The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

2015 - Dir: John Madden - 2 hour 2 minutes
Shown at The FeckenOdeon on 10th July, 2015

We’re not great fans of sequels at The FeckenOdeon. They very often turn out to be a pale and prolonged rehash of the original film - the idea just doesn’t sustain and should have been left to rest in peace. There are always exceptions to rules and tonight’s film is one. The characters are so well drawn and the actors, with millions of screen hours under their collective belts, are so at ease with the script that it’s as if the first film had never been made…. of course it could be, given their advanced years, that the actors have forgotten that they’ve done it all before…..
The original Best Exotic film was a bit of a game changer. The film distributors, forever chasing the pocket money of a young audience, had no idea that a film featuring a whole busload of ancient actors would romp to the top of the box office charts. Of course they reacted in the way they always do - by immediately trying to repeat the trick. A whole raft of (allegedly) feel-good oldie movies was hurriedly thrust into production with varying degrees of success. Of them only the funny and touching “Quartet” really hit the money - but at least a lot more elderly thespians got some work - and were able to keep the gas meter topped up when the weather got chilly last winter.
It’s not difficult to understand why Exotic Marigold was so popular. Those of us who are the wrong side of the bus pass age are only too aware that old people are just young people trapped inside increasingly unreliable and saggy shells. We’re just as daft, playful and downright irresponsible as any teenager. It’s a well loved formula exploited by Roy Clarke’s long running “Last of the Summer Wine” on the telly. All that’s happened here is that they’ve transferred it to a colourful and interesting location and added a bit of big screen glitz - and it works! Mind you, it would have been fascinating to see how Compo and Nora Batty coped with Bangalore….
(Moved from FeckenOdeon 2 to the larger Main Cinema because of public demand).

The Theory of Everything

2014 - Dir: James Marsh - 2 hour 3 minutes
Shown in FeckenOdeon 2 on 22nd May, 2015

This is the story of Jane and Stephen Hawking - you’ll note that Jane is the first named in the catchline - and that’s quite deliberate. What this film represents is a triumph of Jane’s experience and persona after decades in which the family was viewed solely through the prism of Stephen’s genius, who as well as being the world’s best-known scientist is also the world’s best-known sufferer of motor neurone disease.
Stephen Hawking’s verdict on the movie was that it needed more science - but Jane said that it needed more emotion. Both however approved of the film. They met the actors - Felicity Jones and Eddie Redmayne - before the filming began and were both astounded by how closely they were able to represent the mannerisms, gestures and speech patterns of the young Hawkings. Jane said, “When I saw the film, I thought: she’s stolen my personality!”
The relative lack of science in the film isn’t so much down to the film makers not wishing to burden audiences with a weighty subject - more a desire to reflect Jane’s experience. “The truth was, there were four partners in our marriage,” says Jane. “Stephen and me, motor neurone disease and physics. If you took out motor neurone disease, you are still left with physics. Mrs Einstein, you know, cited physics as a difference for her divorce ...” During their marriage, she says, Stephen would retreat into himself. And, though he tried to explain physics to her, she always felt shut out of the world that was so crucial to him.  She also explains her reaction to the movie by saying “The important thing is that the feelings, where they are there, are very much true to our experiences. So from an emotional point of view, it’s spot on. The only thing is that they’ve had to minimise the strains and struggles, because in our real life the difficulties of dealing with Stephen’s disease were much greater than they appear in the film.” And, yes, the impression given in the film that she and Stephen managed to split up without too much acrimony – and that Jane’s new partner and now husband, musician Jonathan Hellyer Jones, became part of their immediate family – is indeed an accurate one.
The Theory of Everything, which was based on Jane’s memoir of their time together. Now 71, she and Jonathan divide their life between Cambridge (where Stephen lives nearby) and their house in northern France, and she makes regular visits to Seattle where her and Stephen’s eldest child, Robert, works for Microsoft and has a son and a daughter. Looking back she says “Being Stephen’s carer was such a struggle, and it’s a lonely job looking after a disabled person. Thinking back, I honestly wonder how I got through it. But what you hope is that the years since have brought improvements to the lives of disabled people and their carers, and I think for a while it was like that. But now the clock is turning back, and we can’t let that happen.”