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Merce Cunningham was the greatest “acquired taste” in modern dance. And living to the active old age of 90, with 60+ years in the public eye, we had a lot of time to acquire that taste.

His choreography is revived, explained and dissected in “If the Dancer Dances,” a revealing documentary about reviving his 1968 piece “Rainforest,” complete with the “Andy Warhol aluminum pillows” balloons), David Tudor music and ripped Jasper Johns “nude” costumes.

New York choreographer Stephen Petronio unleashes his company on one of Cunningham’s classics. But he doesn’t trust himself to stage it.

“The beauty…and amazing thing about dance is that it gets passed from one body, one soul, to another,” Petronio explains. “It comes out of the body, it goes into the air. And then it disappears…How do we keep their work alive?”

We convince the dances who worked with Cunningham — among them Andrea Weber and Meg Harper, to teach the work, the style, to young dancers in a company whose works about “constant motion.”

“There’s going to have to work from a different place within their bodies,” Weber notes. “Everything everything EVERYthing comes from the back!”

He’d build his company, and rebuild it around certain types of dancers, and certain physical types.

“Merce,” who starred in his own pieces late into life, “had these crazy-long arms and legs,” Weber says to Petronio’s troupe, emphasizing the difficulties that creates. Every body part is vital, every muscle just so.

“I’m going to HOUND you about the hands.”

“Rainforest,” a work of graceful, halting lurching, leaps, embraces, blooming and stalking, was inspired by Cunningham’s recollection of a rainforest near where he grew up in Washington state.

Backstage, the Gino Grenek, dancing the lead, gripes that “Everything is cramping,” thanks to the en pointe poses held impossibly long, legs or arms suspended in air for seconds upon seconds, the contortions demanded of the human back.

No wonder a young dancer in the company, Nick Sciscione, whispers “The name evokes FEAR.”

“If te Dancer Dances” — the film takes its title from a Cunningham truism, “If the dancer dances, everything is there!” — underlines what Petronio used as his reasoning for bringing in as many Cunningham vets as possible for the rehearsals. “You can’t teach it from the written page, can’t really learn the dance from a video,” Petronio says. It’s all about “muscle memory,” practiced and passed on, “dancer to dancer.”

If Cunningham’s work is to survive, it will be through efforts like this (The Cunningham Trust was set up to ensure that.).

Cunningham veteran Gus Solomons jr analyzes the essence of Cunningham’s art, “Shapes at different speeds, very fast, or very slow,” he says. “Stripped down abstraction” that can “approach physical impossibility. And that’s what’s exciting.”

Yes. “Everything cramps” performing his works.

All this explanation is useful to the viewer, casual dance fan or otherwise, because for all the glories of lithe, sweaty bodies moving in intense physical concentration, of seeing leads Dava (Davalois) Fearon and Grenek and others mastering the movements, no film version of Cunningham’s work can overcome that “acquired taste” thing in itself.

But “If the Dancer Dances” piques the interest and widens the appreciation for just what a test these pieces are, even to the performing arts world’s Olympic-level athletes — dancers.

MPAA Rating: unrated, some profanity

Cast: Davalois Fearon, Gino Grenek, Meg Harper, Nick Siscione, Andrea Weber, Stephen Petronio

Credits:Directed by Lise Friedman and Maia Wechsler. A Monument release.

Running time: 1:26

There’s an Eastwood in this — Francesca. And Alycia Debnam-Carey and Claire Holt and Ted Levine (“Monk,” “The Silence of the Lambs.” Gerald McRaney, too.

But it’s about brothers played by Brenton Thwaites and Ben Young. A shooting and “a cover up.”

“A Violent Separation” opens in theaters and on VOD May 17.

Several of these folks, including Leo and Don Cheadle, are more accessible to the press via the activism than their work. The most recent times I have spoken with several of them were on behalf of their causes.

Hollywood Reporter (@THR) Tweeted:
In honor of #EarthDay, here’s a look at 10 stars who are making an eco-friendly impact around the world https://t.co/EWh8oyNLxZ https://t.co/s0mYHo7J9d https://twitter.com/THR/status/1120302496449290240?s=17

Better than the fleet of Chevys Roger Moore was chased through New York with in “Live and Let Die,” the endless AMCs in “The Man With the Golden Gun.” https://www.express.co.uk/entertainment/films/1116976/James-Bond-25-product-placement-Omega-Aston-Martin-Bollinger-Heineken-Daniel-Craig/amp#referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com&_tf=From%20%251%24s

Prett good explainer of why one needs to call “The Curse of La Llorona” “bastardized” as I did in my review.

VANITY FAIR (@VanityFair) Tweeted:
La Llarona is the stuff of legend and she will make her way to the screen once more in @LaLlaronaMovie https://t.co/YZdOTJq34M https://twitter.com/VanityFair/status/1119918777980866562?s=17

From Discover on Google https://www.indiewire.com/2019/04/kevin-brownlow-film-preservation-lost-silent-movies-cuba-1202060615/amp/

It’s always a shame, but rarely a surprise, when the best movie of a given weekend underwhelms at the box office. But DisneyNature’s “Penguins,” unless it has a boffo Saturday (when family films do the most business) and Sunday, will not earn the studio and the charities these films support more than $2 million.

Take your kids to see “Penguins!”

This weekend belongs to a scary movie you probably SHOULDN’T take the kids to, the latest title from the extended “Annabelle” universe. “La Llorona” is a one-off (allegedly) retelling of a Mexican folk legend, about “The Weeping Woman,” with one character (the priest played by Tony Amendola) here from “Annabelle” and referencing it, in his role of “explainer of the legend” to the harried mother (Linda Cardellini from “Green Book”) and why her children in 1970s LA are in mortal danger.

A $26 million dollar smash, it wasn’t helped by reviews (I thought it was a well-crafted formulaic thriller, well-acted as well).

The other wide release was the winning, upbeat faith-based drama “Breakthrough,” about a medical miracle those involved insist was caused by prayer. It’s headed towards an $11 million weekend, $15 million by weekend’s end as it opened last Wed.

Last night’s “An Evening with Richard Dreyfuss” at the Florida Film Festival was another of those delightful highlights of many a film festival — a public celebration of the life and work of a big screen legend.

Festivals premiere movies, host Q & As with up and coming filmmakers and stars, and panel discussions on the state of cinema, indie cinema and acting. But it is “victory lap” events like this that I’ve always enjoyed, as both a spectator, and on occasion, as a participant — doing the interviewing, moderating questions from the audience.

I led the Q & A with R.D. at the Festival’s home base, the Enzian Theater, after a screening of “The Goodbye Girl,” one of two classics Dreyfuss starred in during his breakout holiday season of 1977. The other Winter of Dreyfuss hit featured him staring — in perfect slack-jawed awe, gaping at the impossible — while sitting in a power company pickup truck at a railroad crossing in the dead of night in BFE, Indiana.

Dreyfuss was full of anecdotes about Neil Simon, whose life and career the festival wanted to celebrate with this event, as well as “Mr. Holland’s Opus,” “Close Encounters,” “Jaws” and “Down and Out in Beverly Hills.”

He talked about his Dreyfuss Civics Initiative, about taking years off from acting to study up on the subject,

He wanted to set the record straight on his alleged “feud” with Robert Shaw on “Jaws,” his efforts to acquire a reputation for being hard to please (A way to set himself apart from his late ’60s/early ’70s peers, he says.) and how he always thought of Simon as “my personal writer, my guy.”

Others may have heard versions of how “The Goodbye Girl” came to be, but I hadn’t, and most of the sell-out crowd there hadn’t. So we got into that.

In 1976, Dreyfuss recalled, the great Mike Nichols had lined up the already great Robert DeNiro to star in a Neil Simon script titled “Bogart Slept Here.”

It was based, Dreyfuss said, on Dustin Hoffman’s overwhelmed-by-fame-and-life experiences after blowing up in “The Graduate.”

“And they’d looked at like three weeks of rushes, and Bobby DeNiro wasn’t funny.”

This was long before “Midnight Run” and “Analyze This” found DeNiro’s funnybone. ‘

Nichols had to fire him, and Simon agreed. They brought in Dreyfuss for a table-read, and Simon asked him what he thought of “Bogart Slept Here.”

Dreyfuss says he pointed out “the obvious” to Nichols and Simon. That “nobody is going to feel sorry for a MOVIE star who’s having trouble” with his marriage, his loss of privacy, a career that had turned into a smorgasbord of choices. “Because he’s still a MOVIE star.”

“Neil said, ‘You’re right.’ They killed the project, basically right there.”

But Simon, the most prolific playwright/screenwriter of his generation, said he’d come with something else. “Three weeks later, he handed me ‘The Goodbye Girl,’ written with me in mind, I guess in my voice.”

Nichols had moved on, theater projects and film projects that failed to materialize.

Herbert Ross was brought in, and Simon’s then-wife Marsha Mason (already an Oscar nominee for the very fine “Cinderella Liberty,” NOT scripted by Neil Simon).

It became a career-making movie for Ross and Dreyfuss, with Oscar nominations as best picture, best screenplay, best actress (Mason, who won the Golden Globe that year) and best supporting actress (Quinn Cummings) — and an Academy Award for child-actor turned American EveryMensch — Richard Dreyfuss.

One other tidbit Dreyfuss mentioned about the movie stood out. They shot “probably two thirds” of the actor Elliot Garfield’s performance in a gay camp “Richard III,” the disastrous play Dreyfuss’s character comes to New York to star in (“off off OFF Broadway”). The footage “is somewhere in Warner Brothers’ vault, the negative anyway.”

THAT, I’d pay to see.

And the unknown actor in the play who runs Richard through at the Battle of Bosworth Field in the play’s climax? “A few years ago, Powers Boothe comes up to me at some event and tells me ‘I killed you in ‘Richard III.’ I had NO idea!”

Dreyfuss was a delight, and everything you’d want in a screen legend — anecdotes, a little edge, and the perspective of somebody who has been in on everything from The Birth of the Blockbuster to the Golden Age of Netflix.

I can’t find the Orlando Live Streaming archive of the chat, but when I do, I’ll link to it. Good audience questions, and a lot of funny responses from of the funniest guys the movies have ever produced.

Photos by Jim DeSantis of the Fla Film Festival and Kim Waddell.

“Daddy Issues” is a bubbly, bubble-gummy and seriously sexual West Hollywood tale of two lovely young lesbians in love.

Director Amara Cash and screenwriter Alex Bloom treat the characters like candy — some sweet, some sour (and decidedly kinky) — and keep the production design candy-colored in this moony romance set to a girlishly pop music beat.

Maya (Madison Lawlor) is a 20something pink-haired pixie, an aspiring “modern” cartoonist whose drawings are every bit as fanciful as the way she dresses, dyes and decorates herself. They’re “queer pixies,” just like her. She longs to “study in Florence,” as if there are no places to study cartooning in Greater L.A.

But Mom (Kamala Jones) isn’t financing this “a two yr Lez-Cation,” no matter how much Maya pleads “I don’t belong here” and that she needs to be “where people understand and appreciate me.”

OK, Mom has a point. A model-thin gay girl living on the edge of West Hollywood? Girl, people understand you.

Yes, she’s just being dramatic. Maybe that’s because Maya is still young enough that her sex life is mostly coy flirting/teasing games on Grindr. But she has found her fantasy ideal.

That would be the smouldering, sexy coquette Jasmine (Montana Manning), who designs, sews and sells hipper-than-hip (mostly black) clothing online, sharing a whole lot of her active, popular, partying life online — sprinkled with a smidgen of her LaLaLand philosophy.

“Follow your dreams or they’ll chase you.”

Long before Jasmine “checks in” online and thus reveals her actual location, Maya is “cybersessed” with her. The rave/party she gets into puts the two on a planned collision course.

And damned if these two lithe, very pretty young things don’t hit it off when they do collide.

But Maya’s young and in love. And as wide as her pale blue eyes are around “Jazzy,” she’s not picking up the signs.

Their first sexual encounter is underscored with Vivaldi on the movie’s soundtrack, and the insistent buzz of angry messages on Jasmine’s phone.

“You’re LATE” the messenger named “Daddy” barks onto Jasmine’s screen.

Oh yeah, Jasmine is on the sexuality spectrum, or is as far as “Daddy” (Andrew Pifko) is concerned.

He’s much older, well off and bossy.

“Put on the blue outfit” he orders, when they finally hook up. “Does someone want their allowance?”

In a garage apartment Dr. “Daddy” keeps padlocked until Jasmine visits, we see what appears to be a tweenage girl’s bedroom — pastels and bows and froufrou all around. Dressed in little girl outfits, Jasmine goes gamine-aged sex kitten for her “Daddy.”

And then “Daddy Issues” gets downright weird.

Filmmakers Cash and Bloom pack a lot of characters and plenty of chewy/funny or sexy-swooning scenes into this 80 minute dramedy.

Both women have Daddy issues, as Maya’s left her home years ago and mom’s new husband is always walking in on her. Even Jasmine’s older-man-on-the-side has Daddy Issues. His disapproving father (veteran character actor Monte Markham) seems to have a pretty good handle on his son’s psyche.

Simon (Pifko) is a surgeon, and anything that he doesn’t control sends him into a (sped-up action) manic tailspin of hysterics and drugs.

And the mothers? They’re a trip. Jasmine’s (Jodi Carol Harrison) is a manic drunk, ready to marry the first biker who says “Let’s go to Vegas.”

The script finds fun in an over-the-top frat-bro attempting to pick up Maya (“We’ll do extreme brunch. You extreme brunch?”) and poignancy in Maya’s naive tumble for the more world-wise Jasmine.

Jasmine may not want to get “serious,” but her design business doesn’t take off until her new “muse” inspires a radical re-design in the clothing line — cartoonish and colorful, like the pale-eyed pixie with the pale pink hair.

The leads are dazzling, although Pifko’s arch take on kinky Simon suggests there’s more in the closet that’s going to require unpacking before this guy can feel “normal.”

The Cliff Notes psychology of “Daddy Issues” works against it,and it’s hard to keep the tone as airy as the colorful production design and pop tunes that underscore much of the film insist it is.

But this one is too interesting, funny and aggressively/transgressively sexy — if there even is such a thing these days — to pass by.

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast:Madison Lawlor, Montana Manning, Andrew Pifko

Credits:Directed by Amara Cash, script by Alex Bloom. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:21

I saw “The Curse of La Llorona” with a half-full house Thursday night, so I am guessing the answer to that is “Yes.” “The Weeping Woman” should best “Shazam” at the box office, dethroning the WB comic book title.

The ceiling has been raised on horror the past few years, mainly due to franchises, brands that fall within “The Annabelle Universe” or “The Conjuring Universe” or “Blumhouse” producing the film.

“La Llorona” won’t ride in on a tidal wave of great reviews. It’s well-acted and well-crafted and I thought those facts trumped any weariness of the film sticking to that demonic possession formula.

Variety is saying it’ll manage $20 million and be neck-and-neck with “Shazam!” probably, and the Wed-Sunday release of the inspiring faith-based drama “Breakthrough.”

Box Office Mojo is countering with a $17 million prediction, while acknowledging that it did a quite-healthy $2.75 million Thursday night.

I say $20 million, easily. Maybe $25-30.

“Breakthrough” is a sweet picture with a pretty good cast and should have a decent weekend, but you never can tell with this genre. The angrier the movie, the more Fox News/Trump Christians show up. And it’s not angry. Not that angry, anyway.

About $13 million is the safe guess most prognosticators are sticking with, though I think Wed-Sunday it could pull more.

Disney’s “Penguins” Earth Day doc is the best movie for kids out right now. Take them to see it and shock the lowball ($4-5 million) predictions for this cute and dramatic documentary.

“Shazam!” is winding down, and last week’s new releases are doomed to fade pretty quickly. “Hellboy” especially, but “Little” too — a bit, anyway.