Movie Nation

 Rose Marie was a crucial comic cog in the well-oiled comedy machine that was “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” and taught the dancing/singing/pratfalling Van Dyke comic timing.

“Wait for your laugh!”

She was the first woman to host a TV game show, discovered Tim Conway, and became the ablest foil to “center square” Paul Lynde on “The Hollywood Squares” during a run that lasted 14 years.

And those were just the curtain calls on a career that began when she was “Baby Rose Marie,” a three year-old with the voice of a chain-smoking 40 something saloon singer, the “Shirley Temple of Radio” before Shirley Temple was even born.

It’s just after those bonafides are laid out in “Wait For Your Laugh,” the new documentary about her life, that the hilarious, one-liner-braying old broad  pops up on camera, cracks a couple jokes and reminds you that A) she’s still around at 94 and B) she’s looking for work.

This adorable documentary places this comic survivor and pioneer on a pedestal and recounts an epic career that had her on stage with Evelyn Nesbit — the scandalous vamp of “Ragtime” — in the ’20s.

“Baby” Rose Marie Mazetta was then taken under a doting Al Capone’s wing because her dad was a “made man,” who took and squandered every cent she made in a lucrative child-star career. She became an early star of NBC Radio, and then a singing, dancing and joking night-club legend in her teens and ’20s who could manage an Italian patter song with the best of them (She toured with Rosemary Clooney much later in life).

And when TV came calling, that voice let her play old women (at 34) from her first appearance (“Gunsmoke”) and made her “the only woman, the ONLY woman” who could play the grizzled wisecracking gag writer Sally Rogers on “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” according to the guy who cast her, Carl Reiner.

Ahead of her time? Oh yeah. Listen to her daughter recount how Mom lost her big number in “Top Banana” thanks to her public rebuke of harassing Harvey Weinstein type on the set.

“You didn’t want to cross Rosie,” longtime pal and “Squares” host Peter Marshall says.

The revelations here include how she got her personal gag-writer, Morey Amsterdam, “a Human Joke Machine,” the job co-starring with her on “Dick Van Dyke,” how she chewed on the series’ star — calling Van Dyke “a six foot tower of Jelly” whenever he refused to stand up to management on the series.

She married a GI trumpeter from the Kay Kyser (and later Bing Crosby’s) band, and lost him to blood poisoning in the middle of her classic TV show’s run. She grew up with the likes of Milton Berle and George Burns, and calls friends Jerry Lewis and Johnny Carson her “angels” for what they did to help her and her husband when he was sick.

She worked steadily until very recently, doing guest spots on TV shows all through the ’80s and ’90s — “Wings,” “Murphy Brown.” She’s “Mama” in the Gun Van Sant remake of “Psycho.”

There are hints of her rivalry with Mary Tyler Moore (the breakout star of “Dick Van Dyke”) and laugh-out-loud accounts of the troubled backstage diva-duels of that epic touring revue, “Four Girls Four,” with fellow nightclub singers Rosemary Clooney, Margaret Whiting and Helen O’Connell.

There’s not enough about her improv-script polishing on “Van Dyke,” and nothing at all about any interplay — fun or feisty – she had with her fellow inhabitants of “The Hollywood Squares.”

But Jason Wise’s film honors a genuine showbiz trouper, a last survivor of vaudeville and The Golden Age of Radio, remembering what it was like (she’s ridiculously sharp) recalling those she met and still finding the laugh — and waiting for it — from her wheelchair.

MPAA Rating: unrated, mild profanity, adult humor

Cast: Rose Marie, Dick Van Dyke, Carl Reiner, Tim Conway, Peter Marshall

Credits:Directed by Jason Wise, script by Christina Tucker, Jason Wise. A Vitagraph release.

Running time: 1:26

“Jungle” hurls characters into the wilds of Bolivia’s then-uncharted Tuichi River region for a harrowing and hallucinatory trek from the middle of nowhere to the suburbs of nowhere.

It’s based on a true story, stars Daniel Radcliffe, and features almost everything you expect in such “man tests himself against nature” tales — snakes, storms, self-surgery and quicksand.

These are indulged college-age lads with no Bear Grylls to bail them out of their self-produced predicament. Who among them will survive?

Aside from our narrator, the Israeli Yossi Ghinsberg, who narrates the story and is played by the film’s star, I mean.

But what sets this genre picture apart is not just the usual intensity, guilt and hopelessness Radcliffe brings to the role. He’s spot on, as always, and puts us right into Yossi’s foot-rotting boots. It’s the chilling paranoia of the dark unknown, city lads in a jungle where everything noise from the night’s tiniest insects to the glowing-eyed jaguar is out to kill you, the fear that you’ve volunteered for a death march and that you’ve roped friends into it with you.

Yeah, director Greg McClean (“The Belko Experiment”) and screenwriter Justin Monjo have made this Australian production (shot in the jungles of coastal Oz) a horror movie, a living nightmare of ill-prepared uncertainty, Darwinian choices and utter despair.

Not that Yossi’s new friends, the Swiss backpacker Marcus (Aussie actor Joel Jackson) and his more outdoorsy American photographer pal Kevin (Alex Russell of “Chronicle” and “Carrie”) are warned that this awaits them. They’re having a high old time, seeing the sights, trying the local drugs and hitting it off with hot backpacking girls (Lily Sullivan) who read “A Happy Death” by Albert Camus to them.

“It takes time to live.”

But Yossi wants to top off his sightseeing/sex and hallucinogens “year off” before college with something that separates him from “every other tourist.”

And that’s what the Indiana Jonesish Karl (Thomas Kretschmann of “The Pianist”) promises. Unknown tribes, rivers running with gold, photographs no one else has taken, trails no one else has blazed. Yossi is sold, and Kevin and Marcus are persuaded. They’ll follow the rifle-packing he-man into nowhere.

“I’ll be an adventure,” Yossi promises. And he delivers. Before they’ve made much headway at all, the insects and damp have revealed Marcus as a weak link. Factions set up. Karl seems a bit of a savage — shooting monkeys, leaving them to fend for themselves for long, lost stretches.

The quest comes to a head when they all argue about how best to extract themselves form this “Lost City of Z” Hell. A raft?

Events conspire to separate the quartet, and lost and alone, Yossi contemplates his choices, hallucinates his recent exploits (gambling in Vegas is re-imagined in James Bond tones) and remembers the Jewish talisman he was given to protect him and the disapproving family he left behind.

And that’s when the steep learning curve of surviving the “Jungle” hits Yossi — hard.

The best of these movies put us in the jungle with our hero, and this one manages that — hopeless choices, futile hiking and hacking, gruesome meals and the consequences of spending too much time in a place not meant for the coddled.

Kretschmann, one of my favorite actors, manages a mysterious swagger as Karl, a callous, cocky in his competence “Papa” to the boys.

“I know everything,” he says, and they kind of buy it, even if we don’t.

But this is Radcliffe’s movie, another challenging low-budget indie drama that puts the diminutive star in peril that no magic wand or spell can save him from. He’s tackled his version of “Lost City of Z,” tested himself and done it with an Israeli accent.

There’s no much new here, but it’s as engrossing the better entries in this formulaic quest and that’s largely owing to his charisma and focused self-martyrdom. He’s suffering for his art, and he convinces us to suffer with him.

MPAA Rating: R for language and some drug use

Cast: Daniel Radcliffe, Thomas Kretschmann, Alex Russell, Joel Jackson

Credits: Directed by Greg McLean, script by Justin Monjo, based on the Yossi Ghinsberg memoir. An eOne release.

Running time: 1:55

It started, just after Labor Day, with eruptions about has-been internet movie reviewing pioneer Harry Knowles and undenied allegations from the professionally (Hah!) unpleasant reviewer/programmer Devin Faraci.

But that was followed by the A-bomb that the Harvey Weinstein story has become. It gets worse with every passing day. 

A century after “the casting couch” was invented by Fatty Arbuckle era “dinosaurs” who led the way in “I may look like a gargoyle, but if I get enough power in the movie business, I’ll have beautiful women under my thumb in no time,” and Hollywood is shocked SHOCKED to discover they’ve got a sexual abuse problem.

Well, sure. Guys get into the movie business for the same reason they strive to become famous as jocks or rock stars. For access to women out of their reach. You think Tom Petty finds a mate outside of a trailer park without that guitar? It’s an equalizer for the unattractive. For piggish critics, too. 

FYI, I’ve chatted with Knowles a few times (seemed mild-mannered, not the sniggering perv he’s being painted as by accusers), quoting him in stories, and I seem to recall getting flamed by Faraci once or twice. Who hasn’t?

Movies have been made about this unholy “understanding” hard-wired into movie-making lore, movies packed with scenes of the “compromise” made by aspiring actresses (and actors) and writers willing to risk too much by meeting with the wrong sort of producer, a known-lecher director, a compromise that is not a compromise at all.

It’s been treated as a joke, “a game” everybody who wants to work there plays. How many absurdly good-looking screenwriters, assistant directors, producers or agents can you think of? They arrived wanting to be actors, because they were prettiest/prom king in high school. It didn’t work out, so they “settled” for the other side of the camera. Maybe they didn’t “submit” to the right compromise.

How many times have you seen a movie business gnome — Valenti or DeLaurentis or Katzenberg and Swify Lazar — with a bombshell on his arm?

It’s a business that runs on and trades in sex appeal, and that gets one and all in trouble.

The horror stories coming out of the Weinstein scandal and the Knowles and Faraci and Affleck gropings/assaults-humiliations are earning justifiable disgust. But all up and down the line, people are trading on looks and sexual allure for access to power and a career. Some are willing to cross a line that others are not. The grunting boors in charge aren’t bothering to see a difference.

It cuts-both-ways as an affront to women, consisting of not just the assaulted but the whispered-about. Not just crime victims, but beauties of marginal talent make one inevitably wonder what happened to jump them to the front of the line. It’s not fair to anybody, but broken meritocracies are like that. Take away the brutish “leverage” men in power can wield over others and those doubts evaporate.

And yeah, ask me about the screenwriter who attached himself to the older woman director and his frantic phone calls to try and remove that part of the “transaction” from a profile. I was writing. The “transaction” swings that way, too, if more rarely.

One troubling aspect of all this is the braying “Why is X, Y or Z being SILENT on all this?” Right wing media, perhaps worried that the NY Times reporting on Weinstein is merely setting the table for a major take-down of the sexual harasser/assaulter in chief, are screaming this the loudest.

Some, like the Afflecks, live in glass houses and really shouldn’t be the ones to speak out.

Rose McGowan has long let one and all know that someone in power in Hollywood (she took hush money from Weinstein) raped her, and has exploded on social media over everybody who isn’t speaking out now (after not taking her seriously then) on this. She took Harvey’s money, refused to break her non-disclosure agreement to the NY Times or The New Yorker or NBC (where Ronan Farrow’s expose, which the Times learned about and then scooped), and is now trying to take the high ground that she in fact refused to help build.

And McGowan and Fox News are ignoring the obvious, this “speaking out” thing is tricky. Without witnessing abuse first hand, what you’re dealing with is just an ugly rumor. Lots of ugly rumors. I’ve met and interviewed lots of producers — Weinstein, Sean Daniels Sr. and Jr., Parkes, Lasker, Kennedy, Silver, Rudin and on and on. Many of them, but not all, have horrible reputations as bullies. People will say the worst things about any of them — grudges, grievances — so you don’t know what to believe. Is it easier to believe something about Weinstein, Knowles or others simply because they’re obese, physically grotesque? Is that why Woody Allen gets a pass? Polanski?

When does somebody scream “Jealousy” as a defense, or anti-Semitism? And how often?

At premieres and interview/junket weekends in New York or Los Angeles over the years, one couldn’t help but notice how young, pert and beautiful the Miramax and later Weinstein Co. publicists were, veritable replicants in their matching short black dresses. And when you notice you wonder about the office culture that demands they comport themselves like that. You rarely saw the same crew more than four or five times. A regular rotating carousel of young, pretty and deferential to the men in charge underlings passed through.

And an “It’s no big deal — everybody does it” attitude that Weinstein gruesomely voiced isn’t just a lame excuse, it’s a face. Whatever court papers show about Roman Polanski or Woody Allen, they keep getting money to work. Victor Salva’s career didn’t end after prison. The turn-a-blind eye toward anything sexual got Casey Affleck his Oscar, or so it would seem. 

One thing Hollywood can’t abide is a drunken anti-Semitic tirade, even though Mel Gibson is working again. Russell Crowe was “difficult” before he threw that phone. And audiences — female ones — were a lot harder on Kevin Costner for winning Oscars and changing wives than they’ve been on Woody Allen. Weinstein-level crimes and lesser violations have been tolerated, both by Hollywood and especially by the now-outraged public.

Where do you park yourself on the “Believe the accusers” vs “Rights of the accused” spectrum? We should fear a “conviction by accusation” culture that has twitter hunting up a bad Jason Momoa joke or quick to label anyone/everyone a “monster,” “sexist,” “racist” and get a result by rounding up an online mob willing to swallow that, facts be damned.

And what do you do with the rough “sex play” abusive gay/bi comic book superhero whispers, the oft-discussed director (also gay, BTW) who takes liberties (assaults) with young men trying to get a start in the movies? The long-repeated story of an ex-Madonna boyfriend who grabbed a studio publicist “Trump style,” in front of reporters, to “get her attention” at a studio junket? Where do you put that?

So it’s been going on forever, a dirty big secret that puts everybody in the position of “What did you hear and when did you first hear it? Hilarious to see Bob Weinstein’s predatory role in the destruction of his wayward sibling. As if he didn’t know.

For everybody else, “Silence” is, perhaps, understandable. Nobody wants to be sued. Nobody wants to unjustly accuse the merely unpopular –outside of the little dears at Gawker/Gizmodo media. Why speak up until it’s actually out in the open, and until you’re ASKED?

Yeah, I saw the late Don Simpson of Simpson/Bruckheimer derail a busy day of interviews with his every-20-minutes bathroom breaks, followed by intense nose-rubbing afterwards. I recall waiting for a once high and mighty (short, actually) star holding up a concert/film premiere for his own “bathroom break,” insulting his more talented co-star, who was about to perform. Similar nasally fixated.

If you don’t have proof, it’s just “rumors.” And “rumors” not only don’t equal proof, they don’t demand an end to “silence.” Try to work in or around the movies and avoid every unpleasant, creepy SOB and see how far you get. It’s rampant.

But as any journalist breaking a controversial story can tell you, there are few things more reassuring than arm-twisting sources, getting that story out there, and then having legions of the silent come forward, even belatedly, to verify it. That’s happening now. It’s snowballing, “a tsunami” an unnamed source told The Daily Beast. I’m just not betting money on anything in Hollywood changing because of it.

A big Thursday night and a huge Friday have pushed box office predictions for the “Groundhog Day With a Slasher” Blumhouse offering, “Happy Death Day.”

No name stars, a borrowed plot (“Before I Fall,” anyone?), not quite funny, not terribly scary, it’s still managing $26-28 million worth of business on its opening weekend. Universal horror LIVES. Via Blumhouse, anyway.

“Blade Runner 2049” is underwhelming in its efforts to hold onto audience or audience share, shirking nearly 60% in its second weekend — over $14 — but not by much.

The Jackie Chan version of a Liam Neeson thriller, “The Foreigner,” is doing OK — but not much better. Pierce Brosnan hasn’t had a picture open this big since “Mama Mia,” and Jackie? He sheds his light, funny persona for something more Schwarzeneggerish in this violent thriller tailored to the Chinese market. $12-13 million of Americans want to see the peaceful man of the East beat up unreformed, unrepentant IRA terrorists.

It’s already a smash hit in China. So we may never see another villain from the world’s largest one-party dictatorship. Pity.

“Marshall” cracked the Top Ten in limited release, “Professor Marston and the Wonder Women” should have a much better Saturday and might crack it (11th now).

So “Happy Death Day” is a “Groundhog Day” knockoff with a dead teenager horror twist. Somebody gets to live and relive a day over and over again until he or she “gets it right.”

And yeah, so what if that’s already been done with the dark, romantic and soulful “Before I Fall” just this year. No points for originality, in any event.

But all that matters is A) Is it scary? and B) Is it funny? Those answers are “A little” and “More or less.”

Strip away a charismatic mean girl turn by leading lady Jessica Rothe (“La La Land”) and there’s not much to this.

Teresa, or “Tree” (pronounced Trey) as she calls herself, wakes up one morning to the sound of Bayfield University’s tower clock striking nine. Just the look on Rothe’s makeup-smeared face tells us what happened last night, and that it wasn’t the first time.

“Am I in a dorm room?” she asks the stranger (Israel Broussard) she woke up with. She demands “Tylenol,” her clothes and manages a Walk of Shame that has no shame, brushing off her sleepover pal, the “Save the planet” petitioner on the quad, her dad’s phone calls to ignore, a previous one-night stand who wonders “why you never responded to my texts,” the domineering sorority president (Rachel Matthews) and plane-Jane sorority sister roommate (Ruby Modine).

She’s got a class to get to, a professor (Charles Aitken) to make out with and this night’s party to prep for. That’s what party girls like her do, especially on her birthday.

But the night ends with a hoodied nut with a knife wearing a school mascot mask trapping and killing her in her shortest/best party dress. Never saw that coming. The first time, anyway.

For it is now Tree-pronounced-Trey’s fate to suffer that same fate, in different ways and in different locales, every night. For no discernible reason and with no supernatural intervention we’re aware of, it’s Tree-pronounced-Trey’s Groundhog Day at Bayfield in the bosom of Louisiana.

She responds with shock, the slow realization she’s been through this before leading to dismay, outrage, defiance and some sort of acceptance.

No, bingeing on junk foot (“Not a KAPPA diet!”), breaking wind in front of random one-nighter Carter (Broussard), whom she tries to unravel this mystery with, hurling herself at her married paramour and taking a stab (hah!) at being nice don’t add up to Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s Five Stages of Death and Dying (denial, anger, bargaining, etc.).

Or DO they? That anchored “Before I Fall,” which was based on a best-seller and thus a lot deeper than this random Ripper riff on “Groundhog Day.”

I mean, the school is Bayfield, and their team name is…The Babies? It’s a scary mascot mask, but I kept hearing Alec Baldwin barking out “Cookies are for CLOSERS” every time I see the killer show up in it.

The solution to “Who’s KILLING me, night after night?” is easier to guess than any reason — supernatural or otherwise — that Tree-pronounced-Trey is being “taught” this “lesson.”

She’s got issues — a bit loose (“slut” and “skank” can only be used, with love, between sorority sisters) — but nothing that adds up deserving a brutal, gruesome death night after night. Maybe the male screenwriter has issues of his own.

But through it all, our heroine Rothe soldiers on — giving as good as she gets in one knockabout struggle after another, creating empathy for this flirtatious floozy who fights back and slowly but surely reasons her way to an answer.

There’s barely one moment of pathos in all of this, leaving “Death Day” miles behind “Groundhog Day” or “Before I Fall” in terms of ambition, subtext and execution.

The laughs are mostly of the sorority girl name-calling variety. You know the word. It start with “bee” and ends with “yotch.”

The movie all but abandons the “relive your life” thing and devolves into too-too-generic stalked sorority girl thriller in the third act.

But in Rothe, we’ve got a new scream queen worthy of the crown — plucky, testy, sexy and spot-on in landing a catch-phrase or punch line.

“Did I totally embarrass myself last night?”

Not even close.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for violence/terror, crude sexual content, language, some drug material and partial nudity

Cast: Jessica Rothe, Israel Broussard, Rachel Matthews, Ruby Modine

Credits:  Directed by Christopher Landon, script by Scott Lobdell. A Universal release.

Running time: 1:36

“The Meyorwitz Stories (New and Selected)” gives us an Adam Sandler removed from his natural habitat — lowbrow comedy — and divorced from the vast dead weight that is his onscreen entourage.

There’s no David Spade, no Colin Quinn, no Dan Patrick cameo.

He doesn’t mug for the camera, doesn’t come off as delusional about his looks, his athletic skills or the sort of woman who might be paired up with him, sans comic film stardom. Jennifer Aniston doesn’t play his wife, in other words.

He still sings, still skips shaving and wears shorts in most scenes. But I guess even writer-director Noah Baumbach has to make the odd concession.

Sandler plays Danny, an unhappy, about-to-divorce son who grew up in the shadow of a haughty, egomaniacal yet frustrated New York sculptor and professor (Dustin Hoffman), a son whose pride and joy (Grace Van Patten) is an aspiring filmmaker headed off to college.

But when they visit his pretentious, oft-married and pontificating father and Dad’s latest wife — a tippling hippie (Emma Thompson) — Danny’s frustrated life’s origins become clear. The old man could never stand for anybody else to share the spotlight, never treated any child (Elizabeth Marvel plays Jean, Danny’s shrinking/shrunken violet sister) with anything other than dismissive tolerance.

Retired, Harold Meyorwitz still takes offense at the faintest slight to his own importance, be it from his former school, his peers or the art world and culture in general.

He prattles on endlessly about a rumored offer of a show, “a retrospective would be a real feather in my hat…I think I’m doing my best work,” and then we see his little wooden assemblages and wonder which interstate motel chain would find them worth mass-producing.

There’s talk of selling all the work, and their roomy New York townhouse, to gay fans of the work who feed dad’s self-absorbed ego, but do nothing for Danny, who never took his ability to compose little family ditties at the piano anywhere.

There’s another son by a different mother who escaped from Harold’s shadow and got away from his influence. Matthew (Ben Stiller) is a West Coast wealth manager to the stars (Adam Driver plays a rock star client). He drops back into Harold’s orbit, but is immune to his put-downs.

“I  keep thinking I can handle you.”

The filmmaker daughter/granddaughter is fond of showing herself nude in sexual situations in her nonsensical student films. There’s a rival’s (Judd Hirsch) art opening in which Harold storms out in a huff, but not before Sigourney Weaver says “Hello,” which to Harold reinforces his importance in the world.

And a crisis throws them all together for an extended period where old schisms are (partially) healed and misunderstandings give way to bonding. Sort of.

So “Meyorwitz” is Adam Sandler stuffed into a Noah Baumbach (“Greenberg,” “Frances Ha”) world filled with chattering Baumbach characters –self-obsessed, navel-gazing New York Jews. Sandler holds his own, with the occasional cute song, the odd “Punch Drunk Love” explosion of temper, and fits right in with the likes of Stiller, Hoffman and Thompson.

Which is more screen effort than he’s shown in decades.

It’s light and occasionally hard to follow, with might-be-funny exchanges smothered by all the talking over one another. It’s also perfectly watchable, a real novelty in the Sandler canon if nothing really new for Baumbach.

“Meyorwitz” is also insular, insufferably self-involved, like its patriarch, and a bit wearing, like lesser Baumbach (“Margot at the Wedding,” “Mistress America”).

The fact that it’s on Netflix makes the nearly two hour run time of this 90 minute dramedy far easier to take. Yes, we’ve seen Adam Sandler roll up his sleeves and prove he belongs in a smarter, edgier picture. And?

MPAA Rating:

Cast: Ben Stiller, Adam Sandler, Dustin Hoffman, Emma Thompson, Judd Hirsch

Credits: Written and directed by Noah Baumbach. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:52

The Irish actor Domhnall Gleeson may be in every other movie in theaters these days — “American Made” for example. And “Mother!” And “Goodbye, Christopher Robin.”

But you’ve never seen him in anything remotely like “Crash Pad,” as a hapless young lover with that Irish “gift of the gab,” weepy/chatty, drunk and pathetic, trapped in “wing-man” mode with the swaggering stud on sex patrol (Thomas Haden Church).

It starts badly. Stensland (Gleeson) has just bedded Morgan (Christina Applegate). Actually, she’s bedded him. The weekend ends and it’s “I’m married” and “This is the last time we will ever see each other.”

And Stensland doesn’t take that well. He’s a romantic, and a bit of a tantrum tosser, with a way with words.

“I’m not some DILDO you wipe off and put back in the drawer!”

He threatens blackmail, even as he’s hurtling into a funk of hurt and rejection. His old roommate may ponder his problem with “sex without strings” with a hot older woman.

But Stensland is inconsolable — “I WANT strings!”

He barely has time to settle into his “Dawson’s Creek” weep-and-binge session, right after his in-the-mirror affirmation –“You’re not the smartest. You’re not the best looking. But you’ve got something that attracts the ladies!”

Because he pushed the blackmail onto Grady, Morgan’s husband. And after the death threat and gun-pointing conversation that follows, the wealthy lawyer and cuckolded husband (Thomas Haden Church) has decided he’ll move into Stensland’s cluttered “Man Shed.”

“But you just said it ‘looks like a pirate ship and smells like beef noodles.”

“It smells like ‘MAN.'”

Thus is the weepy romantic trapped in a Seattle flat with a testosteroned alpha male, determined to obtain revenge sex with a stranger to get back at his wife, and hellbent on making a man out of Stensland in the process.

Bar hopping, frat party crashing pursuit of coitus ensues.

“Survey the showroom. Pick out a model. Take her out for a SEX drive!”

Yes, it’s an R-rated “How I Met Your Mother,” without the mother. But the Jeremy Catalino banter sparkles, with Gleeson gifted with assorted tirades, manifestos and shrieking lectures (to frat boys and the compliant “little sisters” who show up for their beer busts).

“What is WRONG with you people? This isn’t FUN!”

It’s no surprise that Church jumped into this, and his “Sideways” director pal Alexander Payne got this Kevin Tent film made by taking a producing credit.

Church and Gleeson are hilarious as a love/hate threat-of-violence pair, with a manic chase (Gleeson endures a few nude scenes) and a lot of “be a man” lectures, starting with getting those damned “Dawson’s Creek” tapes out of the VCR.

“Find a sporting event, or something with car crashes.”

Applegate gives Morgan an amusingly irked professional woman’s vexation at her husband and lover setting up housekeeping. And Church is an old hand at this Basset Hound expert on chasing women, and catching them.

“You know what happens when vexed women start thinking? Civilizations FALL!”

The bars are peopled with oddball lovelies who resist the lads’ charms, ordering their “Harlem Mugging” cocktails and talking about their dead ponies. Gleeson’s Stensland is given a wide Seattle support system, from the ex-roomie to the understanding folks at his “safe space,” Soft Solutions Fine Furniture, who let him come in, weep and sleep in their chairs.

I loved the running gag that lets him tell-my-woes-to-sympathetic ears bit that has him sharing drinks and confessing his broken heart to a trio of 40something female black barflies, a hilarious contrast (the ginger-haired Gleeson could not BE whiter).

Nina Dobrev plays Morgan’s man-wise assistant and sounding board, too cute to not be a love-interest for Stensland, too out-of-his-league to give him the time of day.

None of which adds up to much that’s surprising, but is still funny in performance. Even the “that’s my JAM” drunken dance scene is cute, a chuckle mixed in with some very big laughs.

But here’s a memo to ’80s pop star Billy Ocean. If you’re offered a cameo in a comedy produced by Alexander Payne, you take it (another actor plays him). And if they want the rights to “Get Out of My Dreams, Get Into My Car” for a drunken romp/dance scene, you tell them “Loverboy” would work better.

MPAA Rating: R for strong crude sexual content, language, some nudity, drug use and alcohol abuse

Cast: Domhnall Gleeson, Christina Applegate, Thomas Haden Church and Nina Dobrev

Credits:Directed by Kevin Tent , script by  Jeremy Catalino. A — release.

Running time 1:32

Every so often, preview screenings are double booked for me down here in America’s Vacationland. And my rule has always been, “Whoever reserved the date first, that’s whose movie I review opening day.”

And since “The Foreigner” stars Jackie Chan and seemed to have good early buzz, well it was a no-brainer. It got the review. “Happy Death Day,” which is a Blumhouse horror spin on “Before I Fall,” a not-bad thriller about a teen who has to relive her last day over and over again, I will get to later.

The thing about “early buzz” is the reviews that show up before the movie is widely previewed for critics are generally cherry-picked. Either a studio shows a picture to a friendly audience of fanboys and girls (at SXSW, for instance) or it sets up showings for “easy lay” critics who like everything.

Such was the case with “The Foreigner,” a dark, glum Jackie Chan thriller about the IRA and directed by an aged James Bond picture vet. It sat over 80% on Rottentomatoes Monday, got knocked down a few notches by my review Tuesday and went into free fall Thursday AM, when other reviews flooded in.

Like more and more films these days, it’s aimed at cashing with audiences in the lucrative World’s Largest Dictatorship market — China. China pandering is totally a thing, and this badly-acted “Man of Asia/Man of Peace confronts the Violent West” picture is very much an old dog’s dog — grizzled director, aged star who needs a LOT of editing to look like he’s doing all these amazing fights. And without his grin, his friendliness, his little shake-his-hand in pain after every punch, Chan is exposed as the limited martial arts clown he’s always been. He can’t act, or more precisely, has no range.

The picture should still do $10 million in the US. They’ve already made a fortune with it over in China.

The picture that I skipped is faring no better in reviews — maybe a smidge. But “Happy Death Day” figures to win the weekend box. $18+ says Box Office Mojo. Blumhouse is a pretty reliable brand for solid if derivative horror.

Will the good-not-great and over-praised “Blade Runner 2049” turn out to have legs, holding onto audience share its second, third and fourth weekends? Mojo says “No.” I could see it doing better than $16, maybe even $20ish. But there’s a reason it didn’t blow up in previews, and that it fell way off last Saturday after a big Friday. Audiences have not warmed up to it, and word of mouth is poor.

The best-reviewed pictures of the weekend are the bouncy-sad bio-pic “Professor Marston and the Wonder Women” and the rise of Thurgood Marshall bio-comedy “Marshall.” Both have tone issues (“Marston” has an alternative sexuality agenda that considering its star and director, is no big surprise), with “Marshall” setting a lot of laughs in the courtroom…of a RAPE trial. But thoroughly entertaining (truncated, slightly altered) history in both cases. Both should do $3-4 million in limited release.

Somebody needs to get a good children’s picture out before the lame “LEGO” movie and limp “Little Pony” run completely out of box office gas. The only people seeing “Pony” are the Pony-bros, “Bronies.” Apparently.

Oh no…a RED BAND trailer with Leslie Mann and John Cena are parents (and that other guy), and they’re determined to um BLOCK their teenage kids from losing their virginity prom night. Social media, chugging contests, keg parties…with the kids staying one raunchy step ahead of the grownups.

Oh no, not suitable for work. But funny.

Clown masks, classic cars and carnage. It feels like Stephen King on steroids.

No name cast, a real grindhouse special.