‘Old’ clould have used some new tricks

      Imagine if you aged 50 years in a single day.

      Or -- on second thought -- don't bother because if you buy into M. Night Shyamalan's Old, you'll be taking a trip that's often more ludicrous than scary, mind-expanding or (heaven forbid) insightful.

     The movie begins when a family arrives at a tropical paradise, an upscale resort with a genial manager and all the amenities anyone could want. 

    Mom (Vicky Krieps) found the place online. Her husband (Gael Garcia Bernal) seems wary, but the two children -- a six-year-old son and an 11-year-old daughter -- are primed for fun in the sun. 

    Well, sort of. We quickly learn that Mom and Dad are keeping a secret about Mom’s health from the kids.

    On the morning after their arrival, the hotel's manager (Gustaf Hammarsten) suggests the family visit a beautiful beach, a secluded spot he recommends only to special guests.

    The vacationers are driven to the beach along with another couple and their daughter. Before long, a couple of additional beachgoers arrive, rounding out a cast that includes Rufus Sewell, Ken Leung, Nikki Amuka-Bird, and Aaron Pierre.

    Once at the beach, the characters begin a mysterious aging process that baffles and unnerves them. Don’t blame lack of sunblock.

     Those who try to escape immediately black out only to reawaken on the beach, trapped again in a rapid-aging nightmare by a steep cliff wall that makes the beach mostly inaccessible.

    Shyamalan employs make-up and adds new cast members to create the aging process, which includes episodes in which Sewell's character,  a surgeon, steadily loses his grip.  A girl becomes pregnant after starting the movie as a pre-schooler. The bones of a vain woman (Abbey Lee) calcify, turning her body into a mangled heap. 

     More cliched than perceptive, the movie has little to say aging, a topic that might given the movie real weight.

    None of the performances are notable, and I stopped trying to keep track of the cast other than to note that Alex Wolff has a somewhat extended turn as the boy of the early scenes at age 15. 

    Enough. Shyamalan has a hit-and-miss track record that includes movies such as Glass, Signs, The Village, Lady in the Water, and of course, The Sixth Sense. 

   Less mystique-oriented than some of Shyamalan's work, Old makes a lame attempt at social relevance, basing its screenplay on  Sandcastle, a graphic novel written by Pierre-Oscar-Levy and Frederick Peters.

     Not to disappoint his fans, Shyamalan gives Old one of his signature twists, a  big late-picture reveal that's easy enough to predict and which falls flat.  

     The finale strives for moral complexity but proves as unconvincing as the rest of a movie that already has drowned  in shallow thematic waters.    

       

Shattering movie; shattering performance

     Anthony Hopkins is now 83 years old.

   That might not be especially relevant in reviewing a new movie starring Hopkins, but in the case of The Father Hopkins's age  gave me pause.

    It's nearly impossible for me to write about The Father, a story about a once competent man being overtaken by dementia, without wondering how much of the role Hopkins had to internalize. 

   How could he play a character named Anthony who's losing his grip without wondering whether he might encounter a similar fate?

   This is not to say that the Anthony in the movie is the Anthony Hopkins of real life, only that I couldn't watch The Father without wondering what emotional toll Anthony, the character, might have taken on Anthony, the actor.

   Adapting his own play in collaboration with Christopher Hampton, writer/director Florian Zeller has made a movie of shattering power. How awful to lose one's self -- or even to worry about the prospect as age advances.

    But the questions don't stop there: If the self -- strident and full of itself -- can be so easily vanquished, what was it in the first place?

    Olivia Colman portrays Anthony's daughter Anne. We quickly learn that Anne has decided to move to Paris to be with a new lover. As a consequence, she won't be able to look after her London-based father.

    Strains of bitterness and guilt underly Anne's worries about her father, a man who constantly makes it clear that he favors her sister, a character we never meet. Anne may be desperate for one last chance at happiness. 

    But wait. Before long, Anne turns up in the person of another actress (Olivia Williams). The story continues as if nothing had happened. The feeling of disorientation jars. Is this real? Are we seeing the world through Anthony's addled consciousness? 

   Identities plant themselves in our minds and then evaporate. Rufus Sewell and Mark Gatiss appear as different versions of Anne's husband.

    Zeller constantly overturns our assumptions. Anthony seems entrenched in his comfortable London apartment. We accept his reality until Zeller makes us wonder whether the apartment is his at all. 

    Later a new caregiver (Imogen Poots) arrives; her presence gives Anthony an opportunity to be flirtatious, imperious, and funny as if he's thumbing through an old catalog to find the personality traits that once defined him. 

   Once you accustom yourself to Zeller's approach, the movie acquires increasing power and its impact grows until we finally realize that Anthony is losing himself, a horrible situation made worse by Anthony's ability occasionally to apprehend the magnitude of the loss. 

    What could be more unsettling -- for the movie's characters and for its audience? I hope Hopkins, who gives one of the best performances of his career, was able to leave this character behind more easily than I could.

    Take that as both a wish and the deepest of compliments.

Zellweger does justice to ‘Judy’

Judy isn't great, but Zellweger's performance carries the show.

Judy, a drama about the final months of Judy Garland's all-too-brief life, turns the iconic entertainer into a kind of prisoner of her pubic image. Garland's life fell prey to studio tyrants, drugs, bad marriages, and her own need to connect with audiences. Judy already is being hailed as an Oscar showcase for a transformed Renee Zellweger. Fair enough. Judy derives most of its power from Zellweger's performance.

Based on End of the Rainbow, a musical play by Peter Quilter, Judy survives a series of sometimes wooden flashbacks and an overly familiar story arc to reach an emotional conclusion that pays tribute to Garland's enormous capacity to entertain while recognizing the deep sadness that could pervade her life.

I don't think it qualifies as a spoiler to tell you that the movie's finale involves a deeply felt rendition of Garland's signature tune, Over the Rainbow. If you don't see that coming when the movie enters its third -- and best act -- you probably need to see more movies.

Set mostly in 1968, the story places Garland in a swirl of trouble, notably a battle with former husband Sid Luft (Rufus Sewell) over custody of their two children. Garland loved her kids but she couldn't give them the stability they needed.

Problems constantly threat to drag Garland down. Broke and hardly in demand, Garland takes a job in London to play the Talk of the Town nightclub. Not surprisingly, her appearance is marked by difficulties: She refuses to rehearse; she drinks too much; she can't sleep; she barely makes it to performances on time, and in the middle of all that, she decides to marry Mickey Deans (Finn Wittrock), her fifth and last husband.

It's obvious to us, if not to the love-starved Garland, that the marriage will be brief and bad.

In London, Rosalyn Wilder (Jessie Buckley) receives a tough assignment; she's supposed to look after Garland, who misses few opportunities to test Rosalyn's ample patience. As the impresario who brings Garland to London, Michael Gambon is given little to do aside from looking dyspeptic and skeptical. Underutilizing Gambon must always be regarded as a mistake.

In the flashbacks to her MGM days and The Wizard of Oz, Garland (Darci Shaw) finds herself in painful encounters with the tyrannical Louis B. Mayer (Richard Cordery), the mogul who controlled her with threats and humiliation. Garland eventually claimed that Mayer groped her, as well, something the movie hints at.

An effort to acknowledge Garland's importance in gay culture feels both necessary and yet forced. Andy Nyman and Daniel Cerqueira play a gay couple who meet Garland when she's leaving Talk of the Town after a performance. They wind up taking her to their apartment. She's lonely and their company proves welcome.

The two fans also figure in the movie's appropriately sentimental ending, which suggests that the only true love Garland ever experienced (aside from that of her children) was given by audiences.

Aided by prosthetics including a false nose, Zellweger's performance gathers the necessary force. A collection of tics, outbursts, displays of sincerity and vulnerability create a character who spent a lifetime taking morning pick-me-up drugs that she would counter with late-night sleeping pills.

The mannerisms that Zellweger employs make sense; they become Garland's mannerisms; her sometimes sharp motions suggest a person buffeted by ferocious gusts of inner turbulence.

Director Rupert Goold makes the most of Zellweger's transformation and the movie also benefits from the fact that Zellweger does her own singing. She's not Garland, but Zellweger works hard to sell Garland numbers such as Get Happy and puts brassy, entertaining showmanship into the musical numbers that she performs.

Make-up and singing aside, Zellweger hits home when it counts. When Garland calls young Lorna Luft (Bella Ramsey) from a London phone booth, Zellweger joins Garland's vulnerability to a level of self-realization that's heartbreaking.

Maybe this small and sometimes limited movie was inevitable. The figure of Garland was destined to dwarf any story about her and that happens here. Judy stands as a portrait of Garland at the end of a rainbow, one in which the promised pot of gold wound up being empty. You wonder whether the woman who had played Dorothy Gale, a character who awakened the dreams of so many, had lost the capacity to wish for herself.

Lincoln, vampires and big-time blood

This Abe doesn't have it in for Congress; he's off to fight vampires.

If you're a fan of wacked-out movie ideas, Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter has just about everything else beat by a mile. The title alone tells you just how crazy this film will be. Consider: Lincoln evidently didn't have enough trouble ending slavery, fighting the Civil War and desperately try to hold the union together, he also had to fight hordes of vampires, who allied themselves with the Confederacy and slavery.

Some things don't need to be parodied, they need only to be quoted, and that's how it is with much of this vividly realized, intermittently entertaining and often ludicrous adaptation of Seth Grahame-Smith's 2010 novel. Grahame-Smith wrote the screenplay, and Timur Bekmambetov -- known for the Night Watch and Day Watch movies -- directedmostly to mixed effect.

Not surprisingly, the Lincoln we meet in this action-oriented adventure isn't a mirror image of the Lincoln of history books, unless you happened to be exposed to texts depicting honest Abe wielding a silver-tipped ax and acting very much like a summer-movie action hero. It's Abe vs. one vicious vampire after another as the movie plies its way through quasi-historical waters.

Motivated by vengeance (a vampire killed his mother) and a desire to battle the dark side, Lincoln makes the ax his weapon of choice because of early days spent splitting rails. The story follows Lincoln from his boyhood to the presidency with vampires linking different periods in the leader's life.

Benjamin Walker makes a stalwart if not entirely prepossessing adult Lincoln, a character surrounded by a large supporting cast that includes Dominic Cooper (as a good vampire); Rufus Sewell (as the movie's very bad vampire); Anthony Mackie (as a black childhood pal of Lincoln grown into an ally in the fight against slavery); Mary Elizabeth Winstead (as Mary Todd Lincoln); Marton Csokas (as Lincoln's sworn enemy) and many more.

As you probably can tell, Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter is not an A-list production -- at least as far as casting is concerned.

It probably doesn't matter because action tramples character in a story that applies a simplistic moral overlay to its abundant collection of weirdness. Lincoln eventually moves beyond a desire for vengeance to pit himself against an evil that threatens his beloved country, and this Lincoln never wavers in his opposition to slavery.

You get the idea: The movie plays like another big-screen comic book, sketching its story in the kind of broad strokes that make nuance about as welcome as silver bullets at a vampire convention.

Bekmambetov employs CGI to useful effect in creating the movie's 19th century backdrops, and he piles on the action, most notably in a bleary scene involving a horse stampede and a finale that includes a burning bridge and a runaway locomotive.

History buffs will find fleeting historical references -- the Gettysburg address and Emancipation Proclamation -- that presumably are meant to ground a fantastical story in the soil of recognizable history.

If a movie such as this is going to have any credibility, it must be centered on a president who has mythic stature. Lincoln works. Nixon wouldn't.

Although Bekmambetov specializes in severed heads, assorted gore and high octane fighting in which bodies seem to freeze in mid-air, I found the action a bit repetitive. Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter didn't live up to my expectations for something preposterously grand, but it provided a fair measure of unintended chuckles and a bit incidental fun as it tried to swell to mythic proportions.