Scheduling a movie’s release date is an imperfect science and occasionally an art. Just look at the masterpiece that was Barbenheimer.
While most are open to experimentation in figuring out just what audiences want and when in the wild west of modern theatrical moviegoing, there’s also an unwritten rule that it’s best to leave big superhero movie weekends clear of competition. But whoever thought to open the third-act female friendship comedy The Fabulous Four alongside Deadpool & Wolverine deserves a raise. Because if any audience is being underserved on the opening weekend of an oxygen-sucking, violent and self-referential superhero mashup, it’s women over 60.
So, what better way to escape the merc with a mouth than a trip to Key West with Bette Midler, Susan Sarandon, Sheryl Lee Ralph and Megan Mullally?
Photo: AP
In the vein of 80 for Brady and Book Club, The Fabulous Four may not be a great movie, but it’s also better than it looks. Although it strains for raucousness with edibles and a parasailing expedition gone wrong, there is something admirably sane about it too even if you don’t believe a single moment. It begins, as many of these kinds of films do, with a somewhat tortured explanation of why these women became friends in their youth. Though it nods at a slight age difference between college peers Lou (Sarandon) and Marilyn (Midler) and the two gals they met in New York, Alice (Mullally) and Kitty (Ralph), it’s better to not do the math.
Besides, the more interesting question is not why four single girls in the same building became friends, but rather how they maintained that closeness over the decades. This big life mystery goes largely unexplored, instead focusing on the 40-year estrangement between Lou (now a heart surgeon) and Marilyn. It’s a drama that for utterly incomprehensible reasons Alice (a rock star, seriously) and Kitty (a cannabis entrepreneur grandma) are still entangled in.
Marilyn, recently widowed, is newly engaged and desperately wants Lou to be at her wedding. Alice and Kitty lure Lou to Key West under false pretenses, telling her that she’s won a polydactyl (six-toed) cat and can visit the Hemingway House. They don’t have anything more elaborate in store in this lie. Their plan, it seems, is just to roll up to Marilyn’s house and surprise their unwitting hostage. This seems misguided at best but becomes retroactively cruel when the cause of the fallout is finally revealed. Why meddle now?
Photo: AP
The movie was directed by Jocelyn Moorhouse, the Australian filmmaker behind great and varied female-focused films like How to Make an American Quilt, The Dressmaker and Muriel’s Wedding, and written by Jenna Milly and Ann Marie Allison. And it never quite harmonizes. These characters, fabulous as they may be individually or on paper, aren’t greater together somehow.
As Marilyn and Lou dance around this ancient feud, you start to feel bad for Alice (mostly there to be a quip machine) and Kitty, who would have much more fun ditching them and going off on their own adventure. Midler plays Marilyn so big and broad that she’s more parody than person, although there is a grain of intrigue in the 70-something who gets engaged two months after her beloved husband dies and becomes obsessed with creating TikToks. Sarandon’s Lou is the most thoughtfully developed character, as a rule-abiding woman whose life is in desperate need of a shakeup. She has some cringey moments too (the aforementioned edibles), but also several charming flirtations with the bachelors of Key West (Bruce Greenwood and Timothy V. Murphy).
This is a movie that should have probably leaned far less on wild hijinks with diminishing returns and more into the smaller moments of what it means to be friends for 40 years. But it’s not without its charms, either. I’m not going to argue with them breaking into song out of nowhere. That kind of break from reality, especially with this cast, is always welcome.
Photo: AP
Nov. 11 to Nov. 17 People may call Taipei a “living hell for pedestrians,” but back in the 1960s and 1970s, citizens were even discouraged from crossing major roads on foot. And there weren’t crosswalks or pedestrian signals at busy intersections. A 1978 editorial in the China Times (中國時報) reflected the government’s car-centric attitude: “Pedestrians too often risk their lives to compete with vehicles over road use instead of using an overpass. If they get hit by a car, who can they blame?” Taipei’s car traffic was growing exponentially during the 1960s, and along with it the frequency of accidents. The policy
Hourglass-shaped sex toys casually glide along a conveyor belt through an airy new store in Tokyo, the latest attempt by Japanese manufacturer Tenga to sell adult products without the shame that is often attached. At first glance it’s not even obvious that the sleek, colorful products on display are Japan’s favorite sex toys for men, but the store has drawn a stream of couples and tourists since opening this year. “Its openness surprised me,” said customer Masafumi Kawasaki, 45, “and made me a bit embarrassed that I’d had a ‘naughty’ image” of the company. I might have thought this was some kind
What first caught my eye when I entered the 921 Earthquake Museum was a yellow band running at an angle across the floor toward a pile of exposed soil. This marks the line where, in the early morning hours of Sept. 21, 1999, a massive magnitude 7.3 earthquake raised the earth over two meters along one side of the Chelungpu Fault (車籠埔斷層). The museum’s first gallery, named after this fault, takes visitors on a journey along its length, from the spot right in front of them, where the uplift is visible in the exposed soil, all the way to the farthest
The room glows vibrant pink, the floor flooded with hundreds of tiny pink marbles. As I approach the two chairs and a plush baroque sofa of matching fuchsia, what at first appears to be a scene of domestic bliss reveals itself to be anything but as gnarled metal nails and sharp spikes protrude from the cushions. An eerie cutout of a woman recoils into the armrest. This mixed-media installation captures generations of female anguish in Yun Suknam’s native South Korea, reflecting her observations and lived experience of the subjugated and serviceable housewife. The marbles are the mother’s sweat and tears,
RSS