Movie Nation

It’s going to make a metric ton of money, and everybody likes it — most everybody reviewing it, anyway.

A 100 percent approval on Rotten Tomatoes does not lie, though it hides the shades of grey in opinion about “Crazy Rich Asians,” an ultra-light, shallow but upbeat and goofy riff on that corner of the One Percent who came from China and scattered across the Pacific Rim to find their fortune.

Which is why we’ll look at the Metacritic ratings for this one. The “How MUCH do you love me?” shadings there serve a higher purpose and break down the film’s relative merits with more graphic subtlety (77 Metacritic, 100 on “fresh or rotten/thumbs up or down” Rottentomatoes).

My grade for the film, which I saw as hit or miss, with too little “craziness,” too much conspicuous consumption played for (weak) laughs, somewhat fey male leads who frankly had more chemistry with each other than with their lady friends, works out to 68 — 2.5 stars out of four. The director, Jon M.Chu, did “Step Up 3D” and “GI Joe: Retaliation” and “Jem and the Holograms.” Don’t try to sell me on him being the next Ang Lee, Paul Feig, Kevin Feige, Spike Lee or Mike Newell. He isn’t.

But look at the surnames of the other Metacritic-aggregated critics who are, with their inflated scores –100 for a few — bending the rating skyward on “Crazy Rich Asians.” “Yu, Kang, Ng, Chang.” See a pattern there? Shocking! Take away their swooning and it’s a more measured 70, 73 on the Metacritic scale.

Some weeks back, San Diego State’s Center for the Study of Women in Film and Television, in the person of employee Martha Lauzen, crunched Rotten Tomatoes ratings for “female directed/female centric” films and concluded that male movie critics are “harder” on such films than female ones, implying sexism on their/our part.

This had to have been inspired by the beating “Ocean’s 8” endured, prompting Mindy Kaling to get in a huff, as it was not unlike the smackdown of the distaff remake of “Ghostbusters.”

Lauzen wasn’t wrong with her numbers, but she blundered into a perfectly incorrect — if headline-grabbing (The New York Times reprinted the press release) — conclusion. As I argued in that last link, it’s not that male critics are necessarily under-rating such films, it’s that critics of the gender matching that of the filmmakers and/or topline stars are in this case grading these films on the curve. Female critics are identifying with whatever (of whatever quality) is up on the screen more than male critics and in the process, cutting these movies slack.

That’s human nature, and we’ve seen it in movies and criticism going back forever. African American critics may have embraced earlier and bailed out on Spike Lee, John Singleton or Tyler Perry later than white ones (not always) because of a connection with the stories they were telling and the ways they told those stories. The formulaic and slow-footed “Creed” and “Black Panther” had skewed critical perceptions because of their representation. OK movies, but 4 stars out of 4? Seriously?

“Crazy Rich Asians” promises to be a phenomenon, a “Big Fat Greek Wedding” sized hit, if not “Wonder Woman” or “Black Panther” sized. It’s Americanized and Westernized in the extreme, but defiantly, amusingly Chinese, more of a hybrid adaptation of  age-old romantic comedy tropes than a true “culture clash” comedy (Again, see “The Wedding Banquet” for that).

I would expect critics of Asian origin to embrace the representations, the broad spectrum of comic “types” the screenplay, based on Kevin Kwan’s novel, presents. If racial identity was any part of their cultural upbringing, of course they’re going to get more out of it than me or other critics not from any Asian culture. I think they’re giving the movie a bit of a break (4 stars out of 4? Seriously?). But so what? In these cases, there should be an overriding sense of “there’s nothing wrong with that” bias.

Me? Have I ever panned a picture featuring a sailboat (“All is Lost,” “Adrift”)? Panned, well, maybe, but certainly not trashed. Bias. Everybody has it. We’re all different, with different biases. Get used to it, take it into account.

So before some Center for Study of Asians in the Film and Television decides that “white critics are harder on Asian films” is a thesis they’d love to prove, see the film, take some notes. Count the times you actually laugh and maybe figure out if those laughs are of the Chinese “inside baseball” variety. There’s a bias in the reviews, a perfectly acceptable or at least understandable one in all these cases. Try not to miss the obvious or make more of it than you should.

“Crazy Rich Asians” opens Wednesday.

They’re called “Breastaurants” for a reason.

Twin Peaks, Twisted Kilt and the easily imitated Hooters — with their all-female, legs and push-up bras wait staffs and leering, almost all male clientele — are pre-#MeToo, sexist and retrograde. But the “man cave” trend in franchised sports bars isn’t going away.

Especially in places like Texas. And they’re not just surviving because of customer demand, but because there’s an ever-willing parade of nubile young ladies willing to wear the tight, bare midriff tops and whatever leg-baring bottoms the “theme” demands, for the tips and whatever else they get out of all the ogling.

“Support the Girls” looks at this world from inside the man cave, a funny, occasionally biting comedy that will make any veteran of the drudgery of chain restaurant work  wince at the flashbacks even if they recoil from the sexism.

Writer-director Andrew Bujalski (the personal trainer comedy “Results”) builds his “Waiting…”/”Coyote Ugly” mashup around Regina Hall, as the shaky but ever-supportive manager of such a pub, “Double Whammies,” in suburban Texas.

No experience, but need a job and can fill out the uniform (but not too much)? See Lisa. Child-care issues? She’ll talk another waitress into watching your kid. Drowning in debt and need a boost to start over? Let’s have a parking lot car wash fundraiser and not tell the boss.

Coping with the “drama” of her girls, the “performance” nature of the work (which allows companies to discriminate based on appearance), the racist informal policy that dictates that no more than one Black or Hispanic waitress can be on the same shift would be enough to make anybody cry in the car in the parking lot.

Lisa’s got her own problems, but often they take a back seat to her work “family,” especially over the one long day depicted in “Girls.” “Support” isn’t just a pun. She’s got to hire, via cattle call, promising prospects. Once they’ve started, she’s got to protect her girls from boorish customers and from themselves.

She has “zero tolerance” for crude remarks in what she insists is a “family place.” “If these guys wanted to go to a strip club, they know where they can find one.”

But she has to bird-dog the waitresses, who are old enough and pretty enough to have figured out what men want and how they can get big tips out of them by bending the rules, tugging at the uniform and flirting-over-the-limit.

Lisa might grimace when her best waitress, Maci (Haley Lu Richardson of “Edge of Seventeen”) trains newbies by drawling, “Notice how I open my mouth real wide when I laugh?”

She might be taken aback to discover a would-be burglar trapped in her duct work at the start of the day, and that the bum is pals with one of her cooks, who set this up. But the cook isn’t ratted out to the cops. She lets him finish his shift and is even promised a reference. “Compassion” is her middle name.

Over this long grind of a day, we follow Lisa through crises both professional (the burglar knocked their cable out) and personal. Her marriage is in trouble, her girls drive her crazy, her customers (ground-breaking gay comic Lea DeLaria plays a truck-driving “regular” who sticks up for the girls, for different reasons) piss her off and her boss, the owner, is as clueless as bosses in such movies almost always are.

James LeGros is Cubby, a micro-managing jerk of an owner who doesn’t know of or approve of a lot of what Lisa does, but that’s how these places function. Every “corporate” rule Cubby cooks up (it’s a one-off joint he’d like to franchise, like the “Man Cave” chain that’s their competition) is just something else Lisa and her girls have to work around.

“You wanna fire me? There’s paperwork to fill out and I can show you how!”

Hall (“Girls Trip”) makes an earthy anchor for Bujalski’s scruffy, misshapen movie, keeping it on track while she’s on the screen. She lets us read between Lisa’s every line to her charges. “I totally trust your judgment” means “You need to judge again.” When he loses her for a chunk of the third act, “Support the Girls” goes off the rails.

Shayna McHayle and Richardson are the stand-outs from the wait staff, LeGros is well-cast as the rather-be-fishing boor always throwing his “I’m your employer” authority around.

The milieu is rich and colorful and working-class savvy, surprising considering Bujalski’s Harvard pedigree. The movie feels lived in, greasy and real. He just needed more funny lines and help figuring out the most promising thread among the many he introduces to pursue.

A young boy being raised by a working waitress mom in a climate where any biker, soldier, cop or welder can harass mom is one long teachable moment.

“You know his mama didn’t raise him right” isn’t just a put-down of somebody Lisa has to kick out of the joint. It’s the plot-line that could have given “Support the Girls” sharper focus that might have made it consequential.

MPAA Rating: R for language including sexual references, and brief nudity

Cast: Regina Hall, Haley Lu Richardson, Shayna McHayle, Dylan Gelula, Zoe Graham, James LeGross

Credits: Written and directed by Andrew Bujalski . A Magnolia release.

Running time: 1:30

She speaks up, because it’s not her first meeting.

“I’m Ellie, and I’m an addict.” 

Pills, she says,  “took the life out of life, which is exactly what I wanted.” She chased away her husband but somehow held onto her kids. Now she’s starting over in Chicago, renting a stately Queen Anne house for them in “a sketchy neighborhood.” Maybe this time will be different. She surrenders the floor.

Christopher takes a turn, brooding, sympathetic, “Do I stand up like they do in the movies?” It’s his “first meeting.” He says.

“I’ve just torn through…so many people.”

You bet your beetle brow he has. We’ve seen the aftermath of his mayhem in an opening scene of “Family Blood,” a cheerleader stalked through a ruined house, bodies stuffed in a closet.

Her crucifix? “It doesn’t work. RUN.” But he is at every doorway as she tries to flee.

“Family Blood” is a gloomy but dull vampire tale set against the backdrop of 12 step programs. “It’s like any other addiction…manageable,” Christopher (James Ransone) reassures Ellie (Vinessa Shaw), after killing her fellow addict and enabler, and then “turning” her.

“It doesn’t get easier.” She may be a VILF, now. But Ellie knows.

That’s a promising premise, one touched on in countless vampire “romances.” Here, they actually go to meetings (not that their fellow addicts realize it). It’s just a high concept abandoned, or forgotten, in the slow clumsy thriller to follow.

“Blood” has hints of Every Kids’ Nightmare, with an addict for a parent whose even-weirder behavior doesn’t look weird enough to suspect that her AA meeting “friend” Christopher loves Halloween.

But when he knocks at the door, her son Kyle (Colin Ford) is leery. He’s seen the movies, practiced drawing demons. Should he invite him in?

“Doesn’t work” is Christopher’s favorite line. “I was just being polite.”

It begins promisingly enough, with Ellie taking it “one day at a time” and Kyle instantly acting-out in his new school. The fire alarm goes off, her teacher orders Ellie’s younger daughter ( Eloise Lushina) to evacuate.

“It’s just my stupid brother.”

A brooding rebel is catnip to Meegan (Ajiona Alexus). But the boy has bigger problems. And he thinks Mom’s drug addiction is the worst of them.

Co-writer/director Sonny Mallhi (“The Roommate”) doesn’t manage any suspense here, giving away the whole blood-sucker thing in the opening, then failing to make Ellie’s peril something she senses, or is lured into ignoring. No seduction, befriending, what have you. The vampire is just in her business and that’s that.

The pacing is, like the music, funereal.  The vampire tropes — rare meat, tempting paper cuts, “C’mere, putty cat,” etc. — blasé, tired.

The kids are here for pathos, but that doesn’t pan out either. How they ended up in the custody of a not-really-recovering addict should make them both bitter, looking to get out. No matter how fancy the house. An “unreachable” Dad is a blown opportunity.

At least B-movie horror mainstay Ransone takes a stab (thanks to the script) at being funny. The litany of “Doesn’t work” vampire preventions get a laugh.

Aside from that, all we get out of this is a lot of pretty people spattered in fake blood.

MPAA Rating: TV:MA

Cast: Vinessa Shaw, James Ransone, Colin Ford, Eloise Lushina, Ajiona Alexus

Credits: Directed by Sonny Mallhi, script by Nick Savvides, Sonny Mallhi. A Blumhouse/Netflix release.

Running time: 1:32

For me, the money shot of “Skate Kitchen” is a little girl, clinging to her mom’s hand and spinning around in awe and adoration as a gang of load, assertive and a little unruly skateboarders swerve around them on a lower Manhattan sidewalk.

They’re young women and this child of three or four has a new goal in life — to be like them, confident, athletic and brash, to own the concrete all through what used to be Hell’s Kitchen.

Crystal Moselle has followed up her critically-acclaimed, unconventionally-raised-boys documentary “The Wolfpack” with a bracing, documentary-real coming-of-age drama about girls who shred in a boy’s world, a skateboarder who finds her tribe and hangs with these kids who can shred, grind and bail when they fail with the best of them.

They just happen to be female.

Camille (Rachelle Vinberg) lives with her divorced nurse mom (Elizabeth Rodriguez), done with high school and bored out of her skull on Long Island. Her sole adventure — treks to skateboarding parks and favorite hangs where she tries to drop in to the boys’ tricks without snaking their line.

She’s good enough to have a tiny taste of Instagram fame, but she’s an outsider, something underlined when she “credit-cards” on a fall. The injury (you’ll see) is painful, scary and bloody, and her mother gives her the “No more skating, PROMISE me” speech. Camille agrees. And then goes behind her back with elaborate schemes to sneak her board out of the house while she goes to “the library.”

What mom doesn’t know is that Camille has found other female skaters, their online photos and videos luring her to Manhattan like the Siren’s song. She’ll go to “the library,” the 42nd Street New York Public Library and environs, New York’s skateboarding Mecca.

And rough and tumble as they are, these girls — a floating group of five, seven or eight — welcome her in with a “What’s your name? You really shredded that!”

Kurt (Nina Moran) is the outspoken lesbian leader of the pack, who finds them room to skate in the crowded venues — “So many penises in the way!”

Janay (Ardelia “Dede” Lovelace) the friendliest one, with the best life situation — a nice house they can hang in, an indulgent, supportive dad who feeds them all on occasion and gives them a place to crash.

Camille has grown up without a lot of friends, so the girl talk is every bit as valuable to her as the skating camaraderie. They pass the joint and talk about boys, or not being into boys, debunk tampon myths and maybe the difference between heedless, reckless boy skaters and themselves.

“You can’t think. Us girls, we think too much.”

The gender rivalry in the hot spots to skate is borderline violent. Skateboarding is just like surfboarding, Moselle suggests — tribal, primal, turf-protecting. But there’s one boy, Devon (Jaden Smith), who seems to want to keep the peace. With his metallic-red hair and big camera, he stands out.

And he’s noticed Camille and sees a compelling video and photo subject in her mad skillz.

The problem? He has “history” with the girls. Trouble’s coming.

That’s the most conventional thing in Moselle’s narrative, a budding romance, a crush.

It’s a film that sounds improvised much of the time, with Moselle’s camera tracking the skaters down the streets, into construction zones where they’re not allowed, grinding and trying to match each other, trick for trick, scaring and insulting the non-skaters or worse, ex-skaters (adult, working in a straight job, off the board) they come across.

“Hey, can you do an ‘alley’?”

“No, bro, I’m a poser.”

Vinberg is a compelling screen presence and like the others,can skate well enough to manage a trick or three in a single take. Bespectacled Camille is pretty, has a lot of hair, but is just the sort of girl you could ignore in Vinberg’s performance. The other skaters, especially those played by Moran and Lovelace, are loud, out there, making themselves noticed, even when they crash or bail.

Smith has never been less affected on the screen, guarded, making you wonder about the bad blood he’s engendered and the rough crowd he skates with and who share his crowded, dumpy apartment.

Moselle’s second film to focus on a fringe-dwelling “pack” but first to be a narrative, fictional feature, has an intimacy that the novelty of a free-range family of raised-by-themselves boys did not. What the movies share is a non-judgmental point of view, no “don’t try this at home” moments, though the viewer can certainly infer that.

She makes optimistic films with one over-riding message. Don’t worry about kids. Even if they get “credit-carded” along the way, they’ll figure it out.

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

Cast: Rachelle Vinberg, Jaden Smith, Dede Lovelace, Nina Moran, Jules Lorenzo, Kabrina Adams, Ajani Russell

Credits:Directed by Crystal Moselle, script by Jen Silverman, Aslihan Unaldi. A Magnolia release.

Running time: 1:45

Truthfully, teaming up with Emily Blunt’s not a bad call.

And you can’t tell anything from a stars wandering a tiny sliver of the set in a “teaser” trailer.

But as we’ve reached the DDJSP — The Dwayne Johnson Saturation Point — you have to wonder how novel it will feel to see him in yet another high concept kid-friendly franchise. “Jungle Cruise” also features Edgar Ramirez, Paul Giamatti and the equally omnipresent Jesse Plemons and arrives in Oct. of 2019.

Just a little spring break camping trip, that’s what teen bros Sean, Donnie and Jeremy have in mind.

Sean (Daniel Doheny) has been away at school in Germany. Donnie (Luke Spencer Roberts) “might” have been telling the whole town he was in rehab. And Jeremy, aka “Virgin Megastore” (Eduardo Franco) a fake ID and a switchblade he just found, “in case any s— goes down in the woods!”

What can go wrong?

In “The Package,” pretty much everything. Some of it, OK yeah, funny.

You’ve probably heard this, once titled “Eggplant Emoji,” is a raunchy teen comedy that’s one long penis joke. Because what happens, AFTER Jeremy’s sister (Geraldine Viswanathan) and her pal, Donnie’s ex Sarah (Sadie Calvano) crash their “bro’s only” trip, Donnie loads them up with beer and then gets drunk.

And drink teens with switchblades have accidents. A penis is lopped off. It’s amazing the stuff that can happen to a penis, in transit through the woods, toted about by short-attention-span idiots.

Rattle snake bike, dumped on the ground, dropped off a cliff, hauled in a stolen boat, cleaned by taxidermist Redneck Reginald (Mike Elkund, mohawked hilarity), all AFTER the injured party has been serenaded with “Oops, I Did it Again” all the way to the Medivac chopper.

The screw-ups have twelve hours to rescue this member. As the nurse (Mary Holland) keeps reassuring our patient, “It’s not looking good.” Give him some more “living without a penis” literature and hope the four friends can scramble down the mountain, bargain with an oversexed punk 11 year-old, etc. and make to the OR on time.

Director Jake Szymanski (“Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates”), working from a hit or mess script by Kevin Burrows and Matt Mider, keeps the film on its feet and moving — for the most part, a must for comedy. 

Need to signal a Medivac chopper in the dark? There’s a funny way to shoot and cut the desperate act of tossing a propane cylinder into the campfire (It’s going to go BOOM.) and Szymanski knows how to do it. He maintains the cliffhanger suspense with ease.

More than a couple of the penis mishaps are laugh-out-loud funny (wait for “Redneck Reginald and his psychotic girlfriend played by Sugar Lyn Beard). The foul-mouthed kid (Chance Hurstfield) is pin-your-ears back hilarious.

The young cast is uneven but game, with Doheny amusingly hapless, Viswanathan plucky, Calvano as rude as any jerk teen boy as and Spencer, a redhead with an attempted-mustache, a sort of Next Gen Clark Duke — arrogant and clueless.

Oh, and it’s not giving too much away to reveal the victim. It’s Jeremy.

“If this doesn’t work out, I’m gonna be your sister, Becky.”

“You’ve already got the hair for it.”

“The Package” is funnier than any one joke/”dick” joke comedy has any right to be.

MPAA Rating: TV:MA

Cast: Daniel Doheny, Geraldine Viswanathan, Sadie Calvano, Eduardo Franco, Luke Spencer Roberts, Sugar Lynn Beard, Blake Anderson

Credits:Directed by Jake Szymanski, script by  Kevin Burrows, Matt Mider. A Red Hour/Netflix  release.

Running time: 1:34

When the actor Thomas Hulce was preparing to play the film role that defined him, “Amadeus,” he read about Mozart, but he truly studied the tennis star of the day, John McEnroe. Who better to model a precocious brat of a composer on than the player the world nicknamed “SuperBrat?”

“I’m a vulgar man,” Hulce’s Mozart admits in the film, “I assure you my music is not.”

The McEnroe analogy is almost too obvious.

When filmmaker Julien Faraut was plumbing the archives of French sport for a documentary about Gil de Kermadec, the government cinematographer charged with capturing close-up footage of every year’s French Open Tennis Championships in the ’70s and ’80s, he found reels of every great players of the era — Borg, Vilas, Connors and Lendl. And he found reel upon reel of John McEnroe.

Kermadec was putting together instructional films out of this footage, and was drawn to the fiery American with the most complete game ever seen, an artist and “perfectionist” who railed at those he perceived as less perfect (line judges, chair umpires), and at the courtside distractions. Chief among those distractions? Kermadec’s admittedly noisy Arriflex high speed (for slow-motion) camera and the filmmaker himself, sitting court side with a huge microphone, holding up “slate” cards behind McEnroe indicating date, reel, etc.

Faraut took that footage, filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard’s declaration that “Cinema lies, sport doesn’t” and the theories of French film critic Serge Daney — that tennis is inherently cinematic, with drama and players who, like filmmakers, control time — and created a mesmerizing, brilliant film about the movement, motivation and mentality of McEnroe at his peak.

“John McEnroe: In the Realm of Perfection” is quite simply the greatest tennis film ever made and one of the finest documentaries to honor any sport.

Actor Mathieu Amalric (“The Diving Bell and the Butterfly”) narrates this exploration of one player’s game, letting us see up close and in slow motion “what the human eye cannot.” With Kermadec’s rare, unseen footage, we catch a perfectionist in his moment, a player who thrived with an “unpredictable” game that was “never about violence, but variety.” And we come to understand what so transfixed that cinematographer long ago, and something of the McEnroe mystique that lingers over the game even today.

A cinema camera, Faraut argues, creates a “form of truth” about sport, and in Kermadec isolating his camera, focusing in 3/4 view solely on McEnroe throughout a match, we see just “what is needed to win a point in a tennis match” — the speed, agility, snap-judgments, hand-eye coordination, sprints and slides, gasping stamina and mental acuity involved.

We get all that just from watching McEnroe, up close, candid, in his element and in his best year — at the 1984 French Open finals at Roland Garros Stadium.

Faraut plays around with documentary form in what is, in essence, a “found footage” film conjured out of another’s work. He uses vintage tennis instructional movies, live action and animated, an archived TV essay on McEnroe by tennis journalist Bud Collins, that clip from “Amadeus” and tight, fascinating dissections of McEnroe’s play and his endless arguments with officials and swipes at cameramen (including Kermadec himself).

The arguments are a revelation. McEnroe used them to “control time” in his matches, a piece of gamesmanship that still seems grossly unsportsmanlike and unfair, all these decades later.

But his gripes — the sometimes blown calls, the damned noisy cameras in the pristine mid-point silence at Roland Garros, and the disconcerting Frenchman with the huge boom mike sitting behind him? The brat had a point.

“Perhaps I’m 20 times better at seeing, 20 times better at hearing than you ever WILL be,” he berates one chair umpire.

You can write it off to nostalgia for the game when “the rackets were of wood and the men of iron,” but Kermadec’s footage underlines that point as well. Today’s game might have no room for a brittle McEnroe, who hated to practice and used doubles as his match-prep, who never cooperated posing for photos and could not always bend his pursuit of perfection to conditions on the court. Tennis today has no head case to match McEnroe, nobody with as perfect a drop shot or cunningly-disguised surprise lob, either. It’s all about big rackets and baseline power now.

Faraut has made a great film about a sporting icon,  but one that also serves his original purpose, paying tribute to a cinematographer who “studied tennis the way other filmmakers study Emperor penguins in the Antarctic.” Which is to say, McEnroe isn’t the only one “In the Realm of Perfection” here. 

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast: John McEnroe, Gil de Kermadec, narrated by Mathieu Amalric

Credits:Directed by Julien Faraut, . An Oscilloscope Labs release.

Running time: 1:35

The hype — a “Sharknado/Shark Week” marketing campaign and funnier-than-the-movie trailer led to a big Thursday and very big Friday for “The Meg.” 

Warner Brothers had tamped down expectations, and this China-centric, Chinese financed late summer groaner should have made its money overseas. As indeed it is.

But it’s making bank in North America as well, $40 million, Deadline.com is now projecting. That’s not quite double opening weekend guesses about its earnings.

And in China? $16 million on day one. 

Jason Statham, have a cigar!

“Mission: Impossible — Fallout” is in second, still expected to clear $150 by Sunday night ($19 million for the weekend), “Christopher Robin” is falling off 61% to $12.

“Slender Man” is now looking like a $10 million-sized “hit,” low for a horror opening, but considering it’s not a franchise, not bad.

That’s right around what “BlackKklansman” is earning on half as many screens.

An occupied British island, plucky locals “resisting” the Nazis with a fake “book club,” hiding livestock and a recipe for using the one vegetable they were allowed in creative, whimsical ways  — “The Guernsey Literary & Potato Peel Society” has “Whisky Galore!” written all over it.

But that’s not the movie Mike Newell (“Four Weddings and a Funeral,” “Enchanted April”) got out of this British novel. It’s not his fault the tale turns, unexpectedly, towards “The Sorrow and the Pity” and winds up in melodrama-land.

Not totally his fault, in any event. A two hour movie wrung out of a 100 minute novel? Yeah, that’s on Mr. “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire” (one of the better Potters, I thought).

“The Guernsey Literary & Potato Peel Pie Society” was born in desperation, at the spur of the moment. One of the British “Channel Islands,” Guernsey was invaded by the Germans right after France fell. It opens with staggering locals facing Nazi occupiers in the dark of night. No drunken declaration of “This is OUR island, not theirs,” can save them after curfew. But the whopper, “We have a book club,” does. “The Guernsey Literary & Potato Peel Pie Society” is born.

It’s a story the comic adventure novelist Juliet Ashton (Lily James of “Downton You-Know-What”) hears after the war, in a fan letter of sorts.

She and her publisher (Matthew Goode, perfect) are pondering the cash and notoriety her “Izzy Bickerstaff” books give her. Critical acclaim, gravitas and intellectual satisfaction? Not so much.

The war has left her dissatisfied and a little shell-shocked and shaky. Free-spending GIs are still in town, the nightclubs are swinging again — the ones not still in the ruins of the Blitz. “Don’t Waste Bread: Others Need It” is still stamped on every letter.

Maybe the guilt kicks in with that fan letter from a quirky book club, somebody who clung to an early book she wrote during long years of German occupation, when the mail, decent food and contact with the outside world was cut off.

The letter, from a farmer named Dawsey Adams (Michael Huisman), read in voice-over narration, is nostalgic (this is 1946), mysterious and just a little romantic. Juliet is intrigued. She must know the inspirations for this “club” of readers on a German-occupied island where life was put on hold for five years.

“Why did a roast pig have to be kept a secret? How could a pig cause you to form a literary society? And most important of all, ‘What is a potato peel pie?”

Juliet had a rather easy war of it, all things considered, even though everybody suffered loss. And now? She’s got a handsome American diplomat beau (Glen Powell) and the celebratory posh life is all around her. Guilty conscience?

Dawsey writes back, “The Germans took all our animals away. It was against the law to keep even one.” They were ordered to simply grow potatoes instead. “A proper meal was only had in memory, like the post, which they had suspended, the radio, which they had taken,  and the telegraph cables which they had cut.”

The pie? It was invented by the postmaster (Tom Courtenay) as a way of making something of the one thing the Huns let them keep — potato peels.

He writes of their “club” and Juliet takes the bait. She must venture to 1946 Guernsey, forsake her American beau and find this flinty Mrs. Maugery (testy-grim Penelope Wilton, another “Downton” alumna), this Isla (Katherine Parkinson), who distilled homemade gin.

On picturesque Guernsey, isle of rocky cliffs, seaside forests, small farms, cozy cottages, bicycles and horse-drawn carts, she sees a cute story for the London Times. But the book “society?” They’re adorable on first meeting. And less cooperative on the second.

It’s not all nostalgia, grins and giggles. The war is still a recent horror to these quaint locals. Rifts, feuds and bitterness, with memories of evacuated children, missing locals “transported” off by the Germans and hardship stick with them.

Any film fan knows where this is going, but the source novel takes pains to trip up expectations as Juliet digs into the “real story,” finds the “real” objections to her telling it and gets sidetracked from the future that seemed to lay itself before her as she embarked on this journey.

James is a winsome presence, with able support from Huisman, Powell, Goode, Courtenay, Parkinson and Wilton.

But the story veers into pure melodrama, a tale of missing persons, grudges, babies whose real fathers we aren’t sure about and a quite young novelist trying to “investigate” and find the true story — from the club members, or from her unsentimental on-island landlady (Bronagh Gallagher of “The Commitments”).

As we know how this is going to pan out, it’s a puzzlement how Newell wrings 30 unnecessary minutes out of the journey. Guernsey is a great setting, James a properly plucky English heroine and her potential suitors nicely contrasted.

The most intriguing thing here is the “collaborationist” angle, something usually only seen in stories of Occupied France.

But that’s not enough to make “The Guernsey Literary & Potato Peel Pie Society” warrant its long title, its drawn-out ending or patience-testing, flaccid running time.

MPAA Rating: TV-14

Cast: Lily James, Glen Powell, Matthew Goode, Jessica Brown Findlay, Tom Courtenay, Penelope Wilton

Credits:Directed by Mike Newell, script by Don Roos, Kevin Hood and Thomas Bezucha, based on the novel by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows. A Studio Canal/Netflix release.

Running time: 2:04

Hogwarts it ain’t. Kind of a giddy trailer, eh wot?