The Darjeeling Limited

Is taking a spiritual journey on your list of things to do. Or have you taken a journey which turned out to be spiritual in some way without you planning for it. For me, the answer to both questions is yes AND no. You see, I don’t aspire to take a spiritual journey, nor have I found any spiritual events on my many journeys. In that sense my answers were truthful about the NO side of things

But, on the other side is the YES. That’s because I’ve taken a few spiritual journeys through the medium of cinema. The first one was Eat Pray Love which I reviewed here back on August 10, 2010. In that one, Julia Roberts divorced, left home and work, and made her way to Rome, Italy, then to an ashram in India, and last – she went to Bali; in all of those places she was seeking the answers to her personal questions. It may have been a spiritual awakening for her, or might have been that she loved the food. Maybe it was about meeting the right guy. Or maybe, it was about all of the above.

Today I took in the 2007 film called The Darjeeling Limited. Directed by Wes Anderson it is the story of three brothers, played by Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody, and Jason Schwartzman, who are struggling with life, have suffered the death of their father, and their mother, well she had a calling of a sort. She departed their Queens, New York home, and ran off to a convent in the foothills of the Himalayan mountains in far off India. They, the brothers, have not communicated among themselves in the year that has passed since the funeral.  The idea of the trip was to reunite as brothers while simultaneously rediscovering themselves as individuals.

Francis (played by Owen Wilson) organizes a travel by train trip for the three of them through Northern India on the way to a reunion with their mother. Actually his assistant created the itinerary, booked all the tickets, arranged the hotels, and so forth. He’s in the film but doesn’t make any lasting impact.

All of the above is what the film is about, but not the actual beginning of the film. Right at the opening, we are in Jodhpur, Rajasthan, India. We are in a taxi and the passenger is a businessman. He’s played by Bill Murray. The taxi careens through town barely braking for motorized rickshaws, cars, trucks, buses, bicycles, or even pedestrians.

Midnight in Paris

Midnight In Paris quietly arrived in Sarasota today at the Burns Court Cinema, a small film venue that books mostly indies, art, and an occasional foreign film. This was very fortunate for me, as this film, directed and written by Woody Allen, wasn’t booked at either of Sarasota’s big film chain multiplexes. The hall in which I watched the film was indeed small – 10 rows of four seats on each side of a center aisle. Your basic 80-seater.

As for Paris,  I’ve been there three times. I’ve walked its streets like a true boulevardier. I’ve stretched a thimbleful of coffee into a few hours of people watching on the sidewalk cafe at the Deux Magots on the Left Bank, and I’ve even been aboard one of those glass enclosed tour boats (Bateaux-mouches) that slowly make their way up and down the Seine River for a romantic dinner cruise with my main squeeze at the time. In short, Paris, the city of lights, is a very romantic city, especially the Rue Cler neighborhood that I usually stay in. As Ernest Hemingway once said,

If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.

While Woody’s Midnight In Paris might not qualify as a feast for either the palate or the senses, it is certainly worthy of being called a delightful and delicious cinematic pastry.

I wrote the above intro to this review before I actually saw the film. Little did I know the Woody would use the same Hemingway quote mere minutes into this film. Then again, I didn’t know that Hemingway himself would be  a character portrayed by an actor in the film either.

I’ve decided to give this review a secondary title and I’ll call it Woody’s Wish List. Since Woody has more years behind him than he does in front of him, it is altogether natural to look back toward’s one younger days. Or to wish for something that never happened. Our personal memories always to seem to have a glow to them that we didn’t quite see when we lived through those times. But even further back from our own lived in memories are the times we’ve only dreamt about or read about in a book.

How Do You Know

Every year, around Christmas, a movie opens that the MPA has rated a PG-13, is deemed a drama with comedy or a comedy with dramatic aspects, meaning it might be called a rom-com, and there are some big names attached. In 2008, Last Chance Harvey with Dustin Hoffman and Emma Thompson opened on Christmas Day. In 2009, It’s Complicated with Meryl Streep and Alec Baldwin opened on Christmas Day. Last year, How Do You Know which starred Reese Witherspoon, Paul Rudd, Owen Wilson, and Jack Nicholson opened on December 17th.

Nearly six full months later, I am finally getting around to see it. Of course there was a complication in that I moved, and my Netflix disc somehow got lost in the shuffle, but I promise you – I did see it today.

Like most of you who rushed out to see it when it first opened, I had high expectations of this film doing well. After all, with the casting of Witherspoon and Nicholson, along with James L Brooks hands-on as writer and director, it would have to be good, right?

Only it wasn’t the box office hit that Brooks and Co had hoped for. With a production budget of roughly $120 million – this wasn’t an inexpensive movie. But so far, the box office receipts for the USA ticket sales and the International ticket sales yielded only 48 million and the DVD sales of 9 million plus mean that this film lost money.

Why?

First of all the film, looked special. Nice, attractive location shooting in and around Washington DC. Good looking actors and actresses. Well lit, nicely edited, and the acting was pretty darned good if you ask me. So it had to be the script.