"BOOK CLUB"......LIFESTYLES OF THE WELL-READ & WELL-HOUSED.....

Book Club (2018)     We've nothing against menopausal rom-coms, populated with AARP superstars.......in fact, they're damned funny at times and never less than a relaxed pleasure to watch......

              Except when you stop to think of how these movies waste our national-treasure actors in paper-thin, trivial roles.........reduced to spouting the by-the-numbers gags about how little sex they're getting these days........

    

               But if this is all that Hollywood studios can come up with for the likes of Jane Fonda, Candice Bergen, Diane Keaton and Mary Steenburgen.......we'll grin and bear it.......we'll take these wonderful ladies anyway we can get 'em........even if it's in an instantly throwaway movie like "Book Club"......

                Yes, they play the book club matrons who've taken on "Fifty Shades Of Grey" as their next read.......cue the onslaught of jokes about whips, spankings and marathon Olympic-worthy boffing.

                  After the infamous book restarts their romantic engines, the ladies quickly get paired up with a full roster of golden age guys......Don Johnson, Andy Garcia and Richard Dreyfuss.....(Steenburgen's character is already married to Craig T. Nelson......and no, the movie does nothing with the irony of casting Don Johnson, dad of "50 Shades spankee, Dakota Johnson)

                   Everything you'd expect ensues.......internet dating gags, viagra gags, dress shop fails, yada, yada.........to freshen up Keaton's character, the script flips the concept of one of her previous menopausal rom-coms, "Because I Said So"......instead of her meddling in her grown daughter's lives, this film has her overbearing daughters itching to imprison Keaton in one of the daughter's basement, consigned to assisted-living hell.

                 And let us not forget the key element of modern studio rom-coms, no matter what the age of the participants...….the stunning, sumptuous homes that everybody lives in...…...with each room larger than some of the apartments we used to rent in our younger days.....

                  We might have laughed more than a few times during "Book Club"......but more often, we spent the bulk of the running time drooling over the sprawling million dollar real estate that everybody in the movie luxuriates in...….

                   After a while, we ceased caring about their romantic problems...…...we started to become slightly annoyed at rom-coms that seem determined to rub our middle-class noses in their characters boundless wealth...…(yeh, we get it.....for these people, Trump's tax cuts will last forever.....)

                    But for now, we'll store away our 'have-not- bitterness and stay gracious...…..watching all these veteran actors use their comic chops made for a mildly entertaining afternoon...….(and you can never have enough extended (so to speak) sequences about those 4 hour Viagra erections...) So we'll crack open 2 & 1/2 stars (**1/2) for this movie book club...……(maybe if there's a sequel, the group could move on to Bob Woodward's new one as their book of the week.....)