Movie Nation

In the Dutch Caribbean, this word has nothing to do with the fellow who runs Hollywood-Elsewhere.

Acne, hormones, weight issues, hormones, ungainliness, more hormones.

Eighth grade sucks. Sucked. The jump from elementary school to middle junior high is a traumatic chasm to leap.

And that’s what writer-director Bo Burnham (“The Big Sick”) fixates on for this new dramedy, starring Elsie Fisher as the traumatized teen and Josh Hamilton as her hapless single dad.

“Eighth Grade” being an A24 release, expect edge and cringe-worthy comedy from this July release.

Taking a few days to drink Blue Coladas and snorkel in between movies in sunny Curacao. I will have to get to “A Quiet Place” and “Chappaquiddick” next week.

Zombies man, zombies. In Australia. An infected dad trying to get his child to safety before he starts stumbling about looking for brains in this Australian thriller.

“Cargo” looks promising, a hint of “Maggie” about it, accepting the inevitable, struggling to make the world right for your child.

“2001: A Space Odyssey” is getting a VERY limited 50th anniversary “unrestored” re-release, presumably on 70mm celluloid at a few theaters that can still show it.

The mind-blowing effects in it were the result of Stanley the K. playing with chemicals. And it’s not what you think.

And a 1960 Canadian planetarium documentary drove Kubrick’s “mind trip” sequence.

Here it is.

In volleyball terms, “The Miracle Season” should have been an easy spike, a perfunctory “kill.”

The “set-up” is can’t miss. Popular, bubbly star volleyball player with a state championship team dies, gutting her teammates. They have to “dig” deep to save their season, “For ‘Line'” (Caroline) and wring tears out of the audience.

Toss two Oscar winners in the major adult roles — Helen Hunt and William Hurt. And with the director of “Soul Surfer,” one of the best faith-based sports movies ever, well it’s break out your hankies time.

The advertising writes itself — “If you cried at “Brian’s Song” or “The Fifth Quarter” or “Hoosiers” or “We Are Marshall,” you’ll bawl your eyes out at ‘Miracle Season.'”

Only we don’t. Sean McNamara’s “Big Game” formula drama is ONLY about the Big Game — an endless procession of them. Characters are shortchanged, emotional impact is deadened. Heck, the dead teen’s funeral/wake is practically covered in a simple, short montage.

In short, “We Aren’t Marshall.”

Danika Yarosh (“Jack Reacher: Never Go Back”)  plays “Line” as a perpetually beaming, giddy blonde who lifts everybody up, just by her presence. She leads her Iowa City West Lady Trojans on the court, and starts the towel fights and Katy Perry sing-alongs in the locker room afterward.

She’s so damned adorable she makes your teeth ache. But then, maybe she has to be. Her mom is dying, her doctor-dad (Hurt) is reeling. But she’s got volleyball, and her best friend forever — Kelly (Erin Moriarty of “Captain Fantastic”) and a legion of friends, not just teammates.

“This is OUR year!”

And then she’s killed.

True confession time, the movie is right on the edge of insufferable right up to that moment — Line bucking up her recently-split-up coach (Hunt), taking pizza-stuffing dares from the other Lady Trojans, fixing up Kelly with the cute new boy in town (Burkely Duffield).

The town and the team are so devastated by her death that nobody wants to even think about volleyball. And when Coach “Bresh” summons them, they can’t focus on practice through the tears.

“NO crying on my court!”

Kelly is given the captaincy, and the challenge — “Girls are looking at you to see if it’s OK to play again.” She isn’t up to that challenge, not at first.

Line’s dad isn’t holding up well, either. All this death has him noting “God hasn’t exactly for ME lately” as an excuse for skipping church.

But they all suck it up and get back to the game, which takes over the last half of the movie, in toto. Dr. Deadgirl’s Dad sets the corny tone for Kelly.

“I may be the surgeon, but you’re the healer out there!”

Hunt, playing a woman who can’t let herself give in to grief, gets her emotional moment. It doesn’t really make up for the most banal sports movie dialogue ever — “Dig, DIG. Serve to Zone One! ”

But if Lifetime ever decides to make “The Pat Summitt Story,” about the tough, no-nonsense University of Tennessee basketball coach, this shows Hunt would be perfect for it — intense, sensitive, feminine and brusquely butch.

Moriarty isn’t bad in the lead, just underserved by the script. And yeah, she’s Iowa bland. The movie emphasizes wholesome at the expense of pretty much everything else, rendering it pleasantly inoffensive, but nothing more.

The volleyball itself is photographed in the most pedestrian slo-mo imaginable. You get a little sense of strategy, but not much. There’s no insider slang. You have to go back to the gay boy-joins-girls-volleyball-team comedy “Miles” to know that the form-fitting shorts the players wear are nicknamed “Coochie Cutters.” “Miracle Season” is too PG for that.

It could please any crowd with little experience of sports movies, especially teen girls. Maybe teen boys, too. But that lack of tears isn’t due to any great effort to not let anybody else see you cry. With all  it has going for it, the only miracle in this “Season” is that it just doesn’t deliver.

MPAA Rating: PG for some thematic elements

Cast:Erin Moriarty, Helen Hunt, William Hurt, Danika Yarosh

Credits:Directed by Sean McNamara, script by David Aaron Cohen, Elissa Matsueda. An LD release.

Running time: 1:35

Kudos for the folks who hired two Oscar winners and made “The Miracle Season,” and for previewing it in cities across the country.

It’s a “Win one for the Gipper” variation, a true story about a high school volleyball team that took inspiration from a dead teammate to excel.

Helen Hunt is the “tough love” coach, William Hurt also stars.

LD Entertainment did “Anthropoid,” “Killer Joe” and “I Love You, Phillip Morris.” So yeah, this is worth taking as seriously as anything else opening this weekend.

There’s a special corner of movie-lovers heaven for actors who burn through their Hollywood capital on quirky, challenging movies that have little commercial potential.

Zachary Quinto’s earned his place there. And Jon Hamm, with all the offbeat TV shows and goof-on-his-own-image TV commercials, as well as with films like “Nostalgia” and “Marjorie Prime” and “Aardvark,” is getting there.

In the offbeat “Aardvark,” Quinto plays Josh, a troubled soul seeking psychotherapeutic help because his brother (Hamm), an actor and “one of the greatest talents of his generation,” is back in town.

No, he’s not having suicidal thoughts, one of the first questions a new therapist or counselor asks. But when Josh runs into a bag lady on the street or a chuckling African American cop sipping latte at the coffee shop where he works, he’s pretty sure he’s dealing with brother Craig, a guy with a gift for being “utterly unrecognizable.”

He’s that good.

And our question, and one that crosses the mind of the “counselor, NOT a doctor” who sees him, is “Does this famous phantom sibling even exist?”

Emily (Jenny Slate) is full of empathy and genuinely concerned, as Josh is given to precipitous mood swings and dark turns. She’s at a loss, so she confers with her mentor “(Stephen Schnetzer).

“If he’s paying cash for you to treat him for schizophrenia, then he’s NOT schizophrenic.” Wonder if he got that out of the manual, DSM-5? And the way he brushes Emily off, coupled with her tactless exit from her book club and brittle encounter with another ex while running make us see the counselor as somebody maybe in need of a little counseling herself.

Of course she meets the infamous Craig (Hamm). Slate is adorably, gulpingly tongue-tied and flustered upon encountering the TV hunk that we don’t have to have seen her in “Obvious Child” or “Landline” or “Gifted” to know what’s coming.

Slate has a niche worthy of a nickname – “Baroness of Bad Decisions.” Yeah, she tumbles for him.

Meanwhile, Josh’s disassociations are growing. There’s a lovely woman (Sheila Vand) who keeps crossing his path, almost flirting. He doesn’t know whether to testily push her away or charm her with his poor-dude/disturbed guy pickup lines.

You like his shirt? “I got it at a discount. It was marked ‘irregular.’ Sometimes irregular things can be just fine.”

First time feature writer-director Brian Shoaf stages some painfully awkward, sensitive and probing counseling sessions for Slate and Quinto to play.  The script has lovely snatches of dialogue and fascinating, wounded characters, which was enough to drew in the three leads.

Here’s Josh’s reaction to the homeless woman who panhandles him every night after work. “If you spend this on anything other than food, I will be heartbroken. And probably kill myself.”

But Shoaf has trouble resolving the “mystery” of the story in a convincing and satisfying way, abruptly shifting gears for a finale that feels like a cheat.

“Aardvark,” as in “one of a kind” and “odd by nature,” is still a pleasure to sit through. Credit the players for that — Slate’s winsome neediness, Quinto’s barely-functional headcase and Hamm’s up-for-anything breezy actor who gets where he wants and what he wants without ever showing a hint of effort.

They all have other work that they’ll be remembered for. But in movie-lovers’ heaven, they’re celebrated for taking chances on directors and material just like this.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for mature thematic issues, language, some sexuality and violence

Cast: Jenny Slate, Zachary Quinto, Jon Hamm

Credits:Written and directed by Brian Shoaf. A Great Point release.

Running time: 1:28

A spy who falls for a scientist, kidnapping in the desert and a mental escape into the deepest deep blue sea.

Very Wim Wenders. “Submergence” finally gets a release next week. Limited.

American adolescence has been turned into a moving target by Hollywood in recent decades, thanks to the rise of the R-rated comedy about adults who’ve never grown up.

Blame the Ap(atow) Pack, the “Hangover” binge-athons or that Judeo-Canadian vulgarian Seth Rogen, but movies have normalized the kind of sophomoric body-abuse/sexual escapades and immaturity of “Knocked-Up” and “Forty Year Old Virgin,” films which pushed the R-rated edge over the edge even as they paused, here and there, for little dollops of sentimentality.

So arrives “Blockers,” the movie with the title Rogen (he produced) and Company couldn’t get into TV ads, etc.  “Cock Blockers” is the expression, and that’s just what the parents of three teenage girls vow to become when they learn of their daughters’ “#sexpact” for prom night. The BFFs want to get busy, with whatever boy happens to be their date for the big night. Their parents want to “save them” from this mistake that passes for a rite of passage.

Clingy “cool mom” Lisa (Leslie Mann at her fluttery flaky best) wants her kid to avoid the “mistake” she made, saddling herself to that first love that derailed her future 18 years ago. Hovering Superdad Mitch (John Cena, laying it all out there) is fretting that the kid he’s taught sports and turned into an over-achiever is about to lose her virginity to some dork with a “man bun” and a smirk.

And then there’s Hunter (Ike Barinholtz of “The Disaster Artist” and “The Mindy Project”). He’s the “You guys wanna grab a drink?” divorced absentee dad and odd-man out, the one who rented the girls and their dates a limo, the seemingly least responsible “adult in the room” and the one who is not cool with the other two’s plans to intervene.

Yeah, he was the one hip enough to translate the dirty emojis the teens are texting back and forth. That doesn’t mean he’s OK with the adults ruining “the most magical night” of their kids’ lives.

We’ve seen a tearful montage of home movies — first day of school, field trips, honors — all the little victories and moments that parents and kids got to bond over. Now Mitch is appalled at his daughter’s “stripper underwear,” Lisa is empty nesting her way out of her connection to hers and Hunter can’t even compete with his ex’s cooler new husband (Hannibal Buress) in the eyes of his “little girl.”

Over the course of one harried, wild baccanale of a prom night, the adult trio chases the teen trio around Chicago, John Hughes comedy style — with full frontal nudity, “butt chugging,” sex games and general sneakiness. And that’s from the adults.

The film does a good job of rounding out the girls, too, from assertive, brassy Kayla (Geraldine Viswanathan) who isn’t the sentimental mush her dad Mitch is. No, she’s a woman who gets what she wants just like her feminist mom (Sarayu Blue). Julie (Kathryn Newton) is ready to cut Mother Lisa’s apron strings, but doesn’t want to break mom’s heart in the process. And Sam (Gideon Adlon) would love to get through the night without peer pressure sex or being humiliated by Hunter, the dad who tries too hard.

Julie is the #sexpact ring-leader, and she’s got this rose-petal covered bed, “Walgreens candle” fantasy for her “first time.”
“I saw this in a romantic comedy — ‘American Beauty.'”

“Didya watch it ALL the way through?”

The big set pieces are a vomit-off in the limo, a slapstick slap fight amongst the adults in Lisa’s SUV and assorted failed efforts by the adults to “pass” for someone who isn’t a parent or a Narc, but just another kid out for good times in a riotous teen orgy in a downtown hotel, or a beer bust at “the lake house.”

“Untuck your shirt. You look like a youth minister!”

“Pitch Perfect” writer turned first-time director Kay Cannon makes some of these big moments pay off, and delivers the sweetest, most sensitive “coming out” scene at the prom that you can imagine.

What Cannon can’t do is keep this picture from stopping cold every fifteen minutes or so, sensitive moments that kill the comic momentum and make us notice that the kid actors aren’t in the same charisma league as the grownups.

But that’s pretty much the point. We’re not leaving this “to the kids.” We’re growing older but not up. It’s “Don’t do what I did,” even though that has never worked in the history of generation gaps.

And if we’re reduced to “Blockers” because we’ve been there, done that, that doesn’t mean, in the movies at least, that we have to go gently into that “Be the adult here” night.

MPAA Rating: R for crude and sexual content, and language throughout, drug content, teen partying, and some graphic nudity

Cast: Leslie Mann, John Cena, Ike Barinholtz, Geraldine Viswanathan, Kathryn Newton, Gina Gershon, Hannibal Buress

Credits:Directed by Kay Cannon, script by Brian Kehoe, Jim Kehoe. A Universal release.

Running time: 1:42