Movie Nation

You won’t find The Barkley’s Marathons listed online in any of those Outside/Outside Times magazine compilations of the “world’s toughest ultramarathons.”

It isn’t held in the Moroccan desert, above the Arctic Circle or in Death Valley. There’s no “Canyon to Canyon” Grand Canyon hook, no Peruvian jungle to add exponential degrees of difficulty.

So take the organizers’ self-described “world’s toughest trail race” for what it is — hype. Rather like the name of the Tennessean who runs it, who goes by Lazarus Lake — real name, Gary Cantrell. “The truth is malleable,” he reminds us.

But what it lacks in ultra-marathoning community luster, the Barkleys makes up for in exclusivity and eccentricity — mainly Cantrell’s.

“The Barkley Marathons: The Race that Eats its Young” is a laugh-out-loud look at Cantrell’s 30 year old walk-hike-run through the mountains of Tennessee. It’s a running documentary about the annual five-lap race through the wilds of Frozen Head State Park, near Wartburg, Tennessee.

You might not see the world’s big names in the sport there on any given spring. The selection process for the 40 annual entrants leans towards committed, Type-A science and engineering types, with at least one “sacrificial lamb,” somebody they all know “has no business being out there,” running 20 miles laps through bracken and brier, in day and night, 12,000 feet up, and 12,000 feet down.

Runners have to figure out where to register, no mean feat. They have to pay the entry fee — arbitrarily set at $1.60, and “a white shirt,” or socks or whatever else the folksy Cantrell figures he’s in need of this particular year. And you need to bring him a license plate from whatever state or country you’re from.

The runners go up those mountains, down unmarked trails, trot through a creek-tunnel underneath a prison. And at various points, they have to locate a battered paperback book on an ironic subject or with an ironic title. Surely “The Naked and the Dead” has turned up among the vandalized literature.The runners are given numbers for each lap, each number is the corresponding page they must tear out of each waypoint book.

They have to cover 100 miles — actually, closer to 130 — in 60 hours, in the Tennessee spring. There’s little time for rest, little pause for recuperating or mending one’s ruined feet or brier-torn legs. Judgement fades, fatigue makes finding the waypoint books hard in daylight, impossible in the dark.

All they have to go by are their own maps, copied from this year’s trail course, and each other. No GPS.

And almost nobody ever finishes the damn thing — 14 finishers in 30 years. So yeah, it’s plenty tough.

Filmmakers Annika Iltis and Timothy James Kane capture the 2012 race in all its quirky glory — following runners (people with a LOT of training time on their hands) from California and South Carolina, Belgium and Germany as well.

But mainly, the camera’s on Cantrell and all the odd rituals and mythology attached to the race. It started as an “I could do better’n that” challenge to the James Earl Ray prison escape from Brushy Mountain Prison. Ray, who murdered Martin Luther King Jr., took days to find in the Tennessee wilderness. But he covered very few miles in that rough terrain.

The ultra-marathoners cover 15 times as far, every year. The ones who finish, anyway.

Cantrell piles on the colorful quirks. Those granted entry to the race “are sent a letter of condolences.” He announces the impromptu start time — day or night — by blowing a conch shell. He starts the race by lighting a cigarette.

If you quit, you are “tapped out.” A bugler plays “Taps.” The runners take this surprisingly well.

It’s all about the suffering, and good clean muddy fun — testing your body to its limits without having to travel to above the Arctic Circle for the 6633 Ultra, to Greece for the Spartathlon, or Morocco for the Marathon des Sables, the toughest of all.

The film could have used a little context (mentioning, by name, these better known races, for a start), outside experts to talk about its degree of difficulty. No, starting off with a quote about the truth being “malleable” doesn’t excuse you for swallowing the corny hype.

But “The Race that Eats its Young” is still a fun and quick introduction to a sport that, to most of us, seems so extreme as to invite the sort of eccentrics the filmmakers capture here.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with profanity, blood, smoking.

Cast: Gary Cantrell
Credits: Directed by Annika Iltis, Timothy James Kane. A FilmRise release. Running time: 1:29

Director Amy Berg managed to land all the “big gets” she needed for her documentary, “Janis: Little Girl Blue.”

She got interviews with Kris Kristofferson, and the surviving bandmates from Janis Joplin’s three-band career. There are surviving boyfriends, including “Country” Joe McDonald, and a surviving girlfriend.

And she rounded up the two biographers — sister Laura Joplin, and Joplin’s road manager John Byrne Cooke — whose books bookend the life of the great ’60s soul singer. That granted Berg access to the many letters Janis wrote to family and friends (read from in the film by singer Cat Power), and to the behind-the-scenes world of her stardom and the drug abuse that would lead to her untimely death.

“Little Girl Blue” is thus definitive, a thorough portrait of this “American Master”  (it will appear on PBS in 2016, after a limited theatrical release this November and December.

The arc of her musical life has never been more understandable, from folk to folk blues to hard blues. Her growing understanding of how to use her voice is explained (ripped from the pages of Cooke’s book) and explored through footage from shows in San Francisco to Woodstock, Europe to Canada.

The performances are almost uniformly hair-raising — her command of the blues patter and scat between verses of the epic songs of her repertoire.  “Cry Baby,” “Tell Mama All ABout It,” “Me & Bobby McKee,”every song serving up a another “Piece of My Heart.”

Her TV interviews range from the bitter/bittersweet one from the night she went to her Port Arthur, Texas high school reunion, to her free-wheeling chats with Dick Cavett. The self-adoring talk show host has never come off warmer than he does in talking with Berg about Joplin. She was at her most unguarded in TV conversations with Cavett, who asked tough questions with a hint of concern and tenderness that will surprise you.

We learn who her biggest influence might have been — Otis Redding. We see just what it took to get her on stage and on film in the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival from filmmaker D.A. Pennebaker.

Her bandmates — Dave Getz especially — talk about the good and bad influences swirling around her, and how she “turned into a caricature” of the earthy Blues Mama persona the media gave to her.

“Little Girl Blue” is a terrific film, not as moving or damning as this year’s Amy Winehouse expose, but a warm piece of cinematic scholarship. Berg rounds up all we remember and has those who knew her best explain those memories for a musically revealing portrait of a mercurial talent who has been dead far longer than she was alive, but who seems as vital and relevant today as she must have on the cusp of the ’70s.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with substance abuse, nudity, profanity

Cast: Janis Joplin, John Byrne Cooke, Laura Joplin, Dick Cavett, the voice of Cat Power
Credits: Directed by Amy Berg. A FilmRise/PBS release.

Running time: 1:43

I told you it sucked. Word of mouth may be working against, the lingering bad taste of “Mockingjay Part 1” may have filmgoers leery.

And then there’s the matter of the audience aging and perhaps maturing out of the YA target range.

It is opening 33% below “Hunger Games” peak, which was the $158 million “Catching Fire” earned.

Yeah, stretching the last book into two films will pay off financially. But we knew the moment they split them that they would both fail, artistically.

The problem is one you can see with every successful TV and cable series — the staggering amount of filler, dragging a story out with weak, invented cliffhangers.

Anyway, $104 million is nothing to sneeze at.     (OK, it’s dropped to $102 million, based on lighter Saturday numbers as well). “Spectre” for lunch, wiping the James Bond film off the top spot.

“The Night Before” will manage only $10 million on its opening weekend. Reviews were not overwhelming, and it still feels a little early for a holiday picture. Better movie and better box office than “Love the Coopers,” but too soon, too soon.

“Secret in Their Eyes” will manage a barely respectable $7.5 million, based on Friday’s numbers.

So “The Hunger Games” make their exit with a wildly overrated 72% on the Rottentomatoes tomatometer.Rottentomatoes tomatometer.  Even the more reliable Metacritic reflects this bias, tho not to the same extent. tho not to the same extent.

Godawfully dull film, poorly acted, glum and action-starved.

But a few fangirls/boys and a couple of pandering newspaper critics worried about annoying the mob costing them their jobs endorsed it. So there you go. And good riddance to this one.

It occurred to me how much more young adult fiction there is today than there was when I was a kid. But the formulaic sci-fi Maze Runner/Giver/Hunger/Insurgent slop that dominates the genre, just based on the movies, makes one long for the return of an appreciation for the works of S.E. Hinton.

Seth Rogen and his “Interview” crew have baked up a stoner holiday comedy, “The Night Before.” And if you don’t giggle and grin at the bulk of it, or fall on the floor howling at Michael Shannon’s sage weed dealer turn, then forget you.

Mixed reviews for this one, in the same positive territory that “Mockingjay” sits. Comedy being totally subjective, that’s perfectly understandable.

“Secret in their Eyes” is a remake of a better Argentinian film. Still, Billy Ray’s met many of the challenges of Americanizing this twisty tale of the obsessive search for a killer and getting justice. Julia Roberts is great, Chiwetel Ejiofor not bad, Nicole Kidman and Alfred Molina sharp. Too melodramatic, and the reviews reflect that clumsiness.

“Spotlight” goes into wider release this weekend. It’s one of the best pictures of the year, everybody says so. Oscar nominations for…Ruffalo and Keaton? I could see that.

“Spotlight” is the best movie about journalism since “All the President’s Men.”

Director Tom McCarthy and a cast of master underplayers deliver the tale of the Watergate of our times. It’s a newspaper picture, a great one, about the shoe leather, the door knocking, the cold calls, the dogged days of research, the persuasion and the courage it took for four intrepid reporters at the Boston Globe to uncover the vast, worldwide pedophile priests scandal and the all-the-way-to-the-Vatican cover-up that kept this under wraps for decades.

And with every outdoor scene — church steeples in the background, children playing in the foreground — it’s a movie about a city, “a small town,” that grew used to living under a near theocracy, a city and a newspaper that accepted a good ol’ Catholic  boys’ dictum that they just look the other way as this monstrous crime grew and grew.

Michael Keaton is Robby Robinson, veteran editor of the “Spotlight” section of the Boston Globe, leading three reporters on the newspaper’s investigative team. It’s 2001, and a story crops up, not the first one, about adult victims of sexual abuse suing the Church. Robinson and members of his team — the manic workaholic Mike Rezendes (Mark Ruffalo, in the best performance of his career), Sacha Pfeiffer (Rachel McAdams) and Matt Carol (Brian d’Arcy James) are intrigued. But they’re already deep in another story.

It’s the outsider, the new Jewish managing editor, Marty Baron (Liev Schreiber at his most poker-faced) who suggests this is “an essential story.” He’s the one who shakes Robinson and other editors (John Slattery) out of their “hometown paper doesn’t fight the hometown church” lethargy. They sue to get the sealed court papers that the church doesn’t want anybody to see.

What follows is a two hour journalism procedural. This is how you pick at a story nobody wants you to tell. You get names, you make calls. You try to move lawyers, victims and priests from slamming the door in your face to opening up.

“You want to be on the right side of this,” Keaton’s Robinson tells an old golfing buddy (Jamey Sheridan).

Stanley Tucci is Mitchell Garabedian, the determined, shell-shocked attorney for a huge group of victims. A Church that has gotten the legislature to limit “non-profit” liability in cases like that has been trying to get him disbarred for even bringing it up. And he’s leery of the Globe, too. And of this city of insiders that mistrusts outsiders (he’s Armenian).

“If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a village to abuse one.”

Billy Crudup is a slick attorney who has worked for the Church on past payoffs to victims, and won’t admit it.

Neal Huff plays a traumatized victim who has organized other victims, who brings urgency to the reporting by damning the Globe for not acting on his blunt, documented tips to them years ago. He lays it out loudly and plainly, the Church played musical chairs, reassigning priests who “used their collar to rape kids.”

But Ruffalo’s Rezendes is the audience’s surrogate here, shocked at what he’s learning, committed — as the great reporters are — to not let a roadblock and long line of hostile, uncooperative sources, court employees and even a controlling, high-handed Cardinal Law (Len Cariou) beat him.

There’s a sad nostalgia to the details McCarthy (“The Visitor,” “Win Win”) zeroes in on — the tight-knit newsroom culture, the sense of duty, the all-hands-on-deck teamwork best viewed as the paper mobilizes its resources on 9/11. Newspapers are dying, a fact underlined by the 2001 AOL Everywhere billboard in front of the Globe’s headquarters. This sort of reporting is expensive and vital (TV and web-based ventures rarely uncover stories this huge) and virtually no papers have the money for such teams any more.

But if history’s tide runs against the Globe, at least those who worked there have the satisfaction of exposing a global wrong, and helping to end it. And they have McCarthy’s film, one of the best pictures of 2015, as a permanent record, a tribute in cinematic form, to their art and craft in its finest hour.
MPAA Rating:R for some language including sexual references

Cast: Michael Keaton, Mark Ruffalo, Rachel McAdams, Liev Schreiber, Stanley Tucci
Credits: Directed by Tom McCarthy, script by Tom McCarthy and Josh Singer. An Open Road release.

Running time: 2:08

Benedict Cumberbatch. Penelope Cruz, Wiig, Ferrell.An 80s Alfa Romeo Spider.

And Ben and Owen, together again.

Yeah, it had a hint of desperation when it was announced. But “Zoolander 2,” aka “2oolander,” looks self-absorbed and amusing, a comedy for the selfie generation. Perfect comedy for February. Low expectations.

Of all the emotions actors are called upon to deliver when the director calls “Action,” the first paroxysms of grief must be the hardest.

But Julia Roberts makes us feel that she has just this instant discovered that the body she and her fellow detectives are callously looking over in a dumpster is her daughter in “Secret in Their Eyes.”

Jess, her character, falls apart, plunges into that dumpster, tears off the crime-scene vinyl gloves and wails and rocks in unadulterated misery. There’s no movie star vanity, no sense that there’s a camera looking down on the worst moment in her character’s life. It is loss at its most immediate, so real it makes you want to turn away.

The movie this great and rare moment is in isn’t, on the whole, worthy of that scene. It’s an absurdly melodramatic and predictable Hollywood updating of an Oscar winning Argentinian film of 2009.

The conceit, preserved here, are clues lying in plain sight in a couple of photographs. A Federal agent (Chiwetel Ejiofor), on CT (counter-terrorism) duty in concert with the LAPD, sees a photo from the unit picnic, a creepy looking young guy (Joe Cole) ogling Jess’s daughter from across a picnic table. On that hint alone, he disobeys orders, ignores the jihadist mosque he’s supposed to be concentrating on and moves heaven and Earth to find the man who killed Jess’s daughter.

It’s not that he has the hots for her. There’s something deeper involved. Besides, it’s the new assistant DA (Nicole Kidman) he’s interested in, even though she’s engaged.

The initial investigation is covered in flashback, years later, after Ray has left the FBI. But he has never abandoned the case, doggedly poring over mugshot photos by the tens of thousands, spending 13 years trying to find this one guy.

“I’ve found him, Jess!”

Jess, an empty shell all these years later, barely registers this. Claire (Kidman), now DA, is unconvinced.

And then we see all that went wrong, way back when, when Ray was “not just crossing the line, but burying it,” trying to chase down the monster who killed his friend’s daughter. We see all the official efforts to keep this case from advancing, the competing agendas of his fellow detectives and the then-DA (Alfred Molina, terrific).

Writer-director Billy Ray moves this story from an Argentina trying to forget the awful crimes of officialdom of the recent past to post 9/11 counter terrorist hysteria. Great touch.

But everything else about this movie is so predictable as to be ridiculous. Their suspect is known to love the LA Dodgers (He’s a Muslim from Eastern Europe. Why, exactly, has he fallen for baseball?). They search Dodger Stadium, game after game, and think they spot him.

No! Wrong guy. But wait, five rows further up. It’s him!

Ray and Jess have just been told they don’t have a case, get in an elevator, who should get in on the next floor? The suspect. Free to go.

“Secret in Their Eyes” has so many coincidences like this in it to be risible. And whatever the virtues of this fine cast, the whole sexual tension/love interest between Ray and Claire never registers. Even though it’s a major engine of the plot.

Perhaps some of the same flaws lay beneath the surface of the original film, but the distraction of subtitles helped hide them. Here, they’re gaping holes knock “Secret” off the tracks long before it’s far-fetched twist ending.

Still, we have the pleasure of Roberts’ company, dialing down the glamour, playing her age and wearing it without vanity, a woman caught in the first throes of grief and revisited years later, after it has drained all the life from her eyes.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for thematic material involving disturbing violent content, language and some sexual references

Cast: Chiwetel Ejifor, Julia Roberts, Nicole Kidman, Alfred Molina,
Credits: Written and directed by Billy Ray, based on the Argentinian film by Juan José Campanella. An STX release.

Running time: 1:51

It’s not a mistake to call Oscar winner Eddie Redmayne’s appearance as “The Danish Girl” a stunt. Playing the first man ever to undergo a sex change operation was always going to have a “can he look like a real woman” or “Tootsie” cross-dressing feel to it.

But the thin and dainty Redmayne (“The Theory of Everything”) was perfect for the part. He makes the Danish painter Einar Wegener, born a man “but I feel like a woman, inside,” both very real and quite sympathetic.

As much as transgender is in the zeitgeist today, when Wegener came to this conclusion, in 1920s Copenhagen, the world didn’t have a name for what he felt, much less a sympathy for his “malady.”

So director Tom Hooper (“The King’s Speech”) makes “The Danish Girl” both a history lesson, and a grasping attempt to get inside Einar’s head, to explain this phenomenon — if that’s the right word for it — without the pall of a Kardashian or Kardashian trashing hanging over it. He’s more successful at the former than the latter.

Einar was “the greatest landscape artist in Denmark” according to his dealer, a painter fixated on one particular view — a stark line of trees sitting on the shore near where he grew up.

His adoring wife Gerda (Alicia Vikander from “Ex Machina”) is a portrait painter who cannot find her muse — until she dresses Einar up in her makeup and her clothes.

For all its good intentions, the movie is riddled with clumsy, unintentional laughs, the first of which might be that we know that Gerda can kiss her efforts to get pregnant goodbye even if she doesn’t.

Redmayne lets us see those first moments of rapturous confusion — the texture of a night gown, the feel of stockings on his legs. The screenplay doesn’t pass up the laugh-line in that situation.

“It’s pretty,” Einar says of a petticoat.

“I might let you borrow it.”

“I might LIKE it.”

“Is there something you would like to tell me?”

And so it begins, the fascination with undergarments, followed by full-on cross-dressing, going out as Einar’s “cousin” Lili, swooning when he comes under the flirtatious attentions of a man (Ben Whishaw).

Whatever else you say about “The Danish Girl,” kudos to all involved for having the good sense to cast Britain’s two most delicate and effeminate actors, Redmayne and Whishaw, as possible lovers. It works.

The first visits to doctors, who are either as confused as Einar, or quick to pronounce him mad, a “pervert” in need of drugs or a lobotomy, is handled in a montage.

As Gerda paints Einar as Lili — clothed, and in the nude — she grows famous, and more conflicted. Vikander lets us see the greed for fame, the guilt and the regret at the husband she is losing with every modeling session.

Amber Heard plays a friend of the family, a dancer who is sympathetic to Einar’s plight. Matthias Schoenaerts is hunky and brooding (as usual) as a childhood friend who may understand Einar’s situation more than he lets on, or be more interested in his increasingly neglected young wife.

It’s easy to see why this much-delayed project (Nicole Kidman had the project for years) took so long to make. Getting the tone just right is nigh on impossible. The laughs seem unintended, or worse. Is the cause-and-effect pathology of transgender accurately dissected here, or misinformed?

And as the tale — this is based on a historical novel about the real Wegener — reaches for a dramatic, possibly tragic, conclusion, it leaves us wanting.

But “The Danish Girl” never feels like a landmark project, another sexual boundary for the movies to cross. And that is to Hooper and Redmayne’s credit. They find the humanity, here, the confusion and repulsion built on ignorance and darkness. And with a winning performance and a sympathetic eye, they shine a light into that darkness so that the rest of us can see.

MPAA Rating:R for some sexuality and full nudity

Cast: Eddie Redmayne, Alicia Vikander, Matthias Schoenaerts, Ben Whishaw, Amber Heard
Credits: Directed by Tom Hooper, script by based on the David Ebershoff novel. A Focus release.

Running time: 1:59

Well, thank heavens that’s over with.

“The Hunger Games” go out with two hours and seventeen minutes in which every performance, every bored expression of sentiment, every limp action-beat suggests that phrase was the on-set mantra.

Over and done. Where’s my check?

“Mockingjay II” is a bare bones finale — a tedious two hours in which nothing at all happens, with the briefest of breaks for a zombie chase and attack and a half-hearted bit of sci-fi combat.

Yeah, I know they’re called “mutts” and not zombies in this world. A lot of gadgets, pills and what-not get their own semi-original names from author Suzanne Collins. But why remember them when these last two films all but ensure this series will be as forgotten as “Twilight” within a year or so?

The film that might have been titled “Kill Snow Part 2” is strictly for the fans. There’s no summation of the action, no recap of the last film or earlier installments.

We’re just hurled into…exposition. Lots and lots of flat-actors flatly delivering more mountains of exposition, at the very end of a very long YA film series. Not something you pile into the final act of your “epic.”

The huntress Katniss, phoned in by Jennifer Lawrence, has to recover from this or that potentially life-threatening injury, get out her bow and hunt down the evil President Snow (Donald Sutherland), who would rather slaughter the various proletarian “districts” that keep Panem running than give up power.

Very Syrian of him.

Katniss still has to decide which of two co-stars she has zero chemistry with she should fall for, the brainwashed Peeta (Josh Hutcherson) or the hunkier, more reliable Gale (Liam Hemsworth). What’s making out with Katniss like, Gale?

“It’s like kissing someone who’s drunk — it doesn’t count.”

Katniss is weary of the slaughter. First the games, then the endless and murderous civil war.

Killing someone? “It’s ALWAYS personal.”

She’s leery of the rebels’ “president” (Julianne Moore).

“You’re very…useful…to us.”

So to end all this, she must go on one last quest, break into the Capital and kill Snow, slip past the Loyalist Stormtroopers and the ingenious killing zones — “pods” — concocted by the ingenious designers of the Hunger Games themselves.

Only they aren’t. Ingenious. They’re perfunctory minefields, and for a city supposedly wholly embedded with them, there aren’t enough to stand in her way.

Characters die, and every so often enemy “propos” (TV propaganda) turn up on handy, omnipresent TVs. Those are the only times we see Stanley Tucci. Alas.

And don’t expect any fond farewell to the late Philip Seymour Hoffman, who almost certainly wouldn’t want this paycheck job in his obituary or remembered as his “final film.”

The best of these movies haven’t been all that, and in the hands of low-bidder director Francis Lawrence, three of them have been more forgettable than the rest.

It’s a pity this teenage girl empowerment series wasn’t better written, deep enough to warrant the casting of Lawrence, who has gone on to an Academy Award and the promise of winning others.

But whatever effort she made in the earlier “Hunger Games” films, she plainly checked out of this one. There isn’t a tender moment you believe, a wrenching loss that she makes you feel.

This will make a lot of money, and there’s talk of a Hunger Games theme park. But as fans and the rest of us have patiently–ever-so-patiently– waited for these movies to suddenly take flight, grow a heart and have meaning, the words used to describe the lowbrow success of showman P.T. Barnum hang over us all.

“There’s a sucker born every minute.”

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for intense sequences of violence and action, and for some thematic material

Cast: Jennifer Lawrence, Josh Hutcherson, Donald Sutherland, Julianne Moore, Liam Hemsworth
Credits: Directed by Francis Lawrence , script by Peter Craig and Danny Strong . A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 2:17

The raunchy, dopey holiday farce “The Night Before” hits you “like a wrecking a ball,” to steal a lyric from one of its better cameos.

A “Pineapple Express” flavored romp through substance abuse and the sacrireligous, it hoots off the screen, from its rhymed Tracy Morgan-narrated “Night Before Christmas” knockoff narration to its tour of New York city landmarks, bars, Catholic churches, karaoke clubs and one epic Christmas Eve party.

And if it runs out of gas and turns all sentimental-as-if-by-formula in the third act, that’s only because the screenwriting team of Levine, Goldberg, Shaffir and a goyim run completely out of Christmas cliches they can run up the Christmas tree and mock.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt is Ethan, whose high school pals Isaac (Seth Rogen) and Chris (Anthony Mackie) have been true blue, keeping him company for each of the fourteen Christmases since his parents died in a car wreck.

But that’s coming to an end. Isaac’s become a lawyer, and is about to be a dad (Jillian Bell is Betsy, his pregnant wife). Chris is a late-blooming NFL star, marketing himself to death on social media, clinging to a career with steroids.

And Ethan is just a failed musician, the guy who let Ms. Right (Lizzy Kaplan) get away, in his 30s and still doing odd gigs like dressing as an elf waiter for holiday parties.

But that’s where he finds the magic tickets. It’s a super secret, super-hip and super-swank party called “The Nutcracker’s Ball.” And now, finally, on their last night together as a Christmas Eve trio, the boys can get in.

They start at Rockefeller Plaza, do the “Big” piano dance at F.A.O. Schwartz, hit the karaoke and…detour. Chris, squiring them around in a Red Bull promotional Hummer limo, needs to score some weed for this quarterback they’re trying to impress.

And that’s when we first meet Mr. Green. Michael Shannon could very well pull an Oscar nomination out of his ruthless mortgage broker turn in “99 Homes.” His stoned, smoke-shrouded philosopher-dealer Mr. Green could seal the deal.

He was their high school hook-up, and he’s nostalgic when he sees the lads again.

“You’re all my children.”

It’s a comic marvel of precision, wit, warmth and menace. Shannon just kills it, and he steals the movie, turning up time and again, each visit more hilarious than the last.

Swiping a picture with Rogen playing a dad-to-be on one last coke/pot/pills/’shrooms bender takes some doing. The cameos (Miley C., James Franco) are fall-on-the-floor riffs on their public personas.

Mindy Kaling turns up, and Randall Park (the dopey dictator of North Korea in “The Interview”).

The situations — a cell phone mix up, sexting included, hallucinations, a brawl with street Santas — are nothing special. And the story arc, how everybody needs to grow up, is tedious.

But the players are game and flat out bring it. Rogen has the Zach Galifianakis role in this “Hangover,” Gordon-Levitt gives his thinly-drawn character some heart and sings, with gusto. And Mackie, in his third film in two weeks (“Shelter,””Love the Coopers”), has never been funnier — riffing and ripping videos for Youtube uploads, posing for every selfie with every fan who comes along, dancing, singing a little Run-DMC.

It’s not “The Interview,” but there’s daring in sending a Jew into Christmas Mass, and having him throw up (in a Star of David sweater) and yell “We didn’t kill Jesus!” It’s not “Pineapple Express” or “This the the End,” because, well, hell, where’s Danny McBride?

But if the spirit of the season is making you sick to your stomach, “The Night Before”, scruffy and uneven as it is, might be the perfect purge.

MPAA Rating: R for drug use and language throughout, some strong sexual content and graphic nudity

Cast: Joseph Gordon Levitt, Lizzy Kaplan, Seth Rogen, Anthony Mackie, Jillian Bell, Mindy Kaling
Credits: Directed by Jonathan Levine, script by Jonathan Levine, Kyle Hunter, Ariel Shaffir, Evan Goldberg. A Sony release.

Running time: 1:41