, who died last month and who was among the nation's most influential film critics in the '70s and '80s, made his reputation not just by importing the auteur theory from France that cele-brated the authorial role of the director but by disinterring many of those old directors from film history. For Sarris and his acolytes, love of movie history was indispensable to a love of the mov-ies generally. One loved both old and new. One might have thought that as film
