Movie Nation

It was hard to root for Tonya Harding back when the blue collar “redneck” skater was battling the petite princesses of figure skating in the late ’80s and early ’90s.

She was more “girl next door” than her prettier contemporaries, muscular in a way skating fans didn’t appreciate, unschooled at makeup, unfiltered in her response to feminine and effeminate judges who were loathe to give the woman her due.

And then there was the drama, the crying, the “not my fault” whining, and finally “the Incident.”

“I, Tonya” lets us see her hard life and victimhood through her eyes, as performed by the beautiful and petite Margot Robbie.

Director Craig Gillespie (“Lars and the Real Girl”) and romance screenwriter (“P.S. I Love You”) built “I, Tonya” around “wildly contradictory” and ironically hilarious interviews with the principals of Harding’s life, career and downfall.

And they turned Robbie loose on this fierce, unrepentant “white trash” over-achiever in a performance that is flinty yet self-pitying, two-fisted and bloodied but unbowed. For all those moments where Robbie lets a little of her demented turn as Harley Quinn in “Suicide Squad” flash across her teeth and eyes, it’s a stunning transformation and a fearless performance, every it the equal of Charlize Theron’s transformation from runway model to “Monster.”

We figure her out, early, from that first day her foul-mouthed chain-smoking harridan of a mother (Allison Janney, magnificently hateful) bullies her would-be coach (Julianne Nicholson, perfectly demure) into taking her child, a “soft four” years of age, into her Oregon skating school. Years pass, but the mother-coach bickering never ends.

“She looks like she CHOPS WOOD every morning!”

“She DOES chop wood every morning!”

Robbie/Harding narrates her story.  The great athletes perform with a chip on their shoulders, and Harding’s was a doozy. Rivals are always “little bitches,” from the time she was outskating them as a tyke to her tweens and teens and beyond. She could be fragile, facing death threats and class snobbery at every turn. But she was a fighter.

“I, Tonya”  is interspersed with modern day (middle-age to old age makeup) “interviews” recreated for the movie. So we hear her talk about the unhappy home and violence meted out by her mother, only to see Mom, a pet bird picking at her ear on her shoulder, deny it.

“Oh, I hit her one time…with a hair brush!”

The same is true of her first love and eventually first husband, Jeff Gillooly, played with self-aware resignation by Sebastian Stan. Tonya describes the heated juvenile sex, the beatings, the succession black-eyes she had to hide with stage make-up.

“OK,” Jeff counters in his interview, “I NEVER did this.”

We meet Jeff’s delusional lives-with-his-parents “security and anti-terrorism expert” and future Tonya “body guard” Shawn (Paul Walter Hauser, in a spot-on impersonation), an obese dope who lies like he breathes, with the confidence of a clown who never expects to be fact-checked or disbelieved.

All of which sets the table for “the incident.” Gillespie, Robbie and Rogers do such a good job of building this back-story that we almost forget that’s coming. The movie is that good.

“I, Tonya” flirts with mocking its characters, but Janney and especially Robbie counter that with their unblinking, “not on my watch” performances. Yeah, you have to take what the title character says in her version of events with a grain of salt, but she is not to be dismissed as some hapless rube. Robbie doesn’t let that happen.

Want confirmation of the mountain Harding and women like her have to climb? Read the MPAA rating at the bottom of this review. They were more bothered “pervasive language” than the film’s jaw-dropping “pervasive” domestic violence. The roundhouses hurled at her by her husband, the balled-fist “slaps” delivered by her mother, the shooting a careless cop ignored, it’s straight out of a Tammy Wynette song.

In a year when fierce women are stepping up and demanding to be heard, “I, Tonya” gives them another type of role model. And in an awards season where the fearsome Frances McDormand (“Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri”) could simply muscle and menace her way to another Oscar, Robbie’s “never been a girlie girl” Tonya grits her teeth, balls up her fists and announces, with this performance, “Not so fast, sister.”

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

Cast: Margot Robbi, Sebastian Stan, Allison Janney, Julianne Nicholson

Credits:Directed by Craig Gillespie, script by Steven Rogers. A Neon release.

Running time: 2:00

Begin with first principles.

Dito Montiel is America’s Uwe Boll, an inexplicable phenomenon who continues to work, always gets distribution for his movies, seems to hypnotize big names into making those movies, ensuring that distribution comes to pass.

And the work, from “A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints” (with Robert Downey Jr.) and “Fighting” (Channing Tatum) to “Boulevard” (Robin Williams, released the year of his death) to his latest, “The Clapper,” is awful.

Not hilariously incompetent or cultishly delusional. Just tone-deaf, dumb, lacking the awareness to be self-consciously so.

How bad? “The Clapper” isn’t hateful, which is a huge step up for Montiel. It’s merely puerile, insipid, clumsy with only the barest hints of believeability.

But I’ve said it before and it bears repeating. Montiel must be the most charming SOB in show business. He talked Ed Helms, Amanda Seyfried and Tracy Morgan into filming this never-quite-funny Hollywood comedy about Hollywood Blvd. “types.”

Helms, taking a step down from “Father Figures” (as if that was possible) and a miraculously recovered Morgan play professional audience members in La La Land. Got an infomercial that needs warm bodies in its studio audience? They’re “the best audience money can buy.” That’s a quote from Alan Thicke, playing himself in his final screen appearance, selling a dubious real-estate venture on late night cable.

Neither Chris (Morgan) nor Eddie Krumble (Helms) have much going on. But Eddie, at least, has mastered the art of making ends (barely) meet in this subset of Hollywood “extras.” He’s on good terms with the woman (Leah Remini) who books a lot of these audiences. All he has to do is don a goatee, a mustache, a Van Dyke or what have you, stand up in the audience, and say his line — “You mean to tell me that I can get this lot, no money down/this stain out with just one spray” etc. Mostly though, he and Chris and assorted other members of this community of misfits and grotesques just sit and fake enthusiasm for whatever product is being shilled. They clap on command.

He’s got an out-of-his-league crush on the Judy (Amanda Seyfried), who sits glassed inside a Melrose Ave. convenience store cubicle with only a cracking PA system to suggest her charms.

“At night, all the NORMAL people, they just disappear.”

Eddie’s got a mother (Brenda Vaccaro) who calls him from “back home,” having just seen him — again — on “YOUR TV show.”

He’s not really making it, but he’s making do. Until, that is, a late night talk show host (Russell Peters) and his staff spot him in assorted infomercials. A collection of clips make this mysterious “Clapper” look ridiculous. Jayme Stillerman (Peters) orders his audience to “find The Clapper” for him. And it all falls apart for Eddie.

Unemployable, harassed and harangued by tactless tourists and local yokels, he turns for comfort to the one woman in LA who doesn’t have a TV. That would be Judy. Soon, even she is taken away from him.

I love the milieu Montiel gives us here, even though he’s not the first to point a camera at the weirdos of Hollywood Blvd. Ricky Gervais’ “Extras” and earlier films have nibbled at this close-to-home culture of the camera cannon fodder classes of TV and film, and found more biting “But I’m in SHOW business!” commentary, more to laugh at and more empathy for these characters.

And even though he’s not the first to notice the cruel, mocking streak that runs through late night hosts, turning Eddie into “the biggest thing to hit late nite since ‘Stupid Pet Tricks'” is watchably plausible, and mean. Hell, they’re giving Letterman The Mark Twain Prize, despite his reputation for ridiculing foreign people, as a creep and a creeper.

It’s the execution, the writing (Montiel based this on his book, so he charmed his way into publishing, too.), the limp payoffs to set-ups and excruciatingly obvious resolutions to the vexing situations that could have had a real sting to them that grinds “The Clapper’s” gears. This should have been acrid and funny, and it’s neither.

Even the mean people are supposed to have a conscience. In late night TV? Really?

Peters makes a hits-his-marks but zero-charisma chat show host. But does anybody believe Ed Helms and Amanda Seyfried as a couple? A more promising direction might have been giving Eddie and the booker (Remini) some sort of she-has-the-power romantic connection disrupted by Eddie’s sudden “Star is Reluctantly Born” fame.

Every Montiel movie prompts this practice, “If only he’d tried this” or “that.” How he keeps convincing good actors to make movies with him is Hollywood’s greatest unsolved mystery.

His actors see possibilities in the material he convinces them do to. If only they’d watched his earlier movies before signing on the dotted line. His siren’s call, and the lure of making an easy quickie in town on backlots and over-familiar LA locations, would fall on deaf ears if only they’d do that homework.

MPAA Rating: R for language and some sexual references

Cast: Ed Helms, Amanda Seyfried, Tracy Morgan, Russell Peters, Leah Remini, Roger Guenveur Smith

Credits: Written and directed by Dito Montiel. An eOne release.

Running time: 1:30

Let’s start the new year with a few low-budget laughs at the expense of the zeitgeist, shall we?

“Crazy Famous” is another “wacky gang from the mental hospital” fish out of water comedy in the “Dream Team” mold. And even though the plot is rendered less believable than it should be and the violence is both off-putting and unconvincing, there’s a chuckle, here and there, in the Bob Farkas and the way a couple of actors play it.

Gregory Lay stars as Bob Marcus, a young man hell-bent on getting famous in the American way. No, he doesn’t plan and carry out a mass shooting. No, he doesn’t grow his beard out and fake being colorful and eccentric enough to get his own reality TV show.

Bob makes his way to Camp David, strips in front of those guarding the presidential retreat, and uses a portable trampoline to bounce over the fence.

That doesn’t get him the headlines he craves. It just lands him in a mental institution, where he tries to explain his lifelong mania to not be “an average nobody.” He frustrated his stage mom and basketball coach dad back in childhood. And he never got over that.

“People would seek me out,” he thinks, if he was famous. “I’d have value.”

One half-hearted suicide attempt later, he meets his ticket out of there. It’s not Larry, the bug-eyed ranter with anger management issues (Victor Cruz). It’s not even the balding drawler who thinks he’s Dr. Phil (David Neal Levin).

Richard Short plays the mysterious British accented fellow with a few screws loose. He’s convinced he’s a secret agent. He’s sure he knows where Osama bin Laden is. As if that’s proof that he belongs in a mental hospital.

The movie’s first huge hole is the fact that we never come close to buying that this guy is crazy. We’re shown just the opposite, that the staff is medicating him and participating in interrogations of him at the behest of this government glory hog (Bob Jaffe) whom the world credits as the fellow who tracked down and killed “Jackpot,” aka Bin Laden.

Nevertheless, Bob helps Smith and Dr. Phil and Larry make a break for it. His gamble that Smith might be who he says he is pays off in an instant — martial arts expert, able to dodge the cops behind the wheel at a souped up AMC Gremlin, adept at making the most of a misunderstanding gun seller’s confusion.

And they’re off, to confront Bob’s past and hunt down Osama bin Laden.

None of which is the least it interesting, though Lay is manic enough to make at least some of the set-ups pay off.

The laughs come from the periphery, in Bob’s hapless child-actor flashbacks, in Larry’s melt-downs, and in Dr. Phil’s endless supply of quack-pot acronyms to diagnose Larry and the others. Levin’s impersonation of Oprah’s TV shrink is sort of Nick Offerman doing Dr. Phil. Every word out of his mouth is funny. He’s in the habit of walking around with no pants.

“So that mah GEN-itals may BREATHE when Ah’m SLEEPIN.'”

If only the REAL Dr. Phil was this funny.

Still, “Crazy Famous” too often reminds us of its tight budget and its screenplay, basically a collection of stereotype-crutches which don’t add up to much. The flashacks, the connection to our collective zeal for “fame” and the players — especially David Neal Levin’s spot-on take down of TV’s Texan talking-cure king — give it what little life it has.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, profanity

Cast: Gregory Lay, Richard Short, Victor Cruz, Jessica Renee Russell, David Neal Levin, Bob Jaffe

Credits:Directed by Paul Jarrett, script by Bob Farkas. A Gravitas release.

Running time: 1:18

A very good Friday suggests that “Star Wars: The Last Jedi,” could hit $55 million on this, its third weekend in theaters, big bucks which could make 2017 an $11 billion+ year in ticket sales, according to Deadline.com. 

That would be the third best BO year ever, and considering this past summer was the worst in recent memory, that says a lot for the heft of “Star Wars” and Pixar’s “Coco” and the other hits of fall and spring (“Beauty and the Beast”) that made it possible.

But “Last Jedi” was projected to hit $57, and Saturday and Sunday have yet to be tallied. If last weekend was any indication, those two days will drag that number down a bit. Projections last weekend seemed to drop by the day.

And “Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle,” is nipping at the Jedi’s heels. It is on track to do $50 million, and Saturday and Sunday will tell all with that one, too. A kid-friendly comedy with The Rock and Kevin Hart and Jack Black and a smart, tough, self-mocking starlet (Karen Gillan) in Tomb Raider tart-wear? Who knew that’d hit?

“Pitch Perfect 3” is on track to hit $70 million, overall, with another $23-25 million this weekend. Young ladies do love their Bellas. Pity Anna Kendrick et al haven’t been able to turn this success into clout in terms of the movies they get offered.

“Greatest Showman” is showing Golden Globes nominated legs, “Darkest Hour” and “All the Money in the World” are holding their own, “Downsizing” didn’t drop out of the top ten, but “The Shape of Water” and “Father Figures” did. “Molly’s Game” will need more awards buzz to have a prayer of cracking into it.

Let’s get this out of the way right out the gate.

The Best Films of 2017 are “Dunkirk,” “The Florida Project,” “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri,” “Lady Bird” and “Brad’s Status.” Yeah, “The Disaster Artist” can be in that conversation, “The Post,” “Darkest Hour” too.

Many of those films are at least in the chatter right now. “Only the Brave” should be. “Brad’s Status” too. “Stronger” I’d throw in, for the perfection of the performances,

But not all of them are, and many are being swamped in “buzz” for a lot of late-season “The Best movie of the Year, THIS week” swooning by critics and critics’ groups and whatever the hell the National Board of Review and Hollywood Foreign Press Association actually are.

For all the box office woes of this year — holes not totally filled by “Wonder Woman,” “Thor,” “The Last Jedi,” “Coco” “Beauty and the Beast” and “Logan” — reading reviews, you’d swear we’ve entered a new gilded age.

Based mainly on Rottentomatoes scores (with a few inflated Metacritic ratings backing this up), we should be talking about the movies listed below — “Star Wars: The Last Jedi,” “Blade Runner: 2049,” “Wonder Woman,” “Logan” the Sundance-hyped “Mudbound,” with acting Oscars locked up for “Last Flag Flying,” “Battle of the Sexes,” etc., as the “real” Oscar contenders.

Audiences, and Hollywood insiders (who pick the best work in their respective guilds) are saying otherwise. Tickets aren’t being sold, movies praised to the high heavens are being forgotten — especially by the nimrods who took the vapors praising them to high heaven back when they were released and who hope nobody remembers their misguided raves.

Wherever you stand on what a “critically-acclaimed” movie ought to be, whatever you think the Oscars SHOULD stand for, no matter what your stance on “a reviewer writes for the audience, a critic writes for the ages/the artist,” a 3-4 star review should be for a movie somebody/ANYbody recalls two months after its left theaters.

A lot of 2.5/3-star movies have been lifted onto this or that week’s ephemeral pantheon of Great Pictures. “Get Out?” Get real.  A good genre pic that has the smarts of darkly-comic satire going for it, not much else. Is there a performance in that you remember? Brian Williams is excused from that question.

What’s going on? There’s a generation of established Big Media critics who fret too much over seeming irrelevant. You pan a movie everybody goes to see, your editor realizes how out of touch you are. That’s the fearful thinking, anyway. This has been a guiding light in the ongoing accident that is Peter Travers’ career at Rolling Stone, in my opinion. And he’s not alone. Not by a long shot.

A generation of critics and reviewers were culled from the ranks by the Great Layoff of 2005-2015, legacy magazine and newspaper critics by the scores disappeared.

Who’s replacing this fading-forgotten Boomer/Buster legion of opionators? Fangirls, fanboys, and a pretty callow crew, over all. Whatever stand-out voices this new guard has produced, they are drowned out by short term short-timers who haven’t put the time in to see, develop and defend an opinion on genres, directors, screenwriters and classic films. Most won’t stick with this vocation or avocation long enough to get good.

Their handiwork is evident every weekend — junk, derivative horror, sci-fi and fanboy favorite directors, screenwriters and actors praised to the hilt, good to great work undervalued based on the flimsiest grudges, with “logic” and critical judgement and defensible fact-based opinions rarely figuring into it. SXSW, Sundance, Cannes and Toronto groupthink sets in. That’s one thing film festivals are good at — pack mentality reviewing.

Some of this is just a generational sea change, of course, older critics grousing about “What the KIDs love these days,” etc. But take away the gatekeepers who used to ordain who was good enough at the craft of reviewing — debating, using evidence in arguments, etc — and this is where we are.

Most of these movies weren’t BAD, per se. Just indifferent, forgettable. Below, let us remember the forgotten, the middling movies that were the best thing since sliced-bread, according to some (MANY) — for a week, a month, or a summer — and have disappeared, with extreme prejudice — now that “Awards’ season” is upon us.

“Blade Runner 2049” — No Ridley Scott, no “Blade Runner.” Not Rutger Hauer? No pathos. If audiences had trouble embracing a movie in which hardboiled Harrison Ford falls for a replicant who looks the way Sean Young used to look, how can we warm to an over-hyped sequel with Ryan Gosling as a replicant we’re supposed to root for in a future where love, sex, etc. is digital, simulated, VR? Beautiful, chilly and heartless.

“Colossal” — There was a huge run on Depends when this dull, dim limited release reached fanboydom back in the spring. “Hey you guys, it’s a KAIJU movie! With Anne Hathaway! And that Sudeikis guy playing another douche!” And you thought “Pacific Rim” was unworthy.

“Mudbound” — Granted, the Sundance Film Festival comes very early in the year. And the films are screened at…high altitude. So breathless praise for flawed features comes with every year’s festival. Here’s a USA Today headline — “‘Mudbound’ could bring historic diversity to 2018 Oscar race.”  A well-intentioned but murky, over-boiled, meekly-directed, badly-edited obvious and misshapen melodrama, it’s still getting some Oscar buzz for Mary J. Blige, who is pretty good at playing an Depression Era archetype. She plays grinding poverty, in scene after scene (not all), in stylish period sunglasses. Sharecropping paid better than you thought.

“Logan Lucky” — A lack of Southern film critics in this new generation of big city hobbyist reviewers and unworldly appointees (I think NPR gives movie passes to interns, and lets them call themselves “critics.”) meant that this limp, stereotype-stuffed rube comedy from Steven Soderbergh earned plaudits worthy of Soderbergh’s best, and not the notices a cut-rate, cleverly-negotiated NASCAR caper comedy deserved.

“Logan” — A gritty, fitting send-off to The Wolverine. Jackman was as good as he’s always been in these movies, Patrick Stewart plays the hell of out facing one’s mortality. Brutally violent, clumsily-plotted, fulfilling to the fans. A great movie? No. A solid 2.5/3 star movie.

“Wonder Woman” — No, Patty Jenkins isn’t being unjustly dismissed because she’s the WOMAN who directed one of the year’s biggest hits. She’s being ignored because there’s little to this that constitutes directing, not a lot of originality to this distaff “Captain America” riff with vivid cut cut-rate World War I battle recreations, and a passably fierce Gal Gadot in the title role made this a perfectly serviceable, admirable in its empowerment aims, comic book movie. Nothing more. Jenkins’ best work, on Charlize Theron’s Oscar-winning “Monster,” was “directed.” Not “WW.” It was “produced.”

“The Meyerwitz Stories” — Netflix is being painted as a major player this awards season, with “Mudbound,” Angelina Jolie’s passable foreign language film, “First They Killed My Father,” and this bit of Noah Baumbach directed Adam Sandler re-invention. Not hardly. It was a mediocre talkathon long before everybody realized what a sexist heel Dustin Hoffman has been. For decades. Insular, dull and pre-digested.

“Call Me by My Name” — I’ve reviewed and endorsed a lot of queer cinema over the decades, enjoyed the langorous scripts of James Ivory (“Remain of the Day,” “A Room with a View”) as much as anybody. But what inspired the NYC Critics and LA Critics to soil their knickers over this turgid, slow, leaden, gay apologia (older man, teen boy romance) melodrama escapes me. Did they all come out of the closet in the same Scarsdale or Van Nuys synagogue?

“It” — Hollywood wore out Stephen King’s welcome back in the last millennium, repetitive hack-work horror with usually just one really good idea per book as that book became a film. This dark ode to lost childhood wasn’t bad. It wasn’t “Psycho,” either. Splitting it into two movies makes the upcoming sequel, really just the second half of a story told as a single piece, seems an act of greed, not narrative thrift. Reviewers seemed grateful it wasn’t any worse than the decades-old TV version. So?

“Alien: Covenant” — No Ridley Scott, no “Alien?” Wasting Scott’s last vital years as a director on this movie got “Covenant,” a dank stinker in this long, wildly uneven series, graded on the curve. Step away from the chest-busters, Ridley.

“Red Turtle” — Not every animated film to pop out of Studio Ghibli is a masterpiece. This certainly wasn’t, though you’d never know it from the reviews.

“Thor: Ragnorak” — Cute. Fun. Meh. Hemsworth should have played Gaston in the live-action “Beauty and the Beast” remake. Self-aware, muscle-bound and silly when he wants to be. The movie’s a forgettable exercise in fights and effects and inside Marvel jokes. Will anybody be watching this five years down the road? How about six months down the road?

“Star Wars: The Last Jedi” — A tidal wave of effusive reviews (not mine), a sea of black ink at the box office, and a tidal wave of irritated “fan” reviews — on IMDb, on Rottentomatoes, on reddit, comments on my review. It’s gutless, heartless corporate piffle, a middling yet shiny bauble for the faithful, who appear to be losing faith.

“The Shape of Water” — An Oscar contender? Why, exactly? Guillermo del Toro’s derivative little sci-fi romantic fantasy has a look, a very good cast which was parked in roles so on-the-nose as to be eye-rollable (Sally Hawkins as the lonelorn, lovelorn mute? She’s so much better in “Maudie.” Michael Shannon as a psychotic technocrat? Richard Jenkins as a sad, lonely closeted gay neighbor, Michael Stuhlbarg as a Rosenberg-ish traitor?). I found it a tad dull, a touch “icky.” And it’s seemingly derived/ripped-off from a widely circulated student film from the Netherlands of a few years back. Let it contend. Will anybody remember it otherwise?

“Last Flag Flying” — Whatever debt we owe veterans in this country, what we don’t owe them is this vapid, criminally over-praised “Last Detail” road dramedy about old men paying a debt to a misused comrade. Bryan Cranston brought the holiday ham out early for this one.

The “biggest movie hit of 2017, as of this typing, is not “Wonder Woman,” the film phenomenon of the early summer, but a film that opened in March. “Wonder Woman” owned the summer, taking over $412 million, rewarding Warner Brothers for sticking with that DC comics universe, in spite of everything. “Dunkirk” rode the Christopher Nolan brand to $188 million at the end of the summer, giving Warners that season, at least, even if it was the weakest summer for movie ticket sales in ages.

No, the year’s biggest hit is attributable to a famous George Lucas quote, “Figure out what 12 year old girls want” and make your movie accordingly. “Beauty and the Beast,” Disney’s “Beauty and the Beast,” a live-action (sorta) remake of a blockbuster animated musical from the ’90s. “Beast” earned $504 million at the domestic box office.

But by the time we all sleep off New Year’s Eve, “The Last Jedi” will have surpassed it.  I

The latest Disney/Lucasfilm blockbuster will top the $1 billion mark, worldwide, by year’s end as well.

It has turned the punters out on weekdays as well since Christmas, but it had a steep second weekend fall-off, and that could happen again this weekend, even though there’s no new competition to challenge its “#1 at the box office” status until deep into January.

Box Office Mojo wa bullish on “Jedi” and didn’t foresee that 67% plunge last weekend, and they’re expecting a $57 million four midday weekend this frame. “Jedi” did $220 on opening weekend, $68 last weekend ($99 when you throw in Xmas day). So let’s just figure $57 is a benchmark and wait to see if it falls off more than that.

Last weekend’s three-day projections started near $90, dropped and dropped as Sat. and Sunday figures came in until it sat at $68. It was supposed to do $112-120 over four days, and “only” managed $99. So “backlash” or not, we’ll see.

Mojo is similarly generous with “Jumanji” projections, figuring another $39 million is headed its way over four days. The critically derided “Pitch Perfect 3” may clear $20, which means this “last” chapter for the Bellas may not be last at all.

“The Greatest Showman,” a Golden Globe contender, could add another $10; “Darkest Hour” and “The Shape of Water,” potential Oscar contenders, will stick in the top ten.

Will a rare Alexander Payne bomb, “Downsizing,” fall straight out of the top ten? Will “Father Figures” follow it? Stay tuned.

Pardon my tardiness in catching up with the Barden Bellas one last time. I strongly suspected that these “pitches” had run out of ideas with “Pitch Perfect,” and “Pitch Perfect 2” pretty much confirmed it.

But here it is, “Pitch Perfect 3,” a few more not-exactly a cappella renditions of pop classics from George Michael to Pink, songs they keep singing even when they’re singing Shut Up and Dance.”

A few more “Fat Amy” jokes, told mostly by Rebel “Fat Amy” Wilson herself. Her character’s graduated from Barden U. and is pushing a one-woman show, “Fat Amy Winehouse.” She leaves her “Make America Eat Again” hat out of the costume, alas.

There’s more of the silent comedy of Hana Mae Lee, thend  scary-strange and exotic Asian in the multi-cultural 10-member Bellas.

Brittany Snow and Anna Camp treat us to a handful of fresh “We’ll never have it as good as we had it in college,” takes, remembering when they were “famous,” at least to those two commentating clowns (Elizabeth Banks, John Michael Higgins) who have worked their way down the media food chain to making a self-financed Youtube documentary about “Where are they now?”

“We’re gonna CLING to you like mom-jeans on a camel toe!”

And there’s more of Anna Kendrick, sweet-voiced lead singer Beca, who gets much of the attention and all of the breaks, but has too much “integrity” to keep producing no-talent poseurs like Pimp-lo (Moises Arias), so she quits.

“Pitch 3” is a movie as predictable as the big explosion and escape that opens the picture, as the lame script-crutch “Three Weeks Earlier” flashback, as the assorted “love interests” cooked up for this installment, as trite as Fat Amy’s description of how she became estranged from her “dodgy” crook of a father.

“I had to run away, which was a real bitch…because of the chafing!”

But that “father” turns out to be John Lithgow, who sings a little Chicago (the band, not the musical) and does it in an Australian accent. Because — Hugh Jackman, and fair is fair…dinkum. He’s a semi-bright spot in a movie we’ve seen before, cuter and fresher and five years ago.

The twist this time is that the long-graduated Bellas are frustrated with their large animal veterinary aid, juice truck, flight-school flunking real lives, and more than thrilled to dive into a European USO tour, entertaining the troops and feuding with the other bands on the bill, especially the skinner and can-actually-play-instruments all-female quartet, EverMoist.

Ruby Rose (“Orange is the New Black”) is their skinny/scary lead singer.

That nothing here is new isn’t a fatal failing. That nothing here is funny, is.

Wilson has run out of variations on her girth jokes, even though the script tries to find ways Fat Amy can surprise us.

Even taking into account that I’m not its target audience, I was pleasantly surprised by the first film in this trilogy. This? It’s piffle.

Whatever these “Pitches” have done for Kendrick’s singing ambitions, in the movies she’s the perky straight-man, the one who sees hilarity all around her. It’s not a good use of her talents.

As for the rest of the film, if you’ve seen one leggy, twerky, over-choreographed, polished and auto-tuned cover of Sia’s “Cheap Thrills,” you’ve seen enough.

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for crude and sexual content, language and some action.

Cast: Anna Kendrick, Rebel Wilson, Brittany Snow, Elizabeth Banks, John Michael Higgins, Hailee Steinfeld, John Lithgow

Credits:Directed by Trish Sie, script by Kay Cannon and Mike White. A Universal release.

Running time: 1:33

There’s an almost unnerving self-confidence in aspiring filmmakers. Directing is not for the meek or shrinking violets. Egomaniacs are drawn to it like alpha flies.

Spend any time around clusters of committed filmmaker wannabes and you’ll pick up on a shared confidence bordering on mania, arrogance mixed with a fanatical belief that you have a story that begs to be told and that you’re the only person on Earth who can tell it.

Amplify that passion with the cockiness of a combat veteran deluded by what he’s sure is his unique experience of war, and of his government at its most dangerous. Insulated first by the bubble of his service and then by the echo chamber of far-right fanatics who only listen to other far-right fanatics about “what’s REALLY going on in this country,” that’s David Crowley, a young guy with a mission, a message and a pitch — for a movie he knows MUST be made and that he must make it.

“A Gray State” is an A & E/Netflix documentary about Crowley, whose dream to make a thriller about a FEMA/Blue Helmets/Black Helicopters/New World Order assault on the liberties of “patriots” like himself led to his death, and the death of his wife and daughter.

A quick online search shows the internet marketing of his idea, “Gray State,” a planned $30 million film tying together what he’s learned in a business school’s afterthought “film program” with what his worldview tells him is happening in America.

He had a poster, a complex Joseph Campbell “Hero’s Journey” script, which he structures on note cards in an obsessive/complusive version of Spike Lee’s “How To” guide to making a movie. He had a trailer, and he had an online following.

What he didn’t have was $30 million, a fact that trips up many a movie dreamer. Erik Nelson’s documentary is about Crowley’s single-minded pursuit of that dream, his and his family’s deaths in Minnesota and some of the folks who smell a fresh conspiracy in the tragedy of a man who plunged deep into the rabbit hole and did not come back out.

Yes, “Infowars'” Alex Jones has a cameo. We see Crowley’s extensively self-filmed appearances at Ron Paul “Fests” and protests at the Republican National Convention, his pitches to a sea of disaffected white men like himself.

And Nelson, interviewing Crowley’s sad but undeluded father, his friends and filmmaking partners, friends of his wife (who shared his delusions) and TV and alt-weekly reporters who covered this “mysterious” death in Apple Valley, peels away the layers of doubt that Crowley’s online alt-right crowd want to sew into a murder-suicide that they’ve taken up as a furtherance of his cause.

We see a youth a little too into playing Army dress-up in paintball, moved to enlist after 9/11 and sent first to Afghanistan and then, a disillusioning “stop-loss” deployment to Iraq. We hear and see his mono-mania turn from soldiering to songwriting, and then to filmmaking.

And we listen to his high-speed patter, a breathless, evolving movie pitch that got a prospectus trailer filmed and edited to raise money for a film he hoped would “prevent” a bleak future he saw coming, “by consent or conquest.”

He talks in the glib alarmism of conspiracy buffs, connecting dots that he and other “right thinking” people see point to a moment when “the oligarchs take over” and “society fails,” when his fellow armed-and-patriotic types are all that stands between freedom and FEMA enforced slavery.

Then we watch the myriad notes, the twists and Post-It note turns he tries to weave into his epic script, index cards covering a wall in his production office.

Tell me you don’t see echoes of “A Beautiful Mind.” Nelson lets us see Crowley’s fleeting dream of filmmaking glory, this ache to tell a story he believed in above all else, consume him.

If there is a light moment in the movie, which is punctuated by disheartening footage of his wife, Kolem, and daughter Raniyah, it’s Crowley’s rehearsals for a pitch meeting with two Hollywood “types” he hopes will produce his movie. He taped those rehearsals and his conclusions, that these two small-timers with almost zero credits were at best a long shot at being able to keep any promises they made, are played back for these two, whom like David we’ve sized up as poseurs, and who get offended at how Crowley characterizes them.

What happened at that point may not have been inevitable — a wife, isolated by her control freak husband (directors are the ultimate control freaks), unable to connect with her family or any support system that could save her, a husband spiraling down a hole his friends and family can’t pull him from, a film project going nowhere threatening humiliation in front of all these people he’s convinced to believe in him and donate to the project.

But for a guy trying to absorb the lessons of story theorist and guru Joseph Campbell, the tragic arc is there, the tragic flaws that will be the hero’s undoing plain for all to see.

Nelson might have pursued mental health professionals who like popping up on TV speculating on the mental state of narcissists who document their lives fully enough for at least a textbook “opinion” on what ailed them. Instead, we get a local Fox TV reporter willing to comment out of his pay grade about the madness that followed chasing a dream just beyond Cowley’s reach. A & E documentaries have a deserved quick-and-dirty reputation that leaves out voices of real authority weighing in on Nelson’s conclusion.

“A Gray State” is still an engrossing peek into a world few connect with, an echo chamber where “truth” comes to be only the shared delusions its adherents repeat to each other, and a “hero” in their ranks who died, not from the conspiracies of “dark forces” they see in every corner, but from the madness of failing in front of his fellow fanatics.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with violence.

Cast: David Crowley Jr.,  Kolem Crowley, Mason Hendricks, David Crowley Sr., Danny Mason

Credits:Directed by Erik Nelson . An A & E/Netflix release.

Running time: 1:32

It’s safe to say that the on-the-road/on-the-lam thriller “The Strange Ones” was conceived and filmed in a different time.

We’re a lot more sensitive to hints of an age-inappropriate sexual relationship than we were mere months ago. That’s a key element to “The Strange Ones,” a slow-moving mystery that reveals itself in the tiniest of dollops. You wonder if anybody would have ever put up the money for this, post-Weinstein, post-Spacey.

You wonder if even the most myopic and greedy stage parents would have let their child take a part in it.

There was a fire. Now Nick (Alex Pettyfer of “I Am Number 4”) and Jeremiah (James Freedson-Jackson) are on the run, calling themselves “brothers” even though we suspect, in an instant, that’s not the case.

The kid is haunted by what he’s seen and reassurances from the adult Nick are no help.

“The things inside your head, they’re only as real was you want them to be.”

The script gives us odd “clues” as to what’s really going on — TV news reports glimpsed, the two “brothers” sleeping in the car, laying low until they have a Volvo breakdown and Nick has to sweet-talk an out-of-the-way motel manager (Emily Althaus) into letting them stay.

The boy mutters “Just go ahead and kill me. I don’t even care where you bury my body,” but Nick has this place in the far-off woods he wants them to go, woodlore (shooting, etc.) he longs to pass on.

The sexual hints are overt — in a shower, in the twin beds of their motel room. But “Jeremiah” isn’t trying to escape from Nick, and the sweet-faced kid has a cruel streak that pops out here and there. Who’s calling the shots here?

Co-writers/directors Christopher Radcliff and Lauren Wolkstein treat their script as if it has great secrets, and dole them out so grudgingly that the picture lurches from “When will this get going?” to “Will this EVER get underway?”

More problematic is the film’s attempts at being sexually daring. If Louis C.K.’s now-stillborn movie, with a similarly cavalier attitude towards age (and incestuous) sexual impropriety, and with Kevin Spacey’s career ended and director Bryan Singer’s is in mortal peril, what do we do with movies that suggest a boy’s Lolita-ish hold on an older man?

Granted, the New York and LA critics are insisting that “Call Me By My Name,” with a similar sexual mismatch at its heart, is the year’s best picture, grading on some sort of gay pedophile curve.

With all we hear about Woody, with more Roman victims coming forward, with all the heat Spacey took for suggesting, in his “apology,” that he was a gay man and well, somebody’s got to give potentially gay boys their initiation, how do we reconcile films like “Call Me” and “The Strange Ones” with the zeitgeist?

Maybe we shouldn’t. And perhaps this slow and generally dull and opaque picture never should have seen the light of day.

MPAA Rating: R for some disturbing violent images, and brief sexual material

Cast: Alex Pettyfer, James Freedson-Jackson, Emily Althaus, Gene Jones

Credits:Written and directed by Christopher Radcliff and Lauren Wolkstein. A Vertical release.

Running time: 1:21