Movie Nation

Actor Jake Short on the movie set at Riel Recreation Park in St. Albert on Thursday July 7, 2016. Mosaic Entertainment is filming a feature film called #ROXY, a teen romantic comedy, this week in and around Edmonton and St. Albert. (Photo by Larry Wong/Postmedia) Story by Alexander Sorochan Story by Alexander Sorochan will run in the Edmonton Journal (and possibly the Sun), most likely on Saturday July 9.

A high school “Cyrano de Bergerac” in the age of tweets, texts and the romantic gravitas of a proffered “‘S’up?”

That’s “#Roxy,” a flip and funny rom-com from north of the border that, when it works, reminds us that words can woo, win or wound with their power. And that hope springs eternal for the big heart and beautiful soul, no matter how nasal the packaging.

Roxy Rostand (Sarah Fisher) is the pretty, bookish object of every boy’s desire at Bergerac High. She’s “totes” tight with her BFF Deana (Hannah Duke), even though they aren’t on the same wavelength. As in, you’re coming to the secret party tonight, right?

Can’t. “I have a date with ‘The Mayor of Casterbridge.'”

“OMG ewww. Is he like, what, 40?”

Roxy has eyes for the new boy, who looks like he fell off “Twilight” and onto the football team. That would be Christian Newville (Booboo Stewart of “The Twilight Saga”). She has no way of diplomatically showing her interest.

Surely her best boy bud, Cyrus (Jake Short), the witty, super-smart tech nerd with the gigantic schnoz can help. He’s just hack/humiliated a cruel jock at the school pep rally and the administration is on his case. And he’s had this epic, love-to-end-all-loves crush on Roxy since like forever.

“Do I LOOK like Tinder?”

But sure. He’ll be the go-between. Christian gets advice from his bud Lee (Jake Smith, a dead ringer for Jake Short, save for the nose). Whatever you do, don’t talk about Cyrus’s nose. Don’t mention it. He’s got a temper.

“C’mon, how big can it be?”

Short’s Cyrus has to hide how disappointed in Roxy he is. She has him in the friend zone because of his nose, he’s sure of it. He will do his damnedest to make her fondest wish come true, gambling that the guy she’s sized-up by virtue of his looks won’t be a jerk, will be into literature and the fine arts, mooning over poetry, just like her.

She’s into Russian lit right now, Cyrus notes. “Quote Chekhov to her!”

“The ‘Star Trek’ guy?”

He cannot believe he has to hand-hold this jock through love notes as texts (“Give me your phone!”) and woo her with his words on behalf of a himbo. His cousin and partner in pranks Bronwyn (Pippa Mackie) sums it up for him, in case he’s missed the point.

“You get to do the work, he gets to do...her.”

But he wants Roxy to be happy, wants to give her a version of himself that is smart, romantic AND handsome.

If you know “Cyrano,” you pretty much know how this goes.  Sooner or later Roxy and Christian end up alone, she asks “What’re you reading right now?”

“Like, a book?”

Sure. Impress her. Well, “This one had Archie in it.”

The first laugh in “#Roxy” is seeing the high school principal, the guy who barks into the PA system to silence everybody, then barks again to get some “school SPIRIT.” He keeps a framed photo of “Machete” in his office. The principal is Danny Trejo, and he summons a giggle in every scene he’s in.

For instance, Bronwyn and Lee are engaged in an epic practical jokes battle. Principal Castillo looks at her and makes a veiled, out-of-line threat. “Are you going to finish this, or am I?” Challenge ACCEPTED.

Stewart makes an amusingly dim Romeo, who doesn’t know what to do with a girl who greets him by quoting from “Romeo and Juliet.” He’s just thinking he’ll “Hit that booty,” and all will be well.

The smart kids are forced to watch football practice, and are of course, confused.

What’s the object of this game again?

“The object of the game is to reestablish the patriarchy and identify alpha males in a social setting, such as school,” Bronwyn says.

There’s a Cusack “Say Anything” re-creation, with a garden sprinkler and a cell phone and no Peter Gabriel, and of course a LOT of nose jokes — most told by our Cyrano, Cyrus, because he’s had to live with it and he has all the best material.

“With you, it’s not nose-picking. With you its spelunking.” “That’s no nose! It’s a SPACE station!”

Short, of that kids’ comedy “Shorts” of a few years back, makes a convincing wit, standing up to bullies, defending a lady’s honor.

Fisher, a “Degrassi High” alumna like generations of Canadian actresses before her, is winsome enough, even as she’s overshadowed by everybody around her because they have all the funnier lines.

All the performances are lifted by screenwriter Tony Binns (“Truckstop Bloodsuckers”) clever dialogue, and Mackie and Jake Smith have cute chemistry largely due to his writing as well.

“#Roxy” hews a little too closely to the original “Cyrano” when it reaches a moment of violence and goes on and on beyond that in attempt to find a payoff.  It’s an 85 minute movie wriggling out of a 100 minute sack in its final act.

But it turns out that Netflix isn’t making all the clever teen comedies that come out these days, even if “#Roxy” only finds its audience when it finally makes its way to the streaming service sometime next year.

MPAA Rating: unrated, a beating, mild profanity

Cast: Jake Short, Sarah Fisher, Booboo Stewart, Pippa Mackie and Danny Trejo

Credits:Directed by Michael Kennedy, script by Tony Binns. A Mosaic release.

Running time: 1:45

Far away from the spotlight of NASCAR, IMSA, Indie Car or F1 racing, there are still people who race because they love it, work on their own cars because they have to and spend their Saturday nights at a tiny tracks, pursuing local glory and a cheap trophy to add to the decor in their (mostly) Man Cave.

One of the places that happens is the last race track in the area that claims itself as “where stock car racing was born, in 1927” — Long Island.

“The Last Race” is about those drivers and that track, Riverhead Raceway, a quarter mile paved circle in Riverhead, Long Island.

Filmmaker Michael Dweck cheerfully channels the wry, eccentric early documentaries of Errol Morris (“Vernon, Florida,” “Gates of Heaven”) in crafting this would-be eulogy for a way of life and the people living it in this working class corner of suburban New York.

Dweck mixes cheerfully amateurish interviews and staged moments with the driving community and track eco-system with poetic and visceral footage of the action on the track, racing sequences often set to sacred choral music by Mozart.

There’s nothing the least bit fancy in play here — no dazzling drone shots, nothing that would make Fox Sports track him down to work on their whizzbang NASCAR coverage. The technique fits the setting, a tiny 69 year-old track with an “infield” barely big enough for the ambulance and two wreckers that stand by, always at the ready, when the action is underway “Every Saturday Night!”

The people aren’t identified on camera — not the honking “New Yawk” good ol’boys grousing about “Jessica’s here. She thinks she’s a racecar driver.” Not the aged fan who shows off memorabilia from the scores of tracks Long Island used to have, ticking off their names — “Islip, Juniper Valley, Oakwood Park, Roosevelt Raceway, Sheepshead Bay, Freeport…”

Not even the young driver, captured by a GoPro camera in the cockpit of his late model beater, silently psyching himself up, putting on and adjusting his helmet, crossing himself and rolling forward as a “blunderbuss start” kicks off another 20 lap event at Riverhead.

Barbara and Jim Cromarty owned the track when this was filmed, one of the reasons Dweck & Co. came to document the track’s imperiled status (there have been many newspaper stories about Riverhead’s survival over the years). The Cromarties show up on race day with walkers, both of them.

They were hanging on as long as they could, holding out in the face of a crush of surrounding, soul-sucking development.

That’s one of the things that Dweck uses to set the ironic tone he was going for here. Realtors and avaricious developers are posed in front of earth moving equipment or in parking lots, reveling in all “that used to be just trees” which have been cleared for “a new Costco…a Super Walmart.”

One of them even agreed to chat on the golf course. Nothing says “thoughtless greedhead” like that sort of arrogant cluelessness.

As with drive-in movie theaters and small farms, “the land is worth a lot more” than what it’s being “used” for, in this case, more than $10 million.

More amusingly, Dweck drops in on a racing preacher using racing metaphors and caution flags in his sermons.

“This flag, God’s been waving at our lives since we were teenagers. Racers, like the rest of us, do we want to be pulled off to the side…We wanna keep racing. God is telling us, ‘The tire’s falling off. Your CAR is on fire!’ Nooo! I wanna keep racing!”

Because the rest of us need reminding that if you get far enough off the Interstate, there isn’t that much difference between Riverhead and Brainerd, Minnesota, McCool Junction Nebraska and North Wilkesboro or Rockingham, N.C.

We hang out with the drivers, again unidentified, and lip-read “Crazy” Eddie Mistretta cursing a fellow driver, then hear him screaming profane threats, followed by him driving over to the officials and innocently claiming the other fellow was the one threatening to “beat my ass.”

His house is just a storage place for his trophies, something his new-ish wife is having a hard time reconciling.

Another driver shows off the extra junkyard fenders for his ’80s Chevy. “I got plenty’a spares,” he brags, “which is why I don’t mind hitting somebody out there.”

Fights break out in the parking lot that doubles as pit row and the garage. Even with stakes this low, tempers run hot.

One driver fires a few rifle rounds into a junker he’s about to convert into a race car. Another test fires his motor and tamps out his latest carburetor fire — with his hand.

Even though there are young drivers, here and there, Dweck suggests he’s capturing a vanishing subculture and a sport that is going away faster than the internal combustion engine. It might just fade out of sight, the bulldozers rolling in during the off-season.

But not if these folks have any say about it. Not without a fight, or a blaze of carburetor fire glory.

MPAA Rating: unrated, fistfights, profanity

Cast: Marty Berger, Mike Cappiello, Jim and Barbara Cromarty

Credits:Directed by Michael Dweck, script by Michael Dweck, Gregory Kershaw . A Magnolia release.

Running time: 1:15

Well I do. But then, I’m a huge Stellan Skarsgård fan.

Back in 2014, “In Order of Disappearance” made my “Ten Best List,” a brutal story of a snowplow operator whose airport baggage claim son has been murdered. Mixed up in smuggling, or just a bystander snuffed out because of what he sees, dead is dead.

His father (Skarsgård) isn’t one of those “Taken” Liam Neeson types — a fellow “with very particular skills.” He drives a snowplow, knows his part of the world and hunts. So yeah, he has a gun.

He’s not somebody the mob he’s dealing with would take seriously or have any connection with. And he mows through those mo-fos, whose passing is detailed “In Order of Disappearance.” A righteous, visceral, pulse-pounding picture.

Neeson, a man of action in most every film he does these days, won’t be the sort of guy you underestimate that Skarsgård pulled off. Stellan was a “Dragon Tattoo” villain and does the occasion world weary cop. Seeing him figure out how to punish those who killed his kid and broke his wife’s spirit was thrilling.

This trailer? It’s got MORE COWBELL! Best use of “Don’t Fear the Reaper” since, oh, “The Stand?”

Feb. 8, we see if Liam and “Cold Pursuit” pull this off.

She’s playing a pop queen, with sexuality and outrageousness part of her brand.

But she’s got a teen daughter. Not the stage in life when you conquer the charts these days. Younger younger — Lordes/Ariana young. That’s the law.

“Vox Lux” hasn’t shown us much in its earlier trailers. If they want this Dec. 7 release to pull them in, give us something to go on.

“Indivisible” is an earnest, heartfelt and often touching story (based on real people and events) about an Army chaplain on duty in Iraq and his wife at home struggling to maintain sanity and family after a rough tour in Iraq.

It’s lumbering — with episodic TV series pacing. The story slow-marches from its opening to its drawn out conclusion. But the acting is good, the production values solid and the depiction of stresses, in combat and at home, is a modestly realistic rendition of Army life.

No, there’s no real blood and the soldiers depicted here — from the chaplain to the women and men in arms, ranging from cynics to skeptics — are the first in history to never curse like, well, soldiers. It’s still a refreshingly upbeat faith-based drama, one anchored in the real world.

We meet Chaplain Darren Turner (Justin Bruening of “Grey’s Anatomy”) in Fort Stewart, Georgia, a doting dad who plays with his three kids and partners with wife Heather (Sarah Drew of “Mom’s Night Out”) in the marriage and in his ministry.

He used to be a college campus pastor, but he joined up and in 2007 he’s about to deploy as part of a “surge” in occupied Iraq. Back on base, Heather will raise their kids on her own and together with Army wife neighbor Tonya (Tia Mowry-Hardrict of “The Hot Chick”), is part of the Family Response Team. When the shooting starts, they’ll go comfort the families whose soldiers are killed or wounded.

Tonya’s married to a multi-tour veteran, and a drunk (Jason George of “Station 19” and “Grey’s Anatomy”). A guy who shows up at the chaplain’s cook-out and asks for “a cold one,” only to get a juice box, isn’t diving into this Jesus thing.

Nor is young rifleman Lance Bradley (former child actor Tanner Stine). He’s leaving behind his pregnant wife (former child actress Madeleine Carroll of “Flipped”), their little girl. And he doesn’t take that first IED that kills soldiers and an Iraqi girl well.

“You’re peddling a God who could take my life tomorrow!”

Air Force vet and “Black Lightning” co-star Skye P. Marshall is Sgt. Shonda Peterson, aide to the chaplain, crack shot with Atlanta SWAT and a National Guardswoman and single mom deployed in the surge as well. She’s so disconnected from motherhood she’s relieved to be overseas.

The chaplain and his faith are tested as he tries to have an impact in each of their lives, win converts (symbolized by accepting what the guys call “a good luck charm,” a religious medallion “so that you know you’re not alone out there”). He leads prayers before missions and on occasion goes on those missions. And when men don’t come back, he comforts the survivors.

Back home, Heather is coping with her oldest daughter’s asthma and the stress of “holding wailing, sobbing wives and children and felt their hearts being torn to shreds!” It’s not easy on either of them — distracted phone calls, him keeping the dangers of his work from her, her needing help with all that she has to juggle at home.

That early scene where the commanding officer shows Turner a stack of divorce filings from their unit in just the past few months isn’t the only foreshadowing.

There’s the trauma of loss, what it means if he tells Heather “I lost three more soldiers today” (more awful duty on her end as well). The soldiers record “farewell” videos to their families, and the Georgia base full of spouses grows more traumatized with each widow added to their ranks.

And then deployment ends, and yes Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is added to the mix.

“Indivisible” is ambitious for a faith-based film, and “The Grace Card” director David G Evans handles the generic combat sequences with skill, if not a lot of flair.

One sequence has little Ellie Turner (Samara Lee) urgently summoning her brother and mommy with “Let’s pray for Daddy” on a day when the base in Iraq just happens to be under mortar attack. She’s clairvoyant! Another has her lost and asthmatic in a maze at the local fair while her father’s convoy weaves through a maze of narrow streets on its way to an ambush.

The movies “Indivisible” compares to are “We Were Soldiers” and “The Best Years of Our Lives,” and both should have given Evans (he co-wrote the script) an idea for how to tighten this up and move his movie along.

Sure, everybody wants to try a “combat” film, but the most interesting and wrenching material comes back on base — Army wives following a chaplain and the Army team who inform spouses that their loved one has fallen in battle. That part of “We Were Soldiers” and the Woody Harrelson/Ben Foster drama “The Messenger” revealed the emotions of that situation as fraught and the stuff of very good drama.

Why make a middling combat film (half a film, actually) when you can make a powerful, faith-based picture about those left behind whose faith and marriages are tested just as severely, even though we don’t see the combat that leads to the issues?

It’s not bad, and there’s always the argument that “your reach should exceed your grasp.” But “Indivisible” lumbers along too slowly to sustain interest via the seen-it-before combat scenes before getting to the REAL story — what the experience does to those who survived it and those they left behind.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for some thematic material and war violence

Cast: Justin Bruening, Sarah Drew, Jason George, Skye P. Marshall. Madeleine Carroll

Credits:Directed by David G. Evans, script by David G. Evans, Cheryl McKay  . A Pure Flix release.

Running time: 1:59

The lurid absurdity and arch characters of novelist/satirist  Martin Amis drip off the screen in “London Fields,” an adaptation of his work that will be remembered — if at all — for being the final on-screen collaboration between Amber Heard and her ex, Johnny Depp.

It’s a neo-noir murder mystery capturing Heard at peak femme fatale in a tale observed, manipulated and told by a struggling writer (Billy Bob Thornton) for “the chaos.”

“Chaos” doesn’t quite sum up the movie. But almost.

Thornton’s writer Samson Young cuts right to the chase with one line to the femme fatale, Nicola Six (Heard), a fortune teller who has seen her impending death and has agreed allowed him to watch with, “I’m pretty worried that the critics are going to call you a ‘male fantasy figure.’”

You think?

Heard is dressed or undressed provocatively from first scene to last, a woman conning and seducing a hapless pretty boy (Theo James), a darts pro/cabbie-gambler (Jim Sturgess, over-the-top and never worse) and perhaps the novelist desperate for his first murder mystery  to be a hit. Samson’s narration is the only quotable portion of the dialogue, partly because it’s chewy and mostly because it is omnipresent — incessant.

“I know the murderer. I know the murderee. I know the time. I know the place. I know the motive and I know the means.”

London is in steep decline, Keith the gambling cabbie is in hock with every bookie in town, the deadliest of whom has Elton John’s 1970s wardrobe and Johnny Depp’s best English accent.

Nicola wants money for this “get a kid out of Burma” scheme and Guy Clinch (These NAMES), played by James, is putty in her hands.

As indeed are they all, as Keith’s darts game future is on the line, Samson’s novel and whatever the hell Nicola REALLY wants and whatever Guy’s angle is.

Jason Isaacs is the posh Martin Amis surrogate novelist who does an apartment swap that that put Samson in London in the first place, model Cara Delevingne dresses WAY down and lets us see she still cannot act and a cool druggy effect gives Depp Big Eyes for a moment.

You can’t top that with anything but sodomy with a night stick.

This is something of a hi-toned Guy Ritchie knock off, and what the script and director make the actors do does no one credit.

Sturgess is at his most over the top, in your face, brown teeth — dancing -air-guitaring to Dire Straits, wearing a ridiculous

Thornton isn’t blameless, warily underplaying the over-eager, unscrupulous writer cliche.

“If London is a spider’s web, maybe I’m a fly”

A clever conceit — Samson doesn’t just observe and wiretap his book, which Nicola refers to as “MY” book. He is imaging, editing and rewriting scenes that the others are acting out as it goes along. That idea is abandoned after one go.

A particularly stupid scene, grisly Keith putting the moves on Nicola as Guy follows a few steps behind and Samson follows them all a few further steps back.

Director Matthew Cullen is best known as the director of Katy Perry, Modest Mouse and Weezer music videos, and doing effects for “Pacific Rim.” He had the cheek to sue the producers for this 2015 project for messing with whatever cut he’d come up with. The film has a look, but little coherence, logic or connection.

Amis playing around with the decline of Western Civilization seemed timely in the early ’80s, even more so now. But the nihilism of it all, the sheer nonsense, is hard to swallow. Sex kitten come-ons, sex scenes and a finale built around darts?

If Heard had a hard time getting people to believe her version of the Depp breakup, it’s probably because she keeps playing variations of this man eater on screen (often with “Six” in the name) and doing it so darned convincingly.

She’s sexy as all get out in the role, just not interesting here, and the rest of the players act as if they smell “troubled production” in the film’s future — big name cast be damned. They’re tentative, hedging their bets, save for Sturgess. Who could have used a bit of restraint.

It’s just that our narrator never spoke truer words than these — “You can’t stop somebody once they’ve started.”

MPAA Rating:R for sexual content/nudity, language throughout, some violence and drug use

Cast: Amber Heard, Theo James, Jason Isaac, Billy Bob Thornton, Cara DeLevingne, Gemma Chan, Jim Sturgess, Lily Cole

Credits:Directed by Matthew Cullen, script by Roberta Hanley, based on the Martin Amis novel. A Paladin release.

Running time: 1:45

“Green Book” is a tonic for our toxic times,  a “Driving Miss Daisy” road dramedy through America’s increasingly retrograde racial history.

It never shies away from an easy laugh and may have all the makings of holiday cinema season comfort food. But the terrific lead performances and potent and timely social justice message make this film from one of the guys who gave us “Dumb and Dumber” the movie America needs to see — right now.

It’s based on a true story. In 1962, a classically-trained piano virtuoso is about to tour the racist American Midwest, upper South and Deep South. He needs a driver, one with particular skills and mass.

Because Dr. Donald Shirley, PhD, is black, African American — “colored.” And whatever level of tolerance he can expect from the performing arts halls, country clubs and Antebellum mansion “house concerts” on his itinerary, there are miles and miles of potential trouble in between.

He interviews potential drivers in his New York home. It’s an art-packaged apartment upstairs from Carnegie Hall. And Shirley (regal Oscar winner Mahershala Ali), multi-lingual, with impeccable manners, accent and carriage, sees fit to carry out these interviews from a throne.

Literally.

We’ve already met the burly, two-fisted Tony Vallelonga (Viggo Mortensen). At the Copacabana, where he works as a jacketed waiter/bouncer, and among “the boys,” he’s “Tony Lip.”

He’s 40something, a family man with a comically voracious appetite, big enough to have been a bully, brutish enough to still have those tendencies. He’s always looking for an angle, “misplacing” the right mobster’s hat to create a scene and “come to the rescue” and thus inviting an obligation from the boss. But the Copa is closing down for renovations, and he can only score so much spending money by winning hot dog eating contests.

Also, he’s a racist. His wife gives drinks of water to two black plumbers working in their crowded flat and Tony tosses the glasses in the trash afterwards.

He and his relatives switch to Italian when they’re talking about non-Italians, and the slurs come quick and easy. Interviewed by his social superior and informed he’ll need to launder shirts and serve as valet on Shirley’s tour as well, he suggests a previous candidate, “the little (Asian slur)” might be better suited for the gig.

But he’s got the right throw-weight for the job and they come to terms. Just keep this “Green Book,” a “guide” for “The Negro Motorist” handy. Shirley, who fronts a trio with two white musicians backing him, will have to stay in “colored” motels and hotels and eat in “colored” dining establishments from Kentucky to N.C., Atlanta to their final stop, right before Christmas in that oasis of tolerance, Birmingham, Alabama.

Tony is crude, boorish and badly misinformed about much in this world — including black people. He smokes constantly and offends almost as often. Forcing Kentucky Fried Chicken — “ALL you people love fried chicken!” — on Shirley, pricking his new boss’s pretentiousness at every turn, Tony is not the sort of vulgarian you introduce in the circles Shirley travels in. Might a makeover be in order?

“I can help you. You can do BETTER Mr. Vallalonga.”

Tony ain’t having it. And Shirley’s sarcastic comebacks fly right over his head most of the time.

Then he hears the man play, “Like LIBERACE, but BETTER — a genius, I think,” he writes to his wife. “VIURTUOSO,” he says, echoing the boss’s introduction to a fellow driver. “That’s Italian. It means he’s really good!”

But those letters home to Dolores (Jennifer Cardellini, warm and wonderful) start to soften up Tony Lip. Shirley dictates literate, evocative paeans to true love and devotion. Tony goes to school.

And in seeing Shirley’s first class behavior when repeatedly faced with second class treatment is a lesson, too — in “maintaining your dignity.” Not that this mug is swallowing that. Not right away.

Director Peter Farrelly may seem outside of his comfort zone, here. But he’s had a sentimental streak, and he’s done road comedies (“Kingpin”) before. And while he never ever leaves an obvious joke untold, while we just KNOW these two are going to wind up A) in jail and B) in a “juke joint,” and we know precisely what will go down in each locale, he stays out of the way of his dazzling leads.

The little confessional scenes between the two men in the car have a familiar snap to them as Tony learns he’s underestimating his prissy employer and that employer gets an earful about how “black” he isn’t.

“That’s Little Richard! You never heard of Chubby Checker? Aretha?”

Ali gives Shirley the fey demeanor of the pampered artist with barely a hint of the hurt and rage bubbling beneath. Mortensen makes Tony so lived-in that you forget how much of his career he spent on horseback, herding hobbits.

The film tilts towards patronizing at times. White viewers and black ones are almost sure to react to Shirley’s giving in on the fried chicken thing differently Don’t overthink the fact that a guy Tony’s age and generation and ethnicity would be more of a Louis Prima fan, or that the wonderful Mortensen is a little long in the tooth to still be “the muscle.” Accept the jokes you see coming and delight in the ones you don’t.

“Green Book” (opening Nov. 21) invites you to come along for the ride, the comfort food, the socio-political sparks and the laughs.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for thematic content, language including racial epithets, smoking, some violence and suggestive material

Cast: Viggo Mortensen, Mahershala Ali, Linda Cardellini

Credits:Directed by Peter Farrelly, script by Nick Vallelonga, Brian Hayes Currie and Peter Farrelly. A Universal release.

Running time: 2:10

Matt Green is a natural politician.

Affable, a real “people” person, he can strike up a conversation with it seems like anyone he meets. He meets a lot of people in New York City, not known for friendliness.

Eight and a half million people living, working and getting around in a metropolis with over 8,000 miles of of streets, highways, park paths, piers and cemeteries, you’re bound to have a conversation or two.

That’s Matt’s six year quest, to walk all of those streets and byways. On occasion, a camera crew or newspaper or magazine photographer follows him, because Matt’s quest is quixotic and folks, not just the news people with him, are curious about it.

“Only in New York,” one friendly stranger guffaws.

“The World Before Your Feet” is a disarmingly charming documentary about Green’s walk, the people he meets and oh, the things he’s seen.

He’s a history buff, a nature lover, a cell-phone camera photographer and a writer with an eye for the poetic, creating accounts for his “I’m Just Walkin” blog of each day’s treks and the sites he saw — the “oldest living thing” (a Tulip Poplar), a “George Washington Passed Here” marker, the location of New York’s slave market, the spot where the first birth control clinic in the U.S. opened.

The 30something Green, in baseball cap and beard and on warm days, cargo shorts, could pass for any other Park Slope hipster. But the civil engineer who gave up a desk job to start walks (he hiked across America, first) is curious, informed and learning every day of his life.

Aimless? He hears “How do you earn a living” almost every time he describes what he’s up to. But here is a guy living lean (house sitting, dog sitting, cat sitting and staying with friends all over town), spending little on food and nothing else but time as he gives up a normal life for this one thing he really loves doing.

Filmmaker Jeremy Workman did the filmmaker portrait “Who is Henry Jaglom?” and the documentary “Magical Universe” about an obsessive Barbie doll artist, and turns out to be just the right guy to film Green’s odyssey. He is as disarmed as the rest of us by the man and makes sure to include the occasional “What are you doing?” and “Stop taking pictures!” encounter, to show Green’s natural charm winning over “real” New Yorkers.

Using the World’s Fair scale model, the Panorama of the City of New York, to orient us, Workman lets Green do almost all of the talking — a tour guide who relishes details that even the folks who live right next to them are unaware of. He’s marveling at Coney Island in mid-blizzard, stumbling into a pick-up football game during another snow storm (He’s invited to join in, and does.), waxing lyrical about curbside gardens, the city’s Redwoods — that’s right, Redwood trees — and figs.

Workman uses the occasional meditative drone shot to capture this stretch of abandoned Staten Island or the scale of this or that cemetery.

His movie is like a sweeter version of “The Cruise,” a documentary about the quirkiest of  tour-guide’s bus tour of Manhattan

Green gasps at sunsets, and reveals why there are little painted dots on sewer grates (city workers keeping track of which they’ve fumigated to stop the spread of the mosquito-borne West Nile virus.

On Day 1151, he does 15.3 miles on Staten Island. Another day he’s on Cobble Hill, or Vinegar Hill, down on Wall Street or over at Battery Park. Brownsville, Brooklyn to Oakwood and Crescent Beach, Staten Island — he’s not being particularly methodical about where he walks, though he is about recreating those walks for the blog.

The Jewish, Ashland, Virginia native  might note another “churchagogue,” a church that’s moved into a synagogue abandoned when its congregation moved away from the city.

The whole point of doing it might seem “To get somebody to make a documentary about me doing this,” especially in New York (The odds that a documentarian would contact you have to be pretty high, right?), but Green professes to see “no commercial possibilities” in a film or a book or even his little-visited website.

It just “seems important” that he finish this personal mission.

Interviewing others who love walking the city gives us few clues. A visit to Ashland and talking with his family is more revealing.

And chatting with an ex-fiance and ex-girlfriend, we learn a little about the cost of being “quixotic,” even if we envy the guy who has decided material things are not for him, who has mastered New York on $15 a day and who is redefining “a purposeful life” on the fly.

“The World Before Your Feet” suggests an entirely new way of visiting New York, or living there. As Green stops to take another picture of a 9/11 memorial mural, pauses to admire the Palmas de Caribe Community Garden and share a beer with the the retired Caribbean islanders gardening there, you can’t help but think “THIS is the way to SEE New York.”

And “THIS guy should run for mayor.”

MPAA Rating: unrated, one bit of profanity

Cast: Matt Green

Credits:Directed by Jeremy Workman. A Greenwich release.

Running time: 1:35

Watching the new Mahershala Ali/Viggo Mortensen film that takes it as its title, I was wracking my brain, trying to remember the first time I heard of the publication known as “The Green Book.”

I know my hearing about it pre-dates this PBS documentary.

There was a play that took “The Green Book” as its title, but I’ve never seen that. But having interviewed a few elderly black comics and actors who worked the last years of “The Chitlin’ Circuit,” I think it was Sherman Hemsley who brought it to my attention, this fascinating and depressing cultural artifact that named “Negro friendly” establishments all over America for “The Negro Motorist” or touring performer who could not get served in much of the country.

In the film, “inspired by a true story,” the book is what an Italian American dese-dem-dose tough (Viggo M.) has to refer to as he drives and books accommodations for his employer, the jazz pianist Dr. Donald Shirley (Oscar winner Ali, of “Moonlight”).  So white America gets to experience what black America deals with just taking a simple road trip.

Outhouses for restrooms, most restaurants refusing to serve black patrons, hotels refusing the esteemed Shirley a room, clothing shops not letting him try on a suit.

“The Negro Motorist Green Book” didn’t spare the traveling African American third rate service. It did protect you from the rudeness and racism that we thought had been tamped down until a racist got elected president two years ago.

Donald Shirley I remember from my days working in public radio stations, hosting jazz programs. The trailer to “Green Book” doesn’t give away his chosen field, but Shirley was classically trained and a Phd. and kind of pushed into jazz by a record company who was sure audiences wouldn’t stand for a black classical pianist (Tell Emmanuel Ax that).

Actually, that’s not true. He played Tchaikovsky with the Boston Pops as a teenager, had pieces played by the London Philharmonic.

The man had a degree and was a practicing psychologist for a while. In the film, he is fluent in several languages, which his Wikipedia bio omits but is almost certainly true (he studed in Leningrad, among other cities).

Here’s a “Cool Jazz” hit of his, performing with his cello/bass/piano trio.

“Green Book,” directed by Peter Farrelly, opens Nov. 21.

So you’ve got Samuel L. returning as the title character, and Bruce Willis from “Unbreakable,” James McAvoy from “Split,” and Sarah Paulson and Anya-Taylor Joy and a “facility” to tie this one through-line in M. Night Shyamalan’s interesting but wildly uneven career up in a neat three-fer bow.

The back engineering to these things is always impressive, thought “Split” was already grafted onto “Unbreakable.”

It’s all about creating “universes,” letting films mimic long-form cable TV shows, making connections that inspire deeper fan devotion and engagement. It’s smart business, though I find that the movies that are coming out of this Hollywood MBA fad a tape loop grind.

Universal wanted to do this with its classic horror title remakes, but that was never going to work.

With “Glass,” we are intrigued, even if we remember “Last Airbender” and “The Visit” and “The Happening” and “Lady in the Water” and…

Fangirls and fanboys and M. Night’s Knights should let “Glass” own a slow January (Jan. 18 is the release date.). That much seems certain.