Movie Nation

Those “Fifty Shades” dullards are still flirting, fornicating, breaking up and tying up in “Fifty Shades Darker,” a film which promises “darker” but delivers “funnier” — with some of the laughs intentional.

It’s a soapy sequel, a drinks-in-the-face/masked ball/helicopter crash/melodramatic mediocrity that a better director (James Foley of “Glengarry Glen Ross,” “At Close Range” and “A Perfect Stranger”) can’t lift above laughable.

Meanwhile, English author E.L. James, creator of the ridiculous names Anastasia Steele and Christian Grey, typist of such bon mots as “I don’t know whether to worship at your feet, or spank you,” laughs all the way to the bank.

And yes, Anastasia (Dakota Johnson) opts for “the second option.” Otherwise, there’d be no movie.

That’s an achingly obvious flaw in this S&M female wish-fulfillment fantasy. Anastasia (Ana) has broken off with the uber rich “most eligible bachelor” of Seattle (Jamie Dornan), eschewed the pleasures/pains of his “red room” of torture/teasing delights and started her career. But all he has to do is throw flowers her way and promise “New rules” for their sex-play/relationship, and she’s on her back or on her knees again.

The “Darker” of the title refers to the consequences of Christian’s form of sexual release. One of his former “subs” (submissive to his dominance), a tortured soul played without a hint of pathos by Bella Heathcote, is stalking Ana. His initiator (Kim Basinger) into the world of bondage, whips, etc. is still in his life, warning Ana off, disapproving of her in every way.

S&M creates bonds for life. Apparently.

And all the poor girl really wants to do is impress her stubbly, hair-flopped-over-one-eye boss (Eric Johnson), the fiction editor at a Seattle publishing house. The novelist James seems to think it daring or telling that Ana would pursue professional ambitions when her celebrated suitor, who shows up everywhere in a convoy of Audis, could just say “It’s been taken care of” to her every want and need.

The film takes a stab–or cigarette burn — at creating motivations for Grey’s sexual deviance, flashbacks to a tortured childhood and “crack whore” mom. Yawn.

Give Foley credit for making the sex scenes — ten of them — some actual sexiness. He can’t give the fourth-choice actors cast in the leads chemistry, but he can make their copulation titillating and believable. Johnson isn’t outgrowing her mousy screen presence, but at least she’s mastered her orgasm face. Ben Wa balls, elevator gropes and the like have certainly given her enough practice.

It’s all so opulent, from the penthouse Grey calls home to the family mansion (Marcia Gay Harden is his mother, giving this film two Oscar winners) that spawned him, to the stunning, cavernous apartment that Ana manages on an office assistant’s salary.

And it’s all so decadent and empty, designer duds gained without struggle, “trust” and “win her back with the Big Romantic Gesture” moments with no heart, sex without love.

Worst of all, this two-hour clock watcher that doesn’t really go anywhere is the merely the set-up for a third film, whose title at least promises some relief.

“Fifty Shades Freed.” Can’t wait for that.

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

Cast: Dakota Johnson, Jamie Dornan, Kim Basinger, Marcia Gay Harden, Bella Heathcoate

Credits:Directed by James Foley, script by Niall Leonard, based (screenplay), E.L. James . A Universal  release.

Running time: 1:53

Paramount has revived “The Ring” cycle with “Rings,” a middling update that has few of the chills and little of the suspense of the J-horror original, or its Hollywood version.

The ever-cloudy Pacific Northwest is still home to “the videotape that kills you if you watch it.” That’s a story related by one young passenger to another on an airline flight.

He looks at his watch, figures he’s safe unless something happens “in the next five minutes.” And, well, you know.

Two years later, Julia (Matilda Anna Ingrid Lutz) says her sweet good-byes to her college-bound beau, Holt (Alex Roe). She wonders what’s up when, within weeks, his Skype sexting sessions stop and he won’t answer his phone. She dashes to Spokane to investigate.

The foreshadowing here is that their love is to be as strong as Orpheus and Eurydice, from Greek myth. He was the lover who pursued his dead love to the underworld in order to save her. Julia has let Holt and us know that the days of women being damsels rescued by dudes are gone.

And Holt, it turns out, is in need of her commitment and sacrifice. He’s watched the tape, a hodgepodge of black and white images of a suicide, a well, flies and assorted other images — “clues” as to who haunts the tape, and who is coming to get you.

Holt has seen it. As it turns out, a careless/callous college professor (Johnny Galecki of “Big Bang Theory”) has loosed his students onto the tape, and loosed it onto them. It’s some sort of biology/afterlife experiment. No, it’s not likely to get him tenure.

Julia experiences the horror first-hand, is warned away from watching the tape by Holt, but plunges into the nightmare he and others are living and the mystery their somewhat-clever professor hasn’t quite solved.

“Rings” then loses itself in that mystery, which if you remember the original films, was about a hirsute, murdered child rising out of the well to avenge herself on the world. The mystery is expanded and explained further here, which unravels the story’s inherent mystique.

It’s the random ruthlessness of Samara, the child ghost, that was so hair-raising in the earlier films. Knowing about her mother, changing the timeline of how long ago this crime happened, doesn’t improve the tale or the telling of it.

The deaths cooked up by three credited screenwriters aren’t creative and are only mildly creepy. Director F. Javier Gutierrez manages the lighting, but never the dread tone of the film that made Naomi Watts famous.

None of the cast brings anything like genuine terror or urgency to the proceedings. Only Vincent D’Onofrio, making a third act appearance, acquits himself with honor.

And the finale kind of spoiled the generous mood I was in up to that point — “Well, I’ve seen worse.”

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for violence/terror, thematic elements, some sexuality and brief drug material

Cast: Matilda Anna Ingrid Lutz, Alex Roe, Johnny Galecki, Vincent D’Onofrio

Credits:Directed by F. Javier Gutiérrez , script by  David Loucka, Jacob Estes and Akiva Goldsman, based on the novel by Koji Suzuki. A Paramount release.

Running time: 1:47

The fists fly, the bullets blaze and the mayhem borders on magnificent in “John Wick: Chapter 2,” a sequel that ups the artistic ante even as it boosts the body count of that sleeper hit about the assassin’s assassin played by Keanu Reeves.

John Wick is “the legend, the myth,” “a man of focus, commitment and sheer f—ing will,” “the boogeyman,” “the ghost, ‘lo spettro,'” and “death’s very emissary.” So everybody in “Chapter 2” says.

It doesn’t matter that Wick, in Keanu’s spare, hoarse voice, mutters “I’m not that guy any more,” to one an all. To everyone who knows him — and that means pretty much everyone in the movie — he still is.

In a bravura opening gambit, stuntman turned “Wick” director Chad Stahelski hurls us back into the action of the first film — a noisy, nervy vintage car (1970 Chevelle SS) vs motorcycle chase that brings Wick to the Russian mob that stole his Boss Mustang and shot his dog.

Peter Stormare is the mob boss — Russians make the best villains, everybody except for Trump knows this — who fearfully regales a subordinate with the chaos that is coming their way. His hilarious reactions, simply hearing the sounds of Wick shooting, stabbing, beating up his minions and retrieving his car, reset the tone.

This is going to be bloody. Those in Wick’s underworld are going to be damned funny, comically querulous and resigned to their fates. And Keanu? He’s not going to say much, just the way he and we like him.

“Chapter 2” is about “a marker,” a chit Wick owes to a fellow member of the elite international underground mob. The oily, polished Santino (Ricardo Scamarico) is owed a hit. And he’s willing to blow up Wick’s house to make him repay a debt.

The code of killers means Wick will take the job. No honor among thieves means he’ll be double-crossed. And it doesn’t matter that the Italians and the rest of the elaborate underworld invented for the movie come after this killer with a staggeringly high price on his head. John Wick cannot be stopped, will not be denied his vengeance.

I love the world screenwriter Derek Kolstad and director Stahelski concoct for this. There’s a chain of mob hotels run by the likes of the glorious old pros Ian McShane and Franco Nero, hostelries where “no blood” can be “spilled,” safe havens for the likes of Wick or whatever mobster he is hunting. The sommelier of the Rome Continentale (Peter Serafinowicz, plummy perfection) doubles as a Fine Firearms for the Well-Dressed Murderer dealer. Guns, like wines, are “robust” or “dessert. The concierge of the Manhattan Continentale (Lance Reddick, deliciously decorous) takes personal service to even greater heights, taking in Wick’s pitbull. There are tailors (with sweatshops) catering to bulletproof fashions, map dealers offering underground escape routes, a panoply of professionals serving other professionals. 

Lawrence Fishburne is a laugh riot as “the Bowery King,” a sophisticate with a homing pigeon  (microchip delivery) scam and an army of “homeless” killers who sit, beg for change or ramble on in dementia as they watch the city, guns with silencers under their tattered ponchos. Ruby Rose is  sexy/scary as the deaf-mute killer in a lesbian chic bob who signs her oblique threats to Wick, who speaks sign language himself.

Reeves is stoic and focused and his adept, showboat gun handling has hints of TV cowboys of the ’50s, though his line-readings are as stiff as ever. Oscar winning singer/rapper Common doesn’t give us much in his scenes as Wick’s chief rival, the man hunting him down. They’re both overly concerned with the epic fight choreography they must master. At times, the overdone staging reveals itself as Reeves or Common can be seen waiting for the other’s next stage punch or lunge before throwing theirs. Jump cuts suggest the action is sped up for the actors’ benefits.

Shootouts — and there are oh-so-many — take place in glamorously-lit catacombs, an ancient crypt turned mafia queen’s boudoir and candlelit bath, Roman ruins turned into an elaborate laser light/house music rave, and in an art exhibit’s hall of mirrors.

It’s all too much, but also too much fun. The best thing one can say for “Chapter 2” is that it’s not spoiled by the knowledge that yeah, they’re hellbent on making Wick into a franchise, even as they shoot themselves into a corner. Again.

MPAA Rating: R for strong violence throughout, some language and brief nudity.

Cast: Keanu Reeves, Common, Peter Stormare, Ruby Rose, Ricardo Scamarcio, Ian McShane, Lawrence Fishburne,

Credits:Directed by Chad Stahelski, script by Derek Kolstad. A Summit release.

Running time: 2:02

With a little luck, the hashtag “oscarsowhite” will be but a distant memory when the 89th Annual Academy Awards are handed out Feb. 26.

You could see it in the nominations, which handed out a lot of love to “Moonlight,” “Lion” and “Fences.”

You can see it in Denzel’s surprise win at the Screen Actor’s Guild Awards. Sure, the season-long love fest has been for “La La Land” — it’s always daring when Hollywood dares to shower its love on itself (See “Crash,” “Argo,” etc.). But “Fences” and other pictures seem to have a certain momentum in the buzz. Black actors matter, and so do other performers of color.

And you can see it in the odds bookmakers are giving for Academy Awards, especially those at SportsBettingDime.com , which suggest that maybe the momentum is shifting. Perhaps Affleck is earning the perception of “damaged goods,” perhaps the giddiness over “La La Land” is fading.

Trevor Dueck at Sports Betting Dime says, sure, “La La Land” is still the heavy favorite for Best Picture. And Damien Chazelle seems like a lock for best director.

Ruth Negga is a 15/1 long shot for best actress in the Oscar-ignored “Loving,” my pick for the best picture of 2016 (but not Oscar’s).

But Denzel has closed the gap with best actor favorite Casey Affleck (7/3 on Affleck, 3/1 Washington). The SAG win could signal a tilt in Washington’s direction.

Washington’s co-star in the film he also directed, “Fences,” seems like a lock. The long-deserving Viola Davis (13/7) is where the smart money is going pre-Oscar night.

Mahershala Ali of “Moonlight” is best supporting actor favorite (3/2).

African-American director Barry Jenkins of “Moonlight” is given a very good shot at a best director upset (3/1) but is the favorite (13/7) for best adapted screenplay.

And look at the Oscar nominated feature documentaries. “I Am Not Your Negro,” “The 13th,” and “O.J.: Made in America” — all tightly knotted among the oddsmakers, all African-American subject non-fiction films.

A lot of these predictions don’t jibe with the Golden Globes, but I had the sense, watching a little of that telecast this year and scanning the list of winners, that the Globes have lost the last vestige of their “best Oscar predictor/steal Oscar’s thunder” relevance. Critics Choice Awards, SAG, DGA — still reliable indicators.

And if you’re the wagering sort, that’s what you want.

There was probably never a time when Gore Verbinski could have made a small scale horror picture about a man trapped in a sanitarium. Think of the glorious excesses of “Mouse Hunt.” And that came before the blank check that the “Pirates of the Caribbean” franchise guaranteed.

So it’s no surprise that “A Cure for Wellness” suffers from elephantiasis. It’s too long, entirely too gorgeous with stunning sets, striking lighting and design, with a finale that is entirely over-the-top.

The visual cues are from Kubrick and Hitchcock — imagery suggesting “The Shining” and “A Clockwork Orange” and Hitch’s “Spellbound.” There’s a hint of Tony Gilroy’s “Michael Clayton” in the conspiracies — business and otherwise — in its plot.

What “Cure” doesn’t do particularly well is introduce a mystery, add menace and heighten suspense in racing towards a conclusion. There’s no “Race” for the “Cure.” Still, it’s just chilling to experience, a novel and thought-provoking take on what ails us and our fruitless search for relief.

Dane DeHaan (“Spider-Man 2”) is Lockhart, a workaholic rising star at a Wall Street firm whose CEO has gone AWOL. There’s panic and menace in the board as they openly blackmail Lockhart into traveling to the Swiss Alps to retrieve a man whose signature is needed on a desperately needed merger, and whose latest communique is, frankly, a tad demented.

Pembroke (Harry Groener) has lost the plot, or maybe found enlightenment with his musings on “the toxin of self-doubt written into our genetic code” in search of “the illusion” of success.

Either way, the firm’s not having it. And Lockhart flies out, takes a train and then a private car to the exclusive-beyond-exclusive mountaintop retreat where everyone engages in tai chi, plays badminton and croquet in pajamas and robe, eats sumptuous meals and takes “the cure.”

The staff of the Volmer Institute seem robotic…or just Swiss in the extreme. The patients, all aged and seemingly a little loopy, let on that “people tend to stay” once they’ve come there. Lockhart’s blunt urgency is met with indifference. But Director Volmer seems reasonable, insisting that this place is just”an enforced vacation.” Of course Pembroke can leave.

“He’s a patient, not a prisoner.”

As the good director/doctor is played by Jason Isaacs, we don’t believe him for a moment.

Lockhart finds himself trapped there, in a robe, “drinking plenty of (medicinal spring) water” and taking “vitamins” by eye dropper — like everyone else. But he’s suspicious and in control of enough of his wits that the torpor of the patients, all the water cures and “off limits” (written in German) signs for wings of this castle-turned-spa make him hunt for answers.

Could there be something to the animosity the townsfolk have for the “people on the hill,” something more than class resentment? Could the place’s troubled Gothic history reveal all?

DeHaan is perfectly cast as the pasty-faced, sweaty, smart but physically over-matched Young Man of the City utterly out of his element in this place where the “sick” are handled with rough, muscular Germanic efficiency. DeHaan keeps the guy interesting even as he seems unable to string his investigations and suspicions into a workable course of action.

The film’s bigger themes, about wellness and an age where end-of-life care is more technologically advanced than humane (Lockhart’s mother is in a home with dementia) are fascinating and high-minded. That explains the film’s funereal pace. “This is IMPORTANT.”

So long, entrancing shots of shiny, mirror-windowed train circling through the mountains, the camera lingering over the exquisite baroque design of the spa’s baths, grounds and repeated images of the patients’ routine — water exercising, dining al fresco, badminton — must be tolerated, even if the horror gravitas seems unsustainable.

It’s frustrating that Lockhart’s understanding of the place reaches a certain point — the aged English patient (Celia Imrie) and winsome young flake (Mia Goth) are only so much help — and stalls, for basically an hour.

And the climax, like the digital deer that crashes Lockhart’s limo leading to his internment as a patient, is fraudulently deflating. All this effort, so little expense spared, and the long-delayed payoff is — well, this?

Verbinski’s efforts to say “This is IMPORTANT” only make us wonder, “Is it?”

MPAA Rating: R for disturbing violent content and images, sexual content including an assault, graphic nudity, and language

Cast: Dane DeHaan, Jason Isaacs, Mia Goth, Celia Imrie

Credits:Directed by Gore Verbinski, script by Justin Haythe, story by Gore Verbinski and Justin Haythe. A 20th Century Fox release.

Running time: 2:23

It’s early November, 1939. Hitler and the Soviet Union have invaded Poland, Britain and France have honored treaties and World War II has officially begun in Europe.

And a mop-topped workman, his teeth clenching a flashlight, his hands and knees bloodied with effort, is finishing up a job. He’s filling a pillar at an infamous Munich beer hall with dynamite, setting the elaborate clockwork trigger, and carefully concealing his handiwork.

When others fell in line behind the Nazi regime, while children completed their sixth year of Brown Shirt/Hitler Youth indoctrination, when Reds and other dissenters either joined Jews in concentration camps, fled or went into hiding, machinist/clock builder and master woodworker Georg Elser saw a problem with a simple solution.

As one of his interrogators later put it, to Elser, “Hitler is war — and if he goes, there will be peace.”

“Downfall” director Oliver Hirshbiegel‘s “13 Minutes” is a taut, smart and straightforward bio-drama of this largely forgotten early figure in German resistance to the Hitler regime. Christian Friedel (“The White Ribbon”) makes Elser a sympathetic, over-compensating laborer whose hard life and personal disappointments have as much to do with this assassination attempt as his seething outrage at the injustices and thuggery of the Nazis and Germany’s compliant masses.

We know, even those who don’t know Elser’s story, that he failed. Hitler dodged that bomb, just as he dodged the one by the “Valkyrie” plotters in 1944. The film’s nervy early minutes dispense with that part of the plot. Hitler speaks (audio of the real speech playing behind a look-alike at the podium), makes an early exit and Elser makes a clumsy attempt at a get-away.

Hitler survives and Elser is picked up at the Swiss border, his pockets stuffed with bomb-making gear and schematics. “13 Minutes” is about his interrogation,  and through flashbacks, the life that led him to his date with destiny.

“Heil Hitler, Herr Esler,” Nazi police official Arthur Nebe (the wonderful character actor Burghart Klaußner) offers, upon meeting the prisoner. Elser pauses, thinks and replies “Good day.”

Whatever else he’s done or failed to do in his life up to this point, Elser finds the bravery to not give an inch to the torturers who surround him, whip, punch and burn him with a hot icepick.

Hirschbiegel’s film, based on a script by Leonie-Claire and Fred Breinersdorfer, makes clear that Elser’s past had frustrations, guilt and shame that this one act might atone for.

A womanizing accordion player who later hums to his torturers, he took up with a married woman (Katherina Schuttler, flinty), rented a room in her house and stood by too long as her brute of a husband beat her.

He resents the obligations his drunken father has imposed on his life through his blundering, carelessness and incapacity. He winces, speaks out but shrinks when he first sees uniformed fascists bullying a helpless woman in front of the whole town. Smart-mouthing Hitler Youth who taunt Elser and his family as they walk to a Wurttemburg church is about as brave as this man got.

But when the idea came to him and opportunities fell into place to allow this clever working class Fritz-of-All-Trades to “solve” Germany’s big problem, he took on the job.

There’s defiance in him, but also a sarcastic sense of humor. He taunts his fellow Red Front members for misspelling the graffiti they’re painting on a wall, scat-sings his way into women’s hearts and when asked who ordered him to plant the bomb, cooks up a yarn, through swollen eyes and bloodied lips, about how there are only two phones in the village where he grew up, but somehow Churchill got him on the line to give him his “orders.”

You’re going to feel the timing of this 2015 German (with English subtitles) production is oddly apt long before Elser is challenged by Nebe and the more thuggish Nazi interrogator Heinrich Muller (Johann Von Bulow, volcanic) about how “an ethnic German could hate the Fuhrer so much,” when Hitler is “making Germany great” again.

Ahem.

But as the world is roiled by divisive, history-repeating political shifts that draw comparisons to the 1930s and as Americans face, for the first time, a true “What would you/WE have done when faced with fascism at home” soul-searching, “13 Minutes” reminds us that if one evil man can start a movement, that can inspire one equally fanatical counterpart to try and end it.

MPAA Rating: R for disturbing violence and some sexuality

Cast: Christian Friedel, Katherina Schuttler, Burghart Klabner, Johann Von Bulow

Credits:Directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel , script by Léonie-Claire Breinersdorfer, Fred Breinersdorfer. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

Running time: 1:54

I have made it a point, for years, to make St. Goodell Day a travel day, having little or no interest in the copyright protected “big game” (the NFL’s version of calling their little sports party “yuuuuge”). So I missed this as it popped up.

The latest “Guardians of the Galaxy” sequel gives us cool action beats, modest jokes and…

Fleetwood Mac’s “The Chain.”

Now, having long endorsed Wayne Campbell’s “Waynesworld” take on the Mac  — “Classic older brother’s favorite band,” I didn’t find the spot worth getting worked up over. But it works well enough.

Some, but not all of the bright, talented kids who got their big break in the Harry Potter movies have built careers after hanging up their wands.

So it’s nice to see that there’s life after Luna Lovegood for Evanna Lynch. The diminutive Irish actress, sort of a soulful pixie in the Potter films, makes the most of one last shot at playing a teenager in “My Name is Emily.”

It’s Irish, so there’s a romantic/literary bent to it and the titular heroine who narrates her story. More to the point, it’s a coming-of-age picture/road romance about a girl, her philosopher father and the boy she talks into helping her find him.

Emily, one and all seem to agree, isn’t like other children. Elementary school kids pick up on her bookishness, her odd relationship with swimming, reality and authority.

“They called me a WEIRDO,”  she whines to her dad (Martin Smiley).

“They’re right.” Being a teacher himself and a philosopher who will eventually take Ireland by storm with his book, “Swimming and Sex,” he then explains the definition of “weirdo” and tells her to wear it with pride.

Years later, her mother’s died, she’s living with foster families and missing her dad. But Emily can still bring the weird. Teachers, befuddled by her refusal to follow instructions (the smart teen has her reasons), demand “What’s WRONG with you?”

Classmates have moved on to call her “freak.”

But here’s how the fifth prettiest girl in class gets the attention of the tall, dark and handsome Auden (George Webster). She refuses to break down a poem by Wordsworth into its component parts.

“When you cut something up, you kill it.”

Auden, being named for a poet, is smitten.

Lynch and Webster give their characters an aching awkwardness, so that we can’t quite tell if Emily is rebuffing his little kindnesses/romantic entreaties. We can’t quite pick up on why Auden would stand for it.

And we’re as surprised as him when she shows up at his door, announces she’s “leaving, right now,” to find and rescue her father, and wants him to accompany her. But he does.

Up to this point, “My Name is Emily” is meditative, writerly. First-time feature director Simon Fitzmaurice fills the soundtrack with Emily’s narration, about her childhood, her mother and especially her father. Images of the teen holding herself under water as she ponders the universe (And suicide?) blend with flashbacks.

“If you hide from death, you hide from life.”

And then “My Name is Emily” becomes something far more conventional, a road picture. The kids hitchhike, drive and shoplift their way across Ireland, having fairly conventional (melodramatic) encounters with locals, coming to quite conventional conclusions about each other.

There’s not much to its second half, but the picture makes the most of a big romantic gesture or two and finds an excuse to drag out the trek over a full weekend so that we can see the windswept coast and rolling, bare hills between the bogs of rural Ireland.

And the winsome Lynch, narrating her story and irresistibly (to Auden) poker-faced in her dealings with the outside world, makes a heroine worth knowing and following to the ends of Ireland, with or without a wand.

MPAA Rating:unrated, adult situations, violence

Cast: Evanna Lynch, George Webster, Michael Smiley

Credits:Written and directed by Simon Fitzmaurice. A Monument release.

Running time: 1:33

The science is sloppy, the sentimentality is sloppier in “The Space Between Us,” a sci-fi romance pairing up agreeable leads in a cut-and-paste script.

Sci-fi buffs — imagine “Capricorn One” without the suspense, “Starman” without the pathos, all shot on sets left over from “The Martian.”

It stumbles, staggers and sputters out of the gate, and only comes to life after an hour of blundered, banal back story.

Asa Butterfield (“Hugo,” “Ender’s Game”) is Gardner, the first child born on Mars. Nobody knows it. His mother, the mission commander of the first team colonizing the Red Planet, “made a mistake.” Yeah, the script is that tone deaf. And she died in childbirth upon landing.

We’ve seen all that, the cover-up that the visionary (Gary Oldman) who financed the mission and NASA started, heard the speech about a damaged Earth climate that prompted the effort a solid hour of preliminaries.

And then, abruptly, the kid grows up and as a teen is shown flirting with his email pen pal. Britt Robertson (“Tomorrowland,” “The Longest Ride”) plays a rebellious orphan who lives in Colorado and is named Tulsa. Gardner he lives uh, in New York. And he’s, uh, sick. Rare disease. That’s why he can’t come see her.

The world doesn’t know he’s on Mars, how could she? But hormones being hormones, Gardner is ready to fly. Sure, his bones aren’t dense enough and his heart and body aren’t used to working in Earth’s gravity. But science can fix that. They still can’t talk about him with anyone, but one surgery and one spaceflight later, Gardner is on Earth and giving NASA the slip in search of the one girl who will give him the time of day, and the father he’s never met.

“What’s your favorite thing about Earth?” he asks one and all. How does he feel? “Heavy.” Being an alien, he’s got all this Earth stuff — colors, smells, courtship, banter, gravity — to figure out.

“Sorry, he doesn’t speak ‘sarcasm.'”

And NASA? They’re scared to death word will get out, or the kid will die, or something.

Director Peter Chelsom, who voices the obligatory cute robot on Mars (Centaur), did “Serendipity” and “Funny Bones” and more recently, “Hector and the Search for Happiness.” He should know how to make this work.

But the first laughs in the movie show up when Robertson arrives, the first sparks of life are in her spunky/testy scenes with Butterfield. That’s an hour in. The film has already been stillborn.

Butterfield has the right frail, pale, spindly and wide-eyed look of a child raised in low gravity. The camera just loves the perky, animated Robertson. Oldman always gives fair value. And Carla Gugino is well-cast as the scientist/mother figure who looks after Gardner on Mars.

But the screenwriters should have binge-watched “The Martian” before this went in front of the cameras, instead of stealing action beats and story arc from “Starman” and Capricorn One.” The many science blunders might not have mattered had they simply started the film with the only reason to see it — young love, and the obstacles to it.

It’s the space before “The Space Between Us” that is the a fatal blow to the movie.

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for brief sensuality and language

Cast: Asa Butterfield, Britt Robertson, Gary Oldman, Carla Gugino

Credits:Directed by Peter Chelsom, script by Allan Loeb (screenplay), Stewart Schill. An SFX release.

Running time: 2:00

If you’ve ever wondered just how co-dependent the relationship between filmmaker and subject can be in the course of filming a documentary, “Left on Purpose” answers that question. And how.

Documentarian Justin Schein harbored a lifelong interest in the Yippies –the  Youth International Party — pranksters and protesters in the 1960s and early 70s.

So he set out to do a movie about Mayer Vishner, a Greenwich Village fixture and key figure in the group that Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin fronted. Vishner was a fresh-faced junior member of the top tier of the Yippies.

“I wasn’t just hanging out with giants,” he explains, on camera. “I was helping them BE giants.”

An anti-Vietnam War rally organizer, public speaker and later alternative press reporter, critic and editor (of LA Weekly), Vishner seems, even as we meet him in his 60s, like a man who affects change. There’s a neighborhood veggie garden he managed to start, later in life, in his little corner of Greenwich Village.

But Schein points his camera at a 60something hoarder, a not-quite-shut-in who lives off disability payments and family charity. He wanders his cluttered apartment in his underwear and assorted T-shirts, plays with his cat and watches TV.

And he and drinks. A lot. Ironically, the old leftist drinks giant bottles of Coors Light, the product of right wing oligarch Adolph Coors.

About 30 minutes into the movie, he lets Schein know, on camera, that “I’m dying of loneliness…I don’t want to do this any more.” He’s not talking about the movie, which he regards as his autobiography. He wants his “final political act” to reflect his existential angst. He wants to die on camera.

Schein is rattled and over the last hour of “Left on Purpose” he tries to find a way out — bringing Vishner to family and old friends who might talk him out of suicide, filming Vishner’s doctor and others refusing to help him end his life.

“I can’t just stay behind the camera and watch him kill himself.”

Schein’s touching film has him and his wife Eden Wormfeld wrestle over the increasingly needy Vishner’s demands on Schein’s time, just as they’re having a baby. Vishner comes off  as clinically depressed (he was once in a psychotherapist’s care) self-absorbed, stubborn, smart and resolute.

“It’s time to go.”

Those closest to him, those he hasn’t pushed away, see the problem clearly. It’s the wall of empty beer bottles, the never-idle-long bong, that sapped his will to live, or even to organize the treasure trove of ’60s-70s radical life that he’s saved but never archived.

Will Vishner go through with it? Will Schein stick around to the end?

Either way, Schein has captured a life story worth remembering and the pursuit of a death with purpose. And he’s probably learned a valuable lesson about journalistic distance, when to maintain it and be just “the observer,” and when to give in to your humanity when you see suffering right in front of you.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with adult subject matter, profanity

Cast: Mayer Vishner, Andrew Hoffman, Michael Ventura, Justin Schein, Eden Wurmfeld

Credits:Directed by Justin Schein,  David Mehlman. A FilmBuff release.

Running time: 1:25