Movie Nation

It started with Ally Sheedy tweeting in protest about James Franco’s Golden Globes win for starring in “The Disaster Artist.”

Then others came forward, alleging sexual harassment and coercion on film sets. And now the LA Times has chased down several actresses and former acting students of the twinkly polymath Franco, women who tweeted their outrage, etc. at his “win.”

And that may be that for his chances of competing for the Best Actor Oscar.

Franco has courted this sort of always-grinning, intellectual “James Dean Reborn” image as an actor, director, poet,  novelist, what have you. He’s even teased that he might be gay or bisexual as a way of adding to his mystery, his allure even.

But this? As much as I loathe the “Guilt by Accusation” nature of this Hollywood scandal, an all out “#Metoo” war against every offense (Matt Damon is right, there are “degrees” to who has done what) ever committed in an industry that traffics in sex appeal, where no one should show up for work blind to the historic “skin trade” nature of “getting ahead” in the movie business, anybody with multiple accusers cannot dismiss or explain away that. Franco’s peak moment may have been Sunday night, and his Frat Pack days may be over.

Nobody should have to put up with this. Whatever women figure Casey Affleck got away with before winning the Best Actor Oscar last year just multiplies the outrage and “Never again/Enough already!” sentiment that is carrying the day.

The ugly truth, hinted at by one of Franco’s accusers, that he wanted an actress to play a scene nude in one of his movies for $100, is that thousands of times a year, there are women who say “Yes” to that contracted deal. It doesn’t matter that virtually nobody who is “nude stripper/pole dancer #3” winds up as a star, women have  participated in this exploitation to the point where one actress saying “No” just means she’ll be replaced by one who says “Yes, this is my BIG BREAK.”

It’s not. Ask the thousands of women who turn up in such scenes every year, the obligatory “strip club scene” in virtually every crime thriller/cop movie, really just a “producer or director wants to check out/audition/coerce the ‘talent'” opportunity.

If everybody says “No,” thanks to the courage of the women who are now making themselves heard above the Hollywood hype machine, then we can say “Well, that moment changed EVERYthing.” If not, then all these “lads” whose mothers and fathers never taught them how to respect women (Miriam and Max, I’m looking at you), all these sick people drawn to the business for its predatory prospects, this frat house mono culture of men in leadership positions striving to attain those positions for their access to coercable women will continue as before.

Franco? I review LOTS of movies with a fellow who is something of a major movie star that make one scratch one’s head over his presence in them. It’s not just the “challenge”of an indie project, the generosity of lending his name to a tiny film that needs star power to get made, the ego trip of filming his own material or difficult to film literary adaptations.

Looking at him in this new, creeper light, I see all the starlets attached to such movies, the pretty young things in bit roles. Women he could pressure, threaten, lord over and have his way with?

Go on Netflix, check out the haunted bank thriller (HAH) “The Vault.” Tell me that’s not why he made that one.

The first thing that hits you is the quiet. For all the movement, the rush from meeting to meeting, the urgency of the issues they seem to be dealing with, there’s no sign of discord, chaos or quarreling in this White House.

Everybody comes off as smart, articulate, on-task, hard-working and not prone to panic. There’s urgency to their tasks, as they know, as journalist turned United Nations Ambassador Samantha Power notes, “We’re all just passing through these jobs.”

So reaching a deal on Iran, trying every idea they can come up with to stop the fighting in Syria, grasping at straws in Nigeria or opening a door to Cuba, widening the open door to Vietnam, those things “we don’t want to leave hanging” occupied the top decision makers of the Obama Administration during “The Final Year.”

Greg Barker’s documentary filters in outside criticism here and there — news voices and those of political operatives on various broadcast media attacking Syria policy or “The Iran Deal” with various degrees of heat. And the film can be faulted for being an insider’s inside look at Obama Era foreign policy, focusing on President Barack Obama, Secretary of State John Kerry, U. N. Ambassador Power and Deputy National Security Adviser and speech writer Ben Rhodes.

But the overarching idea is the simple contrast of remembering what political, administrative competence looks like. For all the media and political talking heads hacks heat about “America’s standing in the world” and the ongoing struggle to manage the crisis in Syria, “The Final Year” is jaw-dropping in the nostalgia it creates for a time when “THIS is all we had to worry about.”

Most glaring of all is the movie’s one moment of scandal. Rhodes, a brash true-believer who exudes a sort of “smartest guy in the room” confidence, gave an interview to the New York Times Magazine about how the White House managed a DC press corps that was getting younger, greener and dumber thanks to the collapse of newspapers and other legacy media enterprises, making it easier to shape the Obama narrative and also, it is implied, creating the callow online headline-chasing coverage that led to the rise of Trump.

“All these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus,” Rhodes told The Times. “Now they don’t. They call us to explain to them what’s happening in Moscow and Cairo. Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”

That’s it. That’s what a “White House Scandal” used to look like, an adviser speaking bluntly about a “sea change” in the competence of the press covering the government.

“The Final Year” isn’t a great film. It’s so “verite” — bouncing along with Kerry and Powers, Rhodes and Obama as they jet from Vienna to Nigeria, Vietnam to Cuba, fighting fires and tamping down future fires — that it can feel like hagiography.

The chilling and then deflating moments come when we see Trump convention coverage in the background of an historic Obama trip to Laos, hear Rhodes complaining about the staggering accomplishments on the foreign policy front that “final year” (with the glaring exception of Syria, Russian-meddled into a murderous quagmire), all ignored in favor “of something Trump tweeted.”

The documentary’s subjects start facing questions, “What’s going ON with America?” Troubled foreign folks who cross their path express worry about Brexit and what that could herald with America’s 2016 election. The rise of Trump, Rhodes notes, “is already having a cost,” even before the electorate lashes out and elects him.

Power, the daughter of Irish immigrants, has lovely moments of listening to Nigerian mothers weep and rage at losing their daughters to kidnappers of Boko Haram, or choking up, remembering her own story as she swears in new citizens taking the oath.

But the most revealing moments are simple, inside-voice conversations with all involved, especially the ones where Obama talks about the secret to his rise and his ongoing way of shaping messages — “story.” His “story,” told in the way he chose to tell it, got him elected. “America’s Story,” a great tale summarized by The Declaration of Independence, secured America’s place in the world’s consciousness.

Or at least it did until Jan. 20 of 2017.

MPAA Rating: unrated, mild profanity

Cast: Barack Obama, Samantha Powers, John Kerry, Ben Rhodes

Credits: Directed by Greg Barker  A Magnolia/HBO Films release.

Running time: 1:33

Andy Goldsworthy makes art where he finds it — in decaying forests, in snow-covered fields, on streets where he might lie down just as a light rain is beginning. His “ghost” is his dry body shape, which you see on the wet street after he gets up.

It is natural art — made of wood, clay, leaves, flower-petals spewed into the air, and stone — “site-specific” and often mind-bogglingly ephemeral, and not just the wet street he might decorate with what looks like with his dry spot.

He’s world-famous for his stone carvings and assemblages, fallen trees that he covers with yellow leaves, in season, snowballs when winter comes. And he’s something of a muse to art documentarian Thomas Riedelsheimer. Riedelsheimer has filmed or directed a number of documentaries about artists, including “Breathing Earth,” about Japanese “wind” artist Susumu Shingu, and the film that first brought Goldsworthy to the attention of many of us, “Rivers and Tides: Andy Goldsworthy Working with Time.”

“Leaning into the Wind” is their latest collaboration, following the artist from rural Brazil, admiring the sturdy, hand-built houses, the care with which an old woman patches and polishes a homemade floor out of clay and “bull-s–t,” to the fields and hills of his home in Scotland to the stone walls overrun with forest in the hills of New Hampshire.

A favorite — “Wood Line,” a minimalist wavy path of connected logs in the Presidio, San Francisco.

Riedelsheimer listens as Goldworthy talks about “trying to understand the process is how something is made” (the hovel in Brazil) and embraces the decay in a broken-down tree line. “This sliver of trees, a burn (creek) running through it” makes him appreciate the lifetime of work decorating the fallen elms (Dutch Elm Disease) he sees, art made by nature itself.

It takes a team of craftsmen — tree surgeons, New Hampshire stone-cutters — to realize Goldsworthy’s visions. His daughter Holly also pitches in, and Goldsworthy himself seems handy with all manner of stonesaws and chainsaws. “The farm” was what inspired him, long before art school, he admits.

One fascinating sequence lets us watch a dead tree dropped and scored, by chainsaw (by the artist himself) for an installation that will move that tree into a cottage which he will then coat in clay, the tree as well, which changes appearance as the clay dries and cracks.

There’s a limit to how much interest something as static as the creative process can create on film. Films like start to feel repetitive after an hour, even if we’re seeing static works of art in the process of creation. But Riedelsheimer manages a deft portrait of a creative mind in a simple scene that unfolds under the opening credits.

Split screens capture Goldsworthy as he notices a beam of light boring a spot on the floor of that Brazilian hut. He tosses dust in the air, outlining the beam all the way through the room, changing it from moment to moment.

The objects he assembles or carves out of stone will outlive him, but it’ll only be a hint of the mind that saw beauty in the destruction, decay and rebirth that nature itself was creating all around him.

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast: Andy Goldsworthy, Holly Goldsworthy

Credits:  Directed by Thomas Riedelsheimer. A Magnolia release.

Running time: 1:35

On the one hand, you had me at “Fellini.” And then there’s sunny Italy, a boon to any film’s setting, especially an indie one. And Maria Bello, Earth Momma extraordinaire.

On the other hand, it’s yet another coming-of-age romance, and they’re about to join vampire movies and zombie pics on my “Enough already” list.

Can’t tell much about it from its trailer. But again, somebody was at least THINKING Fellini, so there’s that and there’s hope. Nancy Cartwright (“The Simpsons”) co-wrote “In Search of Fellini.”

Yeah, it’s just another Liam Neeson B-movie thriller.

Yes, we’ve seen “The Commuter” before. Hell, we’ve seen it starring Liam
Neeson and also directed by Jaume Collet-Serra. Only that film was set on a plane, not a train, and it was titled “Non-Stop.”

If you can’t guess where this is going by the presence of big-name actors showing up in the credits and in a brief opening scene, you must not get out much.

But this tale of an ordinary Joe being blackmailed to get somebody killed on his daily commute from NYC to Tarrytown, NY is an action picture whose aging hero we care about and root for, a thriller with tension and style, a B-movie Hitchcock would have been happy to call his own.

From its simple but effective prologue, a montage showing the daily routine of Irish ex-pat Michael MacCauley (Neeson), a married insurance agent with a ready-to-trade-houses wife (Elizabeth McGovern), a kid ready to enroll at pricey Syracuse U. and two mortgages, Collet-Serra (“Orphan,” “The Shallows,” “Run All Night”) demonstrates a spare storytelling style with a dazzling eye and a flair for cutting.

Mike’s daily trek includes whatever novel his kid is reading in English class (You don’t get into Syracuse without knowing your English lit), a smile for a train full of familiar, friendly faces (In New York?) and an honest effort to put in another honest day’s work.

Then he’s laid off, cut loose at 60, too broke to have a back-up plan, too horrified to tell his wife. He loses his phone getting onto the train.

And that’s when the mysterious and sexy Joanna (Vera Farmiga) parks herself in the opposite, hum-brags about studying human behavior and posits a pop quiz.

“Someone on this train doesn’t belong,” she says. Could Mike figure out who? Suppose there was a $100,000 payoff if he finds this someone called “Prin?” Could he finger that person, accept a bag of cash and “never know the consequences of what you did?”

She says it’s all “hypothetical,” but we know better, even if Mike is slow to embrace that. “What kind of person are you?” she teases. He’s about to find out.

Mike, it turns out, is an ex-cop. He’s a curious sort who looks for the hidden envelope with the down-payment on the deed. And just as he’s about to do the smart thing, exit the train and maybe call old buddies on the force, the trap is sprung. He’s taken the cash and now he’s got to go through with whatever he’s agreed to.

Thrillers like this rely on a vast array of tech (spy cameras and/or microphones) and a seemingly endless supply of henchmen for unseen villains who can demonstrate their seriousness by pushing a fellow commuter in front of a bus at the next stop. They’re pulling the strings from afar. They’re on board with him, waiting for him to figure out who the mystery rider is for them. They’re armed and murderous.

Seeing Neeson defy Father Time — sort of — has been one of the pleasures of B-movie watching these past several years. The ex-boxer is still convincing taking a beating in a brawl, still willing be that guy, bloodied and increasingly frantic, stalking the aisles of a commuter train, looking for whoever or whatever his tormentors tell him to find. They just might have his wife and son.

Collet-Serra sends his camera hurtling down the center aisle of all the cars in the train, keeps his camera hand-held and jittery when he’s not staging (with digital help) those suspense-building tracking shots. And with his help, Neeson’s Mike seems more manic, more “put this guy on a watch list” as he interrogates/confronts strangers and tries with little success to not come off as a stalker or cop-turned-terrorist.

The train, like the Orient Express, is stuffed with types — the jerk broker who used to work for Goldman Sachs, the put-upon school girl, the frazzled nurse, the backslapping card player.

Farmiga is unfortunately largely off-camera, making threats via cell-phone — “Don’t make me hurt someone else,” and the like. Patrick Wilson plays Mike’s former partner and confidante, Sam Neill is the colleague who made it to Captain, and veteran character player Jonathan Banks is a grizzled fellow commuter of Mike’s acquaintance.

Yet “The Commuter,” like the  “Taken” movies and “Non-Stop” and others of his hair-dyeing action dotage, succeeds or fails on Neeson’s broad shoulders. He commits to these characters and, as blood spills and he suffers through tussle after tussle, cliff-hanger after cliffhanger — kinetically staged by Collet-Serra — we believe in him.

Even if we know what he’s got to do long before he does. Even if we know it’s just a formulaic B-movie, Neeson never lets on that he does, or that he’s giving anything less than his Oscar-deserving best.

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for some intense action/violence, and language.

Cast: Liam Neeson, Vera Farmiga, Patrick Wilson, Sam Neill, Elizabeth McGovern

Credits:Directed by Jaume Collet-Serra, script by Byron Willinger, Philip di Blasi, Ryan Engle. A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1:43

Thomas Middleditch is that lanky, likeable put-upon Canadian star of “Silicon Valley” and too many Verizon commercials to count. Maybe he can’t convince you to switch cell phone services, but his EveryShlump image makes him easy to pity and root for.

He’s the pleasantly suicidal center “Entanglement,” an amusing romantic comedy of limited ambition but an exceptionally light touch. He and it are just winsome enough to work.

We don’t have to read “Telefilm Canada” in the producing credits to taste the maple leaf syrup here. We meet Ben (Middleditch) as he is composing a suicide note. It’s apologetic — very Canadian. He’s just lost, a lovelorn loner trapped “inside the pattern” of his life, determined to “find a way to get out.”

Running a hose from his vintage Volvo’s tailpipe up into his apartment just gets his car stolen. He doesn’t have the right pills to pull off Plan B. You’ve got to plug the toaster in BEFORE you toss it into the tub with you. At least his pen knife is sharp enough to do the trick — slowly.

But in his most Canadian act of all, the buzzer rings for his apartment building and he’s too polite to leave the person standing at the door. He staggers out of the crimson tub to answer it and a package delivery guy saves his life.

Months later, he’s lying on the floor, talking to a shrink (Johannah Newmarch of “Supernatural”). He’s over “Claire,” the woman who broke his heart. He’s much better.

“Do you LIKE yourself?”

“As a friend? A friend with benefits?”

OK, she’s a child psychologist and this isn’t really her thing. Ben needs to sort out “where my life went wrong” for himself. And when his dad, panicked over a heart attack, tells him he and Ben’s mother adopted a girl only to give her up when mom had Ben, the suicidal son thinks he has his answer.

“I could have had a SISTER? You have any idea how FORMATIVE that is?”

“Entanglement” is about tracking down, meeting (cute) that “sister,” and falling for Hanna (Jess Weixler) as she seems to answer his Big Life Questions for him, putting down the coincidence of their connecting to the universe and “Quantum Entanglement” — the idea that particles and people might be invisibly bonded in ways that seem like mere chance but feel like a grand design.

When you set out to keep your romantic comedy quick and to the point, the challenge is in making random moments funny in ways that advance the plot. How’s he find this “sister?” A stern social services employee who refuses to give out her name turns out to hate his job and can be corrupted for just $50.

Middleditch is forlorn in all the usual long-faced rom-com ways, and Weixler ( TV’s “The Good Wife,” “The Son”) makes a swaggering, forward flirt of the first order, great at snappy banter and a challenge to Ben’s self-absorbed wimpiness. She rides a man’s bicycle. Ben?

“You’re riding a girl’s bike!”

“It’s UNISEX!”

Then there’s Ben’s too-helpful neighbor, the sweet and supportive Tabby. Diana Bang plays her with a touching open-heartedness. We can feel her longing for Ben as he throws himself at the blonde with the boots, even as she’s giving the stereotypical Asian supporting character common sense lecture.

“She’s probably catfishing you!”

Even in a short and relatively brisk comedy like this, some ideas fall flat. Ben’s fantasy life is limited to seeing adorable puppet deer in the woods when he’s with Hanna, or glowing jellyfish in the city pool she breaks them into for a midnight swim. His would-be therapist uses a bear puppet, and sometimes the bear talks to him.

But the script has laugh-out-loud moments and zippy exchanges. Middleditch and Weixler give this smarts and just enough sexy sass to work. And Bang gives it heart.

Which adds up to an “Entanglement” that you’ll be in no hurry to rid yourself of.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with suicide attempts, profanity, adult situations

Cast: Thomas Middleditch, Jess Weixler, Diana Bang, Johannah Newmarch

Credits:Directed by Jason James, script by Jason Filiatrault . A Dark Star release.

Running time: 1:25

You don’t have to be a film buff to remember Gloria Grahame. We see her every Christmas, as Violet, the good-hearted Bedford Falls floozy in “It’s a Wonderful Life.”

An Oscar winner in “The Bad and the Beautiful,” a “Girl who cain’t say no” in “Oklahoma!,” a bit player in “Melvin and Howard,” she was a talented character actress who cut a wide and memorable swath across Hollywood in her day.

But like all of us, life caught up with her, demand for her services dropped and she found herself sick and in need of comfort and care, far from home. And that was going to be a problem. As everybody knows, “Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool.”

Her final days make for a sad, downbeat movie based on a self-serving memoir by the man who, with his family, cared for her at the end. Peter Turner’s book of that title recounts taking Grahame in (she was on tour) when she fell ill in Liverpool in the early ’80s, and recalls a 1979 May-November romance between himself, a struggling young actor, and the scandalous Grahame, who as they used to put it so quaintly back then, “liked’em young.”

Jamie Bell plays Turner in the film, a man we meet when he re-connects with Grahame (Annette Bening) upon her return to the Liverpool stage. She’s all aflutter and nostalgic. But she’s not well.

“I just had gas is all.”

A little mothering by Peter’s mom (Julie Walters) is all it’ll take to set her right. But as Peter takes her home and puts away her things, he sees prescriptions and medical records. This isn’t just “gas.”

We’re taken back to their flirtatious meeting a couple of years before, when Peter was in his early 20s and the fiftysomething Grahame first turned her feminine wiles and girlish voice on this strapping young working class actor with limited prospects.

They court, visit her old movies at a cinema revival house and talk shop. Gloria wants to know how to get into the Royal Shakespeare Company. Whatever her screen persona, she wants to be taken seriously as an actress. She’s always wanted to try her hand at Juliet.

“You mean the Nurse, right?” is the worst thing he could have said. Accurate, but mean.

Peter is swept up in a Gloria’s little corner of the world, traveling to New York where they make themselves seen in the same restaurant Liza-with-a-Z haunts.

Hollywood means seeing how a four-times divorced fading star lives — well enough, but sans mansions and the finery of her peak earning power. Vanessa Redgrave plays Gloria’s indulgent mother. Her sister (Frances Barber) is the there to remind her of her failings, the scandal of taking up with one husband’s barely-teenage son, later marrying the kid.

But it’s in Liverpool, far from home, that Gloria feels the most special. When Peter first takes her out, a barman has to fill him in on her back story.

“Proper film star, she was. Won an Oscar, too, if memory serves.”

His mother, doting on her during her illness, is equally starstruck.

“You’re so bloody beautiful!”

“Well, I was.”

The film seems caught up in a scandalous affair that seems fairly mild by today’s standards. Peter confesses his omnivorous sexuality, inviting Gloria to admit to the same. The age difference? Eyebrow-raising, nothing more.

The real scandals that enveloped Grahame are closer to something ripped from today’s headlines, and just remind us how odd it is for any of us to act shocked at the predatory, indulgent kinkiness that has long been the currency of the movie business. Grahame derailed her career after allegedly having sex with a 13 year-old, won an Oscar for co-starring in a movie about a ruthless, manipulative user of a producer (Kirk Douglas) and spent much of her career playing tarts.

It’s chilling to recall how close Mira Sorvino came to impersonating Grahame’s almost childish sex-kitten voice and persona in her Oscar-winning turn for Woody Allen in “Mighty Aphrodite.”

Bell makes a sturdy, thoughtful foil suggesting more than a hint of bisexual about Peter. But what makes “Films Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool” is Bening’s performance, which is as one might expect is much more than mere impersonation. Having the same pointy chin as Grahame means that showing the real GG, in still photos and on the big screen, just makes it easier to believe this is how this aged starlet would have looked pushing 60. Bening gives her a hint of self-awareness, dignity and desperation. The great ones are always most worried about that next acting job, come health or high water.

Director Paul McGuigan’s sorry record on screen (“Lucky Number Slevin” was a low, “Wicker Park” a lower-low) partly explains why this picture doesn’t have the requisite highs that precede the lows. There’s never a giddy moment, never a hint of “My Favorite Year” nostalgia for her superstar past or in her recapture-my-youth-with-another-younger-man tale. Turner is seen having an affair with a woman who seems to be running from her shame rather than owning it.

So nothing in Bening’s spot-on interpretation can lift this glum, joyless film, even excepting the terminal illness hanging over it.

MPAA Rating:R for language, some sexual content and brief nudity

Cast: Annette Bening, Jamie Bell, Julie Walters, Vanessa Redgrave, Kenneth Cranham

Credits:Directed by Paul McGuigan, script by Matt Greenhalgh, based on the memoir by Peter Turner. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

Running time: 1:45

Early returns understated the beat-down “Jumanji” would deliver to “The Last Jedi” this weekend. Granted, everybody’s already seen the latest “Star Wars” movie. And nobody’s seeing it twice.

But the final projected take for this weekend (actuals come Monday afternoon) were even more emphatic.

“Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle,” on its third weekend of release, did a whopping $36 million.

“Insidious: The Last Key,” a new release, earned nearly $30 million.

“Star Wars: The Last Jedi,” on far more screens than either of those (and in its fourth week of release) plummeted to $23 million. 

Among the potential awards contenders, “Greatest Showman” is showcasing Hugh Jackman at the end of a year when he starred in the critically acclaimed blockbuster, “Logan.” It will be at the $80 million+ mark by the start of next weekend, and should clear $100 million.  Especially if there’s good news on the Golden Globes front tonight, and Oscar nominations next week.

“Molly’s Game” opened at $7 million and shoved “The Shape of Water” out of the top ten. “Shape” added theater and lost audience. Whatever its Oscar chances, audiences aren’t warming to it en masse.

“I, Tonya” almost passed it and is only on a quarter of the screens “Shape” is.

“Three Billboards,” “Call Me by Your Name” and “The Disaster Artist” are doing middling business, with “Name” doing well enough per-screen to merit wider release next week.

“Wonder” may not be an Oscar sleeper, but it is a box office one. It’s over $126 million now.

If you thought “Paddington” was as adorable as a kids’ movie about a talking bear could get, you were mistaken. “Paddington 2” sees your “adorable” and raises it with an “inutterably charming,” an Oscar winner and a couple of other prime Brit and Irish character actors. It’s even sweeter, cheek-pinchingly cute and fun to boot.

The London bear (animated, delicately voiced by Ben Whishaw) named for a train station wants to send the aunt who raised him a rare pop-up book that his favorite London antiques dealer (Jim Broadbent, with an Eastern European accent) has for sale.

But there’s this plummy, aging has-been actor (Hugh Grant, PERFECT) who hears about the valuable book from him, and designs to steal it. Paddington is framed for the crime.

“Paddington Goes to the Pokey” ensues. And that’s where Paddington’s ever-so-proper English manners are put to greatest use.

“My Aunt always said, ‘If we’re kind and polite, the world will be right.'”

Prison food is the pits? Take it up with the cook, Knuckels (sic). He’s a gregarious grouch (Brendan Gleeson) but darned if that sweet-mannered bear and his recipe for marmalade don’t win him and the diverse and brutishly whimsical prison population (Noah Taylor of “Shine” among them) over.

The first Paddington movie had enough promise that the cream of British character acting — Sally Hawkins and Hugh Bonneville (funny) return as his “parents,” Julie Walters as the grandmother — raced to sign up for it. And that’s exploded by leaps and bounds for this sequel. Peter Capaldi is the anti-bear martinet neighbor, Joanna Lumley is an agent, Imelda Stanton and Michael Gambon do the voices of the bears who raised Paddington and Tom Conti is the gruff judge who bears a haircut grudge.

Paddington’s prison sentence is based, in part, “on grievous barberly harm.”

And then there’s the Former Pharaoh of Forelock himself, the esteemed Mr. Grant. He lets loose his inner ham for Phoenix Buchanan, once a Prince of the West End Stage, now reduced to donning a dog costume and doing ever-so-proper dogfood commercials, and opening fairs. Grant wraps his tongue around every locution, every punch-line, most of them puns about plays he’s been in.

“Prison is no laughing matter. And I should know. I spent THREE years in ‘Les MIZ!'”

The delightful bluster of Gleeson is topped only by Grant’s outright glee at playing this old actor who dons costumes for capers, and recites lines (in character) to his Scrooge, Magwitch, Hamlet and Poirot (Take THAT Kenny Branagh!) costumes, which he treats as confidants.

I love the light, intensely likable lilt Whishaw (“Q” in the latest James Bond films) gives Paddington’s line-readings. You forget the bear is animated and that bears can’t talk, and your children won’t even need that much encouragement to suspend disbelief.

The sight gags — bear as window-washer, bear as prison cook, bear on the lam from the law — are of a higher order than the first film. The prison newspaper? “Hard Times.” Its headlines? “‘Get out of Jail Free’ card not not legally binding,” “Dry Cleaner’s Money Laundering Case Being Ironed Out.”

Yes, it’s a little long and the opening — a flashback to Paddington’s cubhood and a quick survey of all the lives he touches in his little corner of London — mean that it takes a while to get going.

But the only worry these delightful movies encourage is that Warner Brothers will keep making them after they’ve run out of Bear Living in London jokes, English sightseeing and English sight-gags. “Paddington 2” promises that is still quite a ways off.

MPAA Rating:PG for some action and mild rude humor

Cast: The voice of Ben Whishaw, Sally Hawkins, Hugh Grant, Julie Walters, Brendan Gleeson, Hugh Bonneville, Peter Capaldi, Noah Taylor

Credits:Directed by, Paul King, script by Paul King, Simon Farnaby, based on the Paddington books by Michael Bond. A Warner Brothers release.

Running time: 1:43

Catching a movie after its hype has peaked is always an exercise in “What’d others see in this?” “Mudbound,” far-removed from Sundance, “The Shape of Water” extracted from its fanboy fawnathon can feel empty, thin and lacking.

Remove the film festival groupthink hype.  Abandon the scenic Italian locations from “Call Me by Your Name,” change the romance from gay to straight and strip away the Jewishness and its rather heavy-handed “ahead of their times” tolerance among the parents of the teen boy who falls for his father’s pretty summer grad student assistant.

What you’re left with is a soapy routine romance, teasing and melodramatic, a boy “discovering” himself and gaining “experience” in a sexual sense over a summer. With its rural Italian vistas, a house set in a fruit orchard with lots of lightly-pretentious people reading French poetry in German, debating the etymology of “apricot” and noting the origins of the water in a particular Italian swimmin’ hole, the term “overripe” enters the judgement.

Because there’s lots of swimming, cycling, shorts and shirtlessness. Of course.

It’s Bertolucci’s “Stealing Beauty” without Liv Tyler or Bertolucci, and being scripted by that languorous period-piece prince, James Ivory (“A Room With a View,” etc.), it’s 85 minutes of story in a two hour and 12 minute movie.

Throw in a curious, horny boy having sex with some of that overripe fruit and you’ve got notoriety, “American Pie” with less…baking.

Michael Stuhlbarg is the archaeologist patriarch of a family of “Jews with discretion,” Americans with a summer home in rural 1980s Italy. Amira Casar is his wife, who inherited the place and counseled their teenage son, Elio (Timothee Chalamet) on the whole “discretion” thing.

And he passes that on to their new house guest, Oliver (32 year-old Armie Hammer), an academic Adonis who’s come to help the professor with some work on ancient statuary newly recovered from the deep. Oliver wears a Star of David and has the confidence of the educated, monied and incredibly handsome.

Elio and Oliver share an adjoining bathroom, and the kid offers to show “the only other Jew to set foot in this town” around, by bike.

The skinny boy in the Ray Bans is an aspiring composer with growing confidence in his own right. He’s handsome and exotic (American) enough to warrant the attentions of a French teen (Esther Garrel) staying nearby, and naive and crass enough to figure sharing his sexual “progress” with her with his parents and their new houseguest is just being “open” and “honest.”

In Oliver’s case, he’s testing the waters. Engendering jealousy? Finding out which way the magazine-model blond swings?

And as “Let’s ride to town together” evolves into “Why don’t you and I take a swim?” he gets his answer, and a summer romance flowers. Kind of.

There’s little of the “forbidden fruit” of your typical gay coming-of-age romance, not with parents who seem not only to tolerate this inappropriate relationship, but to encourage it and even envy it.

They’re all etymologists. Don’t they know Ephebophilia when they see it? Oh, right, they’re in Europe. Draw your own conclusions as to why the author and screenwriter keep underlining their Jewishness.

I mean, it’s not “Summer of ’42” or “The Reader,” but we’re no longer venerating this “lover of experience” initiation ritual, or are we? If the gay community is ending Kevin Spacey’s career (assault, etc.) and we’re all turning our backs on all the literature, film (“L.I.E.”) and folk music (“Ode to a Gym Teacher”) about older lovers awakening/initiating the homosexuality of the young, then why is this affair excepted?

All the pains “Call Me by Your Name” goes to in declaring parental acceptance and having the kid the aggressor and Oliver’s many protests of “I want to be good” and the sun-drenched Italian scenery and age of consent don’t fundamentally excuse it, and actually calls to attention the idea that the filmmakers know “We shouldn’t be endorsing this.”

Last year’s justly-honored “Moonlight” offered the same lessons in embracing who you are and acceptance by adults without the overt, teased-out sexual rite-of-passage included. “Call Me” is rather flatly performed to boot, a gay fantasia of a 1983 when homophobia was abandoned and “bathroom bills” never saw the legislative light of day.

And for all the symbolism of curiosity, raging hormones and expanded horizons that having a boy masturbate with fruit might have had in Andre Aciman’s novel, on screen it’s just laughable, topped with a healthy dose of “ick.”

“Call Me by Your Name” isn’t so much a bad movie as a dull, bloated one, a tale of teen sexual intensity drawn out beyond the point of holding our interest, footnoted with all these spoken (repeatedly, by one and all) provisos — “This is OK because…”

That’s all well and good, but I found it lacking as drama, romance and period piece, a turgid potboiler overheated under the Tuscan sun.

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

Cast: Timothee Chalamet, Armie Hammer, Michael Stuhlbarg, Amira Casar, Esther Garrel

Credits:Directed by Luca Guadagnino script by James Ivory, based on the André Aciman novel. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

Running time: 2:12