Movie Nation

Writer-director Elijah Bynum makes his feature film debut with “Hot Summer Nights,” a melodramatic and ham-fisted mashup of beachside-summer-I-came-of-age romance and birth-of-a-weed-dealer drama.

But it stars The New DiCaprio, Oscar nominee Timothée Chalamet, and “It Follows” “It” girl Maika Monroe, so it’s worth a look, just for Next Gen acting value.

It’s a Hyaninis, Massachusetts story parked in 1991, which our very young bystander–narrator (mistake #1) relates as a seminal season — when grieving, anti-social toothpick Daniel Middleton (Chalamet) shows up to spend his summer with an elderly aunt.

Who does this kid, who lost his dad not long before, make his first beach friend? That would be Hunter (Alex Roe of “The Fifth Wave”), the drop-out turned mechanic who is also the town weed dealer and a local legend. The kid passes muster in a pinch, and he’s in with the mysterious Hunter.

“I heard he burned down an ice cream shop just for putting sprinkles on his cone,” a kid repeating his myth says.

“I heard he killed a man,” a chorus of others echoes.

Daniel becomes Hunter’s sidekick, an asthmatic who abruptly announces he wants to get into the weed business, too. Being young and smart, he makes Hunter think big. Of course that eventually gets the interest of someone tougher and further up the food chain (Emory Cohen).

But the real obstacle to this bromance in the making is the girl — the icy, confident and foul-mouthed beauty every boy “within 50 miles” covets — McKayla (Monroe). She imposes on Daniel for a ride, the way arrogant beauties learn to do at an early age, and he’s smitten.

Problem — she’s Hunter’s estranged “baby sistuh.” And “Stay away from her” is all he’s got to say about that.

Bynum weaves in a second forbidden love interest , a “bad-good girl” (Maia Mitchell) for Hunter, two guys who have to keep their new romances secret from some menacing male.

Meanwhile, this ridiculous drug trade thing is racing through a story arc mere weeks in length, with the lads taking on more and more trade, rolling in cash and somehow avoiding the attentions of the local cop who just knows that Hunter kid is “headed for Walpole” where the state prison is.

Bynum makes great use of Chalamet’s unaffected, natural manner on screen. He plays around with the whole androgynous thing which the kid showcased in “Call Me By Your Name.” The moment Daniel sees Hunter for the first time, he hears “I Don’t Want to Lose Your Love Tonight” in his head.

That’s not the way this is going, but a little tease (this was filmed before “Call Me By Your Name,” but the song might’ve been added later) never hurt anybody. It’s interesting to watch Chalamet play Daniel’s increased confidence around McKayla, thanks to his daring drug-dealing on the side. Confident, sure, but he’s still incompetent at wooing her.

Monroe is hyped as the sultry bombshell this time out, many of her scenes open with a backlit fix-the-camera-with-a-sexy/sleepy-eyed-stare to make us see Daniel’s overwhelming attraction. She’s a bad girl who tempts the rich boys, and even if Daniel can win her heart, he can’t tell her he knows her brother, or tell Hunter.

Those two are the stand-out players and the reasons to see this sometimes ludicrous (Daniel buys a Corvette with his drug money, and NOBODY — including the never-really-seen Aunt — notices?) melodrama. The threat of violence is all that disturbs the happy montage of lads loading up on loot as they grow their business, and the love story is so over-familiar as to be a genre unto itself — beach romances, “Summer Lovin,'” as they called it in “Grease.”

And aside from those two leads, the rest of the cast is a catalog of acting affectations. Check out the cool but a bit-much way the cop played by Thomas Jane is introduced — pulling over Daniel, his face hidden in classic “star entrance” fashion, kicking the ground with the toe of his shoe, running his fingers down the side of Daniel’s pre-Corvette Toyota wagon. Busy busy.

Watch Cohen’s man-with-muscle play with his huge stack of waffles at the “meeting” he drags Daniel and Hunter to by force. Fussy.

Yeah, James Dean got famous for loading scenes with tics and mannerisms, but they’re such attention-grabbers they always play as excessive in the hands of lesser acting mortals.  “That’s an actor acting,” we say as we watch each rehearsed tic trotted out.

They’re not the reason “Hot Summer Nights” fails. Their affectations are just what you notice when the story is as contrived, melodramatic and unoriginal as this one.

MPAA Rating: R for drug content and language throughout, sexual references, and some strong violence

Cast: Timothée Chalamet, Emory Cohen, Maika Monroe, Maia Mitchell, Alex Roe, Thomas Jane and William Fichtner

Credits: Written and directed by Elijah Bynum.  An A24 release.

Running time: 1:47

A hint of “The Trip to Bountiful” about this dramedy, with Blythe Danner the mother who is no longer all there, Hilary Swank and Michael Shannon as siblings deciding what to do “when that time comes” and Robert Forster as the husband Mom barely remembers.

We’ve all been there or are going to be there.

Taissa Farmiga and Josh Lucas fill out the cast of “What They Had,” which is slated for Oct. 12 release.

Will we continue to see Sam Rockwell in indie farces like this, now that he’s “Oscar winner Sam Rockwell?”

Blimey, we hope so. The diamond heist comedy “Blue Iguana” earns limited release Aug. 24. Couple of laughs in the trailer, so fingers crossed.

Here’s a “feel good” film that puts us through our share of feeling bad before it delivers its triumph.

“93Queen” is the call sign of a Brooklyn EMT service, an American and perhaps Jewish first. They’re an all-female, all-volunteer team of first-responders drawn from and catering to the largest Orthodox Jewish community in America. The movie is about the baby-steps march towards progress and equal rights that this service represents.

In a rigid, patriarchal subculture where the divide between the sexes is Torah law, a lone progressive, Rachel “Ruchie” Freier, realized that with Orthodox women like herself giving birth at home, having medical emergencies and recoiling at the realization that only men were coming to their aid, this was a need that needed a New York solution.

“No woman should ever be too embarrassed to call for help,” she says in the film.

Great. Make it so. Is this a “win win” situation, or what?

Try “Or what.” Because even though, as one of her EMT recruits says, with an Orthodox woman, “no one’s ever seen her named legs but her husband,” where heads are shaved and wigs are worn to further insulate these women from the gaze of men, the menfolk don’t like it when women, “whose sole purpose is motherhood,” show signs of independence.

Freier and her first recruits endure community shunning, online shaming and endless name-calling. “Radical feminists,” the guys in the beards, white shirts and black suits and hats kvetch. Because their women are kvelling. 

“The worst thing to tell me is that I can’t do something,” Freier declares. She’s a lawyer. She dreams of becoming a judge. She dresses fashionably, drives and hustles like the stereotypical New Yorker. If the famous Orthodox all-male Hatzalah volunteer ambulance service won’t have them, if rabbis won’t endorse the idea, if this many men are getting their Orthodox undies in a twist, they must be onto something.

Ezras Nashim (“Helping Women”) was born.

“If you can’t join’em, beat’em,” Freier says.

“93Queen” is about that birth, the recruitment and training, the endless blowback and nasty infighting that accompanied its arrival in Brooklyn’s Borough Park.

“You are challenging the Torah and playing with fire,” Freier is told, one of the nicer threatening emails she received. People go after her reputation, hammer and tong.

Selected “Mother of the Year” at the Orthodox school she attended? We’ll see about that.

Women who join have daughters in schools and start to look up to their moms as different sorts of role models? Call her in for a “meeting.”

An African-American male EMT consoles them, other Orthodoz women secretly email “You go girls,” or its equivalent. But it’s a steep hill to climb and that may make the outsider viewing “93 Queen” ask, “What millennium is this?”

Poor Ruchie has to distance herself from the “feminist” label — “I also pray, bake challah.” Every Tamir, Dov and Hillel on the street feels male privileged enough to scold the women as they hand out fliers.

You can be forgiven for shaking your head and thinking that for a country that frets endlessly over “Sharia Law” being practiced here, we’re awfully blind to the retrograde enclaves of ultra-conservative, law-unto-themselves patriarchies already tolerated in America — in Brooklyn, rural Pennsylvania, Utah.

Anybody who doesn’t live in or around this world day-to-day — I remember stumbling into this neighborhood once and thinking, “Boy, was THAT the wrong subway stop.  I got off in the Middle Ages!” — will be fascinated by director Paula Eiselt’s sympathetic weaving of rituals into her account of the slow-to-change “bubble” that this community dwells in.

In presenting this story as an overcome-all-obstacles march towards progress, Eiselt skirts the depth of the rift Ezras Nashim has created in Borough Park. Google the name, and right below their website are community forums and Jewish newspaper accounts of mishaps and growing pains that the movie avoids.

Genuine competence issues among the EMTs, or just haters hating in English (and Hebrew)?

Then we see teen girls gathered at the dinner table, chattering about becoming doctors, and the real point is hammered home. It’s hard to stay myopic after those first pioneers have peeled the blinders off.

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast: Rachel “Ruchie” Freier, Yitty Mandel, Tvzi Dovid Freier

Credits:Directed by Paula Eiselt. An Abramaroma release.

Running time: 1:25

There have been better documentaries this year, but none of them are the roller-coaster ride that “Three Identical Strangers” turns out to be.

What begins as a giddy wave of New York disco era nostalgia, one of the delightful “feel good” stories of the day, roils into darkness, a tale so wild it seems borrowed from “The Boys from Brazil.”

In the first act, we’re riveted by old fashioned, kitchen-table or bar stool storytelling. Seasoned 50somethings, talking to the camera, relate their well-worn version of how they met.

“So I was 19, right? First day of college…”

That would be Sullivan County Community College, New York. That’s where these two burly young fellows, Eddy Galland and David Shafran, find themselves confused for somebody else.

“I’m meeting ALL these people who keep sayin’ I’m YOU.”

It’s “Were you adopted? “Yeah.” “Born July 12, 1961?” “Yeah.” “Long Island Jewish Hospital?” “Yeah!”

They meet and it’s love at first sight, that long-lost-sibling love that, in the case of identical twins, pegs the narcissism meter. And they and their families barely have time to register this shock when their tale reaches the local newspapers.

That’s where David Kellman’s friends and family see them. It’s the smiles, the hair and especially the big “baseball mitt” hands that tip everybody off.

“I’m looking at TWO of me. I think I may be the THIRD!”

Phone calls, and next thing you know, the two new siblings/best friends are racing down Long Island in the middle of the night, “So we get there…we get out of the car…”

“His eyes are my eyes, and my eyes are HIS eyes,” they marvel. A relative remembers that joyous meetup as “They needed no introductions…They were were like three puppies wrestling on the floor” in an instant.

They smiled the same, smoked the same cigarettes, has the same favorite color. It was uncanny.

“Three Identical Strangers” gallops through the media circus that then surrounded the trio — “The Today Show,” “Donahue,” a cameo in Madonna’s break-out movie, “Desperately Seeking Susan,” tabloid coverage of their Studio 54 club hopping exploits.

They move in together and the city can’t seem to get enough of them, but Eddy was struck with foreboding. “I don’t know if this’ll turn out to be great, or terrible.” He had a hunch.

Because after they married, after they opened a restaurant/pub together, future Pulitzer Prize winning New Yorker journalist Lawrence Wright (“The Looming Tower,” “Going Clear”) was poking around, looking at siblings separated at birth, and stumbled into a vast, covered-up behavioral study.

Jewish twins and the triplets all over greater New York, born in a Jewish hospital, adopted out by a prestigious New York Jewish adoption agency to families of differing socio-economic and temperamental circumstances, all presided over by a Jewish-Austrian Freudian (who fled the Holocaust) needing human guinea pigs in his search for settling the “nature vs. nurture” debate for once and all, or discovering the power of positive parenting…something.

You don’t have to hear Dr. Peter Neubauer’s Austrian-accented obfuscations over the phone, or a Swiss-accented assistant prevaricating, “I was peripheral” to this work to have diabolical Josef Mengele/Nazi concentration camp “experiment” chills. As did the triplets.

And when their outraged families seek legal recourse, Jewish law firms back away from them and the whole thing feels like an-Anti-Semite’s darkest fantasy about a clannish, insular community keeping its dirty secrets.

If British director Tim Wardle wants to move on from documentaries, the way “Strangers” is shot, edited and paced suggests any big screen thriller project would be well served by putting him behind the camera. In a movie that’s a combination of one or two people in on camera interviews, archival footage and shadowy recreations, Wardle lets extreme close-ups raise suspense and pop songs of the era, over home movies and TV appearances, to generate nostalgia and pathos.

Billy Joel’s “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant” could bring you to tears.

I found the “feel good” opening to the film kind of “meh” and too much “a New York story” to do much for me. Hyped into a “phenomenon,” cute for a news cycle or two.

But as the mystery deepens, scientific curiosity takes over and provoked in me, as it could with you, ethical debates about what could be some of the most fascinating data about the “biology is destiny” theory of human development.

Will any of us, even the triplets (who got access to some of it) ever see it?

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for some mature thematic material

Cast: Eddy Galland, Robert Shafran, David Kellman

Credits:Directed by Tim Wardle. A Neon/CNN Films release.

Running time: 1:36

Someday, when Tom Cruise is using a walker or in a wheelchair thanks to the running, leaping motorcycle-crashing stunts he’s hurled himself into in these “Mission: Impossible” movies, you’re going to regret not giving the man his props when he was laying it all out there for your movie-going thrills.

Someday, just not today. Because “Mission: Impossible — Fallout” is, right now, everything a summer action pic should be — a delirious procession of stunning stunts, epic brawls, state-of-the-art car chases and ticking clock countdowns.

Throw a bunch of top drawer actors at a plot that’s as topical as the latest meltdowns in Washington, London and a world going mad and this is what you get — high tension, higher stakes, witty banter, pathos, pulse-pounding action beats and more “How in the HELL did they do THAT?” moments than you can count. It’s a robust blast of bullet-and-bloody-fisted machismo, delivered with a healthy dose of lens flare.

Ethan Hunt (Cruise) is summoned to retrieve missing plutonium and trade it for a nemesis (Sean Harris) he captured, but who still haunts his dreams. He and his team (Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg) dash from Paris to London and BFE Pakistan, keeping a testy CIA chief (Angela Bassett) at bay, their Impossible Mission Force boss (Alec Baldwin) on tenterhooks, an arms dealer named White Widow (Vanessa Kirby) on the line and assorted Apostles — anarchists bent on global destruction — on their heels.

Or so one would hope.

There’s a CIA sidekick (Henry Cavill) who might be a great ally or a deadly foe, an MI6 black widow (Rebecca Ferguson) who has “history” with Hunt, and some of the tastiest action film one-liners and exchanges you will ever hear.

Sure, we get lots of “I’m WORKing on it,” and “Just so I’ve got this clear,” “We’re going to have to go it alone” and “I need you to TRUST me.”

But how many movies give us a terrorist manifesto?

“There can never be peace without great suffering. The greater the suffering, the greater the peace.”

A favorite exchange — “HOPE is not a strategy.”

“You must be new here.”

Hitchcock always said “Great villains make great thrillers,” and writer-director Christopher McQuarrie of the last “Impossible” mission movie and “Jack Reacher,” found a lulu in Sean Harris. A ginger-haired staple of British films like “’71,” “24 Hour Party People” and “Harry Brown,” he makes a brooding monster of your nightmares.

His Solomon Lane is a messianic fanatic, sparing with his words, hissing his apocalyptic threats and pronouncements. Hunt isn’t the only one whose dreams he’ll haunt.

And Cavill, two-fisted, droll and revealing a sadistic side that his “Man of Steel” never shows, remakes his career with this turn. He’s one bad mutha-hushyourmouth.

I never cease to be amazed by how consistently amazing these movies and their durable star are. Directors change, storylines bend, and yet the dazzle shows up again, every couple of years. James Bond doesn’t have an M:I batting average.

McQuarrie re-connects the films with the action-packed, gadget-riddled 1960s-and-70s TV series this all came from, “Your mission, should you choose to accept it,” the works.

Hell’s bells, we were going to Paris this fall, but we may have to change our plans. Tom Cruise and McQuarrie have gone and torn the place apart.

And seriously, who could have guessed that Lalo Schifrin’s jazzy, Latin-flavored heart-thumping theme song would endure and delight in a movie 45 years after the TV show was canceled?

“Fallout” earns its pathos from the female leads and its stakes from the sense of mortality Cruise & Co. give it. They –he — let us know they can’t keep doing this forever.

But before he gets too expensive to ensure and too crippled to late-middle-age sprint as if his life — and the world — depends on him, you’d better show some love to Cruise.

The man puts on an action hero clinic every time he dons Ethan Hunt’s shades of black, and you can only hope everybody else who takes a shot at the genre is taking notes.

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for violence and intense sequences of action, and for brief strong language

Cast: Tom Cruise, Angela Bassett, Henry Cavill, Rebecca Ferguson, Alec Baldwin, Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Sean Harris, Michelle Williams

Credits:Written and directed by Simon McQuarrie. A Paramount release.

Running time: 2:27

Scotty Bowers has lived quite the life. He grew up in rural (later Chicago) Illinois, served in the Marine Corps during the deadliest time in its history — fighting from Guadalcanal across the Pacific.

He just turned 95, and until very recently, he was clambering onto his roof, climbing ladders to trim trees and driving around, hauling his vast collection of memorabilia between his various houses and storage facilities that he rents in Los Angeles.

How’d he make his living? Well, right after the war, for over a decade, he pumped gas at the most popular service station in Hollywood, a Richfield at 5777 Hollywood Blvd. And he kept a corps of his fellow Marine vets (and a woman, here and there) employed “turning tricks” for the rich and Hollywood famous.

He kept this up for decades, recruiting (and participating) in orgies, “providing a service, being helpful” to everyone from Tracy and Hepburn to Edward and Mrs. Simpson. Cary Grant and Randolph Scott, Cole Porter and the Oliviers, Scotty facilitated sexual encounters for many of them in an era where homosexuality was illegal and the LAPD Vice Squad had a lot of time on its headline-hunting hands.

Bowers even wrote a book about it, “Full Service,” naming names and good-naturedly recounting the predilections of icons of The Golden Age of Hollywood.

“You couldn’t believe how busy I was,” he jokes in “Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood,” the new documentary about his life and loves, that book and his place within Hollywood Babylon.

And many won’t — “believe” it, that is. “Maybe this is all a big secret to some square who lives in Illinois,” he cracks to filmmaker Matt Tyrnauer at one point. “It is hard to believe, unless you were there.”

As gay figures from novelist Gore Vidal to celebrated photographer Cecil Beaton vouched for his bonafides, as his surviving “tricks” show off autographed books and notes from the likes of Charles Laughton, as old index cards with the names and numbers of some of the (not famous) “regulars,” roll out, Scotty Bowers seems perfectly credible.

Add to that his coarse, crude (Marine, remember?) and casual attitude about all this “forbidden” sex he was facilitating, back when careers and indeed a person’s very liberty could be taken away by same-sex scandal, and he’s a star witness for just how gay Hollywood and the world have been, all along. We “squares” just didn’t know it.

Oh, the rumors were out there in the open — Rock Hudson, Pleshette and McCambridge, Garbo and Dietrich, Grant and Scott (“Roommates can be lovers too, you know.”). Books always popped up, right after this or that major figure died and could not sue. “Pathography,” such biographies were labeled.

Now, all these years later, with the Golden Age all but completely died out, Bowers lays it all out there. And a lot of that laying out there is repeated for the film.

A favorite phrase of Scotty’s — “I never took any money” to make all these arrangements. Not buying that. But he did take money for his own sexual favors, from Bette Davis and Grant and so many others — $20 at a time, for much of his “working” life.

Another favored phrase? “Word got around.” As in, he starts at the Richfield, Walter Pidgeon picks him up on the first day, George Cukor, the director and gay impresario gets word. Next thing you know, legions of “pretty boys” are being lined up for nude Sunday swim parties as Casa de Cukor, all arranged by Scotty Bowers.

Ramon Novarro to Porter, Tom Ewell to “that drunk” Paul Lynde, with tales of orgies and drag parties (J. Edgar Hoover made “a pretty homely woman”), with still photos and grainy home orgy movies provided as proof.

Granted, nobody famous shows up in any of those. Cameras were a lot less convenient and commonplace in the Age of Illegal Homosexuality. But Scotty tells their tales, again leaving out anybody who might still be alive. Not that any are.

A PMs he celebrates the publication of his book (in 2012), does birthday events and dabbles in bar-tending (his cover-job, once he left the service station) in the film, there’s something darker beneath the adorable re-connections with former “tricks” — old, old men hugging, kissing and calling each other “baby.”

Scotty’s a hoarder, a certifiable one. And a miser.

His amorality gets to be something of a put-off. His refusal to “judge” his clients extends to himself. It’s not a life that’s involved much self-reflection. Bragging about “turning tricks” before he hit his teens, the scores of Catholic priests who paid for his company in Depression Era Chicago, his tightwad tendencies (his many houses, a couple inherited from a former lover, are wall-to-wall junk), his boasting too of his work commitment — heading off to an orgy he’s organized right after learning his 23 year-old daughter has died — that speaks to compulsions, sickness.

Second wife Lois, a lounge singer, just shrugs it off and does a la-di-dah, I don’t want to know about any of THAT…

The film’s several parties — with penis-shaped cakes delivered by semi-nude waiters, reminiscing about “Big D— Strauss” and the sexual organs of this trick or that one — are crass, at best. Commonplace in gay America, but common.

His “Nothing wrong with that, any of it” about his own underage sexual history or those gay men who like it like that starts to grate.

The fact that he was a major provider of testimonials and “research” for Alfred Kinsey makes you wonder, if not about the sexual peccadillos documented in his books (People were into then what they’re into now, by and large), at least at Kinsey’s statistics.

His contributions to “My Buddy,” a gay nude photo book about “foxhole buddies” and homosexuality in the military of World War II is both touching and challenging. That would make another movie, more controversial than this one.

But as our understanding of sexuality and its “fluid” nature among much of the population changes, “Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood” serves a larger purpose. By telling these tales now, he’s blunting the shock of the pace of changing mores and acceptance of the different.

It didn’t happen overnight. Hollywood sexcapades today are no different from what they were back then.

And Hollywood is now, as it was then, merely a reflection of what’s in the culture, not a bellwether for anything “new” and “shocking.”

You’ve been protected from “the truth” long enough, Scotty Bowers seems to say. What’s the big deal? Get used to it.

MPAA Rating: unrated, graphic sexual material, profanity

Cast: Scotty Bowers, Liz Smith, Lois Bowers, Peter Bart, Stephen Fry

Credits:Directed by Matt Tyrnauer . A Greenwich release.

Running time: 1:37

This story in the Times, based on a study by the Center for Study of Women in  Television and Film (note the error in the Times piece about the center’s name, the goobers), got a lot of people’s attention last week.

And I resisted the impulse to pop off about it to give it a little more thought. I mean, sure, the old saying I was taught in Semantics and Polling classes in college, “The terminology of the question determines the terminology of the answer,” comes into play. When a group dedicated to helping women succeed in TV and Film sets out to crunch numbers about female-directed/female starring films getting more harshly-reviewed than male ones, those numbers are going to jibe with that pre-conceived prejudice.

But as my headline notes, that stiletto cuts both ways. It is far easier, I would posit, to argue that women critics — fewer in number — are giving a pass to female-fronted/female-directed projects because of the messy fact that Hollywood still isn’t giving female filmmakers the opportunities that they’re giving male ones, that female-fronted movies from “Carol” to “Bridesmaids” to “Ocean’s 8” are still exceptional — rarer than they should be. So female critics are grading on the curve to make up for an actual shortcoming/injustice.

On the surface, at least, that’s how it looks. I’ve noticed that several times in recent years — pans, overall for “Ghostbusters,” but female critics by and large embraced it. “What’s up with that?” I scornfully said to myself.

The reality is the sample size is too small — for filmmakers and for critics — to make such generalizations. And the only way to rectify that is to go a LOT further than the Tomatometer, Ladies Championing Jobs for Ladies in TV and Film.

We need hard numbers of female filmmakers, which isn’t hard to come up with. They’re still an exotic thing in the cinema. I’ve reviewed a few female-directed films over the past month, and based on my memory of those, their success rate (a good or half-decent film, well-directed enough to note) is about the same as for male filmmakers.

Lots of middling to mediocre movies, and then there was Sydney Freeman’s cute and edgy “Deidra & Laney Rob a Train,” for Netflix. Or Claire Scanlon’s delightful rom com “Set It Up.” For, uh, Netflix. See a pattern here?

That’s two out of let’s say the last eight films directed by women I can recollect this summer.  Not a bad rate. And if you’re making an ad hominem swipe at male critics not cutting female filmmakers a break, there’s Exhibit A for my defense.

But it’s a tiny sample size, and to get at both the gender gap in reviewing and in filmmaking, you and I and San Diego State are going to need a MUCH larger sample from a much broader spectrum.

Why doesn’t San Diego State’s Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film get enrollment numbers at the nation’s film schools, for starters? Poll the top 25 (every college wants its own film school, for some reason), see what their ratio of males to females is.

I’ve judged student film competitions from several films schools in different states where I’ve worked. OVERWHELMINGLY male enrollment was my experience. Is that because the schools are cutting guys a break, or because male students are indulged (pricey tuition) more than female ones by their parents?  Or maybe it’s a testosterone-drenched profession, at least partially driven by a century of perception of the All Powerful Director/Auteur?

Directing is a very butch job.

The way Hollywood has devalued directors in recent years — disposable no-names headline even the biggest franchises — film school is no easy path to either employment or a career behind the camera. But enrollment numbers are a good place to start if you’re tracking down data to prove or disprove bias, Martha Lauzen of the Center for the Study of Women in Film and Television. You can’t do that just by counting Rotten Tomatoes scores for “Ocean’s Eight,” which plainly inspired this half-assed “take.” How Mindy Kaling of you. 

Yes, “Ghostbusters” got beaten up by male critics. And “Ocean’s Eight” didn’t get a break. But “Wonder Woman” did. And unlike the first two films, it was actually directed by a woman.  I wasn’t nuts about that one, and having watched Patty Jenkins direct “Monster” here in Orlando, I was not surprised that the Gal Gadot and FX spectacular wasn’t so much “directed” — credit Jenkins with its tone — as produced. That’s what I saw on the set of “Monster,” the soon-to-be-Oscar winning star Charlize Theron and a pushy producer or two ran that set.

Kathryn Bigelow enjoys good reviews for most of her films these days, “Detroit” included. Directors from Mira Nair to Sofia Coppola to Greta Gerwig, Lisa Cholodenko, Miranda July, Sarah Polley, Jodie Foster and on and on have made films that merited good reviews. And they got those good reviews.

I can’t remember ever panning a Nicole Holofcener film, and Nancy Meyer never gets anything other than a fair shake from me (Nora Ephron got the same courtesy) and I dare say most of the males reviewing her works treat her the same way. “Feminine” or not, it either works or it doesn’t.

Ava DuVernay made a lousy job of the probably unfilmmable “Wrinkle in Time,” and got called on it. Not all female filmmakers are created equal. Some are Friends of Oprah. Look at her credits and tell me she got entrusted with that expensive picture based on merit and accomplishments.

“Wrinkle” makes my “grade on the curve” point for me. Not every woman reviewing it praised it, but an amusingly disproportionate number did. We could shrug that off to differing sensibilities, narrative/action preferences between men and women. You know, the whole “Women are from Venus, Men are from Mars” thing.

But as the menfolk are being accused here, let’s just lay it out there. A lot of women reviewers packed their readers off to a stillborn, bloated bust of a fantasy. Is that how we build trust in our opinions, ladies? Cutting crap movies some slack because we buy into the Oprah-Ava-Reese-Mindy hype?

That’s unfair and glib of me, as unfair as the “conclusion” the “Center” (one woman, apparently) came to after a little Rotten Tomatoes/Metacritic perusing. When the data sample sizes are small enough, you can leap to any conclusion you like.

Reviewing movies and criticism in general is still something men — gay or straight, mostly white — feel compelled to pursue. Something like 3/4 of the reviewers aggregated on the movie review aggregation sites are male, and overwhelmingly white.

It’s changed a little over the decades I’ve been doing this, but only slowly and only in tiny increments.

That has something to do with background, opportunities, the desire to do something you’re passionate about overruling the need to make the most money in the shortest period of time, as well as “white privilege.” Let’s just say that in this culture, white males are anecdotally given a pass on any impulse to offer an opinion — editorially, politically, in sports and on music, TV and movies.

When I worked for newspapers, the pursuit of diversity was a necessary and yet never-ending struggle. Anybody with the gift of a decent education and the ambition to rise above his or her station would take those traits into a more lucrative field. Journalism thus is more of a calling. A few get rich, a few sell their souls to accomplish that, but most do it for the rush, the ego trip, curiosity, self-righteousness, what have you. Film reviewing is journalism, and it’s the same way.

Getting minority reporters to work in newspapers/websites, etc., spend years in small operations working up to Major Dailies, magazines in the Big Media Markets where TV and book deals lie, is a lot more of a grind than getting a business or law degree and billing your way to happiness. Prestigious journalism degrees can jump you through many of those hoops, just via college. Not all.

But why pursue a chancy/pricey  Ivy League education if low to middling pay journalism work is your goal? The cost-benefits ratio isn’t on your side.

Without that obvious upside, I never saw the thin ranks of minority writers at any paper I worked for change substantially. I didn’t see this as a shortcoming of the company (sometimes, sure) or in the education opportunities to Latin and African American students (sometimes, sure).

But the biggest reason you don’t see enough folks of color in newsrooms is obvious. Where are the Chinese-American, Japanese American, Indian-American reporters? The same place black and Latino reporters dwell — making a living somewhere with a better chance of financial success. Too smart to do it, too educated to waste that on reporting, too common-sense oriented in what their expensive education should give them in return.

By extension, that’s why you don’t see more female critics or critics of color.

To get more female critics, more women have to forgo the English, Art History, Women’s Studies or Latin degrees (analogous, I’d say) and pursue studies in something just as seemingly impractical — film and media criticism.

As the gatekeepers of reviewing, legacy media companies, shrink and shed critics and the web democratizes the platforms and possibilities of gaining an audience, there is no excuse for anybody with the passion and commitment and a computer to not start reviewing.

Get yourself into an online critics organization, maybe one dedicated to female critical voices. Get noticed. It’s easier to do if you’re a minority and regarded as a novelty in the vocation.

But saying there’s a “problem” and pointing to a culprit, when a look in the mirror is in order, is lazy. Ask yourself why more women aren’t setting out to do this, and sticking with it? And shouldn’t those women treat films as gender neutral as we expect the guys to?

For now, I say female critics are cutting female-centric films and female-directed films a break, not grading them as dispassionately as they do other movies. Prove me wrong.

I don’t think they have an opening date for this one, but with Kat Graham, Terrance Howard, Wesley Snipes, Isaiah Washington, Denzel Whitaker and T.I. in the cast, distribution for “Cut Throat City” should be a given.

John Lydon, aka Johnny Rotten, ended his Sex Pistols run with a decision to get out from under “the mockery,” and do a turnaround in his life, his music and his Public Image.

The UK is getting this one this summer. It reaches the US in mid-September.