Tag Archives: Lillete Dubey

Movie Review: Dr. Cabbie (2014)

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Dr Cabbie_VOD2.5 Stars (out of 4)

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Bollywood superstar Salman Khan turns producer for the Canadian film Dr. Cabbie, a comedy that takes a critical look at Canada’s medical infrastructure and immigrants’ ability to assimilate into the culture.

Vinay Virmani — the film’s co-writer — plays Dr. Deepak Veer Chopra, a recent Indian med school grad eager to start his career in Canada. He drags his mother, Nellie (Lillete Dubey), to Toronto, where they move in with her brother, Vijay (Rizwan Manji), and his blonde hippie wife, Rani (Mircea Monroe).

Despite a nationwide shortage of doctors, none of Toronto’s hospitals will accept Deepak’s Indian degree. His new pal, Tony (Kunal Nayyar), convinces the doctor to join him as a cab driver, the city’s go-to job for the over-educated and underemployed.

When Tony uploads a video of Deepak delivering a woman’s baby in the back of his cab, it launches Deepak’s career as a mobile freelance doctor, even if means he has to practice without at license. It also jump-starts Deepak’s romance with the new mom, Natalie (Adrianne Palicki).

There are some especially charming equations in Dr. Cabbie. Virmani and Palicki share a comfortable chemistry, Deepak’s earnestness pairing well with Natalie’s savvy.

Best of all is the friendship between Nellie and Rani. After initially resisting the move to Canada, Nellie is quickly won over, taking to Rani’s life of massages and facials like a fish to water. Impressed with her sister-in-law’s golden tresses and generous bosom, Nellie dons her own blonde wig and pads her bra with socks.

The funniest part of the film is Vijay’s recounting of his proposal to Rani. A flashback shows the audience the truth of what happened in a way that is far less rosy than the story he tells his sister and nephew.

The tone of the film is generally light, and so is the criticism of the Canadian medical system’s inefficiencies. Most of the racially tinged humor is benign, although a few instances are cringe-worthy.

Tony’s character exists for the purpose of inserting as many sex jokes into the script as possible, and the vast majority of the jokes just aren’t funny. It’s hard to imagine a woman being charmed by Tony’s catcalling and the set of blue plastic testicles hanging from his cab’s bumper. A subplot involving Tony’s Italian landlord and the landlord’s daughter should have been ditched entirely.

Though not perfect, Dr. Cabbie has enough cute moments and winsome performances to make it worth a glance.

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Movie Review: The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2012)

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3 Stars (out of 4)

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Note: I’m deviating from Bollywood fare in order to review a British film set in India that features Hindi-film actors Lillete Dubey, Rajendra Gupta, and Sid Makkar.

Early in The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, married couple Jean (Penelope Wilton) and Douglas (Bill Nighy) tour a retirement home. The apartment they tour features a wall-mounted emergency call button to be used in case one should fall and need assistance. Jean caustically notes that the button is handy if she should happen to accidentally fall right next to it, but not so much if she falls anywhere else in the room.

My parents recently moved into a retirement community with a similar setup. To access their emergency call button, one of them would have to fall and land wedged between the TV set and the wall. I’m as skeptical of their button’s usefulness as Jean is of hers.

That sense of pragmatism pervades a movie with a somewhat a fantastical premise: starting a new life of luxury in exotic India. A brochure promises opulent retirement living for British pensioners at The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel for the Elderly and Beautiful.

But it’s not a sense of adventure that leads the characters to move from England to India. For Jean,  Douglas, Evelyn (Judi Dench), and Muriel (Maggie Smith), it’s financial worries. For Graham (Tom Wilkinson), it’s a desire to right a youthful mistake. And Madge (Celia Imrie) and Norman (Ronald Pickup) want to improve their romantic prospects.

When the group arrives in India, they discover that the hotel is not as luxurious as promised. The brochure depicts the vision young owner Sonny (Dev Patel) has for his family’s property, not its current derelict state. The manner in which the retirees deal with their situation makes up the meat of the story.

As my parents, in-laws, and their friends approach (and, in some cases, surpass) age 70, they’ve all repeated the same refrain: “Getting old sucks.” The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is so effective because it acknowledges that reality. No matter how well you think you’ve prepared for your later years, there always seems to be something — money, health, or family troubles — that makes a difficult stage of life even more so.

Acknowledging this reality allows the funny parts of the film to be that much more humorous. And The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is a very funny movie.

Given the caliber of the cast, the performances are universally terrific, as each character adapts to the surroundings while addressing the issues that got him or her there in the first place. Penelope Wilton (Mrs. Crawley on Downton Abbey) is effective to an uncomfortable degree as Jean resists settling down in her unfamiliar new home.

Maggie Smith steals the show with her ludicrously inappropriate jabs, which are funny only because of how powerless she is. Awaiting her hip transplant in an Indian hospital, she reacts in shock to discover that her doctor is Indian. Predictably and appropriately, she takes strides to shed her prejudices over the course of the film.

Sonny’s storyline is the only aspect of the movie that doesn’t really work. Rather than intersecting his storyline with those of his tenants, his runs parallel to theirs. When new characters (e.g., his girlfriend and his disapproving mother) are introduced solely to augment Sonny’s story, it just highlights how separate that story is from the rest of the action.

That said, Dev Patel is very funny, and his storyline doesn’t detract much from what is overall a really enjoyable picture.

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