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.

TOMEGIRLS

 Opening in theaters this weekend:

Book Club: The Next Chapter--"Best friend tough love."

Several times throughout this sequel to the 2018 comedy, one of the characters uses this phrase before offering a critique, usually not terribly tough, of one of the other three. In that spirit, I'm tempted to offer the returning quartet of leading ladies--Candice Bergen, Jane Fonda, Diane Keaton and Mary Steenburgen--some unsolicited movie critic tough love: cranking out this sort of girls-night-out fluff shouldn't be all they do in the valedictory stretch of their careers.

But I can't do it. These four women are all great stars, first-rate actors and classic screen beauties. In some cases they won their chops gradually--Bergen had a pretty rough start, for instance, but eventually developed killer comic timing--while others, like Keaton, seemed to find a one-of-a-kind persona early on. Each of them, however, has a splendid body of work to be proud of, and if now they want to make money doing relatively harmless, undemanding fare like this, they've earned the right.

That said, this one is really fluffy. But so what? There's a sense in which movies like this are critic-proof. As with 80 for Brady, another emeritus chick flick from earlier this year (also featuring Fonda), the stars here are such good company that the feeble plotting and rambling dialogue and platitudes about pursuing your dreams at any age become a shared smirk between them and the audience.

You may recall the line up, lifelong friends who stay in touch through a book club: Keaton's character, conveniently named Diane, is a reserved widow who defaults to finding reasons not to have adventures and has never scattered her husband's ashes. Fonda plays Vivian, a successful hotel magnate who has never married. Part One linked Vivian up with Arthur (Don Johnson) and Diane up with Mitchell (Andy Garcia).

Steenburgen plays Carol, a married chef; here her husband Bruce (Craig T. Nelson) has had a heart attack and she's policing his bacon intake. Bergen rounds out the quartet as Sharon, the long-divorced and still single retired federal judge.

Last time around the ladies were reading Fifty Shades of Grey, which rather embarrassingly stirred them up erotically. This time, after a long COVID lockdown, their selection is Paulo Coehlo's The Alchemist, which helps inspire them to go on a trip, a bachelorette party for Vivian, who has at last agreed to marry Arthur. So the four of them tour Italy; first Rome, then Venice, then Tuscany.

You can imagine the results, again directed by Bill Holderman from a script he co-wrote, again, with Erin Simms. The ladies cavort, from montage to montage, making low-hanging-fruit lewd jokes about classical sculptures, or trying on wedding dresses. They get robbed, and the case is handled without much urgency by a venerable and impressively unformed officer of the polizia (played by Seven Beauties himself, Giancarlo Giannini). They flirt with guys, although Sharon being the only fully unattached one, she's the only one that gets to fully cut loose in this way. And through it all, they drink wine. Lots and lots of wine.

Like many other directors, Holderman leans hard on the Italian locations, and the movie looks great. It sounds great, too; the soundtrack has Bette Midler singing "Mambo Italiano" and Italian-language versions of pop hits from The Monkees to Hall and Oates. And it's hard to completely dismiss any movie that features Hugh Quarshie singing "Gloria," in Italian, accompanied by Mary Steenburgen on the accordion.

GRAY FOX

Opening in theaters this weekend:

Mack & Rita--L.A. writer Mack (Elizabeth Lail) is 30, but has always been a 70-year-old lady at heart. She's faking it when she tries to act like a rowdy young party animal. In Palm Springs for the weekend with her girlfriends, she gazes longingly, from the line waiting to get into a club, at the relaxed older ladies enjoying themselves at the tables in front of the restaurant across the street.

Mostly because it gives her the opportunity to lie down (in what looks like a tanning bed), she tries an age regression therapy session offered in a tent alongside the road. When she emerges, she finds that it's had the opposite effect: age progression, albeit to about the most elegant version of a woman in her seventies you can find: Diane Keaton.

This version of Mack adopts the persona of "Aunt Rita" and goes about trying to reverse the process; she also notices an attraction between herself and her cute young dog-sitter (Justin Milligan) and falls in with a "wine club" of fun-loving saucy ladies around her age (Loretta Devine, Wendie Malick, Lois Smith and Amy Hill, all having fun). Wacky hijinks ensue.

Directed by Katie Aselton from a script by Paul Welsh and Madeline Walter, this is a variation on the seemingly inexhaustible genre of fantasies about people changing their age. Often such tales are about kids wanting to be adults; sometimes they're about adults recapturing childhood or youth. But I can't remember another story about a young adult wanting to be old, even if they get to be Diane Keaton old. As a sixty-year-old who seems a lot less youthful than the 76-year-old Keaton, I could warn Mack not to be in such a hurry. 

This movie is fluffy to the point of insipidity, most of the dialogue is feeble, and the idea is thin at feature length, padded out with montage sequences. But though it takes almost twenty minutes to get to her entrance, right in the middle of the picture is Diane Keaton; funny, sexy and stunning as ever. Nattering Annie Hall-style and gamely pratfalling, she single-handedly gives the movie a charge that almost justifies it.

But only almost. Keaton is one of our best movie stars, and she's been skillfully (and no doubt lucratively) elevating otherwise routine chick-flicks like this for a long time. But she's also a top-notch actress, and it's been a while since she's shown what she can do in really good material. No one can begrudge her the payoff from this sort of thing, but it would be nice to see her squeeze in something a bit more substantive.

One more note, for the dog lovers: Mack has a wonderful little dog called "Cheese" (voiced, in a mushroom-trip sequence, by Martin Short). In the first scene in which Cheese sees "Rita," he stares at her quizzically, for all the world as if he recognizes her but is baffled by her new appearance. It's the closest Keaton comes to being upstaged.

PARTY COOPERS

Opening this weekend:

Love the Coopers—The Coopers, and their extremely First-World problems, being:

Dad (John Goodman) wants to leave mom (Diane Keaton) because he’s sick of her putting the concerns of their grown kids ahead of their own relationship. She’s talked him into sticking around for one more picturesque family Christmas in their handsome suburban Pittsburgh home.

Meanwhile, Gramps (Alan Arkin) has bonded with a young diner waitress (Amanda Seyfried) and now she’s planning to move away. Son (Ed Helms) has lost his job, and is hiding it from his family. Daughter (Olivia Wilde), dawdling in the Pittsburgh airport, meets a handsome young solider (Jake Lacy) on his way to deployment and talks him into posing as her boyfriend for the holiday in hopes of avoiding the disappointed, disapproving, worried looks of her parents.

Gee, wouldn’t it be something if two of them actually fell in love?

Middle-class whining about what a drag it is to spend time with your family at the holidays is theme which the movies have pretty thoroughly explored over the last few decades. Indeed, Keaton has already starred in a similar ensemble comedy-drama, The Family Stone, back in 2005. She’s one of the executive-producers of Love the Coopers, so she must like this sort of thing, or at least like the sort of money it can make.

Directed by Jessie Nelson from a script by Steven Rogers (which went into production under the better title The Most Wonderful Time), Love the Coopers is slickly produced and more watchable than it really deserves to be. Partly this is thanks to a Starbucks-compilation-CD-style soundtrack of genteel holiday numbers, including Sting’s lovely version of “Soul Cake.” Partly it’s because of the underrated winter beauty of Pittsburgh.

But mostly, as you might guess, it’s because of the ability of that cast to engage, even with fairly blah material. Along with the above, by the way, the ensemble includes June Squibb as a dotty old aunt, and Marisa Tomei and Anthony Mackie as, respectively, Keaton’s shoplifting sister and the cop stuck with taking her in. This promises to become the most interesting strand—Mackie gives his role a little tension and sting, and he and Tomei have a nice rapport—but it peters out without a real payoff.

There’s also narration, but both the (unmistakable) voice of the famous speaker and the identity of the narrator seem meant to be a surprise until the end credits.