ASS THE WORLD TURNS

Opening Friday in Scottsdale:

My Old Ass--18-year-old Elliot lives on an idyllic Canadian cranberry farm, but can't wait to head to college and start her life. She confesses her feelings, successfully, to her summer-long crush, and then she and her friends camp out on an island and take 'shrooms.

Under this fungal influence, Elliot, played by Maisy Stella, finds herself sitting next to the Old Ass of the title, her 39-year-old self, played by Aubrey Plaza. Younger Elliot is eager to hear dish and glamour about her future, but Older Elliot is cagey; she just advises her to avoid anybody named Chad. Soon after, Younger Elliot meets a nice young man while swimming. Guess what his name is.

The wish to go back and offer guidance and comfort to your younger self is a human perennial, perfectly expressed in the Faces anthem "Ooh La La." My Old Ass, written and directed by Megan Park, works the premise ingeniously by taking it, one might say, ass-backwards. Thus we see the story from the younger heroine's point of view; that is, from the version of her who, being young, knows everything and is unlikely to consciously accept an older person's counsel. Yet we also see Older Elliot's healthy influence on her behavior.

Stella carries the movie sweetly as Younger Elliot, with a suggestion that she's trying to present as more daring and sardonic and above-it-all than she really is. Her supposed mortification at her provincial circumstances is a less than convincing pose. In the much smaller role of Older Elliot, Plaza's guarded, pained manner complements Stella's performance amusingly, and credibly.

Percy Hynes White, as the amiable Chad, is the other standout of the small cast. The settings--the film was shot in Muskoka Lakes, Ontario--are breathtaking, and the movie glides very agreeably through its brief running time. There's one sequence, involving a Justin Bieber song, that's truly hilarious, but otherwise My Old Ass feels, really, a little mild and undemanding.

This, paradoxically, may be what's most striking about it. Elliot identifies as gay, you see; the crush with whom she makes out early on is a (slightly) older woman. Park doesn't make a big deal about this, and she's almost equally nonchalant when Elliot finds herself attracted to Chad and begins to question her long-held assumptions about her own sexuality.

In the real world, of course, and in this day and age, this probably really does reflect normal teen development. But I couldn't help thinking about the tizzy that this would have stirred up from a teen flick even ten years ago, much less twenty. Like 2018's Love Simon, the sunny, breezy My Old Ass may be most remarkable for how unremarkable it is.

HAUNT GENERATOR

Opening this weekend:

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice--To the list of Gen X-era movie favorites getting very belated sequels, the sweetly macabre 1988 comedy Beetlejuice may now be added. You may remember the title character (spelled, outside of the title, like the red giant star in Orion) is a manic ghost who specialized in exorcizing the unwelcome living from haunted houses. Like Clive Barker's Candyman, he could be conjured into the world of the quick by speaking his name aloud three consecutive times, after which he would wreak havoc.

It's one of the signature roles of the great Michael Keaton; probably his greatest comedic triumph. The film also featured a breakthrough performance by Winona Ryder as the endearing, self-consciously "goth" heroine Lydia, and was a showcase for the visual and comic style of director Tim Burton. It's unquestionably a classic of '80s popular cinema, and it gave rise to a TV cartoon, video games, comics, a long-running stage show at Universal Studios theme parks, and eventually a Broadway musical that put Representative Lauren Boebert into an uncommonly good mood.

None of which necessarily means, of course, that a sequel was required. But one has been made, directed by Burton, starring Keaton, Ryder, and Catherine O'Hara, and scored by Danny Elfman. It has, in short, the stamp of authenticity, and this many years later it's a bit surprising that the original makers have managed to infuse, if anything, even more craziness into it.

Ryder's Lydia, now widowed, is still able to see ghosts, including the occasional startling glimpse of her old nemesis. She's the host of a paranormal TV show produced by her intolerable boyfriend (Justin Theroux). Relations between Lydia and her teenage daughter Astrid (Jenny Ortega) are tense, but circumstances bring the two of them and Lydia's stepmother Delia (O'Hara) back to the old house in picturesque small-town Connecticut. Before long, the boundary between our world and the Kafkaesque, DMV-style bureaucratic afterlife has been breached, and the title ghoul is trying to insinuate himself back into the picture.

What ensues, strung along a script by Alfred Gough and Miles Millar from a story by Seth Grahame-Smith, are more of Burton's elaborate yet non-sequitur slapstick set pieces. The gross-out content is slightly higher here than back in 1988, but it works. The original, you'll recall, had a fixation with Harry Belafonte songs from which its most memorable sequences arose; the new movie is likewise enriched by similarly out-of-nowhere musical interests, even more grandly staged. There are sequence here that achieve true, weapons-grade silliness.

Ortega is touching, and there are other effective new additions to the cast, like Willem Dafoe as an afterlife cop--he was a movie cop in this life--with an exposed brain, or Arthur Conti, excellent as a local kid who charms Astrid. Best of all is Monica Belluci, formidable as the enraged ghost of the leader of a "soul-sucking death cult" who has an unhappy history with our titular hero. The scene in which she pulls herself together with the help of a staple gun is a Burton classic.

Keaton, though used somewhat sparingly, slips easily back into his role, tossing off asides in his muttering natter (or nattering mutter?) with the same moldered aplomb, and moving with the same light-footed exuberance, with which he conducted himself three decades ago. Ryder is also perfectly convincing as the middle-aged version of Lydia; tinged with a hint of emotional desperation in her interactions with Astrid.

I know it sounds ridiculous, and maybe I'm just projecting, but I thought that Ryder, O'Hara and even Keaton brought a subdued, rueful undercurrent to their performances, as if stirred-up memories of the first film's events had awakened genuine emotional pain. Don't misunderstand; if it's there, it's done without the slightest heavy-handed intentionality; it may not even have been conscious on the part of the actors. But it deepens both this film and the original.

BUTT WAIT THERE'S MORE

Last night Your Humble Narrator happened to watch an episode of The Twilight Zone that begins with Joe Maross and Claude Akins as astronauts who have made an emergency landing on a distant and seemingly barren planet...

After the opening teaser, we pan over to Rod Serling, natty as ever in his Eagle or Kuppenheimer suit. He delivers his intro with a cig in his hand.

I couldn't help but wonder if Rod mysteriously left the crushed-out smoke in the sands of that desert world, a cosmic ashtray for nicotine-addicted denizens of...the Twilight Zone.

TEMPLE MINDS

In Valley theaters this weekend:

Between the Temples--A cantor who can't sing sounds like the set-up for a joke. Fate has, indeed, played a pretty nasty one on the hero of this wistful, stinging comedy about grief. Ben (Jason Schwartzman) is the sad-sack cantor of a modest synagogue in small-town upstate New York. A year after an appalling freak tragedy, the devastated fellow can't find his voice.

His Rabbi boss (Robert Smigel) refuses to fire him, possibly in part because Ben's two moms (Caroline Aaron and Dolly de Leon), with whom he lives, are generous donors to the temple. But all that anybody can think to do to help him is push him to re-marry; the Rabbi's avid daughter (Madeline Weinstein) is a prime candidate.  

Enter, or rather re-enter, Ben's grade school music teacher Carla O'Connor (Carol Kane), who used to be Carla Kessler before she was married. Long widowed in her seventies, Carla would like the Bat Mitzvah she never got when she was young. Reluctantly at first, Ben begins to give her instruction, and gradually they bond.

It's no secret that Carol Kane has been a treasure since the '70s, playing ethereal if often hapless waifs in films ranging from Hester Street to Wedding in White to When a Stranger Calls to The Last Detail to Annie Hall. She made her pixie persona legitimately creepy in The Mafu Cage and she gave a riotous self-parody in Scrooged. Her magic hasn't deserted her in Between the Temples; even though she's playing a believable, realistic character she retains a touch of the otherwordly angelic.

Schwartzman is no slouch either. In probably his most vivid role since his tour de force debut in Rushmore, he gets across the terrible confusions and wrongheaded impulses into which bereavement can lead a person, the way one can rebel against one's own best interests if the alternative is acceptance of an unacceptable loss.

I loved these performances and these characters. I loved the direction by Nathan Silver, from a script he wrote with C. Mason Wells, and the grainy, washed-out, '70s-movie-looking cinematography of Sean Prince Williams (this film seems to share a '70s-cinema aesthetic with last year's The Holdovers). But following the psychology of its central character, Between the Temples does spin out of control toward the end, into a deeply uncomfortable climactic scene and an unsatisfying, incomplete-feeling finale. It's a gem, frustratingly flawed.

There can be little doubt, however, that the Bat and Bar Mitzvah is a potent subject, especially when sought by an older person. In 1997, Ira Wohl's too-little-known documentary Best Man; "Best Boy" and All of Us Twenty Years Later concerned Wohl helping arrange a belated Bar Mitzvah for his developmentally disabled cousin, who was then in his seventies. Then in the 2000s, a late friend of mine had a second Bar Mitzvah when he reached the age of 83.

Carla's rather urgent aspiration in Between the Temples reminded me of all this; sometimes, perhaps, you can't see the value of a rite of passage until after the passage has already been made.

BAR NONE

In theaters this weekend:

Sing Sing--A troupe of actors, all incarcerated, work to put up a show in the notorious maximum security state prison in New York. They're members of the institution's Rehabilitation Through the Arts program (RTA). At the center of the company is John "Divine G" Whitfield (Colman Domingo).

In prison for a crime he did not commit, Divine G not only throws his soul into his theatre work, playing Shakespearean leads like he should be onstage in Central Park, he also assists his fellow inmates with appeals and preparation for parole hearings.

His anger at the injustice of his circumstances is unmistakable, yet it's less scary than the intensity with which he works to control and channel it; he knows too well that giving vent to rage would be futile and harmful to his cause. Besides, he's a true believer. His positivity is an act of faith, sometimes a Herculean one.

Like its hero, the movie, directed by Greg Kwedar from a script he wrote with Clint Bentley, is taut and melodrama-free. Perhaps because so many of the actors were actually incarcerated people--many of them RTA veterans playing themselves--Sing Sing has almost a documentary feel at times. Yet it also has, with almost no violence or other prison-movie cliches, the charge of high drama. Clarence "Divine Eye" Maclin and Sean San José are particularly memorable among the other company members. A word should also be said for Paul Raci, who plays Brent Buell, the diplomatic, unflappable director and playwright. 

But the core of the film is Colman Domingo. Rarely does an actor give us so much heart to invest in with so little hamming or telegraphing. It's a classic performance, both for its emotional impact and for its discipline.

My Penguin Friend--It's hard to go wrong with penguins. They've been amusing us for a long time, not just in zoos but in movies like George Miller's mad animated musical epic Happy Feet and its sequel, and Surf's Up, and the crack team of penguins in the Madagascar franchise, and Mr. Popper's Penguins, and the 2005 French documentary March of the Penguins, back though the exploding penguin and the giant penguin in Monty Python, not to mention Chilly Willy and Bugs Bunny's friend "Playboy Penguin," who wept tiny ice cubes when he was sad.

It's also hard to go wrong with Jean Reno. Best known as menacing killers in Luc Besson films like La Femme Nikita and The Professional, the rugged-looking French actor projects an air of effortless authority. So My Penguin Friend, which has both Jean Reno and a jaunty, spirited penguin in starring roles, starts out with certain advantages. And it ends up needing both of them.

This family film is, to use its opening titles, "Inspired by a True Story." In 2011, a man named Joao Pereira de Souza living on Ilha Grande, off the coast of Brazil, found a weakened, oil-slicked Magellanic penguin outside his house along the beach. He cleaned the poor flightless castaway up, fed him some sardines, and soon became friends with him. Dubbed "Dindim"--a grandchild's mispronunciation of the Portuguese word for penguin--the bird disappeared back into the Atlantic some months later. But he returned for many years thereafter, to hang out for the winter with Joao along his migratory route.

This fictionalized retelling of the story, directed by David Schurmann from a script by Kristen Lazarian and Paulina Lagudi Ulrich, starts off on the wrong foot with a tragic episode that seemed entirely gratuitous to me. And in its second half, it follows Dindim's encounters with researchers at his other home in Patagonia. These scenes feel very strained, with dialogue so stilted I began to wonder if it had been written by AI. And the movie's final stretch, which attempts to generate some danger and suspense, feels extremely half-hearted.

In between all this, however, we get to see Jean Reno, looking scruffy and soulful and beaky-faced as Joao, tenderly interacting with a penguin. That can carry a movie a long way. Reno seems to enjoy playing a childlike sweetness here, as Joao proclaims that Dindim "comes and goes as he pleases" and is "not my pet...he's my friend." The other humans in the film, including Adriana Barraza as Joao's wife, are all attractive, even when the dialogue coming out of them seems canned.

The movie is visually impressive, too. Dindim was played by several different penguins, and presumably his adventures, particularly underwater, have been at least partly enhanced by CGI, but it's pretty effective and seamless; he comes across as a character. And the scenery, both in windswept Patagonia and idyllic-looking Ilha Grande, is breathtaking.

So it will be a matter of personal calculation for you to decide if a penguin, a bona fide international movie star and gorgeous settings overcome feeble kid-movie devices enough to make My Penguin Friend worth your time. For me, it was; the penguin tipped the scale the farthest.

Alien: Romulus--A band of young scavengers bust into a huge derelict spaceship in orbit around the cheerless, sunlight-free mining planet on which they live. They're hoping to filch equipment that will allow them to escape their indenture, and they repeatedly express confidence that they'll be in and out in half an hour, and nothing can go wrong.

So in they go, get the stuff they need, and sail off to a new world where they live happily ever after. The end.

Just kidding. The result, in this seventh entry in the Alien series, is of course another gory encounter with an infestation of the elegantly spindly, terrifying creatures in all of their various stages of development, from "facehugger" to "chestburster" to full-grown fang-bearer.

Though it's not close to the 1979 original, Romulus is on the more watchable end of the franchise, deliberate and creepy for the first half, and non-stop in the second. It's a little unvaried and dark, however, and until the climactic scenes it doesn't really give us much that's new. Toward the end, the shots of the ice ring around the planet that the ship is approaching have a certain magical beauty, but otherwise we're mostly stuck in the chiaroscuro space dungeon.

The star is Cailee Spaeny, who played the fresh-faced young journalist in Civil War earlier this year. She's sympathetic, but the movie is stolen by David Jonnson as her companion Andy, a sweet, dad-joke-dispensing android who gets a reboot that gives him an upsetting personality change. Andy may be the best robot with divided loyalties since Robby in Forbidden Planet.

One more note: I'm a little over the vogue for gynecological/obstetric body horror. We got a big dose of nasty surgical instruments and moaning, keening young women birthing unnatural spawn earlier this year in The Last Omen; we get more natal splatter here. The gifted director of Romulus, the Uruguayan Fede Alvarez, also showed unsavory interest in coercive pregnancy in his terrific 2016 shocker Don't Breathe. Even the title Romulus refers to one species nursed at the teat of another.

Could all this be a reaction to post-Roe reproductive chaos? I'll leave that to graduate students with stronger stomachs than mine.

UNDER THE INFLUENCE OF A WOMAN

In 2000, I got to briefly interview Gena Rowlands for Phoenix New Times ahead of her appearance at a showing of A Woman Under the Influence in Scottsdale.

At the beginning of this chat, I indulged in a rather shamelessly unprofessional bit of gush:

"You know, I talk to famous people all the time, so I don't get starstruck much any more," I told her. "But talking to you is an exception."

She acted very girlishly flattered. Maybe she really was, or maybe she was just acting. Either way, it was an honor to be on the receiving end of it.

The word awesome gets thrown around a lot, but Gena Rowlands was awesome.

She did a lot of routine roles that seemed like they were just to pay the bills, and she was good even in that stuff, but when she worked with John Cassavetes--in A Woman Under the Influence, in Minnie and Moskowitz, in Gloria, in the underrated Tempest (directed by Paul Mazursky, but opposite a brilliant Cassavetes as her leading man) or in the grueling Opening Night--she was luminous. Potent as they are at their best, the films that Cassavetes directed can also be overwrought and exhausting, but her classic performances make them indispensably worth it.

Just a few days ago I happened to see her, very young, in an episode of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour called "Ride the Nightmare," opposite Hugh O'Brian.

One of O'Brian's criminal cronies, who he betrayed years earlier, has come seeking revenge, and is holding him at gunpoint. But when the crook gets a load of Rowlands, as O'Brian's wife, he can't help but remark "You did alright for yourself; she's a winner."

Indeed she is. Rest in peace and joy goddess.

DINE AND DASH

In July Pete Wells, the restaurant critic for the New York Times, announced that he was stepping down from that job after 12 years. His principal reason was what the work had done to his cholesterol, blood pressure, blood sugar and weight. He noted the short life spans of legendary food writers like A. A. Gill and Jonathan Gold. But he also said, simply, that "I realized I wasn't hungry anymore. And I'm still not, at least not the way I used to be."

All this rang true in my experience.

For most of my years working for newspapers and magazines, I have principally been an entertainment writer, focusing on movie reviews with occasional forays into writing about theatre, television, music, books. But I've also written about dining, for various publications, for decades.

I was a fill-in restaurant reviewer at Phoenix New Times, where I also had a weekly food review/interview column called "Lunch Meet." I've reviewed or profiled many East Valley eateries for the Wrangler News, and more recently I wrote a monthly column called "Four Corners" in Phoenix Magazine, in which I reviewed four different restaurants from four ends of the Valley, for slightly over four years, until it was shut down by COVID. I've also written many food-related entries for "Best of the Valley" and features like that.

And fun and delicious as all of this was, I too have suffered burnout. I don't expect any sympathy for this, of course; as Wells hastens to add: "The first thing you learn as a restaurant critic is that nobody wants to hear you complain."

This is understandable. Restaurant reviewing is a quintessential example of Nice Work If You Can Get It. Nobody doing data entry or telephone customer service, let alone paving roads in the Arizona heat, should have to endure somebody whining about what a drag it is to eat at nice restaurants for free and then write about it.

The day I was offered the food writing gig at Phoenix Magazine, I was driving home from the doctor's office where I had just learned I had diabetes. I immediately accepted the offer. My pancreas was just going to have to learn to cope.

All the same, after a few years even that nice work can grow old. First of all, not every restaurant is good. It's not fun--at least, it isn't fun for me--to write negatively about a small business into which people have poured their heart and soul and fortune, and on which their dreams are riding.

Besides, poor food can be hard on you. Substandard, misfired meals can clobber your digestion and leave you feeling hung over and help expand your waistline, all without the compensatory pleasure of a culinary success. As Wells says, after a few years you may find you're not so hungry anymore.

Even when the food is good, however, writing about it, for me, was often difficult. Applied to food, adjectives tend to wear out fast through repetition. I adore a good burrito, but it's hard to find a new word to describe even the most heavenly burrito on the planet.

Truthfully, I have sometimes found this same syndrome creeping into my movie reviewing. For most of about nine years, that was my main job--going to see movies and then writing down my thoughts about them. No doubt, if you're a cinema lover, it beats work.

Still, it's not certain that spending your days sedentary, in a cold dark room, eating greasy popcorn and Dots and Junior Mints and drinking Dr. Pepper, is the surest ticket to health and well-being. Certainly there are many movie critics who lived to old age, but two of the most famous departed on the early side, Gene Siskel at 53 and Roger Ebert at 70.

After long stretches of movie reviewing, a sense can sometimes set in that you've seen, and reviewed, all the movies, just with different titles and actors, just as when you're reviewing restaurants, a sense can set in that you've written up all the burritos, just with different dining rooms surrounding them. In my full-time critic days, people used to sometimes say, wow, you're lucky, you get to see all the movies. 

I would agree that I was very lucky. But then remember, I would add, it's not that I get to see all the movies, it's that I have to see all the movies.

Again, I do understand how absurdly fortunate I've been to spend so much of my working life in these amusing pursuits, and I'm inexpressibly grateful for it. My only point in all this, I suppose, is that no matter how cushy a job is, in the end it's still a job. So I wish Pete Wells a happy, and hungry, post-reviewing life.