Movie Nation

Netflix has decided that what the romantic comedy genre needs is another “THIS time I get it RIGHT” fantasy farce, this one starring Adam Devine.

“When We First Met” is built around a guy’s grief  over losing Ms. Right, grief h recovers from by time traveling to earn that magic “reset.” And Devine? He gets to play his abrasive Jack Black Lite thing — singing, funny voices, more music, hapless around women, kind of a jerk.

Noah (Devine) met Avery (Alexandra Daddario of “Baywatch”) on Halloween three years ago. It was a star-crossed night, and he cannot stop thinking about it and drinking himself sick over it at an engagement party — hers. She’s marrying Ethan (Robbie Amell).

“Ethan has nothing on me.”

“He kinda does,” her BFF Carrie (Shelley Hennig, of “Ouija” and “Unfriended,” caustic and funny) says. “He’s like the nicest guy ever.”

“He’s like, ‘Mormon Nice.'”

It takes a bit more drinking, with Carrie and his Noah’s BFF Max (Andrew Bachelor) for the story to gain clarity. Noah and Avery met at a Halloween party. She was Geena Davis in “A League of Their Own.” He was Garth from “Wayne’s World.”

“The key to doing a really good Garth impression is to make your mouth into a tiny little butthole!”

They chat and chat and chat, “Do you like jazz?” “Do I like BREATHING?”  He gets her life story, she gets to hear him play piano at a jazz bar where he works. They even hit the photo booth. A Cookie Crisps binge, foosball and in the end of this adorable night to remember, she hits him with a “You’re cute.” Her “you’re cute” he turns into “this might’ve been.”

Can you say “Friend Zone?”

But when he wakes up, it’s the wrong day and year. It’s Halloween, 2014. Again. Before he can finish sprinting/singing “Goin’ back, back back in tiiiiime,” we realize what he’s really hoping for is “Groundhog Day,” a chance to manipulate events more to his advantage this time around.

So he does. So he’s got to get back to that photo booth. That first attempt at getting ahead of the game, knowing all the right things to say to this stranger still dressed in her “League” uniform, has him changing costumes, learning a Count Basie tune to impress her, etc.

He replays the phone booth game…hard.

Will this turn things to his advantage, let Noah skip past “the friend zone” this time around? What’s your best guess?

“STALKER!”

As bad as things were, they can only get worse. But if you like seeing Adam Devine get pummelled, well you know where to go.

He wakes up with another shot, just like “Groundhog Day.” What does Noah have to “learn” over the course of these assorted attempts to be the sort of “guy Avery wants to be with?”

I’ve seen “Groundhog Day” recently, so I appreciated the attempted journey from whiney and self-absorbed to jerk to kindness, from Garth in “Wayne’s World” to James Bond to…

Devine wanly attempts a played-out drunk scene, and even though I’ve never found him more than irritating in “Pitch Perfect,” “Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates” or the grating “Game Over, Man,” he performs this variation on “Groundhog’s” journey of personal discovery with verve.

Alternate futures with business success (but no more jazz), as a douchebag version of himself or a plump sell-out workaholic variation at least hold the attention. It’s still not really all that funny, I have to say. Except for discovering that he’s fluent in Chinese in one of these variations. The “I guess I DON’T know how to play the piano” version isn’t even close to amusing.

Why do people go to weddings or engagement parties of lovers/crushes they never got over? It seems to happen a lot…in the movies. There’s much more than just that in “When We First Met” that has the ring of the familiar, that reminds us we’re seeing an inferior unfunnier copy.

Devine, like Adam Sandler, has hitched his cinematic wagon to Netflix, and they have done likewise with him. But as ready as the Jack Black comparison (musical, plump, tries too hard) might be, it’s only mean because it’s accurate.

He’s less irritating here, a little charm shows through, which doesn’t save the movie but gives it a perfectly sweet aftertaste.

And even if you don’t review movies for a living you should know where this is going right around the midway point. If not, you’re sentenced to spend a weekend on Netflix, watching “Groundhog Day” and “Before I Fall” and maybe “It’s a Wonderful Life,” for good measure.

MPAA Rating: TV-14

Cast: Adam Devine, Alexandra Daddario, Shelley Hennig, Robbie Amell, Andrew Bachelor

Credits:Directed by Ari Sandel, script by John Whittington. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:38

As I was sitting down to check out a Netflix comedy (“Win it All”), largely on the strength of the fact that Jake Johnson was in it, I had an epiphany.

Jake is, to me, hilarious, even in bad movies (“Let’s Be Cops”) or middling ones (“Tag”). I’ve been a fan since oh, at least “Safety Not Guaranteed,” maybe earlier.

And he looks like Oscar Isaac. More than a little bit, to be blunt. Yeah, they’re both Jewish (Jake Johnson Weinberger), both favor the stubble thing. I’m a big Oscar Isaac fan, too.

But Oscar Isaac, versatile singer, brooder, action hero (meh) that he may be, is not naturally funny. The whimsy’s not there. He’s supposed to be swaggering, swash-buckling in the “Star Wars” universe. Those are inherently funny characteristics.

And he’s not getting it done. He’s not alone in that regard, not laying the limp biscuit these movies are at his feet. But he’s illustrative of the problem.

Oscar and Jake look enough alike that my mind went, “What if they swapped Jake for Oscar in the future ‘Star Wars’ main storyline?” Just as a thought exercise.

Because if there’s one thing most of us seem to agree on, it’s that lighter touch that the Abrams-spawned films lack. And nowhere is that more evident than in the casting.

Go back to the original George Lucas films. Who’d he cast? “American Graffiti” bit-player who could do deadpan Harrison Ford. Mark Hamill, straight off a TV sitcom.

Carrie Fisher, daughter of a great screen comedienne and “Shampoo” comic vamp.

Alec Guinness, a serious actor whose career featured a dazzling array of comic masterpieces.

Abrams? He went for Daisy Ridley, John Boyega, Oscar Isaac and so on. Fine actors, or in some cases, fine enough. The light touch? None of them have it.

Donnie Yen of “Rogue One” is funnier than everybody in all the other films, including the “Solo” sequel, put together. Diego Luna was the closest we’ll see to that lovable rogue Ford turned Han Solo into.

Alden Ehrenreich’s comic chops were fine in “Hail, Caesar!” Kind of playing a “type” there, broad and cornpone. He’s not the least bit funny in “Solo,” nor is Ms. “Game of Thrones” or Donald Glover. Glover’s funniest as his rap alter ego, Childish Gambino, he landed some laughs on “SNL,” and he has the best potential to work out as a young Lando. But not funny enough in the movie.

Which probably won’t spawn its own sequel.

Maybe finding actors with a known light touch should be added to all the demographic check-boxes Abrams & Co. are plainly using when assembling these Disney products. More Jake Johnsons, less Oscar Isaacs.

It’s a sentimental father-daughter comedy about being left at the altar and on a drunken whim, taking Dad on the honeymoon cruise you were going on and meeting Seth Rogen on board.

Yeah, it’s a nightmare.

Kelsey Grammer tries to make us forget his Nugent/Voight/Hannity issues, Bell plays another disrespected and put upon cute blonde and Rogen is her –what? Barstool confessor?

It’s a Netflix film, which means it might have not been worth releasing theatrically, but everybody got a paid vacation. And it might be funny. Hard to tell.

This trailer is a reminder that you’re not under any obligation to give away ANY of the plot to your movie in the trailer for it. “Daddy Issues,” which premieres at LA’s OutFest, serves up impressionistic sketches of a love triangle in a bubblegum colored fantasia that I’m going to call, “Lesbiana.”

Intriguing, but we’ll have to see if there’s more to it than pretty faces, nude bodies and flirty come-ons.

“True crime” documentaries usually stick to a formula — depict the crime, then show the investigation and if there was a solution, how the investigation came out.

But what if you’re not absolutely certain there was a crime? There is no physical evidence, no murder victim’s body, no dead-certain suspect and no motive?

Try making a film out of that. Better still, try building a case “Out of Thin Air.”

That’s just what is depicted in the British-produced documentary of that title, a tale of young people convicted of murders based on a single piece of the evidence puzzle — confessions.

No, this isn’t another movie about the “West Memphis Three.” It’s set in monocultural, ethnically pure and thinly-populated Iceland just a couple of years after it had the world’s attention by hosting the Fischer/Spassky chess match. And perhaps the one object lesson the story the film tells has for other Western democracies is, “if this could happen there, it could happen anywhere.”

In 1974, a young man doesn’t come home from a night of bar hopping and partying. It’s the dead of Icelandic winter, but search parties head out into the frozen lavascape that is this remote and forbidding island, searching in vain for some sign of him.

Did Guðmundur pass out and tumble into a crack in the Earth, fall into the sea? Or did something more sinister happen?

The police focused on where he went, who last saw him, as we’d expect. They can find nobody with a motive for the crime, even though there’s this one suspicious fellow with an Eastern European name, Sæv­ar Marinó Ciesi­elski, who gets their attention.

Nothing comes of that.

Six months later, winter’s back, and an older man, a father, Geirfinnur, disappears even more mysteriously. Vast search parties, more poking around in snow and lava fields, on beaches — nothing. But they remember this foreign guy, and people who partied with him. They’re especially interested in  Erla Bolla­dótt­ir, his Icelandic girlfriend, pregnant with his child.

Months of investigating, endless interrogations of those two, and others who knew them, the revelation that Erla and Sæv­ar had been defrauding the phone company out of large sums of cash, and the cops are sure they have their quarries. Because outside of the investigation, the case is being tried in the equally insular world of Icelandic media. Leaks, revelations, the whole island — where everybody is related — is sure this “gang” did it.

Exhaustive investigations are replaced with exhaustive trials. Still no bodies, evidence of crimes, murder weapons or motives. But if you hold the floor in court long enough…

Now, forty years later, people are finally having their doubts.

Dylan Howitt’s film recreates the “crimes,” or recreates the police recreations of the crimes. He interviews cops, journalists, a memory expert and those who knew the missing men as well as the survivors among the six people accused and convicted of their murder.

“Out of Thin Air” is on its most solid ground pounding home the notion that “memory,” as Erla says, “is such a” fragile, strange thing. It can be manipulated, tricked and twisted by those determined to do it.

Interrogate somebody 180 times, for hundreds of hours, park them in solitary confinement for days and weeks on end to “concentrate” and try to remember details you’re suggesting to them, they just might confess to whatever you put in front of them.

“Out of Thin Air” cannot quite summon up the gossipy atmosphere — alleging governmental involvement, conspiracy and cover-up — the “public hysteria” for a resolution to these cases in what is “kind of a hobbit society.”

Frustratingly, Howitt makes little attempt to recreate the lives of the victims or re-investigate the disappearances. The movie feels incomplete, as indeed the police case still does.

Instead, he focuses on the jaw-dropping case coerced and constructed out of arrests, releases, re-arrests and years of interrogations and incarceration, turning lover against lover, using this coerced conviction to keep people in jail while that coerced conviction is trumped up and added to it.

It sounds like justice in China, not a Western European democracy. And it literally could happen anywhere in which blind justice is worse than blind, and a compliant public believes what they’re told to believe instead of what common sense is putting right in front of their face.

Sometimes, that coup de grace in any case, the fixture of many a police procedural and boilerplate courtroom drama, the “confession,” is the most worthless evidence of all.

MPAA Rating: unrated, descriptions of murder, drug abuse

Credits:Directed by Dylan Howitt. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:24

Flavor of the Year Tiffany H. plays the ex-con who gets out, mooches off of an embarrasses her sister (Tika Sumpter) until said sister, Ms. Success, turns out to have been catfished.

“Nobody’s Fool” was the recycled title they went for, “Aw Hell No” might have been on the money.

Whoopi Goldberg brings some Oscar winning “Let me bask in some of that Haddish Heat” to the supporting part as their mother. Missi Pyle is in there, too.

Can funny women funny up a Tyler Perry script into something dazzling? Nov. 2, we’ll find out. 

You could make an argument that Netflix is redefining the teen romantic comedy, right under our noses.

Not so much re-inventing the genre as pushing what’s acceptable within the “TV-14” parameters.

Sex, teen drinking and profanity standards are leaping beyond the theatrical studios and MPAA’s practices.

Netflix hits like “The Kissing Booth” and now “#REALITYHIGH” may not offer much in the way of surprises. But when John Michael Higgins (“Best in Show/Pitch Perfect”), playing the principal at socially-wired/sexually and alcoholically active Vista Valley High sees his picture on the school wall defaced in the opening credits, he sets the tone for what is to follow.

“F— my life,” he mutters. Allll-righty then.

Beer busts, twerking cheerleaders in search of a pole to dance on, colorful frank “polyamorous” speculation, moist underwear, magic marker huffing and all of it making its mark on social media where they kids not only over-share, they basically stalk, harass and judge one-another at the speed of “like” — that’s the new “reality” here.

Our heroine is nice-girl/vet-school bound Dani (Nesta Cooper of “Edge of Seventeen”), or as snarky Miguel (Patrick Davis) puts it, “never-been-d—-d-Dani.”

How efficient of the three credited screenwriters here, combining the Latino punk with the Mean Girl Gay Boy, all in one package.

“Aren’t you supposed to be at the kennel, with all the other bitches?”

Dani is a bit of a frump, a senior who never quite got over a cruel summer camp prank in her tweens. The prankster? Evil, accented Alexa (Alicia Sanz). Now Alexa has even more power, a mean girl who posts #REALITYHIGH updates and has a huge social media following.

She’s dating Cameron (Keith Powers), the hunky Olympic-hopeful swimmer Dani has crushed on forever. Cameron’s pals have laid down the law.

“It’s like what Darwin said, ‘Hot people are SUPPOSED to have sex with each other!”

Yup.

Then as Dani shows off her veterinary assistant skills with Cameron’s Pomeranian, Alexa finds a youtube star to date and dumps him. Could love, and a makeover for social leper Dani be in the offing?

Freddie (Jake Borelli), her fellow vet clinic volunteer and would-be DJ, the BFF who pines for her the way she longs for Cameron, sure thinks so. Can he stop this love-that-was-meant-to-be from getting traction?

Can Alexa, mean, shallow and controlling to her core, change?

Will Dani’s much hipper to social media little sister (Leah Rose Randall) point her in the right direction? “Get some LIKES!”

There’s some breathtaking cruelty here, dealt by and aimed at the mean girl. As kind people in the movies, especially predictably lame ones, always default toward forgiveness, will that blow up in Dani’s face? What do YOU think?

The kids gather at Bob’s Big Boy, an “American Graffiti/Happy Days” throwback (Santa Clarita was the filming location), compare cars and pass on advice about the opposite sex in between veggie burgers.

Cameron confers with his bros, who note Dani’s “feelings, thoughts” and stuff that separates her from Alexa.

“Yo, you might have to actually put in some work on this one. ”

Will Dani tumble into the tinsel-trap that could derail the future she has so carefully planned — a scholarship veterinary school, caring for critters and bonding with the boy she adores? It’s always the focused kid who lets everybody down by “having fun.”

“#REALITYHIGH” is intriguing in its deconstruction of the “economy” of social media queens, how they shop and photograph and “like” their way to freebies, peddling their influence to star-struck, pot-smoking horndog peers. Parties with fellow Internet phenomena (Kid Ink) create a bubble universe of fame, acquisitiveness and moral and ethical compromise to acquire what they crave.

Of course, Freddie is the lad who gets left behind. Shades of “Pretty in Pink.”

The cast is accomplished and confident, as you’d expect as these teens range in age from mid-20s to 30 (Ms. Sanz). That also tends to soften the blow of how “adult” the behavior they plunge into and the fashions they sample are. Yeah, they know how to “make a mean White Russian.” Not a stretch.

I liked the depiction of the gauntlet kids walk, just striding into school, as classmates’ camera phones record how they look, what they’re wearing and what the person posting that photo thinks of it, on a sex appeal scale.

The parents here are more sympathetic than is common in this genre — supportive, with solid advice, tuned in to where their kids are going wrong on social media.

I didn’t like much of the rest of what I saw and heard — trite situations, conflicts ripped off from eons of teen romances.

And how did this line, from a kid allegedly college bound, get past “Let’s try another take of that?”

“Sorry, I should never have drived you here.” Seriously?

When the screenwriters are so focused on naming a nerdy prankster on campus after one of their ranks (Broussard), juggling peripheral storylines and the Mexican director is fretting over the next costume change for one and all, stuff is bound to slip through the cracks.

MPAA Rating: TV-14

Cast: Nesta Cooper, Keith Powers, Alicia Sanz, Anne Winters, Jake Borelli, John Michael Higgins

Credits:Directed by Fernando Lebrija, script by Brandon Broussard, Hudson Obayuwana, Jana Savage. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:39

“Ocean’s 8” set an Ocean’s caper comedy record on its opening weekend at the box office. It did this in spite of mixed to barely passable reviews, by and large, and the less than stellar exit-polling rating in the “B” range. “A, A+ or A-” are most often the Cinemascore rule when audiences are rating a film they have chosen to go to because it matches up with their interests, and have then shelled out $14-20 a ticket to reinforce that preconceived opinion.

The film’s second weekend was not a nose-dive, but a still troublesome 53% drop from that opening, below expectations.

And the reason for this push-back, says one of the film’s supporting players, Mindy Kaling, is because “white male movie critics” didn’t get it, or went after it. Or are holding her back. Something along those lines.

With the sea change in criticism in recent years, I wonder if she’s simply not basing her annoyance on an outdated model of movie reviewing. Yeah, there are plenty of white males doing it (Me, for instance). But scan through Metacritic or any other review aggregator and you’ll see a lot more female faces and names, though perhaps not the racial diversity you’d want.

Audiences rejecting the movie on its second weekend had little to do with reviews, but if the reviews broke down on gender lines (as with the female “Ghost Busters”) as she maintains, she may have a point — or half a point. And God help me if I am making her point for her in complaining about her simplistic “shoot the messenger” jibe.

But audiences bailed on “Ghost Busters” for the same reason they’re moving on from “Ocean’s” — it’s a gimmick remake, and not nearly funny enough. The critics who pointed this out were merely stating the obvious.

If anything,  like “Busters,” “Oceans” demonstrates how the few female-centric movies that come along that get a much bigger break, by and large, from the sisters of criticism than they do from the guys.

But there are other issues about the movie that Kaling might want to chew over.

There are so many women in it that she had basically one good scene, two and a half, three and a half scenes total.

And the casting of the women has something else that calls attention to itself. Every woman in it is glammed up and given the most flattering camera coverage possible. Every actress and the character playing her got to load up in Met Gala glamwear (see the photo above).

The central characters are played by Sandra Bullock, Helena Bonham Carter, Cate Blanchett, Anne Hathaway, and all are and have been widely acknowledged great screen beauties of their day.

The women of color in the film? Mindy Kaling, Awkafina and Rihanna. Rihanna, like the Kardashians and Minaj and Cardi B and other skin-flashing/sexy image peddling self-made women who are phenomena in the culture, is altering legacy standards of what’s widely accepted as beauty. Striking, but is RiRi on a par with Halle/Gugu/Kiersey Clemons? You know, gorgeous actresses of color?

Why were these the women the big stars/studio/director chose to cast in supporting roles? If they were going for funniest, Melissa McCarthy, Tiffany H., Wiig and others would have been in the conversation as support. Instead, we get a “funny looking” (look at the way they dress Awkwafina) confused with “funny” rule of thumb. We get check-box diversity casting and of those check-boxes only Rihanna is an Instagram bombshell, and not one of three of them was given much of anything funny to play. The studio merely filled those ethnic check boxes, cast more pedestrian looking women of color in support to be “unthreatening” to the talented, better known and more conventionally beautiful leads.  Who also, by the way, have little funny to say or do.

There’s some questionable deference, some old school Hollywood pandering to ethnic corners of the audience, that’s anything but modern and “empowering.”

So “Ocean’s” strikes me as having a lot more questions Kaling could be asking herself, her agent, et al. Demanding that film criticism operate on some grade-on-the-gender/racial/etc curve, that it pander in a cast-diverse-actresses-but-don’t-threaten-the-leads way, as “Ocean’s 8” plainly did, is the least of them.

Catherine Walker, Cillian Murphy, Andrew Scott and Eva Birthistle star in this Irish melodrama from the writer of “Boy A” and “Intermission.”

John Carroll Lynch, Matt Bomer and Maura Tierney star in this story of loss, grief, compassion and that LGBT neighbor who gives a man who has given up purpose.

It’s set in West Hollywood, kind of ground zero in the world this story presents. Sweeter than “Tangerine,” less challenging perhaps. But a grasp at tolerance in increasingly intolerant times.

“Anything” is still making the rounds of film festivals, at the moment. But with that cast, it’ll land somewhere we can see it.