Movie Nation

Little Joan Marie Larkin saw the rock quartets on TV in the 60s and early 70s, and decided she just HAD to have a Sears Silvertone electric guitar for Christmas.

“I can’t be the only girl who wants to do this,” she later remembered thinking.

She wasn’t. As Joan Jett, she crashed the boys-only rock guitarist club, faced sexism, critical dismissal and rock fan and music label abuse..And before she was through — and she’s not done yet — she’d formed two iconic bands, had a decade of hits, dominated MTV and crunched and crashed her way into the Rock’n Roll Hall of Fame.

It’s no surprise that the story of rock’s original female badass makes for a gritty, inspiring documentary. “Bad Reputation” arrives as the Queen of Rock Guitar turns 60 (Sept. 22), and filmmkers Kevin Kerslake and Joel Marcus give the tenacious feminist icon her due in this thorough and thoroughly entertaining look at her career and life.

She burst out of the “post-Stonewall” glam-rock era, getting her start in feminist LA in the mid-70s. She met drummer Sandy West and started piecing together the “all girl” band of her dreams, with producer/impresario Kim Fowley recruiting Jackie Fox, Lita Ford and Cherie Currie as lead singer. Badgered by Fowley, Jett and Currie concocted their most famous song, “Cherry Bomb,” in mere minutes.

And as they rehearsed, he’d throw things at them, prepping them for the reception that the mostly-male rock club crowd would give him, scenes memorably recreated for the movie “The Runaways.” Jett remembers those sessions as “our boot camp.”

With its lead singer blonde and performing in a corset and fishnet stockings, The Runaways created a stir. But the rock establishment — record companies, critics and Rolling Stone, Cream and Crawdaddy magazines — weren’t having them. Debbie Harry and Chris Stein of Blondie appear in the documentary, expressing dismay at their treatment.

As “The Runaways” movie was in pre-production, I interviewed producer Art Linson and we shared memories of how the band was dismissed. The rare Rolling Stone piece on them claimed there were teen boys jerking off in the front row of their shows. That’s the way  Jann Wenner’s magazine covered them.

But they were out there, and they didn’t back down.

“Tell me I can’t do something and that’s something I’m sure to do,” Jett (who took her mother’s maiden name as her stage name) declares.

To underscore that, the film shares DECADES of sexist TV and radio interviews, laugh out loud funny to see now, but grating for a driven performer leading a band that wanted to be about more than sexuality. Fowley, whom Iggy Popp describes as “like Frankenstein’s monster, but if Frankenstein’s monster was on acid,” molded their image and invented their notoriety.

The band became legend.

“There were a lot of girls who didn’t want to be Joni Mitchell,” Iggy says. “They wanted to rock and roll. And then along came The Runaways.”

“Bad Reputation” gives us a glimpse of The Runaways’ peak-then-flameout moment, a Beatles-like reception in Japan, where Fowley’s last manipulations (financial and personal) broke them up.

We see Jett’s spiral into near-suicidal despair, friends intervening because she was self-destructing with booze and drugs, “hanging out with Sid Vicious, Stiv Bators, all these guys who’re dead, now.”

And then she met her musical soulmate — songwriter/producer Kenny Laguna. A self-described “bubble gum” music master, Laguna and others make the case that bubblegum was the precursor to punk, and that’s the kind of punk he envisioned for Joan — creating a Blackheart band and record label partnership that endured anonymity, self-released LPs and decades of bad to indifferent record deals and then sudden, hard-earned fame and glory.

Most of her/their hits were covers — “I Love Rock’n Roll,” “Crimson and Clover,” “Do You Wanna Touch Me,” but she could co-write tunes just as gritty and anthemic and popular — “Bad Reputation” and “I Hate Myself For Loving You.”

Kristen Stewart remembers Joan’s edict for playing her in “The Runaways,” to remember to “pussy the guitar” onstage. Michael J. Fox recounts her acting technique in “our rock’n roll cancer film” “Light of Day,” as “scary,” and gives as much of a clue about her sexuality as Jett herself does, that “She doesn’t care what you think” her sexual orientation is.

No, she still doesn’t discuss her sexuality. Never has. But the fact that she covered “Crimson and Clover,” and was a producer and supervisor of her legacy on the film biography of her breakout band, “The Runaways,” answered that better than any revelation she might be saving for a late-life book.

Debbie Harry declares Joan the very definition of “Rock and roll animal.”

Billie Joe Armstrong marvels at how she led the way, creating her own record label and own success, a model for all the punk, grunge and metal bands that followed.

We see Jett playing for the troops and hear United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley hail her as her icon.

But mostly what we see and hear, in interviews old and new, is a musician who made it all about the music, fighting to do it her way, clawing at stardom, fading from fame and coming back to the Warped Tour, arena tours, back to state fairs and small clubs, mop-topped, close-cropped blonde or bald, working up a sweat and leaving it all onstage.

Yeah, she used sexuality, just like the guys. But here’s someone who made it to “icon” one show, one power chord at a time, and who never ever sold out along the way.

MPAA Rating: R for language, sexual references, some drug use and brief nudity

Cast: Joan Jett, Miley Cyrus, Michael J. Fox, Kristen Stewart, Billie Joe Armstrong, Rodney Bingenheimer, Debbie Harry

Credits:Directed by Kevin Kerslake, script by Joel Marcus. A Magnolia release.

Running time: 1:33

One of the rules of thumb concerning box office prognostication is the way movies for kids are consistently under-estimated. You just never know how many parents are anxious enough to get the children out of the house and make an impulse trek to the cinema.

And whatever tally is gathered Friday, Deadline.com is always ALWAYS sure to under-guess on what Saturday will be for a kids’ film.

“The House with a Clock in its Walls” has been pegged as a mid-$20s opening weekend “hit” (it cost mid-$40s, all of the money going to effects and the two adult leads). A BIG Saturday now tells us that $27 million is within its reach (Kiddie movie Sundays are usually better than the norm, too).

Even Box Office Mojo was thinking “$23” after a middling Thursday night and Friday performance.

“Life Itself,” opening just as wide, will not earn $2 million, or barely hit that disastrous mark. Heads should be rolling at Amazon Studios and their outsourced Three Blind Mice marketing for this one. 

Deadline.com thinks “Fahrenheit 11/9” should have opened in a platform release, which makes more sense than throwing an unmarketed, underpromoted and mislabeled (“Michael Moore’s Trump Movie”) doc into 1700+ theaters. I’d agree. Doing talk shows alone isn’t going to get the word out, and this thing isn’t managing $3 million, maybe a tad more.

Neon should never have released “Assassination Nation” as wide either. It’s a one or two screens per market “specialty house” picture with limited appeal and exploitation potential. It’s going to make everything it was ever going to make this weekend, and they’ll have spent all this money putting it on all those screens all at once, and that’s money wasted. I saw it with one other soul on Saturday afternoon in Orlando. Not bad, but not everybody’s cup of B-.ot bad, but not everybody’s cup of  B negative.

“A Simple Favor” is holding audience and looking like a picture built for the long run. Finally nudged past “The Nun” ($100 million+ by midnight) and “Predator” (close to $40 by midnight). “Favor” will be in the mid $30s when the weekend is done.

It’s hard not to oversell “Smallfoot,” the new bigfoot musical from Warners Animation.

Because words like “joyous” and “profound” (almost) leap to mind at several points in this Warners Smart/Pixar Heart comedy.

Yeah, you’ve seen the trailers, maybe shrugged. Maybe your kids did, too.

And for half an hour or so, the movie’s a lightly engaging goof, starring Channing Tatum as a singing, questioning Yeti who encounters a creature of legend, high up in the Himalayas where he and his kin live — a SMALLfoot!

We’ve been introduced to Migo’s mountain-top world, a village above the clouds whose rituals include the job young Migo is destined to take over from his father (Danny DeVito), the guy who rings the gong that tells the sky snail of light to begin its trek across the horizons, bringing another day to all the Yeti.

Without that gong, how would the snail know when to bring light? Without the phalanx of mammoths, what would keep their mountain balanced on the edge of the heavens?

Without the Stonekeeper (Common) interpreting the Holy Stones of his coat, how would they know they’re alone in this world, that there’s “nothing” below, that “Smallfeet” do not exist and that “Ignorance is bliss?”

See, this is where things get INTERESTING, in that sort of Big Questions about Life, the Universe and all.

Migo’s culture has a comically deep and deeply superstitious -and myopic view of the world. The Stonekeeper pooh-poohs his “sighting.” Everybody breathes a sigh of relief at this, embracing another “perfect day” in bliss.

That’s when Migo meets the Smallfoot Evidentiary Society, people who have artifacts — evidence and theories to go along with it.

And unlike their myth-swallowing, unquestioning superstitious peers, they think the Stonekeeper is Mr. Coverup and his coat of illustrated life lessons and rules stones is bunk.

The outside-the-mountain thinkers Meechi (Zendaya of “Greatest Showman”), Gwanji (LeBron James, The Greatest Showman), Kolka (Gina Rodriguez) and Fleem (Charlie Day  sound-alike Ely Henry) are figuring out The Scientific Method and questioning EVERYthing.

As Meechi sings, “All we are is curious, there’s nothing wrong with that.”

That’s when they decide Migo must go and fetch proof. And that’s how he meets the desperate for ratings, “integrity” free TV wildlife show host (James Corden), and the Yeti learn that Smallfeet have a few scary legends of their own, of “monsters” with fur and horns and teeth and feet big enough to ski on.

So what we have here is a movie puts fact and science in opposition to fear, ignorance and superstition. The team of “Smallfoot” screenwriters take pains to not say “religion,” but they both criticize it and recognize its place in culture and history.

None of this repetitive baby formula “We are family/families stick together” Pixar messaging (save for “Wall-E”) here.

When Meechi sings “A life that’s full of wonder is a wonderful life,” she’s suggesting science, fact and discovery open the world up instead of closing it in. When she argues that their way of thinking is “not just about tearing down old ideas, it’s about finding new ones,” she’s making a case that only the most backwards school boards would reject.

But then the Stonekeeper sings and raps (the Oscar-winning Common’s first career) “Let it Lie,” a brilliant rhymed summation of religion, tradition, myth and society where we learn “the only thing stronger than fear is curiosity,” which is why these outliers are such a threat.

“Smallfoot” picks up steam, and the gags — good, from the start — rise to the brink of hysterical. Corden’s kidnapped TV host Percyis hauled off in a makeshift baby sling, is zipped into a sleeping bag that turns him into an inchworm and the reason Migo and other Yeti find the smallfeet “so cute” and “adorable” is because when humans speak, they’re heard as a gurgling baby gibberish. Who can resist baby talk?

Tatum has a lightly pleasant singing voice, as he demonstrated briefly in “Hail, Caesar!” And since getting James Corden to NOT sing is harder than the contrary, Percy gets a showstopper all his own, capturing all the desperation for ratings and “viral” success, the ethics of making “fake news” to do it and what Percy is willing to do to pay his mortgage in “Percy’s Pressure,” karaoke sung (and danced) to the tune of the Queen/David Bowie hit.

For all that subtext, there’s not a lot of edge to this, nothing deeper than “humans hunt everything and are to be feared.” I’d have made the Stonekeeper a Scar (“Lion King”) of dogma, a villain. Probably didn’t “test” well. The edgiest joke is the legend that the Giant Sky Yak “pooped” the Yeti into this world, as if that could ever happen.

But “Smallfoot” is still a delight, a jokey-smart cartoon that enlightens and teaches even as it entertains. Because we need to learn that sometimes there really are monsters “out there,” and sometimes, the monsters are us.

MPAA Rating:PG for some action, rude humor, and thematic elements

Cast: The voices of Channing Tatum, Zendeya, James Corden, Common, Ely Henry, Gina Rodriguez

Credits:Directed by Karey Kirkpatrick, Jason Reisig, screenplay by Karey Kirkpatrick and Clare Sera, based on the Sergio Pablos novel.  A Warner Animation release.

Running time: 1:36

Equal parts “The Crucible,” “Kill Bill” and well, hell — “Carrie” — “Assassination Nation” is straight up action exploitation, a  scantily clad, sexed-up slut-shamed girls satire about scantily clad, sexed-up and slut-shamed girls who get even.

Not until they first “get what’s coming to them,” of course. Amoral misfits adrift in the phony moralism of suburban East Salem, this quartet has hypocrisy issues, sex and sexuality issues and acceptance issues – even if they aren’t marched out of school the first time they show up in street-walker attire — coochie cutters and bare midriffs, plunging necklines and smart phones filled with sexually suggestive selfies. sexts, the works.

Lily (Odessa Young) is our 18 year-old narrator. She’s a girl with a boorish boyfriend (Bill Skarsgård) and a secret — an older man who sexts her under the ID “Daddy.” Yes, there are self-esteem issues, which she freely owns up to. What bugs her are her self-confessed “prudish” parents (Kathryn Erbe  and Joe Crest), and hypocrites like them, adults hung up on nudity and sexuality, which of course means they’ve got their own secrets.

Their greatest hypocrisy might be criticizing others when they’re letting their daughter under-dress for school and even more so for her unsupervised, binge-drinking parties and torrid encounters with the opposite sex.

Then again, the kids aren’t exactly self-reflective at that age. They’ve never developed empathy, learned the phrase “Walk a mile in my shoes.” When the mayor’s cellphone gets hacked. nobody crows louder than Lily’s transgender BFF Bex (Hari Nef of “Transparent”). A politician who stood against LGBT rights and asserted his unimpeachable morality has J. Edgar Hoover issues, laid out by a hacker for all of Salem to see.

“It’s hilarious when that happens.”

Friends Em (Abra) and Sarah (Suki Waterhouse) are just as shallow, loving a good scandal. And when their cool, worldly principal (Colman Domingo, a stand-out turn) gets hacked? Maybe they feel something, not that the movie lets on.

But all this sexting, Instagramming nudes and what-not has its consequences, as anybody who heard of The Fappening could tell them. Casting social media overachiever/actress Bella Thorne in a supporting part, was inspired. She plays an “Insta” star cheerleader with Amazon sugar daddies (men who buy her stuff thanks to what she shows and says online), she’s set to own this social media age.

“Privacy is just dead,” she declares, utterly without irony. Old people and others living in denial of that blunt fact need to “get used to it.”

Where writer-director Sam Levinson, son of “Rain Man” virtuoso Barry Levinson (Daddy even bought him a credit, here and there) goes astray is what happens after that second community icon is hacked.

Half the town’s secrets are hurled into the ether. And the entire town is faced with disastrous marriage, career and life-threatening invasions of privacy, all at once. Mean gossip sent in secret, porn saved on their phones, those darned nude selfies, sexting under-age kids, homosexual encounters exposed to the homophobic — the works.

Somebody’s going to get blamed, and not just blamed, “purged.” Anarchy sets in without a second thought, mobs attack and punish “transgressors.” And the girls? They’re hunted.

The “Salem Witch Trials” allegory is something of a hard sell as a subtext, The “Kill Bill” connection is limited to a scene that sets it up, and the imitation that follows.

For all the first act drollery about “pressure” to be “perfect” looking in their carefully posed and lit selfies, physically and psychically impossible Lily assures us in words and in her own dressed-down (under-dressed down) appearance — armpit hair, splayed teeth, etc. — there’s not an unlimited supply of it.

Lily’s self-awareness isn’t contagious, alas. Her pals and peers and fellow townsfolk don’t appear to grasp their rush to Internet judgement, their rank hypocrisy in creating community standards they aren’t able to uphold themselves.

She can mull the nature of #flawless, and note the care she and her girlfirends put into the image they put “out there,” “but all it takes is one guy to say ‘LOL’ at your picture,” “nasty” at your sense of sexual security for the whole lie to fall to pieces, and you with it.

“You’re a man, I don’t expect you to understand” is about the end of the deep thoughts and sharp wit.

So Levinson does what many a director (his dad, on occasion, Tarantino as a rule of thumb) attempts as a means of covering up — cinematic whistles and bells. We’re treated to hand-held camera pursuits, the screen split into a triptych, amped-up action beats, suspense, horrific threats and geysers of blood.

As bracing as this “trigger warning” about the gender gap that has grown wider than the generation gap, as troubling as it is as prophecy or “the world we’re raising out kids in,” Levinson tends to squander the thoughtful, messy movie he’s been making for the vengeance fantasy he cooks up for the finale.

A lump in the throat is replaced with a roll of the eyes.  So props for giving Joel McHale the role he was born to play (You’ll see.), but major demerits for bingeing on “The Purge” when you couldn’t think of anything better to do.

MPAA Rating: R for disturbing bloody violence, strong sexual material including menace, pervasive language, and for drug and alcohol use – all involving teens

Cast: Odessa Young, Hari Nef, Suki Waterhouse, Abra, Joel McHale, Bella Thorne, Bill Skarsgård

Credits: Written and directed Sam Levinson. A Neon release.

Running time:

The trailers have been cute. There’s a laugh here and there.

About to see “Smallfoot,” which opens Friday, with an army of tiny tots — the only way to see a cartoon.

Wish me, and them, luck.

HBO’s Jane Fonda documentary, “Jane Fonda in Five Acts,” doesn’t tread lightly on the controversy that still swirls around “Hanoi Jane.” It jumps right in, playing a tape from the Nixon White House, with the disgraced president himself getting the first lines in this mostly “in her own words” biography.

“What in the world is wrong with Jane Fonda?”

Fonda’s stance on the Vietnam War and her infamous visits to Hanoi, even posing on a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun, dominate the middle acts of “Five Acts.” It’s an inclusion not designed to lure in the haters (fat chance) or even calm the still-troubled waters surrounding this chapter of her life. The many TV clips sampled in “American Masters” mainstay Susan Lacy’s film show Fonda apologizing, repeatedly, on chat shows, “60 Minutes,” seemingly everywhere– for DECADES — for that last stunt.

She can’t really use the “just a kid” excuse that many a “youthful indiscretions” blaming politician or Supreme Court nominee can trot out. She was 32, had grown up fast in Hollywood, lived and worked in France and only become radicalized in an Age of Radicals by watching coverage of the Tet Offensive and the police riot of the 1968 Chicago Democratic National Convention.

But as Lacy’s film makes clear, as much as perceptions and misconceptions about her politics have dominated opinions of her in a small corner of the populace, that’s just one act in an extraordinary life, one Fonda and a few (always friendly) critics of her persona willingly dissect in “Jane Fonda in Five Acts.”

You think you know Jane? Probably not. Lacy’s impressively thorough film forces anybody willing to watch it to reconsider her, measure her life’s work and legacy against that of her iconic father and appreciate the screen legend and cultural force she has been.

Here she is at the end of her teens, doing live TV “drop in” appearances as a young fan of Lux, popping up on “What’s My Line?” and posing for “staged” family picnic photos with her frosty, aloof womanizing father, mentally ill mother and her always supportive brother Peter.

“I grew up in the shadow of a national monument,” she narrates. Father Henry Fonda’s “Midwestern values, stand up for the underdog” were reflected in his most famous films, “The Ox Bow Incident,” “12 Angry Men,” “Mister Roberts” and especially “The Grapes of Wrath.” He made himself”the ace of the America he wanted to believe in.”

What did his daughter come to stand for? Consider — she turned her back on Hollywood fluff during the mid-60s, went to France, married French director Roger Vadim and worked in artier films and the straight-up exploitation piece “Barbarella” for famous French filmmakers, including Vadim.

She became radicalized and devoted years to opposing the Vietnam War, supporting the Black Panthers, equal rights and economic equality.

Those famous hot-selling workout videos? Millions earned on behalf of a political cause she and then-husband Tom Hayden (one of the Chicago 7, California politician and activist), organizing people on behalf of economic equality. MILLIONS.

Her films, the projects she shepherded onto the screen back then? “Coming Home,” about the trauma of war for homecoming veterans, the soul-searching many of them did, in anguish, “The China Syndrome,” which one TV wag at the time used to label Jane “The Cassandra of the Nuclear Holocaust” as it arrived mere weeks before Three Mile Island, an event it predicted and then “explained” it as she remembers it, what happened to people who weren’t getting that information from the evening news.

Even “Nine to Five” was YEARS ahead of the curve, championing flex work schedules, equal pay for women, decrying sexual harassment well before the Clarence Thomas hearings put it on the national radar.

So when the equally aged Dick Cavett, a 1970s liberal talk-show host who (gently) chided her for her politics back in the day, doubles down on that critique, as Lesley Stahl or Barbara Walters hits her with the money question, if she is “ashamed of who you were before,” you can understand the hesitation.

Her award winning roles are sampled, her iconic hairstyles are revisited, her parenting questioned and self-questioned (a daughter and stepdaughter she left behind with Vadim).

Troy Garity, her actor son with Tom Hayden, narrates comically irate memories of being dragged around by two committed leftists to conflict zones, living simply and frugally through a childhood of activism with distracted parents, but marvels as an adult at what she was trying to do — and succeeding. And he seems to have turned out OK.

Fonda remembers the ’60s, unlike most of her fiercest critics, an era when being labeled “bourgeois” was more dreaded (Vadim would hit her with that) than “leftist.”

Archival interviews with Sidney Pollack and Alan Pakula let those directors remind us that she was a “Cat Ballou/Barefoot in the Park” “glamour puss,” as Pollack (“They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?”) recalled, but he saw “a serious actress inside” her.

Redford marvels at their onscreen chemistry, vintage Peter Fonda interviews let him disagree with who kissed up to their father and who “had the rougher time of it” (each says the other had it worse). Her “Nine to Five” and “Grace and Frankie” co-star and pal Lily Tomlin and she kvetch about new Hollywood and old Hollywood, two funny old broads who never learned to keep their mouths shut.

Boarding school bulimia (which went on for decades, Jane says), wealth, marriages, conversions, almost all of it is here.

And Fonda marches through it all, her fiercest critics dead, forgotten or condemned by the judgment of history.

At 80, she’s still here, indomitable, sitting in the makeup chair getting dolled up for the Golden Globes, 80 years old and regal as ever, adorned in glamour, gabbing with her trusted hairdresser.

“To drink or not to drink,” she jokes, the Golden Globes question. Will she or won’t she?

They serve wine there, she complains.

“I don’t drink wine. I drink vodka.”

(My most recent interview with Jane Fonda is archived here.)

MPAA Rating: unrated, nudity, profanity

Cast: Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, Tom Hayden, Troy Garrity, Ted Turner, Robert Redford

Credits:Directed by Susan Lacy. An HBO Films release.

Running time: 2:13

Jack Black’s kiddie film quote just went up. Again.

Whatever the appeal of the book it is based on, the added value of having horror mogul Eli Roth direct and Oscar winner Cate Blanchett in the cast, Black’s got to be the BIG reason “The House with the Clock in its Walls” is opening in the high end of expectations for its prospects.

A kid friendly picture, not a proven brand, despite the fact that it’s based on a best seller, “Clock” is ticking over to the tune of $24-25 million on its opening weekend.

That’s dues to Universal’s marketing of it and Jack “Goosebumps” Black starring in it. Go ahead, JB, hire a drummer and keyboardist for Tenacious D. You can swing it.

The weekend’s other wide releases aren’t doing well at all. And all of their failures, reviews be damned (“Clock” is tepid entertainment at best), can be blamed on the thing they got wrong that Universal gets right — marketing.

The Three Blind Mice marketing of Amazon (and Bleecker Street and Roadside Attractions) were going to have a hard time selling “Life Itself,” “despite an all-star cast and that TV tie-in (from the creator of “This is Us.”). The sort of people who consume network TV pablum like the soapy “This is Us” and find it Great Entertainment aren’t moviegovers. But as this marketing concern couldn’t sell merlot to winos, the film isn’t reaching anybody. Preview screenings by the score built no word of mouth, advertising failures, the works. Incompetent marketing and bad reviews mean the movie isn’t opening, it’s making a break for it IN SECRET. A 2 million weekend? If Jeff Bezos doesn’t clean house after that, I’d be shocked.

Michael Moore doesn’t have Harvey Weinstein’s company, or anybody else of note, behind his latest, “Fahrenheit 11/9.” Something called Briarcliff Releasing is distributing it. Plenty of critics got to see it, he’s done all the “preaching to the choir” chat shows to promote it. But have you seen any advertising?

It’s not bad, scores some big points and revisits Moore’s Greatest Hits (“Roger & Me,” “Sicko,” “Bowling for Columbine,” “Fahrenheit 9/11”). A proven distributor with marketing savvy could have boosted this one. But the country has big time Trump fatigue and Moore’s a bit of a broken record. $3 million, instead of the projects $7-10. I’ll bet Fox News trumpets this “failing filmmaker” as will the Tweeter in Chief.

In the studio universe, Neon is the poor man’s A24 — edgy, smart films, as a rule. But unlike A24 and like The Three Blind Mice, they have no clue about selling their product. None. I spend weeks at a time trying to get previews of their films (a week on “Assassination Nation”) and nothing but disinterested silence from their “people.”

“Assassination” is a dead-weekend wide opening, so they never had huge hopes for it. But “cult hit” and “could catch on” are written all over it. And it won’t manage even $1 million (maybe a little more). All that effort  and expense to make a movie, and lazy, inept boobs in charge of selling it? Neon needs to clean house and hire somebody from Searchlight or A24 to MARKET their movies.

“A Simple Favor” WAS marketed and IS getting great word of mouth, and will finish a distant number 2 this weekend, $11 million or so — an impressively small 34% drop from its opening weekend. “Predator” and “The Nuns” are fading at much faster rates.

You see as many horror movies as I do, you start to obsess on the one or two things the ones that work get right.

A pet peeve? Actors who, because they’re not good at interacting with effects or can’t find in their imaginations the proper degree of shock and awe that someone experiencing the supernatural would register.

Lee Pace (“Guardians of the Galaxy”) and Carrie Coon (“Gone Girl”) put on a clinic as to how it’s supposed to play in “The Keeping Hours.” Parents, gutted and eventually broken up by the death of their little boy, are brought together by the impossible. The kid’s still in their old house.

Screenwriter Rebecca Sonnenshine and director Karen Moncrief conjure up sentimental and sad ghost story about loss, guilt and “unfinished business” that manages to be genuinely touching. Cast your horror movie well and that sort of thing is possible.

Not that they don’t have some frights to share. Here’s my favorite. Bitter, ill-tempered Mark has just started cleaning up the house he and his ex split from years before, when their five year old Jacob (Sander Thomas) died. The latest renters have fled and there’s all this stuff Mark and his ex, Elizabeth, left stored in the attic.

That’s where Jacob used to play. And Mark, irked, calls her voice mail to get Elizabeth over there to pick up anything she wants because “I’m finally selling.”

The word “selling” is barely out of his mouth when every single door in the hallway he’s calling from — five of them we can see — SLAMS shut. Chilling.

The best effects are the simplest, and kudos to the effects rigger or production assistants who nailed this precision-slamming in one take. We, like Lee Pace playing Mark, his mouth agape, are shocked and shaken that something inexplicable has just happened.

The radio starts playing “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” which Jacob heard as “best man” at his parents’ wedding. And in the attic, Mark sees the boy. Another shock. How can this be?

He tracks down the dog walker (Ana Ortiz, a hoot) who had been “consulting” with the previous tenants, because, you know, her MAIN job is “medium.”

“You SAW him? You didn’t conjure him, did you? You have a brain tumor or some other medical condition? Family history of mental illness?”

My father has dementia.

“Technically, that’s a cognitive disorder and not a mental illness. What did he WANT?”

He wants his mother.

Janice’s advice? Do what the kid asks. And because in LA, you never underestimate the dog walker, that’s what Mark does.

Elizabeth’s reaction when she sees a little boy in Jacob’s clothes and play mask? Fury. She gives Mark a bloody nose, suggests he seek help, sure he’s played a sick joke.

But eventually she relents, returns and is amazed.

The film begins with their wedding day, and then jumps ahead to the fictive present. Mark, brusque with everyone, including the lady next door (Amy Smart) and her pesky son, establishes much of what happened through visits with his father, the one with dementia. He’s seen Elizabeth on TV. “She’s written a book.” It’s about moving on from grief, and no, they’re not still married. Six years divorced, Jacob dead for seven.

Ray Baker, by the way, plays a beautiful and compassionate take on dementia.

Pace lets us see Mark lose little pieces of his sanity and regain the compassion we fear he lost with his kid. Coon brings a fine “Not having this” to her first moments with her ex, the old “I remember why we split up, even if you don’t” routine.

“I thought you dropped drinking.”

“I did. Mostly.”

I like the way the script sets up the requisite “rules” that those interacting with the supernatural world follow, and just love Ortiz’s version of the “Been there, seen it” “medium” Janice. It’s a worn movie trope that such folks, from “Annabelle” to “The Conjuring,” on back to “Poltergeist” — must be unflappable, direct and a bit funny. Ortiz, of TV’s “Ugly Betty,” nails it.

“Keeping Hours” doesn’t play up its handful of frights. The filmmakers are more interested in what this experience means to the long-divorced people living through it. That robs the picture of surprise and the “gotcha” moments common to this genre these days.

But not every ghost in the movies has to be a demon, not every ghost story has to be an assault.

And sentimental as the picture is, it starts slowly and only finds its heart in the third act.

I still say “The Keeping Hours” is a keeper.

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for thematic elements, some sensuality and language

Cast: Carrie Coon, Lee Pace, Amy Smart

Credits:Directed by Karen Moncrieff, script by Rebecca Sonnenshine. A Universal/BH release.

Running time: 1:31

The buzz around the Netflix comedy “Nappily Ever After” swirls around Sanaa Lathan shaving her head on camera. As it should be.

As an Atlanta ad exec, beauty accounts queen and physical appearance perfectionist, her drunken, broken-hearted tantrum with hair clippers is one of the most dazzling moments in her long (“Love & Basketball”) career.

It’s a minute or so of screen time full of tears, laughter, self-destructive anguish and resignation at what she’s done. Lathan plays the hell out of it.

Sadly, the movie surrounding it is a listless affair, starved of laughs if not utterly devoid of charm. Building an empowering romantic comedy around Lathan and Lathan alone was always going to be an iffy proposition. Sexy, vulnerable she can do. Vulnerably funny? Not really.

Maya Angelou called “hair a woman’s glory,” and Violet (Lathan) has taken that to heart. Her mother (Lynn Whitfield) would have it no other way. Even as a child, the kid was warned away from the pool. Being called “Chia Pet” left her frightened of the daily forecast. Rain means frizz.

“I had to be fixed,” she narrates. When we meet her grandmother, we get it. Hair and appearance obsession passed down, generation to generation.

A successful ad woman whose speciality is “perfect woman” campaigns, Violet’s expecting her live-in love (Ricky Whittle) to propose at her carefully-planned birthday party. She gets a chihuahua instead.

Seeing as how she lost a big chunk of her mane in a last minute hair salon accident (relaxer), got an emergency weave to maintain the aura of perfection, we can understand her pique.

The film, based on the Trisha R. Thomas novel, has “chapters” named after every phase of hair Violet experiences. “Weave” is one, “Bald” is the one that sticks, the one that comes right after “Blonde.” Yeah, she gets a dye job in “f— me blonde” to get herself back “out there” after the breakup, which only lasts for one ill-advised bar pickup.

Then comes the drunken self-pity, the tantrum and the movie’s money scene. Chase that one with the morning after (she did a half-assed job of it), her mother’s hysteria, the way she physically shrinks without her hair, her “glory.”

Only her dad (Ernie Hudson) makes light of it, calming down her mother (“She’s convinced you’re a lesbian, by the way. “) and bucking her up (“You’ve got the head for it.” ) sand seems supportive.

But then there’s the hair stylist (Lyriq Bent, playing a maddeningly under-developed character) whose salon, where his acting-out daughter (Darias Johns) caused the relaxer accident way back. He’s cool with her bald look, charming in  the way he jokes that “the sound of the clipper, Harriet Tubman calling you to freedom?”

The tug of war over Violet’s soul barely holds one’s interest. Will she submit to the demands of the veneer she used to maintain with the superficial man she maintained it for? Or will she fall for the working man who says he’s “trying to change the world, one head at a time?”

The dramatic moments play better, Whittle’s Clint griping that Violet’s perfection makes their relationship superficial, “like two years of first dates,” and a touching moment where this self-pitying success story stumbles across a cancer survivor’s support group and is forced to confess, lands hard.

“My boyfriend didn’t give me a ring so I shaved my hair off.”

The soul searching, stats quoted about African America’s obsession with hair and hair-altering products, were better covered in Chris Rock’s funny and revealing “Good Hair” documentary.

Saudi filmmaker Haifaa Al-Mansour lets the empowering message, Violet losing some of her vanity by losing her “good hair,” overwhelm every aspect of the movie, adding songs like “It’s a Woman’s World” and variations on that theme which fill the soundtrack.

But like Vi, a woman accused of “never taking chances,” “Nappily Ever After” never takes a chance, rarely exerts itself for a laugh or a moment of heart. Al-Mansour (“Mary Shelley”) plays it safe.

We get the message. What we don’t get is “entertained.”

MPAA Rating: unrated, adult situations, sexuality, profanity

Cast: Sanaa Lathan, Ricky Whittle, Kiley Casciano, Lynn Whitfield, Ernie Hudson

Credits:Directed by Haifaa Al-Mansour, script by Adam Brooks, Cee Marcellus, based on the  Trisha R Thomas novel.  A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:38

I found Eli Roth’s direction of the lifeless “House with a Clock in Its Walls” to be inept, “House with a Clock in Its Walls” to be inept, showing him to be out of his depth on a kiddie horror movie/fantasy.

The jokes are thing and disappear about 30 minutes in, the kid is dull and the menace “meh.”

And I wasn’t alone. Reviews overall aren’t setting the world on fire. The metacritic rating reflects a certain deference for Roth (The New York Times included there) that is head-scratching. The proof is on the screen. He lacks the light touch.

Why on Earth would you hire Jack Black, who has a certain currency with kids, and give him so little to play with?

Still, it’s the only wide release with any prayer of clearing $20 million on its opening weekend. Box Office Guru figures it’ll be lucky to even manage that.

Dropping by my favorite multi-plex Thursday I was one of like five people at the first showing “Fahrenheit 11/9.” Michael Moore’s Briarcliffe/State Run films release didn’t preview in much of the country, a start-up many of us couldn’t make contact with to get screenings of. Reviews have been good,Reviews have been good, not as dazzling as Moore’s cultural watershed pictures.

Its most audacious moment might be an epic Obama takedown, and while it is good, I was not dazzled or as moved by it as I have been by Moore’s earlier films. The novelty has worn off, and while pathos is there, it’s more a good film than one of his best. Will it open big in a Year of Trump Backlash? The Box Office Guru, The Box Office Guru, who has been late posting and seriously off his game in recent months, thinks it’ll manage $9 million this weekend. I don’t see it. An unproven distributor, middling awareness and Trump fatigue should suppress turnout to something closer to Box Office Mojo’s $6 million prediction.

I was an audience of one at the showing of “Life Itself” I attended. Amazon, very much a miss miss or “Manchester by the Sea” operation, previewed this thing all over the country in some misguided marketing effort to get word of mouth help.

Amusingly, I was banned from local screenings – several — as Amazon is one of the Three Blind Mice — Bleecker St. and Roadside Attractions being the others — who share marketing/PR from the same firm which has had a beef with me going back years.

They show the film, in a top 20 market, for free to more people than will end up buying tickets for it, and don’t let the local critic with a WWW audience in.

Even their good movies underperform, largely because of these petty idiots. Shocking that Jeff Bezos et al haven’t figured it out. Email me, Jeffy, I’ll give you a couple of names.

“Life Itself?” It’s a disaster.  Everybody says so. Classic Hollywood taking candy from a “New Money in Town” baby — Amazon. Giving that kind of cash to a TV writer/producer for a movie is almost always a bad idea.

Will it make $5 million? Box Office Mojo thinks so. Seven Million? No way in hell, Box Office Guru.

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