Senior Moments

If you plan to see a movie about music next week, might I steer you towards Young@Heart instead of The Rocker? The latter is a mildly amusing movie that your mind nonetheless completely erases because it knows you'll never need any of it ever again. I found I much preferred this story - aging Pete Best-like reject from 80s poodle-rock superstars finds redemption 20 years later with a kids' garage band - when it was still called School Of Rock.

The Rocker is made by young people and still feels ancient. Young@Heart is about ancient people, and yet it has a sprightliness about it that belies the ages of its protagonists - and among these folks, being 78 or so makes you the spring chicken of the coop.

Said coop being a senior citizens' choral group in Massachusetts, whose members might be expected to croon Moon River or Come Fly With Me, but who - under the sway of their mercurial, much younger musical director - find themselves belting out unlikely hits like Sonic Youth's Schizophrenia, James Brown's I Feel Good, and my favorite, the Ramones' I Wanna Be Sedated! Although it looks like the perfect set-up for a Coots-R-Cute festival of nausea and rancid sentiment, and in spite of some pretty B-minus-level direction, Young@Heart - filled with elderly Americans of all races and backgrounds, all of them distinctive personalities and some of them desperately ill or very close to life's rear exit - does manage to suggest that music, togetherness and creative endeavor can do wonders for body, mind and spirit.

I anticipate seeing a lot more material like this as the aging Baby Boomer generation starts its long march toward the sunset retirement homes over the next decade. The people in Young@Heart are the boomers' parents' generation, born in the 1920s, survivors of the Depression and the second world war, who lived long enough to see it all come together for them, and then, as their children took the reins, to see it all fall apart.

I'm trying to envision what kinds of movies we'll see as the largest population bulge in human history starts to age. Surely someone is ready to step up and serve this enormous demographic? Movie-makers' prime targets are pubescent suburban boys with hard-ons and paper-rounds, but these oldsters have the last half-decent pensions and retirement-plans left, and thus a lot more money to spend on movies than their striving juniors. These will not be the farm-born "Greatest Generation", who can be bought off with The Bucket List and Scent Of A Woman, but the college-educated, self-conscious, drug-familiar, Vietnam- and Watergate-hardened generation that ended an evil war in the 1970s, then two decades later pulled up all the ladders to the benefits of the New Deal and the Great Society, leaving the rest of us, the tail-end boomers of the 1970s and the generation beyond, casting around for crumbs.

And you know what?

I never want to hear them singing Satisfaction or My Girl again.