THE BEST EXOTIC MARIGOLD HOTEL: guests who won't leave but will check out

'Slumdog Millionaire' it ain't.
Although both films share the same star, Dev Patel, THE BEST EXOTIC MARIGOLD HOTEL offers a very different view of India.
It's a view which barely even scratches the surface of this multi-faceted country. This surprisingly old-fashioned 2012 drama ignores the many complexities and contrasts in wealth and poverty, tradition and modernity, in favour of a superficial tourist guide take which touches on all the appropriate stereotypes without exploring any of them in any depth.
And it does it all with such charm and good humour that I almost feel bad for criticising it.
TBEMH is a delightful viewing experience peopled by some of British cinema's finest actors and offering up a cast of characters that are so endearingly old school British they could almost have wandered in from the set of a Merchant-Ivory production.

Judi Dench, Tom Wilkinson, Bill Nighy, Penelope Wilton, Maggie Smith and Ronald Pickup are so damned good at what they do that you just want to ignore the one dimensional and stereotypical representation of their adopted homeland.
The chaos and the colour that is India - check.
The delights of spicy food - check.
Copious references to numerous crumbling temples and palaces - check.
Kids playing cricket on a patch of wasteland, using makeshift bat and wickets - check.
At least one Indian who adds humour with his use of flowery, old fashioned English - check.
True love versus arranged marriage - check.
The brief acknowledgment of a vast underclass of 'untouchables' who live in unimaginable poverty - check.
Humanise that underclass to give the impression they're ok with their lot in life - check.
and so it goes on.
It's difficult to avoid the impression that all India really needs to sort out the chaos is a bunch of elderly white westerners because no matter what the Indians have managed to achieve on their own there's nothing that can't be improved upon by the knowledge, experience and worldview of Maggie Smith or Judi Dench, or at least the characters they play.

TBEMH is not a film about India but about the country and its culture as filtered through the differing experiences of a group of elderly white British citizens who've been lured east by the alluring website for the titular residential hotel. It promises them the opportunity to see out their years in the comparatively low cost splendour of a luxury hotel catering to their every whim. The reality is rather different and it's the adjustments in expectations forced upon the guests that the story focuses on, plus their own relationships, or the lack of them. Some are lonely and looking for love, one couple struggle with the growing realisation that their 40 year marriage has reached the end of the road, while a retired high court judge returns to city of his childhood in search of a lost love.
To the extent that India has a culture which is different from the one they are used to back home in Blighty, it does have an impact on how their stories play out but it could just as easily have been Italy, Spain, Kenya or Thailand. The fact that everything happens in India is incidental to the main thrust of the narrative.
It's the top-notch cast that lifts this story to heights it doesn't really deserve to scale and make it possible to overlook the many shortcomings. They're a class act combo and give the lie to the oft-asserted claim that you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear.

LOVE ACTUALLY: one-upping Uncle Sam in the rom-com stakes

Ok, let's get the negatives out of the way first so we can have a grown-up conversation about this film.
I admit that LOVE ACTUALLY is undeniably sentimental and sugary. I could feel it chipping away at the enamel on my teeth and furring up the walls of my arteries. It's not the first rom-com to suggest that love is the answer and that all you need is love but it does so more nakedly and unashamedly than many of its predecessors.
It's nothing more than an implausible fairytale in modern garb where the men are more often than not the ones in distress and it's the damsels who ride to the rescue.

So, with these minuses duly noted and acknowledged I now want to make the case that LOVE ACTUALLY is a really good film. It's not a great film or a classic but it is a lot of fun. The two main reasons for this are writer-director Richard Curtis' genuinely funny script and the engaging performances from a veritable who's who of British acting talent circa 2003.
Among the stand-outs are Bill Nighy in a career boosting turn as an addled rock star making an unlikely chart comeback with a truly awful Yuletide song called "Christmas is all around us" (based on the almost as awful "Love is all around us"), Hugh Grant dithering magnificently (but keeping his fluttering eyelids in check) as the British Prime Minister, Colin Firth as the epitome of the too-nice-for-his-own-good English gent, and Liam Neeson as a newly widowed dad channeling his grief into supporting his young step-son's difficult encounter with first love. Honorable mentions go to Emma Thompson, Martin Freeman, Laura Linney, Andrew Lincoln and Alan Rickman and I could go on, there's really not a bad performance in the entire cast. Even Rowan Atkinson acquits himself well!
With a cast this big and numerous storylines to cover there's not a lot of time for depth so it's to the immense credit of the cast and Curtis's scriptwriting skills that in the short time we get to spend with each of the characters they get to feel like something approaching real people. It's true that we only get to see one aspect of their lives - their love-life - but it's done in such a way that we feel there's more to them than simply their issues with romance.
What makes LOVE ACTUALLY a determinedly British take on the romantic comedy genre - even more than the predominantly British cast and the fact that it's set in London - is the humour. The mix of sarcasm and self-deprecation is uniquely British and allows the male characters in particular to act like an idiot at times without becoming pathetic buffoons. I got a sense of Curtis - his focus fixed very firmly on the other side of the Atlantic - stating confidently "This is how WE make rom-coms, and our style is just as valid as yours!" If that's too subtle for you just look at his depiction of the American President (a cameo by Billy Bob Thornton) as a shifty, immoral bully, and the portrayal of beautiful young American women (those from Wisconsin anyway) as brainless bimbos eager to jump into bed at the first sound of an English accent no matter how ugly the owner. The sub-conscious message seems to be "we may be nitwits but at least we're not Americans."
Heartwarming, life-affirming and seriously funny in places I think LOVE ACTUALLY has the pedigree to become the British version of "It's a Wonderful Life" - the film without which an entire nation's Christmas celebrations aren't complete.