WHEN MV MET SALLY

RIP to the glorious, goddessy yet sweetly vulnerable Sally Kirkland, departed at the age of 84.

Your Humble Narrator got to meet her once. Back in '93 or '94, one of the first attempts at a Phoenix film festival was held downtown at the Herberger. Co-sponsored by Hotel San Carlos, it was a pretty scrappy, underfunded affair, but it did have a celebrity guest. As the newish young film critic for the Phoenix New Times, I was greeted effusively by the festival folks and proudly introduced to their guest star: Sally Kirkland.

I meet celebrities quite often, so I'm not usually starstruck, but meeting Sally Kirkland left me stammering more than meeting Tom Hanks or Tom Cruise would have. Nonetheless, I was able to express my worshipful devotion to her, and she seemed to take it rather well; she gripped me by the hand and dragged me into the theater with her.

Sally was there in support of Double Threat, an excruciating "erotic thriller" of the Cinemax-at-three-in-the-morning sort.

She starred as an aging actress, a faded bombshell driven to jealousy by her young body double. The movie itself, which also starred Andrew Stevens, Tony Franciosa, Richard Lynch and Chick Vennera, was a laugh-riot; it played like an SCTV noir spoof. But there in the middle of it was Sally, intensely sexy yet baleful, a true movie star presence in a preposterous vehicle, utterly negating her young supposed rival.

Anyway, I sat through Double Threat in the front row, holding hands with the star. After that evening I thought of getting in touch with her to suggest that I ghostwrite what I suspect could have been quite a juicy, page-turning memoir, but I never worked up the nerve. Shame on me; as far as I can tell she never wrote one.

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.