NOT QUITE SO ALTOGETHER OOKY

Opening this weekend:

The Addams Family 2--Wednesday, the emotionally reserved daughter, is the focus of this sequel to 2019's animated adaptation of the classic Charles Addams cartoons from The New Yorker. Her exuberant clan gets on her nerves, and she's especially full of woe when her ebullient dad Gomez insists that she go on a family road trip. So when she is told that she may not be biologically an Addams, she's willing to listen.

The whole gang, almost, piles into the spacious, splendidly Gothic camper; along with Chloe Grace Moretz as Wednesday, Gomez (Oscar Isaac), Morticia (Charlize Theron), Uncle Fester (Nick Kroll) and Puggsley (Javon Walton), as well as the faithful, ever-gloomy Lurch (co-director Conrad Vernon), the ever-handy Thing, the moplike Cousin It (Snoop Dogg) and leonine pet Kitty Kat are along for the ride. Only Grandmama (Bette Midler) stays at home, to keep an eye on things (and party). Episodic wackiness ensues, as the family gets involved with everything from child pageants to bikers, while pursued by the shifty rep (Wallace Shawn) of a mad scientist (Bill Hader).

It's an above-average CGI production, with plenty of slapstick chases, fine voice acting and a standard emotional template; Wednesday gradually learns what family she wants to be part of. But the plot runs counter to the usual Addams Family schtick.

The retro-rerun network MeTV recently began airing the original Addams Family series (1964-1966), and I've watched a few episodes for the first time in decades. The show holds up amusingly, and what makes it work, I think, is that the actors don't play spooky. They have a hearty, aggressive geniality that makes them lovable--and, in the case of Carolyn Jones as Morticia, sexy--as well as funny in their macabre context. Even Ted Cassidy's baleful Lurch doesn't exactly play spooky; he's just deeply apprehensive.

The old series bounced the family's antics off of conventional midcentury banality, with the liberating suggestion that people who embraced their eccentricities might just be happier. Addams Family 2 comes to a really bizarre, shape-shifting finale, with the Addams folk in the clutches of the Dr. Moreau-like crazy scientist, that overshadows their peculiarity. Even the kiddie pageant world seems weirder than these title characters. Maybe the exposure of our culture to a couple of decades of reality TV has made the Addams Family seem normal.

LES MS.

Available for purchase and streaming exclusively on Prime Video:

The Glorias--The title characters are all one person: journalist and feminist icon Gloria Steinem, at different stages of her saga. She's played by a couple of excellent child actresses in scenes from her early life, and as a young woman by Alicia Vikander, and in her prime by Julianne Moore. Sometimes the different Steinem vintages interact with each other on the allegorical bus they're riding through life; the script, by Sarah Ruhl and director Julie Taymor, is based on Steinem's 2015 memoir My Life on the Road.

We're shown episodes of her early days in Toledo, Ohio, with her loving, hustling, eternally optimistic screw-up of a father (Timothy Hutton), from whom she inherited a passion for travel, and her ill, long-suffering mother (Enid Graham), who had written newspaper articles under a male pseudonym. We see her post-graduate adventures in India, and her early days as a journalist, undercover as a Bunny in a Playboy Club, or covering the civil rights marches, where she noted that women weren't represented onstage among the speakers; only singers like Mahalia Jackson.

We see her rise to celebrity and the revolting condescension with which she was treated by male editors and interviewers. We see her friendships with Dorothy Pitman Hughes (Janelle Monae), Florynce Kennedy (Lorraine Toussaint), Wilma Mankiller (Kimberly Guerrero) and Bella Abzug (Bette Midler); we see the founding of Ms.

All of this is interesting and at times touching, and the ensemble acting is terrific, although Vikander's Swedish accent peeks out a bit. But this project got away from the enormously talented Taymor, famed for the Broadway version of The Lion King and movies like Titus and Frida; her artsy, theatrical flourishes are a drag on this two and a half hour movie, and add little depth to our understanding of its story or heroine. The Glorias is worth watching, but it isn't as glorious as it could have been.

RAPID GRANDS

The Wife, The Kid and I took in a matinee of Parental Guidance.

Billy Crystal and Bette Midler are dismayed to find that they’re “the other grandparents” to their daughter’s three mollycoddled moppets, and are determined to change this status while watching the kids for a few days. Slapstick wackiness ensues.

There’s not much to it as a movie; it’s just another heavy-handed family-values comedy. But it’s a real pleasure to watch Crystal and Midler in action—both with each other and with some of the other actors, including the kids, acting as straightmen, they get fast old-school vaudeville rhythms going. It may be Crystal’s best star turn since When Harry Met Sally.

The movie takes on wussified modern parenting, with its “choices” and diplomatic catch-phrases instead of simply saying “no” and telling the kid what’s what. It’s an audience-pleasing, fish-in-a-barrel target, but at least, in Parental Guidance, the attitude is reflected in Crystal’s and Midler’s performing style—heartfelt but precise, direct and disciplined.