Movie Nation

You don’t get a to take a bow or receive a gold star for figuring out the Big Allegory in “High-Rise.” It’s there, front and center and obvious to all, thanks to sci-fi novelist J.G. Ballard’s naming of the characters living in the penthouse of the titular apartment block that the film is about.

They’re “The Royals.” And the missus (Keely Hawes) has a thing for Marie Antoinette and pre-revolutionary French decadence. Their huge flat is decorated like Versailles. Her husband, the designer of the high-rise, rules it like a philosopher king.

And all the folks on the floors below? Let them eat power shortages, garbage that isn’t picked up and elevators that don’t work half the time.

Ben Wheatley (“A Field in England””Sightseers”) brings a horror maven’s eye for the grotesque to Ballard’s ’60s dystopia, setting up this “crucible for change” as a period piece and then letting one man’s idea of utopia fall apart.

Unfortunately, the more things spiral into anarchy, the less interesting the story becomes.

Tom Hiddleston (“Thor,””Crimson Peak”) is our lean, dashing “Mad Men” era narrator and protagonist. He lives in the upper floors of this concrete, suburban Brit-monstrosity. And when we meet him, things have already gone to Hell.

Sure, it has every convenience the early ’70s can provide — shag carpeting, a supermarket on one floor, a spa, gym and Olympic pool on another. When he moved in, three months earlier, Dr. Robert Laing (Hiddleston) is greeted with hostility. But even as the snobbery and class consciousness become more evident, Laing is helpless to intervene, even if he sees what’s coming.

Sienna Miller plays the sexy upstairs neighbor whose attentions get Laing involved in the building’s social scene. Luke Evans and Elizabeth Moss are “lower floor” types — unable to afford a higher apartment, with two kids and another on the way.

Wilder (Evans) is a TV personality and veteran class warrior. He’s the first to notice the services seem a little sloppy for the lower floors. Laing suggests as much when he’s summoned to the architect’s penthouse. “The building’s still settling,” Royal purrs, as only Irons can. We don’t believe him any more than Laing does.

Nothing gets fixed. Peons aren’t paid. Resources — starting with the pool — are fought over. Things turn tribal and ugly. There are no cops here. And Laing’s daily commute (all the cars are ’60s era Brit-mobiles) offers no relief. Their society is crumbling.

Ballard was making what now seem obvious points about the inhumanity of science experiment architecture and social planning. As Laing narrates, “They were living in a future that had already taken place.”

The dialogue can be pithy, but comically expositonal.

“I’m an orthodontist and a homosexual,” sneers one snob.

“High-Rise” has not just the look, but the feel of ’60s sci-fi, a certain literary high-mindedness coupled with its vivid recreation of a place out of time and a time out of place.

Moss (“Mad Men”) slings a fair English accent, Hiddleston is properly befuddled and Irons handles the exposition/ethos and imperious noblesse oblige of a one percenter who theorizes about “healthy competition” and other features that his 40 story rat maze will test.

Evans and Miller bring the film to violent, sexual life with their every appearance mirroring the depths the building’s tenants have descended to.

It’s not great, but it’s ambitious, in that “Ex Machina/Her” sort of way. “High-Rise” gives you things 45 minutes of things to chew on in a 115 minute movie.

And if those chewables are not cutting edge or surprising, it’s worth remembering that they were when Ballard wrote this. It’s not his fault his prophecies seem like accepted wisdom, now.

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

Cast: Tom Hiddleston, Sienna Miller, Elizabeth Moss, Luke Evans, Jeremy Irons
Credits: Directed by Ben Wheatley, script by Amy, based on the J.G. Ballard book. A Magnet release.

Running time: 1:58

Wow.

Poor to middling reviews didn’t shorten the lines at the multiplex Friday. No no not at all.

Deadline.com says enough tickets were sold that this Warner Brothers franchise-starter will have pocketed $171 million by midnight Sunday. Those are summer numbers. Record summer numbers. And it’s March. Whew.

It’s not going to be to everybody’s taste, and you have to wonder if word of mouth will push that final take down. The public preview I attended had as many people muttering “Didn’t much like that” as it had clapping at the closing credits. So.

Warners’ idea to go ahead and park “Superman,” who has proven to be something of a non-starter with them, in this “Justice League” prelude seems brilliant. Zack Snyder may be nobody’s idea of a Joss Whedon, but Warners’ kept the faith and he delivered a hit — critically dismissed by many (not me, thanks to tone, weight and the performances) but packing in the fanboy faithful.

“Big Fat Greek Wedding 2” shows there’s still strength in that brand, a dozen years after the first film and the flop TV series it inspired. $19 million. Weak picture, low-hanging fruit jokes, but comfort food for older viewers. And Greeks.

“Allegiant” and “Cloverfield Lane” saw their audiences shrink, but not “Miracles from Heaven” or “Zootopia.” The Disney toon is well over $240 million, or will be by Sunday. “Deadpool” is still setting the bar way up there — over $350 by Monday evening — for “Bat v. Super” to try and top. I don’t see this one as having the legs of the ‘Pool. Both films are going to be hard pressed to come up with fresh ideas to sell in a sequel.

The Sally Field drama “Hello, My Name is Doris” expanded into more theaters and cracked the top ten. I guess I need to get around to that one.

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Full disclosure here. I’m over zombies.

The slow zombies, the fast zombies, the zombies who climb on each other like ants to scramble over walls, the zombies who flirt and zombies who suffer.

They’re overexposed and out of ideas, not shocking since they are, after all, The Living Dead.

“Brains.” We get it.

Even George A. Romero has seemed bored with them in recent years. Too many zombie movies. They’re all over TV, where “I, Zombie” anchors down the CW. “The Walking Dead” are the best-mannered zombies, pausing to let the uninfected get through their dialogue before resuming their lurching charge in the zombie soap opera.

After “28 Days Later” and “World War Z,” where else can you go with this general idea?

A quick search for a photo from the movie “Pandemic” to illustrate this review lays out the problem. Scores of zombie photos from movies NOT titled “Pandemic” come up. The title’s as generic as the contagion, the epidemic, the green-skinned, stumbling, flesh-eating villains.

Rachel Nichols of TV’s “Continuum” and “Chicago Fire” stars as Laura — DOCTOR Laura — – a CDC (Centers for Disease Control) survivor hurled into the fight against contagion in Los Angeles. A prologue sketches in her back-story — wife and mother, husband and daughter unaccounted for.

Dr. Laura is drafted into a search and rescue mission, riding in a Dept. of Corrections bus with a nurse (Missi Pyle), a cynical ex-con driver (Alfie Allen) and Gunner (Mekhi Phifer). His family is missing and even though the outbreak is mere weeks old, he’s over this and trigger happy.

Dr. Laura is overmatched, out of her depth, unable to cope in her issued bio-hazard suit.

“No wonder New York fell,” Gunner gripes. “Do us all a favor, fight back like your life depended on it.”

Because it does. Over the course of an afternoon and night, the mission team fights and runs through the zombie-infested city, wary of zombie “traps” (uninfected, or under-infected people used as bait) and false hopes. They’re on their own.

“Pandemic” manages one gripping, helmet-camera point-of -iew death. Otherwise, Gunner’s view of their mission prevails. It’s not exactly brimming with humanity.

“Ever play ‘Whack a Mole?'”

The surprises are mild, the shocks are AWOL and the novelty long gone. Serious movies about possible real epidemics are always better, which is why “World War Z” worked. It had big servings of “Outbreak” and “Contagion.”

Civilization’s collapse will be more thorough than this, which is why “28 Days Later” grabbed us.

The reality in “Pandemic” is weakly set up, the surreality underdeveloped and the performances, for the most part, as cold as a corpse.

The film’s most overt impression is that of genre fatigue. The feeble attempts to mask this by not quite having the dead return to life cannot hide the true intent, or the absolute absence of new ideas for the living/walking/lurching/dining dead to carry out.

MPAA Rating: unrated, zombie violence

Cast: Rachel Nichols, Mekhi Phifer, Missi Pyle, Alfie Allen
Credits: Directed by John Suits, script by Dustin T. Benson  . A release.

Running time: 1:31

Society may, any day now, lose its grasp of the lessons of The Holocaust as those who witnessed it pass from the scene. But those few survivors left continue their mission, to remind us, to pursue justice, to “never forget.”

“Remember” is a “Memento” mystery about the long reach of that crime and tragedy, and old men who insist on playing their parts to the bitter end. And it’s a fine showcase for two of the cinemas Lions in Winter, with touching cameos for their age appropriate peers.

Zev Guttman (Christopher Plummer) has forgotten much. He wakes up each morning and calls out for his wife, Ruth. A nurse tells him she died a week ago.

“I’m sorry, who are you?”

He doesn’t recall that they lived in a nursing home. He forgot he was sitting shiva, but a star of David around his next is there to remind him of his Jewishness. He didn’t realize her funeral is today, a week after her death.

But his old friend Max Rosenbaum (Martin Landau) can provide some reminders. And Max is dead-set on Zev “doing what you promised. What you promised me, and Ruth.”

He’s written a letter, stuffed cash and a train ticket in it. Read the letter, follow the instructions, “cross them of as you complete each step.” Dementia or not, Zev, “It means ‘wolf’ in Hebrew,” has a mission.

And as this engaging, confused old men slips out, charming children and their parents on the train, buses and taxis he takes, no one takes advantage of him. They connect with his sweetness, his confusion. Some read a little of his letter. None see his tattoo, the number marked on his arm.

Max has sent Zev hunting Nazis.

Canadian director Atom Egoyan (“The Sweet Hereafter,” “Where the Truth Lies”) likes his mysteries and his big, melodramatic twists. Working from a Benjamin August script, he sends Zev on his odyssey, traveling through the West, from dumpy houses to nursing homes, looking for a Rudy Kulander — “the man who killed my family, killed BOTH our families” Max insists.

Max sends Zev to a gun shop, where the sweet old man has to ask the clerk to write out “how to use it” instructions on the Glock pistol he sells him. Whatever is left of Zev’s memory, Max is determined to use it. Max’s life, even in supervised care and confined to a wheelchair (with oxygen tank), is immersed in research, investigations. Several men changed their name to Rudy after World War II and slipped into America. One of them must be Otto, the guard who committed mass murder at Auschwitz. Zev will find him for Max.

Zev travels, wakes up every morning asking for Ruth, and somehow gets back to reading the letter, his “Memento” and memory jogger. And he stays on task.

Plummer is, of course, the perfect blend of sweet dotage and quiet, murderous purpose. He makes every encounter Zev has memorable. And he’s aided by his co-stars, potential Rudys in his search — the great Bruno Ganz (“Downfall”), Dean Norris as the cop son of a dead “Rudy,” the great Jurgen Prochnow (“Das Boot”).

Knowning Egoyan’s penchant for twists, you wonder where this short, quiet but tense movie is taking us. Is Max taking advantage of Zev? Is everyone who they say they are? How will Zev handle finding the real Rudy? Will the old Nazi give Zev the grace of reading the Glock instructions before shooting him?

The mystery, the great cast and the slow simmer of tension that Egoyan builds into “Remember” recommend it. The third act payoff won’t be to every taste. Egoyan is the Canadian Spike Lee in that regard.

But “Remember” packages a fascinating mystery into history’s most important subject, and lets the threat of violence hang over it even as the memory of the violence that set this odyssey in motion linger in our minds as these doddering old men carry out one last reminder and seek one last moment of justice.

 
MPAA Rating:R for a sequence of violence and language

Cast: Christopher Plummer, Martin Landau, Bruno Ganz, Jurgen Prochnow, Henry Czerny, Dean Norris
Credits: Directed by Atom Egoyan, script by Benjamin August. An A24 release.

Running time: 1:34

It sounded mad, right from the outset. British actor Tom Hiddleston, “Loki” from the “Thor” and “Avengers” movies, as that icon of country music, Hank Williams?

Surely somebody had lost his or her ever-loving mind.

But give it to Hiddleston, who doesn’t lack for that old country music character trait, “chutzpah.” He slimmed down to nothing and took his shot at looking like and sounding like one of the most distinct, keening drawls in music history.

“I Saw the Light” works best if you enter it with those “What were they thinking?” expectations. Because Hiddleston isn’t bad. And if he doesn’t quite nail Hank in his performance of several of the man’s legendary tunes, he puts them over.

And a soulful, “Here’s something I’ve been working on” acapella rendition of “Your Cheatin’ Heart” accompanying himself on guitar, lifts the picture just when you’ve lost hope it ever will be.

“I Saw the Light” takes over two hours to cover the ten years of Hank’s rise and fall, an Alabama singer whose frail health couldn’t take the rigors of the road and the drugs he took just to ease the pain.

See Hank get a reputation as an unreliable boozer, late for shows, missing tour dates. Hear him defend his style of singing to producers who would change him.

“When I find a note I like,” he drawls, “I hang on-ta it!”

Fake black and white “documentary” interviews with music biz folk (Bradley Whitford plays Nashville publisher Fred Rose) who knew Hank pepper the picture, and rather badly mimicked color home movies (and newsreels) chart his rising fame and domestic “bliss.”

That’s the heart of “I Saw the Light,” the womanizing Williams’ combative relationship with his wife and would-be backup singer, Audrey Mae. She battles Hank’s controlling mom (Cherry Jones) for his confidence. And she tries to share the stage with him. Brave as it is of Hiddleston to tackle matching Williams’ unmistakable voice, that’s nothing to what Elizabeth Olsen, as Audrey Mae, has to put over. She has to sing just well enough to have the false confidence of “I could be a star, too,” and just badly enough that she never will be.

Producer turned writer-director Marc Abraham (“Flash of Genius”) struggles to organize this life into a lengthy, neat chronology. And that fails the film. Scene after scene of “red letter dates” in Hank’s story — a “Hank Williams Day” in Montgomery, Alabama, his first night on “The Grand Ole Opry,” an infamous disoriented festival performance in Texas — weigh down the narrative.

Hiddleston can’t pull off the folksiness that was Williams’ public persona. But the better movie this might have been is hinted at in a press interview, later in his life, in New York.

“Ever’body’s got a little darkness in’em,” he allows. “They,” his fans, “hear it. I show it to’em. But THEY don’t have to take it home.”

It’s a fair-minded movie that doesn’t sensationalize Williams’ life or demons. But it lacks heart. There’s no single scene that burns into the memory the way a couple of ones in the corny 1964 George Hamilton bio-pic, “Your Cheatin’ Heart,” do — the wrenching death of the black man that taught Hank to play and gave his sound its earthy, working class soul, for instance.

But Hiddleston comes closer than we ever would have guessed. And when he gets around to “Your Cheatin’ Heart,” you find yourself wishing he’d had a smarter, shorter and brisker film leading up to that moment, a movie worthy of the legend whose story “I Saw the Light” tells.

MPAA Rating:R for some language and brief sexuality/nudity

Cast: Tim Hiddleston, Elizabeth Olsen, Bradley Whitford, Cherry Jones
Credits: Written and directed by Marc Abraham. A Sony Pictures Classic release.

Running time: 2:03

Ethan Hawke talked about his “Chet Baker” movie for so long it seemed he might age out of ever getting to play the troubled jazz giant on the screen.

But “Boyhood” and the Oscar nomination that followed allowed Hawke and filmmaker Robert Budreau to get their vision on the screen. And “Born to be Blue” was worth the wait.

It’s a lyrical, self-aware and breezy drama that feels like jazz itself — dated but fresh, a tale of smokey clubs and burning memories, captured in black and white, with an art form just hitting its peak just as its audience faded away. And Hawke makes a perfectly content, laid-back Baker, a matinee idol junkie who owns his addictions, takes his lumps and refuses to truly change his style, musically or personally, even as circumstances force him to.

The self-mocking framing device of this story is Baker’s shot at screen stardom. He’s fresh out of prison and in front of the cameras, making a “Chet Baker Story.” Carmen Ejogo is his co-star, an African American actress portraying “Chet’s women.” She understands his attraction to Black women, but she’s having trouble figuring out what they see in him. He sees that as an invitation to put the moves on her.

“Let’s go out, have some laughs.”

“You don’t strike me as funny.”

When she is witness to the beat-down that ends production on that bio-film, she inexplicably sticks around. The smart, sexy and earthy “Jane” has fallen under Baker’s spell. She just can’t tell us why.

But we do get a sense of his offhanded, thoughtful charm, characteristics of many a Hawke performance. Baker found fame early as a sort of “great white hope” of jazz. He tells her and us the story of his “discovery” by Charlie “Bird” Parker. We see, in flashbacks, the shrieking female fans, the on-stage quintessence of 1950s and ’60s jazz cool — suit, horn, sunglasses. Yeah, he was “The James Dean of jazz.”

Another flashback (all in black and white) sets up his nagging doubt — being dismissed by jazz icon Miles Davis (Kedar Brown, ferocious) upon their first meeting. Baker idolized Miles. Miles sneered at Baker.

And we see that first encounter with heroin , through a woman who isn’t his wife.

“Born to be Blue” tracks through the long struggle to regain his sound that followed Baker’s beating, when he lost his teeth and his embouchure, the mouth muscle and upper jaw bone development born of decades of playing the trumpet. That sanitizes him, somewhat, with much of his junky philanderer edge rubbed off.

Hawke nicely captures Baker’s half-whispered, sexy-slow singing style made most famous in a cover of “My Funny Valentine.” Other jazzmen (Dizzy Gillespie, ably played by Kevin Hanchard) try to get him to stop singing. He won’t.

Even when his disapproving dad, played by Stephen McHattie, who played Baker in writer-director Budreau’s 2009 short film, “The Deaths of Chet Baker,” asks Chet “Why’d you have to sing like a girl?”, Chet won’t change.

His producer/mentor (Callum Keith Rennie) tries to get Chet to stay clean and repeatedly gives up on him when he doesn’t.

But Chet, even while living in a VW Microbus, practicing his playing through rivers of blood, endures.

It’s a conventionally unconventional film, its surprise twists coming from Baker himself. The supporting cast is short on star power and the charisma that accompanies that. But Hawke and Ejogo, who played civil rights icon Coretta Scott King in “Selma,” have enough soul and charisma and chemistry to hold the screen and make us feel “Born to be Blue,” even if we, like Jane in the movie, never quite “get” Chet Baker.

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

Cast: Ethan Hawke, Carmen Ejogo, Callum Keith Rennie, Kevin Hanchard, Kedar Brown, Tony Nappo, Sophia Walker
Credits: Written and directed by Robert Budreau. An IFC release.

Running time: 1:37

It’s the comic book universe’s great imponderable. In a world where Superman exists, what’s the point of any other superhero?

The guy has godlike powers, the purity of a savior and perfect PR. That’s got to cause some resentment and fear, right?

If he shows up 20 years into Batman’s reign of vigilante justice, the Dark Knight’s not going to take it well. And that makes The Bat ask the Big Question of the Man of Steel.

“Do you bleed?”

Zack Snyder, whose post-“300” years as a director have turned him into the most ponderous screen storyteller, tackles that rift in the long, hulking and utterly engrossing “Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice.” It’s a franchise-reboot that gives Superman relevance and a new actor a crack at The Dark Knight.

It swirls in a larger continuum, hurling a Next Generation (son of) Lex Luthor at the Man of Steel, a twitchy, antic supervillain who will test his Ego against Superman, and then his Id. Literally.

And it presents all this in a nation that is starting to question the mysterious alien’s motives, intentions and collateral damage. Can a democracy endure with a citizen who has that much power?

Dark? Oh yes, and not just Snyder’s revival of his “Watchmen/Sucker Punch/300” color palette. In comic book film fanboydom, “Dark equals deep.” Here, that’s kind of true.

I mean, Batman (Ben Affleck) paraphrasing Dick Cheney’s “One Percent Doctrine” about how to treat even the remotest threats?

When the grizzled veteran vigilante Bruce Wayne puts down his gadgets and pistols and ponders his violent past, he’s not inclined to give the new guy the benefit of the doubt.

That’s dark.

Holly Hunter is a senator in charge of Superman oversight. But Superman (Henry Cavill) doesn’t explain himself — to anyone. If lady love Lois Lane (Amy Adams) is in jeopardy, he’s there, making a mess and NOT taking names. Young entrepreneur Luthor (Jesse Eisenberg in Full Zuckerberg) plays with the senator’s fears.

“The redcapes are coming, the redcapes are coming!”

Wayne/Batman has been on the hunt for a mysterious criminal overlord  who is selling weapons, tracking remnants of kryptonite, making the world less safe. And the Superman from Metropolis is messing up the Gotham Bat’s case.

Faithful butler Alfred (Jeremy Irons, perfectly dry) has tired of this crime-fighting and not producing a Wayne heir nonsense.

“Even YOU got too old to die young.”

The Bat, who has taken to branding his quarries, is bitterly sizing up his place in this New Superman World Order.

“We’re criminals, Alfred. We’ve always been criminals.”

And there’s this mysterious, tall, on-task bombshell who sashays straight from the catwalk onto the periphery of this feud — Diana Prince (Gal Gadot).

“Batman v. Superman” was cobbled together from previous films and a pretty famous graphic novel treatment of this potential “war,” and often feels like that. From the opening credits (yet another version of Bruce Wayne’s origin myth) to the various chases through assorted Dodge/Jeep/Fiat products, and the many nightmares Batman has about the ways Superman could go wrong and be his and America’s doom, this is a comic book epic with a lot of fat and flab around the edges. But the fights are shorter and more involving than the “Transformers” cluttered clashes of “Man of Steel.”

And there’s this Hieronymous Bosch feel to the many slo-mo Messianic/Satanic tableaux.

Like Warners’ various “Dark Knight” pictures, it’s not utterly joyless, but certainly a mirth-free two hours and 33 minutes. Where’s the urgency, the wit? Even Laurence Fishburne as newspaper editor Perry White lacks laugh-lines. And that’s just not done.

But Cavill, not forced to carry a picture by himself, grows into the Man of Steel. And Affleck carries the Bat Cape and Bat Weight surprisingly well. Hunter and returning players Diane Lane (SuperMom) and Kevin Costner (Dad of Steel) add gravitas.

But Amy Adams was the casting stroke that continues to pay dividends. She gives the story heart and makes us feel the consequences. Everybody else is kind of vamping through the opera until the redheaded lady sings — or weeps.

It’s involving enough, with all the backfilling from previous stories and revenge and recriminations and communications breakdowns (How DO two superheroes set up a meeting?) and stuff about God and Metahumans and democracy and the responsibilities of power, that you forget the dread built into a picture like this.

It’s a franchise. They’ll be back. And they’ve just fired their most expensive, most impressive bullet. As repetitive as this half-decent reboot is, do the coming “Justice League” and “Suicide Squad” have a prayer of showing us something, anything, new?

MPAA Rating:PG – 13 for intense sequences of violence and action throughout, and some sensuality

Cast: Ben Affleck, Henry Cavill, Amy Adams, Jesse Eisenberg, Diane Lane, Jeremy Irons, Holly Hunter, Laurence Fishburne, Gal Gadot
Credits: Directed by Zack Snyder, script by Chris Terrio and David S. Goyer. A Warner Brothers release.

Running time: 2:33

More than a dozen years after the indie film phenom and the far less successful TV series that it spawned, do those big fat Greeks of Nia Vardalos still deliver the laughs and the love when their excesses are exposed to the world at large?

Yeah, a few. But “My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2” is a veritable feast of low-hanging fruit. The laughs are obvious, we see them coming a mile away.

“Telephone, telegraph, tell a Greek!”

But those laughs will connect with any undemanding audience in search of a little — a dolmades serving — of good, clean fun.

Nia Portokalos and hubbie non-Greek hubbie Ian (John Corbett) are still living in Chicago, still trapped on Moussaka Street within reach of each and every generation that Gus (Michael Constantine) and Maria (Lainie Kazan) brought into this world.

They’re still loud, still gauche, still suffocating and still shoveling spanikopata into every friendly face they see. Nia lost her job as the travel agency profession disappeared. So she’s back to being her parents’ slave at Dancing Zorba’s, the family restaurant, “fixing” every family emergency that pops up.

Ian is principal at their daughter’s high school. But Paris (Elena Kampouris) is a rising senior, looking for new eyeliners to freak out her family, looking for colleges as far away from the Greek Empire as possible.

And Nia? She may look suspiciously younger than she did back in 2002 — Pee Wee Herman in “Pee Wee’s Big Holiday” younger. But “I’m in a rut.”

Nothing like Dad discovering that his marriage to Maria wasn’t official back in Greece to kick her out of that rut. He has to stop searching ancestry websites (Look, an old old man who can’t use a computer!) for his connection to Alexander the Great and propose to the wife of 50 years, the mother of his children, and make this right.

But Pappous (grandpa) Gus is too busy to propose to Yiayia (grandma) Maria. He’s hectoring Paris to “find a nice Greek boy” to “make Greek babies.”

The Greeks are the one culture we seem to give a pass to for this grating, anti-melting pot ethno-centrism, and Vardalos soft-sells this trait, this time out. Paris may get to find her own way in the world, even if there are virtues to dating somebody who “gets” Greek exceptionalism.

Her younger cousins certainly do. They’ve adopted Pappous’s hobby — “Give me a word, ANY word, and I will tell you its Greek roots.”

“Chimichanga!”

Vardalos, the lone credited screenwriter, has nothing new to say about her family, the Greek diaspora and what they have to teach us. This material might have found some spring to its step had there been more Greeks and funnier film geeks, off camera, a Judd Apatow comic Darwinism where a lot of minds are thinking up gags and the Best Gag Wins. Here, a lot of weakest gags get on the screen and Vardalos, in particular, strains to make those lines seem like they work.

“Wedding 2” is a lot more like the lame sitcom than the movie that started all this.

But Constantine and Andrea Martin, playing the overbearing Aunt Voula, still steal the show. He’s still got the twinkle of a man who has never given up his Windex as magic bullet for whatever ails you. She’s still the very definition of a Queen Bee, fixing things for the fixer, Nia, and doing it in an accent to die for.

“Remember, you were a GIRLfriend before you were a wife and mother!”

And there are almost enough sweet touches and funny gags reprised — brothers Angelo and Nick, played by Joey Fatone and Louis Mandylor, still scuffle and wrestle — into their 40s — to make this wedding worth crashing. Almost.

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for some suggestive material

Cast: Nia Vardalos, Lainie Kazan, Andrea Martin, Michael Constantine, John Corbett, Elena Kampouris
Credits: Directed by Kirk Jones, script by  Nia Vardalos. A Universal release.

Running time: 1:34

Hey kids, we WANT to love Pee Wee’s new movie. Honest we do!

Sure, he’s 63. And he’s 30 years removed from “Pee Wee’s Big Adventure.” And just as many years separated from Tim Burton, who made that film a breakout for them both.

But he doesn’t look a day over…40.(Digital erasure of the signs of ageing.) He’s still infantile, pasty-faced and able to deliver the oldest jokes as if he’s just heard them on the playground.

“Have you heard about those new corduroy pillows?”

No, Pee Wee, we haven’t.

“I’m surprised! Cuz they’re making HEADlines! Get it? Heh heh!”

The bow-tie, the white bucks, they’re still the talk of Fairville, his home town.

But the laugh is hard to reproduce in his AARP years. The antic/manic/birdlike energy of his every  gesture is missing. So “Pee Wee’s Big Holiday,” a road-trip comedy starring Paul Reubens as America’s oldest tweenager, doesn’t have the snap of the goofball in his glory.

The pacing is flat, Reubens has lost his fastball and the supporting cast of eccentric casual strangers who cross Pee Wee’s path is middling.

But Reubens/Herman is still innately amusing, and packaging Pee Wee as a bromance-struck short order cook trying to make it to his new bro’s birthday party is hilarious. The new bro? “Magic Mike” muscleman Joe Manganiello, playing himself, a side of beefcake every bit as taken with the kabuki-pale man-child as Pee Wee is with him.

“Double cool,” Pee Wee purrs at Manganiello on a motorcycle, “TRIPLE cool.”

The quest hurls Pee Wee into a female gang of bank robbers (Alia Shawkat plays a hoodlum nicknamed “Pee Wee”), a female car-converted-into-a-plane pilot (Diane Salinger) and Farmer Brown’s farmhouse full of ready, willing, plump and nubile daughters, all of whom want to bed our hero.

Who will not be dissuaded from his quest. The Amish, mountain man Grizzly Bear Daniels (Brad William Henke), Wanda and her RV beauty salon, all just waypoints on his trek from mid-America to New York, where his bro eagerly awaits his new best pal.

Reubens can still milk a simple joke for all that it’s worth, and then some. Watch what he does with the air escaping from a balloon — a vertitable symphony (“Jingle Bells”) built around a rude squeak.

But director John Lee (“The Heart, She Holler”) doesn’t give this any pizzazz. There’s nothing as magical as Pee Wee dancing to “Tequila,” provoking a motorcycle gang or joining the circus.

It’s not much of a movie, frankly. But our good will goes a long way where Pee Wee’s concerned. Herman appreciation is like love for Tinker Belle. If you want to like it enough, you will.

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast: Paul “Pee Wee Herman” Reubens, Joe Manganiello, Alia Shawkat, Michelle Meredith, Hal Landon, Jr., Paul Rust,
Credits: Directed by John Lee, script by Paul Reubens, Paul Rust. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:29

The dying “Divergent” franchise, a cut-and-paste knock-off of “Hunger Games,” “The Giver,” and every other Young Adults save us from Dytopia book-movie, took in enough Friday to suggest it’ll manage a $30 million weekend.

Despite the worst reviews of the series. And that, by the way, is the weakest opening of any of these movies. The fact that Summit/Lionsgate greedily split this last lap around lameness into two pictures is being questioned. As it should be. The last “Hunger Games” (middling, but not nearly so much as “Divergent”) suffered the same fate — two action starved action pictures instead of one with a modicum of violence.

“Miracles from Heaven” opened Wednesday to upbeat reviews and half-decent business. By midnight Sunday, this faith-based sick-kid drama will have rounded up $16 million in ticket sales.

“Cloverfield Lane” fell off 45%+, which is just average. Considering all the critical swooning for this “Room with Aliens”, and fanboy enthusiasm (opening weekend) that’s got to be a let down.

“Zootopia” is headed for another $40 million weekend. Wow.

“Deadpool” is closing in on $350.

“The Revenant” is finishing off its time in the top ten post-Oscars at roughly $185 million.