Movie Nation

You’ve seen snippets of these videos on the internet, on “Craziest Car Crashes” cable TV shows. And just a few moments of any one of them tells most of us “No, there’s no way to drive safely and sanely in the once-and-future Soviet Union.”

For “The Road Movie,” a Russian director and editor has assembled 70 or so minutes of this stuff to paint a quixotic portrait of the national character, as revealed by the omni-present dashboard camera.

Unblinking dashcams see all and reveal all in this tragi-comic romp through the Wild West of Russia’s roadways. We hear the drivers singing along with their radios, carrying on conversations with their passengers, yelling obscenities at their fellow motorists and reacting with dumbfounded shock at the madness and mayhem that they and their on-board windshield cameras witness.

(Watch the trailer to “The Road Movie” here.) 

A nation of drunks, hotheads, idiots, the devout and the profane, the chivalrous and the murderous, pass before our gaze in Dmitrii Kalashnikov’s film. A reckless fatalism sets in behind the wheel. The national “Best to not get involved” motto is tested by road ragers, wrecks involving “other people,” literal highway robberies and confrontations with lunatics and psychotics wielding guns, hatchets and sledgehammers, all witnessed from the front seat of cars which few get out of to intervene, horrors visited upon their fellow citizens “while Russians do nothing,” as one driver, himself doing nothing, complains.

“Fatalism” implies “resigned to one’s fate,” and if there’s a Russian archetype, that’s it. How else do you explain all this footage of gamblers driving through a forest fire (yikes), blizzards, floods, meteor strikes and mass-pileups on the free-for-all-freeways?

“Crashed in the bum,” one victim mutters after a rear-ending. “Again. And again.”

The singing and chatter of one ride goes on just long enough for one to wonder if the occupants of this car rattling down a curvy country road might be drunk. They crash through a guard rail and plow into a river, and we have our answer.

“We’ve arrived,” the driver snorts (in Russian, with English subtitles).

“We are SAILING,” an unseen passenger giggles as they try to steer their still-floating scow towards the nearest riverbank.

Not all the careening is done by drunks, or so one would hope. But an army of belligerent, aggressive rubes is on the roads, and any affront is an excuse for a brawl. Drivers cause crashes and flee, bait other drivers into attempting to pass, then sucker them into spinouts. Buses and tractor-trailers change lanes with impunity and back up with a homicidal malevolence.

We see robberies and break-ins (a camera in the act of being stolen).

And then there are the village idiots, madmen wandering the streets naked, or worse, jumping on your hood and threatening bodily harm. The lady who flicks her cigarette lighter to see if she’s filled her tank is a special kind of crazy.

“The Road Movie” is not a narrative film. It doesn’t tell a story, even though there is comedy, tragedy, madness and romance amidst all the crashes and explosions. I’m not just talking about the guys haggling over rural hookers’ price-structure. Yes, a damsel left in the lurch by a thieving cabbie is saved from having her cash, purse and luggage stolen by a random knight in shining armor who picks her up when he sees this happen.

“I’m Pasha.” “I’m Dasha!” It was meant to be.

There’s an old Midwestern joke about American drivers having to “re-learn the laws of physics” every winter. The Russians of “The Road Movie” don’t so much forget them in the land of longer winters, as ignore them and expect no consequences for that.

And that’s as telling as the fact that they know and accept this on-the-road anarchy, to a one. That’s why Russia is the dash-cam capital of the world. They know bad things are going to happen. They just want proof, even if they have zero faith that anything like justice comes their way in a system that allows this anarchy to go on.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with violence, profanity, adult situations

Cast: Assorted random Russians, Belarusians, etc.

Credits:Directed and edited y Dmitrii Kalashnikov. An Oscilloscope Laboratories release.

Running time: 1:09

Just the trailer for this January release is gonzo enough to make me stop typing and put in a call to Oscilloscope Laboratories to be sure to get a screener of this one.

Got it! My review of “The Road Movie” is linked HERE. 

God help me, but I found the climax to “Insidious: The Last Key” to be quite moving.

For a horror sequel, anyway. Sequel-prequel in this case.

Sure, much of what’s come before that, an hour and 40ish minutes of backstory, lulling detail, inane banter and scenes one can only describe as “filler” interrupted by quick-cut soundtrack-amplified SHOCKS, is a bore.

And so much of what Blumhouse Pictures and screenwriter Leigh Whannell are concerned with these days is working each new film (this is  the fourth) into “The Insidious Universe.” Then there’s the job of giving Whannell, a sometime actor who found his true calling with “Saw,” another acting role where he gets to be the nerdy ghostbuster awkwardly creeping on starlets half his age (he’s about to turn 40).

With these other agendas to fret over, is it any wonder these movies have devolved from a clever “Poltergeist” variation into a weary, idea-starved formula was a supporting cast that’s aged past “cute” that can’t find a new fright to save its life?

A prologue shows us the abusive, working class childhood of our ghost-whisperer, Elise (Lin Shaye). Young Elise (Ava Volker) could see and hear the spirits in the Five Keys, New Mexico house she and her fearful brother Christian (Pierce Pope) grew up in. Her mother (Tessa Ferrer) understood. But her brute of a prison-guard dad (Josh Stewart) didn’t like hearing Elise’s vivid descriptions of executions at the prison, which she hadn’t witnessed.

“And his last words were, ‘Go ta HELL.”

Dad beat Elise with a cane. And those spirits in the house? They murdered her mom.

Fifty-seven years later, Elise gets a call from the new owner of the same house. No, she can’t go back there to dislodge the ghosts. She can’t. OK, she will, because otherwise, we have no movie.

She’ll bring along those ghostbusting pals who helped set up Spectral Sightings with her, Specs (Whannell) and Tucker (Angus Sampson).

“She’s psychic, we’re the sidekicks!”

They’ll get to the bottom of why this house is haunted and Elise’s lingering guilt over the brother (Bruce Davison plays Christian as an adult) she left behind. Yes, there’s a key, a door to unlock and an emergency whistle a mother has given to her child to recover.

Horror matriarch Lin Shaye, who owes her career to being the sister to New Line Cinema founder Robert Shaye, is a comforting presence at the center of these movies. But in the original films, she was the cavalry, riding to the rescue of whoever was desperate to rid themselves of supernatural problems, a supporting player who only had to make a strong impression in a few scenes. She’s no Helen Mirren and making her carry these movies is a burden she’s not up to.

Park her in a scene with horror vet (“Willard”) Bruce Davison, an accomplished character actor, and he underplays her/charisma’s her right off the screen.

The sidekicks have shown us their entire bag of character and acting tricks. They’re not as brave as Elise, and if she doesn’t make them wear white shirts and ties, they don’t register at all. The novelty’s gone and they’re not cute any more.  Giving them a ghost-busting RV (“The Winnebaghost”) doesn’t help.

The ghosts are the long-fingered ghouls with skeletal faces so popular in the genre these days.

All of which adds up to a movie that has no right to the touching finale Whannell cooks up, a nice payoff to a movie that isn’t really worth sitting through to reach that payoff.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for disturbing thematic content, violence and terror, and brief strong language

Cast: Lin Shaye, Bruce Davison, Leigh Whannell, Spencer Locke, Angus Sampson

Credits: Directed by Adam Robitel, script by Leigh Whannell. A Universal/Blumhouse release.

Running time: 1:43

The WGA Nominations can be expected to honor movies (and TV series, movies, etc.) that have a writerly quality — to the dialogue, intricate story structure, character construction.

So while there are some glaring omissions, putting “Get Out,” “Lady Bird,” “I, Tonya,” and such adaptations as “The Disaster Artist,” “Logan” and Aaron Sorkin’s talkathon take on “Molly’s Game” are perfectly defensible.

But, um, no “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri?” Martin McDonagh is the writer’s writer.

No “Wind River?” That’s a smartly structured, hard-boiled and lyrical script.

“Mudbound” kind of wallows in its genre, a weak adaptation where nobody had the good sense to cut scenes and narrow the foucs.

And there’s no much I’d call lyrical about “The Shape of Water.” Not dialogue (Shannon’s lines have bite, but having two mute characters as your leads devalues that), not the fairytale-ish plot.

“Lucky” was a lot more than Harry Dean Stanton’s elegy. “Stronger” was intricate, quotable.

Smaller films in general took a beating, with “I, Tonya” being the only real surprise inclusion.

“The Post” should be in here, maybe “Darkest Hour,” maybe “The Florida Project” sounded too improvised (it wasn’t). I’d even think “Coco” merits a thought. “The Big Sick?” What’s polished about that flaccid, sentimental slop?

“Logan?” OK. The most writerly superhero adaptation not done by Joss Whedon.

Here are their film nominees. The full list, TV etc., is on the WGA website. 

The Big Sick, Written by Emily V. Gordon & Kumail Nanjiani; Amazon Studios

Get Out, Written by Jordan Peele; Universal Pictures

I, Tonya, Written by Steven Rogers; Neon

Lady Bird, Written by Greta Gerwig; A24

The Shape of Water, Screenplay by Guillermo del Toro & Vanessa Taylor; Story by Guillermo del Toro; Fox Searchlight

ADAPTED SCREENPLAY

Call Me by Your Name, Screenplay by James Ivory; Based on the Novel by André Aciman; Sony Pictures Classics

The Disaster Artist, Screenplay by Scott Neustadter & Michael H. Weber; Based on the Book The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside the Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made by Greg Sestero and Tom Bissell; A24

Logan, Screenplay by Scott Frank & James Mangold and Michael Green; Story by James Mangold; Based on Characters from the X-Men Comic Books and Theatrical Motion Pictures; Twentieth Century Fox Film

Molly’s Game, Screenplay by Aaron Sorkin; Based on the Book by Molly Bloom; STX Entertainment

Mudbound, Screenplay by Virgil Williams and Dee Rees; Based on the Novel by Hillary Jordan; Netflix

DOCUMENTARY SCREENPLAY

Betting on Zero, Written by Theodore Braun; Gunpowder & Sky

Jane, Written by Brett Morgen; National Geographic

No Stone Unturned, Written by Alex Gibney; Abramorama

Oklahoma City, Written by Barak Goodman; American Experience Films

It was hard to root for Tonya Harding back when the blue collar “redneck” skater was battling the petite princesses of figure skating in the late ’80s and early ’90s.

She was more “girl next door” than her prettier contemporaries, muscular in a way skating fans didn’t appreciate, unschooled at makeup, unfiltered in her response to feminine and effeminate judges who were loathe to give the woman her due.

And then there was the drama, the crying, the “not my fault” whining, and finally “the Incident.”

“I, Tonya” lets us see her hard life and victimhood through her eyes, as performed by the beautiful and petite Margot Robbie.

Director Craig Gillespie (“Lars and the Real Girl”) and romance screenwriter (“P.S. I Love You”) built “I, Tonya” around “wildly contradictory” and ironically hilarious interviews with the principals of Harding’s life, career and downfall.

And they turned Robbie loose on this fierce, unrepentant “white trash” over-achiever in a performance that is flinty yet self-pitying, two-fisted and bloodied but unbowed. For all those moments where Robbie lets a little of her demented turn as Harley Quinn in “Suicide Squad” flash across her teeth and eyes, it’s a stunning transformation and a fearless performance, every it the equal of Charlize Theron’s transformation from runway model to “Monster.”

We figure her out, early, from that first day her foul-mouthed chain-smoking harridan of a mother (Allison Janney, magnificently hateful) bullies her would-be coach (Julianne Nicholson, perfectly demure) into taking her child, a “soft four” years of age, into her Oregon skating school. Years pass, but the mother-coach bickering never ends.

“She looks like she CHOPS WOOD every morning!”

“She DOES chop wood every morning!”

Robbie/Harding narrates her story.  The great athletes perform with a chip on their shoulders, and Harding’s was a doozy. Rivals are always “little bitches,” from the time she was outskating them as a tyke to her tweens and teens and beyond. She could be fragile, facing death threats and class snobbery at every turn. But she was a fighter.

“I, Tonya”  is interspersed with modern day (middle-age to old age makeup) “interviews” recreated for the movie. So we hear her talk about the unhappy home and violence meted out by her mother, only to see Mom, a pet bird picking at her ear on her shoulder, deny it.

“Oh, I hit her one time…with a hair brush!”

The same is true of her first love and eventually first husband, Jeff Gillooly, played with self-aware resignation by Sebastian Stan. Tonya describes the heated juvenile sex, the beatings, the succession black-eyes she had to hide with stage make-up.

“OK,” Jeff counters in his interview, “I NEVER did this.”

We meet Jeff’s delusional lives-with-his-parents “security and anti-terrorism expert” and future Tonya “body guard” Shawn (Paul Walter Hauser, in a spot-on impersonation), an obese dope who lies like he breathes, with the confidence of a clown who never expects to be fact-checked or disbelieved.

All of which sets the table for “the incident.” Gillespie, Robbie and Rogers do such a good job of building this back-story that we almost forget that’s coming. The movie is that good.

“I, Tonya” flirts with mocking its characters, but Janney and especially Robbie counter that with their unblinking, “not on my watch” performances. Yeah, you have to take what the title character says in her version of events with a grain of salt, but she is not to be dismissed as some hapless rube. Robbie doesn’t let that happen.

Want confirmation of the mountain Harding and women like her have to climb? Read the MPAA rating at the bottom of this review. They were more bothered “pervasive language” than the film’s jaw-dropping “pervasive” domestic violence. The roundhouses hurled at her by her husband, the balled-fist “slaps” delivered by her mother, the shooting a careless cop ignored, it’s straight out of a Tammy Wynette song.

In a year when fierce women are stepping up and demanding to be heard, “I, Tonya” gives them another type of role model. And in an awards season where the fearsome Frances McDormand (“Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri”) could simply muscle and menace her way to another Oscar, Robbie’s “never been a girlie girl” Tonya grits her teeth, balls up her fists and announces, with this performance, “Not so fast, sister.”

MPAA Rating: R for pervasive language, violence, and some sexual content/nudity

Cast: Margot Robbi, Sebastian Stan, Allison Janney, Julianne Nicholson

Credits:Directed by Craig Gillespie, script by Steven Rogers. A Neon release.

Running time: 2:00

Begin with first principles.

Dito Montiel is America’s Uwe Boll, an inexplicable phenomenon who continues to work, always gets distribution for his movies, seems to hypnotize big names into making those movies, ensuring that distribution comes to pass.

And the work, from “A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints” (with Robert Downey Jr.) and “Fighting” (Channing Tatum) to “Boulevard” (Robin Williams, released the year of his death) to his latest, “The Clapper,” is awful.

Not hilariously incompetent or cultishly delusional. Just tone-deaf, dumb, lacking the awareness to be self-consciously so.

How bad? “The Clapper” isn’t hateful, which is a huge step up for Montiel. It’s merely puerile, insipid, clumsy with only the barest hints of believeability.

But I’ve said it before and it bears repeating. Montiel must be the most charming SOB in show business. He talked Ed Helms, Amanda Seyfried and Tracy Morgan into filming this never-quite-funny Hollywood comedy about Hollywood Blvd. “types.”

Helms, taking a step down from “Father Figures” (as if that was possible) and a miraculously recovered Morgan play professional audience members in La La Land. Got an infomercial that needs warm bodies in its studio audience? They’re “the best audience money can buy.” That’s a quote from Alan Thicke, playing himself in his final screen appearance, selling a dubious real-estate venture on late night cable.

Neither Chris (Morgan) nor Eddie Krumble (Helms) have much going on. But Eddie, at least, has mastered the art of making ends (barely) meet in this subset of Hollywood “extras.” He’s on good terms with the woman (Leah Remini) who books a lot of these audiences. All he has to do is don a goatee, a mustache, a Van Dyke or what have you, stand up in the audience, and say his line — “You mean to tell me that I can get this lot, no money down/this stain out with just one spray” etc. Mostly though, he and Chris and assorted other members of this community of misfits and grotesques just sit and fake enthusiasm for whatever product is being shilled. They clap on command.

He’s got an out-of-his-league crush on the Judy (Amanda Seyfried), who sits glassed inside a Melrose Ave. convenience store cubicle with only a cracking PA system to suggest her charms.

“At night, all the NORMAL people, they just disappear.”

Eddie’s got a mother (Brenda Vaccaro) who calls him from “back home,” having just seen him — again — on “YOUR TV show.”

He’s not really making it, but he’s making do. Until, that is, a late night talk show host (Russell Peters) and his staff spot him in assorted infomercials. A collection of clips make this mysterious “Clapper” look ridiculous. Jayme Stillerman (Peters) orders his audience to “find The Clapper” for him. And it all falls apart for Eddie.

Unemployable, harassed and harangued by tactless tourists and local yokels, he turns for comfort to the one woman in LA who doesn’t have a TV. That would be Judy. Soon, even she is taken away from him.

I love the milieu Montiel gives us here, even though he’s not the first to point a camera at the weirdos of Hollywood Blvd. Ricky Gervais’ “Extras” and earlier films have nibbled at this close-to-home culture of the camera cannon fodder classes of TV and film, and found more biting “But I’m in SHOW business!” commentary, more to laugh at and more empathy for these characters.

And even though he’s not the first to notice the cruel, mocking streak that runs through late night hosts, turning Eddie into “the biggest thing to hit late nite since ‘Stupid Pet Tricks'” is watchably plausible, and mean. Hell, they’re giving Letterman The Mark Twain Prize, despite his reputation for ridiculing foreign people, as a creep and a creeper.

It’s the execution, the writing (Montiel based this on his book, so he charmed his way into publishing, too.), the limp payoffs to set-ups and excruciatingly obvious resolutions to the vexing situations that could have had a real sting to them that grinds “The Clapper’s” gears. This should have been acrid and funny, and it’s neither.

Even the mean people are supposed to have a conscience. In late night TV? Really?

Peters makes a hits-his-marks but zero-charisma chat show host. But does anybody believe Ed Helms and Amanda Seyfried as a couple? A more promising direction might have been giving Eddie and the booker (Remini) some sort of she-has-the-power romantic connection disrupted by Eddie’s sudden “Star is Reluctantly Born” fame.

Every Montiel movie prompts this practice, “If only he’d tried this” or “that.” How he keeps convincing good actors to make movies with him is Hollywood’s greatest unsolved mystery.

His actors see possibilities in the material he convinces them do to. If only they’d watched his earlier movies before signing on the dotted line. His siren’s call, and the lure of making an easy quickie in town on backlots and over-familiar LA locations, would fall on deaf ears if only they’d do that homework.

MPAA Rating: R for language and some sexual references

Cast: Ed Helms, Amanda Seyfried, Tracy Morgan, Russell Peters, Leah Remini, Roger Guenveur Smith

Credits: Written and directed by Dito Montiel. An eOne release.

Running time: 1:30

Let’s start the new year with a few low-budget laughs at the expense of the zeitgeist, shall we?

“Crazy Famous” is another “wacky gang from the mental hospital” fish out of water comedy in the “Dream Team” mold. And even though the plot is rendered less believable than it should be and the violence is both off-putting and unconvincing, there’s a chuckle, here and there, in the Bob Farkas and the way a couple of actors play it.

Gregory Lay stars as Bob Marcus, a young man hell-bent on getting famous in the American way. No, he doesn’t plan and carry out a mass shooting. No, he doesn’t grow his beard out and fake being colorful and eccentric enough to get his own reality TV show.

Bob makes his way to Camp David, strips in front of those guarding the presidential retreat, and uses a portable trampoline to bounce over the fence.

That doesn’t get him the headlines he craves. It just lands him in a mental institution, where he tries to explain his lifelong mania to not be “an average nobody.” He frustrated his stage mom and basketball coach dad back in childhood. And he never got over that.

“People would seek me out,” he thinks, if he was famous. “I’d have value.”

One half-hearted suicide attempt later, he meets his ticket out of there. It’s not Larry, the bug-eyed ranter with anger management issues (Victor Cruz). It’s not even the balding drawler who thinks he’s Dr. Phil (David Neal Levin).

Richard Short plays the mysterious British accented fellow with a few screws loose. He’s convinced he’s a secret agent. He’s sure he knows where Osama bin Laden is. As if that’s proof that he belongs in a mental hospital.

The movie’s first huge hole is the fact that we never come close to buying that this guy is crazy. We’re shown just the opposite, that the staff is medicating him and participating in interrogations of him at the behest of this government glory hog (Bob Jaffe) whom the world credits as the fellow who tracked down and killed “Jackpot,” aka Bin Laden.

Nevertheless, Bob helps Smith and Dr. Phil and Larry make a break for it. His gamble that Smith might be who he says he is pays off in an instant — martial arts expert, able to dodge the cops behind the wheel at a souped up AMC Gremlin, adept at making the most of a misunderstanding gun seller’s confusion.

And they’re off, to confront Bob’s past and hunt down Osama bin Laden.

None of which is the least it interesting, though Lay is manic enough to make at least some of the set-ups pay off.

The laughs come from the periphery, in Bob’s hapless child-actor flashbacks, in Larry’s melt-downs, and in Dr. Phil’s endless supply of quack-pot acronyms to diagnose Larry and the others. Levin’s impersonation of Oprah’s TV shrink is sort of Nick Offerman doing Dr. Phil. Every word out of his mouth is funny. He’s in the habit of walking around with no pants.

“So that mah GEN-itals may BREATHE when Ah’m SLEEPIN.'”

If only the REAL Dr. Phil was this funny.

Still, “Crazy Famous” too often reminds us of its tight budget and its screenplay, basically a collection of stereotype-crutches which don’t add up to much. The flashacks, the connection to our collective zeal for “fame” and the players — especially David Neal Levin’s spot-on take down of TV’s Texan talking-cure king — give it what little life it has.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, profanity

Cast: Gregory Lay, Richard Short, Victor Cruz, Jessica Renee Russell, David Neal Levin, Bob Jaffe

Credits:Directed by Paul Jarrett, script by Bob Farkas. A Gravitas release.

Running time: 1:18

A very good Friday suggests that “Star Wars: The Last Jedi,” could hit $55 million on this, its third weekend in theaters, big bucks which could make 2017 an $11 billion+ year in ticket sales, according to Deadline.com. 

That would be the third best BO year ever, and considering this past summer was the worst in recent memory, that says a lot for the heft of “Star Wars” and Pixar’s “Coco” and the other hits of fall and spring (“Beauty and the Beast”) that made it possible.

But “Last Jedi” was projected to hit $57, and Saturday and Sunday have yet to be tallied. If last weekend was any indication, those two days will drag that number down a bit. Projections last weekend seemed to drop by the day.

And “Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle,” is nipping at the Jedi’s heels. It is on track to do $50 million, and Saturday and Sunday will tell all with that one, too. A kid-friendly comedy with The Rock and Kevin Hart and Jack Black and a smart, tough, self-mocking starlet (Karen Gillan) in Tomb Raider tart-wear? Who knew that’d hit?

“Pitch Perfect 3” is on track to hit $70 million, overall, with another $23-25 million this weekend. Young ladies do love their Bellas. Pity Anna Kendrick et al haven’t been able to turn this success into clout in terms of the movies they get offered.

“Greatest Showman” is showing Golden Globes nominated legs, “Darkest Hour” and “All the Money in the World” are holding their own, “Downsizing” didn’t drop out of the top ten, but “The Shape of Water” and “Father Figures” did. “Molly’s Game” will need more awards buzz to have a prayer of cracking into it.

Let’s get this out of the way right out the gate.

The Best Films of 2017 are “Dunkirk,” “The Florida Project,” “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri,” “Lady Bird” and “Brad’s Status.” Yeah, “The Disaster Artist” can be in that conversation, “The Post,” “Darkest Hour” too.

Many of those films are at least in the chatter right now. “Only the Brave” should be. “Brad’s Status” too. “Stronger” I’d throw in, for the perfection of the performances,

But not all of them are, and many are being swamped in “buzz” for a lot of late-season “The Best movie of the Year, THIS week” swooning by critics and critics’ groups and whatever the hell the National Board of Review and Hollywood Foreign Press Association actually are.

For all the box office woes of this year — holes not totally filled by “Wonder Woman,” “Thor,” “The Last Jedi,” “Coco” “Beauty and the Beast” and “Logan” — reading reviews, you’d swear we’ve entered a new gilded age.

Based mainly on Rottentomatoes scores (with a few inflated Metacritic ratings backing this up), we should be talking about the movies listed below — “Star Wars: The Last Jedi,” “Blade Runner: 2049,” “Wonder Woman,” “Logan” the Sundance-hyped “Mudbound,” with acting Oscars locked up for “Last Flag Flying,” “Battle of the Sexes,” etc., as the “real” Oscar contenders.

Audiences, and Hollywood insiders (who pick the best work in their respective guilds) are saying otherwise. Tickets aren’t being sold, movies praised to the high heavens are being forgotten — especially by the nimrods who took the vapors praising them to high heaven back when they were released and who hope nobody remembers their misguided raves.

Wherever you stand on what a “critically-acclaimed” movie ought to be, whatever you think the Oscars SHOULD stand for, no matter what your stance on “a reviewer writes for the audience, a critic writes for the ages/the artist,” a 3-4 star review should be for a movie somebody/ANYbody recalls two months after its left theaters.

A lot of 2.5/3-star movies have been lifted onto this or that week’s ephemeral pantheon of Great Pictures. “Get Out?” Get real.  A good genre pic that has the smarts of darkly-comic satire going for it, not much else. Is there a performance in that you remember? Brian Williams is excused from that question.

What’s going on? There’s a generation of established Big Media critics who fret too much over seeming irrelevant. You pan a movie everybody goes to see, your editor realizes how out of touch you are. That’s the fearful thinking, anyway. This has been a guiding light in the ongoing accident that is Peter Travers’ career at Rolling Stone, in my opinion. And he’s not alone. Not by a long shot.

A generation of critics and reviewers were culled from the ranks by the Great Layoff of 2005-2015, legacy magazine and newspaper critics by the scores disappeared.

Who’s replacing this fading-forgotten Boomer/Buster legion of opionators? Fangirls, fanboys, and a pretty callow crew, over all. Whatever stand-out voices this new guard has produced, they are drowned out by short term short-timers who haven’t put the time in to see, develop and defend an opinion on genres, directors, screenwriters and classic films. Most won’t stick with this vocation or avocation long enough to get good.

Their handiwork is evident every weekend — junk, derivative horror, sci-fi and fanboy favorite directors, screenwriters and actors praised to the hilt, good to great work undervalued based on the flimsiest grudges, with “logic” and critical judgement and defensible fact-based opinions rarely figuring into it. SXSW, Sundance, Cannes and Toronto groupthink sets in. That’s one thing film festivals are good at — pack mentality reviewing.

Some of this is just a generational sea change, of course, older critics grousing about “What the KIDs love these days,” etc. But take away the gatekeepers who used to ordain who was good enough at the craft of reviewing — debating, using evidence in arguments, etc — and this is where we are.

Most of these movies weren’t BAD, per se. Just indifferent, forgettable. Below, let us remember the forgotten, the middling movies that were the best thing since sliced-bread, according to some (MANY) — for a week, a month, or a summer — and have disappeared, with extreme prejudice — now that “Awards’ season” is upon us.

“Blade Runner 2049” — No Ridley Scott, no “Blade Runner.” Not Rutger Hauer? No pathos. If audiences had trouble embracing a movie in which hardboiled Harrison Ford falls for a replicant who looks the way Sean Young used to look, how can we warm to an over-hyped sequel with Ryan Gosling as a replicant we’re supposed to root for in a future where love, sex, etc. is digital, simulated, VR? Beautiful, chilly and heartless.

“Colossal” — There was a huge run on Depends when this dull, dim limited release reached fanboydom back in the spring. “Hey you guys, it’s a KAIJU movie! With Anne Hathaway! And that Sudeikis guy playing another douche!” And you thought “Pacific Rim” was unworthy.

“Mudbound” — Granted, the Sundance Film Festival comes very early in the year. And the films are screened at…high altitude. So breathless praise for flawed features comes with every year’s festival. Here’s a USA Today headline — “‘Mudbound’ could bring historic diversity to 2018 Oscar race.”  A well-intentioned but murky, over-boiled, meekly-directed, badly-edited obvious and misshapen melodrama, it’s still getting some Oscar buzz for Mary J. Blige, who is pretty good at playing an Depression Era archetype. She plays grinding poverty, in scene after scene (not all), in stylish period sunglasses. Sharecropping paid better than you thought.

“Logan Lucky” — A lack of Southern film critics in this new generation of big city hobbyist reviewers and unworldly appointees (I think NPR gives movie passes to interns, and lets them call themselves “critics.”) meant that this limp, stereotype-stuffed rube comedy from Steven Soderbergh earned plaudits worthy of Soderbergh’s best, and not the notices a cut-rate, cleverly-negotiated NASCAR caper comedy deserved.

“Logan” — A gritty, fitting send-off to The Wolverine. Jackman was as good as he’s always been in these movies, Patrick Stewart plays the hell of out facing one’s mortality. Brutally violent, clumsily-plotted, fulfilling to the fans. A great movie? No. A solid 2.5/3 star movie.

“Wonder Woman” — No, Patty Jenkins isn’t being unjustly dismissed because she’s the WOMAN who directed one of the year’s biggest hits. She’s being ignored because there’s little to this that constitutes directing, not a lot of originality to this distaff “Captain America” riff with vivid cut cut-rate World War I battle recreations, and a passably fierce Gal Gadot in the title role made this a perfectly serviceable, admirable in its empowerment aims, comic book movie. Nothing more. Jenkins’ best work, on Charlize Theron’s Oscar-winning “Monster,” was “directed.” Not “WW.” It was “produced.”

“The Meyerwitz Stories” — Netflix is being painted as a major player this awards season, with “Mudbound,” Angelina Jolie’s passable foreign language film, “First They Killed My Father,” and this bit of Noah Baumbach directed Adam Sandler re-invention. Not hardly. It was a mediocre talkathon long before everybody realized what a sexist heel Dustin Hoffman has been. For decades. Insular, dull and pre-digested.

“Call Me by My Name” — I’ve reviewed and endorsed a lot of queer cinema over the decades, enjoyed the langorous scripts of James Ivory (“Remain of the Day,” “A Room with a View”) as much as anybody. But what inspired the NYC Critics and LA Critics to soil their knickers over this turgid, slow, leaden, gay apologia (older man, teen boy romance) melodrama escapes me. Did they all come out of the closet in the same Scarsdale or Van Nuys synagogue?

“It” — Hollywood wore out Stephen King’s welcome back in the last millennium, repetitive hack-work horror with usually just one really good idea per book as that book became a film. This dark ode to lost childhood wasn’t bad. It wasn’t “Psycho,” either. Splitting it into two movies makes the upcoming sequel, really just the second half of a story told as a single piece, seems an act of greed, not narrative thrift. Reviewers seemed grateful it wasn’t any worse than the decades-old TV version. So?

“Alien: Covenant” — No Ridley Scott, no “Alien?” Wasting Scott’s last vital years as a director on this movie got “Covenant,” a dank stinker in this long, wildly uneven series, graded on the curve. Step away from the chest-busters, Ridley.

“Red Turtle” — Not every animated film to pop out of Studio Ghibli is a masterpiece. This certainly wasn’t, though you’d never know it from the reviews.

“Thor: Ragnorak” — Cute. Fun. Meh. Hemsworth should have played Gaston in the live-action “Beauty and the Beast” remake. Self-aware, muscle-bound and silly when he wants to be. The movie’s a forgettable exercise in fights and effects and inside Marvel jokes. Will anybody be watching this five years down the road? How about six months down the road?

“Star Wars: The Last Jedi” — A tidal wave of effusive reviews (not mine), a sea of black ink at the box office, and a tidal wave of irritated “fan” reviews — on IMDb, on Rottentomatoes, on reddit, comments on my review. It’s gutless, heartless corporate piffle, a middling yet shiny bauble for the faithful, who appear to be losing faith.

“The Shape of Water” — An Oscar contender? Why, exactly? Guillermo del Toro’s derivative little sci-fi romantic fantasy has a look, a very good cast which was parked in roles so on-the-nose as to be eye-rollable (Sally Hawkins as the lonelorn, lovelorn mute? She’s so much better in “Maudie.” Michael Shannon as a psychotic technocrat? Richard Jenkins as a sad, lonely closeted gay neighbor, Michael Stuhlbarg as a Rosenberg-ish traitor?). I found it a tad dull, a touch “icky.” And it’s seemingly derived/ripped-off from a widely circulated student film from the Netherlands of a few years back. Let it contend. Will anybody remember it otherwise?

“Last Flag Flying” — Whatever debt we owe veterans in this country, what we don’t owe them is this vapid, criminally over-praised “Last Detail” road dramedy about old men paying a debt to a misused comrade. Bryan Cranston brought the holiday ham out early for this one.