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.

STEVE, MARTIN

Last night The Wife and I betook ourselves to the Comerica Theatre in downtown Phoenix to see...

...Steve Martin and Martin Short, along with the bluegrass ensemble The Steep Canyon Rangers and the gifted pianist Jeff Babko. The comedy legends described it as a "See Them Before They're Dead" tour. I had seen Short, more than a decade ago, perform brilliantly with the Phoenix Symphony--he narrated Peter and the Wolf as Ed Grimly, Jiminy Glick, etc--but I had never seen Martin, and I admit I felt bragging rights after seeing him do the "King Tut" dance during the encore.

Much of the evening consisted of the two men trading companionable showbiz aspersions, and in that way it felt somehow reminiscent of what (I imagine) the famous "Rat Pack" shows in Vegas in the '60s must have been like--famous guys creating the sense that they're just clowning around off the cuff, mostly for their own amusement, in front of thousands of paying customers. It should also be noted--Martin wryly notes it during the show--that while the 72-year-old Martin's style has become relaxed and reserved, Short's is as physically abandoned (and daringly off-color) as ever. He's a crazy whirlwind.

As terrific as the top-billed performers were, however, it's possible that the most exciting part of the show was the Martin-less showcase number of the Steep Canyon Rangers, "Auden's Train." Put simply: Those guys can play.

RIP to the superb Joseph Bologna, passed on at 82. Despite starring in '70s fare like Made for Each Other, Cops & Robbers, Chapter Two and The Big Bus, Bologna's finest hour was in a supporting part: the hilariously virile, blustery "King" Kaiser in 1982's My Favorite Year. (He was also pretty good in 1984's underrated Blame it on Rio.) I was lucky enough to see Bologna live before he was dead, back in 2001 at the Orpheum Theatre here in Phoenix, opposite his wife Renee Taylor in a two-person show called If You Ever Leave Me...I'm Going With You!

Here's my pal Barry Graham on why he doesn't want to see Joe Arpaio, recently convicted of contempt, locked up himself. Vindictive and spiteful as I am, I nonetheless agree with Barry's reasoning here. This would not, however, make it any less outrageous if President Ubu Roi exercised his pardon power for the first time on Arpaio, as he suggested he might do today.

VOLUMES, VOLUMES, VOLUMES...

Here, so that you’ll have some idea of who to blame for my warped worldview, is my annual list of the books that kept my lips moving this past year (excluding as usual magazines and newspapers, individual shorts stories, essays, poems, blogs, etc.):

  Prehysterical Pogo (In Pandemonia) by Walt Kelly

Mr. Mercedes by Stephen King

Blood and Kisses (Vampire Love Book 1) by J.T. Blackfriars

I Must Say: My Life as a Humble Comedy Legend by Martin Short

Silver Screen Fiend: Learning About Life from an Addiction to Film by Patton Oswalt

The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Orczy

The Realms of Gold by Margaret Drabble

The Casual Vacancy by J.K. Rowling 

The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell

The Runaway Robot by Lester Del Rey

Food: A Love Story by Jim Gaffigan 

Feral by Berton Roueché

Dr. Who and the Genesis of the Daleks by Terrance Dicks

 Clans of the Alphane Moon by Philip K. Dick

Go Set a Watchman by Harper Lee

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami

Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives by David Eagleman

The Martian by Andy Weir

The Gods Hate Kansas by Joseph Millard

A Feast of Freedom by Leonard Wibberly

  

Ratman’s Notebooks by Stephen Gilbert

That last selection was a real surprise. It’s the Irish novel on which the 1971 American film Willard and its 2003 remake were based. I had long been curious about it, but I wasn’t expecting it to be a real work of literature. It’s whimsical, witty and poignant, and the rats trained by the (unnamed) narrator of the title are vividly characterized. Both movie versions are pretty pedestrian by comparison.

Anyway… 

Monster-of-the-Week: …this week the nod goes to the tentacled horror from the wonderful cover art of another book on this list, Joseph Millard’s vintage sci-fi tale The Gods Hate Kansas:

Unexpectedly, this picture isn’t a cheat, or at least not too much of a cheat—no such attack on the spaceship takes place, but there are, at least, creatures answering this description in the tale. Better yet, it turns out [spoiler alert!] that they aren’t bad sorts, once you get to know them.

OZZZZZZZZZ...

The opening credits of Legends of Oz: Dorothy’s Return appear on debris flung at us from a twister. The objects on which we see the names are reflective of the person’s contribution—the name of Hugh Dancy, for instance, who provides the voice of “Marshal Mallow,” is emblazoned on a bag of marshmallows.

That’s sort of clever. And there are a couple of amusing passages in this computer-animated musical adventure. Probably the best is the episode set in the Dainty China Country, beyond the “Great Wall of China”—a fortification made up of huge teacups, saucers, etc, protecting a population of animate China figurines and ruled over by the China Princess, voiced by Megan Hilty.

She’s a bit of a diva, but not a bad sort, and Marshal Mallow, a courtly military type, falls for her. His body being made entirely of marshmallows, he’s a good match for such a fragile lady.

The movie also offers a reasonably lively climactic battle, with Dorothy (Lea Michele) and Toto, re-summoned from Kansas, and their allies, against The Jester, the younger brother of the Wicked Witch of the West, who's cursed to wear the coxcomb forever. Martin Short lends this villain his voice, and the rest of the cast is equally impressive: Dan Aykroyd as the Scarecrow, James Belushi as the no-longer-cowardly Lion, Kelsey Grammer as the The Tin Man and Bernadette Peters as Glinda, with Oliver Platt, Brian Blessed and even Patrick Stewart in secondary roles.

Sadly all these great voices are given little to say, or sing, that’s witty or engaging. The aforementioned whimsical ideas notwithstanding, the film, adapted from a book by Roger Stanton Baum (L. Frank’s great-grandson) is mostly a flat, sluggish dud, weighed down with obligatory elements and forgettable songs—some of them co-written by Bryan Adams.

The movie has visual downsides, too. The fantasy characters aren’t bad, but the human characters represent CGI at its most charmless and creepy—the notorious “Uncanny Valley effect” at its worst. Dorothy, Auntie Em, Uncle Henry and their Kansan neighbors come across like CPR training dummies.

Legends of Oz: Dorothy’s Return is a painful example of the unreliability of the “dream team” approach to moviemaking: of how a well-funded, well-intentioned project stuffed with big name talent can stubbornly refuse to come to life. If it’s the only option to take your kids to at a discount theatre on a really boring afternoon, maybe you might consider it. Maybe. But you may find it has the same effect on you as the poppies outside the Emerald City.

RIP to Al Feldstein, editor of MAD Magazine in its greatest vintages and thus arguably the architect of a generation of insufferable adolescent smartasses, passed on at 88.

A STITCH IN TIME SAVES CANINE

Tim Burton gives the boy-and-his-dog movie a macabre but touching spin in Frankenweenie, a remake, from Disney, of his 1984 live-action short. Suburban boy-genius Victor Frankenstein’s beloved dog Sparky gets run over, but Victor, a science whiz, robs his grave and zaps him back to life in a makeshift lab in the attic, in the manner of James Whale’s 1931 Frankenstein.

Other kids get wise to Victor’s revivifying technique and, dreams of science-fair glory in their eyes, try it on a dead turtle, rat, Sea Monkeys and other creatures. A “Weird Girl” even manages, inadvertently, to create a hybrid of her equally weird cat Mr. Whiskers with a bat. The results of all this weird science wreak riotous havoc on the town’s festival, and it raises an angry mob that chases Sparky toward the windmill on the hill…

Rendered in stop-motion and ravishing black-and-white, with a voice ensemble that includes Catherine O‘Hara, Martin Short, Martin Landau and Winona Ryder, all propelled by a splendid Danny Elfman score, this striking piece of movie craft is an homage, principally, to the Universal monster pictures, though it also carries references to everything from Gamera to The Birds to the Hammer films. Indeed, if the film has a fault it’s that it’s too dense and overstuffed with references, witty though they are, for its brief running time.

But the characterizations compensate for the feverish tone of Frankenweenie's parody. Victor has a beautifully long, gloomy face—a bit like a boy version of Burton, perhaps; he’s a junior filmmaker as well as a scientist—and his grief isn’t just a plot point. His parents are a bit generic, maybe by design, but the kids, the science teacher, Weird Girl and Mr. Whiskers, the monsters, the neighbor poodle with whom Sparky has a connection—all of them are vividly real beings.

As for the title pooch, he’s classic; one of the all-time great achievements in stop-motion characterization. Sparky is so deeply endearing that he ensures an authentic emotional response to Frankenweenie. Both visually and as a piece of sustained narrative, this may be Burton’s most satisfying movie since Ed Wood. It’s one of the better films so far this year.