Silver Screen in a Red Envelope: A Diary of Time Wasted

I love the actors in this movie, but I don't think I can fully stand behind it, or them. Several creative and colorful images enhance the production. I felt particularly fascinated by the language of spices, whose vocabulary, I must admit, seemed to have been expanded for the purposes of the plot. Despite the imagination of the tale, and several of the interesting thematic elements, I can't help feeling that a moral outweighs the artistic considerations. In my own words, the movie seems to be saying that you can have sex outside of marriage (outside of the rules of your culture), and still have the support of your traditions. It doesn't work like that. As I watched, I constantly found myself saying those exact words: "It doesn't work like that." The mechanics of the theological realm created inside this story seem alien to my Western theological roots. The gods Tilo (Aishwarya Rai) worships are her spices. They speak to her in a kind of sub-linguistic revela...

 This simplistically titled sequel to a remake actually kept my attention and made me laugh out loud. Although, much like the originals, huge moments made me turn away from the screen in sympathetic embarrassment (this is NOT my favorite genre), I found the whole thing largely funny, with a pleasantly ironic aftertaste. John Cleese's presence made entirely too much sense, if you recall that one of his greatest roles (Basil Fawlty)  had exactly the same tone. I feel that critics too often disregard these after-movies, tossing them off as derivative (but intentionally so!). Largely, these critics make sense, and after-movies should probably be illegal. Most sequels, remakes, etc. simply waste the viewer's time badly retelling an already over-told story. Not so here. Occasionally, the second out-ranks the first, and although this likely isn't that time, the second certainly ranks well in with the first. This cast is golden, and all actors lived up to their reputations. I...