Book Club: The Next Chapter
Verdict: Couldn’t wait to put it down
Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie
Verdict: Candid and touching
The 2018 film Book Club was like a decent novel dropped in a swimming pool, in the sense that it must once have looked extremely promising on paper, before swiftly turning into a soggy mess.
It starred four friends, played by Jane Fonda, Diane Keaton, Candice Bergen and Mary Steenburgen, whose monthly book club in Los Angeles had been meeting for 30 years, and whose stagnating love lives were re-ignited by E.L. James’s Fifty Shades Of Grey trilogy.
With such a classy cast (also with Don Johnson and Andy Garcia) it could — should — have been fun.
In fact, it was dismal: full of laboured double entendres that, never mind E.L. James, would have made Sid James wince. Yet it did thumping business at the box office and has spawned this sequel which, rather impressively, manages to be twice as bad.
Mary Steenburgen stars as Carol, Candice Bergen as Sharon, Diane Keaton as Diane and Jane Fonda as Vivian in Book Club: The Next Chapter
This time, after lifelong commitment-phobe Vivian (Fonda) announces her engagement to her twinkly eyed beau (Johnson), our ageing quartet head to Italy for an extended ‘bachelorette’ party.
They start their trip in Rome. ‘I love this city, Rome,’ one of them says, which is a great help for those of us who had confused the Colosseum, the Trevi Fountain and the Spanish Steps for the industrial outskirts of Turin.
Soon, however, they have left the Eternal City (Rome) and are on their way to the Watery City (Venice), although not before they have had their luggage stolen by the only two Italian men they encounter who are not either incorrigible flirts or certifiable idiots.
You’d think this might be a vacation-wrecking disaster, but after reporting the incident to the cops, where Venezia’s ruggedly charming chief of police handles their case personally, our doughty pensioners barely give their lost cases a second thought.
Scarcely have they left the police station than the film’s insistently jaunty Italian music strikes up again to remind us that losing all your luggage, in a bad movie, is a teeny insect bite of a mishap.
But at least it has introduced us to the rugged charmer who later turns up at the helm of a patrol boat and then the controls of a helicopter, like chiefs of police do. That’s the kind of film this is. Nothing stacks up, except the cliches. We’re expected to believe the characters played by Fonda (85) and Johnson (a mere 73) were lovers in their 20s, as if any of us could be fooled by her alarmingly extensive cosmetic work into believing they really might be contemporaries.
I know it is terribly ungallant to draw attention to the fact that one of the great screen beauties has begun to look like an animatronic Jane Fonda waxwork, yet it’s impossible to ignore.
The script, by contrast, hasn’t had nearly enough surgery. It is truly dire.
In every conversation between the four women, each of them chips in with a quip or a platitude, almost as if their agents are standing by with a stopwatch to make sure their client gets the same number of lines as the others.
Meanwhile, the narrative signposts come in fluorescent yellow. We see Carol (Steenburgen) clumsily learning the accordion in lockdown, so up she later pops in a Venetian restaurant, playing it like a veteran French busker.
We also hear her referring to an Italian ‘hottie’ she met at cookery school a ‘trillion’ years earlier… and up he duly pops, too. Comedies can take such liberties, of course, but they also have a duty to be funny. Book Club: The Next Chapter, directed like the first film by Bill Holderman, with Erin Simms once again his co-writer, is about half as funny as walking through the pouring rain to Waterstones, only to find it closed. It will probably be another hit.
The life of Michael J. Fox was blessed with hits, until suddenly it was blighted by Parkinson’s disease. It now gets the attention of acclaimed documentary-maker Davis Guggenheim, who has made a deeply touching, at times funny, often sad, life-affirming film.
Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie (in select cinemas and streaming on Apple TV+) follows his life chronologically, guided engagingly and candidly by the star himself.
He wasn’t yet 30 when, waking up with a raging hangover, he noticed his little finger twitching uncontrollably. He blamed the roaring hooley he’d had the night before with his pal Woody Harrelson but it was, in fact, the first overt sign of Parkinson’s. It took him seven more years to admit publicly he had the illness.
Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie (in select cinemas and streaming on Apple TV+) follows his life chronologically, guided engagingly and candidly by the star himself. (Pictured with wife Tracy)
But this film is about much more than Parkinson’s (for which Fox has helped to raise more than $2 billion of research money). It’s also about the preciousness of a close family and the peculiarity of becoming a movie star.
‘Actors don’t become actors because they’re brimming with self-confidence,’ Fox says, recalling the ‘acid bath’ of insecurity from which he had to clamber even when he was Hollywood’s golden boy, being chauffeured between the sets of smash-hit sitcom Family Ties and 1985 classic movie Back To The Future.
Honest, insightful and fascinating.
Cannes Preview
Scarlett, Depp, De Niro – my bucket list for Cannes
Johnny Depp playing King Louis XV, in French, is the enticing (or, if you prefer, bizarre) curtain-raiser to the 76th Cannes Film Festival next week.
The film is called Jeanne du Barry and the glamorous French actress Maiwenn, who also wrote and directed, takes the title role as King Louis’ social-climbing mistress.
If Depp’s own highly publicised legal battles were not enough to crank up interest, Maiwenn has also recently been accused of assaulting a journalist in a Paris restaurant, allegedly grabbing his hair and spitting in his face. The journalist has sued. But whatever happens, things won’t go as badly for Maiwenn as they did for Madame du Barry, whose life ended on the guillotine.
As for the English-language films at Cannes this year, there are some very intriguing prospects.
I like the sound of Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City, billed as both a sci-fi film and a rom-com. It stars Scarlett Johansson (pictured)
For a start, we will see whether Harrison Ford, now an octogenarian, can still cut it as a fearless action hero in Indiana Jones And The Dial Of Destiny, co-starring Britain’s own Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Toby Jones.
I’d be looking forward more to Martin Scorsese’s period drama Killers Of The Flower Moon, starring Leonardo Di Caprio and Robert De Niro, if it weren’t nearly four hours long. Someone needs to tell the great man to rein it in a little.
But I’m quite sure that the movie will have plenty of virtues. It tells the true story of a series of murders of Native Americans in the 1920s, after oil was discovered on their land.
I like the sound of Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City, billed as both a sci-fi film and a rom-com. Even though I didn’t care for his last picture, The French Dispatch (2021), he can certainly weave magic, and the cast alone is head-turning: Tom Hanks, Scarlett Johansson, Margot Robbie, Tilda Swinton, Bryan Cranston, Steve Carell, Jeff Goldblum and… Jarvis Cocker.
I’m also excited by Jonathan Glazer’s adaptation of the Martin Amis novel The Zone Of Interest — not so much for the source material but because it’s Glazer’s first movie since his captivating Under The Skin ten years ago. Watch this space.
