Yeah, it’s beautifully done, it’s funny (and throws in enough grown-up jokes to keep me happy), blah blah blah. It’s more complex than most kids’ movies, a welcome change from the insipidly simplistic structure to which even the so-called best kids’ movies seem to hew. My only major complaint was the obnoxious little-kid voices for Nemo and his friends – you know, the fake stammering and lisping – ugh!
Maybe I enjoyed it more than I expected because I’m just a lot less uptight in this particular theater.
We also watched The Guru, a bouncy blend of Hollywood and Bollywood that feels surprisingly wholesome for a movie about sex and the porn industry. Bollywood star Jimi Mistry plays Ramu, who comes to Hollywood determined to become a star (he’s inspired by John Travolta in Grease) and winds up, as so many others like him, as first a waiter, then (through a wacky misunderstanding) a porn actor. Though another wacky misunderstanding, he becomes a guru to flaky, faddish, spirituality-seeking socialite Marisa Tomei (terrifically fun) and imparts such wisdom as he possesses – which, seeing as he gets it all from his porn co-star (Heather Graham, flirting with being typecast), tends to be sexual.
The movie sprinkles a few Bollywood numbers
throughout
-- but they’re wisely shorter and fewer than in your typical Bollywood
movie. Graham and the rest of the Western cast are terrific good
sports in gamely attempting Indian choreography; those production
numbers
actually work much better than the more conventional Hollywood-musical
ones, generally homages to Grease, do. It’s all in good
fun,
and if the plot is flimsy, well, the actors have enough charisma to
carry
you to the end (though not enough to pull off the inane ending, which
was
dumb enough when Olivia Newton-John and John Travolta did it
twenty-five
years ago and doesn’t work any better today).
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