Movie Nation

I don’t make it a habit to watch the Golden Globes. Yeah, “La La Land” may be destined to win the best picture Oscar. But as they unloaded all their love on various Brits last night (“The Crown”? Ahem.) for TV shows, well, I remembered why they don’t matter and that I’m weaning myself of NBC programming altogether, as a matter of principle.

Still, any time Hugh Laurie does something worth honoring, they honor it. Remember when he went through one of his “House” acceptance speeches by pulling names out of assorted pockets, one pocket per win? He’d thank the makeup/wardrobe/screenwriter, etc. whose name was on what came out of that pocket?

He did something equally witty with his “Night Manager” villain win last night.

The weekend’s blizzard over much of the northeast made calling the movie box office race tough until late Saturday night.

For a while, it looked as if “Hidden Figures,” the historic drama about African American mathematicians and the early space program, might pull off the upset. It looks to clear $21 million by midnight tonight.

But “Rogue One” ended up winning the weekend, packing in another $22-23 million, with “Sing” managing another $21-22.

January always means more “Underworld” and “Resident Evil” movies. “Underworld: Blood Wars,” opened at $13 million. The last in the franchise? Maybe. The “last” “Resident Evil” is due out at the end of the month.

“Passengers” has a slim chance of clearing $100 million at the U.S. box office, now, “Why Him?” will clear $50 million by Tuesday.

“A Monster Calls” has great reviews and opened wide — not 3-4,000 theaters wide, but wide enough. And it didn’t crack the top ten. A fairy tale with somber undertones and a dying mother is not much of a draw and it didn’t crack the top ten.

Oscar contenders “Fences” and “La La Land” remain in the top ten, “Manchester by the Sea” fell out. Will “Hidden Figures” get an Oscar nominations bounce to go with its big opening?

Veteran indie writer-director Maggie Greenwald’s best-known films — “The Ballad of Little Jo” and “Songcatcher” — are period pieces, fish-out-of-water romances. And all of her films have the refreshing novelty of being told from a female point of view.

“Sophie and the Rising Sun” is further proof that “an artist is someone who pounds in the same nail, over and over again.” It’s a timid, tired but a tender-hearted wartime romance that should have more edge than its subject promises.

Margo Martindale has a secure place among the ladies with hobbies in sleepy 1941 Salty Creek, S.C. She’s a well-off widow with a garden column in the newspaper, devoted acolytes in the Garden Club and one really good friend.

Julianne Nicholson (“Black Mass”), who co-starred with Martindale in “August: Osage County,” is Sophie, a free spirit who harvests her own blue crabs, dabbles in watercolors and quietly mourns a sweetheart who died 23 years before “in the Great War.”

And then this Asian fellow tumbles off the bus, bloodied and beaten, and Miz Anne (Martindale) is convinced to do the Christian thing and take him in.

The stranger (Takashi Yamaguchi) is barely conscious. And everybody, from the cop (Joel Murray) who finds him to the ladies around town, figure they know who this guy is. So does Anne.

“I’ve got a Chinaman in my cottage.”

But knowing the time setting, taking a long hard look at the man and knowing he’s been beaten, we guess he’s Japanese long before the Palmetto State provincials do. His first uttered word, “Ota,” confirms it.

Anne and Sophie and later Anne’s maid (Lorraine Toussaint) try to keep that information quiet, especially after that “date which will live in infamy” passes.

Ota, being Japanese-American, has garden skills, which endear him to Anne. He likes to paint, which plants the seed of romance in Sophie’s lonely heart.

Can they protect Ota from the town’s rage after Pearl Harbor? Diane Ladd is Ruth, the hateful busybody who insists Sophie keep her distance from the newcomer. But Ruth has her own burdens, caring for a burned-beyond-repair son wounded in the Great War.

The setting is intriguing, and there’s nice period detail — including actual radio broadcasts about Pearl Harbor and its aftermath. The few jokes, about everything one can make with crab, are feeble in the extreme.

“Sophie” has the slack pacing of a Sleepy Time Down South story, and only livens up in a couple of blasts of melodramatic violence. The characters are more than caricatures, but not by much.

And the actors are, to a one, better than the archetypes this stultifyingly unsurprising script (based on an Augusta Trobaugh novel) has them play. There is a little suspense about where things are headed, and just one mild twist in the proceedings.

About the best one can say about “Sophie and the Rising Sun” is that Greenwald & Co. made a film that shows more care than the source material deserves.

MPAA Rating: R for some sexuality and nudity

Cast: Julianne Nicholson, Takashi Yamaguchi, Margo Martindale, Diane Ladd, Lorraine Toussaint, Joel Murray

Credits:Directed by , script by Maggie Greenwald, based on an Augusta Trobaugh novel. A Monterey Media release.

Running time: 1:45

The mischievous twinkle never quite dims in the eyes of the two guys nicknamed, for the purpose of a documentary about them,  “The Sunshine Makers.”

And since the film’s about Tim Scully and Nicholas Sand, the “Orange Sunshine” manufacturers who called themselves “LSD evangelists,” that’s absolutely as it should be.

Whatever the dire warnings attached to anti-drug propaganda of their era, no matter the changing currents of law, social and scientific acceptance of their area of — um — interest, they are still here — Septuagenarian witnesses, participants and enthusiasts for the “Peace, Love and LSD” 1960s.

“Sunshine Makers” is a tall tale, but true story that documents the history of Lysergic acid diethylamide and of the two men who embraced it and manufactured the most famous variation of it to “turn on the world” and thereby end violence and promote transcendence in the process.

Yeah, they were naive idealists. Well, one more than the other, anyway.

Scully (pictured in both photos above) was the scientific one, the methodical dabbler “with a touch of Asperger’s” who got into the drug in the mid-60s, learned how to make it from the underground masters of the art and ran labs until the law caught up with him.

He and his friends speculated that they’d need 200 kilos of acid to create 750 million doses — the number of people, worldwide, they were sure would want to at least try to “experience wonders” and take a trip. Tim wanted to “transform the world” and give this stuff away. So he got to work.

Sand, a portly ex-New Yorker whom we meet as he’s doing nude yoga, is more of a hustler, figured there was a buck to be made. He, too, dove into turning on the world, and turning a profit.

In the film, Scully methodically explains how he set up the various labs and the chemistry involved with flow charts and a winking “Don’t try this at home!”

And Sand mixes idealism with criminal pragmatism, talking about prison and dodging the law as various states altered their legal view of LSD and the pre-DEA Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs was hot on their tail.

“The art of making LSD involves not getting busted.”

Cosmo-Feilding-Mellen’s film folds in “the Hippy Mafia,” a free love/LSD advocacy group called The Brotherhood of Eternal Love, and biker gangs and The Grateful Dead, rich kid financiers and female accomplices/lovers who were never prosecuted for smuggling drugs or aiding getaways.

It’s all utterly amoral, if you look at the world of science, social acceptance and the law as unchanging.

But they aren’t, and that makes “The Sunshine Makers” a light and lively look at a drug culture and trade that didn’t avoid all of the darkness that followed, but seems somehow less a part of it in retrospect as LSD is once again back in science’s good graces, the object of therapeutic study once again after a 50 year absence.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with drug content, nudity

Cast: Nicholas Sand, Tim Scully, Alice Einhorn, Gordon White

Credits:Directed by Cosmo Feilding-Mellen , script by Connie Littlefield. A FilmRise release.

Running time: 1:31

Few have articulated America’s ongoing struggles with race better than the African-American writer and social critic James Baldwin.

“We carry our history with us,” he said. He wanted to make certain we understood that.

A gay man, he fled the racism of a country that would not accept him, much less nurture his talents and allow him to flower. But he came back from self-imposed exile in France for long stretches during the turbulent years of the Civil Rights Movement to make the intellectual case for equal rights in debates, in essays and magazine articles and in long, thoughtful TV interviews back when TV did long, thoughtful intellectual interviews.

“I Am Not Your Negro” is a filmed attempt to complete his last, long-contemplated but never finished project. “Remember This House” was to be his researched and annotated memoir of three Civil Rights leaders martyred by the cause.

Raoul Peck’s film uses Baldwin’s many TV appearances — most famously on “The Dick Cavett Show” — and his letters to his agent, Jay Acton, letters voiced by Samuel L. Jackson, which outlined the parameters of the project and Baldwin’s memories of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X and Megdar Evers.

In those letters, Baldwin described the photo that so moved him that he had to return to America to weigh in on the great issue of our times. It was a news image of Dorothy Counts, the gutsy and assailed young black woman who integrated Charlotte, N.C.’s public schools. Her courage reminded Baldwin that he “missed the life that nourished me,” awful as it sometimes was, that he needed to reconnect with African America and African Americans, who possessed “that style like no other people in the world.”

Peck uses grim images from the era — white rioters attacking black protesters at lunch counters or in voting rights marches — as well as footage of police beatings, then and now, murdered kids, from the 1950s through Trayvon Martin on up to today — to underscore Baldwin’s incisive arguments about the disconnect between what Black America experienced and what White America wanted to see.

“White Americans’ evaluations of these matters are laughable,” he intones over the whitewashed TV and film images of “The fabulous ’50s.” He bites off lines about the violence of “the vast, unthinking, heedless and cruel white majority” as images of recent unrest in Ferguson, Missouri plays out on screen.

Images from way back when remind us that swastikas and Confederate flags have long been a part of the iconography of American racists.

In film chapters with titles such as “Paying My Dues” and “Purity,” Baldwin recalls his own journey, from exile to involvement.

Baldwin, in his letters, sets up the conflict between non-violent Martin Luther King, Jr. and “any means necessary” militant Malcolm X, men he saw “being driven closer and closer together” over the years he knew them until, by the time each was murdered, their positions on the “movement” were mirror images.

Peck’s brilliant and timely film ranges from “the famed Bobby Kennedy meeting” Baldwin and playwright Lorraine Hansbury (“A Raisin in the Sun”) had with the former attorney general, to images of white people “apologizing” for America’s history of racism, white people who include Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump.

But best of all is the man who stands front and center, thinking, smoking and expounding, off-the-cuff, about a subject he spent his career and life mulling over, fuming over and struggling to understand in depth. At a time when intellectualism is once again under assault in America, it’s worth remembering that we once produced giants like James Baldwin, and had the good sense to honor and embrace them. Eventually.

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for disturbing violent images, thematic material, language and brief nudity

Cast: James Baldwin, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr. and the voice of Samuel L. Jackson

Credits:Directed by Raoul Peck, written by James Baldwin. A Magnolia release.

Running time: 1:32

He’s well turned-out and driving a Mercedes. But you know the minute the black gloves come out that he’s up to no good.

In the movies, guys who wear black gloves are hit-men or burglars, to a one. Besides, he’s putting them on before he goes INTO a store.

He’s got his routine. He looks, distractedly, through the merchant’s wares — jewelry, pens, odd cheap sundries. His cell phone rings, he fumbles for it, and as he pulls it out he slips whatever he’s pilfering into his tailored overcoat pocket. Afterwards, there’s time for a smirk and a cigarette. It’s like sex to Sandy Duffy, skillfully played by Conleth Hill of “Game of Thrones.”

Sandy’s a famous writer whose break-through novel, “A Patch of Fog,” had touches of autobiography about it — a tough childhood, a father suffering from agoraphobia. Twenty-five years after publication, Sandy Duffy is very much enamored with “being Sandy Duffy,” as one person notes. He teaches at university, stars on a Northern Ireland arts and affairs TV program, dates the lovely hostess (Lara Pulver) of that show and is very much the Big Man in the Arts in that small pond.

But he likes to steal. And one night, he gets caught.

“A Patch of Fog” is a superb thriller in the Hitchcock mold, touching on Hitchcock’s big themes — fear of the law, the sexual rush of committing a crime and blackmail. Because that’s what the simple but skilled store security guard Robert (Robert Graham of “Boardwalk Empire”) seems to do when confronted with a famous man he’s caught in the act and caught on tape.

“I’m not blackmailing you. Just making conversation.”

The fiendishly clever twist to this John Cairns/Michael McCarthy script, is that Robert’s motives defy expectations — Sandy’s and ours. What does he want, because it certainly isn’t money?

A painfully awkward relationship develops between the Man of Letters and the “sad little man” who needs a dictionary just to get through Sandy’s famous book. But that’s all right, Sandy. You’ll record it for me to listen to, right? My very own “book on tape?”

First-time feature director Michael Lennox and his actors dangle their scenes, even simple conversations in a pub, on tenterhooks. Sandy frets for the reputation that could be ruined and tries to play the “sad little man.” But Robert holds too many cards, revealing new ones every time Sandy seem to gain the upper hand.

Graham who has done his share of thrillers — “Snatch” to “Public Enemies” — has a menace lurking just beneath Robert’s naivete. The guy is gauche, but insists on sitting in on Sandy’s college lectures, going to art openings with him. His every “request” of Sandy seems needy and frightening at the same time, even the selfie he insists on in Sandy’s posh home.

Hill gives Sandy mercurial moods, veering from fearful to arrogant, timid to threatening. Does he truly have the measure of this name-tag wearing “Shoplifters will be prosecuted” martinet?

And as the relationship plays out, we wonder to what lengths each man will go to in order to obtain what he wants. What do we not know about them that will illuminate what they’re capable of.

Lennox gives the film a moody, nocturnal tone with an uneasy edge. Scenes keep us off balance. He plays up the script’s literary qualities — “metaphor” is explained to Robert even as the film is underlining what the word means. Is Lennox the son of famed Northern Irish Oxford academic and Christian apologist John Carson Lennox? He directed the more famous Lennox in a documentary debate he had with British scientist/atheist Richard Dawkins.

In any event, he and his players have made a tight, smart and nervous little thriller that keeps right on surprising us, almost right to its inevitable, melodramatic end.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with violence, profanity, pot use

Cast: Stephen Graham, Conleth Hill, Lara Pulver, Ian McElhinney

Credits:Directed by Michael Lennox, script by John Cairns, Michael McCartney. An XLRator Media release.

Running time: 1:32

The numbers for Disney/Lucasfilm’s “Rogue One” just keeping piling up — another $50 million weekend, $60 million+ over the four-day holiday.

Closing in on $700 million, worldwide. Passing “Captain America: Civil War,” to be the second highest grossing film of 2016.

“Finding Dory” is #1, in case you wondered. So that makes Disney producer of the top three films of the year. Bonus checks all around Burbank. You bet.

And yes, this week’s take sets the all-time in unadjusted dollars Hollywood box office record over all, well over $11 billion, better than 2015’s $11.15 billion.

“Passengers” appears to be bombing, but worldwide could prop it up enough to break even, per Deadline.com. Ditto “Assassin’s Creed.” Both are dying in the US.

“Collateral Beauty” won’t make it to $40 million without Oscar buzz. And there is no Oscar buzz.

“Fences” is sitting healthily in the top five, and Oscar heat should give that one legs.

Disney pushed “Moana” back into more theaters, noting that if audiences will waste money on “Sing,” maybe they missed the Polynesian picture that is much more likely to be an Oscar nominee. “Moana” is over $200 million, “Sing” may hit $75+.

The thing about bad movies is how rarely they stick with you, how utterly forgettable they are.

Anybody remember “Clown Town,” “Max Steel,” “Incarnate,” or the last ever “Divergent” theatrical film? Me either.

“Run the Tide?” Yeah, that one starred Taylor Lautner.

I recall the grim deja vu of ” The People Garden,” an utter bust of a thriller set in Japan’s spooky “suicide forest.” But that’s because I remember “The Forest,” a better-budgeted horror film using that same setting and a similar story and starring Natalie Dormer. This one had…Pamela Anderson, and only in a glorified cameo.

Was the disappointing (yet box office dominating) “Suicide Squad” one of the worst pictures of the year? Close. But so is “Why Him?”, which along with “The Infiltrator” finally ends the great run Bryan Cranston has had in choices of projects, and successes with those choices. “Collateral Beauty” should be the end of Will Smith’s Oscar dreams.

Others could name “Passengers” one of the worst of the year and I’d resist the urge to argue.

We had sequels nobody wanted — “Bridget Jones,” “Blair Witch,” “Inferno,” etc. We had bio-pics that seriously let down Hank Williams, Hemingway and others.

Actually, I could build a Worst Ten list out of animated awfulness and bad video game adaptations alone, as you will see below.

But let’s see what stands out in a year with its share of misguided movie moments.

“Independence Day: Resurgence”reminds me of how much I love just love Jeff Goldblum. But even the Great Goldblum should know “you can’t go home again.” One of those sequels nobody begged for, this inane aliens-invade adventure was just sad, sloppy sci-fi all the way round.

“Man Down” is, as the ads say, “Another Debacle by Dito Montiel.” The cut-rate Scorsese landed Shia LaBeouf, Kate Mara and Gary Oldman for this all-in-his-head dystopian fantasy about a combat vet (Shia) who imagines one last “World War Z” styled mission to “save” his wife and son. Laughably bad on every level.

“Keeping Up with the Joneses” had the worst script of any Hollywood-budgeted action comedy of the year, a disastrously ill-conceived packaging of Zach Galafianakis and Isla Fisher as suburbanites whose new neighbors turn out to be “Mad Man” Jon Hamm and “Wonder Woman” but never funny Gal Gadot. The New Yorker endorsed this tripe, the fools.

“The Do-Over” can be appreciated for being proof positive that Adam Sandler’s big screen career is over. Because this, like his other recent “projects,” went straight to Netflix. Co-starring his pal, David Spade and with a plot that was worn out before either of them was born, this is some sort of nadir for one and all.

“The Wild Life/The Angry Birds Movie/Sing!/Ice Age: Collision Course” all remind us that they won’t be contenders for the Best Animated Feature Film Academy Award. I’m guessing “The Secret Life of Pets” and “Finding Dory” and “Storks” and “Trolls” and “Sing” won’t be in contention either. It was a record year for big screen cartoons, and almost all of them were bad to middling. It’s become one of the few reliable places a studio can put its money, these days. Parents are still taking kids to cartoons, even at 3D prices. So every half-baked idea and cut-rate start-up can get their film financed and onto the screen. But “Kubo and the Two Strings,” “Zootopia” and “Moana” should be vying for the Oscar, with “Sausage Party” the odd-man out, so it’s not all bad news.

“Dirty Grandpa” pairs up the legend Robert DeNiro and the aging but still callow Zac Efron for an R-rated farce about a geezer who cons his about-to-be-married grandson into driving him to Florida for Spring Break. Icky, seriously unfunny, even with Aubrey Plaza taking her best shot at playing one more man-eater.

“Cafe Society” is the off-putting Jesse Eisenberg film/performance that stuck with me this year. Not his nattering nabob Lex Luthor turn in the widely-mocked “Batman v. Superman” mashup. Woody Allen gets a pass from most critics, and has been getting that pass for years. The odd bright spot (“Midnight in Paris”) leads to years of carry-over good vibes and good reviews for whatever pap the old man cranks out afterwards. This period piece “comedy” is a doddering farce, a laugh-starved/love-lorn dog, distasteful, stagy, with never-been-worse turns by Kristen Stewart and this year’s Allen alter ego, Eisenberg.

“Warcraft/Assassin’s Creed/Kingsglaive: Final Fantasy XXIV” should be the final nails in the coffin of “Let’s make this hit, branded video game into a movie.” They never hire a good screenwriter, never figure out a story to take us beyond first-person shooter/slayer on a quest, and every actor involved winds up embarrassed. Worst of all, movie reviewers endure endless waves of, “Hey, you can’t say that about my favorite game!” from fanboys and girls, who have to be reminded that this is a movie — the rules are different.

“Nine Lives” is the worst non-animated kids’ movie of 2016, featuring Kevin Spacey, Christopher Walken, Jennifer Garner and Cheryl Hines in the story of a callous dad who has to switch bodies with a cat to learn his lesson. Spacey as a cat?

“My Dead Boyfriend” lets Heather Graham, Gina Gershon and John Corbett try to pretend that the first 25 years of their careers never happened. Especially Graham, who has played endless variations of this sexy-cute and quick to strip bimbo ever since “Boogie Nights” and “Bowfinger.” The DVD comes with a “may cause potentially injurious eye-rolling” warning.

There is novelty in the idea of Oscar winner Reese Witherspoon as a sow singing Taylor Swift’s “Shake it Off” or “Fireworks,” by Swift’s arch enemy, Katy Perry.

That Reese, a real peace maker.

And her fellow Oscar winner, Matthew McConaughey, crooning a bar of “Call Me, Maybe,” as a cuddly koala bear Broadway impresario? Sure.

Who knew Scarlett Johansson could carry a tune? We still don’t. She voices Ash, the porcupine punk rocker, so we don’t actually see her lips move.

But entertainment value? Not much here, there or when eager beaver crooner Seth McFarlane, as a jazz-loving mouse, belts out Sinatra’s signature tune (written by Paul Anka) “My Way.”

“Sing” is a cynical “Let’s put on a show” musical that piles on the star voices (Oscar winner Jennifer Hudson has a small diva role) and plays on the guilt that has parents taking the tykes to any tuneful toon that comes down the pike, especially over the holidays.

It’s marginally worse than “Trolls,” for those who’re wondering whether to park the kids in the theater while hanging out, texting and noshing in the lobby.

The story — one shudders to call it that — is about that impresario, Buster Moon (McConaughey), on the ropes after a string of flops titled “War of Attrition” and the like.

His lone remaining backer (a sheep voiced by John C. Reilly, not allowed to sing here) is wary. Buster  needs a hit in the worst way. Which is how he comes up with an on-stage “America’s Got Talent,” a live audition singing competition in which the audience will pick the winner of a grand prize.

Buster’s so broke he doesn’t have the cash to pay a winner, but he’s got “The show must go on” in his fur. They’ll use “music and light to bring dreams to life,” by gosh.

And they’ll have their singers perform to backing tracks. No sense paying a stage orchestra union wages, after all.

The audition montage, an “American Idol” riff with a water buffalo crooning “Come come, my lady” (“Butterfly” by Crazy Town),  a snail blasting through “Ride like the Wind” by Christopher Cross, a porcine exhibitionist (Nick Kroll) vamping Lady Gaga, is how they’ve been selling this in the trailers and TV commercials.

Don’t be fooled.

The movie is nothing more than that, with the finalists, voiced by McFarlane, Witherspoon, Johansson, Kroll, Brit Taron Egerton (as a sweet-voiced gorilla who doesn’t want to take up his dad’s bank heist trade) and Tori Kelly (as a shy elephant belter) rehearsing for the Big Show while Moon tries to keep the sky and his creditors from caving in.

There are two, maybe three laughs in this. No, the fart jokes don’t work. Any touching moments come from the inclusion of songs by famous musicians who have died in 2016 — pure accidents.

Love the message — “Don’t let fear stop you from doing the thing you love.”

And truthfully, McFarlane’s sax playing, self-absorbed jazzman may be the most appealing character he’s ever voiced. The animation is generic, even though a lot of effort was hurled at animating a Broadway “Zootopia,” with backstage intrigues, club scenes and a heist.

But “Sing” is only to be embraced for its music, from the stars singing cover tunes that include the late Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” to the incidental music which includes Pavarotti, Cyndi Lauper, George Michael, Queen with David Bowie and The Gipsy Kings.

So here’s a thought. Buy the kids the soundtrack, skip the movie.

MPAA Rating: PG for some rude humor and mild peril

Cast: The voices of Matthew McConaughey, Reese Witherspoon, Scarlett Johansson, Seth McFarlane, Tori Kelly, Taron Egerton, Nick Kroll, Jennifer Saunders and Jennifer Hudson

Credits:Directed by Christophe Lourdelet, Garth Jennings, script by Garth Jennings. A Universal/Illumination release.

Running time: 1:48

Here’s a documentary about unflappable, relentlessly optimistic educators and “The Bad Kids” they’re guiding — or dragging, kicking and sleeping (in class)– towards a high school diploma.

Black Rock High School is in scenic but remote and limited Joshua Tree, California, where as U2 taught us, “the streets have no name.” The place may be pretty, but growing up there makes it feel like the deadest of dead-ends.

Black Rock is a school of last resort for kids who have been messing up, all over the region. They’re from broken homes, have access to drugs and what little supervision they seem to have is generally disinterested. They have probation officers, some of them. Others have become teen parents, repeating the endless cycle of poverty, neglect and abuse that brought them into the world.

Whatever their home situation, they’ve been kicked out or flunked out of the schools where they started. Black Rock gives them a shot at collecting the credits, as juniors and seniors, to graduate.

The idea fomented here is to give each and every one of them a shock to his or her system. The principal, Vonda Viland, greets each busload of kids by name. Hugs are doled out, no strings attached. And the rest of the staff follows suit, calling the students at home when they are no-shows, driving out to pick them up, giving them a generous dose of “We care about you” for the first time in many of their young lives.

It’s bracing and inspiring, what filmmakers Keith Fulton and Leo Pepe show us in that first hour. Kids get motivated, act reasonably, learn anger management and seem to appreciate the attention.

But during the course of a school year, as the movie zeroes in on drug dabbling musician Joey, abuse victim Jennifer and teen baby daddy Lee (and his girlfriend Layla), we see pitfalls, backsliding and attempts to give up.

Some will succeed, at least one is sure to fail. That’s the way such documentaries (this one had Sundance Institute sponsorship) work. That’s also the way of things in such “last resort” high schools all over America.

Viland keeps a sign, “The Witch is In,” on her office door. But her every breath contradicts that. Kids are arm-twisted into second, third and fourth chances. The tough love can be compassionate — “Your daughter is me, 40 years ago.” It can be funny in the ways she demonstrates that the best parenting begins with the phrase, “I’m WATCHING you.”

“Who’s that suckin’ on your neck, there?”

And it is blunt. “Get your butt up every day and get on with it.”

Joey has to be cajoled out of his “I don’t want to DO high school” malaise.

Lee must learn to do the math that explains his dilemma in harsh financial terms, the eighteen years of child rearing he and Layla have set themselves up for.

Jennifer has to stay focused and forgive or forget the parents who might be holding her back.

Random snippets of mini-counseling sessions pick up “I really DO want to get out of that trailer” and “How can I believe in me when I don’t believe in myself?”

They’re not little angels. They pass off excuses — excuses more raw than most, but still excuses — like any slacker. They sass Ms. Viland and the teachers, get in fights on the bus and flip off the bus driver.

But their struggle, and the Herculean efforts of the staff — veteran teachers, all of them, bringing in guitars to reach a kid whose only interest is music, weeping over a child they know is heading into a homeless shelter after the bell rights — to give these hard-luck teens at least a shot at making something of themselves, is inspiring.

And as touching as the movie can be as every graduate is given a farewell full of love and group support, “The Bad Kids” makes us appreciate the awe the graduates must feel at clearing this first all-important life-hurdle. The teachers know that these are the littlest of victories. But they also know, given all their bad circumstances and bad habits, that a little cheerleading goes a long way to egging on the kids still in the system, still aching for that one last nudge from adults who care.

MPAA Rating: Unrated, with some profanity, discussions of drug abuse

Cast: The staff and students of Black Rock H.S.

Credits:Directed by Keith Fulton and Lou Pepe. A FilmRise release.

Running time: 1:41