Movie Nation

The dull repetition of “Jurassic Park” enjoys yet another dino deja vu outing with “Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom.”

Sure, give them points for shoehorning Jeff Goldblum, the quirky, cautionary Dr. Malcolm, into a couple of scenes warning a clueless Congress about the consequences of letting once-extinct dinosaurs live on, despite the repeated failures of the “Jurassic Park” business model.

That’s just to set up the next dinosaur dinner buffet, which is all any of these movies amount to. Dinosaurs live! Humans congratulate each other for resurrecting them. Dinosaurs get hungry. Humans dine out on the folly of man.

The failed theme park reboot of “Jurassic Park” has left the Isla Nublar facility a ruin still filled with living, fighting and breeding dinosaurs. And now the island’s volcano is erupting. Bryce Dallas Howard‘s park publicist has turned animal rights activist, running the Dinosaurs Protection Group. They’ve just gotten the bad news — Congress won’t rescue the surviving dinosaurs — when the mysterious partner of the late founder of the park (James Cromwell) throws out a lifeline — another island refuge she can move them to.

The billionaire’s foundation chief  (Rafe Spall) says there’s just one catch. OK, two. She has to do this on the down low. And she has to drag along her ex (Chris Pratt), the expert who raised and tamed the last velociraptor still alive there. It takes drinking and begging to get Owen back on her team.

“If I don’t make it back,” he tells her, tenderly, “remember, you’re the one who made me come.”

With punk veterinarian Zia (Danielle Pineda) and girly-voiced shrieking tech nerd stereotype Franklin (Justice Smith), they’ll help the “great white hunter” (Ted Levine) and his rough customers hunting crew track down and capture the dinosaurs before the volcano swallows the island, the ruined park and the last vestiges of the Jimmy Buffett’s Margaritaville there.

You’ve read that plot description, so you pretty much know what’s going to come. Michael Crichton’s long dead and gone, so Universal is flushing good money after bad on writers Derek Connolly and Colin Treverrow, who shamelessly collect checks for cutting and pasting action beats, situations and even storyboards from all the earlier films into a file and insisting it’s an “original screenplay.”

Like hell.

A novel underwater opening is about all they contribute. It’s easy for any viewer to guess, just by framing and camera placement, which of “Jurassic Park’s Greatest Bites” is coming next, from which side of the frame, from which dinosaur, and with which dramatic dinosaur pose at its climax.

Again and again I found myself stifling a “Didn’t see THAT coming,” which I so wanted to shout out loud.

Pratt’s act is wearing thin, which is saying more than his ability to do his own stunts. All these cut-aways as he hangs from this or clambers over that. The editing doesn’t hide it,  man. Sit-ups. Personal trainers.

But Howard does a dandy job of “selling” the frights here. Together with the latest billionaire offspring to be imperiled by the park (Isabella Sermon), Howard convinces us that whatever non profit her character is running, these toothy monsters sniffing around for redheaded flesh freak her the hell out. I appreciate a good, realistic reaction to horrific beyond belief. Still, when Ms. Howard’s the best thing in the picture, what’s that tell you?

The direction is pedestrian, with only a couple of scenes having any novelty to their set-up — a race against a pyroclastic (eruption) flow, a desperate trapped-underwater moment. My crack about “storyboards” earlier falls on J.A. Bayona, a fine director (“The Orphanage,” “The Impossible”) who just took a paycheck and cribbed set-ups and pay-offs from the earlier films for his dino-bites here.

The villains are generic oligarchs and those who serve the oligarch market (Toby Jones with dentures), standard issue for Trump era thrillers. The cat and mouse games with the stalking raptors have merely changed locales, from a lab to a mansion out of the Harry Potter movies.

I was one of the few naysayers when the franchise was rebooted with “Jurassic World,” yet even with the bar set lower for expectations on this one, I found it “Transformers” boring, a summer movie that however much it earns, fails to justify its existence.

At least there’s Goldblum’s Dr. Malcolm there to speak for those of us who think these movies smell to high heavens.

“When…will we learn? When?”

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for intense sequences of science-fiction violence and peril

Cast: Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard, Justice Smith, James Cromwell, Daniella Pineda, Rafe Spall, Ted Levine, BD Wong, Toby Jones and Jeff Goldblum

Credits:Directed by, script by . A Universal  release.

Running time: 2:08

Eugene Jarecki’s “The King” is a moving masterpiece of music, pop culture montage and Big American Metaphor.

Yeah, it’s about Elvis and race and rock’n roll and America at the Trump Moment.

And it’s packed with interviews, from Elvis friends and Elvis fans to Elvis experts, throwing in a couple of haters — just one, really — for “balance.” Layers of TV and radio news coverage of Elvis and the world we live in today weave in and out of images of the Elvis Era and Beyond, although one of the most pointed arguments presented here is that we’re still in the Elvis Era, 30 years after his death. Performances of Elvis influences and Elvis himself and those who came after him are folded in.

That turns the movie into something the best written biographies of Elvis — both Greil Marcus and Peter Guralnick are among those interviewed — accomplish. It “rescues” him from his legacy, his more backward fans, his impersonators and the “cultural appropriation police.”

Jarecki’s gimmick here was acquiring the use of an Elvis car. No, it’s not one of his legion of Cadillacs, “which would have been poetic,” TV writer David Simon (“The Wire,” “Treme”) complains.

John Hiatt (“The Thing Called Love”), another interview subject, the singer-songwriter of a song about Presley’s “pretty pretty Cadillacs with Tennessee plates,” gets in the back of Presley’s 1963 Rolls Royce to be interviewed and perform a song and breaks down in tears.

Here it is, “the trap” that all that fame, all that money, the times he came up in and the “follow the money” path Col. Parker always insisted that he take, Hiatt suggests. So yes, even the wrong car is the perfect metaphor for the Elvis story arc.

And as we hear newscasters, opinionators and others lament, “What is WRONG with America?” in a 2016 election cycle blur on the soundtrack, the rapper Immortal Technique slides into the backseat, about to perform one of his angry, protest-tinged songs and drops this on us.

America is “Elvis about to O.D.,” he says, a nod to Trump and America’s decline. All that’s left now is dying on the toilet before our time.

Jarecki (“Why We Fight,” “Reagan”) is going for a more hopeful film than that, but it’s hard to shake the feeling that the Elvis analogy that’s been dangling in front of us for decades — taking greedy, cowardly short term gain with catastrophic long-term consequences — is merely writ large and indeed written in stone as “The King” makes its way to theaters.

The movie covers familiar Elvisiana — taking the Rolls (which breaks down, here and there) to Tupelo, the poor (mostly black) neighborhood where Elvis was born, to Memphis and neon-lit fame, New York and glory, the Army, the “Hollywood Years,” “The Comeback Special,” Vegas and The End.

Along the way, musicians walking in his footsteps crawl into the back seat and play, most charmingly, young Knoxville Blue Grass singer Emi Sunshine and Memphis soul-singing teens from the Stax Music Academy.  Some of them have thoughts on Elvis, some just have a song.

And other musicians, biographers, actors (Ethan Hawke, Mike Myers), journalists (Dan Rather), old friends and girlfriends and Memphis Mafia alumni tell his story, often in the front seat of this car that winds from Memphis to New York, and out to Las Vegas and back to Memphis.

CNN’s Van Jones remembers how much his father, another Memphis native, “hated” Elvis, how he’d taken black music and culture and gotten famous and “given nothing back.” Jones challenges Jarecki, “Why do you care so much about rescuing Elvis?” He quotes Public Enemy’s Chuck D and the song “Fight the Power,” with its infamous Elvis “was a straight-up racist” lyric.

Then a mellower Chuck D shows up and recalls thinking that at the time, but softening on the whole cultural appropriation thing as he’s matured. He may be the marvel of all these interviews, ruminating on the crushing weight of that level of fame, the circumscribed choices Elvis was shoehorned into and declaring an appreciation for the singer’s authenticity.

TV writer Simon is more blunt. Haters? “They’re not listening to the records,” the amalgam of country, gospel and blues Elvis channeled into something new.

James Carville talks about how the world changed, in an instant, with Presley’s arrival. Alec Baldwin weighs in on the physical beauty, “the most perfect looking guy ever” that was part of the package, Hawke and Mike Myers (?!) gripe about the fateful decision to “go Hollywood.”

“Celebrity is the industrial disease of creativity,” Myers notes. And he knows.

Jarecki edits in footage of the original “King Kong” to illustrate a performer trapped by fame, includes clips of Presley’s over-rehearsed “keep my opinions to myself” mantra (had to be The Colonel talking) as Jones wonders how different the world might have been had Presley walked with Martin Luther King Jr., just once, or turned up at the “I Have Dream” speech in D.C. (with legions of other celebrities). It might have risked his celebrity, but might have reflected more of who he really was.

We can’t know, the film suggests. We cannot ever know what it was like to, as a late Elvis hit posited, “Walk a Mile in My Shoes.”

“He had it all,” songwriter Mary Gauthier declares, “and he had more of it than anybody had ever had.”

Just like America. And the film argues that just like Elvis, America is stuck in the past, living in “the politics of nostalgia.” Bloated, unable to make the smart decision when faced with the easier, expedient one, unwilling to speak out when the need to speak out was never greater, drug addicted, lost and fat — and not just in the rural Trump-centric places that still worship Elvis, either.

It’s the American Dream we mourn when we focus our mind and not just our heart and ears on Elvis, the opportunities of the country a country boy like him came up in.

Jarecki’s film, his most thoughtful and oracular, had so many interviews and so many musicians that many you see on its IMDB page didn’t make the final cut. Frankly, I’d have lost Baldwin and Myers and a couple of others to get at one guy who hasn’t just followed Elvis, studied Elvis and gone through the dark side of fame with Elvis. Nicolas Cage, who married Elvis’ daughter, would have been a real coup and added something important to an already important, wonderfully-crafted argument and film.

But what’s here is enough, a stand-out documentary in a year already littered with glittering, delightful titles.

It’ll be on PBS at some point, but don’t wait. Seeing it in a cinema has a hint of religious experience about it.

MPAA Rating: R for language

Cast: Elvis Presley, Eugene Jarecki, Ethan Hawke, Emmylou Harris, Chuck D, John Hiatt, Immortal Technique, Alec Baldwin

Credits: Directed by Eugene Jarecki, script by Eugene Jarecki and Christopher St. John. A Oscilloscope release.

Running time: 1:48

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

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

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

“Ethan has nothing on me.”

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

“He’s like, ‘Mormon Nice.'”

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

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

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

Can you say “Friend Zone?”

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

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

He replays the phone booth game…hard.

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

“STALKER!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MPAA Rating: TV-14

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

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

Running time: 1:38

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which probably won’t spawn its own sequel.

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

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

Yeah, it’s a nightmare.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nothing comes of that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MPAA Rating: unrated, descriptions of murder, drug abuse

Credits:Directed by Dylan Howitt. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:24

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yup.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MPAA Rating: TV-14

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

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

Running time: 1:39

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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