Movie Nation

Nothing dazzling about the Metacritic scores for “Solo: A Star Wars Story.”

A 63 is “meh,” and I find it a tad generous. 

Of course, Rottentomatoes, where fanboys find legitimacy, is registering a more (meh) robust 71.

With “Deadpool 2” its chief competition, what numbers are we looking at, this Memorial Day weekend?

Deadline.com is calling it a “low-flying” opening, in the $105 million over FOUR days plus Thursday night (“Deadpool 2” did $125 in three plus Thursday night).

Box Office Mojo is calling it a $108 million weekend, with “Deadpool” hanging around at $50-60.

And Box Office Guru is throwing caution to the wind and saying $147 million over four days. Is he headed to Vegas this weekend? That’s a roulette bet.

I hate to see Ron Howard take the hit for a movie whose casting failures he was stuck with during his attempt to salvage the film. Younger critics tend to crucify a reliable old hand like Howard, who was never a dazzling stylist, in any event.

The J.J. Abrams storyline has been just as bad, in my estimation. “Rogue One” was the stand-out in this cycle of Disney cashing in on the Golden Lucas.

But in any event, $100 million in tickets is a lot of customers, and feedback. What are people thinking? I’m not an outlier as a naysayer this time. Lots of pans across Metacriticdom. Usually, if I’m all alone, the people who hate a film flock to a review they agree with (a big source of review traffic).

Yay, or nay on Alden Ehrenreich, Woody, Thandie and Ms. “Game of Thrones” and “Solo?”

It’s a common knock on comedies that they “try too hard.”

But not comedies set in laid-back, chillin’ and slackin’, South by Southwestin’ Austin, Texas. Not since “Slacker.”

Just park your romantic comedy in “The People’s Republic of Austin,” where hipsters grow unruly hair, insist “It’s just patchoili , cling to vinyl like it’s IPO Apple stock and eagerly await the return of VHS, and the comic culture shock laughs will follow.

Theresa Bennett’s “Social Animals” is basically a star vehicle for the quirky charms of Noël Wells, of “Master of None” and the dead-cat indie comedy “Mr. Roosevelt.” It co-stars Josh Radnor (“How I Met Your Mother”) and Southern comic Fortune Feimster. And while it throws a lot of Austin-iana at the wall, laughs and comic/romantic insights are hard to come by in a script that expects the “scene” and the “vibe” to do all the heavy lifting. 

Characters rage at how precious the place is turning, “artisanal cupcake shops” driving up property values and driving out old businesses. One of those businesses is House of Wax, where Zoe presides. Yeah, she gives “Brazilians,” a noble profession on the bikini lines of the most hirsute city in the South. 

Except nobody will get waxes with a more painless laser hair removal emporium just down the street. She’s broke, all alone and failing, and about to turn 30. “Let (30) fall on your like a warm blanket on a cold day” her pal (Carly Chaikin) advises. But her pal has “settled” for a dull, boorish fiance — a Republican in “The People’s Republic of Austin.”

“We look great…on paper.”

Not for Zoe.

Across the street, another business is failing. Vulcan Video was doomed before it opened, but its owner Paul (Radnor) likes lost causes. Like his marriage. He and Jane (Aya Cash) have kids, but no life. She’s stressed about supporting them all, and he’s whining about the lack of intimacy.

“Maybe you should have an affair,” she gripes.

“Who has time for that?”

That’s our set-up here, people peripherally interconnected (the newlywed played by Samira Wiley is the planet the others orbit), sort of thrown together as Jane takes up with a gigolo (!?) and sweet, romantic-at-heart Paul is hurled at Zoe, with whom he can wax nostalgic (Hah!) about mix CDs and classic films and the days when a video store clerk could have an impact on his customer’s lives. Bars? Not the best place for them to meet.

“I’m sober.”

“That’s great, because I’m an enabler!”

Wells has an approachable pluck about her, but Radnor is such a bland big screen presence that they set off no sparks and never make us believe them as a couple, or root for them.

Bennett, who scripted “Petunia,” couldn’t find a laugh here if the Alamo Drafthouse depended on it. Characters are introduced with illustrated “favorite sexual position” profiles, and the plus-sized stand-up comic Feimster leads a felatio workshop involving most of the women in the cast, and cucumbers.

Jane’s profound insight, “It’s just so hard to be alone…especially when you’re with someone,” drives the action. But what transpires from a real world relationship in crisis is absurd on every level, and not funny on any.

MPAA Rating: R for strong and crude sexual content, language, and drug use

Cast:  Noël Wells, Josh Radnor, Aya Cash, Carly Chaikin, Fortune Feimster

Credits:Written and directed by Theresa Bennett. A Paramount release.

Running time: 1:30

It’s always looks so easy in the movies, “the Big Score,” the “heist.”

“Oceans 11,” Oceans 12,” “Oceans 13,” “Oceans 8” or even the woebegone “Logan Lucky” go off like clockwork. The “team” of smart, smooth career criminals with “special skills,” is assembled, the “joint” is “cased,” the caper is rehearsed — preferably with a scale model of the “mark” in question.

The crooks, who banter and get along — when they aren’t double-crossing each other — have seemingly unlimited resources, especially in the glossy all-star caper comedies of Steven Soderbergh.

But the truth is a lot more like “Masterminds,” disorganized mayhem masterminded by morons, or at least people who don’t know what they’re doing. Because they taught themselves how via the movies.

“American Animals” makes it look hard. British producer-director Bart Layton, of TV’s “Breakout” and “Locked-up Abroad,” uses that access to real criminals to conjure up a near masterpiece of  “just ordinary guys out to commit a robbery” genre.

It’s a suspenseful “How to” primer and a droll, amusing and sobering “How NOT to,” the sort of movie that could discourage all the bumpkins, frat boys and anybody else bellowing, “WE could do that” while watching a heist picture and knocking back a few.

The Lexington, Kentucky quartet who actually took their shot at instance riches over a dozen years ago could have used that.

Yes, many of us might be able to score a fake-ID. Anybody with a zest for playing dress-up could figure out a disguise. Procuring firearms? This is America. “Whatever you want.”

But surveillance of the place you want to rob without being detected, “logistics,” how to get in and out, procuring a get-away car, finding a “fence” to sell the stolen property to, hurting somebody who gets in your way? That’s where the fantasy sets in. That’s where the “American Animals” get in over their heads.

Barry Keoghan (“Dunkirk”) is Spencer Reinhard, a UK frat boy studying art who takes a shine to the rarer-than-rare, oversized and illustrated by the author John James Audubon “Birds of America” stored under lock-and-key at nearby Transylvania University.

An introvert like Spencer would never act on any thieving impulse. Or so he’d have us believe. So his reprobate adrenaline junky pal Warren (Evan Peters, Quicksilver in the “X-Men” movies) is who he decides to tell about it.

And Warren, jock that he is, takes the ball and runs with it, right up to the moment he sizes up the task and cracks, “We’re going to need a bigger boat.” They need a larger crew. Smart, organized Eric (Jared Abramson) and go-getter/overachieving, monied entrepreneur “Chaz” (Blake Jenner) answer the cryptic question, “Are you out or are you IN?” in the affirmative.

Are they there for the cash? They’re all middle class to upper middle class “kids.” Curiosity of the “What would actually happen in REAL life” variety? Thrill criminals of the Leopold & Loeb persuasion?

Or was it just testosterone-fueled peer pressure?

Layton zips through the obligatory preliminaries — getting a laugh out of the “scale model” cliche, letting us see the various holes in their “fool-proof plan,” as in, a plan conceived by fools who rent “Heist” and “The Thomas Crown Affair,” who watch Sterling Hayden tough-talk the gang through “the plan” in the Kubrick classic, “The Killing,” by way of preparation.

They take on “color” names, just as in Tarantino’s “Reservoir Dogs.”

“Can I just say how DUMB this whole thing is?”

“This is just how it’s done,” Warren brags. Like he knows.

But Layton, with all his access to reality TV convicts, lifts “American Animals” to another level by the simplest device imaginable. He has the real crooks comment on their actions, thoughts at the time, and their remorse. He interviews the family, teachers and others about how “We were in SHOCK” at what these boys did.

And from time to time, he injects the real Spencer, Warren, Eric and Chaz, into the action, staring in forlorn regret from a driveway as the fictional versions of themselves drive the getaway car towards their “destiny,” and actually IN that car, stupefied at what their younger self just did.

It’s clever to the point of bloody brilliant, and you can say that about the entire movie as well. Peters pegs the needle as a hyped-up punk in need of a thrill, Keoghan (also seen in “The Sacrificial Deer”) makes you wonder if cagey introvert Spencer’s version of events is true, or a cover-up.

Ann Dowd is the officious, grandmotherly librarian in charge of “special collections,” the one they know they have to “eliminate.” And Udo Kier is all understated menace as a Dutch fence, the one person they can find who might buy what they steal, if they can steal it.

“American Animals” is a tense, taut sober and occasionally silly thriller that reminds us that the Caribbean Island at the end of the Hollywood heist is always a mirage. Real life is not like a Steven Soderbergh movie, and real crooks aren’t all-knowing versions of Bullock, Clooney, Pitt and Cheadle.

They make mistakes, even the ones who aren’t American idiots.

MPAA Rating: R for language throughout, some drug use and brief crude/sexual material

Cast: Barry Keoghan, Evan Peters, Blake Jenner, Ann Dowd, Jared Abramson, Udo Kier

Credits: Written and directed by Bart Layton. An Orchard release.

Running time: 1:56

The title “The Sisters Brothers” tells you the tone they’re going for — darkly comic, bloody.

Jake Gyllenhaal and flavor-of-the-moment Rami Malek also star in this comic horse opera. And Rutger Hauer.

Who plays the Sisters Brothers’ mama? Carol Kane.

Jacques Audiard of “The Prophet” and “Rust and Bone” directed. Will it be funny? Dark and bloody, yes, but funny?

Forest Whitaker is the journalist trying to find the truth. Johnny Depp is the cop who may not know who shot Biggie, but has an idea why he DOESN’T know, in this trailer for the Sept. 7 release.

A favorite of conspiracy buffs, this Brad Furman (“The Lincoln Lawyer”) film is based on a “book,” but “true story” might be stretching things a bit.

Well, we all needed Victoria Justice to play one last tormented teenager. We all needed to hear her blurt out “What the F?” like Nickelodeon or The Disney Channel wasn’t there to tell her not to.

“The Outcasts” unleashes Justice, Eden Sher of “The Middle” (aka Mayim Bialik, The Next Generation) and assorted TV teens on a PG-13 high school comedy about bullying, bully baiting, boys, revenge and blowback.

You’d expect no less from the kids at Richard Milhous Nixon High, suburban land of “self-segregated cliques and stereotypical angst” — in movie terms, a sea of pretty, white or at least almost entirely non-black faces.

Justice plays Jodi, a senior who sounds, dresses and seems to think like a 20something wishing she was playing “the cool chick just out of college” or something, anything more removed from “Victorious” than “The Outcasts.”

Sher is narrator-Mindy, MIT-bound while Jodi, daughter of a widowed-dad (Frank Whaley, remember him?) is headed “for a minimum wage job so that I can join the 21st century’s version of serfdom.”

“When did you start speaking like Trotsky?”

Mindy has goals and expectations, and Mr. Samuels, a supportive science teacher. Jodi? She’s seeing the real world through her postal-carrier dad, whom she calls “Herb.” She sings her self-penned songs to a non-existent online audience and fumes.

So she’s NOT the one who suggests, “I think we should ask Whitney (“Queen Beeyotch”) to stop torturing us.” And that “cool kids” party they’ve been invited to? Admiral Ackbar knows, and so does Jodi.

Blonde Whitney (Claudia Lee, wicked) did not get to be queen without mastering the epic, unprovoked burn. Of the Beautiful People, only Dave (Avan Jogia) with the rock star hair seems irked at “Adolf Whit-ler’s” hatefulness. Every generation needs its non-WASP Andrew McCarthy.

“Big Bang Theory” and her “frizzy-haired lapdog” cannot be Whitney’s equals. Not having it. Thus begins the “beating those fascists at their own game” where they “overthrow generations of ingrained high school social strata” to have their revenge.

The plan? “Unionize the outcasts.” Just like legions of such comedies before them.

I’m quoting lots of snippets of dialogue here because that’s a strength of this otherwise lowbrow-slow-going formula teen comedy.

“How’s it going, guys?”

“Well, we haven’t been roofied, yet.”

Kudos to screenwriters Dominique Ferrari, Suzanne Wrubel for giving the ladies, at least, something funny to say — which Justice, with her bangs and deep voice not cannot hide the fact that she’s 25 and too sitcom-stilted to not hit the comebacks, punchlines and pithy aphorisms entirely too hard. 

They people the “outcasts” with the usual mix of too-pretty but ignored, overachiever, black revolutionary, emos, band nerds, goody two-shoes and virginal misfits these movies ALWAYS serve up.

No, not all the outcasts are the same. But in the movies, they’re all “types,” the same types. Here, with rare exceptions, they all live “like rich white people.”

Asian “how to get rich by 18” stereotypes, “angry black girl” stereotypes, bespectacled sci-fi nerds, bearded “fantasy cosplay” kings, we’ve got’em all. And they must be recruited in their native “tribe” and habitat. Kind of funny. Even if the scenes are too on-the-nose and hit their laugh-lines entirely too hard.

Virginia, the over-achiever with tech savvy, is played by Ashley Rickards of “Killer App” and TV’s “Awkward. “Ted McGinley is Principal Whitmore because, of course he is.

Nothing too deep here, even though the writers could have angled for homophobic cruelty or anti-Semitic ostracizing. I mean, our heroines are named Shellenberger and Lipschitz — sounds like a Boca Raton law firm, or an NPR co-hosting team.

The payoffs, instead, are bland, perfunctory and cutesy. Big sports movie speeches, fist-bumps of acknowledgement, and we’ve got ourselves an Emo/Goth/Nerd/Smart Kids Rebel Alliance. A bullying in progress? Who you gonna call? Um, text?

Then the Mean Girls (lots of Tina Fey shoutouts) Strike Back. And then “We’re becoming the things we used to hate,” which to be fair, teen comedies like this usually leave out. Not always, but usually.

The sentiments and the story arc are perfectly supportable, the execution? Slow, slack, humorless and lifeless. “The Outcasts” stops dead in its tracks at the midway point and never recovers.

There are film formulas, and then there are production line scripts like “The Outcasts” — scene by scene, character by character cut-and-paste jobs, add “fill in up to the minute snarky dialogue,” and start filming.

“The Outcasts” climaxes early, and heads to prom late. Because of course it does. Whatever sentiments it reaches for feel shoehorned in.

One last gripe, there ought to be a law against opening/establishing shots of yet another pillared portico entrance of Anytown High School for high school movies. Seriously, 40 years and hundreds of versions of it, enough.

MPAA Rating:  PG-13 for crude and suggestive content, language and some teen partying

Cast: Victoria Justice, Eden Sher, Ashley Rickards, Katie Chang, Avan Jogia, Claudia Lee, Will Peltz, Peyton List

Credits:Directed by Peter Hutchings, script by Dominique Ferrari, Suzanne Wrubel. A Red Granite/Netflix release.

Running time: 1:34

Return we now to the early 1970s, the Golden Age of softcore porn, the days of “The Story of O” and “Emmanuelle” and ooh lah lah — “Immoral Tales”

Days when the cognoscenti could say, “Oh, that’s not obscene. Its FRENCH.”

“I’ve been craving your mouth for SO long,” the gawky-young Andre barks at “gamine” Julie, sharing an intimate if not romantic moment on the rocky, chalky cliff beach in Normandy. He’s played by Fabrice Luchini, who enjoyed a long, leonine career in French films (“The Girl from Monaco,””Potiche” are two more recent credits of note). She is Lisa Danvers, who only made two films. Alas, France is as sexist about women’s screen careers as Hollywood.

Andre is commanding and demanding, and he over-explains what he’s going to do to her “untouched” lips, entreating her to fantasize over “What I will give you” (in French with English subtitles), urging her to become “a gourmand,” to think of the ebb and flow of  “The Tide.” He’s loudly, poetically calling for oral satisfaction — a BJ on the Beach.

And he’s her older brother.

The gulls caw, the waves lap, the hands wander, the tide comes in and young people get teach each other about sexuality and French hair removal practices of the ’70s.

“We didn’t come to the rocks to have fun,” Andre hectors. Not for her, anyway.

“Immoral Tales” is an anthology, a collection of episodes about desire and sexual practices, but also a movie memoir of objectification, sexism and the sexual inequality of its day.

“Therese the Philosopher”  is about a 19th century village girl Charlotte Alexandra), in petticoats and parasol, who explores the icons and artifacts of her church, hearing the voice of God as she caresses robes, statuary, the organ and the altar, “I am here,” he intones. “I shall not leave you.”

“Show me your weaknesses,” suggests where this conversation with the Almighty is going.  That earns her a whipping and getting locked, hysterical, in the attic back home. But leaving her to her own devices allows her to fondle dolls, to dally in a little dress-up and stumble across nude postcards and a book about “Therese the Philosopher,” illustrated with Old School depictions of sexual practices of the past.

And she prays and slowly strips and loses herself in sexual fantasy.

“Erzsebet Bathory” is about a countess (Paloma Picasso, you-know-who’s daughter) in 17th century Hungary, interrupting a village where cows are being milked, coleslaw is being squished, chickens are copulating and milkmaids are making love to goatherds.

The Countess is recruiting girls “pure and humble,” offering maidens the chance to “touch her dress.” But she’s not asking for them to accompany her – she’s ordering. And after ritual group showers (24 nude women), anointing with oil and serving some sort of spiked wine, the countess comes among them in a splendid bejeweled dress.

Which in a frenzy, the maidens tear off her — for the jewels. There’s a “blood of virgins” motive in here somewhere.

And then we get to the Borgias of Italy. All the other predilections and perversions seem so…amateurish when compared to this lot.

The acting ranges from competent to indifferent, the imagarey striking in that Bergmanesque Euro-film of the era style. Extreme close-ups, semi-erotic displays of female nudity, women reduced to body parts.

The “Bathony” story as the most unconvincing fistfight/wrestling the cinema as ever seen.

Visuals tell the “stories,” but not in any sort of brisk, engaging way. It’s a ponderous, dated and obscure male wish-fulfillment fantasy — women as objects in the sexual service of men, the ultimate “girl’s locker room” scene, assorted lesbian moments designed to titillate.

And then the Borgias sow up and the grotesquerie of even the most benign moments is thrown into sharp relief.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, sexual perversion, etc.

Cast: Florence Bellamy, Fabrice Lucchini, Charlotte Alexandra, Lisa Danvers, Lorenzo Berinzini, Jacopo Berinzini

Credits: Written and directed by Walerian Borowczyk, based on the  André Pieyre de Mandiargues story collection. An IFC/Argos Films release.

Running time: 1:43

The brute simplicity of “O Matador/The Killer” makes it feel like an over-budgeted student film, at times.

This Brazilian B-Western as has a striking, alien setting — the desert lands of Pernambuco — and the story and style of storytelling are downright primitive.

But don’t go into it with the idea that you’ve found the font from which the next “Spaghetti Westerns”  will spring from. The acting is soap operatic, the action is sluggish and static and even the sound effects rob the shoot-outs — murders, actually, as most of the protagonists are hired killers of the Brazil of the 1910s to 1940s — sound like popguns.

And the story? So many characters, threads, murder after murder in a lawless land, endless parenthetical victims, killers, killer’s bosses, hookers and the like.

There’s even a pause for a duet, sung by a town boss (Etienne Chicot) and his wife (Maria de Medeiros), in FRENCH no less.

Hell, I’ll watch anything with horses and bad hombres (“Homa mal” in Portuguese). But this? Crikey.

It’s sort of an “Outlaw Josie Wales” tale, about Cabeleira, a foundling plucked from the desert by Seven Ears and raised to hunt, survive and kill.

Until that day Seven Ears (Deto Montenegro) doesn’t come back from “The City of Men,” which is actually a village. That’s when the unnamed foundling comes to town, comes to call himself Cabeleira, and comes to have a taste for the coin of the realm for killers in these parts in these hard times — gemstones.

Cabeleira (Diogo Morgado of the recent faith-based film “Son of God”) becomes a killer for hire, shooting and outsmarting the likes of Dry Mouth, The Peruvian, The Gringo, Sobral and The Monkeys. Head shots, tongue-cuttings and rapes abound. The film’s treatment of women is so retrograde as to be hateful and misogynistic to North American eyes.

The entire tale is told by a cowboy taken by surprise by two bad hombres (Homens maus), a lazy framing device that leads to lots of voice over narration, which doesn’t really make the story move any faster or more sensibly.

If you’re going to watch it, take the time change your Netflix settings to endure it with subtitles. I tried a half hour of the dubbed version and it is excruciating. The dubbing is done by the most sissy-voiced Portuguese speakers available, so in order to take this the least bit seriously you’ve got to watch it with subtitles.

I could see a Western working in this setting, maybe even with this star (Morgado as screen presence). But “The Killer” or “O Matador” if you prefer, is a bit woebegone, grim going pretty much from start to finish.

MPAA Rating: graphic violence, much of it directed against women, explicit sex

Cast: Diogo Mordado, EtienneThais Cabral, Etiene Chicot, Will Roberts, Deto Montenegro

Credits: Written and directed by Marcelo Galvão. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:39

My favorite book as a teen was “Papillon,” written ex-con Henri Charriere detailing his years in the French penal colonies of South America — French Guiana and Devil’s Island off its coast.

Nicknamed “Papillon,” French for “butterfly,” after a tattoo on his chest, he repeatedly escaped from these inescapable hells, endured the unendurable, found a little piece of paradise and “escaped” that, too.

And lived to tell the tale and write a best seller about it. I must have read the damned thing five-10 times. The 1973 big screen version starred Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman, and wasn’t bad. Just epic enough.

As you can see from the Wikipedia entry, the book is now called an “autobiographical novel.” He borrowed adventures from some, made others up. Barely true enough is my guess about its veracity.

Bleecker Street is advertising this remake as “the incredible true story,” but Charriere’s tale was widely discredited shortly after it came out, and more thoroughly in the decades since.

Still, a ripping good “yarn,” and Charlie Hunnam and Rami Malek make an interesting pairing. No McQueen/Hoffman, but they’ll do. Danish director Michael Noer isn’t the most experienced hand at feature film directing.

It’s being dumped at the end of August, sadly. And this is Bleecker St., after all, which “couldn’t market merlot to a wino.” But might be worth hunting down right around Labor Day. If it’s still in theaters.

Is there an actor in the history of film who’s enjoyed a better third act in his career than Christopher Plummer?

Rhetorical question, of course there hasn’t. An Oscar, his choice among all the roles available to actors of his vintage able to deftly manage curmudgeon, eminence grise or guff, cuddly codger, he’s constantly employed and always a pleasure to watch.

In “Boundaries,” he lights up a seriously lightweight road trip farce, playing the aged hippy pot dealer who passed on his “issues” to a semi-manic self-diagnosed neurotic single-mom (Vera Farmiga) and her “weird” passive-aggressive teen (Lewis MacDougall).

Laurie set an alarm as her phone ringtone from her father, alerting her that these are the calls she’s not going to answer. And he calls. A lot.

“He has a condition,” is all she’ll tell her shrink. So she won’t talk to him, avoiding bringing back up “years of disappointment.”

“You set boundaries,” the therapist is relieved to hear. Then she spies the kitten in Laurie’s purse.

“I thought you weren’t going to pick up any more strays this month?”

Laurie has a “condition,” too. She’s filled her house with stray dogs and cats, covering the bed, rubbing themselves over whoever’s sleeping with her and driving them away.

Which suits her sullen son Henry (MacDougall, of “A Monster Calls”). He has a tendency to draw anatomically insulting nudes of whoever he doesn’t like — mom’s beaus, teachers at school. He’s “special” and they kick him out after one incident too many.

And mom’s ditzy rich employer — she’s an “executive assistant” — is no help. Maybe it’s time to listen to her sweetly flaky LA sister (Kristen Schaal, of course) and take the Old Man’s calls. Because whatever retirement home he’s being kicked out of this time, Jack Jaconi always has money.

“My side venture” sees to that. But hell, pot’s being legalized here, there and everywhere. “Takes all of the fun out of it.” He’ll go stay with Laurie. No? Her sister, then. And not by plane. That’d force him to leave behind is ancient Rolls Royce (A gold 1970s Silver Shadow, maybe?).

And that would deprive the “dying” old man the chance to bond with daughter and “accomplice” grandson, and this Shana Feste (“Country Strong,” “Endless Love”) road picture of its road.

Funny thing about that, “Boundaries” was filmed mostly in and around Vancouver. So all the stops they make along the way — wouldn’t be a road picture without Jack insisting on “detours,” to catch up with old pothead pals (Christopher Lloyd), Buddhist retreat customers and Laurie’s ex (Bobby Cannavale) — are in ports, coastal evergreen forests and the like. They don’t ID the locations because it looks like a 20 hour drive down to LA on the map. That would make this a 50 minute movie.

“Cross country” they call it, and that’ll have to do.

Jack cutely explains his livelihood to the kid with a “Your grandfather’s got a green thumb.”

The wary kid makes a “cute” cutting crack about how he’s “too old to molest.” The old man isn’t offended.

“You couldn’t get molested with a bow in your hair!”

We suspect the old coot is lying about not having “much time life.” And we, like the writer-director, have a hard time getting a handle on Laurie’s manic personality, her bizarre connection to her on-the-spectrum ex (Cannavale), though her need to create “family” by filling her life with strays earns the Psychology 101 treatment. Critters approach her at gas stations, etc., all along the route, drawn to her by instinct and plot device.

“You’re like the Pied Piper of mange!” the old man chortles.

The dialogue and performances are far more interesting than the lazy, cliche-ridden story Feste cooked up.

The kid character is underdeveloped, Farmiga’s Laurie is like a needs-help/gets-help/self-help caricature.

But Plummer’s ready twinkle makes “Boundaries” (June 22) go down easily, even if he’s old enough to be Farmiga’s granddad, even if Lloyd is the more on-the-nose casting choice if you’re looking for a ’60s stoner in his dotage.

Feste may be building a career out of reaching for sentimental, easy laughs and tugs on the heartstrings. But even she knows that would have been too on-the-nose.

MPAA Rating: R (for drug material, language, some sexual references and nude sketches)

Cast: Vera Farmiga, Christopher Plummer, Lewis MacDougall, Kristen Schaal, Bobby Cannavale

Credits: Written and directed by Shana Feste. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

Running time: 1:44