Movie Nation

“Patti Cake$” is a lowdown New Jersey epic, a down-in-the-dumps of Bayonne but dreaming big tale of a hard place and the hard people looking to get out.

Australian Danielle MacDonald, in the title role, carries the ghost of everyone who ever yearned to cross that river, to make it to New York on talent, chutzpah and feverish desire. From Sinatra to Springsteen, Latifah to Ice-T, being able to see that skyline is just enough to cling to keep a singer motivated, with eyes never wavering from the prize.

Patti fantasizes herself in music videos, getting epic introductions to sell-out crowds from her idol O-Z (Sahr Ngaujah). Then she awakens, psyches herself up with hip hop affirmations in the mirror and lumbers off to her job slinging drinks at a karaoke dive filled with aged drunks, one of whom is her mall makeup mistress mom (a fearsome Bridget Everett). 

Mom clung to her own music dreams once upon a time. Now, the only things she puts down her smokes and drinks for are to dismiss Patti’s dreams, and demand her paycheck. They’re drowning in medical debts.

Patti’s high school nickname stuck — “Dumbo ” — and not because of her ears. But she’s got a talent for improvising rhymes, be they obscene limericks for her sickly grandmother (Cathy Moriarty) or for rap battles with the locals — “My verse if full of curses cuz’ I live in Dirty Jersey.”

The one guy who feeds her ego is Hareesh (Siddharth Dhanajay) a delightfully delusional pharmacist who harbors his own hopes of hip hop fame. To him, she’s “Killer P,” “Marilyn Mansion,” “The QUEEN.” He ties his fate to hers.

Geremy Jasper’s film charts this motley duo’s struggles to chart a path to success. All they know is how others did it before them — cut some tracks, copy their own CDs, even though nobody plays CDs any more — get a showcase, make some noise.

But even that out-of-date path painfully evades them. The script makes the characters vulnerable but laugh-out-loud funny and only takes them seriously when they’re down.

Enter “Bastard the Antichrist,” an anarchic guitarist/tech whiz and poet whose articulate calls to “WAKE UP” inform his genre-busting speed-metal rhymes. They meet him (Mamoudou Athie) at an amateur night show, and even though he’s homeless and plainly a bit mad, they become PB&J, seemingly primed to take that one shot at getting “across the bridge.”

Jasper gives his picture the muted colors of faded inner city graffiti, with sequences energized by extreme close-ups, swish-pans, hand-held cameras and natural lighting. Even Patti’s bartending/waitressing work scenes have a crackle thanks to the shooting and editing.

The grit and grime weighs on the characters, but they sparkle with grim, deluded optimism. Watch Patti spit rhymes as Hareesh keeps the beat on the hood of her ancient Cadillac (“PattiWGN” plates), staring across the river, and the whole film reveals itself. The goal is within sight, their longing for it is palpable, and their youthful optimism blinds them to their long odds.

Their setbacks will make you grimace for them, but their pluck is almost inspiring. Jasper has blended “Precious” with “Hustle & Flow,” and even if you don’t dig the music, you will root for the characters and hope for a happy ending even though disaster and tragedy lurk around every corner.

MPAA Rating: R for language throughout, crude sexual references, some drug use and a brief nude image

Cast: Danielle MacDonald, Bridget Everett, Siddharth Dhanajay, Mamoudou Athie, Cathy Moriarty
Credits: Written and directed by Geremy Jasper. A Fox Searchlight release.

Running time: 1:48

Maybe it’s the old Alaska radio hand in me, but if John “Chris in the Morning” Corbett took over as preacher at a local church, I’d be in the front pew. “Northern Exposure” lingers lightly on one’s existential soul.

And maybe I’m not the right guy to point this out, but “All Saints,” which parks Pastor Corbett in a dying Tennessee church in need of a minor miracle, is the kind of faith-based film that Hollywood and the “God’s Not Dead” crowd have forgotten how to make.

It’s amusing and uplifting, self-help oriented and not self-serious. It goes easy on the supernaturalist literalism that fundamentalists have locked onto as a political line-in-the-sand. And Corbett, the zen master of Cicely, Alaska’s KBHR (K-Bear), makes a most engaging center to this story of immigrants, tolerance and God working in mysterious ways.

Salesman-turned-preacher Michael Spurlock’s first assignment out of seminary is All Saints, a pretty little brick church in Smyrna, Tennessee. The congregation has mostly died out, and the Episcopal Church’s books-balancing bishops want to close it and sell it off. Michael is to just be a weeks-long caretaker, helping the dozen or so congregants left cope with losing the church they grew up in.

“Have you tried the mega-church down the road?”

“You’re not here to do CPR,” his wife (Cara Buono) reminds him. But when a dozen Burmese refugees — survivors of a civil war, and Anglicans (sister church to Episcopalians) to boot — show up, needing help and a place to worship, what’s a man of the cloth to do?

It doesn’t matter that “The bishop (Gregory Allan Williams) is going to hang me from the steeple.” Spurlock has to help. Some of the older members don’t take to foreigners. One (Barry Corbin, Corbett’s “Northern Exposure” boss), a just-retired farmer, doesn’t even want to bother learning the hired-gun preacher’s name.

“It don’t matter. We ain’t gon’know each other that long.”

But the pastor hurls himself at the Karen (Burmese) community’s problems, hunting for solutions, stirring folks up, creating a stink among the local chamber of commerce, whom he asks for help.

“How can you sit there chewing $30 streaks when we’ve got people starving?”

That’s as close to edgy as this dramedy — based on a true story — gets.  The script preaches this can-do Christian attitude that disarms even the radioactive immigration debate, even the xenophobia of small town America.

No, the obstacles here aren’t rural Red State racism, but more Biblical in nature. Spurlock and the leader of the Karen (Nelson Lee, nicely unflappable) come up with a scheme to use the church’s cleared land as a farm, raising crops to cover the mortgage.

And that’s when every calamity known to nature descends on Smyrna like a plague of you-know-what.

Corbett has rather cunningly avoided major stardom, despite being in two hit series (HBO’s “Sex and the City” was the other) and the blockbuster “Big Fat Greek Wedding” movies. This is the most comfortable he’s looked on the screen since “Northern Exposure,” confident in his soft-sold sermons and quoting Biblical verses that make his case, amusingly shocked when he gets what he sees as “a message from God,” amused at his journalist wife’s “signs and miracles” jokes, not-quite-amused at every fresh agricultural challenge that comes his way.

“That’s NEXT week’s problem.”

Director Steve Gomer and screenwriter Steve Armour keep it corny, avoiding conflicts that sort of leap out as potential brawls,. It’s filmed comfort food for the faithful, and it works. And the third act twists (following the facts of the true story that inspired it) make it a lot less predictable than you expect.

The genre picture it most reminds me of is from way back — “Angel in My Pocket” — an Andy Griffith comedy about a preacher trying to do right, do good and heal a town.

Somebody ought to remake that instead of finding new ways to argue “God’s Not Dead.” And if they do, “All Saints” has just the preacher who could take it on.

MPAA Rating: PG for thematic elements

Cast: John Corbett, Cara Buono, Nelson Lee, Barry Corbin, Gregory Allan Williams, David Keith

Credits: Directed by Steve Gomer, script by Steve Armour. A Sony/Affirm release.

Running Time:  1:48

Sherry Graham lives in an extended-stay motel and spends her days driving her ancient Ford Escort from neighborhood to neighborhood, selling makeup door-to-door.

“I like the personal interaction,” she says. She wears her one-good suit, laughs at clients’ jokes, brushes off the brush-offs and plows ahead, street by street.

And at night, she has a few drinks and picks up strangers in bars. Sometimes they wind up in her motel room, sometimes they never make it out of his or her car.

“I will not settle for less than I deserve,” she insists. We wonder what she deserves, or thinks she deserves.

Every so often, she drops in on a tweenage girl, Alice, whom her sister is raising.

“I’ll call you ‘Mom’ if you want me to,” the child offers the sad-eyed near-stranger.

No way to live, you say? “Easy Living” Sherry would insist, explaining the title of this spot-on character study of self-destruction in progress. Adam Keleman’s first feature film is a minor tour de force for one-time Canadian child star Caroline Dhavernas, best known on both sides of the border for TV’s “Hannibal.”

Dhavernas makes Sherry the very picture of “keeping up appearances,” carefully separating the various lives she lives, dodging AA meetings, aggressively pursuing men but avoiding “complications” with them, scraping by but dreaming big, even in her sober moments.

It takes a village — or at least an extended family — to keep a drunk going, and Sherry tests the patience of her sister Abby (Elizabeth Marvel), a postal worker who shares her life with Liz (Quincy Tyler Bernstine) and Liz’s son, raising Sherry’s Alice (Taylor Richardson) without any financial support.

And then there’s Danny, the indulgent hair-dresser/best-friend, played by transgender actress Jen Richards. Abby is the person Sherry allows herself to dream big with, a nail, makeup and hair salon that’ll bring a little glamour to their corner of Pennsylvania.

Keleman conjures up this total ecosystem for Sherry, picking up men, not wearing out her welcome at any one bar, trying to keep her private life private in the small community where she grew up and more than a few folks must know her secret.

It doesn’t add much to the story that the writer-director built a gay couple and a transgender performer into his picture, but it’s interesting and mildly provocative. As is Dhavernas’s out-there performance — sexual, but guarded, even in its most naked moments.

But rarely has a filmmaker gone to so much trouble to create a world and populate it realistically, only to throw the whole thing into the Melodrama Mixer for a laughably unbelievable third act. And no, making the “deus ex machina” who resolves the story a dialysis patient doesn’t excuse how magically ridiculous the entire finale is.

It plays like a re-write, slapped on the film, with tension and dialogue that has an edgy crackle that still doesn’t hide the situation’s manifest absurdity.

Up to that point, “Easy Living” makes the vividly-drawn characters and high school beauty queen’s slow death spiral towards 40 look effortless, easy. Wrapping it all up proves the film’s undoing.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with substance abuse, graphic sexual situations, nudity

Cast: Caroline Dhavernas, Elizabeth Marvel, Jen Richards

Credits: Written and directed by Adam Keleman. A Gravitas release.

Running time: 1:20

Over the years, I’ve had many a beef with AMC. This Kansas City based empire has used its Second Biggest Movie Chain status to lead the market in ticket price spikes, in killing off low-cost corners of their concession business (Remember “Clip’s Picks”? You could get a popcorn and drink for under $5. They dropped that like a hot potato.).

AMC was the chain that bought most heavily into the dishonestly-marketed “IMAXing” of a America — installing undersized screens, calling them “IMAX” when “MiniMAx” was more like it. And charging premium prices for a screen that was WELL short of “The IMAX Experience.”

They were the first chain to drop newspaper advertising, washing their hands of the symbiotic relationship between media that got their films noticed, their showtimes parked in another medium and studio-placed advertising that benefited one and all. When customers at the last newspaper where I worked called and wrote to complain, they got form letters from AMC suggesting these print readers “complain to the newspaper, which should run showtimes ‘as a public service.'” Right.

And theatres should provide pre-show copies of newspapers as a CIVIC service. Not that they get that in Kansas.

Anyway, MoviePass is an online outfit that’s bulk buying cinema passes and offering people a $10 a month subscription to see “a movie a day” per month.

With ticket prices in the wince-worthy $15 range in most cities, premium pricing running over $20 in some markets, you can see how MoviePass got everybody’s attention with this bargain basement “introductory” offer.

As theaters claim that they make all their money on concessions, that seems like a winner. But NOT with all the 3D, IMAX, and seating up-selling that chains now offer patrons in an effort to make money money per customer. Because customers are staying away.

And AMC is fighting MoviePass. They’re refusing to honor digital tickets through MoviePass in several cities.

Maybe it’s a deal that is “too good to be true.” But knowing AMC’s track record, there’s probably more balance to this arrangement than they’re letting on. This is classic “Disruption” as a business model, and I’m curious to see where it leads, and how studios, whose box office take will be deflated (it stands to reason) if cheap seats becomes the norm.

Any hopes that “Logan Lucky” would hold audience and saunter towards a break-even box office take are Gone with the Wind of Hurricane Harvey.

Or Hurricane Indifference, is more like it. “Lucky” might clear $4 million, but it will probably not reach $25 million, all in, by the end of its US box office run. Comically, cluelessly enthusiastic reviews for this Southern caricatures caper comedy were no help at all.

The new releases of the weekend — a limp cartoon from The Weinstein Co., “Leap!,” will clear $4 million, based on Friday’s numbers.

But “Birth of the Dragon,” a dreadful no-stars bio pic about Bruce Lee’s formative fight that seems tailored for the Chinese market, despite its focus on a white student of Lee’s, will not hit $3 million.

Warner Brothers shoved “Wonder Woman” onto a 1000 more screens to wring a little more out of the summer’s biggest hit, and failed to hit $500,000. Sony did the same thing for “Baby Driver,” but everybody who wants to see that has.

“All Saints,” a John Corbett faith-based bomb, is on a lot of screens and will manage $1.5 million.
“Hitman’s Bodyguard” pulled in another $10 million, “Annabelle” will be clear of $80 million by Monday, Tuesday at the latest. And “Wind River,” the best thriller of the summer, will clear $10 million by Monday night.

The last chapter or so of John J. Winters’ “Sam Shepard: A Life,” gives one the feeling that perhaps he or his publisher knew something, and rushed this biography of the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, Oscar-nominated actor and iconic Man of the West into bookstores.

The secretive Shepard had been sick, looked awful in his last TV appearance and had retreated to solitude for what turned out to be his last days. Winters noted that there were no booked acting gigs, no publication dates for new work (his last plays were from a decade before) and no production of his most acclaimed works that would require his attention, and hadn’t been for the last two years. Shepard died July 27.

But as an actor, at least, he went out in a blaze of glory. His last ten years included searing, compact work in “Cold in July,” “Blackthorn,” “Midnight Special,” “August: Osage County,” “In Dubious Battle” and “Out of the Furnace,” mostly smaller films where his character actor gifts — lean, Dustbowl Okie looks, man of few words Westerner — were put on display. Check out his cult-leading preacher in “Midnight Special” and you get him — not an electric public speaker, but a charismatic one — magnetic.

I’ve seen a lot of his plays over the years and the assessment of such American masterworks as “True West,” “Curse of the Starving Class,” “Buried Child” and “Simpatico” seems spot-on. Vivid, harrowing, character and dialogue and surprise/shock driven, thin on narrative.

But there’s a lot one doesn’t know about Shepard, things he wouldn’t reveal himself, in print (earlier biographies), in a somber documentary of a few years back. And there’s more that we might have forgotten.

His real name, growing up? Steve Rogers. That’s right. The Inland Empire native who lit up the theater with his words and the screen with his looks, had the same name as Captain America.

He was a near lifelong adherent of the teachings of a Russian guru who died in the ’40s. There are some who regard G.I. Gurdjieff as a self-help seer, and cling to his insistence on doing “The Work” to achieve your best self and happiness. And there are many more who see him as a con-artist.

He’d take most any acting role that put him on horseback. He turned down scores of great films, and even turned down “The Right Stuff” because he didn’t think he looked or sounded anything like Chuck Yeager, whom Winters says “he knew.” And once he had played the role that made him, refused to help publicize the movie (which needed it) and skipped the Oscars, where he was nominated.

He hung with Dylan, co-wrote a song with him and tried to script the unscripted “Renaldo & Clara” Rolling Thunder tour docu-drama. Mainly what he took from that experience was how to maintain an air of mystery, as Dylan had.

The book is built largely on the vast collections of letters Shepard exchanged with intimates — especially those he wrote to theater mentor Joseph Chaikin and his ex-fatherin-law, Johnny Dark (the best documentary on Shepard might be “Shepard & Dark,” built on those letters and those two men), and on the sparse interviews he gave over the decades. There aren’t a lot of revelations from those who knew him just for work (film colleagues) or love (Jessica Lange, Patti Smith).

But for being a quick read and a bit of a surface-skimmer (Perhaps a rush job?), it’s a pretty fair picture of a writer, actor, drinker, lover, brooder and significant observer of the American scene, the American family and a nation, culture (Hollywood) he spent a lot of decades shaking his head over.

It’s not too much to expect Bruce Lee to be the “hero” of a martial arts biography titled “Birth of the Dragon.”

But Lee, here played by Philip Wan-Lung Ng, is sort of this jerk in the background of a tale of early 1960s San Francisco Chinatown. He’s cocky, swaggering, teaching kung fu to “the whites” and emphasizing the “ass-kicking” part of the discipline.

He exists as some American “problem,” a showboat embarking on a movie career who has to be reined in by the Wisdom of the Old Country in the person of a famous Shaolin monk.

Sure. Make THAT work. Outside of China.

George “The Adjustment Bureau” Nolfi’s film focuses — absurdly — on a white student (Billy Magnussen of “Ingrid Goes West”) intermediary between the two “sifu” (teachers/masters). The film follows the student as he learns from each, tries to defend a pal’s mom’s Chinese laundry and courts a binu (“servant girl/slave”) smuggled in to work in a Chinese restaurant, running afoul of the Chinatown gangs (tongs) that run the protection rackets, human smuggling, and everything else.

“Everything else” seems to be the goal of this script. As in everything-BUT-Bruce. It’s allegedly based on “Bruce Lee’s Toughest Fight,” but it takes so long to get to that, you’d better have something else fun and interesting to show us in the meantime.

“Something else” comprises a pretty slice of San Francisco, circa 1964, and an alternate take on Lee from the one the marvelous and worshipful “Dragon” gave us. Sure, I’ll buy that, and I kept waiting for the movie to give me a buy-in moment. But it never does.

Shaolin master Wong Jack Man (Yu Xia)  has fought one of those epic “demonstrations” at a mountain monastery in the film’s opening scene. Now, he’s come to America, allegedly to hassle Lee for teaching “The Whites” the martial art that “belongs to China.”

Steve McKee (Magnussen) hears he’s coming, picks him up and the docks and is shocked when the master takes a job washing dishes at a diner.

“I must wash dishes until my soul is clean,” he says, throwing a little zen at the kid.

The muscle-bound Bruce (Ng, of “Zombie Fight Club”) is spoiling for a showdown, a “You’re the past and I’m the FUTURE” moment. But the visitor won’t oblige.

Until the machinations of this picture’s “Dragon Lady,” called “Auntie Blossom” here (Xing Jin) and the tongs conspire to give us the fight all of Chinatown wants, but virtually no one will be invited to see.

Nolfi limits the amount of wire-work “magic” in the fights. But whenever a guy floats and there’s an abrupt jerkiness to his landing, that’s what’s going on. “Birth” doesn’t come close to matching the fanciful fights of the great martial arts pictures of the past 25 years — “Crouching Tiger,” “Hero” and the like. The final fight is fun, if not wholly realistic. But it’s the only “fun” brawl.

Ng is skilled but charisma-free, perhaps the best reason to focus the film on his opponent. Xia does the inscrutable “Shaolin navel gazing” thing well.

The whole enterprise plays like a throwback, summoning up memories of Lee’s cut-rate/no-script “chop sockey” pictures where the charisma was obvious, the fights epic, the stories an afterthought and the effects wincingly obvious.

And the fact that they set out to tell the wrong story from the least interesting point of view (Is there a longer cut that corrects that?) makes you wonder why anybody bothered, or if estate lawyers got in the way at some point.

Unless, of course, the whole point was to humble the American master in a film intended for the Chinese market.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for martial arts violence, language and thematic elements

Cast:  Philip Wan-Lung Ng, Billy Magnussen, Yu Xia

Credits:Directed by George Nolfi, script by STephen J. Rivele and Christopher Wilkinson. A BH Tilt release.

Running time: 1:33

Here’s a clever promotion that I expect to see replicated as more and more movie studios get into the business of streaming their own back catalog, and not licensing it to Hulu, Amazon, Youtube or Netflix.

The prestige picture distributor Focus Features is celebrating its 15th anniversary. And as part of that, for several Fridays they will offer a classic film from their vault (recent classics, mind you) for free for everybody to stream.

The titles –

Friday, August 25^th: The Motorcycle Diaries (2004) won the Academy Award for Best Original Song (“Al Otro Lado del Río”). Following an inspiring journey of self-discovery and tracing the youthful origins of a revolutionary heart, the Latin American continent is unveiled in all its glory as two friends experience life at its fullest.

Friday, September 1^st: The Constant Gardener (2005) sweeps audiences along one man’s emotional and global journey to uncover the truth behind a personal loss and a worldwide conspiracy. For her performance opposite Ralph Fiennes, Rachel Weisz won the Screen Actors Guild, Golden Globe, and Academy Award.

 Friday, September 8^th: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)earned Golden Globe Award nominations for its stars Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet, in an unforgettable love story, a tumultuous relationship seen through a maze of memories. Winner of the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay.

They’re showing #FocusFridays on Facebook live (the link is here) beginning at 9pm Easter, 6pm Pacific.

Another excuse to cut the cable cord? Why yes, it is.

The three widely acknowledged masterworks by those virtuosos of  British period pieces, director James Ivory, screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala and producer Ismail Merchant, are “A Room With a View,” “Howards End” and “The Remains of the Day.”

The most acclaimed, Oscar-honored films by the American director, Indian producer and German-born Jewish writer who married and moved to her husband’s native India were exercises in restraint, manners and romantic/sexual repression, adapted from the novels of E.M. Forster and a clever modern practitioner of his style,  Kazuo Ishiguro.

But a newly-restored re-issue of their 1983 classic “Heat and Dust” is back in theaters to make the case that the “Holy Trinity” of literary adaptations might well be a quartet.

“Heat,” from a Booker prize-winning novel by Oscar-winning screenwriter Jhabvala, touches on themes, settings and secrets — things “just not DONE, my dear,” or things best not said out loud in the polite company of the day — familiar to any Forster fan.

The film came out in the flurry of British film and TV projects wallowing in the nostalgia for The British Raj, the Empire’s rule of India, along with “The Jewel in the Crown” and “A Passage to India” (another Forster adaptation, this one by David Lean).

And seeing “Heat and Dust” anew brings its contrasts with the other works sharing its setting into sharp relief, and perhaps explains why this film is lumped in with the more Indo-centric and lightly-regarded films of this famed production team, which got its start with “Shakespeare Wallah,” “Bombay Talkie” and “The Guru.”

Greta Scacchi, in her first English-language starring role, is Olivia, an English newlywed new to India. She’s just arrived in a rural Satipur to be with her civil servant “collector” husband (Christopher Cazenove) when we meet her.

That marriage did not end happily, but with a mystery. Olivia fled the man. And in the film’s fictive present, the granddaughter (Julie Christie) of Olivia’s sister, a restless BBC researcher, has arrived in-country to experience India for herself, retrace the life Olivia lived that she shared, in letters, with her sister, and maybe fall under the nostalgic spell of The British Raj herself.

In just over two meticulously detailed, leisurely hours, “Heat” takes us into the India of the past, where unhappy, bored and over-heated Olivia finds her only true connections in India are a chatty, outspoken and probably gay British “go-between” Harry (Nickolas Grace) and the ostensible ruler of this province who likes Harry. The Anglicized Nawob (Shashi Kapoor) is a dashing, rich and handsome man with a hint of ruthless cruelty about him. He delights in telling his English dinner guests about the massacres his ancestors carried out while his mother (Madhur Jaffrey) and her ladies in waiting grill the new “memsaab” (wife of a man of authority) on her life.

Back in the present, Anne (Christie) experiences similar culture clashes — chattering Indian women (and men) wanting to know why she isn’t married, how can she stand not having any children, etc.

Her landlord (Zakir Hussain) is a handsome, helpful flirt who guides her, much as others guided Olivia back in the day, through a land of strange foods, oppressive heat and alien spices, where you do not, even today “drink the water.” Anne also has tapes she made of the one surviving man who knew Olivia, Harry, whom she interviewed before departing.

The film touches on the too-familiar themes of British racism and Indian resentment, a hatred mixed with a desire to emulate their “masters.” Even the Nawob is sure to entertain his guests with a bagpipe corps playing “God Save the King,” and it is he who makes the “To the King/Emperor” toast at dinner.

The ex-pat community’s doctor (Patrick Godfrey) may treat one and all, but he’s filled contempt for “those people” you suspect he calls “wogs” behind their backs.

Olivia faces all these “You cannot let them SEE you like this” and “I really DO know best” strictures on how to treat “them.” Anne learns, first-hand, what Olivia was told way back when, that for all the social/culture/behavioral mores limits the Brits imposed, Indian culture was and can be even more suffocating and conservative.

Ever seen the prim, not-quite-puritanical “love scenes” of a Bollywood picture? There you go.

But that gets at the fundamental shortcomings of “Heat and Dust.” The mystery has no urgency, and its solution is one of the great anti-climaxes of cinema.

And for all the talk of murderous heat and how one simply MUST away to the mountains in the summer months if one is female and doesn’t wish to go MAD, well, it doesn’t look that hot. “A Passage to India” let us see characters perspire, and the overripe, overheated repressed sexuality of that film sweats right off the screen.

The subtext story of tensions, riots and possible treachery of the Nawob are given short shrift in favor of forbidden picnics and gossip over gin and tonics. The entrance of an annoying “seeker” pilgrim (Charles McCaughan) into Anne’s world adds no sexual tension to that half of the story and only highlights the “Eat, Pray Love” guru-mystic cliche that became India’s calling card in the years just after The Beatles went there.

There’s nudity and sex, but the filmmakers, 35 years ago, weren’t able to give the feared “ultimate crimes” of that age — miscegenation, illicit pregnancies and abortion — any sting.

Every world that Merchant/Ivory/Jhabvala immersed us in was fascinating, be it the India of a traveling company of British actors (“Shakespeare Wallah”) or “Jefferson in Paris” or the sexual frustrations of the “Downton Abbey” era service classes in “The Remains of the Day.”

But sometimes, they got lost in their settings and could not bear to trim their tales for the sake of dramatic clarity or dramatic drive.

Thus it was with “Heat and Dust,” which recreates a time, a place and a scandal, but fails to deliver that scandal’s heat and pathos.

MPAA Rating: R, sexual situations, nudity

Cast: Greta Scacchi, Julia Christie, Shashi Kapoor, Christopher Cazenove, Zakir Hussain, Nickolas Grace, Charles McCaughan, Julian Glover

Credits: Directed by James Ivory, screenplay by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, based on her novel.  A Cohen Media Group release

Running time: 2:13