The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

‘The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel’ is not really my sort of film, it even has a terrible title, but here I am anyway... on a 2-for-1 ticket deal at Cineworld. It is based on the novel ‘These Foolish Things’ by Deborah Moggach, which is a much better title in my opinion.

We are introduced to the seven main characters, a motley crew, all of a certain age, who have all fallen for the so good it can’t be true advertisement for the ‘Best Exotic Marigold Hotel’ encouraging them to outsource their retirement to Jaipur, India.

After an arduous journey, they finally arrive and can congratulate young entrepreneur Sonny (Dev Patel) on how nicely he Photoshop-ed the advert. He has an admirable ambition to run the hotel ‘for the elderly and the beautiful’, all he lacks is the money to do so.

The guests settle in, dust off the furniture, crush the cockroaches and tuck into their traditional British roast of... goat curry.

The cast is impressive. There’s Celia Imrie as the much married Madge who’s had enough of babysitting duties back home. Ronald Pickup plays the ageing womaniser Norman while Maggie Smith plays Muriel who hates all things foreign but accepts hip surgery in India. Tom Wilkinson plays Graham, a judge who walks away from his career to return to his boyhood India and to track down a former gay lover.

Naturally we have Judi Dench, she plays Evelyn who has been impoverished by the death of her debt ridden husband and Bill Nighy who is Douglas, one half of a couple, the Astley’s, who have been bankrupted by their daughter (we know their pain). Penelope Wilton play his miserable wife Jean. Jean hates India whereas it Douglas feel liberated. You hope that eventually he’ll be liberated from her too and so it proves. She is the only one who fails to let go the past and to embrace the future. Travel is of course supposed to broaden the mind, well some minds anyway.

As a backdrop, India itself steals the show. There’s also a nice side story as Sonny tries to woo his call centre sweetheart Sunaina (Tena Desae).

As a film it’s not too taxing, well not taxing at all really. As charming as it’s predictable, with many of the jokes as old as the cast. It’s a fluffy dog story without the fluffy dog. Come to think of it, why isn’t there a dog? Fluffy or otherwise. Why didn’t one of the characters have a four legged friend? Major oversight.

It’s not a word I'd ever use to describe a film but my partner described the film as ‘lovely’. So there you go. Lovely. Apparently.

Moneyball

In 2001 the Oakland A’s baseball team lost to the New York Yankees in the divisional playoffs. This wasn’t surprising considering the payroll of the Yankees was triple that of the A’s. It’s a situation that isn’t going to change either and the A’s are set to lose three of their star players to teams who can afford to pay more for their services.

The general manager of the A’s, Billy Beane (Brad Pitt), and his scouts start debating who they can recruit to replace them.

Beane is not impressed with any of the options and realises that in order to compete, they need to totally re-think the way they recruit players. Then, by chance, he stumbles across Pete Brand (Jonah Hill), an economics graduate working for another team who believes he has a better system. A system purely based on statistics. A system that didn’t care if a player was too old, spent all his time in strip clubs or if his girlfriend wasn’t photogenic enough, provided he got the runs.

Beane recruits Brand to be his assistant and then much to the annoyance of his scouts, they go about recruiting new players based on data not scouting, even the ones who frequent strip clubs and have ugly girlfriends.

Another person who was unimpressed by this was Art Howe (Philip Seymour Hoffman) the team's head coach and he refuses to pick the players that Beane and Brand have bought for him. When the club embark on a disastrous start to the season, everyone blames Beane’s purchases but the two of them refuse to be diverted from their strategy. Instead Beane sells a couple of the players the coach is picking to force his hand. I don't quite understand why he didn't just fire his coach but selling the players has the correct effect and the team embark on an all-time major league record of 20 consecutive wins.

They top their division and again reach the playoffs, only to lose at the same stage again. The point though has been made and Beane is headhunted by another team, although ultimately he decides to stay in Oakland.

It’s an interesting film and a true story. I love all the statistical stuff, but it does uses jargon that only baseball fans would comprehend, so an understanding of the game would be useful. I feel a lot of the actual results were glossed over but as this is all factual, if you’re in America you probably know the details of what happened.

Pitt is good and I'm a bit of a Pitt convert over the last few years. Although I can't see anything in this that warranted his Oscar nomination but he is as good in this as has been in most of his recent work. Recommended.