Movie Nation

In “Death of a Nation,” Dinesh D’Souza laments the end of the “American Experiment,” brought low by racism, xenophobia, unlimited Koch Brothers money and gerrymandering, finally embracing its deplorable “Id” by putting a racist Russian puppet in the White House.

Nah. But that’s about as factual as the Punjabi Pinocchio of the Lunatic Right’s own pronouncements in “Death of a Nation,” a laugh-out-loud lie, almost from start to finish.

Seriously, if you haven’t fallen in the sticky aisles of whatever 9/10’s empty multiplex is showing this latest abortion by the Mengele of Moronic Political thought long before he equates Abraham Lincoln to Ronald Reagan, and then to Donald Trump — who pardoned him for his election fixing scheme of a few years back-–  you probably are worried that your walker won’t help you get back up.

Because before that D’Souza, a pathological, well-connected hustler whose well-financed defense against corruption charges couldn’t keep him out of prison because he was guilty as hell, and stupid about it, has argued that “The South became more Republican as racism ended.” Oh REALLY? He’s quoted a Nixon campaign adviser  who swore there was no “Southern Strategy” (Sure, we believe that, too.) that reformed the GOP as a racist xenophobic and Fundamentalist cult guaranteed to win “The Solid South” in general elections, and that the Nazis were inspired by and emboldened by the Democrats in America to start work on their Master Race.

The opening image of “Death of a Nation” is a recreation of Hitler’s last day — suicide and all. That’s right, a guy trying to distance today’s fascist, Nazi-sympathizing, treason-enabling GOP from “Nazi” and “fascist” labels sentimentalizes the Nazis, brands them as “progressives,” and then has the gall to visit the grave of Sophie Scholl, of the German White Rose resistance group to Hitler’s regime.

It’s a good thing D’Souza abandoned any belief in karma when he emigrated to America, because that’s all that keeps the real Scholl from reaching up from her grave and strangling his chinless neck.

Yeah, the “Punjabi” crack crossed the line, but hey, you make your bed with bigots, you get what you asked for.

Throughout “Death of a Nation,” which has the usual attacks on wingnut boogeymen the Clintons, “Antifa” and George Soros and the third act “patriotic” performances by D’Souza approved singers (an African American choir, ironically), the man finds himself coddling Nazis. Why is he so much more comfortable cozying up to American “alt right” swastika fan Richard Spencer, than any Democrat? Because he’s a gutless hack who flees “real” debate. He’d rather hang with those who don’t challenge his comfort zone or question his honesty/intelligence.

Not that he doesn’t interrupt Spencer when Mr. Alt Right rips into Reagan or corrects D’Souza’s hilariously dishonest insistence of “Republican vs Democrat” thru-lines, when the real connection between Andrew Jackson Democrats and Roy Moore Republicans is racism, capitalist “control” of working people, backwoods “conservatism.”

D’Souza cherry picks quotes from major academics, but as always, builds his standard array of straw-man arguments on the backs of D-list “thinkers” from the U.S. and Germany. He abandons context for quotes about FDR and others, leaves The GOP Great Depression, “Mein Kampf” loving Joe McCarthy and decades of outspoken GOP bigots, then and now, out of his narrative. Because. Well. Because.

There’s a whole half hour of Trump 2016 nostalgia to buck up the faithful. But the film’s focus might be a head-scratcher, pondering why D’Souza is talking so much about “resistance” and moral high ground in a testing time, with his sorts of people/corporations/oligarchs/fascists in charge of most state governments and all three branches of the hated Federal government.

But he can look out into his own audience, and into his savior Trump’s, and see the reckoning to come. They’re not just sending their money to Nigerian princes any more, and indictments are starting to pile up for their voted-in idols. And QAnon  theories, “emails” and “pizzagate” won’t save them.

They’re out of touch, forever blaming the wrong people and party for their ignorance, poverty and moral bankruptcy and that gloomy future facing their kids. Their icon, put in power with Russian effort and Russian money (through the bankrupt NRA) is about to be indicted.

D’Souza is prepping these folks for the fall, and for his NEXT next book, which they will buy but not be able to get through, and his next movie — which they will applaud, in their ever shrinking numbers — because who thought putting this rhymes-with-Mitt movie in over a thousand theaters was a good idea (it’s bombing)?  D’Souza’s on to the next hustle and con.

Maybe it’ll be about “straws” and “sucking away our freedom.” 

Most hilarious of all is how eagerly they’ll await, in the fury and fog of Alex Jones and Fox News, the next affirmation that they’ve been right all along — that the dentist WAS putting microphones in their fillings, fluoride WAS a Communist plot, that billionaires (Not Trump, who isn’t one.) were their FRIENDS and brown, black and yellow people and foreigners were their inferiors. Except for the one they agree with.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for strong thematic material including violence/disturbing images, some language and brief drug use

Cast: Dinesh D’Souza, Richard Spencer, Pavel Kríz, Victoria Chilap

Credits:Directed by  Dinesh D’Souza, Bruce Schooley, script by Dinesh D’Souza. A Pure Flix release.

Running time: 1:48

Sometimes, you have to re-visit the Internet Movie Database just to be sure whether Uwe Boll has made good on his latest promise/threat to retire.

Because disciples and acolytes of the Worst Director of Our Times (Sorry, Tommy Wiseau) are everywhere.

Justin Lee has three movies out this summer. “Big Legend” was his shot at a bigfoot horror picture, scenic but inept in the extreme. And with September brings the threatened release of a Western, “Any Bullet Will Do.”

He makes films in the northwest, and he even has what you could call a repertory company — actors who work on film after film as he cranks them out in Montana, Washington state and points in between.

But Lee is one of those directors with the wherewithal to get a movie made, and none of the talent to warrant anyone encouraging his efforts in this direction. Seriously, I hope he isn’t blowing through his parents’ retirement with this garbage.

You don’t want reviews to turn too personal, and there was little point stomping “Big Legend” into pulp. I mean, the guy gives the ancient King of the Bs, Lance Henriksen, work. But Lee shows signs of getting worse, film by film.

He isn’t getting the hint.

“A Reckoning” is badly-acted, colorfully costumed (freshly dry-cleaned, in the dirty dusty bloody Old West), incompetently-plotted and inanely directed, a Western fiasco of the cut-rate order in which its writer-director thinks having an Old West town elder (Henricksen) rail at “an act of violence instilled upon us...yet again” and similar assaults against the English language, is going to ring in the listener’s ears like poetry. Line after line like this grimaces through the early scenes.

The secret to Lee’s “success” must mean he makes a great pitch. “Reckoning” seems promising enough, about a human-devouring monster terrorizing 1871 coastal Washington. A woman’s husband is murdered, and the locals “heard he wasn’t all there” when he was found.

Mary, his widow (played by the facial-expression-impaired June Dietrich) declares before Breck (Henriksen) and Miss Maple and the whole community that “I aim to kill the man who took my husband from me.”

No suggestion that “this is insane,” followed by “it’s not ladylike” can stop her.

“Your heart burns with a vengeance that could fuel the fires of Hell,” says Miss Maple (veteran character actress Meg Foster). She must see something the camera doesn’t.

What follows is a static pursuit through the wild Northwest, with Mary following no recognizable trail, just occasionally running afoul of the mountain man/murderer Jebediah (Todd A. Robinson) something-or-other.

Dull shoot-outs accompany their encounters.

He’s not the cannibal Mary is looking for, and the lack of trail, evidence of victims and her own woodlands naivete make one wonder how this tinhorn is ever going to find a killer, even if he is “as big as a mountain and mean as a bear.”

When she reaches the Pacific, she lets us see her compass for the first time. Dear, it’s the Pacific. To your left is South to San Francisco, to your right is north to Seattle, Canada and Alaska. Straight ahead? Swim.

Lee lets things plod and plod along through cliff-strewn coastlines, rainforest waterfalls and dense woods. An 80 minute movie with endless longueurs, that squanders this much screen time between action sequences, is beyond trying one’s patience.

And when there is action, hey, we’ve got to have a little blood splatter on the lens. A tip — people who do that make it a short-edit, with the next image seen through a clean lens (Nowadays, lots of filmmakers do this lens-spatter digitally).

Not here. Lee spatters the lens and then makes it a longer take, blood still there as the camera pans down, after the violence has ended. Holy Uwe Boll.

Chance encounters, where strangers “know” Mary and her quest because “Word travels fast in these parts. Sometimes, faster’n the wind itself.”

And then? Hell’s bells, an “Alas, poor Yorick” after-dinner finale.

Whoever is giving this guy financing is throwing good money after bad. The actors taking role after role in his films (Kevin Makely seems to be Lee’s muse) will be deleting this from their resumes. There’s nothing they do on camera in this that would make a calling card for a next job with anybody in the business. It’s embarrassing.

So no more “Nice try,” no more “Better luck next time.” I’d watch most anything calling itself a Western, but  you’ve got to draw the line somewhere.

That’s why I’m trotting out the dread rating that I rarely use more than once or twice a year — no stars, zero, zip — blank — out of four. It isn’t a career killer (the guy has projects lined up into next year). But it should be cause to think about work-shopping scripts, working with a tougher producer or just…stopping until you figure out what the hell you’re doing.

MPAA Rating: unrated, graphic violence

Cast: June Dietrich, Kevin Makely, Todd A. Robinson, Meg Foster, Lance Henriksen

Credits: Written and directed by Justin Lee. A VegaBaby/Sony release.

Running time: 1:20

A solitary, bloodied old man, fleeing across the desert flats who suddenly stops, resigned to his fate.

A rifle shot, punched through his right eye, finishes him off.

“Happy Hunting” is a thriller built around such spare, fraught images, under-played scenes set in the trailers, beat-up SUVs and half-ruined houses of the Great Rural Emptying Out of America.

riter-directors  Joe Dietsch, Louie Gibson conjure up a savagely minimalist scenario, horror set in the grim, dry and reactionary American West of xenophobic gun nuts, half-derelict houses, a dust-caked convenience store, roadhouse and motel — a dead end decorated with only the odd burst or arterial spray.

Warren gets a call, and we learn everything we need to from half-sentences overhearing one side of a phone conversation.

“Habla Ingles? English? Yeah…I knew her…it’s been…Shit. How did she die?”

And “You sure it’s mine?”

Warren, played by Aussie actor Martin Dingle Wall, is a low-life and low-volume drug dealer, a drunk with the shakes. That doesn’t help when he’s trying to hustle a couple of rednecks.

A few bloody moments later, he’s on the run, bodies left in his wake, AR-15 rounds zipping by his head.

Where to run to, way out there in the wastelands of the West?  To the border, with only a stop at “last gas” Bedford Flats in his way.

Warren experiences a waking nightmare of horror, a not-quite-recovering alcoholic staggering towards his destiny, interrupted by this desert hole where “everything is fair game,” a town “founded by the Bedford Corporation, a hunting town.”

“Stayin’, or passin’ through?” Everybody wants to know. Even at the helpful AA meeting chances upon. “Stayin’ for the Festival?”

What’s that? Turns out, there’s a touch of “The Purge” to this late night “festival” frolic. “Remember where we came from,” the sheriff (Gary Sturm) lectures. “We are a town of hunters, and even though the great herds may be gone…”

Well, man is still “the most dangerous game.”

Gun culture, survival of the well-armed and murderous, an NRA wet dream plays out in this hellhole where these in-bred Confederate flag-wavers can’t admit why “the big game died out.” No, you shot it all. Not that the further-drying salt flats give any hope that climate change will allow wildlife to come back.

Now they’re hunting their socially undesirable neighbors, the drunk junkie stranger and anybody else no one would miss.

“It’s just once a year…brings the community together. It’s not like an everyday thing.”

And they’re keeping score and capturing it on an old school camcorder.

It’s a sadistic film of elaborate traps and clumsy ones, lapses in logic and nothing anyone should spend more than a few seconds overthinking.

And for all its righteous, satiric rage, it tends to unravel in the last act.

But Wall makes a riveting anti-hero, sort of a dark side of Luke Wilson, stumbling forth, suffering, hallucinating with feeling, fighting back and meting out rough justice.

“Most Dangerous Game” — men hunting men — has proven one of the most durable plots in the cinema. Ice-T did one, with Gary Busey.

Even Andy Griffith had a go at a version of it, a TV movie of a Robb White novel that stole O.Henry’s concept.

I can’t say this is one of the best, too grim and gory. But it does get a down and dirty job done.

MPAA Rating: unrated, graphic violence, drug abuse

Cast: Martin Dingle Wall, Kenny Wormald, Connor Williams, Ken Lally

Credits: Written and directed by Joe Dietsch, Louie Gibson. A Waterstone/Netflix release.

Running time: 1:30

Google Orlando’s Bloom’s name these past few years, and you’d get an eyeful of naked paddle boarding shots, notices of who he’s dating and a countdown clock for “how long it lasts.”

Katy Perry, Kate Bosworth, Penelope Cruz, Selena Gomez (!?) and Miranda Kerr, whom he married and divorced. Among many others.

Oh, and you’ll also see this week’s nude video of him catching a spider.

Truthfully, if you or I had $35 million left in our “LOTR/Hobbit/Pirates” money, well, isn’t that what we’d all be doing?

I watch 500+ movies a year, and I have missed most of the scanty selection of performances he’s offered outside of the online tabloids. “Haven” I rather liked, him playing a broke and dissolute version of himself in the Bahamas. The “broke” part required acting.

Then this trailer pops up, Chinese market (English language) thrills, looks like they spent some money. They re-titled it for international release. Used to be “The Shanghai Job.”

Who’d he “date” over there, one wonders?

There’s a lot to be said for a 78 minute romantic comedy.

These things aren’t complicated, despite Hollywood’s poor batting average with the genre.

Cute couple, cute banter, “how we met” bits, obstacles to their love parked at strategic points, funny BFFs or relatives, happy ending.

Jared Stern’s “Happy Anniversary” could not be simpler. It shows its cards with every new one dealt from the deck. But a winning couple, clever dialogue and funny support win the day in this tale of a third anniversary gone wrong.

Mollie, given her usual winsome wit by Noël Wells (“Mr. Roosevelt”) is the perfect match for Sam (Ben Schwartz of “Parks and Rec”). They cringe at the same things, like the couples night pretensions of Lindsay (Kate Berlant of “The Characters”) and Hao (Leonardo Nam of “The Perfect Score,” “West World”).

“Lindsay? We went to COLLEGE together.”

“Buncha people went to art school with HITLER. But eventually they moved on.”

They delight in playing chicken with the automatic parking gate as they drive their Prius home each night, the joys of Donnie their Boston Terrier and bickering that involves a lot of profanity, a little brinkmanship and make up sex that includes role playing.

But on their third anniversary as a couple, Mollie isn’t impressed with his breakfast in bed pitch, and not because he cracks “Your breath smells like catfood.”

No, her foreplay on their special day is “I’m not happy.”

That sets off an argument, a break-up just as Sam and pal Ed (Rahul Kohli, funny) are about to pitch their T-shirt design firm to retailers. A day of dorky drama, flashbacks to the night they met, their first date, miscommunications and moments of heart ensues. 

She wants “the most perfect version of imperfectness” in their relationship.

He wants less drama — “You get off on unhappiness.”

The flashbacks are adorable — meeting at a bar as he’s looking for his Internet date, his promise, after flirting, that he will be “thinking about you the whole time,” as he goes through the date, the fights over what they don’t have in common.

“You sugar coat things!”

“I’ve seen less sugar on a Krispy -Kreme!”

“This is about ‘the baby thing,’ isn’t it? You don’t think I’m baby-worthy. You’re letting a person who doesn’t even exist get in the way of our relationship!”

Wells and Schwartz click, their exchanges are sparkling fresh.

Annie Potts makes a warm impression as her distracted but supportive mom, Joe Pantoliano hits the Italian immigrant undergoing chemo and hoping to live long enough to attend Mollie’s wedding a little too hard.

“Stage-a four. Got’a PLENTY of time.”

We know where it’s going before it gets there, but a game cast act as if they don’t.  But they know there’s no heavy lifting here, and they make something that should be easy feel and especially sound easy.

Amazing how few rom-coms manage even that.

MPAA Rating: TV:MA

Cast: Noël Wells, Ben Schwartz, Rahul Kohli, Annie Potts, Joe Pantoliano

Credits:Directed by Jared Stern. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:18

It’s Sydney 1959 in this Bruce Beresford film of the Madeleine St. John novel, and the various “department store women” face differing futures, but futures constricted by the “No girl’a MOYN is goin’ t’UNIVERSITY” times, and Australia’s lingering provincial reputation in the world.

Yeah, that’s Julia Ormond slinging a French accent, with Rachael Taylor, Angourie Rice and a lot of fresh faces from the land of Kidman, Robbie, Watts, Blanchett and Mailman. 

“Ladies in Black” opens Sept. 20 Down Under, but with Sony having it and Beresford’s rep, a North American release is sure to follow.

A troubled child finds her life’s purpose, if not necessarily solace, spending the summer on a relative’s farm in “The Swan,” a disquieting coming-of-age drama from Iceland.

Icelandic filmmaker Ása Helga Hjörleifsdóttir uses images, melancholy reveries and the voice-over narration of her nine year old protagonist to turn Guðbergur Bergsson’s novel into an austere, chilly and cryptic film set in the treeless farm country of northern Iceland. 

Sól (Gríma Valsdóttir) is standoffish, stuck inside her own head, the kind of kid the other kids call “weird.” She also shoplifts and lies and that’s what prompts her parents to send her to live with her aunt and uncle up there.

“You’ll feel better about yourself,” she is assured (in Icelandic, with English subtitles). Feeding the chickens, helping with the cows and horses, taking hikes in the valley, along the streams that lead to the sea, sounds like “the cure,” right?

But there’s something brittle about this family, troubling about the dynamic at work here. The odd moment of warmth aside, these folks are all about practicality, not nurturing.

And the fact that the couple (Katla M. Þorgeirsdóttir, Ingvar Eggert Sigurðsson) park the young girl in the same bedroom as the 20something farmhand Jón will raise eyebrows, if not in Iceland, in North American theaters where this plays.

Jón (Thor Kristjansson) has been coming here for seven summers, laboring by day, writing by night. It’s his annual writer’s retreat.

Jón is friendly to Sól, even as he’s stuck babysitting and informally given the task of explaining this new world to her — not so much the farm, but human personalities and relationships.

“People are always in character,” he says. And lying, making up stories? There are worse sins. Writers are all liars, he assures her. Sól’s voice-over narration suggests she’s taking this to heart, even as we fret over the crush she’s developed on the man.

It is the abrupt return of prodigal daughter Ásta that upsets this uneasy idyll. She (Þuríður Blær Jóhannsdóttir) is mercurial, beautiful, big-city-blunt and upset. She broke up with her boyfriend, fled college and isn’t happy about it.

And she has history with Jón, smarting off about his unpublished “great book,” sassing her parents at dinner about their “medieval ways,” complaining about the cooking.

One minute she’s nice to the kid, not the first one who’s shown up to spend the summer there over the years, the next she’s scaring her with the legend of the “monster” swan that lives on a remote lake in the mountains nearby.

The performances are uniformly sharp, with young Valsdóttir impressively understated when the moment calls for it, and wrenchingly overwrought when confronted by the harsh realities of farm life (animal slaughter) and human relationships. “Troubled” Sól becomes “sensitive” right before our eyes. 

Writer-director Hjörleifsdóttir labors to get across her points without words, and having Jón quote a line from an Andrei Tarkovsky (“The Mirror,” “Solaris”) film tells us what she’s going for.

The obvious thing is that this girl, stealing Jón’s journals, absorbing experiences that can seem like body blows, is destined to write. “We the Animals,” another new indie release, covers that ground more lyrically and more overtly.

The less obvious points every viewer can make up her or his own mind about.

There are other films about a child’s eye view of troubled lovers, feckless affairs of adults. “We the Animals,” for starters. But the one “Swan” brought to mind for me was “The Go-Between,” filmed in 1971 (a classic) and again in 2015, about a boy misused as the messenger/enabler for an illicit affair. It’s famously cryptic and inventive in its flashback and flash-forward narrative.

“The Swan” lacks the coherence of those challenging films, and one suspects that this makes complete sense only in the American-film schooled filmmaker’s head.

But it’s still a darkly poetic, beautifully scenic and in a couple of instances, haunting film that will stick with you even as you’re sorting it out.

MPAA Rating: unrated, adult situations, nudity, animal slaughter, alcohol abuse, smoking

Cast: Gríma Valsdóttir, Þuríður Blær Jóhannsdóttir, Thor Kristjansson

Credits: Written and directed by  Ása Helga Hjörleifsdóttir, based on a Guðbergur Bergsson novel. A Synergetic release.

Running time: 1:31

James Gunn spends years telling seriously tasteless but some would say “revealing” “jokes” online, on a blog (since deleted) and on Twitter.

A conservative activist decides he doesn’t like the anti-Trump politics of the director of the “Guardians of the Galaxy” movies, tracks this stuff down, and has his followers email-bomb Disney with the news. Gunn is fired by Disney/Marvel.

But if there’s one thing we’ve learned by every college sports scandal, the “fans” are perfectly willing to forgive, forget and move on. Because their short term craving for a their “fix” trumps any sense of principle their parents failed to teach them.

They want what they want. So we (Disney) gets petitions. 

More petitions. And stories about petitions. 

We’re seeing the cast of the very lucrative “Guardians” films rally to Gunn’s side. 

And what do the vast majority of these stories, about petitions, about the cast, even the original ones on the scandal, leave out? The actual “offensive” tweets.

All these people arguing for Gunn’s reinstatement, rallying the troops, calling the posts and tweets “ancient history.” And they are scared to death to actually re-post the tweets.

First of all, six years is NOT “ancient history.” Gunn was not some callow kid when he said this stuff. He was a 40something closing in on 50ish writer and director who cut his teeth on bad taste — TROMA Films — under his mentor, Lloyd Kaufman.

“Ancient history” is when a teen ballplayer posts homophobic or racist tweets, perhaps out of genuine bigotry, perhaps in a false sense of “permission granted” to use words that Axl Rose and other entertainers have used in public that most Americans find offensive. And they come back to bite him in adulthood.

Based on my memories of the films, pedophilia gags are not a staple of the TROMA universe, but I am sure it’s considered fair game there. So he gets the benefit of the doubt, there. Kind of.

If you read this stuff , and it wasn’t isolated — it was oft-repeated and creepy (What is James Gunn’s DEAL?) — maybe you pick up on the attempts at humor.

But you cannot miss the meanness — the actionable, vile shot at a guy with a certain amount of showbiz power takes at a pre-“Baskets” and thus relatively powerless comic Louis Anderson.

How daring of Little Jimmy Gunn. Want to make a “likes boys” joke, go after oh somebody with a name. Crack on Tom Cruise’s sexuality, the whispers about any number of far more powerful showbiz folk with a taste for “twinks” — you know who “The Usual Suspects” are, SKG.

Nah. Wouldn’t be prudent.

Here’s the Cernovich “reporting.”

And here’s another gag that didn’t land.

So enough with this “reporting” that is more of a “paint this over.” 

ENOUGH of this utter BS that “Gunn has GROWN” since, what, his 45th birthday?

It does not MATTER that a wingnut activist played “gotcha” with him over his tweets. They were first pointed out by GLAAD.  Disney knew.

Yeah, there’s a pitchfork mentality at work here and yes, people have to do a lot better at being able to take a joke. We’ve all crossed lines with this or that attempted un-PC humor.

But this dude’s go-to jokes only play in R.Kelly/Polanski-land.

Back in the day, Margaret Cho was a Disney (ABC) employee, doing a family sitcom while regaling her largely-gay following with “fisting” jokes. And demonstrations. On stage. Disney didn’t can her.

Sarah Silverman built her career on being cute as she told jokes about minority groups and the like, called for a military coup after Trump’s election. Not yet, dear. She’s still in “Wreck-It Ralph 2.”

On the other hand, they paid an actual pedophile to make “Powder,” back in the day.

And they were in business with King Creeper Harvey Weinstein for more years than they’d care to remember.

Maybe Gunn is closer to the Weinstein end of the spectrum than, oh, Sarah; so much so that the controversy-averse Disney can not tolerate it. Perhaps not.

But say what you want, it took guts to #MeToo a guy who added this much to their bottom line.

Hey, maybe Disney knows something that isn’t being reported — about pee tapes and little boys and James Gunn. See how that works, Jimbo? Maybe Louis Anderson can use that one in your Comedy Central roast.

I say let Gunn look for work and let others learn from this “teachable moment.” Cultural mores shift, the line in the sand moves. Would “The Hangover” have as many “Don’t be gay” jokes if remade today? We could all use a dose of “It’s a JOKE, move on.” But pervert poses and nods toward bigotry are timeless and have no statute of limitations.

And taking a stand while pretending the actual tweets don’t exist, that they don’t follow a creepy, offensive pattern of “thinking” that would give anybody pause, avoiding the actual language he used, as a GROWN ASS MAN, for YEARS, and refusing to repeat it, is disingenuous at best, dishonest and cowardly at worst.

Netflix has rapidly evolved into a safe space for famous actors to dabble in TV — streaming series — and take acting risks without denting either their quote or their marketable screen personas (brands).

Think Jason Bateman’s dark “Ozark,” etc.

Thus, “Maniac,” with the New Jonah Hill as an institutionalized man living a rich fantasy life that includes Oscar winners Emma Stone and Sally Field, Gabriel Byrne and Justin Theroux, directed by Cary Fukunaga (“Sin Nombre,” “Beasts of No Nation”).

I try not to invest much time in series, in general, as there are only so many hours in the day and the feature film is, to me, the perfect storytelling art form — compact, efficient — while TV, “limited series” (and interconnected never-ending film series, for that matter) drag stories out in droplets, dribs and drabs, endless cliffhangers, wider and wider “universes” that are by their very nature, repetitive. Don’t get me started.

But this looks as if it’ll be worth a peek — Sept. 21.

The bonds of familial love are strained to the breaking point, tugged in several directions, in the lyrical movie memoir, “We the Animals.”

Based on the semi-autobiographical novel, Jeremiah Zagar’s moving indie film takes us into the lives of three tightly-bound siblings, clinging to the joys of pre-teen childhood in rural Pennsylvania even as they endure the trauma of their parents’ turbulent marriage.

“Us three” is how Jonah (Evan Rosado) always refers to he and his brothers. Born just a year apart, they’re a rough and tumble crew — shirtless, roughhousing tweens romping in the woods, raiding a neighbor’s garden, sleeping on the porch, making pretend tents under the covers (“Body heat! Body heat!”), diving into the ol’ swimmin’ hole.

But Jonah is the youngest, the sensitive one. He slips out of the bed they still share and by flashlight, writes and draws in a journal he keeps stashed in the box springs.

“Sometimes, we wanted less…Less work. Less noise.”

Maybe he’s speaking for all of them, but his older siblings (Isaiah Kristian, Josiah Gabriel) are anything but quiet. Jonah’s talking about their parents.

Paps (Raúl Castillo) met Ma (Sheila Vand) when she was 14. He wasn’t. They married, stayed together, got deep into a family — but life is a struggle, even when you’ve got a house and a car.

It’s the ’80s, and that car is a clapped-out Pacer. They’re working two menial jobs, juggling child-care as they do. The boys sometimes go to Paps’ night-watchman workplace, sleeping bags in hand as the old man drinks beer and punches a clock.

There’s a lot of love in this house. Ma dotes, especially on her littlest. “Promise me you’ll stay nine forever.” Paps cuts their hair, teaches them to dance and tries to teach his youngest (and wife) how to swim the only way a macho, working poor Boriqua knows how — letting them sink.

“How else you gonna learn?”

The trauma of that sticks with Jonah, constantly flashing back to “drowning” in confusion over events in the house, the ways he’s the odd boy out in “Us three.”

Ma? She’s enraged that her oaf husband could have drowned one or both of them. The screaming match that follows ends with his admitting to the boys he had to “take her to the dentist” last night, that maybe he was “punching on her a little.”

They haven’t processed that when he abruptly leaves, as he must. Kids don’t know what to do about a mother who won’t eat, won’t get out of bed. They revert to being “the Animals” of the title.

Parents who fight and reconcile this way make kids grow up too fast, learning too many of the wrong lessons.

“You think that’s funny when men beat on your MOTHER?”

Zagar filmed this tale in the gauzy twilight of memory, the hand-held camera chasing the boys on their explorations, finding the wonder in lying on your back as street lights whisk by above the bed of the pickup truck you’re riding in. He never lets the reality of what he’s portraying break from the child’s view of it.

“Is it our fault?”

“It’s always our fault.”

The characters may begin life as tropes — “sensitive” boy turning out the way sensitive boys do, “violent Latin” father, martyred mother.

But as Zagar turns Jonah’s voice-over narration into incantatory repetitions of phrases — “Body heat, Us three,” as he has Jonah’s rough, revelatory, sexually curious and explicitly violent drawings animated to life, as the first rifts between the brothers become clear even as they learn the value of presenting a unified “team” to the outside forces pounding on them, “We the Animals” sets itself apart from other run-of-the-mill “coming of age” stories.

This is “The Florida Project” set in Pennsylvania, a memoir both brilliantly specific and depressingly universal.

MPAA Rating: R for strong sexual content, nudity, language and some underage drug and alcohol use

Cast: Evan Rosado, Raúl Castillo, Sheila Vand, Josiah Gabrial, Isaiah Kristian

Credits:Directed by Jeremiah Zagar, script by Daniel Kitrosser, Jeremiah Zagar, based on the Justin Torrés novel. A The Orchard release.

Running time: 1:33