A romcom mashup that sputters

 

   Fly me to the moon or so goes the lyric. On second thought, if it means sitting through the mashup of romcom moves, intrigue, and satire that's being peddled in the new comedy Fly Me to the Moon, I'll happily remain on Earth.  

  Scarlett Johansson and Channing Tatum star in roles that seem intended to evoke memories of the comedies of yesteryear -- updated with a dose of conspiratorial thinking on the part of screenwriters Keenan Flynn, Rose Gilroy, Bill Kirstein, and director Greg Berlanti.

  Fly Me to the Moon isn't meant to be taken too seriously, but it often feels slight, and inconsequential, a big-screen bauble hasn't been polished enough to shine.

  Johansson plays Kelly Jones, an unscrupulous marketer who's recruited by a shadowy government agent (Woody Harrelson) to help sell the public on NASA's Apollo 11 mission, which, in 1969, landed the first humans on the moon.

  As the Apollo launch chief stationed in Cocoa Beach, Fla., Channing's Cole Harris resists efforts to commercialize the mission. He gradually yields, accepting   the idea that putting astronauts on cereal boxes will help provide much-needed support for NASA funding.

   The movie attributes Cole's all-business attitude to the seriousness of the task and to a past tragedy. He was the launch director of Apollo 1, which resulted in the deaths of three astronauts.

   Harrelson's Moe Berkus has more in mind than elevating NASA's popularity. He involves Kelly in a scheme to set up a faux moon landing that he plans to televise regardless of what the real astronauts accomplish. Berkus refuses to risk losing what he views as an ideological battle with the Soviets.

   Blather about a faked moon landing isn't new, but little of the movie's maneuvering passes the credibility test, and the romance between Kelly and Cole poses no threat to the likes of Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert or any of the other great romcom pairings.

   At the same time, a lively Johansson brings plenty of verve to a role that allows her to employ a variety of accents. Channing's character, on the other hand, seems to have been written in ways that minimize some of the actor's strengths, notably charm and good humor.

    The supporting cast adds little. Anna Garcia portrays Kelly's assistant, and Jim Rash plays the deluded director Kelly hires to fake the moon landing. A frustrated director of commercials, Rash's character is waiting for Hollywood to recognize his brilliance.

   The movie wastes Ray Romano as a NASA engineer and the movie's resident sadsack.

    The Apollo astronauts, of course, reached the moon. This one? If not a case of crash and burn, its overlong two-hours and 11 minutes hardly rocket to new heights.

    

This father doesn't know best

 Ray Romano makes his directorial debut with Somewhere in Queens, the story of a construction worker (Romano) who’s emotionally invested in the basketball life of his teenage son "Sticks" (Jacob Ward). Romano’s Leo pushes his son to pursue a college scholarship. He wants to shield the kid from a life working in the family business, a small company operated by Leo’s dad (Tony Lo Bianco) and his instantly dislikable brother (Sebastian Maniscalco). Leo’s wife (Laurie Metcalf) has recovered from breast cancer but lives in fear of its return. The plot hinges on the arrival of Dani (Sadie Stanley), a girl who captures Sticks' heart. Unlike Sticks her interest in a relationship doesn't go beyond sex and affection. Romano, who co-wrote the screenplay with Mark Stegemann, can't entirely avoid cliches in his creation of an Italian family environment (Sunday dinners and parties) and I had trouble buying a major plot twist. Moreover, the movie can feel confused about whether to focus on Sticks or Leo. In its more genial moments, Somewhere in Queens proves likable but its pleasures are limited.

'The Irishman' -- stories from a hitman's past

Martin Scorsese, Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, and Joe Pesci have made an epic that reminds us how terrific all of them can be.

I wondered why, at the end of director Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman, I felt so sad. The movie concludes — and I don’t consider this a spoiler — with an aging union official, who’s also a hitman, contemplating his demise. Shouldn’t I have felt a sense of satisfaction that the inexorable flow of time was about to do to Frank Sheeran, a.k.a., The Irishman, what he had done to so many others?

The reason for the sadness, I think, is complex. It mixes love for the movies of my younger days with the arc of Frank's story. I'm unable to separate the two, so I'm not going to try.

Frank Sheeran first came to light in a 2004 book by Charles Brandt. Titled, I Heard You Paint Houses, the book included the claim that Frank killed Jimmy Hoffa, the Teamster boss who was revered by his membership. (Painting houses evidently is a mob euphemism for carrying out murders.)

For the record — and also in the movie — Frank also said he murdered Joey Gallo, a.k.a. Crazy Joe, a famous mob murder that took place in 1972 at Umberto’s Clam House in Manhattan's Little Italy.

In the movie, Robert De Niro portrays Frank and Al Pacino plays Hoffa. Frank’s closeness to Hoffa made the assassination possible. As someone who seldom seemed troubled by his work, Frank found himself in an uncomfortable position regarding Hoffa. He had to kill a man he admired and with whom he shared a common ethnic background.

Frank’s crime life began in earnest when he met Russell Bufalino (Joe Pesci), a soft-spoken guy who ran a crime family in Northeastern Pennsylvania. Bufalino took a liking to Frank and recommended him to Hoffa, who eventually made him a union official.

When Hoffa tried to reinstate himself as Teamster president after spending time in jail for jury tampering, the mob got tired of his bravado. They wanted him gone. Hoffa didn’t want to be gone. They decided to make him gone.

But the plot and its revelations about corruption, though carefully detailed in Steve Zaillian’s fine screenplay, aren’t at the heart of what makes The Irishman great.

To understand that, you need to understand that Scorsese, who'll be 77 when The Irishman begins its run on Netflix on Nov. 27, has returned to the gangster turf that spawned his signature work. Only this time, like his aging characters, he's moving at a slower pace. The Irishman runs for three hours and 20 minutes -- and, no, it never seemed too long to me.

In The Irishman, Scorsese seems to take less delight in the colorful way his characters speak and in the way their violence can spark a scene. A more deliberate pace takes the Scorsese's characters beyond amusement and, at times, even makes them seem a little pathetic.

The bulk of the action takes place in the 1950s and ‘60s, which enables Scorsese to use lots of period music. He begins with the Five Satins' In the Still of the Night for an opening that finds Frank old and friendless in a nursing home. He begins talking about his life. In The Still of the Night, the background singers chime in with a telling two-word refrain: "I remember. I remember."

As Frank remembers his life, dozens of characters come and go. Scorsese’s large cast includes Ray Romano, as Bill Buffalino, a Teamster attorney; Bobby Cannavale as a gangster Felix 'Skinny Razor' DiTullio; and an incendiary Stephen Graham, as Tony Provenzano, a New Jersey-based hot-head who challenged Hoffa’s Teamster leadership.

The connection to movies proves inescapable. It’s not only Frank who's dying: It’s a certain kind of gangster film; it’s the period in which De Niro, Pacino and later Pesci rose to prominence. The Irishman might be Scorsese’s goodbye to a part of his own big-screen life -- and maybe to his youth.

This is not to say that anyone in The Irishman plans to retreat from the screen. But I can’t imagine that they’ll ever make another film like The Irishman, an epic tale of corruption and color that reminds you that De Niro, who has been in a lot of questionable movies, still can be great, that Pacino’s flare and bombast can imbue a character with brute power, and that Pesci, the movie’s true revelation, can find a quiet resolve in himself, a sense of proportion that allows him to steal the movie. Bufalino asserts his power with a spirit bordering on resignation.

To allow his characters to appear youthful in early scenes, Scorsese employs a de-aging technique that can be a little disorienting, making the faces of his characters look slightly unreal at times. But somehow it works and the acting is so strong that the de-aging becomes part of the atmosphere Scorsese creates, one of estrangement and distance.

At one point, Bufalino and Frank drive across the country with their wives (Kathrine Narducci and Kate Arrington). They're en route to a wedding in Detroit, but the trip really is a cover for something more sinister. The drive crops up from time-to-time as Frank narrates a story full of vividly recalled memories that still feel anchored in the past.

I loved that sense of fading time about The Irishman, which also has plenty of the expected ingredients: violence, bloodshed, and the gangster grit that Scorsese’s moving cameras have been spreading across screens for years.

The Irishman may impress you as somber, particularly as the story nears its resolution. The feeling is reinforced throughout by Frank’s relationship with Peggy, one of his four daughters, played as an adult by Anna Paquin. She knows her father and rejects him. Forget the law. She's his judge.

Peggy and also time. Mobsters, union leaders, violent men, and blowhards are all subject to the same destiny. All of them eventually will die and be forgotten.

Frank doesn’t relish the idea. At one point, he talks to a priest. Frank is too honest to say he feels remorse. He says he feels nothing about the things he's done. One thing he does seem to feel — and De Niro’s performance reflects it — is a reluctance entirely to vanish. Frank wants his body housed in a vault because it strikes him as a little less final than burial or cremation.

It’s the last futile hope of a gangster, the idea that somehow he’ll be able to evade — if only by a shade — the one hitman that can’t be beaten.

A topical rom-com that works

In The Big Sick, a young Pakistani aspires to be a comic and finds himself in a challenging relationship.

He's an ethnic Pakistani who's trying to make it in the world of stand-up comedy. That's a tall enough order for anybody, but Kumail also must deal with constant nagging from his family. Mom and Dad want him to marry a nice Muslim woman, have children and solidify his relationship to the Pakistani community, a group consisting largely of recent arrivals to the US.

Kumail (Kumail Nanjiani) has other ideas. He does his best to resist the women that his mother invites over every time he shows up for dinner. He keeps photos of these possible brides in a cigar box in his apartment, claiming to have no interest in living the life his family wants for him.

But Kumail's assimilationist values are put to the test when he meets a white woman and their relationship begins to click.

In most rom-coms that might be the whole story. Not so, The Big Sick, a pleasing and provocative comedy that forces its main character to admit that he lacks the gumption to pursue a love interest that could jeopardize his relationship with his family.

When his new girlfriend (Zoe Kazan) learns that Kumail isn't willing to go the distance with her, she walks out on him.

But that's not the end of the story, either. The screenplay -- written by Nanjiani and Emily V. Gordon, Nanjiani's real-life wife -- includes an ingenious plot twist. Kazan's Emily falls ill and is put into a medically induced coma.

Emily's illness brings Kumail into contact with Emily's understandably anxious parents (Holly Hunter and Ray Romano). The irony is obvious, but still painful. Kumail was afraid to introduce Emily to his parents (Anupam Kher and Zenobia Shroff). Suddenly, he's deeply involved with Emily's parents.

Both sets of parents are quite good. Kher and Shroff are insistent about their Pakistani roots without entirely giving way to caricature. Hunter and Romano are especially sharp as an apparently mismatched pair. She's rural; he's a city guy. Somehow, they've managed to negotiate the difficult pathways of a long marriage.

Nanjiani makes for an easy-going film presence. He can be funny without constantly resorting to shtick, and Kazan serves up a winning mixture of eccentricity and strength.

Additional color is added by real-life comics Bo Burnham, Aidy Bryant and Kurt Braunohler; they play a trio of aspiring comedians who perform at the Chicago comedy club where Kumail, who earns his keep as an Uber driver, spends most of his spare time.

Obviously, putting a major character into a coma pushes the movie toward the dire side of things. Even so, Nanjiani doesn't overplay Emily's life-and-death drama or the agonizing ordeal her parents suffer through. He trusts us to understand the seriousness of the situation.

Co-writing the screenplay and starring in the movie must have been enough for Nanjiani who turns the directing chores over to Michael Showalter (Hello, My Name Is Doris). Showalter keeps the movie humming along nicely.

Vella Lovell has a nice turn as the one woman who might well entice Kumail away from his relationship with Emily. Not only would Lovell's character satisfy Kumail's parents, she's engaging enough to make us wonder exactly why Kumail remains stuck on Emily, who may never emerge from her coma.

But love is love, and there's not much to be done about it.

At its best, The Big Sick is one of those increasingly rare movies that works the way a romantic comedy should.

Nanjiani also has his finger on a brand of ethnic and religious tribalism that feels both current and rooted in the American experience. Although no one will accuse Nanjiani of writing a treatise, he deals with identity issues that resemble those faced by numerous generations of immigrants.

In this case: How can a Pakistani-born Muslim integrate into a new country and still honor his heritage?

My only complaint about the movie involves its protracted ending -- or should I say several endings. But that doesn't diminish the credit Nanjiani deserves for having taken a genial and entertaining leap into the multicultural melting pot.

Stay for the end credits, which feature photos of the real people on whom Nanjiani has based the characters with whom we've just spent one hour and 59 minutes. Clearly, The Big Sick has its roots in autobiography -- which, after all, may be the basis of some of our best comedies.

'Rob the Mob,' an entertaining heist

The story of two robbers who can't read the danger signs.

Rob the Mob may not be a classic, but it's made enjoyable by a bizarre, reality-based story that focuses on two characters too dopey to understand that they've put themselves in danger; i.e., they think robbing Mafia hangouts will be a breeze.

Why worry? Can Mafia guys call the cops?

Director Raymond De Felitta had a minor hit with City Island. Less of a crowd pleaser (but more entertaining for my money), Rob the Mob offers a comic immersion in the small-change world of Queens, N.Y., during the 1990s.

When I first saw American Hustle, I didn't think I'd ever see a performance with as much New York bravado as Jennifer Lawrence's. I was wrong.

Nina Arianda's performance as Rosie Uva is almost as funny and so full of sass, it's irresistible.

Known mostly for stage work, Arianda plays a woman who works for a debt collection agency and who joins with her ex-con boyfriend Tommy (an equally good Michael Pitt) in conducting a series of ill-advised robberies of the social clubs at which mobsters spend their idle hours.

Rosie drives the getaway car, and Tommy barges into clubs wielding an Uzi he barely knows how to use.

All of this takes place against the backdrop of the trial in which mob boss John Gotti is about to be convicted of murder, and in which New York gangsters are taking a major hit from law enforcement.

Pitt and Arianda receive able support from Andy Garcia (as a mob boss), Ray Romano (as a New York newspaper columnist), as well as from Burt Young, Frank Whaley, Cathy Moriarty, Michael Rispoli and Griffin Dunne.

You won't find a bad performance in the lot: Rob the Mob is one of those movies that feels as if everyone embraced the project with enthusiasm and love.

Working from a script by Jonathan Fernandez, De Felitta gives his movie a beating tabloid heart. We're won over by the genial stupidity (and innocence) of some of the characters, by the true love between Rosie and Tommy and by unexpected sentiment, some of it stemming from Garcia's Big Al, a mob boss who once made his living cooking rice balls (actually, risotto). In a tender scene, Big Al encourages his grandson to avoid the pain of gangster life.

Rob the Mob -- a story of doomed lovers -- may have difficulty finding a niche when pitted against some A-line competition, but this small gem of a movie about feckless denizens of a small-time world shouldn't be missed -- either now or when it finds its way to DVD.