Movie Nation

Denzel Washington is still box office in the right vehicle, and that’s what the remake of “The Magnificent Seven” has going for it — Denzel, in a “cool role” as a man of violence.

Nobody else in the cast is much of a draw, though Chris Pratt may be at that point, after “Guardians of the Galaxy.” Ethan Hawke and Vincent D’Onofrio to the “Let’s appease our Chinese finance masters” casting of Byung-hun Lee (quite cool, BTW) and “We’ve got a Mexican” (a line from the film, applied to Manuel Garcia-Rulfo).

Reviews won’t be much of a help for it. I found Antonoine Fuqua’s film rather missed the whole “Men of Violence in Need Redemption” theme from “The Seven Samurai” and the original “Magnificent Seven.”

And as funny as D’Onofrio is and as cool as Lee turns out to be, they’re no Brynner/McQueen/Coburn/Bronson/Vaughn. Where’s the punk kid? (Horst Bucholtz)? Where’s Mifune?

Anyway, it should do well enough to take the top spot at the box office from “Sully,” but we’ll see. Box Office Guru figures it’ll hit $38 million.

“Storks” is a scatterbrained animated comedy with some clever conceits, some very funny supporting players. Think “Madagascar” with “Storks” and wolves in the penguins role.

Weaker reviews, overall, for this one.

It has Warner Brothers behind it, but will that be enough to earn it more money than “Kubo and the Two Strings?” Maybe. Maybe not. A $25 million opening would be a happy day for WB. 

On the offbeat end of the spectrum, the “final” Jerry Lewis movie “Max Rose” makes an appearance in some theaters, here in Orlando and elsewhere. Sentimental? A safe bet.

“Mr. Church” is such a departure for Eddie Murphy that you want to praise the intent if not the outcome.

An actor reviled for decades of godawful paycheck pictures takes on something resembling an indie dramedy, with a “name” director — for the first time — he ought to be praised.

But “Church” is a faintly patronizing period piece about a black man essentially indentured to a beautiful working class white woman and her daughter. He’s to be their cook, even if little Charlotte (Natalie Coughlin) finds the arrangement creepy.

Mr. Church isn’t “Driving Miss Daisy.” He’s feeding Miss Charlotte.

It’s the 1970s, and Charlotte’s mom (Natascha McElhone) has just lost her married lover. But he was a man of means, so he saw to it that Mr. Church (Murphy) would look after her. He’d cook. Since she’s dying of cancer, he’s also a caregiver.

“I was just asked to cook for you and your child until you passed on.”

And Charlotte isn’t to know Mom is dying. Mom only has six months, so this won’t take long.

Murphy abandons every comic instinct he has to play this guy, a comfort-food cook who listens to jazz and smokes and turns out wondrous pies and cakes and stews and grits.

“You never heard of grits?”

But he’s a man of mystery, fierce about his privacy. And as the months turn into years and Mr. Church transforms Charlotte into an avid reader and makes her the envy of friends with his cooking, that mystery deepens. Charlotte (Britt Robertson), narrating from the start to the finish, just grows more curious.

Does he have a secret family? Is there a dark reason for his indebtedness to Mom’s lover? Is he a criminal, a drunk, a closeted gay man with a hidden life?

Sadly, any of those solutions would be more interesting than the one TV sitcom hack Susan McMartin’s “inspired by a true story” comes up with. The plot seems plausible, but the dialogue, characters, situations — everything that fleshes out that plot — is predigested mush.

Charlie’s equally poor friend (Lucy Fry) uses her looks to get the life she thinks she wants, Charlie’s prom date with a dream boat, Charlie’s mom’s lingering illness which never lets her look anything less than gorgeous and healthy? Been there, seen the Lifetime Original Movie.

The odd clever line stands out in this cut-and-paste scenario. Charlie, even at 10, knows she was “an accident.”

“Your DADDY was the accident. YOU were my miracle!”

Charlotte narrates an explanation for why she avoids her mother once she learns how sick she is. She knows what it is “to love someone so much you actually hate them for leaving you.”

There’s a long, labored history of African American helpers/caregivers shaping and teaching white people humanity, from “Member of the Wedding”  to “Driving Miss Daisy” to “The Help.” Bruce Beresford  directed that middle film, and finds nothing interesting or new in this situation here. The whole enterprise feels out of date.

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As for Murphy, he looks at home in the kitchen, less at home at the piano and only lets us see the odd flash of temper in Mr. Church. He’s to give the self-taught cook, pianist and dressmaker (Oh yes) a zen quality, and rarely lets us see emotion.

“Even his weeping was  graceful.”

For anyone who wrote this guy off 20 years ago, the transformation is surprising. But it’s the curse of “Mr. Church” that it’s not more than mere surprise — not startling, dazzling or even that interesting. “Mr. Church” serves up comfort food in an era when every food truck and most indie films offer more interesting fare.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for thematic elements

Cast: Eddie Murphy, Britt Robertson, Natascha McElhone
Running time: 1:44
Credits: Directed by Bruce Beresford, script by Susan McMartin. A Cinelou release
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After all the decades, all the books and documentaries, is there anything new to discover about the alchemy that created The Beatles and their place in pop culture?

Not really. Throwing Oscar-winning director Ron Howard and the endless BBC and AppleCorps archives at “The Beatles: Eight Days a Week — The Touring Years” produces more warm nostalgia, but nothing of the “startling revelation” variety.

The hook, here was how they sounded live, here was how they got that good and here was why they quit touring, has been extensively covered in such docs as “The Beatles Anthology.”

But a lot of the footage is fresh and Howard weaves an engaging overview of their history, with anecdotes, vintage interviews and enough tidbits from surviving Beatles Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr and some of those who toured with them or saw them live to keep it fun.

Here’s Ringo scrambling, pretty much on his own, to turn his improperly positioned drum kit and riser around on a stage, in the midst of the utter bedlam of shrieking teenage girls. The audiences got so loud he could only keep track of where they were in songs by knowing the posture, gestures and moves of George Harrison by heart.

There’s young Sigourney Weaver, in black and white home movies, at an American tour date in the mid-60s, and here’s Whoopi Goldberg getting choked up at her mother, saving up and surprising her with a trip the famous Shea Stadium show.

A favorite moment? The vast crowd at a Liverpool football (soccer) game, almost entirely men, young and old, singing “She Loves You,” in mid-match in black and white footage from the early ’60s. This city embraced their boys, whole-heartedly.

Ringo talking about “the incredible pressure” of performing in America and McCartney remembering their fear of coming over and failing and what that would mean “back home” isn’t new. But Brit comic Eddie Izzard dissecting their cheeky wit and its anti-establishment (adult) appeal to kids, screenwriter Richard Curtis (“Four Weddings and a Funeral”) confessing that he’s spent his entire career trying to create ensembles with the comical/witty/familial feel of the band’s press conferences, is.

There’s even a villain, if you can call him that. Howard makes extensive use of Miami radio reporter Larry Kane, who rode and flew with The Fabs on tour during one of the most news-packed years (1964) in history, resenting the assignment, at least at first.

Kane’s recollections, and clips of interviews with the band at the time, talk about their first real exercise of cultural power in America, their insistence that Jacksonville’s Gator Bowl not be segregated for their show, which brought down barriers all over the South, is “The Touring Years'” most pointed remembrance.

Kane himself? Affable, professional, and you can’t help but hate him. I mean, the guy got to hang out with the biggest band ever on the most epochal tour in pop music history. The lucky bastard.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with incessant smoking, profanity, drug use discussed

Cast: Paul McCartney, John Lennon, Ringo Starr, George Harrison, George Martin, Brian Epstein, Neil Aspinall, Richard Curtis, Whoopi Goldberg, Eddie Izzard, Larry Kane, Richard Lester, Elvis Costello, Sigourney Weaver
Credits: Directed by Ron Howard, script by Mark Monroe. An ApplesCorps release.

Running time: 2:17

There’s a random daftness, or a daft-randomness, that makes the offbeat animated comedy “Storks” fly.

I’m not saying it soars, but the throw-away lines, and odd inspired wacky conceit get this film, from the director of “Neighbors” and screenwriter of the recent “Muppets” movies, airborne.

Winning conceit one — Storks no longer “deliver” babies. There was “an incident,” so they’ve transitioned into hauling packages for cornerstone.com, an Amazon-like retailer where avian non-union labor is cherished.

Winning conceit two — The reason for the “incident,” the reason storks can no longer be trusted to tote infants is a malady that they share with humans and even, it turns out, wolves. Babies make everyone melt with their cuteness.

“Awwwwwww.”

Junior (Andy Samberg) is a stork on the rise, a delivering machine who has utterly absorbed All Storks’ mantra — “Make a plan. Stick to the plan. Always deliver!”

The Boss (Kelsey Grammer) sees Junior as management material. All he has to do is fire the one human on the packaging/delivering assembly line. “The Orphan Tulip” was a botched delivery, years ago, a teenager who never got to her family and now spends her time trying to fit in, invent ways of flying (like storks). But she (veteran voice actress Katie Crown) is a klutz, and like Big Bosses everywhere, Boss doesn’t have the guts to cut her loose himself.

But “The Orphan Tulip” (“Just ‘Tulip’s fine. ‘Orphan’ hurts my heart. A little bit.”) makes one last mistake. She processes a letter to “The Stork” from a little boy whose realtor-parents are too busy to play with him, so he wants a baby brother “with Ninja skills!” The Babyworks are cranked up, a baby pops out and Junior has a BIG problem to cover up and a baby to deliver.

With Tulip’s help.

“Storks” teeters along as a dizzy “quest” comedy after that, with the story cutting back and forth between Junior and Tulip’s travel travails and the home life of The Gardners (Jennifer Aniston and Ty Burrell), where the parents humor little Nate (Anton Starkman) and his belief that they need to prep for an answer to his letter to The Stork.

Junior and Tulip? They crash land in the frozen north and are chased by wolves. And those scenes are some of the most inspired moments of animated comedy to come along in years.

The two top dogs (Comedy Central’s Key & Peele, Jordan Peele and Keegan-Michael Key) bicker over who gets to eat the baby, but succumb, as dogs do, to the gurgles and giggles. Awwww.

They give chase when the impromptu “family” of Junior, Tulip and the babe get away. Wolf teamwork is embodied by the pack gathering to form whatever shape they need to continue the pursuit. The command and response is straight out of “300.”

“WOLVES! Make a bridge!”

“How-WUUUH!”

The film peaks with their scenes and tends to bog down a bit after that. But I laughed out loud at all of Nate’s guilt-trip-the-parents zingers, efforts to get them to take out their earpieces and pay attention to him.

“You’ll blink, and I’ll be in college….Dad, you’ll be my idol for like, two more years…I’m not a jerk teen yet. Fleeting moments! Precious memories!”

And Stoller and Samberg’s comfort zone — more PG-13 — pops up.

“Is your seat wet?”

“Yeah. That’s my urine. I peed myself.”

It’s not as start-to-finish funny as Warner Animation’s “Lego Movie”, and that also goes for the quirky Lego cartoon short — basically the chicken-botched filming of the opening credits to a martial arts movie.

But there’s wit, warmth and invention here, enough to make you hopeful for a Warner Animation future.

Because, those wolves? Tex Avery and Chuck Jones and the other Looney Tunes would have been happy to call them their own.

MPAA Rating: PG for mild action and some thematic elements

Cast: The voices of Andy Samberg, Katie Crown, Kelsey Grammer, Jennifer Aniston, Ty Burrell, Keegan-Michael Key, Jordan Peele, Danny Trejo
Credits: Directed by Nicholas Stoller and Doug Sweetland, script by Nicholas Stoller. A Warner Brothers release.

Running time: 1:29

The great Donald Sutherland gets his best screen “entrance” since “M*A*S*H” in the Canadian drama “Milton’s Secret.” Backlit, still ’60s hip, warm and wise, the man still wears a Hawaiian shirt with class. Alas, it’s an entrance wasted on a weak-kneed, wan little picture for wimps.

In the film, the veteran character actor plays the twinkly grandpa who visits his daughter’s troubled family to lay a little zen on them.

Mom (Mia Kirshner, “The L Word,” “The Vampire Diaries”) is a struggling realtor, facing financial ruin if she can’t sell a house and therefor living her life by “orbiting the future.”

Dad (David Sutcliffe, a “Gilmore Girls” vet) is a down-on-his-luck stock broker “stuck in orbit around the past.”

And the kid, Milton (William Ainscough), our 11 year-old narrator? He’s being bullied, a child stuck “on Planet Fear.” If only he’d rat the creep out to his teacher, played by original “Girlfighter” Michelle Rodriguez.

Grandpa, or “G-pa,” as the kid calls him, will save their dying backyard garden, sip a tea blend that he calls “tranquility” and listen to every hippy-trippy Donovan tune from his youth to keep himself centered. He’s a combat veteran who has found inner peace. All he needs to do is share it.

“I have lived with many Zen masters,” he muses to Milton. “Each and every one of them was a cat!”

Milton needs G-pa’s lessons because he’s desperately trying to “fix” his broken family himself. He and his wimpy pal Timmy practice alchemy in an abandoned property his mom is trying to sell. If he can find a way to create gold, all their troubles will be over.

Save for Carter (Percy Hynes White), the punk who bullies Milton at school because Carter’s violent, frustrated ex-jock Dad takes out that frustration on his kid.

The script is based on the writings of meditation/life coach/ “Guardians of Being” guru Eckhart Tolle, a German who moved to Canada and apparently, fit right in. The Barnet Bain movie is adapted from Tolle’s “Milton” novel. It’s vintage “turn the other cheek” stuff, with much of the wit and wisdom coming from Grandpa’s mouth.

“You have to be skeptical of your skepticism,” he counsels. “When the Saints Coming Marching In” is his cellphone ring tone, a phone he refuses to answer during meals (driving his cell-addicted daughter and son-in-law nuts) because of an unspoken “Be here, now” credo.

He’s bought a Harley, is dating his Zoomba instructor. Grandpa is a cliche, or so he would seem.

His teachable moments are few and far between. I was hoping for a lot more of G-pa passing on the wisdom of a man of violence who found something deep and special, more overt scenes of that nature. At the very least, I was hoping for a “Karate Kid” level of spiritual instruction (certainly the way Hollywood would have treated this set-up).

But no. Canada. Trudeau. Eckhart Tolle.

It’s the sort of cinematic world where even the supposedly neglectful, self-involved dad is sensitive enough to stop and listen to his son, and to confront his son’s bully’s dad. It’s the sort of childhood where a kid makes a dangerous and potentially injurious and certainly expensive mistake playing with fire, and the adults — to a one — apologize to him.

Insipid, in other words.

North American culture has made bullying its current whipping boy, and it may be sociologically and psychologically sound, according to current thinking, to reason one’s way out of such a situation. Maybe that will work. There’s always a first time.

The ripple effect of bullying — Milton’s fear, his own unresolved anger rippling out from his humiliations by Carter — is touched on but not really resolved or explained.

Movies like this grate largely because of their test tube “solutions” to real world problems as old as the species. If you don’t stand up to a bully, even with the help of friends (Milton’s pal Timmy is Prince of Wusses), it will do a number on your “inner peace” for years. That’s simplistic and “Hollywood,” but it’s also field-tested.

What’s the lesson Milton should learn, that letting a disturbed, angry kid settle his psyche by lashing out at him will only earn Milton a bloody nose?

“Milton’s Secret” has a touch of fairy-tale unreality about it. And the movie seriously shortchanges Grandpa so that his feel-good life lessons — to his daughter, his son-in-law and grandson — don’t resonate, no matter how much Sutherland summons up his twinkle.

MPAA Rating:PG for thematic elements involving bullying and adolescent issues, and for brief language

Cast: William Ainscough, Donald Sutherland, Mia Kirshner, Michelle Rodriguez
Credits: Directed by Barnet Bain, Sarah B. Cooper and Donald Martin, based on the bullshit of Eckhart Tolle. An eOne/Momentum release.

Running time: 1:25

The charms of “Hillsong: Let Hope Rise,” essentially a tour documentary about a big pop band created by an Australian megachurch, plum evaded me.

Meandering, stream-of-Biblical consciousness tunes, all under-written and over-produced pop pablum, performed by bearded, ripped-jeans wearing 30something white Aussie hipsters? Who wants to hear that? Or see the (labored, but not inspired) music in the process of creation?

Many do, apparently. They don’t play to empty houses.

The youth ministry group Hillsong provides subtitles with the lyrics, not just for the film, but on stage as well. They’re the sort of tunes one forgets before first hearing — generic, wussy chords, murky sound mixes that don’t seem to capture half of the instruments we can see members “playing” on stage.

No, kids. Raising your hands to the sky doesn’t make the songs better. It just signals your audience to grade you on the Christian curve.

It’s a musical ministry that has toured the world, a dozen or so musicians “with purpose, with a calling.”

They’re a “family ministry” (lots of people with the same last name, like any family business). Group members declare “You don’t work for a church to earn money…It’s not worth what we’re being paid, but it’s worth what we’re doing.”

They’re looking for converts, or actually to revive the already converted, with their tunes about the one “seated on high, the Undefeated One…There is no other name — Jesus Christ, Our God.”

You don’t have to question their sincerity — their back stories, families separated for months at a time during tours, the baby born with a heart murmur, the worship leader whose sister killed herself — to roll your eyes at these wimpy, flat shimmering piles of notes they call songs. Michael John Warren’s film renders the stage productions honestly, the tunes open to lyrical mockery and the band itself whiter-than-whitewashed, duller than dull.

“The songs mean nothing if they don’t help people connect with God,” one member — and really, aside from Taya Smith, they all blandly blend into one — proclaims. So the tunes, pieced together on smart phones and then vetted by their ministry for Biblical rectitude, aren’t necessarily meant to be chart-topping singles. Still, the film reveals a creative process that is short on…something.

“I’m trying to find the words, but it’s like, ‘Jesus, please, now!'”

Let’s not blame Jesus for bad poetry.

They’re passable singers, but nobody who could cut the mustard on Broadway or “Australian Idol.”

They say their biggest worry, in between facing enraptured True Believer crowds in famous venues all over the world (Red Rocks, the LA Forum) is “being underwhelming.”

Are you ready for some bad news, kids?

MPAA Rating: PG for some thematic elements

Cast: Jad Gillies, Taya Smith, Matt Crocker, Michael Guy Chislet, Brian Houston, Bobbie Houston, Joel Houston, Dylan Thomas
Credits: Directed by Michael John Warren. A Pureflix release.

Running time: 1:49

Antoine Fuqua and his screenwriters take care to credit the original Japanese “Seven Samurai” screenplay, and still utterly miss the point with their “Magnificent Seven” remake.

A tale of redemption, of desperate men facing their fates with the fatalism and bravado of their code becomes a simplistic shoot-em-out under the director of “Training Day.” It’s all about revenge, gunplay and mass slaughter, with sassy characters delivering death and jokey one-liners in the Old West.

Fuqua tried, in other words, to deliver “the cool parts” of the 1960 “The Magnificent Seven,” but seems to have forgotten much of how those were set up, given nobility and meaning, by the Americanized version of Akira Kurosawa’s film. And slapping Elmer Bernstein’s iconic score over the closing credits doesn’t excuse all that comes before.

Denzel Washington has the Yul Brynner role, that of a man in black with a black hat on a black horse — a black man, this time — summoned to save a town under the thumb of a ruthless gang of cutthroats.

The gang, this time, are the hired guns of a rapacious mine operator (Peter Sarsgard) whose mines poison their water, enslaves miners and demands that every other honest citizen in Rose Creek sell-out and leave town.

Sam Chisum (Washington), a “sworn warrant officer” of assorted courts, licensed lawman of several Western states, is who the spunky widow (Haley Bennett) turns to.

“I seek righteousness, as should we all,” she hisses. “But I’ll settle for revenge!”

Chisum — “not a bounty hunter” — proceeds to use his own “Most Wanted” list –ostensibly, the desperadoes he is supposed to be hunting — to flesh out his posse.

Chris Pratt is the wisecracking, card-hustling, hard-drinking Faraday, who interrupts the brothers who are about to shoot him with a card trick.

“You’ll get a hoot outta this!”

Manuel Garcia-Rulfo is the Latino pistolero they need.

“Oh good, we got a Mexican.”

Ethan Hawke is the drawling New Orleans-born sharp-shooter/poet who quotes Shakespeare and comes with his very own Chinese knife-fighter partner (Byung-hun Lee). They somewhat resemble the Robert Vaughn and James Coburn characters in the 1960 film.

Matrin Sensmeier is a Commanche exiled by his tribe and ready to sign on.

And Vincent D’Onofrio, plus-sized, high-voiced and Bible quoting, is the aged mountain man/Indian fighter who steals the movie.

“I b’lieve that bear is wearin’ people’s clothes.”

I liked the weathered, dust-covered (save for Denzel’s duds) world Fuqua gives us, though that attention to detail wavers during the epic shoot-out that is the film’s long, drawn out finale. Characters fill the air with lead, shriek about being “low on ammo,” while we can see gun belts fully laden with bullets around their waists.

History’s laziest Westerns, many of which starred John Wayne, featured those magical talismans the Gatling Gun and dynamite at crucial moments. It’s not a spoiler to say they turn up here. The derivative, unschooled script makes us expect them.

This “Seven” is more diverse, less patronizing than the famous Western it remakes. But it lacks the moral certitude and righteousness of its predecessor, a pre-Vietnam “America saves Paradise from a Dictator” allegory.

Stripped of their samurai origins, no longer hungry swordsmen or gunmen desperate for one last gasp at making a noble statement as they earn a few meals and a pittance from peasants, most of the characters lack the higher purpose that motivated earlier versions of this tale.

And without that, all they’re left with is one-liners and six-shooters, both of which pop off with unerring precision if little motivation.

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for extended and intense sequences of Western violence, and for historical smoking, some language and suggestive material

Cast: Denzel Washington, Chris Pratt, Ethan Hawke, Haley Bennett, Vincent D’Onofrio, Peter Sarsgard,Byung-hun Lee,  Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, Martin Sensmeier, 
Credits: Directed by Antoine Fuqua, script by Richard Wenk, Nic Pizzolatto. An MGM/Columbia release.

Running time: 2:12

Guilt, love and pity wrestle for primacy in “My Blind Brother,” a cute and cutting romantic comedy about the “able” person stuck in the shadows behind a blind “hero.”

That’s how everyone refers to “The Amazing Robbie,” a character given a mean, narcissistic edge by Adam Scott. He can’t see, but he runs Ohio marathons. He’s planning a Great Lakes swim. All for his charity, the Out of Sight Foundation.

All for others. Right.

Maybe brother Bill (ever-droll Nick Kroll) wouldn’t feel that way. He’s the guy who has to train with Robbie, the brother with eyesight lashed to him by a ribbon so that Robbie can manage his latest media-friendly feat. He’s the fellow Robbie always forgets to thank from the podium, or interviewed on TV. He’s an afterthought, even to his parents.

“Look, Robbie, I made your favorite, moussaka!,” Mom says. As for Bill?

“You can just take the eggplant out.”

Bill is guilted into each new exploit, even though he wants out.

“Kids don’t stop being blind, Bill.”

Bill drowns his guilt-ridden sorrows in a bar, where he meets a weeping, equally guilt-ridden Rose, played with heart and hurt by Jenny Slate. Her boyfriend was hit by a bus — right after she broke up with him. The Rose and Bill drinking game becomes “Who is the worse human being?”

“I’m a superficial narcissist!”

“I’m lazy and resentful!”

They have chemistry, shared misery, and their alcoholic embrace would go somewhere, only she won’t let it. Too soon. Too guilt-ridden.

But what does Rose find to atone for that guilt, after giving up drunken delusions of Peace Corps service? She’ll become a ‘reader,’ the guide a blind athlete needs to lead him through his exploits. And wouldn’t you know it? That guy turns out to be Robbie.

Writer-director Sophie Goodhart tore down and rebuilt her 2003 short of the same title for this, hanging onto one very funny central idea. The disabled can be…difficult. And demanding. And self-centered.

The dynamic here is that Rose stumbles into a pity affair with Robbie, while Bill pines away for her as they share training responsibilities. Zoe Kazan is Rose’s annoyed roommate, the one she tries to palm Bill off on, the one who sees where the real sparks are and what sad, broken-hearted Rose is really up to.

Charlie Hewson is funny as Bill’s blind, dope-smoking pal, the one who reassures Bill that Robbie “isn’t so amazing.” Talia Tabin (“Parks & Rec”) stings Bill’s rude, bullying Russian underling at the photocopy shop he manages. 

The love triangle here, all co-stars on TV’s “Parks & Rec,” clicks largely because of Jenny Slate’s “Obvious Child” fearlessness. She makes a “morning after” nude scene hilarious by scrambling into panties backwards.

As Rose and Bill threaten to give in to the inevitable, behind Robbie’s back but not actually behind it because he’s blind and doesn’t need to have his back turned, Slate, Kroll and a deadpan Scott make getting undressed, then hurriedly dressed, a sparkling bit of physical comedy.

“My Blind Brother” takes things in some very predictable directions, and Goodhart was too goodhearted to let Scott go full-bore jerk as Robbie. The character errs on the side of anti-archetype. He’s believably real — as real as Bill’s grim acceptance of his fate and his responsibility for it, as real as Rose’s resignation about doing one good thing for one person, no matter what it costs her.

All that adds up to a comedy with chuckles instead of belly laughs, and not quite enough of those, and poignant moments of hard, sad reality that everyone plays nearly perfectly.

MPAA Rating: R for language, some sexuality and drug use

Cast: Adam Scott, Jenny Slate, Nick Stoll, Zoe Kazan
Credits: Written and directed by Sophie Goodhart.  A Starz Digital release.

Running time: 1:25

Danny Fields was “the Company Freak” for Elektra Records in the 1960s, the “interface” between the drugs, sex and rock’n roll culture he immersed himself in, and “the suits.”

He was “the speck of sand in the oyster” who instigated great things — The Doors’ rise to stardom, the birth of Glam.

He is a gay man who “was never in, he was always ‘out'” who identified many a future star, from ur punks the MC-5 to Iggy Pop, Leonard Cohen to The Ramones.

That last band, which launched punk in both America and Britain, even wrote a song about him. The new documentary about Fields, “Danny Says,” takes its title from that tune, and offers a refreshingly frank if somewhat adoring appreciation for the man who always seemed to be not where the action was, but where it was going.

Brendan Toller’s film has Fields, born Daniel Feinberg, accepting plaudits hurled his way by Iggy (born James Newell Osterberg, Jr), Alice Cooper, Judy Collins and others.

And he hum-brags through 100 minutes or so of Danny’s Greatest Hits.

The magazine that published the infamous Beatles’ “more popular than Jesus” interview and quote? Danny ran it.

The guy who transformed Elektra from a sleepy folk record label to a rock and then punk giant? Danny, as a sort of A & R guy and Dr. Feelgood, pulled that off.

His gift was he would “look at something every else should see,” Iggy says. From The Doors to Aerosmith, Lou Reed to Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers, Danny was the first to see and hear something special in them.

It’s rare to hear someone at the heart of the drug-addled/corpse-riddled music scene of the 1960s speak so frankly about the era and his place in it without apology. Danny Fields is that guy.

Yeah, he got Iggy, introduced Iggy to Bowie, and gave Iggy his first taste of cocaine. No, Jim Morrison didn’t care for him at all. According to Danny.

He glommed onto the Warhol crowd, pushed Nico into the spotlight and at Jim Morrison and always had the best drugs when the artists wanted them. He hung with music tastemaker journalist Lisa Robinson, and has funny anecdotes about boats she missed.

But as celebratory as Toller’s film is, Fields comes off as not necessarily the best influence to have in your corner. The death toll among his “discoveries” speaks to that, though the film doesn’t broach that subject.

No more than the subject of him changing his name. A lovely prologue lets Fields show us his bar mitvah home movies and rattle off his wunderkind college arrival, his odd jobs on his way to where the action was. But there’s something a little creepy about him that Toller doesn’t pursue.

Was he hand-picked to make this film? His IMDB biography seems self-written and just as self-adoring, an artiste provocateur.

Which is what this film actually lacks, provocation. The film celebrates him, but the lack of critical mulling over from people who aren’t in his fan club doesn’t keep him from seeming somewhat unlikeable.

Danny Fields is no “Supermensch,” no Tom Dowd, no matter what “Danny Says.”

You can’t help but feel a lot was left unsaid, that even the frankest comments seem only about the dead, that Danny Fields was everything he says he was — and more, and just possibly, less.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with profanity, frank discussions of drugs and sexuality

Cast: Danny Fields, Iggy Pop, Judy Collins, Alice Cooper, Jann Wenner, John Cameron Mitchell, Jac Holzman
Credits: Written and directed by Brendan Toller. A Magnolia release.

Running time: 1:47

The heroic pilot picture “Sully” will enjoy one more weekend at the top of the fall box office, thanks to a strong Friday and projections that it will hit the $21-22 million mark for the weekend, and $70 million overall, by midnight Sunday.

Next week, “Deep Water Horizon” will chase Hanks and Clint off the top spot. Trust me.

None of the newcomers are setting the world on fire, which means whatever the Brits and the rest of the world may still love about Bridget Jones and her now-digital diary, America is over her and Renee Zellweger and Firth. They waited entirely too long to make the third film, and did such a horrid job with the second one.

It should have a certain f-bomb laced resonance with an over 35 audience, late unplanned pregnancy, etc. But the character hasn’t matured as she’s aged beyond “klutzy cute kid” and Zellweger has fallen off the radar, with only her alterations to her appearance meriting any coverage during this long, fallow stretch of her career.

“Bridget Jones’s Baby” will clear $8 million, kind of a bomb. It may give the “Blair Witch” reboot a run for its money, but even that is underperforming, opening in the $8-9 range as well. A good horror picture or one with a little franchise buzz will do mid-teens every time. Not this one.

And both of those are besting Oliver Stone’s latest, “Snowden.” Making the leaker who landed in Russia a hero isn’t going to sell a lot of tickets, even if Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Shailene Woodley, Rhys-Ifans and Nicolas Cage are in it and as good as the hagiography script lets them be.