Where I Watched It: iTunes

English Audio Description?: Yes

Ben Kingsley top lines this movie destined for the AARP Awards this year. When a curmudgeonly man (Kingsley), with a set routine, and a concerned daughter, finds a spaceship crash landed in his backyard, he does the only thing logical. He befriends the little tyke, and lets him into his house. Even though there are no communication pathways, these two seem to find ways of understanding each other. The alien, who becomes known as… well I’ll let you guess… enjoys apples and just often sitting and staring at his surroundings. Things get slightly more complicated as two more seniors find out and eventually, these three work to help little ET back to his home planet.

It is basically ET for the 65+ crowd. That crowd that has been waiting to see Jane Curtin in a film. There’s a very specific audience for that, but I have to say that I think everyone will like this. It’s just too damn charming. Unless you like cats. Cats do not fare well here. Not that the film is gory, or anything, but there is a cat element that cat lovers won’t like.

Kingsley has one of those resumes, much like Nicolas Cage, where they seem to say Yes To The Dress far too often. Every once in a while, they accidentally stumble into a hidden gem, and Kingsley has found that here. He’s just the right kind of stubborn while also being a smidge kind, in order for you to want this whole alien thing to work out for him. The film keeps a light tone the whole way through, even the cat stuff isn’t that heavy, and it just is a pleasant film to watch. I’m not sure it reinvented the genre, or did anything spectacularly new, but it does a nice job of making a nice film.

The audio description here soars mostly when it has to describe the alien, who is basically non-verbal, and communicates almost entirely through having really expressive eyes. Yes, there are some cats we need to know about, and it’s nice to have descriptions of the neighborhood and also the spaceship. I think my main qualm was with the size relativity of the ship. I picked up on the idea that it wasn’t very big, because the alien isn’t very big, but I also wasn’t really sure just how small it was. It doesn’t seem to be easily visible to anyone, as Kingsley makes no real effort to hide it.

Jules is a surprisingly harmless and charming little comedy that no one is talking about, but might be just the right pick me up for your day, and is accessible to anyone… except cat lovers. And even they might forgive this film.

Final Grade: A-