MUST BE THE SEASON OF THE SWITCH

Opening in the multiplexes this weekend:

Freakier Friday--Any movie with Jamie Lee Curtis has something going for it right off. Freakier Friday is no exception. Curtis is exuberantly unafraid of looking silly, and this Disney sequel to their 2003 version of the Mary Rodgers novel Freaky Friday gives her plenty of opportunity. Intrepidly mugging and pratfalling in age-inappropriate costumes, Curtis helps the movie, certainly, but not enough to save it.

The 1972 novel, oft-remade for movies and TV since the 1976 version featuring Barbara Harris and Jodie Foster, is one of the many, many stories, possibly starting with F. Anstey's Vice Versa (1882), in which a youth exchanges bodies with an older person. It's a common fantasy for kids, and not uncommon for adults too, even though the ostensible point of such yarns is usually that being any age comes with hassles and stresses that aren't easily seen from other ages.

Back in 2003 Tess (Curtis) and her daughter Anna (Lindsay Lohan) accidentally found themselves in each other's bodies. In this version, the grown up Anna has a surf-loving teen daughter of her own, Harper (Julia Butters), as well as a fiancé, Eric (Manny Jacinto) whose fashionista Brit daughter Lily (Sophia Hammons) doesn't get along with Harper.

After an encounter with a wacky palm-reader (Vanessa Bayer, who's pretty funny) all four of them switch places; Tess with Lily and Anna with Harper. In this decidedly freakier situation, the stepsisters-to-be, in their hijacked adult bods, call a truce and try to sabotage Anna and Eric's impending wedding, while Tess and Anna try to navigate teen life.

The movie feels well-intentioned, in the vague, general Disney manner, and the four leads are all appealing. The trouble is that their characters here aren't really distinct enough from each another to keep straight when they switch, and the actors don't make more than a half-hearted effort to recreate each other's accents and mannerisms. Combined with the frenetic, hyper-edited approach of director Nisha Ganatra, it leaves Freakier Friday's twisty complications mostly chaotic and confusing rather than hilarious.

TWOFER THE SHOW

Time, or possibly past time, for another edition of my very occasional recurring feature in which I discuss weird-ass old comics from my stacks. With The Fantastic Four: First Steps now in theaters, it's appropriate we check out an adventure of The Thing, with The Human Torch in support, paired with none other than...

...The Man of Bronze himself, Doc Savage. It's an issue of Marvel Two-in-One from November of 1976.

But wait, I hear you object (if you're a nerd), how can such a pairing be? The Doc Savage pulps were set in the 1930s and '40s, while The Fantastic Four began in the early '60s.

Well, Marvel finds a way. As the issue begins, we see storylines in two periods on either side of the pages, ingeniously paralleling each other across the decades...

Apparently this clever conceit wasn't thought sustainable, as a few pages in writer Bill Mantlo trumps up a time warp which drops Doc and his cronies together with The Thing and The Torch.

Perplexed as they are at each other's presence, they team up to take on Black Sun (later known as The Nth Man) in his debut appearance, a supervillain created when a power mad rich guy and his equally power mad son are joined into a single formidable fiend through the power of the stars.

It ends rather anticlimactically. But the beginning is quite an ingenious use of the Two-in-One format; a shame they didn't try to take the parallel plot gimmick all the way through to the end.

GUN AND GAMES

Opening this weekend:

The Naked Gun--It's in the trailer anyway, so allow me a spoiler: "Please, take a chair," says Detective Frank Drebin to his beautiful costar. After politely declining on the grounds that she has plenty of chairs at home, she ends up walking out with a chair.

There are better jokes in the movie, and there are worse jokes, too. But it's a fair representative.

Directed by Akiva Schaffer, this new version of the late-'80s/early-'90s-era series, derived from the short-lived 1982 TV show Police Squad! (the first feature was titled The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!) shows real allegiance to its source. There's some fine silly wordplay and elaborately constructed sight gags. Most essentially, though, the movie keeps a first-rate poker face.

Frank's adversary this time is a rich guy (Danny Huston), boss of a company that sells self-driving cars. He's also the head of a cabal of "evil billionaires" with an ambitious plot to cleanse the earth of mediocrities and rebuild it to their advantage. But the plot is little more than a clothesline on which to hang schtick. 

The old show and the first three movies were the creations of writer-director-producers David and Jerry Zucker and Jim Abrahams and writer Pat Proft, who in various combinations were also behind the Airplane! and Hot Shots! movies. Their seeming approach was to fling multiple dumb gags per minute at the audience, apparently on the theory that if only one of them landed, the movie would still be a laugh a minute.

But their best trick was to let old-school, stone cold serious actors like Peter Graves, Robert Stack, Lloyd Bridges and George Kennedy deliver those dumb gags. And nobody benefitted from this technique more than Leslie Nielsen. Younger audiences may not remember that Nielsen had been a bland leading man who had graduated to authority figures and shady villains as he matured, until Airplane! allowed him to let out his goofy side. Before 1980, the idea that he would have become a major comedy star would have seemed funnier than most of the jokes in those movies.

Liam Neeson is probably about as close a contemporary equivalent to Nielsen as you could find. In the new film, Neeson takes his cue from Nielsen and plays it utterly, hilariously straight as Frank Drebin the Younger. If you happen to reflect that that's Oscar Schindler, or the avenging middle-aged tough guy from the Taken flicks, up there glowering and deadpanning those absurd dad jokes and acting out that slapstick and potty humor, it deepens the comedic effect.

Pamela Anderson is just as game as Neeson's leading lady, at one point knocking out a jaw-dropping scat number. She keeps her dignity through some major raunch, and through one of the strangest romantic montages ever.

It takes very smart people to craft something this artfully stupid, and while this style of comedy might not be the healthiest as a steady diet, The Naked Gun could be just what we need right at the moment. Maybe smartest of all, it's blessedly short, clocking in at under an hour and a half. Brevity is the soul of wit; it's also the soul of this movie.

TRUNK SHOW

Another Moon Mammoths update: Despite a loss on the scoreboard, the debut of the Erie Moon Mammoths appears to have been a triumph. According to John Oliver on Last Week Tonight, the Moon Mammoths, aka the Erie Seawolves (AA affiliate of the Detroit Tigers), have sold four years worth of merch in just three weeks. I was one of those sales:

This shirt arrived Monday afternoon; Monday evening I wore it to a movie screening in Scottsdale, and two different people at the theater recognized it and complimented me on it. One of them, a stranger to me, said "Tusks up!"

The next day I wore it to lunch, and one of the servers recognized it. Later that day, a passing stranger grinned at me, gave me a thumbs-up, and said "Erie!" I asked him if he was from there and he said no, he was a just a John Oliver fan.

Then, as he walked away, he also said "Tusks up!"

That's four people in Arizona, in less than 24 hours. The country is in the grip of Moon Mammoth Mania!

LEHRER WITHAL

This one hurts. The great Tom Lehrer has departed us, at 97. Too soon, as far as I'm concerned.

In the late '60s, we had the album That Was the Year That Was in our house...

It's a live recording, made at the hungry i in San Francisco in 1965, of Lehrer performing topical songs he had written for the NBC comedy series That Was the Week That Was, interspersed with his commentary. At 6 or 7 years old, I of course understood very little of what he was singing about. When he said "dirty books are fun, that's all there is to it," in the intro to his marching anthem "Smut" I can remember wondering why a physically unclean book would be fun, and when, in the song itself, he refers to "...a dirty novel I can't shut," I can remember picturing a book with a broken spine that he literally couldn't close.

So you can imagine how little of the political and social material I grasped. But it didn't matter. I listened to the album endlessly. It's probably my favorite record of all time, to this day. The reason, of course, is the sensibility; the snide, snarky yet genial and affable manner. Tom Lehrer was exactly the smartass I wanted to be when I grew up. And now, at 63, I'm not sure I see much reason to revise or abandon that ambition.

Lehrer was also the first of many lyricists and poets to teach me a love of rhyme I've never gotten over. From "Smut," for instance, comes Lehrer's admirable "As the judge remarked the day that he acquitted my Aunt Hortense/To be smut it must be ut/Terrly without redeeming social importance..." Or, from his  splendid ballad "Alma" (about Alma Mahler Gropius Werfel): "and that is the story of Alma/Who knew how to recieve and to give/The body that reached her embalm-ah/Was one that had known how to live!"

So was yours, good sir.

Also, in one of the more badass show-business gestures ever, in 2020 Lehrer, a lifelong bachelor with no children, released all of his songs to the public domain.

Back in 2000, one of the few music reviews I ever wrote at New Times (for the great Gilbert Garcia, then Music Editor) was of a Lehrer boxed set containing almost all of his recorded work, including a couple of marvelous tunes he wrote and sang for The Electric Company.

Peace and joy eternal to you great man, and as my friend Owen Kerr would rightly say, Ave, magister.

FOUR BETTER OR WORSE

Opening in the multiplexes this weekend:

The Fantastic Four: First Steps--Week before last, in my review of the new Superman movie, I grumbled about the reliance of contemporary superhero movies on devices like interdimensional travel and parallel universes. Now comes this Marvel entry, which is set entirely in a parallel universe, "Earth 828" in the Marvel "Multiverse," the home of the famous super-team. It's a realm of snazzy midcentury modern decor and beehive hairdos and stentorian TV announcers and the like.

Partly because the whole movie takes place in this setting--no universe-hopping--and partly because I'm a sucker for this style of design, I didn't mind it in this case. Director Matt Shakman and the other filmmakers generate a fine atmosphere of nostalgia for a period that never happened, at least not in this universe. Cool as the movie looks, however, it took me a little while to get pulled into the story. 

You may remember the title quartet, created by writer Stan Lee and artist Jack Kirby in 1961, scientists and explorers endowed with superpowers by a trip to space. Reed Richards can literally stretch himself to ridiculous lengths; Sue Storm can make herself invisible and also commands force fields from her hands; her brother Johnny Storm, aka The Human Torch, can make himself a flying fireball at will; and Ben Grimm aka The Thing, is a super-strong and super-durable rock-man.

Despite the title, this isn't an origin story. Our heroes are well-established here, and Sue is pregnant with Reed's baby, when a threat from space turns up. The planet-gobbling giant Galactus (Ralph Ineson) is headed hungrily for Earth, scouted as a suitable snack for him by Silver Surfer (Julia Garner). Even with Sue eight months along, The Four journey to space to intercept Galactus and negotiate with him. Turns out The Big G is more than willing to make a deal, straight out of a fairy tale: He'll spare Earth, in return for Sue and Reed's baby, who he says will absorb his hunger and let him retire from planet-eating.

Or some nonsense like that. Despite the high-powered stars--Pedro Pascal as Reed, Vanessa Kirby as Sue, Joseph Quinn as Johnny and Ebon Moss-Bachrach as Ben--the characters didn't initially pop as vividly as they do in some Marvel and other superhero flicks. Pascal is subdued as the reflective, problem-solving Reed. He and Bachrach and Quinn are all good enough company, and Garner is quite an elegant Surfer, but only Kirby zaps the earlier parts of the movie with energy when she speaks.

Eventually, though, things get lively. I think it was during a scene in which the Four are multitasking on the edge of a black hole that the actors seemed to wake up, and First Steps started to feel kind of deranged, in a good way. By the time Galactus arrives in New York, the movie takes on an agreeable kaiju flavor; the titan looks a bit like the title character of the '60s-era Japanese film Majin, Monster of Terror, and the climactic clash between him and The Four is satisfying. There's real, off-the-wall imagination here, and after an unsteady start First Steps ends up surefooted.

BEST NOT FORGOTTEN

The July/August issue of Phoenix Magazine, now on the stands...

...features the 2025 edition of "Best of the Valley." Your Humble Narrator was proud to once again be among the authors and officious imperious judges of what is best in this community. See if you can guess which eleven finely-crafted baubles of prose were of my painstaking and polished composition!

Moon Mammoths update: Alas, the Erie Moon Mammoths aka Erie Seawolves did not win their debut matchup against the Chesapeake Baysox of Bowie, Maryland, though it was reportedly a good, competitive game; the final was 6-5. But by most accounts a grand time was had by all, not least comedian John Oliver, mastermind of the rebrand, who scurried from job to job throughout the evening. Oliver threw out the first pitch (to scuba diver George Moon, discoverer of the Moon Mammoth), sang "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" in the Seventh Inning Stretch, and pulled duty as bat boy, public address announcer and concession vendor, selling fans the special mammoth-themed goodies on the menu that night:

Mammoth tusks and mammoth balls for me, please! Maybe the mammoth ears, too...