We saw a lot of movies this weekend. It seemed like Sam Elliott was in most of them, but it was only a couple.
First, we watched an oddball film called The Age of Adaline. It stars Blake Lively as a woman who has an accident in her late twenties that mysteriously causes her to stop aging. She has a daughter who catches up to her and surpasses her in apparent age, and she comes to the attention of some government agencies who want to study her, so she has to go off the radar, switching identities every decade or so. When she’s about 107, she meets and falls in love with a man (Treme’s Michael Huisman) but she knows that, like all the other times she’s gotten involved, it must end because, as with Doctor Who, the other person will grow old and die while she remains the same. Then she meets the man’s father (Harrison Ford) and all manner of mayhem breaks out. It’s a cute movie. The stentorian narrator is a bit of a buzz kill, but Lively (who I’ve never seen in a movie before) is good and Harrison Ford is great.
We went retro on Saturday night and watched a couple of films from the early 1980s: Heavy Metal and The Wall. Here’s the thing: I’d never seen either of them before. I couldn’t have told you what Heavy Metal was about to save my soul, and I was under the impression that The Wall was mostly animated, that’s how little I knew about them. Heavy Metal hasn’t aged well. It was clearly targeted at teenage boys, who probably don’t care that the film doesn’t make a lick of sense whatsoever. At least it was short. The Wall, however, was worthwhile seeing, even thirty years after its release. It was a lot different than I expected. I think Geldof says about 15 words in total in the film, other than what he sings. The film does a fine job of amplifying on the album’s story and themes, and it’s clear that losing his father in WWII had a lasting impact on Roger Waters. The animation, when it happens, looks decent for its era. The marching hammers (about the only impression I had of what the film was like) still look cool.
Then we watched Mystic River because we inherited a copy of the DVD. Still an impressive film, one that I saw on the big screen when it came out. It has Marcia Gay Harden in it—I got to spend some time with her on the set of The Mist. That wouldn’t be the last time we saw her this weekend, either.
On Sunday we saw A Walk in the Woods, starring Robert Redford and Nick Nolte, based on the memoir by Bill Bryson, which I read many years ago. We didn’t even see the trailer. Redford and Nolte sold us on it, and we later discovered that it also has Emma Thompson and Mary Steenburgen. It’s about a guy (Redford is quite a bit older than Bryson was in the memoir, I believe) who decides to walk the Appalachian Trail, which spans a distance of over 2100 miles from Georgia to Maine. His wife (Thompson) thinks he’s crazy and forbids him to go unless he can find someone to go with him. His friends all think he’s nuts, too, until his old friend (Nolte) hears about the adventure from another friend and volunteers to go with him. Nolte’s character is a recovering alcoholic with two bad knees and incipient diabetes, but he’s better than nothing. In fact, the two men are polar opposites and haven’t spoken in years. The movie is a milder version of the Reese Witherspoon movie Wild. The two men get up to some hijinx and have some funny encounters (one with an annoying no-it-all hiker, another with a couple of grizzly bears, and the funniest of all with the husband of a woman Nolte tries to charm at a laundromat). They have some minor crises but for the most part it’s just fun to watch the two together, and Nolte hasn’t been this laugh-out-loud funny in a long time. He enters the movie looking not too different from that famous mug shot from a number of years ago and you’d think two months on the trail would slim him down a little more than it did, but we enjoyed the heck out of the film.
Then we saw I’ll See You In My Dreams, which stars Blythe Danner (apparently in her first starring role in a feature), Rhea Perlman, Max Gail (from Barney Miller) and Sam Elliott. Danner plays a woman who has been a widow for decades. She has a group of women friends her age that she spends time with. Her dog dies early in the film, which is sort of a catalyst for change. She meets Sam Elliott, a suave and debonair guy who has decided to spend all his money before he dies. She has an adult daughter who drops by for a visit. She goes karaoke singing with the pool guy. Dope is smoked. It’s just a nice film about growing older and deciding to entertain the possibility of one’s life having a second or third act.
Finally, last night we saw Grandma, starring Lily Tomlin, and it was the best of the bunch. Ellie’s (Tomlin) teenage granddaughter Sage (Julia Garner from The Americans) needs $650 by the end of the day for an abortion and Ellie has no money so she has to go around visiting people from her past to try to raise the dough. She’s just broken up with her recent lover (Judy Greer, cute as always). She’d had a 38-year relationship with a woman called Violet, who is only referenced but never seen, but she’d also knocked boots with Sam Elliott (hey, there he is again) a long time ago. He’s not nearly as nice a guy in this movie, but it’s still fun to watch and listen to him. Sage’s mother is Marcia Gay Harden (her again!) and eventually they have to go visit her and put up with her disapproval. Along the way we run into Elizabeth Pena (in her last role) and a hilarious John Cho and we piece together all the parts of Ellie’s life. The morality of abortion isn’t a big part of the film (the only person who actively tries to talk Sage out of it is a protester at a clinic) but Ellie knows the lasting impact the procedure will have on Sage, so it isn’t dismissed out of hand, either. Lily Tomlin has rarely been more charming, saltier, tougher or funnier, and she’s all these things and more. Garner keeps pace with her, too. This is a small movie, shot in 19 days for a $1 million budget, but it should be a big hit for Tomlin. Go see it: you won’t be sorry.
