Film: Within every great comic is a dramatic actor yearning to break through. Or that’s how the show business cliché goes. But it is true about Lily Tomlin, who gives a remarkable, tough, smart-mouthed performance in a brief – only 78 minutes – low-budget film called simply Grandma. She is Elle, a lesbian poet whose granddaughter, Sage (Julia Garner), arrives on her Van Nuys doorstep one day and announces that she is pregnant. There is no question in either woman’s mind that she will get an abortion, but Elle has to figure out how to scrape together the needed $600. After several dead ends, including a nice sequence with Sam Elliot, a former heterosexual beau of Elle’s, they try the last resort, Sage’s angry businesswoman mother, Ellle’s daughter (Marcia Gay Harden). Director Paul Weitz (About a Boy) keeps a firm hand on the wheel and the tone, with the results being memorable largely because of Tomlin.
Theater: Procrastinators, you have one last chance to catch Shorts Gone Wild 3, the entertaining evening of eight brief plays on LGBT themes, co-produced by Island City Stage and City Theatre. This weekend only, through Sunday, the production moves down to the Fillmore at The Jackie Gleason Theater in Miami Beach. Six high-energy versatile actors sprint through the work of eight prominent playwrights, both national recognized and local in sketches both comic and dramatically poignant. Go to www.fillmoremb.com for details and reservations.
Music: They say they’re not a boy band, but Australia’s 5 Seconds of Summer has all the right features of one, with handsome young men barely in their 20s and clever tunes like “She’s Kinda Hot.” The quartet, now on its Rock Out with Your Socks Out Tour, will be joined an all-female quartet, L.A.’s Hey Violet, for a show Sunday night at the Perfect Vodka Amphitheatre. It’s likely to be a tween madhouse out there at the Fairgrounds, but somehow that’s a fitting end to the summer and the arrival of the fall season. Tickets range from $25 to $69.50 through LiveNation, and the show starts at 7:30 p.m.