Movie Nation

Tiffany Haddish has understandably been acting like a kid in the comic candy shop since finally breaking out in “Girls Trip” last year.

She’s taken on a TV series, which she’s complained about signing for before her quote went up.She took the co-star role in a low quality but sure-fire hit Kevin Hart comedy. And she took a flyer on the indie-ish satire “The Oath,” with Ike Barenholtz.

She’s just announced a short but certain-to-be-lucrative stand up tour, where she can do her “Saturday Night Live” and talk show guest monologue about the hard road she had to travel to get here.

But one thing she shouldn’t have done was get into the Tyler Perry business. Whatever his entrepreneureal skills as a producer and brand, Perry’s day of having anything funny to say in a screenplay is long past. The proof is in “Nobody’s Fool,” the unamusing mess he ostensibly cooked up for Haddish, a movie in which she’s a has-to-try-way-too-hard supporting player to prop up another lame, misshapen Perry placeholder — a movie he figures black folks will go to simply because it has his name on it.

It’s a meandering, clumsy and inept attempt at making an R-rated raunchy comedy from a guy most at home with sentimental PG-13 sermons delivered by himself in drag.

There’s barely a laugh in it. And Haddish does lasting damage to her brand and suggests “time’s up” on her 15 minutes as she mugs, vamps, overplays and over-reaches in a vain attempt to give what she HAD to see was “not funny on the page” a laugh or two.

It’s really a Tika Sumpter vehicle, moving her from “Ride Along” support to the lead. She’s Danica, a high-powered Atlanta advertising exec whose boss jilted by her pretty young thing fiance, and now carrying on a long-distance online romance with Charlie, an oil rig worker who fills most of the boxes on her “list” of what her ideal mate would be.

That handsome hunk who runs her favorite coffee shop, Frank (Omari Hardwick)? He’s not in her league, not on her list.

She’s got an Oprah-sized colleague/assistant/confessor, Callie (Amber Riley) who follows her professional life and love life and is full of “Girl” advice. That’s Perry’s idea of edgy, hip dialogue, Callie explaining “Girl, if you get this account” and “Girl, if you get this promotion” and “Girl, I can’t even with you” every time she hears about this Charlie guy who emails and calls, but never visits or Skypes.

Momma (Whoopi Goldberg) interrupts this reverie by sending Danica to pick up her weed-loving, trick-turning sister Tanya (Haddish) from prison, and stuff gets real and real-R rated in a heartbeat. She’s uninhibitedly sexing up some random in the back of his pickup truck in the parking lot — a loud, lewd and rough tumble. When she’s done, she climbs in Danica’s M-series BMW with “I didn’t kill him. I just choked him out a little.”

Tanya gawks at Danica’s success and affluence and begs for weed and “club” hookups. The job she’s supposed to get, the drugs she’s supposed to avoid and the AA meetings she’s supposed to attend barely cross her mind.

A painfully unfunny moment — Haddish as Tanya pretending to struggle with walking on higher than high heels for the first time in five years. A second — Tanya turning every question on her job application at Frank’s coffee shop into a lewd and crude sexual come-on.

As for Danica’s mysteriously unreal love life, Tanya’s got a prison TV room solution to the mystery — “You got ‘Catfished.'”

Perry brings in the hosts of MTV’s “Catfished” for Tanya to convince and hit on. Not funny.

He gives Oscar winner Goldberg a lot of scenes as a weed-growing little old lady and nothing the least bit amusing to say or do in them.

And he uses Sumpter and Hardwick to deliver his homily, his little sermon on “Is there no (datable) black man who hasn’t been to prison?” The object lesson being, in Perry World, that shouldn’t rule out a good man as an eligible mate.

There’s a lot of affluence, swank apartments, designer clothes and perfectly made up and groomed men and women, an aspirational trademark of Perry pictures. Haddish? She looks rough, more often than not.

Plenty of sophomoric dope jokes are another trademark, and they’re no help.

And here is poor Haddish, collecting a check, figuring out that just because a writer-director needs her a lot more than she needs him doesn’t ensure that he won’t embarrass her with a role and presentation in that role that uses up her peak earning period with every minute she is or isn’t on the screen in it.

MPAA Rating: R for sexual content and language throughout, and for drug material.

Cast: Tika Sumpter, Tiffany Haddish, Whoopi Goldberg, Omari Hardwick, Miss Pyle

Credits: Written and directed by Tyler Perry. A Paramount release.

Running time: 1:50

Mateusz lays out two of the biggest obstacles facing someone with cerebral palsy in just a sentence, a line of interior monologue that serves as narration for the Polish drama, “Life Feels Good.”

“When you’re a vegetable, no one understands you.”

Communication when you have no command of speech or the limbs it takes to write or even to gesture to the right word on a page is a high hurdle to climb.

And by the time you think of yourself as a “vegetable,” having absorbed that from everyone around you since you were old enough to understand, life can feel permanently circumscribed — the world, fenced off.

They’ve given up, but Mateusz, played with energetic, gnarled physicality by Dawid Orgodnik, is very slow to come to the same conclusion in this true story in the “My Left Foot/Diving Bell and the Butterfly” tradition.

We meet him in his late 20s, as he’s to be evaluated by a panel of medical experts. It’s not his favorite situation. The long flashback that tells his story begins with him resisting testing, even as a child.

Born with cerebral palsy, his limited means of communicating come off as acting out throughout childhood. Everyone from doctors to faith healers in 1980s Poland tells his patient and hopeful, but overwhelmed mother (Dorota Kolak) and indulgent, loving father (a soulful Arkadiusz Jakubik) that he is “mentally deficient” and to learn to accept it.

But Dad includes Mateusz in all the home projects he does with the boy’s brother, Tomek. He shows the kid the stars, talks to him as if he’s sure he understands because he is and becomes the kid’s co-conspirator.

Only they know he’s a normal guy trapped in an abnormal body.

Naturally, considering his luck, his dad dies young, leaving Mateusz with a supportive but not truly able to help him brother and mother, and an older sister, Matylda (Helena Sujecka) who resents him and calls him “idiot” (in Polish, with English subtitles).

As Poland transitions to democracy and Mateusz reaches young adulthood, he takes his takes his first real shot at learning and starts narrating — wryly.

“My favorite class was anatomy,” he smirks without smirking (he can’t) and we see what he sees — disrobing women of all shapes.

He takes to curling up in the apartment window, taking in the world outside and what’s happening inside the windows of the neighbors’ apartments.

Anka (Anna Karczmarczyk) is a new neighbor whose mother “every night invited in a new man to help her sleep.” One of them stays, becomes the abusive stepfather and Mateusz, helpless, looks on. Anka has become his first crush, and trapped in a body that won’t allow him to do much of anything, not able to communicate beyond the simplest ideas to even his own family, he has to find a way to help, to intervene.

One of the most romantic moments you’ll see this year is in a 2013 Polish film only now getting North American release — a severely disabled man, a grateful young woman who doesn’t under-estimate him, touching a single finger beneath a locked door.

If there’s a quibble with this straightforward, overcome-all-odds drama it is that Hollywood cliche — it’s the return of that “crippled” and all-but-mute man is catnip to lovely young women plot contrivance. Anka is merely the first. Magda (seriously sexy-rebellious Katarzyna Zawadzka) is the next.

When even his ever-hopeful mother treats him as if he’s having a fit when he tries to communicate or reach for something, how this cinema romance trope survives is a mystery for the ages.

Writer-director Maciej Pieprzyca (the Polish import “Splinters”) lets us hear the man’s sense of humor and see the raging hormones that no disease that puts him on the floor or in a wheelchair could suppress.

When his brother visits with a girlfriend, Mateusz can hear what he’s missing out on.

“They made worse noises than I did.”

There aren’t a lot of dramatic incidents in the film, not enough to justify its running time. His interior life isn’t that much different from anyone else’s.

But “Life” is broken into chapters, inter-titles with symbolic signs and Polish words (“Wizard,” how he thought of his father, “Boyfriend,” how he started to think of himself) that hint where it’s going, even if it takes its sweet, overly-familiar time getting there.

For all the turmoil going on around them in Poland, the revolution in attitudes towards the disabled — Mateusz is moved to a mental hospital — were just as dramatic.

And even if we’ve picked up on those clues and recalled the opening device — that “evaluation” by skeptical medical professionals — that doesn’t lessen the impact of the breakthroughs to come.

These scenes are incredibly moving, and you don’t have to have had your first conversation with a cousin suffering from this disease via computer when he was in his 30s, to get a bit choked up at where “Life Feels Good” takes you.

But I do, and did.

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast:  Dawid Ogrodnik, Dorota Kolak, Arkadiusz Jakubik, Katarzyna Zawadzka

Credits: Written and directed by  Maciej Pieprzyca. An Under the Milky Way release.

Running time: 1:52

No, Paramount didn’t see fit to preview this for critics. It’s not usually a good sign, but there’s no law that says a company selling a product has to give the public any warning about its quality before they buy tickets to see that product. So it will be what it will be.

And I will catch it on opening night.

I’m curious to see if Haddish can maintain the last vestiges of her “Girls’ Trip” SNL hostess Emmy buzz. A bit over-exposed, a bit played in terms of her bag of comic tricks.

A fan, but looking for something fresh from her, more than “The Oath” let her show.

I dunno Will. You had me until the whole pigeon transformation thing. You’ve got until Sept. 19 to convince me Blue Sky didn’t ruin your kid-friendly Black James Bond movie, “Spies in Disguise,” with another bird picture.

One wondered if plus-sized silly Rebel Wilson was ever going to graduate from scene stealer and sidekick to romantic lead/comic lead.

And so she has. This Valentine’s Day release has a frump wake up “in a romantic comedy,” with New York “filtered” in that rom-com way, impromptu dance numbers, bedding the hunk of her dreams.

One problem? “I’m in a mother-f—–g romantic comedy and it’s f—–g PG!”

Priyanka Chopra, Adam Devine, Jennifer Saunders and Liam Hemsworth are the co-stars. Three credited screenwriters and the director of “A Harold & Kumar Christmas” are involved, so we will see what we see when we see it Feb. 14.

It was always just sitting there, waiting for somebody to attempt it.

The chest thumping, ego-tripping, rhymed insult fights that began life as “The Dozens” and morphed into “rap battles” was ripe for a smart, mouthy, down and dirty comedy.

“Bodied” is a seriously funny — laugh out loud, PBR through the nose funny. And the framing device, a white academic — an English major, of course — studying hip hop for his master’s thesis, “The Varied Poetic Functions of the N-word” in Battle Rap,” provides an entre to the form for those last holdouts who don’t take the talent, quick-thinking wit and artistry of rap seriously.

That’s Adam’s function in this clever, canny, outstays-its-welcome goof on art form. Calum Worthy of TV’s “Austin & Ally” and “American Vandal” is sort of a ginger Tobey Maguire, a hint of “Gee whiz” about him as he acts as surrogate for the audience, watching rap battles, explaining them to his nerdy womynist vegan girlfriend (Rory Uphold, hilarious) even as she obsessed about the violent, sexist imagery of these profane throw-downs.

“It’s a gun metaphor,” translates at one point.” “I think we can assume everything’s a gun metaphor.”

Berkeley student Adam connects with one of the top dogs of this Oakland underground scene, the smart and amazingly accepting rapper who goes by “Behn Grymm.” The fact that he’s using a homophone for Ben Grimm, “The Thing” of The Fantastic Four,” should be a tip that Adam shouldn’t condescend to him when explaining his thesis. The guy throws “Sue Storm” (another Fantastic Four member) into his rhymed insults, “Sandra Bullock couldn’t save your black ass (a “Blind Side” shot)” at his obese foe.

So Adam asking about “the N word as an intensifier for both comedic and intimitadory effect…or as a rhythmic flourish” is child’s play to Grymm (Jackie Long, suggesting depth and wit and “Sure, I could put up with a white mascot” warmth in his performance).

As Adam’s questions point to his seriousness and genuine affection for and understanding and appreciation for the form, Grymm throws him into a post-event parking lot rap battle with another ditzy white rapper wannabe. Ignoring  girlfriend Maya’s shrieks of “cultural APPROPRIATION,” Adam engages, tests himself (he dabbled with a “slam poet” phase), Adam thinks of his feet, cooks up intricate rhyme scheme insults (slowly) with obscure, literate and culturally-sharp references.

And impresses. The guys, and women like Devine Wright (Shoniqua Shandai) start to accept him. Maya’s demands be damned, Adam is hooked.

What lifts what could be another “white boy takes rap by storm” story (scripted by Alex Larsen, directed by Jonathan Kahn) is the film’s satiric sting. There’s little reluctance in allowing Adam’s inclusion in this world. But everybody from Maya to Grymm to Behn’s wife (Candice Renee) brings up the race thing, the “cultural appropriation” thing, what Adam is and isn’t allowed to use in these seriously politically incorrect battles. Sexism, homophobia and race make it into battles. Adam isn’t given the same license.

“If you really wanna a ‘nigga’ pass, move back to New York.”

The self-satisfied and prudishly PC Maya lands the best shot — “Do you REALLY want to be another white guy appropriating black culture? We don’t NEED MAcklemore. We need MackleLESS.”

But as Adam takes down this white rapper (“You’re suffering from I Wanna be Down Syndrome.”) and holds his own against Korean rapper Prospeck (Jonathan Park), as he starts treating Maya with the male privilege (groupies) endemic to this scene (not a good idea), he wins attention and “respect” for his thesis.

Not from his star academic dad (Anthony Michael Hall in a biting, aloof and clueless-but -doesn’t-know-it turn).

Kahn stages the battles like prize fights, a swirling camera circling bouts titled accordingly — “Devine Wright vs. Groom” — with in-your-face rhyme-spitting, many a finger jab given a visual/aural gunshot effect.

Yeah, “battles” can be bloody.

I loved the way much is left unexplained, slang (“You gots bars, son!”) and just why this culture which treats the kid with contempt one minute and embraces his embrace of that culture the next.

The script lets characters play stereotypes — Maya’s gender identity politics, Prius driving feminist/communist veganism, contribute to her emasculating harpy image, the “Asian” guy has an Asian guy’s job — and points out those cultural cliches. The movie generally circles back around and upends those stereotypes.

Maya and her PC friends insist that Adam demonstrate, on the fly, how he’d insult them in a rap battle, but he keeps the ugliest stuff he thinks up (which we hear and see) in his head. The friends have that patronizing take on African American culture of the liberally clueless.

“Your exaggerated Ebonics are offensive.”

“I can’t be a racist. I’m Asian.”

The milieu is colorful, with too many funny, feisty rappers to name here. They are legion, from the master of ceremonies who introduces Adam as “The Nerd who Needs No Revenge,” peers who drop a little “He so white, he make Michael Jackson look like…Michael Jackson” and nail “Home Alone” and other movie references.

“Oh the irony, You look like Ron Weasley, you sound like Hermione.”

Adam’s not-quite-benign racist assumptions have him constantly surprised at the houses, the “real life” work and personas of the people he battles. Smart battlers aren’t ghetto, aren’t broke and aren’t to be underestimated.

And the rapping and dialogue just sparkles. The film even breaks the fourth wall as Jas (Renee) “black-splains” how the movie fails “The Bechdel Test.”

The third act, built around a far more “serious” battle, drags and drags and is the main reason this otherwise light-on-its-feet romp clocks in at a tedious two hours.

But for its first 90 minutes, “Bodied” dazzles, ducks and dishes through a corner of hip hop most of us only experience through documentaries or Youtube clips. Here’s a movie that takes the form seriously, and gives us a taste of how hilarious it can be — for those not on the receiving end of these epic couplets of insult.

MPAA Rating: R for strong language and sexual content throughout, some drug use and brief nudity

Cast: Calum Worthy, Jackie Long, Rory Uphold, Shoniqua Shandai, Debra Wilson, Dizaster and Charlamagne Tha God

Credits:Directed by Joseph Kahn, script by Alex Larsen. A Neon release.

Running time: 2:00

Production-designed to within an inch of its life, backed by the gorgeous music of Tchaikovsky and including a ballet, though not the famous one their “story” was inspired by, Disney’s “The Nutcracker and the Four Realms” offers up a heaping helping of eye candy and treacle for the holidays,

If only they’d had a coherent story and a good actress in the lead. If only those were the only two serious shortcomings in this brainless, cotton candy bauble.

Filmed by Lasse Hallstrom (“What’s Eating Gilbert Grape'”), re-filmed by Joe Johnston (“Honey, I Shrunk the Kids”), and re-written to boot, it’s the sort of movie you don’t need to be told was a hash job followed by a hack job. A child could see it’s a beautiful, eye-popping empty-headed mess.

In Steam Age London young Clara (Mackenzie Foy, pretty to the point of colorless) is coping, along with her siblings and her gloomy dad (Matthew Macfadyen), with her first Christmas without their mother. Even a posh silver egg present from her tinkerer/godfather Drosselmeyer (Morgan Freeman) and the lush Christmas ball he throws every year cannot melt the family’s chill.

The egg requires a key to unlock, and gadget-designing Godfather Drosselmeyer sends Clara searching for that key as the final bit of her present. But a mouse snatches it, she finds herself chasing it through the vast mansion and into The Christmas Tree Forest. That’s where she meets a nutcracker soldier (Jayden Fowora-Knight).

He helps Clara discover that her late mother was a queen in this fanciful universe where such realms as The Land of Enchantment and the Land of Snowflakes and Land of Flowers are in conflict with The Land of Amusement, led by Mother Ginger.

Clara, as the princess, must join the other regents — Hawthorne, Shiver and Sugar Plum (Eugenio Derbez, Richard E. Grant and Keira Knightley) — and stop Mother Ginger  (Helen Mirren), who presides over a realm that is an abandoned, enchanted amusement park.

Every set is more dazzling than the one before. Everything is dependent on elaborate, clockwork gadgets. And an awful lot of it is digital, computer-generated-imagery (CGI).

Most impressive — the mice who swarm into a giant mouse monster, the tumblers who break apart like Russian nesting dolls.

There’s a royal ballet in the middle of all this, telling the “story” of the realms, and it too impresses, as prima ballerina Misty Copeland dances, accompanied by an orchestra conducted, in a nod to “Fantasia,” by Gustavo Dudamel in silhouette.

But none of it makes a lick of sense. The quest is a non-starter and the action — toy soldiers brought to life for the Big Battle — is blasé.

Knightley is the only member of the cast to register, all high-voiced and bubbly and fretful.

“Oh…POOH!”

That’s the only quotable line from Ashleigh Powell’s disastrous script. Names such as Tom McCarthy and Simon Beaufoy have been reported as among those trying to “fix” it, but there’s no getting over the nonsensicalness of it, no line that is any better than the trite and true — “I wish mother was here.” “We ALL do.”

Grant looks miserable, first scene to last, Macfadyen, Knightley’s “Pride and Prejudice” co-star has nothing to play and Mirren is wasted in a role in which her stuntwoman did all the real work.

Still, it’s quite the spectacle and harmless enough, what with the color blind casting, the high culture (ballet and Tchaikovsky) sampled, the princess resourceful enough to rescue herself.

The most inventive thing about this twist on the Nutcracker “brand” is a modern dance piece re-imagining “The Nutcracker” in modern dance form under the closing credits — far too little, entirely too late to save “The Four Realms.”

MPAA Rating: PG (for some mild peril)

Cast:Mackenzie Foy, Keira Knightley, Jayden Fowora-Knight, Helen Mirren, Misty Copeland, Matthew Macfadyen, Eugenio Derbez, Richard E. Grant and Morgan Freeman

Credits:Directed by Lasse Hallstrom and Joe Johnston, script by Ashleigh Powell. A Walt Disney release.

Running time: 1:39

It sounds like a movie pitch.

Guy starts talking in his sleep, somniloquy, the phenomenon is called. He’s hoarsely whispering in a strange tongue. His significant other records him, and what he’s muttering sounds like something he heard on a little seen, unmarked and mysteriously unknown horror movie, preserved on VHS video in a white box.

And these “white tapes” seem to come from a long-closed videotape emporium, “The Video Palace.” Our somniloquent hero, Mark, a video editor by trade, sets out to talk to experts in “white tape” horror; interviews with horror bloggers, producers, collectors and aficionados, trying to unravel what he’s saying, what he’s watched and what a movie “that you watch, that watches you back” might mean.

Mark will make this journey and record it as his podcast. So it’s not a movie…yet.

Still, this podcast about a podcaster is up to its eyeballs in horror fandom, with hints of “The Ring” and “The Blair Witch Project” and any tale that sends the curious looking for that which should not be found abound, with bloggers, oddball collectors, fearful myth-believers and skeptics littering the supporting cast.

“Video Palace” is a part of AMC NEtworks “Shudder” channel. The series has Ben Rock (“Alien Raiders,” “Shadow of the Blair Witch”) as director, Bob DeRosa (“Killers” “White Collar”) as writer and was created by Nick Braccia and Michael  Monello (he produced and dreamed up the ingenious marketing for “The Blair Witch Project”).

It’s available on iTunes here. 

It’s a 10 episode series, and the cast includes Chase Williamson (John Dies at the End) and Devin Sidell (31) along with Bonita Freidericy (Preacher), Larry Cedar (Twilight Zone: The Movie), Leon Russom (A Quiet Place) and Justin Welborn (Beyond the Gates).

The explosion of podcasting — talk shows, performance programs, dramas, comedies etc. in forms that mimic radio suggests that we’ve entered a new Golden Age of Radio Drama — pre-recorded, listen-at-your-leisure and typically on-your-phone programs in all the genres radio used to pursue before “format” and TSL (time spent listening) became broadcasting’s king and queen.

I’ve known these guys for years — hardcore horror buffs, most of them. They’ve got a clever concept that’s well-executed, not offering frights straight away, but building a mystery, a “universe,” with names (interview subjects) familiar to horror fans.

It’s immersive and pretty darned good. Bear in mind that I started my career in public radio during a period when NPR was doing binaural sound radio dramas and Stephen King works were making it on the air. Want to “see” the best version of “The Mist?” It was on the radio in 3D (binaural, headphones-only sound).

So the bar is high for such projects, inside my head anyway.

I love the way this connects to our fading memories of the video store experience, of “clam shells” (soft-sided VHS boxes), head cleaner and screen streaks that let you know a tape was on its last legs.

Or that the hairy horror from “The Ring” was coming out of that well to GETCHA.

So check out “Video Palace,” and explain to the kids coming up that “Be Kind, Rewind” was around long before Jack Black made a movie of that title.

“People’s Republic of Desire” is a cinema verite documentary about online streaming stars in China, people who “perform” on demand and are rewarded directly by patrons — viewers with money.

It’s narrow-cast capitalism at its most ruthless.

“People’s Republic”“People’s Republic” opens in New York and other cities in early Dec.

The problems started pretty much the moment the Pell Grant, named for a U.S. Senator who wanted to move college aid from colleges which dispensed it to students, to the students themselves, was invented.

The idea, as recounted in the documentary “Fail State,” was to give students “choice,” to spend aid money at state schools and community colleges, or private — typically non-profit ones.

But that act opened the Pandora’s box of “for profit” education, “schools” built on “the market model,” which found they made more money by not actually providing an education, by spending their Federal student loan guarantees obtained from students on obtaining more students — advertising, recruiting and rounding up warm bodies that qualified for loans — and paying for lobbyists and making campaign donations to ensure Congress would never ever derail their fraudulent gravy train.

Jennifer Wilson, an alumnus of Everest University pictured above, holds up her degree, which no prospective employer would recognize, and states a cold, hard personal truth — “This $50,000 piece of paper is completely worthless.”

The film’s title — a play on college names like “Boise State/Albany State/Ohio State” — isn’t the cleverest. And the film is something of an overreach, offloading far too much information to easily process. That’s because the movie has a lot of ground to cover, with a lot of policy turning points, too many villains to track and too much money spread around to trace.

Still, Alexander Shebanow’s film shines a damning spotlight on these “degree mills,” which many represent as simple “frauds.”

We see how The University of Phoenix sponsors concerts at military bases because they need veterans to sign up for their courses. Not shown, Full Sail University buys billboards all around their city block-sized Orlando, Florida campus (re-purposed shopping malls along with a few purpose built structures) touting how many “Oscar nominated films” or “Grammy winning albums” their alumni worked on. What they did on those projects, or even if the figures themselves are accurate, isn’t disclosed.

And your TV is filled with ads for schools that sound prestigious, but are often just money-transfer operations making their investors and founders rich.

“Fail State” focuses on academics, journalists and legislators fighting to expose, regulate or close such schools. And it zeroes in on their victims — low income people of every race, recruited, pressured, hustled and conned into signing up for “educations” that are in most cases, lacking, and for loans that millions of such students will never be able to repay.

Shebanow sums up decades of reporting on this, another solvable problem made unsolvable by politics. The first story we see identifying this then-new ripoff was introduced by Walter Cronkite on “The CBS Evening News” back when he anchored it. The latest, by John Oliver on “Last Week Tonight.”

Members (Maxine Waters) and former members of Congress (Senator Tom Harkin) detail how attempts made, over the decades, to regulate, police and if necessary close such businesses, which are responsible for billions in un-repaid student loans every year.

Former President Bill Clinton is given millions to sit on the board for Walden University. Former Speaker of the House John Boehner rode to the speakership on the millions donated by parent companies of such schools, the sainted John McCain defended them and George W. Bush started the gutting of rules his father’s administration pushed through years earlier.

And Trump University? Never let it be said that a grifter doesn’t know a good grift when he sees one.

Schools such as Kaplan’s ICM School of Business,  Westwood College, Rasmussen, Columbia School of Broadcasting, DeVry, Everest, ITT Tech, Strayer, University of Phoenix and hundreds of others focus their pitch on the disadvantaged, offering a fast-track (months instead of years) program that won’t cost you anything up front.

But even as a narrator notes the shifting nature of work in America, where “college is the only route to the middle class,” “it’s increasingly out of reach.”

The many academics interviewed point out how “poor students have just a one in ten chance of graduating,” how “higher education is functioning as a caste system.”

F. King Alexander, president of LSU, details the history of collapsing state support for colleges that began under Reagan and continues today

One film chapter explains “The Pain Funnel” approach to recruiting — a step-by-step plan recruiters use to break down recruits, embarrass, frighten and goad them into signing up.One Miami “campus” even hired strippers as on-street recruiters.

With $100 billion in student loans going out today, there’s a lot of incentive to get that money, moving it from taxpayers to corporate chiefs, sticking the poor and when they default, the government with the debt.’

It’s no wonder one congressperson calls two of the instigators of this mid-2000s deregulation looting spree, Congressmen John Boehner and Howard McKeon, “bag men for the mob.”

The warnings about “creating a permanent underclass” are underscored with who is losing out on the money the for profit operators are grabbing — America’s community colleges, “the Dark Matter” holding the country together, providing cheap, practical and legitimately accredited educational training for millions hoping to better their financial situation.

We meet Marquette Bascom as she struggles to raise two sons and attend LaGuardia Community College. Her student loans are sizable, but not onerous.

And unlike the other students hoping for the same results she does, she will have a legitimate degree and a loan she will be able to pay off.

It’s a lot to take in, and “Fail State” doesn’t leave the viewer with a lot of hope. When the Obama Administration figured out how to grade such operations and shut down the ones plainly set up to fail their students, Corinthian, Everest, ITT Tech and DeVry went away.

And then Donald Trump got elected.

MPAA Rating: unrated

Credits:Directed by  Alexander Shebanow, script by Alexander Shebanow, Regina Sobel, Nicolas Adams, narrated by Gibson Frazier. A Gravitas/Starz release.

Running time: 1:33