jeffyoung1

One of my vivid memories in October 2008 watching the live news coverage of the Mumbai terror attack against the world-renown Taj Hotel was of a newsman saying that the Indian authorities were fighting a terrorist inside the hotel but the problem is that they didn't know how many terrorists were inside. This movie answers the question, more than one of course. I'm suspicious of the many, low, one-star ratings posted on imdb which leads me to suspect a clandestine campaign to undermine the movie for opaque reasons. As a moviegoer from last night, I can definitely tell everyone that HOTEL MUMBAI had me sitting on the edge of my seat. Contrary to negative reviews, I didn't encounter any tedious, slow points in the movie. Everything was well paced if it didn't pertain to the actual terrorist attack itself. When the terrorists strike Mumbai and then the Taj Hotel, the movie moves into high gear and you're on a fast-moving amusement park ride which you cannot get off. You experience almost first hand the terror of the guests and hotel staff, many of which could not avoid their violent deaths, so sudden was it. It is a tale of survival against the odds and the ability to cope with such a life-and-death situation in which impromptu leaders have to be agreed upon and quick decisions have to be made that result in either survival, even if just for the time being or instant, violent death. There is no time for the movie to go into character development and that was not its purpose, but to give a quick snapshot of the lives of ordinary people, celebrities, the wealthy, and the hotel staff just trying to earn a decent living in an overcrowded, smog-choked, polluted Indian city with a long historical past. The movie, I believe does its best to avoid clichés while being forthright about how people would behave in such a life-and-death situation. You feel sympathy for the main character, an experienced, polished Sikh waiter played by Dev Patel, a man living in the many overcrowded Mumbai slums with his wife and infant son, doing his best to eke out a living, lucky to have a good job as a high-end waiter in a five-star Mumbai hotel, thinking only of his wife and child all the time. The movie even makes you feel sympathetic for the wealthy British Iranian woman, Zahra, who is initially presented as a stereotype spoiled, rich diva, who gets her bath water temperature measured precisely at 48 degrees by hotel staff but we quickly learn is a nice diva, not a nasty one. She married out of love for a tall, blonde, blue-eyed American architect, David, obviously below her social station and her love is deep and true as will be her tragedy. So I write, disregard the suspicious naysayers with one-star ratings and short reviews that are one sentence or less. See the movie for yourself. I go to movies for the entertainment, not to be bedazzled by some, deep-thought, existential, cosmic Hollywood wannabe that critics feel obliged to rate highly. If I walk out the theater feeling entertained, then the movie succeeded. A movie can succeed in its intent to disturb and HOTEL MUMBAI will no doubt leave you disturbed by the violence and malevolence of its portrayed, heartless terrorist killers, that were accurately described by one reviewer as, being like the android terminators of Hollywood.

By reading the synopsis and other poster's comments you know just about everything in this movie so there really are no spoilers. Plus Wikipedia tells the whole story. So I'm not going there. This movie dates back to 1978 and everyone who is interested in this movie knows the entire storyline. This post is about why Polly was so unloved by her parents. In fact her father, Harry disdained her and the mother was indifferent. Yet the younger sister was deeply beloved by the parents who showered attention, love, and physical affection. This shows the complexity of human nature when it involves, love, affection, and caring for one's offspring. Psychologists and researchers have long known that parents are not always equal in how they feel and show love to their offspring. Often the individual parent cannot understand themselves why they feel more love for one child over the other. In another Hollywood movie, the father loved his eldest son, who died in a car crash, over his youngest son. I think the movie's title was, Stand By Me. In, 'The Summer Of My German Soldier', Patty learns the horrific truth from her father behind his coldness towards her. The father, Harry, related to Polly how much his late, mother-in-law disliked Harry and never wanted her daughter to marry him, even though both families are Jewish. In return, Harry despised his mother-in-law. When Polly was born and grew up, she reminded Harry of his despised, late mother-in-law. As a result, Harry felt similar emotions towards his own daughter and could not love her. Polly was the innocent victim of two people's deep animus towards each other. At the end of the movie, Harry tells Polly that she will live at their home until he is no longer legally responsible for her. That means age 18, after high school. Then Polly will have to leave home forever. Your heart really goes out to Polly. You want to hate the father, Harry, as a real bast**d, but somehow you feel a twinge of understanding for his mindset. What if the mother-in-law had liked Harry a lot? Some husbands are lucky like that. Polly's life would have been radically different.

The title reads cynically but the whole background story of detective Frank Serpico is one of cynicism. During the movie a fellow detective objects to Serpico, "How can we trust you if you're not on the take?" You see the word, 'trust' perverted from the mouth of a corrupt law enforcement officer who had long ago justified his actions as perfectly ethical. You have to watch the movie several times to realize the obvious. Besides Al Pacino as Frank Serpico, the whole New York police establishments served as the second, main character of the movie. You then begin to perceive then realize the corrupt police detectives are cynical, demoralized, and possibly filled with some measure of self-loathing. You ask yourself, why? What set the New York police force down the long road of self-rationalizing institutionalized corruption? You see something extraordinary. The corrupt police detectives seem to have an almost clinical obsession with collecting and hoarding paper money, far, far in excess of what they could possibly find use for it. Yet collecting more and more criminal money has become their daily obsession, not their jobs at law enforcement. Again, one has to ask, why? The answer might be discerned in the physical environment in which the police work. The move depicts the buildings and offices of the New York police departments as literally decrepit. The police are working out of what looks to be slum buildings including cheap, old, worn-out office furnishings. To the police working in such abysmal conditions, their mindset must have devolved to, so this is how low the city and state government considers our social value, so low as to merit the poorest of working conditions. In essence the police felt they were treated as poor people little worthy of consideration and that is how they began to see themselves, as an underpaid, underclass ignored by the upper tiers of society and the government. As a result the accumulation of wealth, accomplished by graft and corruption, to climb above their perceived low social economic standing, became their daily primary mission. Law enforcement itself took a back seat and even then as the straight avenue towards collecting those ill-gotten gains from the vast, disparate criminal elements of New York City. In 20/20 hindsight, had Frank Serpico truly understood the entrenched, institutionalized sub-society he was entering, then he might have thought twice about a law enforcement career. It doesn't take long to understand how the New York borough corrupt detectives view Frank Serpico. Serpico is the corrupt one, not them. Everyone is playing 'fair and honest' by the established social system, mores and behavior of their police sub-culture which is rationalized that stealing from criminals is not wrong nor unethical. In the 1960 horror movie, "Last Man On Earth", vampire hunter, Vincent Price, discovers in the end that the vampires consider him the real monster, a fiend who awakens at daylight to hunt them and slay them in their sleep under the sun. The vampires are the new population. Price, the vampire hunter, is the monster that must be hunted and taken down. In the corrupt, decrepit hallways of law enforcement that Serpico entered, he found himself perceived as the 'monster' come to destroy their sub-culture and brotherhood of common graft.