The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel: Second-rate

The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2015) • View trailer 
Three stars. Rated PG, for mild profanity and sensuality
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 3.6.15

In this particular case, “second best” is ... merely OK.

It’s like visiting a friend you haven’t seen for a few years, only to discover that the friend has changed. And not for the better.

Able — if only for a moment — to forget the various issues plaguing his personal and
professional life, Sonny (Dev Patel, center) reflects on the warm bond he has established
with Muriel (Maggie Smith, at his immediate right).

The set-up is familiar, and therefore offers less of the first film’s delightful sense of discovery; the subplots are more contrived, giving a sense, at times, that all concerned are trying too hard; and Maggie Smith doesn’t get nearly as many of her deliciously piquant one-liners (echoing those she also flings so readily on TV’s Downton Abbey).

At 122 minutes, this sequel also is a bit long, and drags in spots.

Fortunately, familiarity isn’t an entirely bad thing. The entire cast has returned for this second outing, as have writer/director John Madden and co-scripter Ol Parker. They’re all seasoned pros, and while the ground on which they tread may be worn, they nonetheless step with alacrity.

There’s no question that the first Hotel’s success owes much to aging baby-boomers who tire of comic-book movies; we also can point to similarly delightful “aging relic” characters in recent films such as Quartet, Philomena, Pride and even the aforementioned Downton Abbey. Frankly, it’s refreshing to spend time with people who weren’t in diapers a mere decade ago.

That said, Madden and Parker shrewdly hedge their bets by including the much younger Dev Patel, even more familiar now, in the wake of his three-season run on HBO’s The Newsroom His Sonny Kapoor continues to be the hilariously over-enthusiastic glue that binds the residents of his Jaipur-based Exotic Marigold Hotel.

Patel also knows his way around a well-timed line delivery, and Sonny remains much like the dinner guest who invariably embarrasses himself, no matter what the conversational circumstances, by going one ill-advised sentence over the edge.

But poor Sonny endures more than his share of flustered setbacks in the second outing, and Patel struggles gamely to navigate these abnormal waters. That he mostly succeeds has more to do with his skill as an actor, than with the material with which he’s forced to work.

And “forced” seems the operative term. Much of the first film’s dynamic revolved around fish-out-of-water tension: the need for ex-pat Brits to navigate this exotic and wholly alien territory. Well, the territory has become comfortable, which means that Madden and Parker have to pull new narrative tricks out of their hats ... and the strain is noticeable.

Arbitrage: A fascinating, high-stakes poker game

Arbitrage (2012) • View trailer
Four stars. Rating: R, for profanity and brief drug use
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 9.14.12

Alfred Hitchcock was famous for this trick.

Deranged Robert Walker, intended to plant incriminating evidence — a cigarette lighter — to unjustly implicate Farley Granger in a murder, accidently drops the item into a storm drain while nearing the scene of the crime. We viewers should be delighted; if Walker loses the lighter, then Granger triumphs: Good wins out over evil.

Increasingly troubled by irregularities in their company books, Brooke (Brit Marling) shares
her concerns with her father (Richard Gere). But his efforts to reassure her ring hollow,
forcing this intelligent young woman to wonder why he's being so evasive. What might
he be hiding?

And yet, perversely, as Walker stuffs his arm through the grate during this climactic scene in Strangers on a Train, his fingers not quite able to reach the lighter, we’re on the edge of our seats ... wanting him to succeed.

In Frenzy, serial killer Barry Foster disposes of his latest victim in a potato sack that is dumped into the rear of a truck filled with such sacks. Shortly thereafter, Foster realizes that his monogrammed stick pin, lost in the struggle, must be clasped in the dead woman’s hand. Foster tears off after the truck, climbs inside and starts pawing through burlap sacks.

We shouldn’t root for him; failure means that the wholly innocent — but circumstantially accused — Jon Finch will go free. But, again, we become emotionally invested in Foster’s search, and feel relieved when he finds the body ... and calmly breaks her fingers in order to retrieve the pin held tight in her fist.

In writer/director Nicholas Jarecki’s richly nuanced Arbitrage, uber-wealthy New York hedge fund magnate Robert Miller (Richard Gere) cheats on his wife, and has embezzled funds in order to conceal a $420 million shortfall that would derail the sale of his company to a bank. Just to dig the hole deeper, he flees the scene of a road accident in order to evade responsibility.

Make no mistake: Miller is a bad guy ... a smug, self-serving reprobate at best, and a conniving, soulless, law-breaking bastard at worst. And still, almost against our wills, we cheer him on, hoping that he’ll somehow keep all these tottering plates spinning, and somehow extricate himself from this ever-widening disaster of his own creation.

Jarecki’s clever premise and archly savvy script deserve considerable credit, as does Gere, giving the performance of his often under-appreciated career. But he’s not the only person tearing up the screen; solid supporting performances also are turned in by Susan Sarandon, Brit Marling, Tim Roth and young Nate Parker.

Amelia: Stalled flight

Amelia (2009) • View trailer for Amelia
Three stars (out of five). Rating: PG, for mild sensuality
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 10.29.09
Buy DVD: Amelia• Buy Blu-Ray: Amelia [Blu-ray]


As long as this film is in the air, it positively soars.

Hilary Swank delivers an all-embracing performance, playing the legendary pilot in director Mira Nair's crisply paced but oddly flat Amelia. With her tousled and "mannish" hair cut, not to mention an eerily similar frame, Swank looks for all the world like the actual Amelia Earhart.

Immediately prior to beginning her ambitious, around-the-world trip, Amelia
Earhart (Hilary Swank) poses for photographers along with husband George P.
Putnam (Richard Gere, center) and navigator Fred Noonan (Christopher
Eccleston).

She also captures Earhart's polite but feisty manner, her eyes flashing at the very suggestion that a woman might not be capable of anything a man could do. It was a rare attitude in the 1930s, and it got Earhart into trouble more than once; Ron Bass and Anna Hamilton Phelan's script — based on two Earhart biographies — touches on this vexing aspect of the aviator's public image.

One might argue that Earhart was born 50 years too soon, but that's wrong; if not placed firmly in her own era, her accomplishments — both as a woman, and also as a flier — wouldn't have been nearly as impressive.

The trouble is, Nair's film stalls every time it returns to earth, as we spend considerable time with Earhart's unconventional relationship with promoter and publishing magnate George P. Putnam, played with his usual wooden anti-acting by Richard Gere. Given Earhart's free-spirited, wild and untamable nature — so well captured by Swank — it's simply impossible to imagine her falling for the sort of one-dimensional stick portrayed here by Gere.

Mind you, Earhart and Putnam were quite the item in real life, and I've no doubt that the actual gentleman must've been one helluva persuasive charmer. But Gere can't sell that act; given that his entire thespic range revolves around his signature smirk, he never makes Putnam look anything but insufferably smug.

Nothing would have turned Earhart off faster.

So we go with the flow, grind our teeth every time Gere pops up, and wait for the next transcendent flying sequence, when Swank once again conveys, with such sparkling, wide-eyed wonder, the sense of oneness Earhart must've felt every time she was in the air.

Nights in Rodanthe: Contrived nonsense

Nights in Rodanthe (2008) • View trailer for Nights in Rodanthe
Three stars (out of five). Rating: PG-13, and quite needlessly, for mild sensuality
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 9.25.08
Buy DVD: Nights in Rodanthe • Buy Blu-Ray: Nights in Rodanthe (+ BD-Live) [Blu-ray]


Full disclosure time:

I'm a hard-core romantic and a sucker for sweet little love stories; were it not for light-hearted caper thrillers — absolutely my favorite genre — starry-eyed melodramas would occupy the No. 1 spot.

Dr. Paul Flanner (Richard Gere), having traveled to North Carolina's Outer
Banks during the off-season, for a supremely uncomfortable personal errand,
doesn't wish to eat alone at the inn managed by Adrienne Willis (Diane Lane);
he therefore brings his dinner into the kitchen and joins her. It's a cute, gently
flirtatious scene; sadly, the rest of the film can't match its charm.

And I'm absolutely equal-opportunity; I don't care whether the equation's two halves are a guy and a gal, two members of the same gender, mismatched robots or cowboy string-dolls named Woody and Jessie. As long as they fall into each other's arms as the final act concludes — or we know they will — I'm a happy camper.

Shirley MacLaine's sidelong demand that Jack Lemmon "Shut up and deal," at the end of 1960's The Apartment, is one of the greatest — and most romantic — closing lines ever written for a film.

I mention all this by way of demonstrating that I am, quite clearly, part of the target audience for director George C. Wolfe's adaptation of Nights in Rodanthe, scripted by Ann Peacock and John Romano, and based on the novel by Nicholas Sparks.

But despite my genre willingness, this flick did nothing for me.

Sparks, frequently courted by Hollywood, has a tendency to ladle his melodrama with a trowel; the films adapted from his overly contrived novels often suffer from the same disease.

Sparks' characters don't just suffer; they endure the overwhelming mental anguish of the damned.

It might work on the printed page, but selling such purple melodrama on the big screen depends on the acting talent involved.

Kevin Costner spent all of 1998's dreary and laughably improbable Message in a Bottle looking for character motivation.

2002's A Walk to Remember — despite the sympathetic treatment of its religious protagonist — was little more than a hiccup in Mandy Moore's slow rise up Hollywood's ladder of fame.

The Notebook, depending on your tolerance for such stuff, was either too maudlin for words or too sad to endure, although it certainly boasted a strong cast.

Which brings us to Nights in Rodanthe, which gets some of its notoriety for once again re-uniting stars Richard Gere and Diane Lane, who struck reasonably tragic sparks in Unfaithful, and first worked together all the way back in The Cotton Club.

Lane can act — quite well, in fact — and she pulls off this story's tougher scenes.

Gere cannot, and does not.