Get it here first! Our intern Diane gets a big scoop on holiday releases that Hollywood hasn’t even publicized yet!
For a long time it seemed that Madison Avenue was ignoring the baby boomer generation. It was almost as if advertisers were saying, “well, we gave you ads with hippies and flowers and music but you didn’t buy a damn thing so we’re moving on.” Of course young boomers were not a generation of mass consumers. That came a lot later after we finally found jobs and got credit cards and sold out.
Now we are being bombarded with product ads aimed at boomers. They usually feature people in their 30’s, with hair dyed grey, who give away $60,000 cars for Christmas presents. Cialis ads show the same good-looking not-very-old people folding laundry when “the mood” strikes and the scene transforms into a private garden with a waterfall. It’s magic, although a recent survey showed a majority of boomers are unhappy with their sex lives. Maybe the survey takers hadn’t seen the Cialis ad yet.
Hollywood has gotten in on the act lately. The studios have a long list of aging actors and actresses in need of work, and they have been very busy cranking out movies aimed at boomers. Red, The Expendables, It’s Complicated, Mad Money and so on show that oldsters can still be heroes, thieves, romantics and lovers. Fortunately they don’t show nude scenes anymore.
Since Fred is now busy writing news briefs, thanks to an overwhelming vote by readers for him to stay on, we had to turn to another intern, Diane, to dig out some inside info from Hollywood on movies for the holiday season. After digging in studio trash cans for a week or so, Diane came up with several used notepads and was able to piece together a short list of the boomer-oriented movies still to come this season. As a reward for her good work we are going to reimburse Diane for the coffee she brought in this morning. Here is our exclusive scoop on upcoming films, and we can guarantee that you won’t see this anywhere else.
The Hero **1/2 The heartwarming story of an aging superhero played by Dennis Quaid who is out of work and takes a delivery job for a sandwich shop in a big city. While delivering a six-foot sub one day, he interrupts the mugging of a beautiful 50-plus woman (Annette Bening) and a romance ensues. Quaid has to choose between Bening or saving the world when aliens attack trying to steal the world’s supply of pepperoni for fuel.
It’s Even More Complicated*** A holiday sequel to It’s Complicated, Meryl Streep gets bored with Steve Martin and swaps partners with ex-hubby Alec Baldwin. Baldwin and Martin are hilarious as a newly emerged gay couple that gets mixed up in a community theater production of A Gay Christmas Carol. Meanwhile, Streep decides that she likes Robin Williams, a straight man pretending to be gay to keep his job as head of the community theater, but her new partner Lake Bell threatens to blow the whistle to keep Streep to herself.
RGB: Red, Green and Blue **1/2. Loosely based on the original movie Red, semi-retired techies are recalled to active status to fight a global computer virus originating from India. The virus is in a program language that has not been used since the 1970’s and is unknown to modern programmers. George Clooney and Sandra Bullock team up as the boomer programmers with a cloudy past, and Jeff Bridges is their crusty but benign former supervisor who still works for an unnamed mega corporation that has outsourced all its IT work to…yep, India.
Rudolfo *. An animated Christmas story about a teenage Mexican reindeer who emigrates illegally but with good reason to the North Pole, only to encounter species profiling and trouble from corrupt reindeer and elves. Rudolfo falls in love with Clarice, Comet’s daughter, and stumbles on information that Blitzen has rigged the annual reindeer games so his son Fireball will win. With help from Dominick the Italian Christmas Donkey, Rudolfo discovers he is actually Italian, not Mexican, and reunites with his Sicilian relatives to save Christmas. Voices by Antonio Banderas, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Joe Pesci and Danny DeVito.
It’s a Wonderful Wife ****. Based on the hit TV-series The Good Wife, Alicia (Julianna Margulies) finds herself out of work after losing a major case that bankrupts the law firm and she decides to end it all by jumping into the Chicago River on Christmas eve. She is saved by an angel (Tom Hanks) who shows her what life would have been like if she’d never switched from being an ER nurse to a lawyer. This movie has a surprise ending that we are not allowed to reveal, but we can mention that it involves a guest appearance by George Clooney.
Christmas Gory *1/2. A chilling docu-drama sequel to the charming movie A Christmas Story by Jean Shepherd, this off-beat tale follows the story of the Red Ryder BB gun as it passes hands from owner to owner after Ralphie no longer plays with it and throws it away. The casualties mount as victim after victim encounters the wrong end of the vaguely lethal weapon, until a bill is finally introduced to impose a waiting period on the purchase of BB guns for minors.
The Gift of Maggie **. Kind of a cross between The Gift of the Magi and Prizzi’s Honor, this is the story of an aging hitman (Jack Nicholson) who donates a kidney to his kid brother only to discover that his other kidney is starting to fail. A nurse named Maggie (Anjelica Huston) helps Nicholson by giving one of her kidneys to him, but she dies during the surgery. Nicholson, wracked with guilt and distracted, is hit by a bus and killed the same day he is discharged from the hospital. He meets Huston in heaven and…we can’t tell what happens from there but boy is she pissed off.
Note: “A Christmas Story” opened in November, 1983, and earned just over $2 million the first weekend. The movie was made with a budget of $3.2 million and eventually grossed $19 million. In 2009, “A Disney Christmas Carol” opened its first weekend with sales of over $30 million on a budget of $190 million. Worldwide gross sales ended up at $323 million. The all-time high for opening weekend sales was “How the Grinch Stole Christmas,” which made over $55 million in three days in 2000. Merry Christmas Hollywood.
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