Movie Nation

OK. Sure. It looks like “Oscar bait.” It’s due out in the fall, on the cusp of “Awards Season.”

And Melissa McCarthy? Maybe her Queen of Comedy run is winding down. So why not take on something dramatic, a “true” story about a failed writer turned literary forger?

Casting her as down-on-her-luck loner Lee Israel, pairing her up with Richard E. Grant, this looks…great. Absolutely wonderful — sad and tragic and giddy with fraud.

“Can You Ever Forgive Me?” wasn’t directed by indie icon Nicole Holofcener. But she scripted it. Look for this Oct. 19.

“Paul, Apostle of Christ” is an intimate, conversational film of the last days of the Apostle Paul, the Pharisee (Jewish zealot/judge) and persecutor of Christians who had the original “Come to Jesus” moment on the Road to Damascus. He became the prophet who developed and enforced early Christian dogma and passed it on through his epistles — long, discursive letters to the Corinthian, Galatian and Roman Christian communities —  and his travels.

Half of the New Testament can be attributed to his writings, “definitive” accounts of testimony about the actions, life and teachings of Jesus — not witnessed first-hand, but collected from those who said they had and from Paul’s own visions, three encounters with Jesus (post mortem)  recounted in the Acts of the New Testament.

A story worth telling? Most certainly. But worth a better storyteller than was entrusted here.

In the movie, Paul (James Faulkner, a character actor still known for playing King Herod on TV’s “I, Claudius”) is in prison in Rome, and in 67 A.D., the Romans are literally feeding Christians to the lions.

Christianity has spread over much of the Mediterranean. But with so little written down, the threat of a watering down of the faith via false teachings, phony Jesus accounts and the like, and Paul no longer traveling and “correcting” the record, is real.

That’s why Luke (Jim Caviezel of “The Passion of the Christ”), a physician later canonized as St. Luke the Evangelist, has shown up. He needs to put Paul’s final thoughts down on paper, a last gasp at synthesizing the still-new religion for now and forevermore.

At least until the Council of Nicaea, 250 years later, when the Christian Bible was edited into something resembling its current form.

The story’s urgency is conveyed by the furtive nature of Luke’s meeting with the (literal) Christian underground. John Lynch (“The Secret Garden”) is Aquilas, who lays it all out for the future saint (Luke was Greek) when they finally meet.

“Rome is stained with the blood of our brothers and sisters.”

“I’ve never seen Rome darker,” adds Aquila’s wife Priscilla (Joanne Whalley, recently seen as a nun in TV’s “Daredevil”).

Christians are a threat to the Empire, Nero has decreed.

But Luke’s imprisonment, even after he’s been moved to a dungeon, is lax enough that Luke can see him to take dictation and confide in the Voice of the Church. What he tells Paul, about unrest within the community, a determination by many to take the fight to the Romans, earns lecturing messages to be taken back to that community.

“Evil can only be overcome with good.” Luke underscores this when he passes Paul’s words on to the Faithful with an emphatic “Love is the only way.”

If that’s too subtle, Priscilla chisels this line in stone.

“Christ asked us to care for the world, not rule it!”

Paul, in his conversations with Luke, flashes back to his younger days, persecuting Christians and “blinded by the light” of his encounter with Jesus, his sight only restored by the Christian healer Anainis (Manuel Cauchi).

Meanwhile, his Roman jailer (Olivier Martinez of “Unfaithful” and “The Physician”) holds them all in contempt, but has his own crisis of faith looming. His daughter is sick, and no Roman physician or Roman gods can save her. What about “the Greek,” this Christian fellow who keeps meeting that trouble-maker Paul?

If you’re going to make a movie set during the Roman Empire, Malta is the most authentic-looking location you could choose. And writer-director Andrew Hyatt, who earlier tried his hand at horror (“The Frozen,” “The Last Light”) and failed, assembled an impressive cast for this handsomely-mounted Biblical story.

But Hyatt isn’t very good at getting across the urgency of the story, and for all the suggestions of torture (“Another 20 lashes!”) and scenes of prisoners being burned, the picture lacks drama or the tension that an account — based on the New Testament’s “Acts” and Christian tradition — might have had.

Faulkner’s Paul looks right, bald, bearded, weary but righteous — “I boast only of my weaknesses!” But his mostly-whispered performance has few moments with a fiery human spark to them.

“You speak as if you have never heard the words of Christ!”

Having his jailer as Paul’s only foil puts pressure on the French actor Martinez, and there’s no intellectual heft, no menace and little heat in their encounters.

Nowhere in the Bible does it say how Paul died, but Catholic tradition dating from a few decades after his death says he was martyred by order of Emperor Nero. Nero and the Great Fire of Rome that occurred during his reign (Catholic tradition says Nero blamed Christians for starting it) are mentioned several times in “Apostle.” And speaking in strictly dramatic terms, the movie sorely misses Nero’s actual malevolent presence.

Lacking that conflict, and with slack pacing that fails to maximize the rising panic of a community hunted and under threat of death in the Circus, without the budget to show us the horrors of that Circus, “Paul, the Apostle” just lumbers along between half-whispered Conversations with the Prophet.

Whatever a movie’s message, whatever value it to its intended audience, it’s an old movie maxim that sums up the shortcomings of this “Apostle.”

Think of Robert Duvall’s “The Apostle” or Kevin Reynolds’ “Risen.” Good directors make good movies. “Paul” didn’t have one. And it shows.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for some violent content and disturbing images

Cast: James Faulkner, Jim Caviezel, Joanne Whalley, John Lynch, Olivier Martinez

Credits: Written and directed by Andrew Hyatt. A Sony Affirm release.

Running time: 1:49

Saint Patrick’s Day didn’t send me to the pub for a pint (for once), but had me searching the streaming services and cable networks for Irish film fare I’ve missed over the years.

No “Quiet Man” or “Leap Year” or “Brooklyn” or Minnie Driver binge for us, oh no. Just something we could watch and say, “Oh look, dear. It’s Dublin/County Cork/Howth/Galway. Remember?”

The appeal of scenery in Irish cinema cannot be understated.

After sampling John Ford’s “The Moon is Rising” from 1957 (Dublin, the way it was before modernity hit), we settled on “The Pier,” a little-seen Gerard Hurley character study/homecoming comedy.

Put “comedy” in quotes here, because this sad-faced little romance is a genre pic that pours effort and thought into defying genre. There are laughs, but a dark undercurrent, too. It avoids melodramatic choices, even as it shoves in a romance in the most melodramatic way imaginable.

I can’t say it’s all that, ah, but the coastline (County Cork), the quaint fishing village, the pub! The PUB!

Hurley (“The Pride” is his only other film credit) is an Irish carpenter living in Chicago, summoned home by the urgent call, “Your Da’ is dying!” from a neighbor lady.

Jack borrows money for plane fare and rushes home, but can’t even get to the door without cursing. There’s the old man (Karl Johnson of “The Illusionist”), out playing golf in the wind-whipped mists.

Jack is in a lather, especially when he picks up on why his estranged father — they haven’t seen each other in 20 years — called. Dad has money owed him all over the village. Jack is called back to help him collect it.

The son’s less-than-bemused dismay — he takes a break to rage and curse at The Almighty in the surf — is tempered, somewhat, by the presence of an age appropriate single-woman “outsider,” an American, conveniently in town and warmly played by Lili Taylor. It’s only the promise of “platonic” walks that gets him anywhere with her.

Instead, he and his cranky, loner father, spend their days riding about in a van, getting told off by many, blown off by others, who owe the father money.

The predictable ways this might have played out are we learn a dark secret about those “debts,” that we hear the “true story” of how Jack’s mother died (on “The Pier”) when he was just a boy.

Hurley avoids these, and most other plot points that would drive interest in this tale. Estrangement from his father, his father’s estrangement from The Church, his father’s actual health, etc., dominate scenes that fill in between arguments in the pub and ambling confession walks with The American Woman along the scenic Cork Coast.

The performances are winning enough, with Johnson’s masterful irascibility masking an ugly streak that reveals itself, scene by scene.

It’s not utterly aimless, but you do get the sense that this one, for its scattered sharp exchanges of dialogue and odd turns (not reaching the level of “twists”) is coasting along on its Irishness, with barely enough blarney to get by.

As a general rule, “Oh look dear, it’s County Cork! Remember?” isn’t enough.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with violence, profanity

Cast: Gerard Hurley, Karl Johnson, Lili Taylor

Credits:Written and directed by Gerard Hurley. A Black Equus release.

Running time: 1:29

The head scratching thing about “7 Days in Entebbe” isn’t so much its almost tension-free take on a harrowing hostage crisis of the ’70s, that rare one resolved with a professional, successful military response. As I said in my review, it’s the mere existence of it.

Why this movie, why now? Is there another agenda at work? Aside from Hollywood’s somewhat tone-deaf echo chamber executive ranks?

“Yeah, a movie about ‘Israel’s Finest Hour’ over 40 years ago is what audiences are clamoring for.”

The movie bombed. Critics pounded it and audiences avoided it, not even getting it into the top ten on this, its opening weekend. More diversity in the offices where movies are greenlit might be in order, because nobody wanted to see this and a broader cross-section of voices in those development meetings would have stopped this, dead in its tracks.

“Love, Simon,” a gay coming-of-age romance whose time came, oh, 10-12 years ago, underwhelmed as well, only managing $11 million or so. Weeks of studio previews to build word of mouth, a Saturday night “paid” preview last weekend, rapturous reviews (Oh please), and…enthusiasm waned from the moment tickets were first turned in Thursday night.

Group buys are a big part of the success of the faith-based musical bio-pic “I Can Only Imagine.” As I mentioned earlier, I saw it Thursday night when some unknown entity bought out several showings and handed out tickets to folks coming to my local Regal Cinemas, people there ostensibly to see something else. That they were going to pay to see.

Interesting way of ginning up “support.” Did all those purchased seats leads to attendance? Cannot tell. It’s earned $15 million plus this weekend and much support from its target audience.

Then there’s the MGM/Warners “Tomb Raider” reboot, based on the rebooted video game, but more like the 2001 Angelina Jolie film “Lara Croft: Tomb Raider” than anybody would care to admit. It managed nearly $24 million, which means it could break even with a LOT of overseas help, only if audiences everywhere else dive into it with more enthusiasm.

“A Wrinkle in Time” lost a respectable 50% of its barely passable (for its genre and hype) opening weekend take.

And “Black Panther” piled up another $28-29 million.

Attention Deficit Disorder is diagnosed at higher rates in the US than in anywhere else in world. And once it’s diagnosed? It’s treated. Ritalin and Adderall are prescribed, what we used to call by the more generic umbrella name, “amphetamines.”

Parents feeding a hyper-competitive “human capital value” culture that has first them then their kids, eager to get “an edge,” look for more energy, focus and stamina in a pill.

The prescriptions often start in elementary school. By college, the kids using these stimulants call it “college crack.” By adulthood, software engineers and musicians, athletes and soldiers are hooked, making America Amphetamine Nation.

“Take Your Pills” is a new Netflix documentary that downloads data, expert commentary, user-testimony and zippy animations and graphics to make the case that it’s not just the meth and opioids that are have American addled.

It’s Adderall.

College kids, Wall Street types, jocks and Silicon Valley nerds discuss their need for the drug, what they get from it.

And academics, journalists, authors and physicians break down the chemistry and the history. Alan Schwarz (author of “ADHD Nation” and “Overselling ADHD”) relates the history of the drugs — Benzadrine of “Speed” made it into many a soldier and fighter pilot, and it made its way into folks at home, getting comical mentions in movie and Big Band novelty song during World War II —  the development of Ritalin, and the timeline of parental and school system push for help with “concentration” that has addicted the nation’s middle to upper middle class kids and adults.

Among those testifying, Eben Britton, an ex-NFL offensive lineman, and his wife Brit — the push to get him a league exception to use it, his wife’s testimony about how it impacted him, from “focus” to the downside.

“Obsessiveness” is one of those drawbacks.

“Blue,” an artist manager in the music business, notes that “Society as a whole, has ADD.” Distracted at every turn, in every minute of the waking day, pills become the easier way to shut down those distractions. His special ed teacher mom Maxine derides the “instant cure” her son sought out once he was old enough to make that decision for himself.

Companies have been able to advertise the drugs on TV, marketing “better grades” and “more compliant” kids as the drugs’ benefits. A popular New Orleans “TV doctor” is shown interacting with kids, and a parent who has a Master’s notes how determined she is that her son, “who had to repeat kindergarten,” get a doctorate.

Other parents confess, “Did I do research? Painfully, no.”

The risks dribble out later — addiction, irregular heartbeats, compulsive behavior, “perfect employees” working themselves until they get sick, have a seizure or collapse.

Psychotherapist Liz Jorgensen declares that “stimulants can help, until they don’t.”

Footballer Britton expresses regrets at “cheating” his way to his achievements, and remembers the “crash,” the depression and exhaustion that followed every hyper-focused “high.”

“Take Your Pills” is a fast-read doc, a surface-skimming of the subject, with most corners of the philosophical, medical and ethical debate over these re-branded uppers at least touched on. People hunting for a way to become “the optimal me” dominate the proceedings, parents, kids, athletes and others rationalize what they’re doing.

“Cognitive enhancement is here to stay,” one marketer/seller announces, and the experts quoted here take a moment to talk about the Brave New World of LSD microdoses, mushroom self-dosing and the murkier self-determination arguments that might be guiding the debate down the road.

It’s pretty late in the game to be getting a primer on this years-long epidemic, but the least you can say about this super-slick, ADHD friendly film is that you can’t watch it and say you don’t have an idea how it could benefit you or your kid, and just a taste of exactly why it’s a bad idea.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with drug abuse

Cast: Dr. Wendy Brown, Dr. Anjan Chatterjee, Alan Schwarz, Eben Britton, Dr. Nicolas Rasmussen, many others

Credits:Directed by Alison Klayman. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:27

Gosh, I got all the info I needed to put out there in the headline, didn’t I?

Oh. Right. “Black Panther” wins another weekend at the box office, is at $460 million US, a phenomenon that just won’t quit, etc. It’s all about Marvel and all the other studios are fighting over chump change.

That includes the prestige house, Warner Brothers. Their MGM co-produced reboot of “Tomb Raider” is riding underwhelming reviews to an “It’ll never see a profit” $23 million weekend. That’s the good news. It was looking like a high teens weekend for the Alicia Vikander take on Lara Croft. The bad news? It cost $90 million. Not “Avengers” money, but it will have to make a bundle overseas just to break even.

Lionsgate and Roadside Attractions didn’t have faith in their no-budget Christian music bio-drama, “I Can Only Imagine.” They spent $7 million on it (they say, and it shows) and did not preview it for critics. Opening night (Thursday), the Regal Cinema I showed up at to see it was giving away two theaters worth of tickets. A word-of-mouth strategy that they didn’t advertise, and is quite curious (Christian film festivals do that, but Hollywood studios and Big Cinema Chains?).

I am guessing that won’t count in the film’s robust showing –$14 million opening weekend. But they were handing out tickets, maybe SOMEbody was paying for them, so maybe walk-ups not paying for a movie were going for free and they’re counting that as “tickets sold by popular demand.” I certainly did. “Group Buys” by, in this case, Full Sail University? That’s what the posters said at the giveaway tickets table. Interesting. Fishy.  

For “Love, Simon,” Fox Searchlight did just the opposite. They previewed and previewed and previewed it. They had a “paid” preview last Saturday night. Audiences bought tickets and saw it a week in advance. It is opening at a middling $12-13 million, and didn’t cost much, so it’s a wash. Kind of a dated, underwhelming coming out romance, but Fox says liberal and tolerant big city kids (including Orlando) are showing up, and that counts.

“A Wrinkle in Time” dropped on its second weekend — a 48% plunge, not awfully steep, but hardly enough to warrant Warners hiring director Ava DuVernay to pilot a future DC Universe franchise, which was announced this week. Mediocring her way to the top, the Hollywood way! Disney’s heavily-hyped “Wrinkle” will be over $60 million by midnight Sunday. Not where they wanted or needed to be, but if it holds like this into April, well — we’ll just see.

Some movies make you question their very existence. The quality starts the questioning. then you think about how over-familiar the subject matter is. Maybe you scratch your head over the timing.

Why are we seeing yet another movie about the daring Israeli commando raid in Entebbe, Uganda, now? The latest, “7 Days in Entebbe” is a blase stroll through a desperate and harrowing affair, inspiring more boredom than fear and utterly lacking in suspense.

The 1976 terrorist takeover of an Air France jet, collusion with an outlaw state led by a vain, delusional and murderous lunatic, Jews singled out among the passengers for mass murder by German and Arab hijackers inspired fierce debate, within and without the Israeli government, little of which is shown here.

The operation planned, re-planned, rehearsed and rehearsed, with every passing hour raising the stakes and the tension. Not that you’d know that here.

And of course, having inspired three movies shortly after the hijacking and raid to free the hostages, including a classic of the oft-maligned TV movie genre (“Raid on Entebbe”), you have to be very young or very forgetful to not know how all this turns out.

The new “7 Days,” by Jose Padilha, a director who forgot what he knew about creating suspense when he made the taut, politically charged hostage docudrama “Bus 174” by the time he remade “Robocop,” is just one long anti-climax.

  Daniel Brühl and Rosamund Pike play the idealistic/fanatical German remnants of the Baader-Meinhoff Gang, leftist terrorists in disarray, desperate for a face-saving/status reviving action that would put them back on the map.

Under the overall command of Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and with two Arab accomplices, they brazenly brought machine guns and grenades on board a Tel Aviv to Air France flight with 248 people on board and took control.

The script hints at the naive radical book publisher “Boni” Böse (Brühl) as being a “useful idiot” (Lenin’s term), idealistic but not the hardened, committed soldier for the cause that those who were fighting to take their homeland back from Israeli domination. The script has Brühl’s character overly-concerned about how “Germans killing Jews” might look in the headlines. Because he’s no Nazi. No sir. Not him.

Pike brings her “Gone Girl” crazy-eyes to Brigitte Kuhlman, his co-leader, even though the actual hijacking is shot and edited in a most perfunctory, unexciting fashion.

Back in Israel, the government of Yitzhak Rabin (a low-energy performance by the great Israeli actor Lior Ashkenazi) treats this as not just a military threat, but a political one. Will Defense Minister Shimon Peres (brilliant character actor Eddie Marsan), militating for a military response straight away, use this to bring down Rabin’s government?’

Whatever little suspense there is on board the jet, which traveled to Khadafi’s Libya (Benghazi!) to refuel and the on to Idi Amin’s Uganda, is frittered away in the quietest Israeli Cabinet meetings in recorded history. There’s no fractious debate, no voices-raised considering of the stakes of negotiating with terrorists, no bickering over how the world will see their action or inaction, only silence from virtually every actor on set save for Marsan and Ashkenazi.

“You want to invade their country, Shimon?”

“We’ll give it back to them when we’re done.”

Then there’s what might have been the most interesting parallel in the story, the Israeli modern dance company putting on an arresting, symbolic “Shed your Orthodox Fanatic Garb” piece (choreographed by Ohad Naharin), led by lead dancer Sarah (Zina Zinchenko), their rehearsals and performances framing the action as Sarah’s commando/lover (Ben Schnetzer) prepares for war.

The commando training, a staple of such movies, is given short shrift. Not the dancing. And the hostages barely make an impression, as a group or as individuals, save for the ruff French aircrew engineer (Denis Ménochet).

    Nonso Anozie has the look, the braying self-promotion and the chuckle of Idi Amin, but little of the murderous menace.

Too much time is wasted on the moral debates of the two German hijackers (The English Pike does most of the heavy-lifting in German), halfhearted attempts to fill in their back story.

That contributes to the sense of a film that tries to have it both ways — jingoistic Israeli decisiveness and righteousness (the Holocaust is invoked), vs. Europe’s youth, consumed with passionate support for legitimate Palestinian grievances and the world’s inattention to them.

All of which points to how inferior “Entebbe” is to “The Baader-Meinhoff Complex,” “Munich” or that long-ago, ham-loaded TV movie I mentioned above.

And all of which brings us back to why this picture was even made in the first place.

Then you remember the heroes of what the Israeli Defense Forces called “Operation Thunderbolt.”  There was a Netanyahu involved — a heroic Netanyahu, not a corrupt, bellicose wag-the-dog politician, but a soldier.

Maybe that’s it.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for violence, some thematic material, drug use, smoking and brief strong language

Cast: Daniel Brühl, Rosamund Pike, Nonso Anozie, Eddie Marsan, Lior Ashkenazi

Credits:Directed by José Padilha, script by Gregory Burke. A Focus Features release.

Running time: 1:46

“I Can Only Imagine” takes its title from a best-selling Christian pop ballad, and tells the story of how composer Bart Millard came to create it.

An anthemic profession of faith, the Christian pop superstar Amy Grant (Nicole DuPort) wants to know how Bart (Broadway’s J. Michael Finley) came up with it.

“You didn’t write this song in ten minutes,” she pooh-poos in an exaggerated Georgia drawl. “It took a lifetime.”

That’s the framing device for this sluggish story of an unhappy, abusive childhood and the two-fisted Texan Daddy (Dennis Quaid) who tried to teach his dreaming, artsy son “Dreams don’t pay the bills. They just keep you from knowin’ what’s real.”

It’s a drab, emotionally flat film, despite having Quaid play an embittered version of the ex-jock dad of “Friday Night Lights,” a jerk who takes out his frustrations in life out on the wife we see leave him, and the little boy (Brody Rose) who learns, very early on, to fight back.

“Life hits me,” the old man growls, “I hit it back.”

The promising cast includes National Treasure Cloris Leachman, as “MeMaw,” the granny who always supported little Bart and whose favorite expression became the name of his grown up band, Mercy Me.” And Madeline Carroll of “Flipped” plays the high school sweetheart Bart leaves behind when he discovers his talent and takes it on the road.

We track through Bart’s high school life, trying to stay out of the way of his violent father, trying to impress him by playing football, and failing at that, getting discovered by the high school choir teacher who casts him as Curly in “Oklahoma.”

Securing the rights to sing “Oh What a Beautiful Morning” wasn’t cheap. The producers sprung for songs by U2 and ELO to show young Bart’s love for music at an early age. But they couldn’t talk the real Grant or Michael W. Smith into playing themselves, showing their role in discovering the tune. Either they want to forget that stage in their lives, or they read the limp screenplay.

The film’s leading man — in boy and adult form — sorely lacks the charisma to carry a movie. The kid’s amateurism shows. And Finley’s a doughy, inexpressive lump in the middle of this generic “band tours its way to fame” tale married to a Christian redemption narrative.

Because Dad changes. Cancer will do that to a body.

The only real laugh in it — Finley playing a drunk scene is a real career-killer — comes that first time he takes the screen, as a guy plainly too old to be a bearded high school tight end. “You look like you’re 30,” a character cracks. As indeed he does. Not like a footballer, either.

The producing-directing Erwin Brothers of Alabam made a faith-based football movie (“Woodlawn”) and the comic miscarriage “Moms’ Night Out” and “October Baby.” Unlike a lot of faith-based filmmakers, they have little trouble attracting big names to flesh out their supporting casts. No Kurt Cameron. Country star Trace Adkins, the best thing in “Moms’ Night Out,” plays the band’s manager here.

But their filmmaking has no spark, no flair. Lifeless scene follows flat “travel” filler, with nothing light or urgent about any of it. This story, pointlessly delaying the moment when we finally hear the tune, didn’t offer them many possibilities to demonstrate that they know how to tug emotions, either.

If the song is strong enough, show it/let us hear it more than once. Ask Tom Hanks (“That Thing You Do”) about that. This one? Not exactly a spine-tingler, a tad uninspiring, as performed here.

And that goes for the movie, its lip-syncing (?) star and the rather winded “inspirational” story it tells.

MPAA Rating:PG for thematic elements including some violence

Cast: J. Michael Finley, Dennis Quaid, Cloris Leachman, Brody Rose, Madeline Carroll

Credits:Directed byAndrew Erwin, Jon Erwin , script by Brent McCorkle, Jon Erwin, Alex Cramer. A Lionsgate/Roadside Attractions release.

Running time: 1:50

“Girlfriend’s Day” is a quick, dark sketch of a comedy, sort of a Bob Oedenkirk special.

Made with a bunch of friends doing cameos (Derek Waters of “Drunk History,” Flo from those “Progressive” commercials, Toby Huss, Natasha Lyonne, Ed Begley Jr.), it captures the hard-drinking desperation of a greeting card writer, “a poet, if you’ve gotta label me,” suffering from writer’s block.

It’s a collection of deadpan one-liners and wry observations, semi-random scenes in bars, poetry slams and an office of fellow romance card-writing depressives.

“Ray here used to be the best, a real Shakespeare of romance cards.”

“Can I offer you a beer?”

“I’m uh, on medication. So…yeah.”

His wife left him, he lost his job and his former boss, months later, pitches him one last break. A “side project,” where the power word in every card is “Girlfriend.” Before Ray has given it a lot of thought, the governor announces “Girlfriend’s Day,” and it all becomes clear.

“Who can write the most romantic card in celebration of the new holiday?”

It’s all about saving the “failing greeting card industry.”

Here’s a chance to jump the gun, get ahead of the game. Will he blow it, lost in nightmarish visions of his ex-wife (June Diane Raphael) having sex with an owl (a children’s book author played by Andy Richter stole her away)? Or will Ray come through?

Former students (Rich Sommer of “Mad Men”) try to buck him up. Ex-colleagues, too.

A bar pickup (Amber Tamblyn) has the soul-dead Ray suspicious.

“How many cats do you have?”

Ray and Jill (Tamblyn) bond over the sad state of card-writing.

“You’ll get it back. You’ve got to have the feelings, first. Then you can write about them.”     Ray pounds at the typewriter and pounds back the whisky. And then things turn REALLY dark — film noir dark. Stacy Keach as the heavy dark.

None of it quite builds up to a belly laugh, just the occasional half-grinned Oedenkirk smirk.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, alcohol abuse, sexual situations, locker room talk

Cast: Bob Oedenkirk, Amber Tamblyn, Natasha Lyonne, Stacy Keach

Credits:Directed by Michael Paul Stephenson , script by Eric Hoffman and Bob Oedenkirk. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:10

Dennis Quaid is the abusive husband and dad who bullies and poor-mouths the kid who grew up to write MercyMe’s “I Can Only Imagine.” J. Michael Finley is “Bart Millard,” the songwriter.

Cloris Leachman also stars, with Trace Adkins. Not previewed for critics (Lionsgate doesn’t generally preview its movies), so I am catching it opening night.

Always hopeful that a faith-based film will play up the hope and the uplifting, and not the “God’s Not Dead” victimhood. We’ll see.