Movie Nation

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

“Star Wars: The Last Jedi” owned the top of the box office charts for three weeks. It made a boatload of cash on a helluva lot of screens.

But unlike say, “Avatar,” it hasn’t turned out to be this phenomenon that grew and grew and then lingered and lingered. There’s a it of an audience disconnect. It lost huge chunks of its opening weekend audience right away, and has dropped off in the 55-60% range every weekend ever since.

So yeah, it cleared a $billion worldwide. But it was dethroned Monday, as “Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle” opened big and then held audience share week after week.

“Jumanji,” a body-switch comedy starring Dwayne Johnson, Kevin Hart, Jack Black and a self-mocking starlet dolled up like Lara Croft, will collect another whopping $36-37 million when all the cash is counted midnight Sunday. When a movie is connecting with the public, it loses 20-30% of its opening weekend audience every week. “Last Jedi’s” fall-off suggests otherwise.

The poorly-reviewed “Insidious: The Last Key,” with no “name” stars, is opening at $25.

“Last Jedi” may clear $23-24.

Oscar contenders like “Darkest Hour” are adding screens and growing at the box office. “The Greatest Showman” has legs — is collecting $12-15 million every weekend and could, if it gets a Golden Globes boost, suddenly find itself in “too big and ambitious to not get Oscar consideration” territory.

“Molly’s Game,” an Aaron Sorkin talk-a-thon with Jessica Chastain as its Oscar bait star, opens over $6.

“The Shape of Water” added theaters and still fell out of the top ten.  “The Post” has yet to open wide enough to crack that top ten. Tiny awards season pictures like “I, Tonya” and “Phantom Thread” haven’t opened wide at all, “The Disaster Artist” has faded away.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cast: Assorted random Russians, Belarusians, etc.

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

Running time: 1:09

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“She’s psychic, we’re the sidekicks!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Running time: 1:43

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Get Out, Written by Jordan Peele; Universal Pictures

I, Tonya, Written by Steven Rogers; Neon

Lady Bird, Written by Greta Gerwig; A24

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

ADAPTED SCREENPLAY

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

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

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

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

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

DOCUMENTARY SCREENPLAY

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

Jane, Written by Brett Morgen; National Geographic

No Stone Unturned, Written by Alex Gibney; Abramorama

Oklahoma City, Written by Barak Goodman; American Experience Films