Jules (2023)

A spaceship has crashed in my back yard and has crushed my azaleas. Milton Robinson (Ben Kingsley) is a 79-year-old widower living on his own in his small town of Boonton in Western Pennsylvania. He regularly attends city council meetings where he asks the same questions every weeks and makes the same comment about the town’s slogan phoning home. He receives regular visits and help from his daughter Denise (Zoe Winters) a veterinarian locally. One day, a UFO lands in his backyard and a small humanoid alien (Jade Quon) crawls out. Milton attempts to get help, calling the police and his daughter and bringing it up at the city council meeting but is brushed off as senile. Milton brings the alien, who is nonverbal, a rug to keep him warm but after seeing he’s cold outside on the back stoop, coaxes him inside the house and treats him as a regular houseguest, providing him with a tray of assorted food but discovering that his guest only drinks water and eats apples. Sandy (Harriet Sansom Harris) an acquaintance from the meetings, stops by and discovers the alien, telling Milton that they should keep it a secret for its own safety. Joyce (Jane Curtin), another elderly woman from the meetings irritated that Milton has been keeping company with Sandy also discovers the alien when she doorsteps them. Jules, the alien, begins repairing his ship but does not appear to be making quick progress. Milton’s daughter hears about her father’s antics and schedules him for a mental evaluation at a local facility where a neurologist Dr North (Anna George) says his faculties are quickly diminishing and that they should consider assisted living. The idea that he might have dementia upsets Milton and he storms out. Sandy, who is attempting to start a programme to connect with the youth of the neigbhourhood, is robbed by Danny (Cody Kostro) a young man she invites in to her home after he’s called her up on seeing the poster around town. After she states that she will call the police, the man tackles and attempts to strangle her. However the alien (whom Milton and Sandy have named Jules but Joyce insists on calling Gary – is there a certain singer in mind? His birthday is tomorrow, fact fans!) receives a vision of the events and telepathically causes the assailant’s head to explode. This raises the suspicion of the National Security Agency since they are conducting an ongoing search for the crashed spaceship. Milton, Sandy and Joyce finally figure out from Jules’ regular cat drawings that he needs dead cats to power his ship, so Milton and Sandy go out to find some but Milton continues to be troubled by thoughts of his declining faculties. Meanwhile, they are unknowingly followed by police who observe their strange activities … I’m not sure what to do. This hasn’t happened to me before. At first the screenplay by Gavin Steckler seems like a blend of Cocoon and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (the situation plus verbal nods are more obvious than meta) but this witty portrait of pension-age life also hits dark notes with ease and bats them away as quickly – in one case in an act of astonishing violence, albeit offscreen. His eyes are very understanding. There are some fun running jokes – Milton walks everywhere and curses the lack of a crosswalk; his repeated requests at the local council meetings; and each time he says he’s got an alien living with him, it’s received with the same query – An illegal alien? How three very different elderly adults deal with this extraordinary situation is treated with kindness and humour – while Joyce insists on performing If I Leave Here Tomorrow a 70s song that recalls her wild days and nights once upon a time in Pittsburgh, Jules’ empathy is such that he sees that Sandy is on the verge of being killed and does the necessary as Joyce warbles away beside him. That’s some juxtaposition. He’s very friendly, he’s undemanding, he watches whatever I watch. Companionship, the ignorance of adult children getting on with their own lives and the patronising misperception of the elderly’s capacities to cope are part of the emotional tapestry being enacted here – against the backdrop of a grand science fiction scenario. It is quite literally a study of alienation. I don’t see why we should prejudice him with our fearful thoughts. This meditation on ageing and friendship has a serious subject at its heart and that’s our loss of control when our faculties start misleading us. But this has the happiest of outcomes, all thanks to an alien who has the power to explode the head of a marauding raping home invader. Aside from the references to Milton’s beloved CSI on TV three times a day, there’s a knowing nod to the Men in Black who are in pursuit of the gentle non-verbal alien in their midst. You’ve seen the movies, you know what happens to these guys, deadpans Milton. A droll, witty, assured and heartfelt paean to friendship and the ironies of people on their home patch where they wind up being treated as idiots once they hit a certain age. The performances are pitch perfect from all concerned and Joyce is right about Gary/Jules – those eyes really are understanding. Quon is remarkable in the role of listener as these seniors pour out their worries. A low key left field joy! Directed by veteran producer Marc Turtletaub. You’ve got to enjoy your life, not worry it away

The Flip Side (2018)

I’m a perspectivist. I take from many sources. Struggling Adelaide restaurateur Ronnie (Emily Taheny) has her life thrown for a spin when an old lover, British film star Henry Salbert (Eddie Izzard), goes on a promotional tour in Australia joined by his French girlfriend Sophie (Vanessa Guide). Henry stays with Ronnie and her laidback boyfriend Jeff (Luke McKenzie) a part-time teacher and wannabe novelist who has inadvertently invited them into their home without realising that Henry and Ronnie were involved. His unpublished book Bite supposedly elicits Henry’s interest but it’s really so that Henry can get close to Ronnie again. As Ronnie’s creditors close in on her business and she can’t make the payments for her impaired mother’s (Tina Bursill) retirement home, a road trip beckons and the rekindling of a romance that left Ronnie devastated five years ago… I had forgotten how eloquent you Australians can be. Directed by Marion Pilowsky from her screenplay with L.A. Sellars, this what-if is a play on national stereotypes – Guide has fun as the French floozy, Izzard is a supposedly typical Old Etonian, and the narrative plays  on the outcome of Jeff’s subject – a spider in love with a human woman, with all the dangers of the outback encountered in a reenactment of the novel’s themes as a foursome mess with each other’s heads.  Do we believe that the old romantic partners could ever have been a couple, even on a movie set? Hmm. Even Jeff seems a sad sack. Ronnie learns the hard way that everything Henry says is role play and his career is paramount. It’s light stuff  but in truth it’s more drama than romcom. Overall, a nice tribute to Adelaide and Shiraz with lively performances from a miscast ensemble filling in for some thin setups and occasional shifts in tone. I don’t act. I just be

 

 

The Last Movie Star (2017)

I should have stayed a stunt man. Ageing film star Vic Edwards (Burt Reynolds) has to put down his ailing dog. His spirits appear to be lifted by an invitation to the International Nashville Film Festival but he’s only persuaded to go by his friend Sonny (Chevy Chase) who points out that previous recipients of the Festival’s Lifetime Achievement Award were Nicholson, De Niro, Pacino. When Vic boards the plane he’s in coach; his limo is a BMW driven by angry tattooed Goth girl Lil (Ariel Winter); and his first class hotel is a crappy motel. He wants out, especially when the Festival is in a bar with projection on a sheet and Shane (Ellar Coltrane) irritates him by asking on-the-nose questions about his choice of roles which tees off Festival organiser Doug (Clark Duke). After hitting the bottle, then hitting his head, Vic persuades Lil to take him three hours out of town to Knoxville where he goes on a trip through his past … What a shit hole. A riff on the career of Burt Reynolds himself, as the well chosen film inserts illustrate, in which his avatar Edwards appears and comments (as his older incarnation) on the presumptions of youth and the lessons he has learned as age and illness have beset his life, his stardom a thing of the past. An explicitly nostalgic work, in which the trials of ageing are confronted head-on by the only actor who was top of the box office six years straight, with Reynolds’ character (aided by the walking stick he used in real life) taking a tour of his hometown in Tennessee including visiting the house where he grew up and seeing his first wife Claudia (Kathleen Nolan) in an old folks’ home where she’s suffering from Alzheimer’s.  The buddy-road movie genre was something Reynolds helped pioneer and he and Winter wind up being an amusing odd couple, both eventually thawing out and seeing the good in each other as they learn a little about themselves. Adam Rifkin’s film is an unexpected delight, a charming excursion into the problems for a man faced with life after fame and it concludes on something Reynolds himself must have approved for what transpired to be his final screen role – his shit eating grin. Bravo. An audience will forgive a shitty second act if you wow them in Act Three  #MM2200

A League of Their Own (1992)

Every girl in this league is going to be a lady. In 1988 Dottie Hinson (Lynn Cartwright) is persuaded by her daughter to attend an event at the Baseball Hall of Fame commemorating the women’s league established during World War 2, when her husband had gone to fight and she was left looking after the farm with her younger sister. This prompts a flashback to the day a scout (Jon Lovitz)came calling and lured them into professional sport after candy bar mogul and Cubs owner Walter Harvey (Garry Marshall) decides to set up a new event with women athletes when the Major League games might be shut down for years. Dottie (Geena Davis) isn’t too keen despite being a great catcher.  But her younger sister and pitcher Kitty (Lori Petty) wants to make something of her life and they go together to try out at Harvey Field in Chicago and join a crew of other women doing something new:   a pair of New Yorkers, taxi dancer  ‘All the Way’ Mae Mordabito (Madonna) and her best friend, bouncer Doris Murphy (Rosie O’Donnell);  soft-spoken right fielder Evelyn Gardner (Bitty Schram); illiterate, shy left fielder Shirley Baker (Ann Cusack); pitcher/shortstop and former Miss Georgia beauty queen Ellen Sue Gotlander (Freddie Simpson); gentle left field/relief pitcher Betty “Spaghetti” Horn (Tracy Reiner); homely second baseman Marla Hooch (Megan Cavanagh), first baseman Helen Haley (Anne Ramsay); and Saskatchewan native Alice ‘Skeeter’ Gaspers (Renee Colman). They and eight others are selected to form the Rockford Peaches, coached by Jimmy Dugan (Tom Hanks) a former player and a drunk who wasted the last five years in a bottle and is only doing this for the money. But some of the women actually want to win even as their internal team rivalries threaten their potential … I have seen enough to know I have seen too much. What a great line! That’s one of the commentators on a high point of a game late in this marvellous film, which in its pitch (yes!) perfectly catches (yes, again!) the hopes, fears and achievements of the All- American Girls Professional Baseball League, a sporting institution established when the men went off to fight. From a story by Kelly Candaele and Kim Wilson, Lowell Ganz & Babaloo Mandel craft a screenplay that is characterful, witty, broad and specific, with each player given an arc to play beyond what’s on the field.  Davis is superb as the charismatic woman whose younger sister only sees a rival who has blocked her throughout her life and Hanks gives a perfect comic performance as the guy who finally touches base once again with his inner competitor when he needs to persuade others of their worth.  Moving and funny in turn, and a brilliant tribute to a little-known period in sport, this is a superb entertainment, proving director Penny Marshall’s hit with Big was no fluke. She was inspired to make this after seeing a 1987 documentary and she set the project in motion. What a gal. The credits sequence rounds it out with one of Madonna’s best songs (This Used to be My Playground) over a game with the older women and some inspiring photographs. Ladies, it’s been a thin slice of heaven

 

 

Miss Congeniality 2: Armed & Fabulous (2005)

I just don’t want to become FBI Barbie again. Gracie Hart (Sandra Bullock) is Amiable Agent according to the newspapers following her success at the Miss United States pageant but it fouls up her success in the middle of a bank heist. When her romance with a fellow agent ends she spends ten months being made over as the face of the FBI enduring book signings and teamed with bodyguard Sam Fuller (Regina King) who is far from impressed with her celebrity. The pair has to put aside their differences when one of Gracie’s former beauty queen pals, Cheryl Frasier (Heather Burns) is kidnapped with pageant MC Stan Fields (William Shatner) and the FBI is put on the case but Gracie decides this is one for her on her own.  Fuller has other ideas … The face of the FBI uses her words or her fists. Not a chair. And no snorting. Bullock returns a few weeks after becoming runner-up to Miss United States and she’s her old self, just dying to hit somebody except her fame is foiling her effectiveness on the job. Beauty queen rivalry is replaced with her violent new colleague Fuller, which sucks up the energy she used on her departed boyfriend now stationed in Miami. There are fun moments and a nice chase with a supposed Dolly Parton impersonator (with a nice cameo by you know who). Not as charming as its predecessor with more PC marks hit (gay, black, drag, kid, etc) but mildly entertaining. Bullock’s charm carries most of it and there are some good exchanges when she uses pageant clichés in highly inappropriate scenarios. King is good as the tough lady who beats up on anyone – even Regis Philbin and old people looking for Gracie’s autograph –  and it’s nice to see Treat Williams as the Vegas bureau chief and Eileen Brennan as Shatner’s mom but even in a comedy Enrique Marciano’s dimwit agent beggars belief. Great advertising for Vegas though! Written and produced by Marc Lawrence (based on characters by him, Caryn Lucas and Katie Ford) and directed by John Pasquin.  It’s been months since I had a good debriefing although I’m really more of a boxers man

 

 

The Straight Story (1999)

You don’t think about getting old when you’re young… you shouldn’t.  Retired farmer and widower in his 70s, WW2 veteran Alvin Straight (Richard Farnsworth) learns one day that his distant brother Lyle (Harry Dean Stanton) has suffered a stroke and may not recover. Alvin is determined to make things right with Lyle while he still can, but his brother lives in Wisconsin, while Alvin is stuck in Iowa with no car and no driver’s license because of his frailties. His intellectually disabled daughter Rose (Sissy Spacek) freaks out at the prospect of him taking off. Then he hits on the idea of making the trip on his old lawnmower, so beginning a picturesque and at times deeply spiritual odyssey across two states at a stately pace…  I can’t imagine anything good about being blind and lame at the same time but, still at my age I’ve seen about all that life has to dish out. I know to separate the wheat from the chaff, and let the small stuff fall away Written by director David Lynch’s collaborator and editor Mary Sweeney and John E. Roach, this is perhaps the most ironically straightforward entry in that filmmaker’s output.  He called it his most experimental movie and shot it chronologically along the route that the real Alvin took in 1994 (he died two years later). This is humane and simple, beautifully realised (DoP’d by Freddie Francis) with superb performances and a sympathetic score by Angelo Badalamenti. A lyrical tone poem to the American Midwest, the marvellous Farnsworth had terminal cancer during production and committed suicide the following year. His and Stanton’s scene is just swell, slow cinema at its apex.  The worst part of being old is rememberin’ when you was young

When Harry Met Sally (1989)

I want to propose a toast to Harry and Sally. If Marie or I had been remotely attracted to either of them we wouldn’t be here today.  In 1977, college graduates Harry Burns (Billy Crystal) and Sally Albright (Meg Ryan) share an acrimonious car ride from the University of Chicago to New York, during which they argue about whether men and women can ever truly be strictly platonic friends. Five years later they run into each other as they’re making their way in the world. They so dislike each other they don’t even acknowledge that they know each other. Five years after that, Harry and Sally meet again at a bookstore, and in the company of their respective best friends, Jess (Bruno Kirby) and Marie (Carrie Fisher), attempt to stay friends without sex becoming an issue between them. When Jess and Marie get together Harry and Sally become closerthanthis.   Over the next two years when they each experience breakups they’re the first person the other calls … I’ll have what she’s having. The film that sets the modern standard for romcom, this is hardly cookie cutter stuff, from the interviews with old married couples (kind of a poke at the ultra serious Reds), the meetings at traditional gatherings in others’ happy coupledom (a nod to Hannah and her Sisters), the gabfests with friends, the disquisitions on the impossibility of male-female friendship and the infamously faked orgasm in the deli. Harry meets Sally every so often and that’s the main narrative, at particular intervals with little extraneous action except these super-smart exchanges that bristle with wit. They spend years fighting each other and then they surrender to the inevitable and fall in love. The dialogue is priceless and the performances are classic. And it’s as simple as this:  if you’re a guy, you’re Harry. If you’re a gal, you’re Sally (alphabetized movie collections and all). Writer Nora Ephron and director Rob Reiner’s collaboration got it all so very right. As evergreen as the great American songs delivered by Messrs Sinatra and Connick.  I’m going to be forty. Some day!

The Third Man (1949)

Western pulp writer Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten) arrives in post-WW2 Vienna at the invitation of old schoolfriend Harry Lime (Orson Welles) only to find that he is just in time for his funeral. British military intelligence in the form of Major Calloway (Trevor Howard) makes his acquaintance while Holly believes there was a third man present at Harry’s mysterious death and he finds himself falling for Harry’s lover Anna (Alida Valli). There are some films whose imagery is practically enamelled in one’s brain and this is one of them, regularly voted the greatest British film ever (despite the crucial involvement of David O. Selznick) with its unforgettable score, the shimmering rain-slicked streets, the chase through the sewers, the treacherous manchild, the funeral, the theatre, the appalling talk at the British Council, the cuckoo clock speech, the Prater … A combination of spy thriller, spiv drama, film noir, character study, western, romance, this was an unusually brilliant collaboration between director Carol Reed and writer Graham Greene, whose friend Kim Philby was a source of much of the story. And this is ultimately a film about stories and storytelling. But nothing can explain this film’s legend – not even Orson Welles’ tall tales – it must be seen to feel that tangible atmosphere, those shadows, the light at the end of the tunnel, those canted angles, that amazing sense of place. My book on its complex origins, production and afterlife in radio and TV is published today on Amazon:  https://www.amazon.co.uk/Trouble-Harry-Third-Man-ebook/dp/B072BTQN48/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1494840986&sr=8-2&keywords=elaine+lennon.

Everyone Says I Love You (1996)

Woody Allen’s musical comedy is a delightful collage of Thirties movie genres – romance, screwball, ghost, crime, all told by the daughter DJ (Natasha Lyonne) of perpetually unlucky in love writer Joe (Allen) and his ex-wife Steffi (Goldie Hawn), who now lives in Upper East Side splendour with liberal lawyer Alan Alda, his engaged daughter Skylar (Drew Barrymore) and their right-wing son Scott (Lukas Haas) and 14 year old twins (Natalie Portman and Gaby Hoffman),  plus his ancient dad whose Alzheimer’s means he has to be supervised by their wicked Bavarian housekeeper. They have posh people problems ie none at all and when DJ pushes her father into a relationship with an unhappily married art historian patient Von (Julia Roberts) of her friend’s mother, a psychoanalyst, we get to see the sights in Venice where Joe affects a knowledge of Tintoretto to get into her good books. Everyone gets to sing (whether they can or not), there’s a dance routine in a maternity ward, a robbery involving one of Steffi’s pet criminals who breaks up Skylar’s relationship with Edward Norton, and it all culminates in a Duck Soup ball in Paris on Christmas Eve with Steffi and Joe recreating their romance from many years ago with a high-wire romantic dance by the Seine. Simply wonderful, nutty fun with a to-die-for soundtrack put together by Dick Hyman.

Love and Death (1975)

I fell over laughing when I first saw this on TV aged about 13 so I thought it was time to revisit and see if it holds up. With a screenplay by Allen, Donald Ogden Stewart and Mildred Cram you’d have a high expectation of this satire of Russian literature and the Napoleonic war being extremely funny and it is! Cram was a very popular short story writer and got the Academy Award for the perenially popular Love Affair (1939) which most of us know better from its modern iteration, Sleepless in Seattle. DOS of course was a famous humorist and wit, a member of the Algonquin Round Table and had a slew of movie credits to his name. He is immortalised as Bill Gorton in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. A member of the Anti-Nazi League prior to WW2, he was nailed by HUAC and had to abandon the US for the UK. Let’s just say he was a lot funnier than any of the censorious goons who hounded him out. Allen? He takes the concept of Monsieur Beaucaire and puts himself in the Bob Hope role, a coward running through swathes of Tolstoy with a disrespectful pitchfork in pursuit of real-life lady love Diane Keaton, playing the helpless trampy cousin he adores, and it’s an amuse-bouche for Annie Hall, that other devoted homage to anti-heroic schmuckery, sex and all-round meaninglessness in the face of egotistical slaughter. This is the film that birthed the exchange, Sex without love is an empty experience/As empty experiences go, it’s one of the best:  not necessarily what you’d expect in a piss-take of War and Peace. Supremely silly with screamingly witty lines and an abundance of hilarious sight gags – even the bloody battlefield scenes are a hoot. Gotta go watch it again and pretend I’m still 13. With Harold Gould, Olga Georges-Picot, Jessica Harper, and Death.