We highly recommend seeing The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. You will love it!
I’m not big on seeing movies more than once, but we recently viewed it again in order to share it with friends who hadn’t yet seen it. We were all thoroughly entertained the second time around as well.
Endearingly awkward, elegant and humorous, the acting is extraordinary and real, the script enchanting and deep, covering sensitive issues tastefully, and the scenery and colors of India, enchant and delight. Helen Mirren stars in a role identifiable and real, made all the more through her superb acting, and even the more quirky characters all manage to touch viewers hearts and funny bone, while cultivating understanding and empathy.
The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel gives us a chance to laugh at our human foibles, reflect on this stage in our lives with, and to see new possibilities beyond what we might have imagined for ourselves, while gently revealing that who we are may be a product of our conditioning. Then it picks us up, shakes out our pockets of residual programming about who we think we are versus who we can become, and reveals how we experience the world and how much fun we have along the way, is ultimately entirely up to us.
If you saw it (or after you see it), please share your experience of this landmark film. And, by the way, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel 2 comes out in 2015…hopefully it will do justice to its older sibling.
Reviewed by LeAura Alderson