Movie Nation

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.

Well well well, Millennials. You’re the most tech-savvy generation in human history, but pitching a tent confounds you, and you still can’t find your way out the woods.

You can load an app to your smart phone and control a camera drone with it. But you’re still terrified by tied-up twigs.

“Blair Witch” is a sequel/reboot of the hand-held camera classic “The Blair Witch Project,” a film so close to the original that it’s no wonder the filmmakers don’t acknowledge the first film in the screenplay credits.

Considering the generation that’s grown up without seeing the 1999 film — and I polled four Millennials this week, including alleged horror fans, none had — maybe a remake is all that was called for.

But taking a bigger and more attractive cast back into the Black Hills Forest around Burkittsville, Maryland (British Columbia, actually, because who could get lost anywhere in Maryland?) doesn’t make for a better, or even remotely different movie.

Simply put, there is no “Blair Witch” without the “Project” that launched it.

The lame idea that writer Simon Barrett came up with is that a brother of Heather, the young film student who disappeared 17 years ago, is sure he’s seen footage of her — or something that looks like her — from those woods. He wants to “find that house” where she and those who vanished with her could only stare at the corner, facing away from some unspeakable spectral horror.

James (James Allen McCune) thinks Heather might still be alive. In any event, he wants answers and closure. His pal  Peter (Brandon Scott) humors him, but laughs at such beliefs behind James’s back. Film student Lisa (Callie Hernandez) wants to video the search, with ear-bud cameras, GPS, a camera drone, the works.

And Peter’s girlfriend Ashley (Corbin Reid) is along for grins and giggles.

First obstacle, the guy who found the “new” footage is a nerdy local “researcher” and Blair Witch buff who insists that he (Wes Robinson) and his witch hunting girlfriend (Valorie Curry) come along.

They’ll roast wieners, make s’mores by the campfire. It’ll be fun!

Don’t worry about leaving the cars in the wilderness, “No one cares” that they park there. “No one LIVING that is!”

So the dynamic is set — city kids camping for the first time, locals with supposed local knowledge, people whom the first four don’t trust, along for the ride.

It’s a symptom of this Adam Wingard (“You’re Next”) film’s general haplessness that so little is done with any promising idea in all this. The stick figures are hung in trees all around the campsite, the locals are accused, the groups split up in a huff, and bad things go down, one camper at a time.

Seventeen years of shaky-cam/first-person-point-of-view pictures have ruined the novelty of scaredy cats running through the woods, only seeing what their puny flashlights expose in the pitch darkness. Cheap frights — characters keep sneaking up on each other while they’re filming, with deafening sound effects accompanying them bumping into each other — and a selection of horror stunts borrowed from the “Son of Blair Witch,” aka the “Paranormal Activity” movies, deliver the only hair-raising moments.

There’s no wit, no methodical build-up to the suspense, no time to empathize with the characters, just unneeded bits of exposition the first film didn’t need to scare you to death.

“Legend says that if you look directly at the witch, you’ll die from fright!”

Among the cast, Hernandez (TV’s “Graves” and “From Dusk Till Dawn”) is best at getting across the notion that she’s experiencing something impossible, something utterly terrifying. Her wild-eyed gulps of fear rival Heather Donahue’s fumbling, panting confession in the tent in “The Blair Witch Project,” one of the most iconic scenes and images in all of horror.

The woods around Burkittsville are cursed by the Blair Witch, but we’re the ones dealing with a curse that’s worse. We’re trapped in a movie era of repetition, pointless reboots and inferior copies of the original.

If only the potential audience for this one could be bothered to Netflix “The Blair Witch Project” — preferably on something other than their phones — this reboot could have been avoided. Actually, it still should be.

MPAA Rating: R for language, terror and some disturbing images

Cast: James Allen McCune, Callie Hernandez, Corbin Reid, Brandon Scott, Wes Robinson, Valorie Curry
Credits: Directed by Adam Wingard, script by Simon Barrett, based on “The Blair Witch Project.” A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1:29

Here’s an idea sure to get your movie into a LOT of film festivals.

Turn Jane Austen’s “Pride & Prejudice” into a gay romance. Maker the “prejudice” homophobia and suggest the “pride” is, well, gay.

Writer-director Byrum Geisler’s “Before the Fall” uses the characters — a lovelorn Bennett, the proud Darcy, the cad Wickham, the mooning/swooning Bingley — and bends them to his will. Jane, the older sister of Austen’s book, becomes the straight BFF of Ben, not Elizabeth Bennett.

And in the movie’s cleverest conceit, Geisler picks up on all that scenic rambling those Great Brits do in the various film versions of the book. He sets this tale of love and misunderstanding in lovely Abingdon, in the mountains of Southwest Virginia, and shot his movie in the fall.

Everybody in Abingdon, home to the world famous Barter Theater, is into hiking. Yes, even the gays. Yes, even the bitchy ones (played by Daniel Wallen and Bryan Pridgen).

Abingdon is where Ben Bennett (Ethan Sharrett) practices law and looks for love. His pals (Wallen and Pridgen) complain that “the queens got left out.” But they have each other. Closer to stereotypes, they prowl and “Meow” at every eligible unattached man to wander into town.

New attorney George Wickham (Jonathan Horvath) gets Ben’s attention, and before you can gasp, “Elizabeth Bennett, you tramp!” is suggesting “Why don’t you stay the night?” after a date.

Cheerful nature-lover Bingley (Jason Mac) is also new in town, and once we’ve determined he’s straight, he sets off sparks with Ben’s gal-pal Jane (Brandi Price). It’s a pity he works for a non-profit, with no prospects.

And then there’s the haunted Mr. Darcy. Lee Darcy (Chase Conner) is a miserable factory worker living with Kathy (Carol Marie Rinn) and drinking. A lot.

“Why are you so miserable, Lee?”

Oh yes, Lee’s “confused.” In another twist that would have given Austen the vapors, he’s an abusive drunk. Which is how he runs afoul of the town’s gay legal eagles.

If “Pride & Prejudice” can survive the coarseness of “Bridget Jones,” travel to India (“Bride & Prejudice”) and into World War Z (“Pride & Prejudice & Zombies”), there’s no reason it can’t work in this re-setting. But you’ve got to try and match the warmth, the brittle hurt and above all the wit of Austen. No mean feat.

Frankly, even though the “queens” of the piece are stereotypical, a lot more of their snark would have lifted this. When your funniest line is “Open your EYES, Shelby,” gays quoting from “Steel Magnolias,” you’re just letting us know what your movie’s missing — humor, and Southern accents.

Elizabeth Bennett’s flaws are usually harder to find in most screen adaptations of the book — the sexy/saintly Jennifer Ehle set the standard. Giving Ben some of Darcy’s arrogance and meddling helps.

Bland performances mean that little crackles about the mismatched Bennett/Darcy relationship, and the only sparkle-in-their-eyes moments come from the straight couple, Jane and Bingley.

And there’s an edge to this that doesn’t fit the material. Domestic violence, alcoholism and a ready rural willingness to hurl gay slurs smother the warmth of the story. This 90 minute film omits about half the characters of the populous book, and the poverty depicted here is Appalachian genuine, not Empire Era genteel.

“Before the Fall” has the germ of a great idea, one that will get the film noticed and some festival play. But the promise of “Pride” is, in this case, not fully kept. It lacks the wit and the light touch to come off.

MPAA Rating: unrated, domestic violence, adult situations, alcohol consumption

Cast: Chase Conner, Ethan Sharrett, Brandi Price, Jonathan Horvath, Carol Marie Rinn, Daniel Wallen, Bryan Pridgen
Credits: Written and directed by Byrum Geisler. A Washington House production.

Running time: 1:35

So there’s this no-budget indie thriller “ClownTown” coming out Sept. 30.

Is there a connection between it and the sudden surge in scary clown sightings all over the South, originating in South Carolina?

The setting is rural Ohio, but the rutted, remote roads could easily pass for S.C., and at least one character in the country-music-concert-going cast has a drawl.

The clowns seem inspired by all manner of painted Pagliaccis, from serial killer John Wayne Gacy to Stephen King’s “Pennywise” to “The Baseball Furies” street gang of “The Warriors.”

So. Maybe. Probably not, but maybe. Check the distributor’s phone records, see if anybody put in a call to any of the “Blair Witch Project” boys.

The movie, actually filmed in Ohio, is pretty bad, but not campy bad. Frank (Greg Violand), the old man who explains the sordid history of ClownTown to the five travelers trapped in it, has the only funny line.

“Clowns OWN this town, now.”

It’s a perfunctory by-the-numbers slasher pic with no frights and only the two female leads getting across the idea that something terrifying is happening. The guys? A quartet of stiffs.

A stop in Stanley’s Diner leads to bad directions, and a set-up. Jill (Katie Keen, a beauty and a great screamer) loses her phone. Her beau (Andrew Staton) and their traveling friends Sarah (Lauren Compton, another gorgeous screamer) and Brad (Brian Nagel) are stuck with her as she tries to track the lost phone down.

No way they’re going to make it to the big country music show they’re Jeeping to.

Billy and Dylan (Tom Nagel, and Jeff Denton) are roughnecks who stumble into the lost four just as it’s getting dark, just as clowns start to turn up, reflected in their rear-view mirrors but unseen. Until it’s too late.

There’s a machete clown and a baseball bat wielding clown, a crowbar clown and a tire-iron clown. Only the girl clown, offering makeup to any of their victims they manage to take hostage, has any lines. She’ll make you real “purty,” she will.

A pointless “Scream” prologue shows ostensibly the first victim, a nubile babysitter whose role required her to strip off her top. I’ll leave her name out of this to spare her mother the embarrassment.

Did that stripteease trigger the Clown Apocalypse? Not really, not that they’ve explained here.

The women shriek in terror, the guys just stare blankly as this or that “buddy” is butchered, tentatively running as if their only fear is that they’re not going to hit their marks. Every guy in this thing who isn’t in clown makeup is as bad as the ridiculous, obvious and disjointed script they’re trying to play. An awful lot of the guys, and a woman playing a waitress, share the director’s last name — Nagel.

But who knows? Maybe this is a movie where the real genius is in the marketing. Start with clown sightings in the South, work your way north.

Keep an eye on the news. See if the cops ever catch anybody pulling these clown stunts. If any suspect’s name is “Nagel” we’ll have our answer.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with graphic violence, nudity

Cast: Brian Nagel, Lauren Compton, Andrew Staton, Katie Keene, Tom Nagel, Kaitlyn Sapp, Thomas A Nagel
Credits: Directed by Tom Nagel, script by Jeff Miller . An ITN release.

Running time: 1:24

Getting Oscar winning actress Emma Thompson into the cast of “Bridget Jones’s Baby” was a coup, and as Bridget’s OB-GYN, she’s the perfect droll foil to all the rom-com pregnancy nonsense going on around her.

Letting her take a pass at the script was even more inspired, as the Oscar winning screenwriter (“Sense & Sensibility”) renders this third and hopefully final film in this Britcomedy about a “singleton” who keeps a diary warm and watchable.

Because a dozen years ago, the sequel to “Bridget Jones’s Diary”, “Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason,” was a bit of an abortion.

Not “LIT-rally,” as Bridget herself might put it. But “Edge” certainly was a comedy that never should have been brought to term.

Here, we open with a funeral and end with a wedding. We bury Hugh Grant’s louche lout at a ceremony Bridget and his legions of female conquests cannot keep a straight face through.

Then Bridget gets pregnant. And as ever, there are two men she figures could be the father. It’s just two different men.

Because even at 43, having “reached my ideal weight” with her cute and cozy flat and job (TV newscast producer) she’s plainly incompetent to do, she’s still the klutz.

Renee Zellweger re-connects to Bridget as best she can, though the pratfalls and potty-mouth are somehow less endearing in a grown woman “of a certain age.” She’s cracking to her new BFF, a saucy anchorwoman (Sarah Solemani), about being “past my sexual sell-by date,” and that any dreams of motherhood must be dashed as “I’m sure my eggs must be hard-boiled by now!”

But it’s easy to believe that this pathologically careless cutie — lousing up live interviews by taking phone calls during newscasts — could get pregnant by accident.

The interior monologues — diary entries (now on computer) — are still here, but less vital to the narrative. “Can’t go back and keep making same mistakes,” she types. “Must make new ones!”

A one-night fling in a tent at a rock festival with a dashing, willing American (Patrick Dempsey) might have led to her condition. Or another one-nighter with her longtime off-and-on beau, now married and moved-on (Mark Darcy) could have been the magic moment.

Either way, she’s unmarried with child and utterly hapless at the business of figuring out who the dad is and keeping the two potential dads from running into each other and figuring out her secret.

Dempsey brings his “McDreamy” A-game to this comedy, and he makes a far more engaging contrast to the stuffy stiff Darcy that Colin Firth could play in his sleep. Sure, the whole handsome heel vs. snobbish man of character thing worked for Jane Austen, and for novelist Helen Fielding, who copied copied and goofed-on “Pride and Prejudice” for “Bridget Jones’s Diary.”

And nothing against Hugh Grant, terrific, at least in the first film. But Dempsey lands his funny lines, manhandles Zellweger when called for and gives this story something new– American charm. His best scene? A disastrous live TV interview on the show Bridget produces, in which she has her anchor pal prod the dating website guru on his love life, genetics and the like.

Dempsey, a movie star since childhood, plays this like every irritated celebrity trapped in an off-the-rails interview, someone who still has something to sell and who cannot get up and leave. It’s wonderful work that he handles as if it’s happened to him a hundred times. Which it probably has.

Firth, wearing the perpetual scowl of an unhappily married barrister stuck defending a rude and plainly Russian girl band NOT named Pussy Riot against extradition to a villain state (plainly Russia), has aged into a dead ringer for Sam the Eagle of The Muppets. Still a hearthrob, but now an Oscar winner utterly unchallenged by this part.

Zellweger, who has endured years of abuse about how she has changed her appearance, doesn’t really silence that here. She’s lovely, though how she managed the odd trick of looking much older in the opening scene than in the last one is less of a mystery than it should be.

Her performance captures a little of the sparkle of the first film, now fifteen years in the past. But there’s a weariness about the character that’s not entirely due to her ongoing, hapless and unhappy state of singleton-hood.

The script, which Fielding had a hand in, has a gutless touch or two — you’ll know them when you see them — and far too much low-hanging fruit, easy laughs, none easier than having Bridget, assorted mom-pals with children (Shirley Henderson) and children themselves filling the screen with F-bombs.

It’s not just easy, it’s lazy. That’s the thing about profanity in general and the F-bomb in particular. The more liberally you apply it to a featherweight comedy, the weaker the effect.

The weighty stuff the movie might have wrestled with — a media culture of young, trend-chasing faux hipsters — makes no worthy foil for Bridget. Because the idea of an incompetent like her standing up for “journalism” is as laughable to her as it is to us.

Still, in a just world, you’d hope this would land the one-time America’s (and Britain’s) Sweetheart a new acting lease on life. Zellweger shows flashes of her Oscar winning talent and is certainly not past her sell-by date, even if she’s tampered entirely too much with the packaging.

MPAA Rating:R for language, sex references and some nudity

Cast: Renee Zellweger, Colin Firth, Patrick Dempsey, Emma Thompson, Jim Broadbent, Sarah Solemani, Shirley Henderson
Credits: Directed by Sharon Maguire, script by Helen Fielding, Dan Mazer and Emma Thompson A Universal release.

Running time: 2:02

John Krasinski finds his way back on the big screen, both in front of and behind the camera, in the sentimental and sweet but obvious and sit-commie “The Hollars,” a melodrama about an amusingly dysfunctional family brought together by terminal illness.

That’s what drags son John (Krasinski) home to rural Ohio. Mom (Margo Martindale) has a brain tumor.He’s an aspiring artist and graphic novelist (comic book designer) failing in New York, about to become a father. His rich girlfriend (Anna Kendrick) is close to term.

But back home, Mom’s bad news sends Dad (Richard Jenkins) into a weepy shame spiral. Dad so badly misread Mom’s symptoms that he told her it was her weight.

“He sent me to Jenny Craig!”

Brother Ron (Sharlto Copley) is living out his own train wreck, stalking his ex-wife and two daughters, regretting the divorce ever since she (Ashley Dyke) took up with a new, better man, a handsome and tolerant youth pastor (Josh Groban) at church.

A better title for this James C. Strouse script, which Krasinski took by the horns and got made, would have been “Piling On.” Troubles pile up at John’s feet from the moment he shows up in the hospital. Dad’s HVAC business is bankrupt. Ron used to work there, but was fired, and now lives in his parents’ basement.

Mom is wondering if she wasted her life. Even Mom’s nurse has a beef with John. He, apparently, is the fellow who married and had a child with John’s ex, played by the winsome Mary Elizabeth Winstead. And Jason, played by Charlie Day at his most Charlie Day (screechy and annoying) is worried she still has a thing for John.

Which she, of course, does.

That’s a HUGE knock against “The Hollars,” its screaming obviousness. John takes a moment to collect his thoughts at the Ol’ Swimmin’ Hole. He climbs on the old tire swing, and…you know the rest.

The casting is so on-the-nose that pairing up the great pros Martindale and Jenkins has no potential for surprise, though both have moments that pay off. That on-the-nose business goes for Krasinski himself, who settles into the rhythms of “The Office,” doing the whole sweeter than/maybe smarter than his surroundings bit he did so well there.

Sit-commie.

The wildcard here is the South African Copley, who seems miscast and out of his comic depth, but who is consistently out-there and hilarious in pathetic and predictable (for the character) ways.

There’s always something to be said for a comedy that errs on the side of “heart,” and “The Hollars” has that — warm moments, a few genuine tears, a spell just starting to be cast when something silly comes up to jolt the works back into the realm of comedy.

Randall Park is pleasantly nonplussed as the doctor who has to deal with Ron’s inane “Asian” questions.

“What martial arts do you practice?”

“None.”

Jenkins has a lovely, offbeat moment of song, an established tradition in romantic comedies since time immemorial — or at least since “My Best Friend’s Wedding.”

And Kendrick shows up to amp up the pathos and throw paranoid-pregnant-woman hilarity at the looming tragedy.

It doesn’t really skip by, but Krasinski keeps the squishiness to a minimum and lets his co-stars land the laughs even if “The Hollars” are nothing to shout about.

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for brief language and some thematic material

Cast: John Krasinski, Margo Martindale, Anna Kendrick, Richard Jenkins, Sharlto Copley, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Charlie Day, Randall Park
Credits: Directed by ,John Krasinski, script by James C. Strouse . A Sony Classics release.

Running time: 1:28

If college cinema professors aren’t teaching “The Screen Gems View of Urban Affluence and its Impact on African American Aspiration,” then somebody is seriously missing the mark.

The studio, which gets by on random horror hits and the occasional franchise (“Resident Evil”) has made glossy African American comedies (“This Christmas”, “The Wedding Ringer”), romances (“Not Easily Broken”) and thrillers (“Obsessed,””No Good Deed”) its low-risk/high-return bread and better.

The films may not have African-American directors or screenwriters, and some suffer a tone-deafness because of that. But they share a sheen, a polish and a beauty that puts Tyler Perry’s similar ambitions to shame.

“When the Bough Breaks” does for surrogate mothers what “The Hand that Rocks the Cradle” did for nannies, and does for another character what “Fatal Attraction” did for bunnies.

It’s derivative and obvious, downright risible as it portrays Screen Gems’ go-to affluent hunk, Morris Chestnut, manfully resisting the frank sexual advances of the possibly dangerous and unstable surrogate (Jaz Sinclair) he and his wife (Regina Hall) have hired to carry their “last viable embryo” to term.

But from its New Orleans mansion and penthouse office suites, to its Mercedes and parties packed with haute couture glamour, it presents a vision of African American aspiration and achievement that Hollywood generally ignores.

Something about Anna (Sinclair) and her boyfriend (Theo Rossi) gives John Taylor (Chestnut) pause. He’s a high-end corporate attorney who senses something predatory in the guy, and a little too goody-two-shoes about the young woman.

“I’ve never been able to give anybody anything!” she gushes. And chef Laura (Hall) just melts for her, heedless of the dangers in putting their last egg into somebody whose beau does too much speaking for her and seems too eager to pass himself off as her pimp in this arrangement.

John keeps his misgivings to himself to please his desperate-for-a-baby wife. And sure enough, the boyfriend beats up poor Anna, they invite Anna to stay with them and Temptation is Right Under Their Roof.

Mousy but lovely Anna va-va-vooms up with barely an effort. Even Laura notices.

“She might have a little thing for you!”

She doesn’t know the half of it.

Things follow a generally predictable path from there, with the question “What sort of game are they/Is she running here?” hanging over it all.

It’s heavily patriarchal, as the husband is the only one to see the danger and tries to “handle” the situation on his own. Sinclair makes a sexy femme fatale, but there’s nothing subtle about the character, the performance or the I’m-having-your-baby-big-boy stares.

“Can’t blame a person for staring. It just means they like what they see!”

But “When the Bough Breaks” gets the job done, even if we see this cradle rocking right out of the tree pretty much from the get go.

Deeper significance? That’s for some future college course to dissect.

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for violence, sexuality/partial nudity, thematic elements, some disturbing images, and language

Cast: Morris Chestnut, Regina Hall
Credits: Directed by Jon Cassar, script by Jack OIsen. A Screen Gems release.

Running time: 1:47

The voice of skepticism is sorely missed in Oliver Stone’s credulous bio-pic, “Snowden.” But Stone doesn’t really do skepticism, characters playing the Devil’s Advocate, contrary voices.

He didn’t have that to impedge his groveling before Hugo Chavez in the documentary he made about the Venezuelan populist/strongman. He didn’t let facts get in the way of his grand Vast Right Wing Conspiracy epic, “J.F.K.”

So why start with “Snowden,” a hagiography celebrating the ego-tripping “moralist” who exposed the vast U.S. data-sweeping capabilities to journalists bent on embarrassing the bulwark of liberty facing down a sea of anarchy, Islamo-fascism and unreconstructed communist dictatorships?

But as lopsided as the film is, depicting the NSA/CIA contract “leaker” as the greatest friend privacy rights and freedom ever had, he makes plenty of sturdy moral arguments, the ones that allegedly drove the then-29-year old to put himself above an elected government with (supposed) checks and balances and expose the country to ridicule by its friends and subversion by its enemies.

As Snowden’s intel-mentor, drolly performed by Rhys Ifans, puts it to his new charge just as Snowden is joining the intel war, “If there is another 9/11, it’ll be your fault.”

Indeed. Snowden and his fellow bomb-throwing vandal Julian Assange 0f Wikileaks are exposing those who won’t kill them for telling their secrets, leaving the great criminal enterprises, outlaw states and murderous cyber-barbarians of every religious and Russian stripe all but untouched.

But I digress. When the filmmaker’s opening title describes the film as “dramatized” from actual events, not even bothering with “Based on the true story” or “inspired by the true story,” you have to wonder what you can believe. And based on Stone’s and Snowden’s record of spin, it all starts to play like agitprop — a $4 word best abbreviated as “B.S.”

Joseph Gordon-Levitt dons glasses and cleverly colors his voice into Snowden’s tech savant drone, portraying a patriotic soldier unfit for the Special Forces job he craved, but who finds his niche in Sig-Int, Signals Intelligence. He’s a self-taught programmer/hacker/decoder who dazzles his mentors (Ifans and Nicolas Cage) and supervisors, earning promotions and more and more prominent postings.

Shailene Woodley is the leftist girlfriend the young conservative bickers with and loves. Shailene is a smart actress who relishes any role that lets her play a full-fledged adult, so naturally there’s a nude love scene.

Zachary Quinto is crusading paranoid (perhaps with cause) journalist Glenn Greenwald, Melissa Leo is the documentary filmmaker who joined Snowden, Greenwald and a veteran British newspaper reporter (Tom Wilkinson) in a Hong Kong hotel room where they schemed to unleash the story of this vast data gathering operation on the world.

Cell phone and Internet companies turning over tracking data, backdoor entryways and bulk email and phone records to the USA, sweeping sweeps of personal records that span the globe and the US, it was all news to us. Computer cameras activated by remote control, real-time observing of often innocent people who might have three, four or five degrees of separation from someone with ties to illicit activity.

Good stuff, important to get out there. But…Except, well, maybe a lot of people figured their electronic footprint was no place for privacy. And in a war with ruthless cyber-states like China, North Korea and the hacking haven of Russia, well, who is naive enough to think there won’t be excesses?

“Most Americans don’t want freedom,” Ifans, this film’s version of the all-knowing/all-pontificating Donald Sutherland spook of “J.F.K.,” intones. “They want security.” Here’s another, delivered as he is literally and hilariously made to embody Big Brother (on a giant TV screen), “Secrecy is security, and security is victory!”

Well, sure. And if the film makes the case that this is a conversation we’ve avoided having and shouldn’t avoid, bravo Oliver Stone. But he’s not content there, no. This is a Snowden of pure heart, purer motives, purer still methods — he goes out of his way to leave a “trail” so that his Intel colleagues won’t be implicated in his espionage. It’s hagiography.

This is “Snow White” (a colleague’s nickname for him, or was it?) Snowden, not the self-satisfied, morally superior attention whore who would rather flee, with the aid of China, to Russia on his way to Ecuador, rather than face the music and force this debate in open court. You know, the Snowden we’ve seen on TV, interviewed freely by all media comers.

The film presents the various waypoints of Snowden’s career, the ways he picked up intel outside of his paygrade, his rising paranoia that he and he alone has put the whole nefarious picture together in his head, and his difficulty keeping his free spirit lady love from posting nude self-portraits on her hard drive.

Yes, “Terrorism is the excuse” for everything he found a threat to our liberties — the judge, jury and executioner drone strikes driven by simple suspicious cell-phone numbers (according to Snowden), the spying on businesses, governments, looking for vulnerabilities to exploit.

Perhaps America would be safer had Snowden just read a few good spy novels to understand the moral grey area of all of this sort of work. It’s not pretty, and he’s not Jesus Christ on a Laptop.

The over-arching accusations — some of which have been borne out, others discounted utterly — the suspicion he applied to everyone and everything — UNTIL he meets some journalists of various stripes, whom he instantly tells “I TRUST you” — the patriotic kid whose patriotism turned from conservative combat ambitions to “saving” us from our intel state tyranny — it’s all just too hard to swallow, even if Stone, as usual, shoves it down our throats.

And only Oliver Stone would insist that we do — swallow it — without bothering to chew over the facts first.

MPAA Rating:R for language and some sexuality/nudity

Cast: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Shailene Woodley, Rhys Ifans, Zachary Quinto, Melissa Leo, Tom Wilkinson, Joely Richardson, Timothy Olyphant,
Credits: Directed by Oliver Stone, script by Kieran Fitzgerald and Oliver Stone. An Open Road release.

Running time: 2:08