AGE AGAINST THE MACHINE

Now in theaters:

Thelma--Played by June Squibb, the title character is a widow in her nineties, living on her own in a lovely house in Encino, California. She's intelligent and proudly self-reliant, but she nonetheless falls prey to a scam; somebody claiming to be her beloved grandson Danny (Fred Hechinger) calls up claiming to have had an accident and to need $10,000 fast.

Before she can reach her daughter (Parker Posey) or son-in-law (Clark Gregg), Thelma has mailed the money. She's informed that there's little the cops can do, and her family tells her to let it go. But she can't. The theft has threatened her sense of independence, and left her furious, both at the perpetrators and herself.

She goes to see her old friend Ben (Richard Roundtree), who lives in a nursing home. She no longer drives, so she asks Ben if she can borrow his rather snazzy scooter to follow up a lead she's found on the scammer. Though he's horrified at what she wants to do, soon the two of them are zipping along the sidewalks of L.A. in the scooter, Thelma at the handlebars.

The writer-director is Josh Margolin, whose real-life Grandma, really named Thelma, was really targeted by such a scam. Though the real Thelma didn't fall for it, you can understand Margolin's impulse to dramatize such an infuriating, odious plot.

There's a certain raggedness to the movie's middle stretch. Margolin seems so delighted with the image of Thelma and Ben riding to vengeance on a scooter that he may have sacrificed a certain amount of narrative logic to it; it's hard to imagine that they couldn't have contrived a more efficient way to get across town. And Thelma's daughter and son-in-law seem underdeveloped and caricatured, though Hechinger's Danny is endearing. When this goodhearted but coddled and aimless kid in his early twenties bemoans his lack of life skills, plenty of us in the audience can empathize.

But the center of the movie, of course, is June Squibb's performance as Thelma. Now 94, Squibb has been around show business since the '50s--she was in the original Broadway run of Gypsy!--and in TV and movies since the '80s and '90s. She made an impression with her role in About Schmidt (2002) and got an Oscar nomination as Bruce Dern's salty wife in 2013's Nebraska, but this is her first star part.

She handles it with great skill, careful to keep Thelma from getting too twinkly and adorable, and giving her a reflective side. She also has a fine rapport with her costars, especially Roundtree, whose last film this was (it's dedicated to him). His quiet, dignified Ben has, unlike Thelma, accepted his declined status. He insists he likes living in the home, and playing Daddy Warbucks in the production of Annie there.

His idea of aging gracefully is not being a bother or a worry to younger people. In the buddy-picture structure of the movie, this makes him the fretful Danny Glover or Martin Lawrence to Thelma's Mel Gibson or Will Smith; he's quite literally getting too old for this shit.

The comparison isn't strained. Margolin's most fertile source of comedy here comes from shooting and editing the film like any tense urban action thriller; Nick Chuba's driving musical score helps a lot with this. When Thelma has to climb a steep flight of stairs or stand up on a bed to reach something in a high place, it's treated much the same as, say, Tom Cruise's daring feats in a Mission: Impossible movie, and you realize that, in terms of courage and risk, there really isn't much difference.

I DON'T WANT A PICKLE...

Opening this weekend:

The Bikeriders--There are many variations within the genre, but overall, biker movies tend to fall into two broad categories. There are those, exemplified by The Wild One (1953), in which the bike gang is seen from the point of view of mainstream society, and those, like The Wild Angels (1966) or Easy Rider (1969), where mainstream society is seen from the point of view of the bikers.

This new "wheeler" manages to have it both ways. Adapted by writer-director Jeff Nichols from the 1967 book by photojournalist Danny Lyon, the film traces the growth of a fictitious Chicago area club, The Vandals, based on The Outlaws, with whom Lyon embedded off and on throughout the '60s. It's very much an insider's view, focusing less on riding action than on the tempestuous relationship between Johnny (Tom Hardy), the club's founder, and Benny (Austin Butler), his beautiful, stoic, monosyllabic right-hand man. The Vandals begins as a racing and social club--Johnny, a truck-driving family man, is initially inspired by seeing The Wild One on TV--but criminality and ugly violence gradually creep in. 

Wisely, however, Nichols makes a mainstream viewpoint central to the film as well. The story is narrated to Lyon (Mike Faist) by Kathy (Jodie Comer), a respectable young working-class woman who stumbles into a biker bar one night to meet her girlfriend, and is unimpressed, not to mention understandably scared, by what she sees. She's unimpressed, that is, until she gets a look at the angelic Benny at the pool table, and can't keep an infatuated smile off her face. Despite Benny's anomie and recklessness, before long he and Kathy are a couple, and she's in competition with Johnny for Benny's devotion.

The beguiling Jodie Comer's Kathy is the live wire in The Bikeriders. A Brit of course, Comer lays on a Chicago accent as thick as a deep dish pizza as Kathy tells us, in hilariously bemused terms, about both the follies of bike gang life and her own folly in loving the seemingly emotionless, self-destructive Benny. Her sensible, self-deprecating take is pre-emptive to how many of us in the audience may feel, and keeps The Bikeriders from skidding into cornball melodrama.

None of this is to say that the movie's other elements aren't top-notch. It's full of fine performances: Hardy, sporting a sort of buzzy, mild-mannered Brando voice, has a quietly tragic appeal as Johnny. By the nature of his character, Butler is asked to play Benny very close to the vest, but he brings a star presence to the part. Damon Harriman, Boyd Holbrook, Emory Cohen and others are strong in supporting parts, and Norman Reedus drops in as "Funny Sonny" an unnerving representative of a California club. As the frazzled Zipco, who wanted to serve in the Army, Michael Shannon makes his big monologue a knockout.

The Bikeriders is also one of the best-looking movies of the year, stunningly shot in Grant Wood-esque midwestern tones by Adam Stone. Like the biker pictures from the period it depicts, it seems to be made up of images of real people, objects and places, lovingly captured but rock-solid. In our computer-generated era, this is refreshing; for all its brutality, this movie takes the world in a love embrace.

ULTRA BEAUTY

Now on Netflix:

Ultraman: Rising--The very name Ultraman is a madeleine for me, evoking powerful childhood memories, often thrilling, just as often frustrating. As a kid in rural northwestern Pennsylvania in the early '70s, I used to try to tune in UHF Channel 29 from Buffalo, New York, on weekday afternoons to see reruns of the late '60s Japanese TV series about the solar-powered superhero who battled all manner of bizarre kaiju threatening humanity.

When the weather was clear, especially in the summer, I would often have a good signal, and I'd get a clear picture of the weird psychedelic paint swirls out of which the show's opening title would take shape. When the weather was lousy or wintry, I'd usually get nothing but snow, and great would be my indignant disappointment.

In the early iteration of the show that I loved (1966-67), created by Godzilla special effects master Eiji Tsuburaya, Ultraman was the alter-ego of Clark Kent-esque Hayata, an intrepid member of the "Science Patrol." This agency was tasked with animal control duties on the myriad massive monsters that regularly inconvenience Japanese society and threaten its infrastructure. When the situation became sufficiently desperate, Hayata would excuse himself and press a button on the "Beta Capsule" he carried, thus transforming himself into the sleek android giant, who would then fight the creature in question with a combination of martial arts and a variety of rays he could shoot from different parts of his body.

Ultraman's might was short-lived, however. Very early in the fight, a small warning light in the center of his chest would begin to flash, and the narrator, in the English-dubbed versions I saw, would gravely intone (if memory serves): "The energy which Ultraman draws from the sun diminishes rapidly in Earth's atmosphere. The warning light begins to blink. If it stops blinking before he returns to the sun, Ultraman will never rise again!" Or something like that. It seemed pretty urgent, every episode.

The franchise has continued in Japan throughout the decades, over dozens of series with differing characters, as well as movies, comics, video games etc. I never followed any of them. This animated feature from Netflix, however, is of American origin, though it's set in Japan and is an unmistakably loving homage. Directed by Shannon Tindle from a script he wrote with Marc Haimes, this one gives The Big U a new alter-ego, a handsome baseball star named Sato, who is estranged from his father, a scientist who once had the Ultraman secret identity gig.

Early on, a winged monster's baby imprints on Sato/Ultraman (voiced by Christopher Sean) and regards him as his parent. The story involves our hero's efforts, aided by a flying robotic sphere (Tamlyn Tomita) to protect the baby from the schemes of the kaiju-hating Dr. Onda (Keone Young), and also to mend his relationship with his Dad (Gedde Watanabe).

The old show was deeply silly but visually elegant; this new feature is visually elegant but balances the silliness with a sincere attempt at solid characterizations and relationships. It's an entertaining movie, but it does have a large downside, at least for me: I found the baby kaiju grotesquely cutesy; it looks like a mutant human baby in a tacky Halloween costume. It's like an Anne Geddes photo gone nightmarish.

In general, I could have done with more full-grown kaiju action. But the finale of Ultraman: Rising is fairly spectacular, and there's a lot to like in this movie. I would welcome future installments in this series. I particularly like the idea of an Ultraman who treats kaiju as humanely as possible. Or, rather, ultra-humanely.

SUMMERTIME VIEWS

There may not be a cure for the summertime blues, but going to summer movies has long been a source of temporary relief. Your Humble Narrator had fun chatting with Mark Brodie of KJZZ's The Show...

...about some of the big midyear releases; listen to it here.

THUMB AND THUMBER

Check out my review, online at Phoenix Magazine, of Space 55's Roger & Gene...

...playing at Metropolitan Arts Institute through June 16.

CRITICAL MASS

Check out my interview, online at Phoenix Magazine, with playwright Ashley Naftule, whose new play Roger and Gene...

...runs through June 16 at Space 55 in Phoenix.

OLD MEN WILL BE BOYS

Opening this weekend:

Bad Boys: Ride or Die--Walking out of the theater after this fourth film in the Miami cop franchise, I was reminded by a friend that the original was released in 1995. Strange as it may seem, Bad Boys is almost thirty years old.

My first reaction was envy at how well the stars, Will Smith and Martin Lawrence, appear to have aged. These can no longer properly be called bad boys; as a title, something more like Grumpy Old Men seems more in order at this point. Yet neither actor looks ridiculous going through their action paces.

But it also strikes me that, to have lasted anywhere near this long, these movies must have meant something to audiences. Using the most routine, generic, by-the-numbers car chase and explosion formula, these four flicks, spaced out over decades, have kept people coming back to theaters.

The reason, of course, is the bickering. Directed by the Belgian filmmaking team of Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah, Ride or Die opens with Mike Lowrey (Smith) and Marcus Burnett (Lawrence) kvetching at each other on their way Mike's wedding. There's a vague attempt to flip the script (by Chris Bremner and Will Beall) by giving Marcus a health scare which turns him into the daredevil of the duo and Mike into the worrywart. But the result is basically the same, with our heroes squabbling like an old married couple as they attempt to redeem the reputation of their late boss Captain Howard (Joe Pantoliano).

The Captain (who appears, via some visions and prerecorded cautionary messages) has been posthumously framed by drug dealers, led by a quite hissable Eric Dane. Jacob Scipio returns from the third film--over which Ride or Die felt to me like an improvement--as Mike's hunky convict son Armando.

In what appears to be a sheepish, pre-emptive wink at the audience, Smith gets slapped at one point in Ride or Die. Still, even with that almost fourth-wall gag, it wasn't until near the end, when an enormous albino alligator threatens Marcus, that it occurred to me what the Bad Boys flicks have come to resemble in tone: the Bob Hope-Bing Crosby Road pictures. But that series of seven goofy, easygoing movies started in 1940 and ended in 1962. So for longevity, Bad Boys already has it beat.

OH, BROTHERS

Check out my review, online at Phoenix Magazine, of Sam Shepard's True West...

...by Arizona Theatre Company, through June 9 at Tempe Center for the Arts.

CAMPING IT UP

Now in the multiplexes:

Summer Camp--As she's been doing for most of the last three decades, Diane Keaton here cranks out another fluffy senior chick-flick comedy. The formula, seen in the Book Club flicks and Mack & Rita and others, is simple: Assemble Keaton and some other big names popular with the AARP crowd in a pleasant setting for some undemanding romance and mild slapstick, then pad it out to at least an hour and a half.

In this one, written and directed by Castille Landon, Keaton finds herself at Camp Pinnacle, nestled in gorgeous forest scenery in North Carolina, at a camp reunion with cohorts Kathy Bates and Alfre Woodard. Keaton is a widowed hotshot biotech exec; Woodard is an accomplished but unhappily married nurse who really wanted to be doctor, and Bates is a rich celebrity self-help author with a devoted following. They met at Camp Pinnacle as kids, and Bates is trying to make them keep their vow they'd always stay pals.

Other mature favorites are around, like Beverly D'Angelo as the adult version of the pretty-girl alpha, Eugene Levy as a love interest for Keaton and Dennis Haysbert as a love interest for Woodard. As a bone to anyone under fifty who wanders in, Betsy Sodaro, Josh Peck and Nicole Richie are thrown in as camp staffers.

This movie is quite terrible, but all three of the leads are high on the list of the best film actors of the last fifty years. It's possible to react to this in two ways; one, that it's a disgrace they all aren't doing something better with their time and glorious talents, or, two, that it's simply great to see them, and to see them together, hanging out, being silly, and making money as leading ladies. Indeed, it seems to be possible to react to Summer Camp in both of these ways at the same time.

If they're going to keep doing stuff like this, however, it really seems like Keaton and cronies could find somebody to write them some snappier dialogue than the meandering stuff they shrug out here. Most shocking, perhaps, was how the filmmakers went to the trouble to hire Eugene Levy, only to use him as a bland straight man to Keaton. He's still charming, but he had, I think, one laugh line of his own. Maybe it was a nice summer vacation for him.