movies
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And So It Goes ★
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re you sitting down? I’m about to coin a new phrase, and I wouldn’t want to knock you over with its culturally observant pithiness. Ready? Wrinkle porn. That’s the classification I’m going to use from now on for the increasingly common phenomenon of crappy films distinguished solely by the fact that their casts are on the far side of 60. It’s true, of course, that Hollywood is obsessed with youth. Everyone makes movies for 15-year-olds. Almost nobody makes them for the Social Security set. But, sensing a market ripe for the tapping, studios have recently begun testing the waters with product for older audiences. This should be good news. The problem is that, to date, they haven’t so much tested the waters as dumped toxic waste into them. The attitude seems to be This is an audience starved for material it can relate to. It’ll show up in droves for anything about life after AARP. Quality is not a requirement. The trend may look like progress, but it’s actually pandering of the most cynical variety. If you need proof, just try sitting through Darling Companion (2012), Quartet (2012), Trouble With the Curve (2012) or Last Vegas
(2013). Truly, this is no country for old moviegoers. Onto that geriatric junk pile we now toss And So It Goes, an insipid schmaltzfest whose shocking awfulness is all the more shocking for being the work of Rob Reiner. What gives? For years the director could do no wrong. This Is Spinal Tap, Stand by Me, The Princess Bride, When Harry Met Sally…, Misery, A Few Good Men — classic after classic in a mind-blowing, 10-year run. Then, in 1994, things went south with North, and the filmmaker hasn’t been able to pull out of that creative death spiral since. Have you even heard of 2010’s Flipped? Doubtful, as it grossed less than $2 million. That’s this close to going straight to video. The prospects look equally bleak for Reiner’s latest, which stars Michael Douglas as a cranky real estate tycoon and Diane Keaton as the world’s least believable lounge singer. They meet when Douglas moves into a lakefront complex while awaiting the sale of his estate. Naturally, she lives next door. Because these two are the only ones who don’t realize immediately that they were created for the sole purpose of falling in unlikely love, fate provides a ham-fisted nudge. This is the kind of movie in which a character’s son
AN AFFAIR TO FORGET Keaton and Douglas assist the formerly infallible
filmmaker in hitting a new low. YOUR SCAN THIS PAGE TEXT WITH LAYAR SEE PAGE 5 a reformed addict, showsHERE away, (Scott Shepherd),
up, announces he’s about to begin serving a prison sentence, and asks his grinch of a dad to look after his 10-year-old daughter (Sterling Jerins). It’s the kind of movie in which “Heroin’s an ugly drug, but it gave me a beautiful girl” is not a punch line. The tyke adopts Keaton as her new “grandma” and moves in. This development, first, means Keaton can now play Grammy Hall when Woody Allen’s immortal comedy is inevitably remade; and, second, it provides the impetus for Douglas to drop by, bond with the new women in his life and, little by little, become less of a dick. All of which a cataract patient could see coming a mile
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and none of which is originality or wit. The direction is phoned in and the dialogue is inane (what’s with the nonstop penis jokes?), while the film’s performances occupy a category of embarrassment all their own. Douglas flails in search of a credible comic tone, and Keaton doesn’t really play a character so much as wear a succession of signature getups. You know the type. This is wrinkle porn at its most synthetic and lazy. All involved are at the fake, cheesy, brain-dead bottom of their game. And so it blows. RI C K KI S O N AK
REVIEWS
Lucy ★★★
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ucy is a silly science-fiction flick built on a concept disclaimed by actual scientists and, had it lasted much longer than 90 minutes, it might have become a drag. But writer-director Luc Besson is an expert at hitting the audience’s sweet spot, and the film goes by in such a blur of eye and brain candy that its emptiness doesn’t sink in until we head for the exits. If Besson has crafted a less memorable twist on The Matrix, Lucy is also, for what it’s worth, a far less self-important film. Its philosophical pretensions are impossible to take seriously in tandem with its cartoonish action, and that’s part of its charm. The filmmaker sets up his premise like an attention-deficient kid playing with action figures while console gaming and surfing Wikipedia. In the tone-setting first scene, the action figures in question are Lucy (Scarlett Johansson), a student living in Taipei, and her loutish boyfriend (Pilou Asbaek). As he tries to badger her into delivering a mysterious briefcase to an equally mysterious Korean businessman (Min-sik Choi of Oldboy), Besson repeatedly cuts away to illustrative metaphors: A mouse sniffs a trap; a big cat stalks its prey. The director seems to want these interpellations to convey the scene’s universal resonance, rather like the prologue to 2001:
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GET SMART Johansson learns to use 100 percent of her brain in a film that may require only about 30 percent of yours.
A Space Odyssey or that trippy creation sequence in The Tree of Life. But they play more like a commentary on genre-movie conventions that are so familiar, they might as well be encoded in our DNA. Happily, Lucy doesn’t take long to veer off the rails. Predictably, the briefcase turns out to be as dangerous as the businessman, and soon the chemical contents of the former are inside Lucy, transforming her from a terrified victim to, well … Scarlett Johansson. At this point, Besson cuts away once again, to a neuroscientist (Morgan Freeman)
expounding uncritically to a crowd on the notion that human beings could access unimaginable powers if we started using more than 10 percent of our brains. Thanks to the experimental drug in her system, we learn, Lucy is now functioning at about 20 percent brainpower. She’s already tossing strong men across the room, and she’s getting smarter by the second. At this point, the audience has every reason to expect Lucy to spend the rest of the film using her superpowers to kick bad-guy butt. But Besson isn’t interested in remaking
his La Femme Nikita with a science-y twist. He has something far more ambitious (and ridiculous) in mind; something that involves melting the film’s reality into a psychedelic pixel-blizzard while Freeman’s character intones things like “Time is the unity.” This is your brain on pseudo-scientific mysticism, functioning at 100 percent. In the past year, we’ve seen (or heard) Johansson play a superheroine, a computer operating system discovering its soul and an alien trapped in a human body. All these experiences no doubt prepared her to embody a woman whose cerebral makeover lifts her off the plane of recognizable human emotions and physicality, and she does so with maximum plausibility (a relative term here) and minimum fuss. Toward the film’s end, there’s something poignant about Lucy’s isolation — unlike Samantha in Her, she can’t find 641 peers to fall in love with, or even one. But Besson doesn’t seem too interested in exploring Lucy as a character. Terrified of losing our attention, he keeps the actionmovie business swirling around her long past the point where it has much impact or makes much sense. The filmmaker may think he’s encouraging us to run our brains at 100 percent (which, by the way, we already do every single day), but Lucy is a lot more enjoyable with your critical-thinking faculties offline. MARGO T HARRI S O N