Magic Mike (***)

Steven Soderbergh has made dull movies, but never cheesy ones, and his drama about male strippers isn’t either. His star, Channing Tatum, may have gotten his big break in a dance movie, but this is a step up from Step Up, whose story was mostly a prelude to a big dance off. In fact, for those looking for something entirely fluffy with some male eye candy, this may not be not even be cheesy enough.

The eye candy is there, of course. Besides Tatum, the major characters include the head cheese and master of ceremonies at the Tampa establishment, Matthew McConaughey, in a showy, tailor-made role, and “the Kid” (Alex Pettyfer), a new recruit that Tatum’s character takes under his wing. The Kid has a sister (Cody Horn). You can tell she’ll be a love interest because she wears a scowl, is smart, and doesn’t have casual sex like the other characters. The stripping scenes are there, too—no full monty, though—and they’re kind of funny, with different themes.

Soderbergh depicts Mike’s world as not really glamorous (odd, dark lighting effects contribute), perhaps a bit sleazy (with casual sex and drug use), but in most ways just another workplace in post-recession Florida. Mike (Tatum) has a couple of jobs and is saving his money. He’s kind of a stripper with a heart of gold, facing the usual fork in the road. He’s a believable character, maybe too realistic for those seeking fantasy. The crucial scenes that establish the rapport between Mike and the Kid’s sister really work, though, and the stripping stuff seems realistic enough, other than the absence of any gay men either among the strippers or in the audience. (No black folks either.) The realism might be explained by the fact that Tatum’s real-life experiences in the business were a basis for the screenplay (credited to Reid Carolin, whose prior credit was a documentary about the Rwandan genocide). In any case, the premise alone might draw a certain crowd, but the actual product is a little better than it needs to be.
 

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viewed 7/12/12 7:30 at Roxy and reviewed 7/13/12 and 7/17/12 and 7/18/12

Boynton Beach Club (***)

? A group of Florida sixtysomethings unite around a bereavement group and find new partners. The gentle comedy by director Susan Seidelman (Desperately Seeking Susan) — whose own mom gets a story credit — provides a trio of famous 1970s actresses (Dyan Cannon, Sally Kellerman, Brenda Vaccaro) with good roles, and the male leads (Joseph Bologna, Len Cariou, Michael Nouri) are also semi-familiar faces.

+ Happily, the script not only avoids making the characters into drooling corpses but also avoids making them into teenagers with wrinkles. Nobody listens to hip hop (or even rock), nobody has a pierced tongue, and nobody has a potty mouth that’s supposed to be cute. The characters each felt real. Being essentially a romantic comedy, the movie de-emphasizes the negative aspects of aging (such as health issues), but it does examine the insecurity that can come with being intimate with a new person after so many years.

- The humor is benign, and the character arcs have the usual predictability. The “crises” that develop in the new romances are mild indeed. Some people will probably object that the group portrayed is a rather homogenous group of upper-middle-class types, but that’s true of so many Hollywood romantic comedies that it’s hard to single this out.

= *** There’s nothing new except that everyone’s old, but that alone is enough of a novelty. And remember, the movie’s cheaper if you catch the early-bird special.

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Hoot (***)

A faithful, modestly likeable version of Carl Hiassen’s teen novel about a Florida kid who stumbles his way into some activism of behalf of endangered owls.

“Tween” novels don’t get made into movies that often (Holes is one that comes to mind), so this faithful adaptation of Carl Hiassen’s 2002 tale is welcome. Roy Eberhardt, the hero of the tale, is the new kid in the town of Coconut Cove, Florida. In short order he’s become the target of the school bully, pissed off a girl called Beatrice the Bear, and gotten hit on the head by a golf ball after chasing a barefoot kid. In another subplot, a local cop (Luke Wilson) is trying to figure out the source of some petty vandalism at a construction site. Turns out it all has to do with a pancake house and some owls competing for the same slice of real estate. The Florida in this movie isn’t the one of Disney World or CSI: Miami, but the quainter version found in Hiassen’s novels and the songs of Jimmy Buffet. Not surprisingly, Buffet, one of the film’s producers, provides much of the soundtrack and plays a science teacher. I wouldn’t have minded a little more of the whimsy of Hiassen’s adult novels; unlike those, Hoot gets less quirky as things progress, settling eventually into a straight pro-environment, teen-empowerment mode. Adults may find the corporate villain one-dimensional as well. Almost all of it is straight out of the book. Perhaps dismayed by the reception afforded the only other film made from one of his novels (Striptease), Hiassen wrote the script himself. There are more original films, but by virtue of likable characters and having no competition at all, Hoot is the junior-high semi-comedy of 2006 (so far).

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posted 8/20/13

In Her Shoes (***1/2)

In Her Shoes, based on the semi-comic novel by Philadelphia writer Jennifer Weiner, is fortunate to have a screenplay from Susannah Grant (Erin Brokovich) and direction by Curtis Hanson, whose adaptation of Michael Chabon’s Wonder Boys is one of the better character-driven literary adaptations of recent years. The story is a tale of two Jewish sisters. Rose (Toni Collette), the lawyer, is the brainy achiever, while Maggie (Cameron Diaz) is the pretty, irresponsible one. A long-lost grandmother (Shirley MacLaine), living in a Florida retirement community, indirectly brings them closer together. That may sound trite, but it never feels that way because the characters never seem like types. This is also true of the supporting characters. It’s nice to see the old people portrayed as neither feeble drones nor unconvincingly “hip” grannies. In Her Shoes, which has some nice shots of Philly, isn’t only about sibling rivalry but about being comfortable with who you are and figuring out what you want. Both Collette and Diaz are excellently cast. (As she did for her breakout role in Muriel’s Wedding, Collette gained weight to play the role.) I was impressed by the way Grant retains the essence of Weiner’s story (and often more, right down to a reference to the Pepper Hamilton law firm that gets repeated) while tightening up the plot. In a few cases, I thought Grant improved upon the novel by mildly altering a couple things I found corny or fanciful.

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reviewed 10/3/05