TOMFOOLERY

In theaters this weekend:

80 for Brady--It's a testament to the star power of the four leading ladies in this movie that I didn't resent that their characters were Tom Brady fans. Not that much, anyway. I didn't even resent that the film amounts to a feature-length commercial for the NFL; it's being released the weekend before Super Bowl Sunday, almost as if the league is trying to offer its own counterprogramming.

Who cares? At this point in their careers, Lily Tomlin, Jane Fonda, Sally Field and Rita Moreno could pretty much read grocery lists and it would carry a certain pop-culture gravitas. The script, by Sarah Haskins and Emily Halpern and inspired by a real-life circle of elderly Boston-based fans of Tommy Boy and the Patriots, doesn't really offer them much more to work with than a grocery list would, and they still come off all right.

Tomlin, a cancer survivor, is the outspoken instigator who insists that she and her friends must go watch Brady play in the 2017 Big Game. Fonda is a flirt given to romantically leaping before she looks; she's also successful writer of erotic fiction about Rob Gronkowski. Field is an academic weary of her dependent, literally absent-minded professor husband (Bob Balaban) and Moreno yearns to break free of assisted living despite a fellow resident (Glynn Turman) who likes her.

The quartet ends up in Houston having wacky adventures at the Super Bowl Experience and at parties and poker games and chicken wing eating contests and such. All does not, it need hardly be said, go smoothly. They're befriended by the choreographer of the half-time show (Billy Porter) and if you think they don't end up dancing to get past security, think again.

With her blunt, urgent delivery, Tomlin somehow emerges as the team captain of the ensemble. But all four are infectiously energetic and seem to enjoy goofing around with the supporting players shoved in their paths, like Porter, or Harry Hamlin as a love interest for Fonda, or Sara Gilbert as Tomlin's daughter, or Andy Richter as a high roller in a skybox, or Alex Moffat and Rob Corrddry as a dyspeptic sports-talk team, and of course Brady and Gronk and Guy Fieri and others as themselves. Even the bit players include the likes of Patton Oswalt and Sally Kirkland.

80 for Brady starts slow, but it should be said that as it progresses, and gets broader and sillier, it also gets better; both livelier and more heartfelt. By the end these women had me absurdly emotionally invested. This is, possibly, the lamest and most ridiculous film that has ever brought tears to my eyes.

LILY IN THE VALLEY

Opening this weekend:

Grandma— Lily Tomlin plays Elle, a widowed poet, sort of famous by poet standards several decades ago, now eking out a meager L.A. existence with lecturing and writer-in-residence gigs. Elle’s granddaughter Sage (Julia Garner) shows up one morning in a jam and needing a few hundred bucks, but Grandma’s broke at the moment.

Like last year’s Obvious Child, this comedy-drama from Paul Weitz concerns a young woman who, unlike Diablo Cody’s Juno, is in no serious doubt about her desire for an abortion. Elle and her granddaughter are both reluctant to face the wrath of her high-powered daughter (Marcia Gay Harden) so they set off in Elle’s 1955 Dodge Royal in search of anyone else they can hit up.

It’s a simple, poignant story, but the great Tomlin gives it comic force. Or she did for me, anyway. I’ve never been able to resist Tomlin, not since I was a small child. I interviewed her once, and she cracked me up to a professionally unseemly degree. While most of her lines in Grandma aren’t laugh lines, on paper, her blunt, declarative delivery makes the cantankerous yet kind Elle a potently mirthful figure.

But this enhances her authority rather than undermining it. When she says, in that Detroit accent, that they should stop and buy a couple of dollars worth of gas—“stahp and buy a couple of dahllers wirth of gahss”—it somehow has the quality of a Biblical pronouncement.

Garner, wistful beneath a Jean Harlow-like blond halo, wisely does little more than hang back and serve as Tomlin’s foil. Most of the other cast members that pop up in the episodic storyline—including the late lamented Elizabeth Pena—do the same, but one actor is allowed to shine: Sam Elliot, as Grandma’s distant ex.

Over the last couple of decades Elliot has sometimes been on the borderline of a joke—a piece of prime ‘70s beefcake that aged uncommonly well, an endearing, easygoing hunk emeritus. In his brief scene in Grandma, however, he reveals a painful bit of Elle’s backstory, and in the process gives maybe the most startlingly intense performance of his career.

No Escape—Owen Wilson has taken a job with an American firm operating in an unnamed Southeast Asian country, and has moved there with his wife (Lake Bell) and two daughters. They aren’t even there a day, however, before the government is overthrown and the revolutionaries are massacring people in the streets, including Americans. They have a special resentment for Wilson’s company.

So for the rest of the movie, Wilson and his wife frantically try to elude the murderous mobs and get their kids to safety. They’re eventually helped by Pierce Brosnan as a skirt-chasing Brit expat who [spoiler!] turns out to be with British Intelligence.

Directed by John Erick Dowdle from a script he wrote with his brother Drew Dowdle, No Escape is undeniably gripping, especially in its first half. As it progresses, the hairbreadth escapes and turns of good fortune grow harder and harder to accept, and the dialogue grows more sanctimonious, but the situation keeps us invested until the end credits.

The stars are well-cast, too. Beautiful, strapping Lake Bell has the right physicality for this brave and capable Mom, and Wilson, with his boyishly openhearted American-idiot persona, is a perfect fit for the clueless hero. You think, really? You took this job and dragged your family to this distant country without so much as spending ten minutes reading up on Wikipedia about the potential problems there?  But then you look at Wilson and think, yeah, it’s possible.

No Escape isn’t boring, but it is distasteful. It was hard for me to shake the sense that we’re meant to see what happens to this family as extra-special horrible because it happens to middle-class white Americans. It’s true that Brosnan’s deus ex machina character is given a heavy-handed little speech in which he says all the right things about how western influence in repressive regimes leads to this sort of horror. This seems intended to preempt charges of xenophobia, but it’s cosmetic. The visceral impact of the film is Yellow Peril, all the way.

Playing this week at FilmBar Phoenix:

Turbo Kid—This actioner is set in the post-apocalyptic year of…1997. The conceit is that we’re seeing a cheesy sci-fi flick of the ‘80s, a low-budget Road Warrior knockoff in the vein of Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone or Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared Syn or World Gone Wild or Crime Zone. It even has Michael Ironside, all but reprising his Spacehunter role as an evil warlord.

The title character, played by the sympathetic Munro Chambers, is a bicycle-borne scavenger of the wastes who models himself on a comic-book superhero called Turbo Rider. A sweet, daffy blonde pixie called Apple (Laurence LeBoeuf) befriends him, and when she’s abducted by the despicable Zeus (Ironside), who presides over gladiatorial games a la Thunderdome and has found a way to turn dead bodies into precious water, The Kid comes to her rescue. Somewhere in there he and Apple are also befriended by a Down-Under-Accented cowboy-type tough guy (Aaron Jeffery).

It certainly can’t be said that Francois Simard, Anouk Whissell and Yoann-Karl Whissell, the writing-directing team that created this insane Canada-New Zealand co-production, don’t know their source material. Everything rings on-the-money ‘80s: the editing, the costumes, the hair, the stunts, the special effects and especially the music, including Stan Bush's marvelous pump-up anthem, “Thunder in Your Heart.” Apart from Ironside’s gray hair, about the only giveaway we’re not watching a genuine artifact is the extreme level of slapstick gore, which in those days, if memory serves, was more the province of stuff like the Evil Dead flicks and, later, Peter Jackson’s Dead Alive than of the wasteland-warrior genre.

If this kind of splatter, mostly played for laughs, doesn’t bother you—I wouldn’t recommend the film for younger kids—Turbo Kid is nostalgic fun. I spent many hours in front of movies like this, often with some poor long-suffering girlfriend I’d dragged along, and I can attest to its authenticity.

IVY BELEAGUER

For the large majority of us who didn’t especially want to go to an Ivy League or other prestigious school, or weren’t up to it academically, or couldn’t have afforded it if we were, Admission is a smooth and pleasant hour and a half. For those who did or were or could have, it might be painful, and compelling, too.

One of the more intriguing elements of this romantic comedy, directed by Paul Weitz, is the inside look it claims to give at the admissions process for Princeton University—the script, by Karen Croner, is based on a novel by Princeton faculty member Jean Hanff Korelitz. If your own college career was ever in the hands of a system this baroque and whimsically subjective, it might make watching this movie that much more maddening.

The heroine is Portia (Tina Fey) a veteran admissions officer who, like her colleagues, has long since become immune both to the plying and the outrage of Princeton aspirants and their families, and is ruthlessly able to stamp “DENY” on their dreams. She loves, or thinks she loves, the life she has with her nebbishy Prof boyfriend (Michael Sheen)—quiet, child-free nights in, reading poetry. She has to endure an occasional awkward visit with her disappointed Mom (Lily Tomlin), the author of an iconic feminist classic who expected more from her daughter than guarding the gate for the elite. Other than that, however, Portia’s life is comfortable.

But of course all this gets yanked away from her, and a wacky new life is dropped in its place. She meets John (Paul Rudd) the adorable head of a “progressive” school in rural New Hampshire, who introduces her to his most promising student, Jeremiah (Nat Wolff), a brilliant, sweet, slightly dizzy kid that John thinks belongs at Princeton. Then, when he gets Portia alone, John’s real agenda emerges: He tells her that Jeremiah is her biological son, given up for adoption when she was in college.

Instead of recusing herself, Portia starts trying to steer the process in Jeremiah’s favor. She also, it need hardly be said, finds herself falling for John, and bonding with his adopted Ugandan son Nelson (Travaris Spears), who likes her because, in contrast to the globe-trotting, do-gooding John, she’s “boring,” as he feels an adult ought to be.

This complicated, rather contrived story gives rise both to farcical and to poignant scenes, and the terrific cast gives them punch. Fey’s persona, with her declarative delivery and her self-conscious disinterest in sex, seems to generate a love-her-or-hate-her response in many people. I’m in the former category—she’s fine company here, and strikes some surprisingly heartfelt, touching notes.

Rudd gets to show less of his manic, squirrelly side here in this unambiguous good-guy role, but he’s appealing as always, as is Tomlin. Sheen is a riot as the sad-sack boyfriend; he looks like a melancholic teddy bear with Albert Einstein’s hair. There are good turns by Gloria Rueben, Wallace Shawn, Sonya Walger, Olek Krupa and others, but the real standout is the beguiling Wolff (son of actress Polly Draper) as the wide-eyed, fast-talking Jeremiah. Our investment in the story hinges on his likability—on him seeming, for all his intelligence, like a clueless boy.

Of course, you may find yourself hoping that Princeton doesn’t ruin him. A quiet ironic joke built into the fabric of Admission is what it says about the American sensibility in relation to prestige institutions—the tension between the belief that they’re often essentially meaningless and their unshakeable currency in the American culture of success.

On the one hand, the movie suggests that getting into Princeton is an arbitrary, even corrupt process. On the other, we’re expected to root for Jeremiah to get into the school anyway. We’re told he’d “thrive” there, and he may believe he will, but it’s mentioned several times that he’s an “autodidact,” so you may wonder how much, in purely educational terms, he needs with college at all. I suspect the real reason the grownups want him to get in is simply so that he can put the word “Princeton” on his resume for the rest of his life.

INSCREDIBLE

RIP to Muppet performer Jerry Nelson, passed on late last week at 78. Since Nelson has already been rightly celebrated as the voice of Count Von Count…

Monster-of-the-Week: …let’s note one of his less-remembered characters, the fanged, scaly, amorous Scred, from the Land of Gorch…

…part of the cast of the Muppet’s short-lived tenure on the first season of Saturday Night Live. Here he is singing "I Got You, Babe" with Lily Tomlin.

RIP also to Steve Franken, aka Chatsworth Osborne Jr. from Dobie Gillis, among many other roles, passed on at 80.