Cafe Society

**Spoiler Alert**

Director: Woody Allen/Starring: Jesse Eisenberg, Kristen Stewart, Steve Carell, Blake Lively, Corey Stoll, Sari Lennick, Ken Stott, Parker Posey and Jeannie Berlin

These days, I'm always prepared to write Woody off, particularly after his last two forgettable efforts; Magic in the Moonlight and Irrational Man. But with Woody, consigning him to oblivion is always a mistake, for he can still surprise, as with Blue Jasmine. I'm happy to say he has done so again with Cafe Society; his new story about ideal love and its emotional pitfalls. Though some scenes and plot points resemble moments from his cinematic past, he shows he can still write terrific dialogue and give his characters dimension and depth. In his latest, we see his characteristic charm, wit and his romantic pessimism about love but also present is his irrepressible romanticism, particularly for the city he loves most. Cafe Society is fun, funny and is irresistibly charming.

Set in 1930s', Woody narrates his own story about a young man; Bobby Dorfman (Jesse Eisenberg), who leaves Brooklyn for the sunny coast of southern California. Hoping to find a job with his wildly successful Uncle; Phil Stern (a terrific Steve Carell) in his casting agency, he stakes out temporary digs in a hotel and waits for a meeting. Lonely and hungry for female companionship, Bobby arranges for a call girl to visit his hotel room, but finds he is her very first customer. The failed encounter yields funny results.

In another scene, we see Phil hosting a swank Hollywood party in his home. Sitting poolside, Phil talks with all manner of movie industry people, dropping names of stars in nearly all his conversations.

As the story moves forward, Woody's narration remains steady, embellishing the story and providing insightful comments about the characters. We meet others, like Bobby's older brother Ben (excellent Corey Stoll), whose life in organized crime troubles his mother Rose (Jeannie Berlin). Though Rose's relationship with her husband Marty (Ken Stott) is contentious; their arguments contain some of the film's funniest lines. Another character is Bobby and Ben's sister, Evelyn (Sari Lennick), who stays in touch with her little brother via letters, which, when read; provide the film supplementary narration.

Bobby is finally granted a few minutes with his Uncle and after a what-are-you-doing-out-here probing overture, he explains his want of a change of scenery and a job in the agency. Although Phil initially mentions the mail-room, he suggests Bobby run errands for him. He then introduces Bobby to one of his secretaries; an lovely young woman named Veronica (a luminous Kristen Stewart, made more so by soft focus), or Vonnie. As Vonnie shows Bobby around, sparks crackle and glow between them. Before long, Vonnie and Bobby enjoy lunches and drinks together until one day he feels confident enough to ask her out. She tells him she is seeing someone but enjoys his friendship, which continues in spite of his rejection. Bobby (and we) learn Vonnie is one of the many young women who migrated to Tinseltown hoping to make it in the movies before becoming disillusioned.
The conversations between Vonnie and Bobby are often magical. Woody shows he can still craft intelligent dialogue that is also pleasing to the ear. Some of the best moments in the film are Bobby and Vonnie's tete a tetes.

In time, Bobby finds himself meeting his Uncle's big name associates, who bandy the names of stars and starlets about, which becomes a source of annoyance to both he and Vonnie. But life in Hollywood has a way of working on those most resistant to its charms. Vonnie herself shares an anecdote about Samuel Goldwyn and his peculiar voice.

The visuals in the Hollywood party scenes are particularly intriguing. In nearly every scene featuring an industry soiree, we see the guests dressed uniformly in khaki-color clothes. Woody's cinematographer; the famed Vittorio Storaro, casts everything in soft, golden light, as if to compete with the soft hues of khaki. The effect leaves us with something fairy-talish; a heady foray into the unreal.
Hollywood's seductive but shallow charms begin to wear on Bobby. He finds the beautiful women, stars and the lush mansions to be a fascinating curiosity but they eventually lose their charm. He begins to miss New York. Before long, he plans his return home. But complicating his idea is his relationship with Vonnie, which takes a dramatic leap from the platonic to romantic. In love and happy, Bobby plans for their marriage and their move to New York, where his brother Ben has offered him a job running his nightclub. But before Bobby's plans are consummated, the plot takes a startling twist when Bobby discovers the man Vonnie has been seeing is none other than Phil, who plans to leave his wife for her. Phil later tells her he is unable to walk away from his 25-year marriage, only to experience yet another change of heart. The situation becomes stickier when Phil and Bobby become aware of the other's interest in Vonnie. Faced with a painful decision, Vonnie chooses Phil, leaving Bobby to return to New York, alone and crestfallen.

Bobby's east-coast homecoming serves as a transition to Part II, as he leaves his Los Angeles experiences behind for his brother's nightclub, which he helps christen The Cafe Society. Bobby becomes popular with the nightclub set, which is a colorful mix of the city's upper crust society and members of New York's active social scene. Excelling at his job and taking to the club's giddy atmosphere, Bobby is able to put Los Angeles behind him.

One evening, he meets a beautiful blonde, whose name also happens to be Veronica (Blake Lively, who was kicking shark butt the last time we saw her onscreen). I found this contrivance to be a little too convenient but oh well. The two quickly fall in love, which leads to a happy courtship and marriage; helped along with a surprise pregnancy.

Of course Woody won't let us forget Vonnie, who happens to drop back into his life one evening when she and Phil appear at the nightclub. The scene where Bobby stands before their table; staring dumbstruck at Vonnie, may remind one of the scene in Crimes and Misdemeanors where Woody's character happens upon Mia Farrow's at a wedding where she is embraced by his rival. Dismayed at seeing Phil and Vonnie together, Bobby reluctantly sits down to chat but excuses himself after she tries to regale the table with a long-winded, gossipy Hollywood story; the type he and she once loathed. It isn't long before the two meet for coffee, which reawakens their latent love for one another. One knows how it will play out if one has seen enough Woody Allen films. The key word is melancholy.
A significant subplot unfolds; involving Ben and his violent, criminal past, which has a grim but almost inevitable outcome.

Woody manages his multi-character story with aplomb and like his best work, makes us care about them. He has helped create one of the movie industry's emerging great couples in Jesse Eisenberg and Kristen Stewart, whose onscreen romance marks their third together. How and why such an offbeat pairing works so well can be chalked up to the mysteries of chemistry but they are magical together; particularly in a scene where the two share an intimate moment on a Central Park bridge; the skyline a romantic tableau. Woody's other characters are wonderful, particularly Corey Stoll as Bobby's thuggish brother and Jeannie Berlin, who is quite amusing as Bobby's mother.

Woody still has it. He is still capable of making good films. Everything that characterizes his best films is conspicuous here. Terrific camera work, beautiful cinematography and brilliant performances. Let's not forget witty dialogue and great lines. My favorite: live every day as if it were the last and one day it will be true.

Cafe Society isn't a Woody masterpiece but it redeems his last two efforts and it is done well. It might not set the world of cinema alight but it is a mild intoxicant. In summers, bad Hollywood is the occupying force, but films like Woody's always come along to give us respite from the drek. Let's hope he has more of these films in his bag.

The Shallows

**Spoiler Alert**

Director: Jaume Collet-Serra/Starring: Blake Lively, Brett Cullen, Oscar Jaenada and Sedona Legge

Director Jaume Collet-Serra's track record has been less than inspiring the last decade. With several Liam Neeson action films (groan) and a mediocre horror film (Orphan) in his resume, you'd might expect his next directorial effort to be more of the same. But with his new film The Shallows, we enjoy a respite from his characteristic clunkers to have a bit of fun. Don't mistake my post for a gushing rave. Though his film defied my low expectations, it is very much like its title. It is shallow, often silly and its characters have fewer dimensions than the savage shark who menaces the heroine therein. But if you relax your mind and set your thought controls to cruise, you'll find the movie to be an enjoyable trifle.

Blake Lively (needing desperately to atone for Age of Adaline), plays Nancy; a young woman in her mid-twenties on holiday in Mexico. Her surfing getaway has a purpose, for she hopes to find the remote, inaccessible-to-tourists beach her mother once visited. The film tells us Nancy's backstory efficiently and economically with her brief phone call to her father (Brett Cullen), who asks why she is surfing when she should be in medical school. We also learn of her mother in a series of iPhone photos she looks upon wistfully. One picture shows her mother in her carefree youth, the next with a head-covering, which clues us into her cancerous demise. So we know Nancy's journey to the beach is a sort of pilgrimage which imparts a sentimental dimension to her vacation and the film.

The backstory behind us, the story forges ahead. Why does Nancy's guide Carlos (Oscar Jaenada) offer ominous advice about surfing the beach when she asks its name? He doesn't divulge it but drives off in his jeep, leaving Nancy to her surfing.

Collet-Serra takes time to show us blue waters and the thrills of surfing as Nancy and two young Mexican men hit the waves. The men are amiable and nonthreatening as they leave Nancy to herself though she ignores their advice about quitting at the end of the day.

Floating about on her surfboard, Nancy begins to sense something isn't right. Of course we know what's coming when she is attacked by a Great White shark, which bites into her thigh. Terror-stricken and bleeding, Nancy manages to swim to safety, which happens to be on the floating carcass of a whale. Her medical training comes in handy when she tends to bleeding leg. She manages a crude suture (the squeamish can turn their heads), then shreds part of her wet suit to slip over her injured leg, which tests her capacity for pain.

But her safety proves to be ephemeral, for the angry shark--yes, he's angry--begins ramming the whale's dead body, causing Nancy to fall into the water. Desperate, she manages to swim to a rock outcropping, which she barely reaches. Knowing her safety on the rock is guaranteed until high-tide, Nancy is aware her next perilous swim may be for a relatively distant buoy. Nancy rests on the rock while keeping tabs on the shark fin that pokes menacingly from the water's surface. Her only company is a wounded seagull whose wing is dislocated.

No need to go further into narrative detail for the story plays out the way one would expect a battle between a sexy blonde star and a Great White might. A few people get munched trying to help Nancy and a few failed attempts at hailing a passing ship leave her at the mercy of the vindictive shark. Incidentally, Nancy eventually learns why the shark is so pissed--apparently he suffers the wound inflicted upon him by someone or something and is out to even the score. I guess the shark has a backstory too.

The fact that the film had a screenwriter shocked me. Someone had to write this? You mean they didn't make this up as they went along? All you need is the premise: blonde, American babe squares off against killer shark during a surf excursion. The rest writes itself, que no?

Nevertheless, the movie is still fun. Lively manages to express excruciating pain and fear quite well and of course looks amazing doing it in her alluring bikini. The shark looks quite real and convincingly vengeful.

Just as The Exorcist is a film many horror flicks must pay a toll to, Jaws is the shark thriller to which others of this sub-genre must genuflect before. Though Collet-Serra understands its mythic stature, he mostly ignores it. You have to respect his artistic impertinence.

The film has its logical slips; Nancy doesn't seem to be troubled by a lack of potable water and one may wonder why the shark doesn't feast on a whale carcass instead of a bikini blonde. Some other minor puzzlers come to mind but who cares, who needs fidelity to reality when Blake Lively and a Great White are locked in inter-species combat?

I walked out of The Shallows feeling quite satisfied and hardly duped. It doesn't pretend to offer anymore than what it does: surfing, a surfing babe, vicious shark and minimal gore. For a June afternoon at the multiplex, more would be criminal.

The Age of Adaline

**Spoiler Alert**

Director: Lee Toland Krieger/Starring: Blake Lively, Harrison Ford, Ellen Burstyn, Kathy Baker and Michael Huisman

Every time I saw the trailer for Lee Toland Krieger's film, I would change the title in my head to The Age of Asinine. After seeing The Age of Adaline, I feel my title would have been more appropriate. And it is one of those films that gets dumber in recollection. I'm not sure what story screenwriters J. Mills Goodloe and Salvador Paskowitz had in their heads when they penned this travesty but if what plays onscreen is an accurate reflection of their artistic intent, we know who to blame.

Krieger's film doesn't have the whimsy and playfulness of his comedy Celeste and Jessie Forever, which is too bad because how he and the screenwriters could tell such a gimmicky, earnest story without a wink or a smirk is beyond me.

And the story is Gimmicky (that's right, a capital G is in order). A woman named Adaline Bowman (Blake not-so Lively); born in early 20th century America, nearly dies in a car accident when she is flung from her vehicle. She becomes submerged in water, unconscious. The god-like narration explains in minute, scientific detail just how she not only manages to survive, but also how her body stops aging. Of course this phenomenon is accomplished with a lightning bolt and some processes that are explained with technical mumbo jumbo.

Though the story is set in 2015, much of the story takes place in Adaline's past as we see how this extraordinary phenomenon affects her life. Though the idea of immortality may be appealing to many, Adaline finds arrested aging comes with much unpleasantness.

Her condition makes it necessary for her to avoid relationships, for obvious reasons, which means her life must also be secretive and lived itinerantly, lest her peculiarity be discovered. Her quest to live anonymously is borne of her fear of becoming a laboratory specimen.

The lone keeper of her secret is her daughter Flemming (the elder version played by Ellen Burstyn, who does penance in this film); now a silver-haired senior who has lived the normal life denied her mother. Their easy rapport tells us they've both accepted the strangeness. Other than being her mom's elder, Flemming doesn't seem to factor in to the story very much. And poor Burstyn; she has to utter awful lines like "You'll always be my momma."

But Adaline has other problems. A youngish stud named Ellis Jones (Michael Huisman), a man who earned his wealth as a college student when he invented an algorithm that had economic applications, falls in love with her. Though she rebuffs him, for very practical reasons, he is persistent and before long, she falls for him against her better judgement.

We see, via flashbacks, how she once fell in love with an American man during an English sojourn in the early 70s'. Later, after the relationship gained momentum, we see her in a cab, en route to her lover, who sits on a park bench with an engagement ring in his hands. She tells the cab driver to motor on; thus abandoning another love; sparing he and herself heartbreak. This moment in her life will figure prominently later in the story.

The film reaches a climax during a Jones family weekend get-together when Adaline meets Ellis' parents. His father William (Harrison Ford) and Adaline are dumbstruck when they meet. It turns out (one might have seen this coming earlier in the story) William is the man Adaline left waiting on the park bench. William, stupefied, tells Adaline she bears an uncanny resemblance to a woman he was once close to named Adaline Bowman. Adaline has the presence of mind to explain she is the daughter of the woman and mentions, to William's sorrow, that her mother passed away, years before. The ruse seems to work, though Adaline's presence stirs William to distraction, which causes his wife Kathy (Kathy Baker) great anxiety as she becomes suspicious of her husband's past.

But during the weekend, William catches sight of a scar on Adaline's hand, which he remembers from an accident in the past. The shocking realization prompts a confrontation with William then her flight from the Jones home, which leaves Ellis in despair. And during her escape from the Jones' home, she--wouldn't you know it--gets into an accident. And what do you think happens? Ellis arrives in hot pursuit, hoping to rescue and reclaim his love. During this scene, the annoying, omniscient narrator returns to describe in detail--once again--the miraculous chain of events that follow. I'll leave the rest to you to suss out.

If this all sounds like fascinating material for a great movie, trust me, there is less here than meets your heavy eye-lids.

Among the film's legion of shortcomings is Adaline herself. For a 107 year-old woman in a twenty-something's body, her life is stubbornly ordinary and it leaves one wondering why eternal youth would be wasted on someone so vapid. Yes, we see she can kick butt at Trivial Pursuit during the Jones family weekend and has exceptional powers of perception but so what? What else is there? Other than being unable to have normal relationships, what does her condition mean to her? To her daughter? Might there be advantages in being a hundred year-old twenty-something? Sure, it would be a hassle to have to change one's identity every so often but would it be such a drag to be perpetually in one's sexual prime? The film doesn't have the imagination to explore any idea the premise might engender. Harold Ramis' Groundhog Day shows us what it might be like to live one day over and over again in a very inventive and clever way. I wish The Age of Adeline had one second of that film's wit and whimsy.

I found little things vexing too. The fact that William gave up medicine to become an astronomer is a big deal in the story, as is his discovery of a comet. So why does Ellis have a book on astrology in his bedroom? Wouldn't the son of an astronomer know the difference between his father's field of study and a pseudo-science? What's that about? I realize it's a trifle, but it seemed glaring to me.

Blake Lively's performance is one of the film's major handicaps. She doesn't explore her character or go deeper than looking pretty. Maybe the script called for an incurious bombshell who kicks butt in board games? I also found her voice to be quite odd. She sounded somewhat stiff, as we sometimes hear when British actors or actresses affect an American accent. This might be a first in American cinema; an American actress putting on an American accent.

I felt sorriest for Ellen Burstyn. An actress with her talent and exceptional career playing second banana to an underwhelming, blonde yo-yo like Lively must feel like a career low, I'm sure.

So what do we learn from Adaline and her situation? Not much. Nor did I come away moved from the flick in any way. Makes sense, nothing seems to move her much either, other than a garage that was formerly a movie theater back in her day. The canopy of stars that once graced the ceiling is shown to still be intact, which she proudly shows Ellis on a date. Oh, I almost forgot, she also loves her dog. Geez, I don't think I can handle all her layers.

Wait a second; there is one lesson to be learned from Adaline's experiences: take your date to a garage that was once a movie theater rather than to a movie theater playing The Age of Adaline.