Movie Nation

Here’s what the data tells us, data that “Ingrid Goes West” taps into and uses to its evil advantage.

We are the most plugged-in and connected we’ve ever been. And yet, “loneliness” is the cancer of our epoch, now and extending broader and deeper into the future than we can even imagine.

“Celebrity” has become the most devalued word in the English language, largely through the qualifying prefix “Internet.”

And Aubrey Plaza, if she wasn’t voted “Most likely to Social Media Stalk” in her high school, that’s only because social media then wasn’t what Social Media is now.

“Ingrid” is a dark/darker/darkest comedy about a broken, mentally unstable young women who looks at her Instagram (in this movie’s case) feed and weeps. The way we all do. Because, dammit, everybody is having a better time/living a richer life than we are.

When we meet Ingrid (Plaza), she’s taken that last digital Internet straw — somebody she knows has gotten married, Instagrammed a year’s worth of wedding prep, and not invited her to the nuptials. Ingrid goes over the edge, crashing the party and making a scene. Medication and psychiatric supervision is in order.

But she’s made the faintest of “connections” with an “Internet celebrity,” America’s latest web “girl crush,” the magazines assure her. Taylor Sloane (Elizabeth Olsen) is, her profile reassures us, a “Treasure Hunter, Castle Builder and Proud Angelino.” And she’s living the life we all want — Venice Beach, hip parties for the young and hip, meals from restaurants she plugs, clothes from designers/shops Miss “Instafamous” endorses — offhandedly, in that “my best friend says” kind of way.

The word isn’t used, but the beautiful, blond-ish nasal Joan Didion “The White Album” fan is an “influencer,” with enough followers to justify self-promoting/selling-herself to assorted sponsors.

Did you follow the Treasury Secretary’s trophy wife Instagram scandal? She’s like that.

But dizzy, awkward Ingrid doesn’t know. She’s come into a little money, so she resolves to “Go West,” check out the establishments Instafamous Taylor haunts and become her “best friend.”

And damned if her crackpot cunning plan doesn’t work. She gets an apartment — O’Shea Jackson Jr. of “Straight Outta Compton” is her vaping/questioning landlord — finds Taylor, follows her, kidnaps her dog and ingratiates herself into the “IT Girl’s” life.

But of course, that’s when things turn dark, and keeping up with the glamorous poseur (impulsive trips to Joshua Tree, cocaine, party invitations) is tougher than it looks.

Wyatt Russell, so much better here than the ex-hockey player son of Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell is in “Goon: The Last Enforcer,” is a struggling no-talent artist married to Taylor and leery of her eagerness to sell-out. Billy Magnussen is Nicky, Taylor’s out-of-control but instantly suspicious brother who becomes Taylor’s gatekeeper when he figures out Ingrid’s act.

“That’s like ‘Single White Female’ s—!”

As indeed it is, this comic notion of envying someone else’s life so much you stalk your way into appropriating it.

Here the questions of identity and privacy are irrelevant. If Taylor and her Kardashian ilk don’t want the world to stalk them, maybe they should stop sharing every detail of their daily lives with millions.

What stings in this Matt Spicer/David Branson Smith comically chilling satire is the obscene, unspoken social bartering system that has this web celeb glomming onto another web celeb who has more “followers.” Whatever Ingrid’s doing, we soon start to wonder if the effortlessly hip and connected Taylor didn’t do it before her.

Earlier generations would have gone red in the face at the concept of “following” anyone, but not these millennials. Oh no.

Plaza dials down the vampy image — just a smidgen — for Ingrid, a needy, desperate and in the right lighting and dowdy attire, just…ordinary twentysomething. In the extreme. And she may be crazy, but she realizes it.

Olsen exaggerates her natural “Olsen” family (Remember who her sisters are) nasal twang, gives Taylor the arrogance of the true social (media) climber and creates a fine narcissist who makes her self-absorbed ways pay, a great villain.

“Oh my God I LOVE you, You’re amazing! I’m sorry, am I talking AT YOU?”

Jackson gives Dan the landlord a street-wise edge with a laid-back chaser, caught up in Ingrid’s fantasy, maybe a little too into his vaping to realize his place as a pawn in her master plan to get in tight with these “phonies.”

The writer and director are more intent on defying “Single White Female” expectations than delivering a third act coup de grace that sticks. But “Ingrid Goes West” is still a wickedly on-target cautionary tale about whom we let “influence” us and just how little is to be gained by looking “West,” much less going there.

MPAA Rating: R for language throughout, drug use, some sexual content and disturbing behavior

Case: Aubrey Plaza, Elizabeth Olsen, O’Shea Jackson Jr., Wyatt Russell

Credits:  Directed by Matt Spicer, script by  David Branson Smith, Matt Spicer. A Neon release.

Running time: 1:37

One of the benefits of a broadening indie film horizon is the multiplicity of voices which ensure that stories outside of that NYC/LA corridor are told and made.

Winston-Salem, N.C. native Angus MacLachlan wrote “Junebug,” which made Adam Adams, and wrote-and-directed “Goodbye to All That.”

He’s got Amy Ryan, Terry Kinney and Max Gail (of all people) in the cast of this story of family, land, and the connection that people who have grown up on a farm feel to it.

Here’s my connection to it. I knew Angus when he was an emerging playwright back when I worked in Winston-Salem. And while at the Winston-Salem Journal, I wrote what Wikipedia still uses as a definitive short history of the location of this shoot, East Bend, N.C., for a series we were running on the various small towns in the region. Once home to a huge buggyworks, birthplace of Babe Ruth’s major league roommate, a little town too far from the Interstate to thrive, if my memory isn’t failing me.

Lovely setting, promising story, very good cast.

“Abundant Acreage Available” is coming from Gravitas Ventures this fall.

In movies, as in life, there comes a time when getting blind drunk, vomiting in the parking lot after closing time, swearing like you just learned the F-bomb and playing sports and brawling like you’ve nothing to lose isn’t cute any more. It’s just sad.

Of course, in the movies actors play-acting characters still making poor life-choices of arrested development stops being cute deep into your ’30s.

So it is with most everybody in “Goon: Last of the Enforcers.” A lot of actors without much else going on revisit the blood-stained ice of a 2011 B-movie and try to make it half as funny as the half-funny farce (a limp imitation of “Slap Shot”) it is based on.

Seann William Scott is back at Doug Glatt, “nice guy” who says “Sorry” after every hard check into the boards, after every punch thrown in a hockey brawl. If there was ever a time where he could pass for “a huge Jewish freight train” on the ice, it has passed. “Oy vey” indeed.

Allison Pill is back as Eva, the bartender he fell for, married and in this film, has impregnated.

“Doug, my water broke.”

“That’s OK. I can get you another one down at the gas station!”

She wears exactly the mileage of a 30something who has spent too much time in bars and begun the long downward slide of just giving up.

Liev Schreiber pops back in to try and class up the proceedings as an aged “goon” — with just enough scenes to not draw star billing, because nobody would want it for this.

T.J. Miller drops in as the foul-mouthed TV “Sports Desk” hockey analyst — “It’s SPORTS…at a Desk!”

And Jay Baruchel overplays the childhood pal named Hoolihan, who never sobered up and never heard a rhymes-with-puck profanity he wouldn’t use or a penis joke he didn’t love — in front of and now (he co-wrote this and directed it) behind the camera.

The story this time has Glatt’s career with the Halifax Highlanders brought to an overdue end by a better brawler (Wyatt Russell). After a brief, humiliating (and underwritten) turn in insurance — Jason Jones of TV’s “The Detour” is his goofball boss — Doug reaches out to the retired goon Ross Rhea (Schreiber) to teach him how to fight with his left, not his right, doctor’s orders be damned.

He’s got to get fit, get back on the ice (behind his foul-mouthed bride’s back) and take his team back from Anders Cain (Russell).

Schreiber has the best scenes, a new home for has-beens from hockey’s not-quite-the-big-leagues. It’s the Bruised and Battered Competition, a Hockey Fighting Tournament “without the hockey.” Aged brawlers take to the ice in fifth tier arenas in uniform and on stakes, and beat each other deeper into CTE.

But there’s no time to mourn for heroes on their last legs in a comedy built on “”Jaeger bombs” and F-bombs.  Baruchel’s script lacks the guts to stick with that “We all grow old” elegy, and lacks the laughs to take away the funereal feel that hangs over the picture — with players who got famous in teen roles pushing 40 and gone to seed.

Scott has lost his “American Pie” fastball, Baruchel has lost his nebbishy lightweight in Judd Apatow comedies edge (all that “How to Train Your Dragon” voice-over work?). He does OK with the hockey game scenes, manages a passable version of hockey fights, but the funny lines don’t land — partly because they’re weak and partly because Baruchel the director couldn’t arm-twist his actors into giving him more.

It seems like just yesterday when I was trying to talk Wyatt Russell’s dad (Kurt Russell) into sending the hockey prodigy to my alma mater, The University of North Dakota. Here, he’s the career-ending cheap-shot artist Anders Cain, a psycho on skates, just not that interesting as a villain, a character or an actor — not yet, anyway.

Truthfully, nobody here makes much of an impression, save for Schreiber.

But I did like two lines — one, the owner’s curse of amazement at a “Battle Royale” of hockey retirees brawling to entertain the great unwashed — “Jesus Christ on a bike!”

The other’s a nice speech about learning “the difference between a ‘moment’ and a career,” a poignant lesson in life, sports and acting which deserves to be in a better movie.

MPAA Rating: R for pervasive language, crude sexual content and bloody sports violence |

Cast: Seann William Scott, Allison Pill, Liev Schrieber, Wyatt Russell, Jay Baruchel, T.J. Miller

Credits: Directed by Jay Baruchel, script by Jay Burchel and Jesse Chabot, based on the Adam Frattasio, Douglas Smith  book. A release.

Running time: 1:41

So you think you’ve seen “the worst movie ever made.” You’ve plumbed the depths of “Plan 9 from Outer Space.” You’ve sampled the sins of “Showgirls.”

You’ve marked time sitting through “The Room,” “Red State” and “Ishtar.”

But you don’t know from inept, you can’t really talk about cinema as an ordeal, until you’ve rolled up your sleeves for “Mike Boy,” a cult thriller destined for cult status unless it is mercifully dismissed and forgotten.

This badly-acted, incompetently written, clumsily directed and ineptly-edited fiasco is so awful that spelling the cast and crew’s names correctly in a review is an act of unblinking cruelty.

My jaw may be agape, but I’m not blinking.

A mother coos over her infant’s crib, only to be shot, right between the eyes in the film’s opening scene. Everybody in this — even those shot by people who have never picked up a gun before — gets it right between the eyes.

The mother’s last word? “Mike!”

Decades later, that same “orphan Mike” (Hugh Massey) is working at a Middle Eastern restaurant, where the pretty-enough-to-be-cruel head waitress (Aya Mukhtar) cheats him out of his tips. 

But she’s not as bad as that last elderly customer of the night. He spies Mike Boy’s one reminder of Mama, a medallion of an Andalusian horse (never have guessed “Andalusian” myself) and yanks him by the neck and shouts at him.

Leaving him a big tip only gives Dina another chance to cheat Mike, and opens our ears to the stunningly alien (as in “English as a foreign language”) dialogue.

“Don’t question the generosity of the elderly. Money is more for the youth!”

Mike has been “made.” Next thing he knows, he’s waking up with a dagger at his throat, a one-eyed “Agent Chris” is describing some “prophecy” and giving him a series of tasks to complete before the night is through. Mike turns to his “just a friend,” Charlotte — who prefers to be called “Laura,” (Emily Killian) for help.

Since we’ve seen her give Mike “an original edition” of Dickens (he meant “first edition,” but it’s a paperback, so it’s neither), we know she’s a vintage bookseller’s daughter. Or a clueless screenwriter’s version of such offspring.

Through this long day and night, Mike and Laura will face threats and violence, hear more cryptic mumbo jumbo about two competing groups who can say “The government works for us,” they’ll kidnap a perky little girl and run afoul of the Russian mob and a swishy antiques dealer.

Mobsters walk the streets, dressed all in black, waving guns around. A rabbi, a priest and an imam play a game of backroom poker (or blackjack, I can’t decide, neither can they) with Mike for life-or-death stakes.

Not my experience of Pasadena, but hey.

And Mike and Laura acquire this box with “everything you will need” to complete the tasks contained within it.

Truly awful movies are not just characterized by a nonsensical plot, actors sleep-walking through it, static camera work that, like the actors, demands a retake that wasn’t offered and editing that slows everything to a crawl so that you notice each and every flaw as they’re magnified by the lack of pace.

There’s also the “I’ve never heard a real conversation in English” dialogue. And as much as Woody Allen makes me question if his recent experience of his Mother Tongue is collected only from old movies and the plays of Tennessee Williams, I truly believe whether writer/director Hamzah Tarzan (Why didn’t MY parents/agent think of that name?) hasn’t even that much connection with American English.

“I should’ve taken BOTH your eyes…not just one,” as if that last half of the thought wasn’t, oh, obvious.

“Fight me, man for man!” Is that anything like “man TO man?”

“The only time that Fred does not answer the phone is when he’s asleep, or dead. These are not his sleeping hours?”

“What are you trying to say?”

That last phrase is a character speaking for the audience, yelling to the filmmaker the rhetorical question to end all rhetorical questions. Which can only be answered with the following words of wisdom.

Just because you can get a movie made is no reason you should.

MPAA Rating:  unrated, graphic gun violence

Cast: Hugh Massey, Emily Killian, Robert Sisko, Gerard Sanders, Aya Mukhtar, Karola Sánchez

Credits:  Written and directed by Hamzah Tarzan. An HT Films release.

Running time: 1:28

The lost art of slapstick — physical comedy — is so rarely practiced that when true masters of it show up on screen it’s like a surprise smack right on your funnybone.

The first form of film comedy, the ancient art of pantomiming your way to laughs, is what dazzles in “Lost in Paris,” a daft and deft farce about the Last Canadian Who Should Ever Get Herself into a Fix in the Most Gorgeous City on Earth.

That would be Fiona, played by Fiona Gordon, an Australian farceur who co-wrote and directed this twee romp. She and co-director and co-star Dominique Abel set the tone right from the opening images. A little girl and her French dancer Aunt Martha look down on the snowy village in the Great White North where they live.

It’s a model, a child’s fantasy of what “frozen” Canada looks like.

Martha tells her niece that she must leave and go to Paris. Fiona? She grows up to be a gawky, clumsy redheaded librarian — Another Canadian stereotype? — stuck in a town in perpetual winter (so it must seem), where every open door is an epic sight gag.

Decades have passed, and Martha is very old. A letter has arrived for Fiona pleading for her help in keeping Martha out of an old age retirement home. A misunderstanding sends Fiona, her bright-red backpack festooned with a Maple Leaf flag, away from the provinces and into the City of Light.

Being clumsy, Fiona poses for a photo with the Eiffel Tower in the background, and promptly tumbles into the Seine, losing her backpack, her passport, her money and her phone.

While she’s weeping to the Canadian consulate (in French, just because), a homeless fop (co-writer/director Abel) finds that backpack, dons some of her clothes, spends her cash and stumbles into Fiona, with whom he is instantly smitten.

Meanwhile, Aunt Martha, played by the great French star Emmanuelle Riva, is on the lam — hiding from the nurse and authorities who want to ship her off. There’s an old flame/vaudeville colleague (French farceur Pierre Richard) who figures into her past and present.

The sight gags include a pretzel-legged tango between our leads, a hilarious pup-tent sex scene (spied outside the tent), funeral mix-ups and an elderly take on the old soft shoe performed sitting on a bench at the famed Pere Lachaise cemetery.

Gordon has a hapless physicality that brings to mind Popeye’s Olive Oyl, and Abel makes an adorably unkempt version of every suave French masher the movies have ever shown.

The locations — mostly in Belgium, with the odd Paris insert — have a charming unreality to them, which spills over to the rest of the film. Drunkenly singing a toast to Lady Liberty (the Paris version of The Statue of Liberty) and hearing it answer back, staggering up the Eiffel Tower, generic funeral homilies that get out of hand, a cremation that threatens to go terribly wrong — all bits I can describe but which you must see to truly fall into the gags.

Which you will. Because whatever the international allure of Paris, it’s still hard to find an English speaker as you wander the boulevards. But the universal language of physical comedy as performed by the happy few who still practice it needs no translation.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with a little profanity, alcohol consumption and adult situations

Cast: Fiona Gordon, Emmanuelle Riva, Dominique Abel, Pierre Richard

Credits:Directed by Dominique Abel and Fiona Gordon. An Oscilloscope Lab release.

Running time: 1:23

“Step” is an inspiring documentary about disadvantaged inner-city kids getting their shot at college, “breaking the cycle” of poverty and a better life through a charter school and the step team that gives them discipline, confidence and focus.

It’s amazing what a tiny school — just 120 kids, single-sex to limit distractions — where one and all are committed to placing poor black girls in college, can achieve when the principal isn’t afraid to chew girls out for letting their grades slide, when the guidance counselor breaks into tears begging college admissions officers to give one of her kids a chance.

The Baltimore Leadership School for Young Women is a model of what education could be like if schools were more focused on academics and preparation for life instead of the social, the athletic and the mass production of some lowest common denominator “education.”

Yeah, it robs “Step” of a measure of “inspiring” when most people’s reactions might be “Why can’t EVERY school be like this?” And the film will surprise or dazzle only the young audience it is aimed at, as adults have seen this “Follow the Team to the Big Game” formula many times before.

Filmmaker Amanda Lipitz’s biggest previous credit was as a producer on TV’s “Legally Blonde The Musical: The Search for Elle Woods.” So it’s no shock that she built her documentary about the school Step team. That’s the percussive African-American line-dancing popular in colleges and high schools — sort of “Stomp” meets cheer-leading, with a hint of Maori war chants/dancing about it.

And it’s no surprise that Lipitz gives most of her camera time to the prettiest girl on this girls-come-in-all-sizes squad. Blessin Giraldo looks like a young Nia Long, and knows it. She’s a Kardashian-admiring narcissist among the Lovely (or Lethal) Ladies of Baltimore squad — into the routines, with the commitment to performance showing in her face and every gesture she makes, every fresh style she tries with her hair.

“We’re making music with our bodies!”

She’d be a natural leader for the team, but she tends to flake out — skipping school, lost in dreams of who she might become (in front of the make-up mirror), prone to bickering with her teammates and threatening blows, like her self-described “depressed” and sometimes violent mother. She’s the only girl shown with a boyfriend, and we can see Andre is designed for nothing but holding her back.

Cori is the skinny, smart girl — hellbent on being class valedictorian, hoping for the chance to get into Johns Hopkins University.

Taylor is the girl whose mother works in corrections, makes her opinions (and moves) known at step practice, a no-nonsense single parent with job security in a world where those traits stand out.

“Step” loses track of the dancing as it gets caught up in the normal senior year struggles and anxieties of the girls, and that’s just as well. Aside from working some social relevance into one routine — “Hands up Don’t Shoot!” — in the very neighborhood where Freddie Gray, the young black man given a death-ride in the paddy wagon by local cops, lived — the choreography isn’t any more impressive than you’d expect from high schoolers.

But the film still focuses on the “Big Game,” a season-ending meet at Bowie State where we’re given a taste of what other schools that compete at this can do, and marvel how the school with the film crew following it could ever have a chance against them.

“Step” is more inspiring in unexpected ways — simply showing a normal range of kids and body types, tall and short, thin and hefty, made healthy by the workout that stomping in time in Uggs delivers. And a guidance counselor this involved with her students shatters decades of stereotypes about that profession.

Just don’t be surprised if Blessin is the one to get a series deal or a Hollywood break from this exposure. Whatever else it achieves, and “Step is Life!” is the “Let’s make a movement out of this” motto of the movie, putting Blessin on a series is the one accomplishment I can see within the movie’s reach.

MPAA Rating:

Cast:

Credits:Directed by Amanda Lipitz. A  release.

Running time:

In this, the summer that broke Hollywood animation, we take our small blessings where we can find them.

And The Weinstein Co. found its smallest of blessings in the French/Canadian ballet cartoon “Leap!” It’s a sweet, sentimental gotta-dance tale that finds a few laughs — mostly in the international language of fart jokes — but finds just a hint of magic in that ballet dancer’s wildest dream — to grand jete your way to fame in Paris.

It’s about a poor orphan — Mon dieu, is there any other kind? — who dreams of escaping Brittany — the Province, not the Spears — and dancing in Paris.  Felicie (voiced by Elle Fanning) has an accomplice, the smitten inventor orphan Victor (Nat Wolff).

She will go earn her slippers, and he will invent things that make his fortune in the Paris of Monsieur Eiffel. The Eiffel Tower is under construction, the Statue of Liberty is being fabricated, and they barely escape the warder of the orphanage (Mel Brooks) who chases them on what would have had to have been the world’s first motorcycle.

Victor’s unrequited love drives his inventions and his ambition. His “chicken” wings need perfecting, and Eiffel’s 1885 workshop is as good a place as any to make his way in “The Windy City” (sic).

Felicie preaches “We should never give up on our dreams,” but she has about as much chance cracking into “The Nutcracker” as a housemaid — which is what Odette (Carly Rae Jepsen) does for a living, a limping one-time dancer who reluctantly takes Felicie on as an assistant and dance pupil.

The mean girl ballerina (Maddie Ziegler) who lives in the house Odette cleans lords it over Felicie, labeling her “Little RAT.” “You’re nothing. I’m a star! You’re just orbiting around me!” Her Cruella-ish mom (Kate McKinnon) is worse.

But then there’s a purloined invitation to try out for the school of the Ballet de Paris, and Felicie cheats her way in. There’ll be no stopping her….if the gawky girl can learn the five pose positions of the classical ballerina, gain command of the barre, and actually learn how to dance. In, you know, a day or two.

There are temptations by the prettiest Russian boy in ballet school, a rowdy dance interlude or two, some slow-motion fart jokes and a couple of sharp observations about the nature of dance training.

“It’s when you’re tired that you start to progress,” and “To pirouette you must become mistress of your dizziness!”

It’s more sweet than silly, and while the period Paris backdrops are grand, the animation is kind of Pixar 3.0 in terms of mastering human facial expressions — years behind what Hollywood’s best are producing these days.

That said, it’s not a leap to call “Leap!” perfectly watchable, if entirely too bland dull for the very young — especially the hyper-active.

MPAA:PG for some impolite humor (fart jokes), and action

Cast: The voices of Elle Fanning, Carly Rae Jepsen, NBat Wolff, Mel Brooks, Kate McKinnon

Credits:  Directed by Eric Summer and Eric Warin, script by Carol Noble, Laurent Zeitoun and Eric Summer. A Weinstein Co. release.

Running time: 1:29

Dick Gregory was a very funny man — a comic who broke out just before Bill Cosby, and turned his attention toward social issues as the decades passed. A fairly thorough summary of his life and work is in this Hollywood Reporter obituary. 

I got to chat with him the ’90s when I was working in Winston-Salem, N.C.  He was having a laugh about coming to the Heartland of Big Tobacco for a show, I think connected to the National Black Theater Festival. Cigarettes had become one of his favorite objects of satire and mockery. I mentioned to him that RJ Reynolds had just gotten in trouble for poisoning the pigeons that roosted all over their HQ in town. He laughed, and said “There’s gotta be a joke in THAT.” Yeah, I says, “I guess the Camel Unfiltereds weren’t working FAST enough.” He roared, and I says, “You can USE that,” and he says, “Oh I WILL.”

Biting, incisive, generations of comics — especially African-American ones — could look to him as the font, the guy who made comedy and social commentary work together in one act. Hannibal Burress, Larry Wilmore, they may talk up Richard Pryor. But Gregory opened the door for Pryor. He will be missed and remembered.

Jerry Lewis did pratfalls and funny voices, made childish hit comedies for the big screen and insisted on crooning on TV when he had a show — or a telethon — to star in. He took on Broadway and took himself and his craft awfully seriously for such a silly man.

But to generations of kids, he was the definition of “hilarious.”

About a dozen years ago, Jerry Lewis did a tour on behalf of this medical supply/medicine pump company, Medtronic, that brought him through Orlando. He was checked into the Westin Grand Bohemian, where I went to pay my respects. As in, “You know, the newspaper has had me write and update your obituary two or three times the last couple of years.” His comeback? “Me, too.” And then, “You weren’t the ONLY one,” and then “That’s the best YA GOT?”

Lewis said that Medtronic had a pain pump that gave him a pain-free back, and gave him full use of his legs back from the decades of back pain he’d suffered since a TV pratfall, sliding off a piano, in the mid-1960s. He was puffy, comically gruff, in a wheelchair, making a big show of punching the son that was to keep him on schedule. HARD.

But funny. In his bones. One of those obit drafts I wrote I gathered Chris Walken (made his showbiz debut on an early Lewis TV show) and Oliver Platt quotes. Walken — “I was a kid…and in AWE.” Platt played Jerry’s son in the under-rated British comedy “Funny Bones.” I think I was interviewing Platt at about the time Peter Hedges’ “Pieces of April” was coming out. And Platt graciously stopped, gave a moment’s thought to a question off topic, “a Jerry Lewis obituary remembrance.” And he said, “The whole damn movie was about Jerry Lewis. That’s what ‘funny, in your BONES’ means. Him.”

A controversial man, famously unpleasant at times, loved holding forth on topics he could be politically-incorrect about, loved holding a grudge.

But funny. In his bones.

A serial killer mystery set in the bawdy music hall world of 1880s London? With the suspects including assorted performers, a monster of Jewish folklore, a murder victim and old Karl Marx himself? And the Scotland Yard sleuth working the case from “in the closet?”

“The Limehouse Golem,” based on Peter Ackroyd’s novel, has the makings of a corker of a thriller. A solid British B-list cast animate it, and they bring this world to life and find intrigue (under-developed) a few thrills (not enough) and plenty of pathos and more or less pull it off.

The tale is framed within a stage presentation, “a shocker,” as the genre was labeled back in the day. A cross-dressing star (Douglas Booth of “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies”) purrs, “Let us begin, friends, at the end.”

That end is a poisoning. A journalist (Sam Reid) has died, after seemingly burning all his papers and leaving his grieving widow (Olivia Cooke of “Me and Earl and the Dying Girl” and “Ouija”) with nothing.

Save for a mouthy maid (Maria Valverde) who fingers her mistress to the cop (Daniel Mays of “Vera Drake”) sent to investigate.

But the Lizzie Cree case isn’t all Officer Flood has on his plate. A string of mutilated murder victims have been found in the same area as a notorious slaughter from 70 years before. The press has labeled the crimes monstrous, and given the killer a monster’s guise — “The Limehouse Golem.” Flood is brought on to assist Detective Inspector Kildare, played by the tall and soft-spoken Bill Nighy.

Kildare is to be “the scapegoat” when that case isn’t solved. He’s been passed over for promotion for decades because “he’s not the marrying kind.” Yes, a gay cop is to take the fall when the public’s appetite for blood isn’t sated with a suspect.

But Kildare is a smart, well-dressed (a Nighy trademark) cookie — “To the library!”

And it is there that the two cases become truly intertwined — a book on Jewish mythology with a gruesome hand-written “journal” by the killer scrawled in the margins, a reading room where the late Mr. Cree hung out with the likes of Karl Marx, clues that lead to victim profiles and store ledgers and library sign-in sheets that produce a list of suspects.

“It’s not my place to have an opinion,” Kildare declares. “I just follow the threads.”

Jame Goldman’s script throws three threads of story at us. In court, and in questioning, we learn of the horrific life of poor Lizzie Cree, a girl “from the docks” who found her way into music halls, where she caught the eye of her future husband, a man in search of a “damsel in distress.”

There’s the investigation-proper, where Kildare teases out flashbacks of Lizzie’s past, and takes pity on her, all the while imagining the crimes as they might have been committed, narrated in an indistinct/disguised voice by each would-be murderer.

And there’s the music hall, where Dan Leno (Booth) is the toast of the town, a cross-dressing vamp so successful he runs his own theater, and was once in a position to give poor Lizzie an escape from her plight and put her on the stage.

The leads are all compelling, with Cooke giving Lizzie pathos with a touch of furious resignation. Life’s been awful, men have always mistreated her and she’s just had to put up with it. Nighy makes Kildare’s sympathy — that of a gay man misused and underestimated — perfectly plausible common ground with Lizzie.

American-born director Juan Carlos Medina (“Painless”) loses himself, as do we all, in this milieu, The Ripper’s London, with seedy backstreets, rampant crime and a lowbrow theater scene that he had the most fun populating.

A Who’s Who of British character players show up. Just when you think, “Where’s Eddie Marsan, the Prince of Brit Character Players,” there he is — a jovial music hall proprietor with plenty of menace in his manner. David Bamber of the classic TV “Pride and Prejudice,” is flashy as the sneering prosecutor condemning Lizzie’s upbringing, class and associations in making the state’s case against her.

The solution to the mystery feels like a cheat, and that’s the only sequence that takes on any urgency. “Limehouse” is more a fascinating world to be immersed in than a dazzling telling of a morbid tale.

But the players bring that world to life, and if we care enough to know the solution to the mystery and who is guilty, who is innocent and who will come out of this the hero, it’s thanks to them.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, sex crimes

Cast: Bill Nighy, Olivia Cooke, Douglas Booth, Daniel Mays, Eddie Marsan, Sam Reid

Credits: Directed by Juan Carlos Medina, script by Jane Goldman, based on the Peter Ackroyd novel. An RLJ Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:48

It’s not a blockbuster, by any means. But package two fan favorites — professional smartasses associated with Marvel franchises — in a sass-off/shoot-out action comedy and you might have a hit.

“The Hitman’s Bodyguard” is number one with a bullet, a bullseye with a big bodycount, churning toward a $21 million weekend, based on late previews Thursday and a big Friday. $21 million+, per deadline.com. 

Nick Fury and Deadpool, aka Samuel L. Jackson and Ryan Reynolds, turn out to be a winning formula in these dying days of the generally underwhelming summer of ’17.

Much has been made about Steven Soderbergh’s inventive financing and marketing for “Logan Lucky,” a movie his script has a character dismiss as “Ocean’s 7-11.”

It was going to break out in “the flyover states” of “NASCAR country,” with its “Let’s rob Charlotte Motor Speedway” plot and “Magic Mike meets James Bond” casting.

Cluelessly upbeat reviews missed the same thing that Soderbergh (a Georgia native who should know better) and his generally alien-to-the-South cast did. I’ve rarely felt more disconnected from the critical community than with this one. But I knew what they seemed to have missed. The “hicks” in the “sticks” don’t like to be caricatured. Nobody does. NASCAR cooperation or not, this isn’t as funny as SS thought. So no “flyover money” for you. $7.2 million is below even the lowballed opening weekend estimates. Soderbergh’s marketing went bust.

“Annabelle: Creation” did another $14, “Dunkirk” is besting “Logan Lucky” in its FIFTH week of release — close to $8.

“Wind River” opened wider and is in the low $3 million range.

“Valerian” and “Wonder Woman” lost most of their theaters and join “Apes” and “Baby Driver” in the “made all we’re going to make” category.

“Spider-Man” is still selling tickets, as is “Emoji Movie,” but “Dark Tower” is fading out, and “Glass Castle” drops out of the top ten on its second weekend of release.