Movie Nation

Scott Eastwood’s career guidance appears to be “Try everything my Dad did,” and that’s why we’re getting dramas, romances and now an actual comedy from the chip off the old block.

But is there a “movie star” today who’s more bland?

He’s not managed any of those “big breaks” particularly well. But before we sentence him to TV, or pack him off to Spain to shoot “spaghetti Westerns” with the Italians, let’s dump 250 more words criticizing Hollywood nepotism, and how rarely it works out.’

“Walk of Fame” is a desultory comedy which surrounds Eastwood with ostensibly funnier people, a farce about how “everybody butt EVERYbody” in LA may do one thing for a living, but their dream — which they are actively working on — is to be a star.

Eastwood plays Drew, whose law degree is useless as he has already flunked the bar twice. He can’t manage to be on time to his job in the omnibus call center where he takes orders for “butt busters” or deals with customer complaints for a whoever is outsourcing that work.

“Thank you for calling Vantage Light Bulbs. How can I brighten up your day?”

A walk with his work-friend Nate ( Cory Hardrict) leads to their witnesses an attack by a “serial humper,” a caped/masked villain who molests women on the street.

The guys fail to offer assistance, but Drew decides to follow the sizzling stewardess of the slow-mo hair flipping persuasion Nikki (Laura Ashley Samuels), because she’s out of work (nude photos all over the Internet) and headed to Star Maker Studios, a cut-rate acting school run by a wannabe/never-was played by Malcolm McDowell.

“I’m the only person in this town who can take you RIGHT to the top, baby,” he insists.

“Watch out, NASA. It’s time to discover some NEW stars!” he adds.

“I was offered the lead in ‘Amadeus.’ All right, it was the TOUR. But I turned it down because I care THAT MUCH about my students!”

McDowell has the only funny lines in this thing, and even those are in limited supply.

“By the time I’m through with you, you’ll have seen more red carpet than the streets have seen urine!”

The classes of “no talent idiots” are trained by the likes of Alejandro (Chris Kattan), and are a motley assortment of delusional Italian mug, irritable dwarf, never-too-late little old lady, young pretty stroke victim, nebbish and fashion nerd.

They are to be polished and prepped for “their Big Showcase.”

Eastwood has zero difficulty play-acting scenes in which he’s incapable of expressing any emotion or eliciting any reaction from his audience.  Few of the comic veterans around him manage anything either.

There are seemingly-fake cops riding around “helping” people by harassing them from their motorcycle with a sidecar.Drew has a hippy/surfer/stoner roommate, played (wanly) by writer-director Jesse Thomas. Jamie Kennedy has a scene as a very effeminate airline steward/colleague of Nikki’s.

The only promising pairing here is putting Eastwood with Hardrict, a young black man who rides a Segway, not a car (they double up on it once), leery about waiting for the cops to show at that “serial humper” incident.

“Black people do NOT fare well at crime scenes.”

No matter what he orders in restaurants, fried chicken is what he gets.

“Free at last, my ass.”

Build a romantic comedy around these two, with Eastwood pursuing whoever and Hardrict setting him straight about women or racism in America, and you’d have something much more conventional, and more more potentially funny.

But Thomas & Co. knew what they were getting with Eastwood, that he’s just not funny. Not in the least. No comic heavy-lifting for him. 

He’s working steadily, in bad action films (“Suicide Squad,” “Pacific Rim: Uprising”), the odd romantic weeper (“The Last Ride”) and a lot of supporting roles.

But he’s not making any impact at all as an actor. How long before the magic surname stops getting his calls returned?

He’s blandly handsome, sure. But at this point you have to wonder if TV, Spain or even co-starring with an orangutan could save him.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA

Cast: Scott Eastwood, Laura Ashley Samuels, Malcolm McDowell, Cory Hardrict, Sonia Rockwell, Chris Kattan, Jamie Kennedy

Credits: Written and directed by Jesse Thomas. A Level 33 release.

Running time: 1:27

Got to love it when a bad comedy sums itself up and all but saves you the trouble of writing an entire review.

As in, “Guys, is this supposed to be funny, or not?”

That’s what Debbie (Alex Meneses) blurts out to best buds Harris (Russell Peters) and Reeves (Faizon Love) in “Ripped,” a comedy about two potheads who hit some “Area 51…CIA weed” in 1986, and wake up thirty years later.

Debbie used to date Harris, until her father chased the two blitzed boys away for being irresponsible bong brothers with an eye on ruining his baby girl.

Now, thirty years later, she’s a divorced single mom in her ’40s. And her first beau and his bro? Morbidly obese middle-aged teenagers.

“Ripped” is the sort of comedy that can ill afford to waddle through an interminable 16 minute prologue with two even less funny actors playing even more blitzed versions of Love and Peters as teens.

The guys wake up, morbidly obese (munchies will getya) in the Chevy van they got stuck in the woods with 30 years earlier, looking at the world as “the worst hallucination ever.” Reeves is now rocking a gut butt, Harris is trending plump, and the world? It’s left them behind.

Plug-in cars, cell phones, self-flushing toilets, “Goggle” and people talking to them from “Planet Skype?” How’s a mellow bro supposed to take this all in? Weed is LEGAL.

“Welcome to Home De-Pot. How can I medicate you?

Harris tries to re-start things with an indulgent Debbie, but she has a kid, whom they meet in spite of her best efforts. Sophomoric reactions is all they’re capable of.

“Debbie’s been f—–g. Here’s the receipt!  Brad (Bridger Zadina)!”

No college, no cash, never had any ambition, they cook up the one idea guys who stay blasted and peckish can manage — a restaurant that serves chili, just chili — but chili spiced with marijuana. It creates its own cravings for that second serving, right?

One of the rare laughs in the movie is the one loan officer who agrees to back them, because “You guys have really good credit, too. Nothing pops up!”

Peters and Love are two guys who fall into that “Whatever happened to?” corner of the comedy universe. Nobody rocks the gut-butt like Love (“Couples Retreat,””Zookeeper”), but here he’s a little too convincing at trying to act in a movie stoned. Was he?

Peters reaches for charming, showing off DJing and roller-blading skills like a guy who never grew up.

But there’s nothing for these guys to play that doesn’t involve a pipe and a lighter, and there’s something inherently sad in middle aged stoners that isn’t a downer when the stoner is AARP age, for instance.

Even the lads’ bank pitch, a “history” of pot and its famous users (George W., Franklin, Bill Clinton, Obama, etc.) feels played, though its assault on the “gateway drug” ad campaign recently hurled into theaters in states where legalizing pot is on the ballot, is almost almost cute.

“It IS a gateway…to PANCAKES, Cinnabons” and of course, chili.

MPAA Rating: TV: MA, drug use, scatological humor, profanity

Cast: Faizon Love, Russell Peters, Alex Meneses, Farah White, Stephanie Drapeau

Credits:Directed by Brad Epstein, script by  Billiam Coronel, Brad Epstein. A Screen Media/Netflix release.

Running time: 1:28

Spy recruiters tell us that there are four prime reasons why people betray their country, summed up by the too-cute acronym “MICE — Money, Ideology, Coercion or Ego.”

And a couple of those can certainly be applied to the Egyptian turncoat Ashraf Marwan, the one his Israeli Mossad handlers code-named “The Angel.”  The son-in-law of Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser was studying in London, never quite good enough for the president-for-life’s daughter, his opinions not respected at dinners where Egyptian leadership was present. His “ego” was bruised.

And studying in London, he developed a taste for alcohol and the other pleasures of casinos. More “money” would be nice.

Perhaps he was a tad rash, calling the Israeli Embassy there, offering information. “Coercion” could certainly be used to turn him.

But in some spies’ minds there can be another motive for treason, one implied, repeatedly, in the new biography, “The Spy Called Orphan,” about Donald Maclean of infamous “Cambridge Five,” who sold or gave away secrets to the Soviet Union during World War II and on into the Cold War. Some traitors figure they’re preserving the peace in giving away secrets, maintaining balance in a tense diplomatic relationship, preventing deadly blunders based on false assumptions.

That’s the way Ashraf Marwan is painted in “The Angel,” a fascinating if somewhat muted spy thriller from the director of “The Iceman” and “Criminal,” Ariel Vroman.

What starts as a tale of another Israeli espionage coup finds something closer to an uneasy middle ground as this cagey, well-placed operator, played with a perpetual poker-face by Dutch actor Marwan Kenzari, tries to “save Israel” with one gesture, save Egypt’s face with another and save lives as he walks the tightrope between the two in those tense years between The Six Day War and The Yom Kippur War.

Marwan’s father-in-law (Waleed Zuaiter plays Nasser) is sure he needs watching after Marwan suggests, in a state dinner, that preparing for another war to regain lands lost to Israel after the debacle of the 1967 “Six Day War,” when Arab states all around Israel invaded, and saw their forces annihilated, is maybe not the best way to achieve Egypt’s aims.

Nasser puts a highly-placed thug (Slimane Dazi) on the Marwan case. And his studies in London? Those might curtailed. But not before Marwan has attended a class that discussed the work of “Garbo,” a Spanish Nazi agent (Juan Pujol García) who moved to Britain to help fool the Nazis about when and where D-Day would occur.

Marwan is of a mind to stop another bloodbath by tipping the Israelis about Egyptian plans. Merely removing the element of surprise could do that.

He has just enough time to change his mind when the Israelis put an agent (Toby Kebbell) on him, blackmailing the headstrong young man who called their embassy and brazenly made his pitch over the phone. Nasser dies, Marwan schemes to cozy up to the more reasonable and thus mistrusted by most in the government new president, Anwar Sadat (Sasson Gabai).

Marwan isn’t trained in spycraft, and the Israelis, while cagey and enthusiastic, don’t exactly have his best interests at heart. They’re thrilled to have this inside source, willing to pay him handsomely, but don’t fret over the fact that he must keep his actions and movements secret even from his wife (Maisa Abd Elhadi).

Marwan has to be a quick study with steady nerves as he passes what he knows on, tries to convince the Israelis of his “bonafides,” and at the same time protect Sadat from his enemies within Egypt and himself from exposure and summary execution.

Real life spy stories are always much closer, cinematically, to “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” than any “Bourne” or Bond film. One way “Angel” flirts with more melodramatic thrillers is the actual danger faced by Marwan, not just from his own government’s spy hunters, but from the increasingly irate Israelis, who are sure he’s “crying wolf” about plans for an attack.

Another Bond touch is Marwan’s enlistment of help from “a friend,” a Swinging London sexual adventurer played by Hannah Ware. She is temptation incarnate, and handily amoral when it comes to Marwan’s need for assistance with whatever clandestine thing he has going on.

Vroman never raises the suspense level in all of this to any great height, never shows Marwan having any real crisis of conscience. The spy comes off as a gambler with few “tells.”

Gabai gives Sadat, a future Nobel Peace Prize winner, as cagey enough to suggest he doesn’t know what’s going on even as we wonder if he does.

Kebbell and the actors playing his Mossad bosses are the only ones who let on how frantic they are, recognizing the stakes are much higher for Israel, fundamentally mistrusting any Arab who purports to be “helping.”

Netflix has cooked up a good-looking production, period perfect in its costumes, London and Cairo settings peppered with period-perfect Triumphs, MGBs and Citroens. But the occasional anachronism sneaks into the dialogue, and only an utterly inept music supervisor would park both K.C. and the Sunshine Band and “Long Cool Woman in a Black Dress” in the mix years before they hit the pop charts.

“The Angel” falls thus more on the “sturdy,”  tradecraft-oriented spy thriller end of the scale than “Neftlix’s answer to Jason Bourne.” It’s still a fascinating piece of history built around the possible higher moral calling of a traitor whose motives for his actions can be looked at as much bigger than simple M.I.C.E.

MPAA Rating:

Cast: Marwan Kenzari, Toby Kebbell, Hannah Ware, Sasson Gabai, Waleed Zuaiter

Credits:Directed by Ariel Vroman, script by David Arata, Uri Bar-Joseph. A Netflix release.

Running time:

“A Simple Favor” is a thriller that ticks likes a Timex, a precision exercise in button-pushing manipulation and a laugh out loud mystery that mocks its own manipulations, giggles at its own far-fetched twists.

Paul Feig of “Bridesmaids,” working from a  Jessica Sharzer (“American Horror Story”) script based on the Darcey Bell novel, gifts us with a goof on “Gone Girl, a calculating dark comedy that skips by on the ,most on-the-nose casting of the fall.

Blake Lively as the willowy, brassy and profanely sexy mom-gone-missing, and Anna Kendrick as the Mommy Vlogger/Mini Martha Stewart who is her brand new best friend — how perfect is that?

Stephanie (Kendrick) is the demure, over-eager, overdoes it Single Mom/SuperMom at their kids’ suburban Connecticut school. Emily is the rich, high powered PR director for a famous fashion designer in the city. They meet, and it’s love at first sight. Their little boys want a play date.

“Mommy already has a playdate…with a symphony of anti-depressants!”

Emily jokes about the kids drinking, drops F-bombs like she buys them wholesale, and from the tip of stilettos to the top of her perfectly-coifed blonde tresses, is everything Stephanie is not. “Love” doesn’t begin to cover it.

Within minutes, Emily is schooling Stephanie to stop apologizing reflexively, “a f—-d up female habit,” how to confront powerful men head-on, how to make the perfect London martini and she’s bucked up her non-existent libido with a bubbly, “Baby, you’re too sexy to give up!”

Within hours, they’re sharing, and then over-sharing — “secrets.” Stephanie’s are…interesting. Emily’s have to do with her once-promising writer-husband, played by Henry Golding with all the sexual sizzle he lacked in “Crazy Rich Asians.” Stephanie’s crack, that they have “more chemistry than a science fair” is right on the mark.

And within days Stephanie is being asked to pick up the kids, watch the kids, all leading up to the day Emily just vanishes. Stephanie must deal with two boys that have been dumped on her, a worried best-friend’s husband who leans on her, cops who wonder just what’s going on and a rising suspicion that Emily isn’t missing, she’s split, that she isn’t dead but just “gone.”

Kendrick carries off the cuteness with her usual pitch perfect timing and physically expressive acting. Stephanie is awkward, from her mask-the-fear smile to her Mom dancing to Emily’s vintage French pop, and guilty stumbling rummage through Emily’s closet.

There’s too much cuteness, of course. But the whole Mommy vlogger element makes a convenient plot device when Stephanie starts crowd sourcing the search for Emily. And if anybody can pull off a saintly-sweet but R-rated Nancy Drew, it’s Anna K.

“Every mom knows,” she says of her amateur sleuthing, “if you want something done right, do it yourself.”

Lively is so much more than a clothes horse in movies like this and “The Age of Adeline,” films where she’s “an enigma,” a woman with a secret. She is stunning, brazen, blunt and scary, and she turns Emily into an irresistible hormonal force — a man-eater/woman-teaser who turns every scene into “The Shallows” with her as the shark.

Feig’s touch is most pronounced on the picture’s periphery, the bitchy coterie of moms whose queen is the bitchiest of them all, a gay parent (Andrew Rannells), smart alec cops (Bashir Salahuddin), foul-mouthed kids and a fashion designer (Rupert Friend, never more hilarious) whose PR director may be missing, but that doesn’t mean he won’t insult every inch of your wardrobe in between your questions.

A favorite cut, the mean moms notice Stephanie’s methodical search, her helpfulness with Emily’s family and their queen snips, “It’s an arts and crafts project” to her.

The picture delivers one scene of shocking violence, and a third act full of twists that are pure hokum.

But Feig plays his audience — especially the female two thirds of it who will laugh, reel and grab hold of the empowerment (good and evil) messages — like a Wurlizter, the kind that used to accompany silent film melodramas where the vamps were just as obvious, the heroines just as pure (seeming) and the twists just as laughable and simple as “A Simple Favor.”

MPAA Rating: R for sexual content and language throughout, some graphic nude images, drug use and violence

Cast: Anna Kendrick, Blake Lively, Henry Golding

Credits:Directed by Paul Feig , script by Jessica Sharzer, based on the Darcey Bell novel. Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1:57

Picture By: Duncan Bryceland – Picture shows John Lydon performing with Public Image Ltd (PIL) on the third night of their seven date reunion tour at the O2 Academy, Glasgow, Scotland, UK 18th December 2009. Singer John Lydon was formerly known as Johnny Rotton and was the frontman for the notorious English Punk band the Sex Pistols who produced an array of infamous songs such as ‘God Save The Queen’, ‘Anarchy In the UK’, ‘Holiday In The Sun’ and ‘Pretty Vacant’. The shows mark the 30th Anniversary of the release of PIL’s groundbreaking ‘Metal Box’ album and the gig showcased their whole career including their eponymous seminal single ‘Public Image’, ‘Flowers of Romance’, ‘(This is Not a) Love Song’ and ‘Rise’.

In his youth, John Lydon, who went by Johnny Rotten back then, was always good for an quote.

Point a TV camera at him, as more than one British TV provocateur was given to do, ask him to say something outrageous and he’d oblige. If he didn’t, his bandmate Sid Vicious would jump in and steal the attention.

“Johnny Rotten was a piece of work,” he says now, over 60 and chuckling. “I WORKED on Johnny Rotten.”

But in his reflective moments, even back in the “Anarchy in the U.K.” days, he’d talk about longevity — about not living the legend and dying young, about not being trapped by a legacy, mythology, record contracts or band obligations.

“There’s nothing glorious about dying. Anyone can do it,” he’d say. And as to staying power, “I’m one of the very few people in pop history who will just not go away.”

In the new documentary “The Public Image is Rotten,” there’s Lydon, leaning on the breakfast bar in his kitchen, tucking a coffee mug in the oven (NOT the microwave) to warm it up, joking, pontificating, saying nice things about most everybody he ever dealt with (not all), at least at first.

At 62 (he was 60 when “Image” was filmed), he’s still rocking something like a Mohawk, his English considerably more polished than in his punk days, barrel chested and if not bourgeois and self-satisfied, at least peaceful and mellow. For him.

Filmmaker Tabbert Fiiller focuses on Lydon’s career with Public Image Ltd., the band he formed when The Sex Pistols imploded in the late ’70s. Trapped in a management contract with credit-hog impresario Malcolm McLaren, practically broke despite fronting one of the most influential bands in pop music history, “Rotten” captures a band at inception and tracks it and Lydon through its many MANY incarnations, many musical identities and enduring albeit cult appeal.

From its name, taken from a Muriel Spark novel, to their debut namesake tune (shades  of “Bad Company”), through hits such as “This is Not a Love Song” and the melodic “Rise,” driving through so many changes to the band, the sound and the music industry around them, “The Public Image is Rotten” tracks so much turmoil, so many musical chairs packed into every year of its existence that time seems to stand still.

The Sex Pistols take up a tiny portion of the man’s life, and take a back seat in the movie as Lydon leads us from his meningitis coma and associated amnesia of childhood, through the burden of the Pistols (Lydon lost the use of “Johnny Rotten” as a moniker to McLaren when they broke up). It basically jumps into that subject with late Pistols appearances where he’d shout “This is NO fun” from the stage, and finish a show with “Ever get the feeling you’ve been CHEATED?”

But he got famous, he insisted then, “through being HONEST.” and now he just shrugs off “positions I had to assume and tolerate,” as part of his “image,” positions which he’d then “walk away from.”

In interviews in the early PiL years, he’d call Public Image Ltd “a corporation, not a band.” Granted, he was writing the songs and his bandmates served at his whim, so he was president, CEO and CFO. But most of those collaborators make appearances in “Image is Rotten.”

Guitarist Keith Levene, whom he hired from The Clash, drummer Jim Walker and original bassist Jah Wobble seem more than happy to talk about PiL,, Wobble finishing more than one story of this difficult show or that dust-up in a pub with “I kicked ‘im in the face.”

Lydon is similarly sentimental and generous of just about everybody he played with over the decades, up to a point. Remembering Wobble’s exit from the band (where nobody made any money), swiping a box of band cash and vacationing in the States,  Lydon says he “contributed, but he took more than he gave.”

Friends like music video pioneer and filmmaker Julien Temple (“Earth Girls are Easy”) vouch for Lydon’s “authenticity,” fans such as Thurston Moore (Sonic Youth), Moby and Flea of the Red Hot Chili Peppers marvel at the range of music PiL rambled through over the decades (Flea was even offered the band’s bass player gig in the ’80s, and turned it down).

Legendary drummer Ginger Baker of Cream played on one record and laughs about that now, others tell of finding out the band was headed on tour (“We don’t do tours, just a gig, here and there.”) and realizing they’d not been invited.

There was the infamous New York City Ritz show where Lydon tried to do a performance art “concert” of pick-up musicians playing behind a movie screen, in silhouette, one of many occasions “the audience almost rioted.”

Lydon explains the origins of several songs, his reputation for brawling — “When push comes to shove, you shove back.” — and the various band-mates exits, some of which seem to break his heart, even now — “An immediate disaster, wasn’t it? But you just have to get on with it.”

He draws the line at getting “too personal,” so no talking with his wife and her daughter’s kids, whom they’ve been raising, nothing too deep even if “by being honest” is his self-declared secret to success.

Nobody really got rich doing this, but Lydon has always been hellbent on doing his own thing “rather than a pop band rented by a record label and told what to do.”

Second drummer Martin Atkins fondly recalls the many lean times, “All of us in John’s Chelsea apartment — us, and the police. NOT The Police, the BAND,” he cracks.”

Long after punk died, the punk icon carried on — getting kicked off Tom Snyder’s “Tomorrow” show, getting spat upon by unreconstructed Sex Pistols fans a decade after that group broke up.

And through it all, the icon endures — wild-haired, bug-eyed, his manic keening and yelping evolving into something quite musical in midlife.

The man? Surviving, keeping the faith and carrying on. And mellowing. Just not all that much.

MPAA Rating: unrated, profanity

Cast: John Lydon, Michael Alago, Martin Atkins, Flea, Thurston Moore, Moby, Vivien Goldman

Credits:Directed by Tabbert Fiiller. An Abramorama release.

Running time: 1:43

Nothing to do with Nirvana, so let’s avoid any “Smells like” wisecracks.

This Max Minghella film is about an aspiring pop starlet (Elle), her mentor (Rebecca Hall) and a BIG CONTEST that can make or break her.

They’re premiering “Teen Spirit” at the Toronto Film Fest but it doesn’t open until Jan.

Regarding the college sex comedy “Frat Star,” it doesn’t really let co-directors Grant Johnson and Ippsie Jones off the hook by saying “They MEANT” to make something appalling.

They succeeded, exposing the elitist, sexist and degrading “Greek” system as it ruins a perfectly good kid with callousness, sexist humiliations, class snobbery, racist indoctrination and sexual privilege in the most explicit sense.

But it’s a “light” comedy, one that tries to have it both ways, suggesting our hero/victim was already a victim before he got there — that his “initiation” into “manhood” is both necessary and funny. Because Nick Cooper is nothing if not a “pussy,” a financially-aided Ivy League kid who thinks hard work and true love are how one finds success and happiness.

That’s not the way it works at all, and there is comic potential in those Barney-in-“How I Met Your Mother” hard lessons about sex and women and love learned while coming of age.

But this grating farce makes its satiric points so clumsily, pounds its punchlines so relentlessly and vulgarly that it only made it to Netflix for the titillation factor. Teenage boys can watch college boys having lots of sex, much of it degrading, with compliant, half-nude coeds.

Any effort to make the sorority sisters every bit as cruel, sexually calculating and selfish -“They think this is THEIR sport. It’s not. Trust us.” — is just lip service paid to equal rights  in this infuriatingly Neanderthal college comedy.

Nick (Connor Lawrence, out of his depth) has all the wrong ideas about college. Pep talks about “You’re going to have truffle butter out the wazoo!” from his boorish dad (Chris Elliott, less funny than usual) don’t impress him. “That’s not me.”

That’s even his mantra when he meets his antic/manic/Old Money roommate Billy (Justin Mark, trying WAY too hard). Billy offers him a bottle, lures buxom coeds into their room with it and flips out when Nick shows how little experience or interest he has in getting it he has getting either.

“That’s not me. I’m going to orientation.”

“What do we need orientation for? We already KNOW our gender!”

Billy refuses to give up and coaches Nick relentlessly about hiding the financial aid thing, giving up on the girlfriend back home who dumped him with extreme prejudice and hitting every “rager” and keg party the frats on campus toss.

Nick may be a social media pariah, #NickCooper is a meme the ex’s colorfully-nicknamed new lover (F— Jerry) created to show how pathetic his pleading texts to the hateful Ashley (Kelley Missal) are.

Nick — “We need to talk.”

Ashley — “Who are you again?”

But dragging Nick with him into Phi Delta becomes Billy’s mission. Working class Nick is reinvented as the heir to Cooper Tires. Of COURSE he’s down with treating women as objects to be grabbed, used and tossed aside. Of COURSE he’s old money conservative.

That cute music major, Rosanna (Cathryn Dylan, barely registering)? She’s as trapped as he is. Every time they start to talk, a pushy sorority sister who calls Nick “Faggot” interrupts, or the handsome, entitled frat president (Tyler Weaks) cuts in.

The film takes a stab at showing the parallel progress of our two innocents in college — mean sorority girls trying wise-up Rosanna by bedding the one guy she has an interest in, frat boys imprinting their racism, homophobia, xenophobia and class privilege (“Work? You don’t have to WORK in college. Not if you know the right people!”(.

“Segregation kind of makes some SENSE. I mean, the reason we’ve never had any African Americans here…”

“Blacks. You can say ‘Blacks.’ There aren’t any here.”

The Chinese pledge is named “Ching Chong,” and given a racist pidgin accent. The black pledge is nicknamed “Token.”

As mean and un-PC as that is, gags like that actually brought laughs in “Animal House,” which made the same satiric points even as, like “Frat Star,” you know the WRONG message was the one the future frat boys and sorority girls took home from it. Party, copulate, cheat, lie and steal, for the adult world is all that lies beyond.

“Natural Selection,” the raving Trump Bro (Peter O’Connor) snaps.

“Get some color,” among our recruits House Manager/Pledge Leader Augustus (Max Sheldon) urges. “Mix it up. Mulatto. Maybe a mulatto…Let’s not shove it in everybody’s faces that we all drive S classes.”

The frat brothers work up a homoerotic sweat as they urge each other to “RIDE these pledges…Paddling. I want more PADDLING.”

Nick, caught up in all this, develops a complex — a preppy “conscience” who ridicules his better instincts and urges him on, to use women, slip into sorority windows and complete the steps of his initiation quest.

Nick learns to demean women, mock lesser Ivies (“Brown” jokes, of course.) and memorize the values of the fraternity leadership.

“Best band of all time?” “Uh, Coldplay? ”

“MUMFORD and Sons!”

“Best TV show of ALL time?” “Entourage.”

“Best Adjective of all time? WRONG! EPIC!”

“Best MOVIE? ‘Boondocks Saints!'”

That little bit of ridicule pays off. The rest? Lost in a sea of profanity, slurs, frantically-delivered weak lines or buried in a wildly uneven sound mix.

By the time the cocaine shows up and this debacle dives across the finish line for its very sour ending, I was beyond over it.

“Animal House” brought fraternities back from the dead in the late 70s. The one comfort we can take from “Frat Star” is that this time, appalling isn’t the least bit appealing.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, graphic degrading sexual content, profanity

Cast: Connor Lawrence, Justin Mark, Cathryn Dylan,  Chris Elliott

Credits:Directed by Grant S. Johnson and Ippsie Jones, script by Grant S. Johnson. A Gravitas release.

Running time: 1:25

The evangelist Billy Graham long had a film production company that produced movies with the same aim as his televised “Crusades” — to win converts, or at least reaffirmations of faith from believers.

These were simple, modest-budget films with varying settings but always stories about people in crisis — legal, moral, ethical — finding hope, in the third act, via a Billy Graham Crusade.

Billy Graham died earlier this year, and “Unbroken: Path to Redemption” wasn’t produced by his film company. But this low budget sequel to Angelina Jolie’s 2014 Oscar season film biography “Unbroken” follows the same formula, with the same basic ingredients, as Graham’s self-produced big screen infomercials.

There’s a soul in crisis, the Olympic runner Louis Zamperini, who survived torture in a Japanese POW camp and is so tormented by what he went through that coming home doesn’t mean his war is over. Reconnecting with family and finding love cannot stop the nightmares — drifting in a life raft for 47 days in the Pacific, surrounded by sharks, beaten and threatened with beheading by a monstrous prison guard nicknamed The Bird for years. He falls into despair and alcoholism.

And then Billy Graham comes to LA for the Crusade that would make his reputation and park him in the public eye for the next 70 years. After pushing and prodding and reaching rock bottom, the Catholic Zamperini goes, reluctantly rediscovers his faith and finds purpose.

It’s not a star-studded affair, and “Path to Redemption” was directed by the “God’s Not Dead” director — Harold Cronk — who is operating outside the Hollywood mainstream. But it shows why that formula was left unaltered by Billy Graham Worldwide Pictures, back in the day. And in some ways, it betters Jolie’s big budget Oscar bait, with its team of Oscar winning screenwriters and “name” cast.

Samuel Hunt of TV’s “Empire” and “Chicago P.D.” is Zamperini this time. He looks like the young Louis, has a runner’s build and a miler’s stride and the gaunt face of a man starved in a prisoner of war camp, unlike the Englishman (Jack O’Connell) Jolie cast in the role. If Jolie sees this she’s going to kick herself. Hunt is terrific in the part.

We meet Louis upon his return to Japan in 1950, a man in a nice suit followed by a Time Magazine photographer, searching the faces of chastened war crimes’ prisoners, questioning them and their American guards.

“Where’s Watanabe? Where’s The Bird?”

The story flashes back to Louis’s homecoming, the onetime “Torrance Tornado” welcomed back to his big, loving family who show him his fan mail and explain the shouts and waves he gets walking down Torrance streets.

“You are a hero!”

“You’ve got me confused with somebody else, Mom. I just survived.”

He endures the backslapping of his local priest, but quickly corrects the man’s embrace of the “miracle” that got him home safe.

“Miracles didn’t save my tail-feathers, Padre. Two atomic bombs had something to do with it.”

Louis declares that his experience got him over the whole God thing. Pushing that, or forcing him to listen to reminders of what he went through tends to set him off.

Aimless, he hits the local bar entirely too often. An Army shrink (Gary Cole) offers little comfort. Then the military (Bob Gunton) enlists him in in the ongoing War Bonds drive needed to pay for the very expensive conflict America just fought. As with the overwhelmed heroes of Clint Eastwood’s “Flags of Our Fathers,” Louis finds himself immodestly retelling and reliving his ordeal, increasingly drunk while doing it, on the road from coast to coast.

Maggot-filled rice flashes before his eyes at meals, elevator rides are strafed by Japanese Zeroes and his epic grudge with the barbaric Japanese guard who assaulted him over and over grows.

Even meeting the love of his life (Merritt Patterson) and their whirlwind Miami romance doesn’t end the nightmares.

Only revenge can, or so he thinks. And then Billy G. (played by Will Graham, Billy Graham’s grandson) comes to Los Angeles.

Cronk and screenwriters Richard Friedenberg and Ken Hixon handle all of this with care. The always spotless and creased costumes (even aprons) may not look like they’ve been lived in, Graham the Younger may have little of Grandpa’s telegenic passion, charisma and magnetism. But the story moves along even as it covers familiar ground.

The courtship features a lump in the throat romantic gesture, as Cynthia (Patterson) gently rebuffs a too-hasty Zamperini proposal with “I’ll race you for it.”

A POW twelve years removed from the Olympics or not, the fellow’s still a world class runner, even on Miami Beach. Cynthia?

“I’ve been outrunning boys my whole life.”

They line up in the sand, on your mark, set, GO. He explodes out of the blocks and sprints towards a lifeguard stand only to realize she’s behind him, smiling and walking towards her future — him. That’s a “Yes,” big boy.

“Thank you for preserving the free world for silly girls like me.'”

The dialogue is sharp and generally period-correct, Zamperini’s flirtation with re-starting his running career a dozen years after his previous (very young and not triumphant) appearance at the Berlin Olympics lets us see that Hunt is more at home on the track than the previous big screen Louis.

But you don’t have to have seen Zamperini on stage with Graham, later in life, telling his story to feel that what you’re seeing is entirely too familiar. It takes nothing away from what the man endured in saying the entire arc of this telling of it is worn and robbed of surprises, with only the odd dash of pathos. Every movie with an AA meeting in it has a roughly similar testimonial, excepting the POW torture element.

We see his cynicism, his rejection of Christianity, but it never has enough heat and fury to it for us to believe it. The director and his star play these moments as pulled-punches, and they don’t land.

This material was partly covered in the original film, “Unbroken,” and there’s just not enough that’s novel or interesting about Zamperini’s odyssey through this phase of his life to warrant another movie. They just changed the emphasis to his faith.

When I was a kid, my Boy Scout troop was called in to act as ushers whenever a Billy Graham movie would play in the single screen theater in the small town where I grew up. I got to know the “formula” for these films before I knew what to call it.

“Path to Redemption” is too much like those earlier works for its own good. Message over movie, “drama” lacking drama. 

It truly works on the level too many other faith-based dramas do, as comfort food for the faithful, an altar call for the already saved.

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for thematic content and related disturbing images

Cast: Samuel Hunt, Merritt Patterson, Will Graham, Gary Cole, Bob Gunton, David DeLuise

Credits:Directed by Harold Cronk, script by Richard Friedenberg, Ken Hixon based on the Laura Hillenbrand book. A PureFlix/Universal release.

Running time: 1:38

Shane Black writes the chewiest, funniest tough-guy dialogue in the movies. So having the writer-director of “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang” and “The Nice Guys” in charge of “The Predator” reboot was sure to pay dividends.

He’s a born smart-ass, and lines like “It’s an alien Whoopi Goldberg”  describing the dreadlocked hunter-killer from space were sure to pop up, delivered at screwball comedy speed.

A kid (Jacob Tremblay) whose dad is an Army sniper tells the blue uniformed fellow making a delivery and asking too many questions this — “He kills people so you can be a mailman.”

That dad (Boyd Holbrook) is being interrogated after his “encounter with a space alien,” and is asked, “You think you’re being railroaded?”

“I see the tracks on the floor!”

Black is also the guy who scripted “Last Action Hero,” and on “The Predator,” he thought it would be a good idea to cast an old buddy who is also a convicted sex offender, and that actress Olivia Munn would be OK with that.

So Shane Black’s also the opposite of a “smart” ass, if that’s not too subtle.

Both Blacks are on display in this, the sixth film in this spree-killing “alien Whoopi Goldberg” franchise. It’s got the same macho camaraderie as the 1987 original film, and with the Baron of Butch Banter writing zingers for Holbrook, Munn, Keegan-Michael Key, Thomas Jane and Sterling K. Brown, the only question at the end would be “Which two folks in this ‘Predator’ will be the ones elected governor in 10 years?”

Or it would be if the not-smart “ass” Black hadn’t shown up about 45 minutes in, delivered a “cuddly” alien hunting dog, muddling up the non-competing agendas of the teams of humans killing each other (Sterling K. Brown plays a mysterious villain) and generally drivimg this thing into the “ENOUGH already” zone of most of the previous Predator pictures.

Holbrook, who made a very good heavy in “Logan,” plays Quinn the sniper on a stalk in Mexico when a space ship crashes right in the middle of a hostage rescue. He loses his team, but grabs alien gear on site, mails it to his old hometown where his little boy (Tremblay) and ex-wife (Yvonne Strahovski of “The Handmaid’s Tale”) are sure to get their hands on it.

Actually, it’s the savant-brilliant “on the spectrum” little boy who gets his mind around the alien tech helmet and weaponized gauntlet. Halloween is about to get VERY interesting for the bullies in little Rory’s neighborhood.

“Leave me ALONE!”

“Or what, you’ll wash your hands 500 times?”

Dad Quinn finds himself on a military “loony” prison bus filled with misfits like “Nebraska” (Trevante Rhodes of “Moonlight”) and “toughs” played by Keegan-Michael Key, Alfie Allen, Augusto Aguilera and the funniest of all — Thomas Jane as a disturbed GI with Tourette Syndrome. I’ll let you guess what he insists was “Sheesh, you’re pushy,” that he blurted out and offended the alien contact biologist (Olivia Munn) who falls in with them.

Jane and Key are so funny they could take their act on the road.

But in addition to the other un-PC gags, Black tries to wring laughs out of eviscerations, beheadings and dismemberments as aliens and humans take the measure of each other and hurl a lot of firepower into the firmament.

The body count and blood and guts gets old in an instant. And while there’s something inherently hilarious in casting Jake Busey as a lab-coated scientist, the manic combat in between the blasts of banter is wearying.

The predators are always picking people up, then killing off the bit players, letting the leads live on to fight in another scene.

These have always been movies better suited to being video games, and that may be the fate of “The Predator,” too. It’s just that video games don’t mold tough-guy images the way movies do, and nobody from a video game ever got elected governor on “I ain’t got TIME” to bleed.

MPAA Rating: R for strong bloody violence, language throughout, and crude sexual references

Cast: Boyd Holbrook, Trevante Rhodes, Olivia Munn, Thomas Jane, Keegan-Michael Key, Jacob Tremblay

Credits:Directed by Shane Black, script by  Fred Dekker, Shane Black. A 20th Century Fox release.

Running time: 1:47

What did the sisterhood used to say about “mini skirts?”

“If you’re old enough to have worn them the LAST time they came around, maybe they’re not for you THIS time.”

Doesn’t really apply to movies, although you could make the case that “If you were into ‘Predator,’ in 1987, maybe this isn’t for you.

Because over the course of 31 years, most people have outgrown Predators, Ayn Rand and heavy metal.

Two musclehead stars of 1987’s “Predator” went on to become governors. I am pretty sure I didn’t predict that in my review of the film for the esteemed Grand Forks Herald daily newspaper in movie-mad North Dakota.

Arnold and Jesse have moved on, but this alien gun-nut “hunter” has not. Six feature films, several video games and a couple of short movies later, the hunting goes on.

Boyd Holbrook, Olivia Munn and Keegan Michael Key are in this incarnation. More “Alien” than “Predator?” Dunno.

Review to follow shortly.