Movie Nation

Disney’s diversity strategy in casting its tentpole pictures has been paying off in their approach to “Star Wars.” But the success of their discovery that “Hey, if you cast a broader net and bring in more actors of color, more subsets of the American melting pot might show up to identify with them,” has never been more stark than this weekend, with Disney/Marvel’s “Black Panther” still pulling in over $40 million three weeks after it opened, and Disney’s “A Wrinkle in Time” bellying up to the bar with another $38 million plus.

The more kid-friendly and” critically panned “Wrinkle” may improve its standing on Saturday, family movie day. But there won’t be any tears in Burbank over the drubbing the soulless kid-lit misfire is taking from the reviewing classes.

Their strategy, and the hype that they manufacture for it, is box office gold. And silver. Other studios are sure to take note. More heroines, more actors and directors of color getting breaks. At this point, they’re using diversity as a selling point and a means of getting their movies a break from critics. They want their films grades on the curve.

Because two weak “Star Wars” installments, the garbage trailers for “Solo,” and the simple fact that they didn’t hire the best actors or director for “Wrinkle” made for forgettable, inferior films. Diversity does not guarantee quality, just a broader audience base to appeal to. If you don’t start sweating the OTHER stuff — sharper scripts, executives not afraid to tell a director “Not working out,” or re-cast if the actor’s a stiff, DECISION MAKERS of color — there will be a reckoning and it won’t be lucrative.

The new horror pic that opened this weekend, “The Strangers: Prey at Night,” a sequel, is doing a little light for horror — under $10.

But the crap on crackers being served by startups STX and Entertainment Studios, “Gringo” and “Hurricane Heist,” are both bombing.

“Jumanji” may still crack the top ten one last weekend, “The Shape of Water” is in a lot more theaters, but is getting no real “Oscar bounce.” “The Greatest Showman” is finally off the charts. “Peter Rabbit” will hit $100 million before it disappears.

“Death Wish” and “Annihilation?” Officially bombs.

History has provided us with two great death scenes that play like farce.

One was the heroic end of Lord Nelson at Trafalgar, an admiral who had signaled his fleet that “England expects every man to do his duty.” Wounded and bleeding out in the battle that followed, he repeated, to every man who came to attend to him, “Thank god I have done my duty!” He literally grabbed men by the lapels to ensure his “last words” were written down thusly. Over and over again.

How Monty Python missed spoofing that is beyond me.

The other hilarious passing was the farce that surrounded the last hours of the ruthless, paranoid and genocidal Soviet dictator Josef Stalin in 1953. A country run by men so paranoid that they sought to seize power simply to ensure that they wouldn’t be killed by a rival in the sure-to-follow purges, it was morbid, dark and low comedy captured memorably in Premier Nikita Khruschev’s memoir, “Khruschev Remembers,” and later in the comic book, “The Death of Stalin.”

That’s what the folks who gave us the acrid comedy “In the Loop” adapted in bringing “The Death of Stalin” to the big screen — a comic book. And just to be sure we understood how they were handling this Great Death, they included a member of Monty Python in the cast.

“Stalin” is a morbidly hilarious back-dealing/coup-planning/body-disposing farce that treats the monster with the respect he so richly deserves. If it’s not the unimpeachable Gospel truth of how he died — it’s close enough. It should be shown in history classes. Especially in Russia.

In this country, it’s a helpful reminder of why all right-thinking Americans hate these bastards. You’d have to be a traitor to get in bed with the once-and-future Bolsheviks.

Steve Buscemi, in the role of a lifetime, plays Khruschev — a central committee member valued by Stalin, he is sure, for his jokes — his jocularity. Damned if Buscemi doesn’t manage this with aplomb. Add a little belly padding and he doesn’t have to fake one of those “Red Sparrow” accents. We totally buy in that’s he the paranoid, back-stabbing insider who comes off as the most reasonable of those whom Stalin set up as his heirs.

Not that Stalin picked one.

The movie begins with the old man’s latest tidal wave of purges, rounding up “enemies of the state” and “traitors to the Party.” Stalin (British actor Adrian McLoughlin) has already had the smartest, the best doctors, virtually everybody who could threaten him, rounded up and either shot or sent to a Siberian gulag.

Among those on “the list” this time is his longtime foreign minister, Molotov (Michael Palin) who guided the USSR’s foreign policy during World War II and lent his name to the bottle bomb “cocktail” that poorly-armed militants use against armies, even today.

The theoretical second in command and heir to the throne, as it were, is the bumbling, always-saying-the-wrong-thing, lucky-he-hasn’t-been-purged Georgy Malenkov, Chairman of the Council of Ministers. He is played with a hapless/clueless “Don’t talk to me that way!” befuddlement by the hilarious Jeffrey Tambor.

But the power behind Stalin figures to be the power behind Malenkov, the man who runs the vast secret police state, oversees the purges and keeps dossiers on EVERYbody — Lavrenti Beria.

The great British stage actor Simon Russell Beale (seen in “My Cousin Rachel”) plays Beria as a venal ogre. His jokes are cruel and always at the expense of others. His sexual tastes put every pretty young woman within his sight within his brutish power. And he’s not given to leaving torture to his minions. He wouldn’t cheat himself of that fun.

This is one of the screen’s most magnificent portraits of Hannah Arendt’s “The Banality of Evil,” a pudgy omnipotent monster so cunning he is minutes and then hours ahead of his rivals in learning of Stalin’s debilitating stroke, capitalizing on it and consolidating his power by flattering and bullying the jelly-spined Malenkov.

“There are procedures in place,” Malenkov notes, referring to the “Articles” spelled out in the Soviet constitution — glimpsed as inter-titles between chapters of the ongoing farce. “Article VI:iii, The Body will lie in state in the Hall of Columns for Three Days.”

Co-writer/director Armando Iannucci and his team conjure up an “Animal Farm” of entitled killers, protected by “laws” which, of course they suspend, willy nilly, to suit their needs, murder their rivals and oppress the ignorant, Stalin-adoring masses. The proletariat wanted him to Make Russian Great Again, and in their minds, Stalin did.

  Olga Kurylenko plays a concert pianist ordered (with the entire audience, and orchestra) to repeat a concert they’ve just broadcast so that it can be recorded. Because Stalin called the broadcast booth and demanded a recording, 19 minutes after the concert began. And they weren’t recording it.

It is her enraged note to the dictator that sets off the choking stroke that fells him (not history).

Stalin’s spoiled, tyrannical daughter (Andrea Riseborough, fierce) and drunken, Army officer in charge of the hockey team son (Rupert Friend, hiccuping hilarity) are as real as any history book can make them — heirs to be coddled, cosseted and pushed aside.

And then there’s the third act arrival of the one man above it all, Zhukov, the “generalissimo” who “saved” Mother Russia during the “Great Patriotic War.” To say Jason Isaacs shows up and chews up the role, the scenery and the movie in this Larger than Life turn is not giving his dentist his due.

“What’s a war hero got to do to get LUBRICATED around here?”

But it is Buscemi, a lifetime of weasel roles behind him, who carries “The Death of Stalin.” He keeps Khruschev teetering on the knife edge of fear — so careful about his interactions with Stalin that he debriefed every long evening they all spent together watching John Wayne/John Ford Westerns to his wife — which jokes worked, which insults would never be forgiven.

Buscemi’s got the face of a worrier, and in this, playing Russia’s greatest weasel, he gives one of his great performances. We don’t have to hear Molotov declare, “You look like you’re about to be bulldozed into a lime pit!” to see the thin ice Buscemi’s little Nikita is skating on. It’s all in his his darting eyes, his quick reversals and recoveries, his carefully chosen moments of assertion.

I loved Palin’s take on Molotov, too, suggesting a man so addled by his near-arrest, his wife’s long-ago conviction and arrest and her sudden post-Stalin release that he doesn’t know who to denounce and who to endorse.

He’s not alone. A great running gag? Committee meetings where everything is be to agreed upon unanimously, but none of the six old vipers gathered around the table has the guts to fully raise his hand until he’s seen other hands go up first. Great way to govern.

Most everybody in the farce has his or her mercurial tirade, her or his moment of terror and doubt. The comic energy flags in the middle acts, but as things take a turn for their darkest in the latter scenes, “Death of Stalin” evolves — briefly — into a ticking clock thriller, with brinkmanship, gamesmanship and marksmanship.

And a staggering body count, all vital elements in the first great movie of the year.

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

Cast: Steve Buscemi, Simon Russell Beale, Andrea Riseborough, Olga Kurylenko, Jason Isaacs, Jeffrey Tambor, Michael Palin, Rupert Friend

Credits:Directed by Armando Iannucci, script by Armando Iannucci, David Schneider, Ian Martin and Peter Fellows, based on Fabien Nury/Thierry Robin comic book. An IFC release.

Running time: 1:46

I’d missed this trailer, attached to a showing of “Nostalgia” I caught Thursday. That film stars Jon Hamm, as does this one. Both are Bleecker St. releases.

A mediator trying to negotiate the release of an old friend who’s been taken hostage by militants. Rosamund Pike and Shea Whigham also star.’

And it looks good. Tony Gilroy scripted it, Brad “The Machinist/Transiberian” directed it. I’d given up on Hamm after that Disney disaster that had him playing an agent who recruits Indian cricket players to baseball. Bleecker Street did not.

April 9.

Illumination’s “Minions” worthy take on the Doctor Seuss classic seems different enough to hold the eye. At least the trailer does.

Heck, they got Benedict Cumberbatch to voice the heartless creep.

Inferior to the Chuck Jones/Boris Karloff/singer Thurl Ravenscroft original? No doubt about it going in.

Nov. 9.

The tides of life see us add and acquire, collect and gather people, relationships, property and things. And as we age, we let — often reluctantly — those things and people fall away. As the tide goes back out we understand what Anne Morrow Lindergh meant when she wrote, “One cannot collect all the beautiful shells on the beach. One can only collect a few.”

Letting those “things” go — mementos, tchotchkes, collectibles — is often the hardest. This is a life lesson you pick up at estate sales, and helping aging friends or relatives thin out the material life that they’ve accumulated as they downsize their living quarters can be equally illuminating. What they have — photo albums, records, collectibles, sports trophies, etc. — had meaning to them. It can’t possibly be worth the same to someone else.

  “Nostalgia” is a somber, wistful dip into those waters, a movie about the value of memory and those memory jogging “things” that we gather around us might have. In the age of digital music and photography, when you’re one lost phone or wrecked computer away from losing a lifetime of photos, sounds and memories, Mark Pellington’s film grapples with the tangible things we gather around us, questions their actual value and mourn their loss.

The film meanders through assorted scenarios of letting go, letting the acquisitions of life fall away, introducing us to people coming to grips with what has enduring value to them and those around them, and what doesn’t. I can’t say it quite comes off. But as somebody helping an aging relative downsize, and from years of auctions and estate sales (the girlfriend’s side business is collectible resales), it spoke to me.

  John Ortiz plays an adjuster for an insurance company whose job has somewhat vague parameters. He’s not just the man who shows up when you’ve had a loss, photographing the things you lose in a fire. He also comes in and does that first assessment of what you have in your house that might be worth selling at auction.

His first visit is to an aged widower (Bruce Dern) living in a quiet old house filled so filled with cameras, radios, an out of date word processor, and books — some read, some he still expects to get around to reading. His granddaughter is arranging for the property and everything in it to be auctioned.

Daniel (Ortiz, of “Silver Linings Playbook”) is an old hand at his job, gently invading the 80something’s space, asking polite questions, making helpful suggestions and above all — listening.

“It never gets to me personally,” he says. “And it never gets old.” Each assessment is unique, each life and its connection to the things around it are fascinating.

Daniel’s next stop is more somber. Helen (Oscar winner Ellen Burstyn) is a widow whose house just burned down. She sits on the ruins with Daniel and recollects facing that dilemma we all fear but few face, that moment when you have to “decide what you take from a burning building.”

Would it be valuables, clothes, letters or photos? And think fast because what you’re doing is weighing exactly what in your life you can call “irreplaceable,” as the flames lick up the walls.

One thing she saved was an autographed baseball treasured by her late husband. But even that has a finite, firm price. She discovers that as she meets with a kindly sports memorabilia dealer (Jon Hamm, in his sweetest film role) and the focus of the narrative shifts.

Will (Hamm) has aged parents who are finally selling their old house, and he’s got to fly in to help his older sister Donna (the wonderful Catherine Keener) empty it out. Enlisting Donna’s teenage daughter (Annalise Basso) is a non-starter. The kid’s grown up in a world where photos and mementos are ephemeral. Nothing lasts so she, like many of her generation, look to collect “experiences.”

Tallie the teen realizes what Daniel the assessor knows to be a hard truth, that when we experience loss, “You’ll never replace your things or lives.” So gathering things to guard against that day is futile.

Big emotions are in short supply until the film’s act, and every performer who turns up — Nick Offerman, Joanna Going, Beth Grant, James Le Gros and Arye Gross play relatives and neighbors of those giving up the detritus of their lives — underplays every scene.

I can’t see anybody under the age of 30 getting much of anything out of “Nostalgia.” Pellington’s soft-spoken, meandering film feels autumnal in tone and in timing. It’s the sort of movie we might get more out of in that contemplative season of the year.

It demands attention. It requires a lot of life experience to connect to its themes and subject matter. It’s a movie for the old, and those dealing with the philosophical, taking-stock questions of life.

If that describes you,  sad as it sometimes feels, “Nostalgia” can be an exercise well worth doing.

MPAA Rating: R for some language

Cast: Ellen Burstyn, Jon Hamm, Catherine Keener, John Ortiz, Bruce Dern, Nick Offerman, Joanna Going, Arye Gross

Credits:Directed by Mark Pellington, script by Alex Ross Perry and Mark Pellington . A Bleecker St.  release.

Running time: 1:54

  Bad movies always start with bad scripts — poorly conceived characters, inane scenes, drab dialogue.

  “Gringo” doubles down on disastrous by casting some seriously unfunny people as those unfunny characters. Nobody in this Australian-directed, multi-national cast caper comedy is known for his or her comic chops.

Not Charlize Theron, as a man-eating Mean Girl of a pharmaceutical chief, not Joel Edgerton, as her swaggering, womanizing Massengill of a partner, not Thandie Newton or Amanda Seyfried, though they at least can do comedy when it’s not written by the humorless, and most certainly not David Oyelowo, so noble as Martin Luther King Jr. in “Selma,” so utterly out of his depth here.

Everybody’s bad, playing bad dialogue in bad scenes that have little reason to exist other than “We need to get this dog up to 100 minutes running time.”

It’s an absurdly-over-populated, over-complicated kidnapping action comedy in which Oyelowo plays a hapless, cuckolded mid-level manager for a company about to go BIG into medical marijuana in pill form (“Cannabex!”), and merge with another, larger firm.

That will probably put Harold (Oyelowo) out of a job, not that his old pal Richard (Edgerton) would tip him off about that. Richard’s a real Dick, and is too busy sleeping with Harold’s wife to care. And with his partner, Elaine (Theron).

Harold’s only play, he thinks, is to fake his kidnapping in Mexico and cash out the company insurance policy against such an eventuality. He might be up to pulling this off (though not amusingly), but it seems the local cartels are actually hellbent on kidnapping him themselves. They need the formula for the pot pills.

Seyfried is a guitar shop clerk whose boyfriend (Harry Treadaway) has been suckered into making a pill “pick up” for U.S. drug dealers, “a free trip to Mexico” is all he tells Sunny, his girl.

And Sharlto Copley is Richard’s supposedly reformed mercenary brother who now does humanitarian aid work, but gets abruptly called in to free Harold from whoever may or may not actually have him kidnapped in Mexico.

Edgerton’s “Animal Kingdom” director brother Nash is behind the camera, a man not unlike Ava DuVernay when it comes to having no clue about a comic touch, pacing and trimming the flab off a positively leaden movie that needs to be light on its feet.

A drug lord interrupts his debate over “the best Beatles album” by lopping off an uncooperative factory boss’s toe, Harold doesn’t speak the language and is constantly victimized (not really) by the locals, who talk of how they’ll scam him in “Mexican.” Neither of these Matthew Stone and Anthony Tambakis (the hacks who wrote it) gags works.

The one proven funny guy here is Yul Vasquez, a memorable gay bully on “Seinfeld,” reduced to being a stiff of a mob minion hunting for Harold, too.

Oscar-winner Theron wears a lot of makeup and delivers decolletage — bra-revealing outfits — in come-on scenes, sex scenes and general Beauty Queen insolence.

“Fat people are SOooo funny!”

Not her best line, but almost.

Absolutely nothing about “Gringo” works. Well, maybe one decent car crash pays off. The performances, situations, dialogue and story beats are just flung at the screen in the vain hope that something sticks.

Nothing does.

MPAA Rating: R for language throughout, violence and sexual content

Cast: Charlize Theron, Joel Edgerton, David Oyelowo, Thandie Newton, Sharlto Copley

Credits:Directed by Nash Edgerton, script by Matthew Stone and Anthony Tambakis. An Amazon Studios release.

Running time: 1:50

So America’s major cinema chains got together and started their own movie production company, Entertainment Studios. And what these geniuses decided that they needed for their screens was a “Sharknado” without sharks. Or jokes.

What audiences are clamoring for and not getting on the big screen is a soft-headed “Hard Rain,” a heist picture with bad plotting, tin-eared dialogue, a no-name cast and bad acting — underlined with some seriously inauthentic Southern accents.

As if Hollywood couldn’t manage that level of crappy on its own.

  “The Hurricane Heist” is about a heist in a hurricane. It’s that “title tells the whole story” that sells it, right?

A huge hang of thieves with their own fleet of semis wants to raid a Treasury depository in Gulf Shores, Alabama. They aim to do this in the middle of an “off-the-charts” hurricane landfall, in essence taking over the town, making hostages of Federal agents and National Guard troops while Mother Nature blows everything away.

What they hadn’t reckoned on was not capturing the one Fed (Maggie Grace of the “Taken” franchise) who has the combination to the vault. What they REALLY hadn’t counted on is intrepid local stormchaser/Weather Service drawler Will (Toby Kebbell) and his “Dominator” hurricane-proof SUV.

We’re treated to chases through the valleys of Bulgaria, with mountains plainly behind the tight-focus close-ups of the drivers. It’s supposed to be the pancake-flat Alabama coastal plain. We hear all manner of folks-who-ain’t-Southern (including “Chariots of Fire” hero Ben Cross, as a sheriff) doing that Elizabethan stage version of Southern accents.

“Thut’s tha AYE o’the STORM, a BRAT sunny DYE in the middle’o HELL!”

Will has a brother in the military whom he passes instructions to as ol’ football signals — “Red Dawg on TWO.” Something like that.

And to be fair, we’re also treated to a few cool effects — a cargo ship battered against a sea wall, a hurricane eye-wall worthy of a “Wizard of Oz” remake. And since this is a Rob “Fast and the Furious” Cohen film, there’s a semi-truck race against the storm, with digitized stunts hurling characters from vehicle to vehicle with a boiling cauldron of black, blue and grey swirling up on them from behind.

Aside from those random moments, this is an utter excrement storm, from start to finish. And as bad as the acting, nonsensical plot and dialogue are, there’s not a laugh in this thing — intentional or unintentional.

Whoever the theater chains put in charge of this “studio,” “Hurricane Heist” makes one thing obvious. He knew suckers when saw them reaching for their wallets.

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for sequences of gun violence, action, destruction, language and some suggestive material

Cast: Toby Kebbell, Maggie Grace, Ben Cross

Credits:Directed by Rob Cohen, script by Jeff Dixon, Scott Windhauser. An Entertainment Studios release.

Running time: 1:40

The Death of Stalin opens in some cities Friday, in Orlando (at the Enzian) Mar. 23 and expanding Mar. 30.

Steve Buscemi as Kruschev, Michael Palin, the folks who made “In the Loop.” We could use a few laughs at Russia’s expense. Considering the joke they’ve played on us.

“Nostalgia” is a multi-actor/actress “mosaic” of characters and how they relate to the people, places and things of their past. Jon Hamm is the biggest name in it, nostalgic for the days when “Mad Men” put him at the top of every movie maker’s short list. Indie icon Catherine Keener (“Get Out”) also stars.

Very curious to see “Gringo,” which “previews” (opens early) tonight, a comic piece that its studio didn’t choose to preview. STX occasionally previews its films, Disney showed “A Wrinkle in Time” and it didn’t earn anything remotely like universal acclaim. The other three movies opening wide tonight did not DARE screen their films — even the one starring Charlize, Amanda, Joel, David Oyelowo and Sharlto.

After that, it being a Thursday with three films opening wide that were not previewed, I figure I’ll get to “The Hurricane Heist,” which smells like a “storm” of a different type.

Entertainment Studios, a start-up owned by the major theater chains, somehow figured cheap effects C-list cast action pictures directed by Rob Cohen, who hasn’t had a hit since the first “Fast and Furious” film, was something the “major” studios weren’t filling their theaters with. Their real agenda appears to be in the politically charged history “Chappaquiddick,” that arch conservative nostalgia for ancient Democratic scandals that keeps Fox News on the air. At least one of those two should bring in an audience that doesn’t go to the movies any more.

There’s an audience for “The Strangers: Prey at Night” sequel, and another “Mad Men” refugee (Christina Hendricks) as its star. But I don’t know if I’ll get to it tonight. Maybe some other time.

Hyped up to 12 on the “Black Panther” anticipation scale and as high-minded as “A Very Special ‘Oprah,'” “A Wrinkle in Time” arrives in theaters as an exquisite waxwork rendition of  Madeleine L’Engle‘s Newbery Medal-winning novel.

It’s lovely to look at — occasionally. And director Ava DuVernay lets the camera linger over those gossamer effects — as if the natural beauty of New Zealand could be improved by digital crescent moons and fantastical additions to the Hobbitscapes. She also dwells on the circus aerialist makeup of her version of L’Engles “Three Witches” (“Three Mrs.”), the startlingly dolled-up Reese Witherspoon, Mindy Kaling and queen of them all, Oprah, as if they’re special effects unto themselves.

The child actors cast are just as gorgeous as the children of a coupling of Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Chris Pine would be.

And the story? A lost father chased through the cosmos by his intrepid daughter (Storm Reid), “brilliant” son (Deric McCabe) and the classmate who’s sweet on the daughter (Levi Miller) holds promise, even if the movie can’t find its actual excitement, suspense, coherence or narrative drive.
Which is a big build-up to essentially saying, “This movie’s a stiff — ‘Still Life with Oprah.'”

Mbatha-Raw and Pine are married scientists who have discovered an interstellar Tesseract, a fifth dimension which connects places and people throughout the universe. Their peers have laughed, but NASA researcher dad disappeared into it years ago.

And his smart and intrepid daughter Meg (Reid) and too-clever-chatterbox son Charles Wallace (McCabe) pay the price for his absence — bullied at school, gossiped about by teachers.

Until Charles Wallace invites this Bjork-attired weirdo (Witherspoon) in for a visit. She’s “Mrs. Whatsit,” she insists. The boy is a genius, she declares. The girl, even if she clings to Dad’s “Love is always there, even if you don’t feel it” credo, is more troubled. Whatsit can help. But not on her own. She summons her sisters in galactic stewardship.

Mrs. Who (Kaling) is given to quoting the wisdom of the ages — “‘The feet feels the foot when if feels the ground,’ Buddha.” She’s a veritable inspirational calendar of aphorisms — “Loves sees not with the eyes, but with the mind,’ Shakespeare!”

Mrs. Which (Winfrey) lords over them all, warns of “the darkness” spreading over the universe and onto Earth and directs their journey.

Whatsit? “Wild nights are my glory!”

They somewhat aimlessly and cryptically point the kids in the direction Dad went, seeking help from The Happy Medium (Zach Galifianakis, blessed comic relief) and an intergalactic dream merchant (Michael Peña, dolled up like Rip Taylor selling ice cream on the beach).

All the while, this more or less threatening ink blotch of “darkness” spreads.

DuVernay (“Selma”) fails utterly in her search for urgency in this story and cannot concoct a threat any more palpable than the “darkness” of which Mrs. Which speaks. The director loses herself in static conversation scenes and extreme close-ups of her beautiful players. That’s soap opera/TV movie camera work and no, that’s not a compliment.

The “Hero’s (heroine’s) Journey” quest takes a back seat, when it’s given any seat at all. The heroine? Meh. Jake Lloyd with curls.

The performances are as flat as the static, generally dull conversations (exposition without wit) the script makes the actors play. The story provides no highs or lows, just changes of costume and (digitally enhanced) setting.

“Selma” had built in goals, tension, heroes and villains. DuVernay is at a loss to provide them or do justice to the ones L’Engle’s novel provided.

The eye candy is, I have to say, somewhat underwhelming. This is the sort of movie that screams for a visionary director with proven chops in the genre, or at least producers with those credits. Time passes so slowly in “Wrinkle” that one can lose oneself in imagining what a Terry Gilliam in his free-spending prime, a Tim Burton or Kathryn Bigelow could have done with this.

Memo to Frances McDormand. “Inclusion riders” are a great way to bring overdue diversity to film sets, in front of and behind the camera. Read DuVernay’s IMDb page to see just how many different jobs the future “Selma” director had on film sets and in movie studios before she finally made her own breaks.

But using that as an end unto itself is how one arrives at movies of mendacious mediocrity,  echo chamber productions where “feeling” and message (“Love trumps hate.”) and checkbox “This is what America looks like — EVERYbody is represented” casting takes precedence. No consideration for their acting chops, they’re just here to fill a checkbox. Nobody on set has the wherewithal to state the obvious — this director isn’t suitable for this material.

And NOBODY remembers “Hey, we’ve got to find charismatic actors and make a riveting, witty, exciting or at least ambulatory movie out of this classic novel.” Because here, nobody did.

MPAA Rating: PG for thematic elements and some peril

Cast: Storm Reid, Reese Witherspoon, Oprah Winfrey, Chris Pine, Mindy Kaling, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Zach Galifianakis, Deric McCabe,  Michael Peña, Levi Miller

Credits:Directed by Ava DuVernay, script by Jennifer Lee and Jeff Stockwell, based on the novel by Madeleine L’Engle. A Walt Disney release.

Running time: 1:47

We’ve already had a perfectly serviceable film biography of A.A. Milne and the little boy who inspired his Winnie the Pooh books, “Goodbye, Christopher Robin.”

That one starred the omni-present Domhnall Gleeson and Margot Robbie and came out a year or so ago.

“The Disney Version” features Ewan McGregor as the older, soured by business Christopher, Hayley Atwell and a talking bear who sounds exactly like Sterling Holloway, who voiced Pooh way back in the original cartoons in the ’60s.

It isn’t, of course, it’s legendary Holloway impersonator Jim Cummings. This “Robin” is due out in August.