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.

ALLEY WHOOP

Opening this weekend...

Nightmare Alley--"Geek" has now become roughly analogous to "nerd" or "extreme enthusiast." But the term once had horrific connotations; it was carny slang for a sideshow performer who would do ghastly acts--bite the heads off of live chickens, for instance--usually to feed an alcohol or drug habit. The bottom rung of show business (I almost wrote "the bottom rung of humanity" but then I remembered the 45th President and his cronies), this revolting occupation was the jumping-off point for William Lindsay Gresham's classic lower-depths novel Nightmare Alley (1946).

An atmospheric if softened-up movie of it was made in 1947 with Tyrone Power as Stan, the newbie carny who looks at the geek and knows he could never fall to such a degraded level. Bradley Cooper plays Stan in this gorgeously stylized new version from the great Guillermo del Toro, working from an adaptation he co-wrote with Sunset Gun maven Kim Morgan.

Stan, a drifter running away from something awful, makes himself useful as a laborer to a desolate midwestern carny. Soon he's learning the tricks of fortune-telling and mind-reading acts, which here are so talmudical that earning an honest living seems like it would be far easier. He learns how to calm down an angry cop, and how to dispose of a geek who's outlived his usefulness, and where to find a new one. 

And the work brings out Stan's creative side; soon he's designed a spectacular new "electric chair" act for the lovely Molly (Rooney Mara). He's also taught a weird sort of hustler ethic; the veteran fortune-teller Zeena (Toni Collette, magnificent as ever) warns him against doing a "spookshow," that is, actually faking a manifestation of a departed loved one.

This first half, set in the carny amongst its disreputable but mostly warm and likable denizens, is darkly delightful, visually sumptuous and full of terrific, potent acting and pungent dialogue. As with both the novel and the earlier film version, the second half, in which Stan leaves the carny to start a higher-end mentalist scam--and foolishly ignores Zeena's advice--is less engaging. His scenes as the hapless fly in the parlor of a lacquered, satanic psychoanalyst (Cate Blanchett), though entertaining enough, border on camp, and are a little oppressive after the buoyant, motley first act.

Still, this is a rich and absorbing melodrama. Actors seem to thrive in front of del Toro's camera, and alongside the leads and the wondrous Collette, scene-stealers here include Willem Dafoe as the candidly heartless boss, Ron Perlman as an avuncular carny and, perhaps best of all, David Strathairn as Pete, Stan's washed-up, gently rueful mentor. Even in the second half, there's a splendid quick turn by Mary Steenburgen, and Richard Jenkins is scary, and briefly piteous, as the cold-hearted tycoon for whom Stan puts on his spookshow.

Finally, a word should be said for Paul Anderson, as the geek. He plays the part to the hilt, yet without hamming, and with a dreadful glimpse of the human being he was.

TENOR MERCIES

Happy Friday everybody! Check out my "Friday Flicks" column, reviewing Ron Howard's Pavarotti...

...as well as the drama Katie Says Goodbye...

Happy Father's Day next weekend. Check out my "Four Corners" column, also online at Phoenix Magazine, with some suggestions that Dad might enjoy.

VOW FACTOR

Opening this week:

I Do...Until I Don't--A noxious British filmmaker (Dolly Wells) shows up in Vero Beach, Florida, to work on a documentary about marriage. The institution, she thinks, is in need of reform. Florida being the divorce capital of the world, or so she says, she starts following three married couples around with her camera, looking for (and trying to engineer) evidence to support her theory that marriage should be a seven-year contract with an option to renew.

Longtime married couples are represented by Harvey (Paul Reiser) and Cybill (Mary Steenburgen), affluent, perennially combative New York expats. Harvey walks around in a leather jacket and helmet even when he isn't riding his motorcycle; Cybill mocks him for it.

Younger specimens are Noah (Ed Helms) and his creatively frustrated wife Alice (Lake Bell). They run his late father's window blind business, which is on the verge of failure, and despite this looming financial disaster are rather halfheartedly trying to get pregnant. Also a target of the documentarian's camera and agenda are Alice's younger sister Fanny (Amber Heard) and her husband Xander (Wyatt Cenac), hippies in a theoretically open marriage.

This is the second feature written and directed by the talented Lake Bell. The actress has kept busy with prolific voice work and supporting parts, and pulled occasional nominal leading lady duty in stuff like No Escape and Million Dollar Arm. But it was with 2013's In a World...,  a screwy, uneven but original comedy about envies and career barriers in the voice-over community, that she showed her behind-the-cameras promise. I Do...Until I Don't, though by no means without strong performances and laughs, suggests, alas, a sophomore slump for Bell.

Neither the critique nor the defense of marriage presented here is anything really new. This wouldn't much matter, if the specific storylines were surprising in some way, but the characterizations, as written, are sitcom-basic--the hippie couple and the comic-villainess filmmaker are particularly weak and stereotypical. And the interweaving of the various plot strands feels awkward and uncertain.

On the upside, there are many passages of bright, funny dialogue, and Bell gets good work out of her cast, down to minor players like Chauntae Pink and Rae Grey as massage parlor workers. Bell's own performance as the sweetly complaisant, melancholy Alice, is the strongest, but Reiser and Steenburgen also develop an impressive comic rapport out of their underwritten scenes that allows us to see the touching, almost reluctant bond beneath their distracted sniping at each other. There's real venom and acid in their bickering, but no real urgency; their marital resentments have a familiarity, a low-key domestic rhythm.

Performances like this allowed me to enjoy I Do...Until I Don't quite a lot, even as I recognized its significant weaknesses and limitations. Bell has ability and vision, and I hope she gets to continue to toll.

VIVA LAS AGED

A busy movie weekend:

Last Vegas—Robert DeNiro, Michael Douglas, Morgan Freeman and Kevin Kline are friends from the old neghborhood—Flatbush, Brooklyn, that is. They’re scattered around the country now, but when the most financially successful of them, Douglas, finally gets around to getting engaged, the quartet meets in Vegas for a wild bachelor-party weekend.

One of them, DeNiro, is there under protest; a depressed widower, he bears Douglas an angry grudge. Freeman recently suffered a mild stroke and is being kept on a short leash by his son. Kline’s wife (Joanna Gleason), fed up with his crankiness, has given him a condom and a Viagra tablet and told him to improve his attitude in Sin City. Douglas, whose trophy-wife-to-be is half his age, simply hasn’t come to terms with being old.

What is ensues in this comedy, directed by Jon Turtletaub from a script by Dan Fogelman, is just what you’d imagine—corny, heavy-handed gags about geriatrics drinking, gambling and flirting with scantily-clad nymphs young enough to be their granddaughters. Mary Steenburgen charmingly plays a slightly more appropriately-aged lounge singer who gets drawn into the gang and stirs up a bit of romantic conflict, but nothing very serious. The movie is shamelessly fluffy, and more enjoyable than it has any real right to be.

These guys are the real thing—movie stars—and there’s a reason that each of them has an acting Oscar. Even clowning around, they can effortlessly command an audience.

Oddly, though, the standout is the one that, if you were ranking them, would probably have to be considered the acting lightweight of the four—Douglas. Toward the end, he has a short monologue in which his feelings about aging finally pour out, and this amusing old-guys-behaving-badly smirk-fest turns, for one scene, into a real drama.

Man of Tai Chi—The title sounds like an SCTV sketch, but it’s not meant as a joke—this Hong Kong action melodrama wants to make the case for Tai Chi not as a great exercise for old ladies in the park, but as a badass martial art. The hero (Tiger Hu Chen) is a young delivery boy who studies under a Tai Chi master and competes in tournaments. He gets sucked into the world of a to-the-death spectator fight club run by an odious gangster, and soon finds he can only get out if he dies.

The gangster is played by Keanu Reeves, and the movie also represents the directorial debut of Reeves. Turns out that Matrix Boy makes a pretty good director. Man of Tai Chi is a flamboyant, highly entertaining piece of showmanship. Young Chen makes a sympathetic hapless hero—he has some of the passive, guileless charm of the young Reeves—and a thrilling performer; his Tai Chi moves have a riveting, dancerlike beauty. And Reeves shows, for my money, a better eye for martial arts sequences than most current action directors. He gives us less frenetic cutting, and lets us watch the fighters do their thing.

About all that Reeves the director isn’t able to do here is get a good, non-wooden performance out of Reeves the actor. But that puts him on a long list of filmmakers.

Underdogs—This indie football yarn, which played at the Phoenix Film Festival this year, is set in North Canton, Ohio, at a Catholic high school with an abysmal record. A tough, my-way-or-the-highway new coach (D.B. Sweeney) is brought in, and turns things around with his demanding work ethic.

For a brief time in the ‘80s and ‘90s, it looked like Sweeney might become a big star. That didn’t happen, but he remains an interesting presence. His performance here is good, but there isn’t one football scene in this competently-made but banal debut effort by director Doug Dearth that doesn’t feel derived from earlier, better sports movies like Rudy, The Rookie, The Blind Side and others—the final sideline scene here is virtually a remake of the same scene in Hoosiers.

The movie has a subplot about a different kind of underdog—the quarterback’s Dad, Bill Burkett—that is based on the story of the real North Canton resident Bill Burkett, developer of the EdenPure heater. According to Underdogs, Burkett faced a legal struggle with his then-employer over the intellectual property rights to the device which he had invented at home in his spare time. This is an intriguing story, and it’s hard not to suspect that the football stuff was grafted on to make Underdogs more commercial.