Movie Nation

The baseball is sloppy and the sentiments border on maudlin in “You Gotta Believe,” the latest “true story” Texas sports dramedy from director Ty Roberts and writer Lane Garrison.

Luke Wilson plays a Little League coach with cancer — he was in Roberts and Garrison’s “12 Mighty Orphans” — in what’s meant to be a plucky account of (what was back in 2002) “The Longest Little League World Series Game Ever Played.”

A good supporting cast includes Greg Kinnear as a fellow coach, and Sarah Gadon and Molly Parker as the coach’s wives, mothers to Little League players called on to “Win One for Coach Bobby” when Coach Ratliff (Wilson) gets a terminal diagnosis.

But everything from the Westside League’s all star team to the games themselves tumbles off a cliff into nonsensical as we march towards that “longest game” through the usual “conditioning” montages and games littered with errors and skinny child actor home runs.

And entrusting mostly inexperienced child actors to play the assorted player “types” on this underdog squad from tiny, remote Fort Worth (ahem) ensures that a sitcom season’s worth of corny punchlines are blown — neither enunciated or delivered with any sense of timing or emphasis.

“Is that a forced error?”

“His old man ‘forced’ him to play.”

OK, that one lands.

Kinnear’s a distracted lawyer-coach Jon and Wilson’s the ever-upbeat Coach Bobby, who is full of “Life’s short, the time is NOW” aphorisms for their inept nine.

We see their bad team lose a game — badly — at the end of a losing season. That in itself is amusing. Their pitcher beans an opposing batter, the ump ejects the pitcher, and calls the inning without anybody on the other team being called out for the BEANBALL on THEIR player. Next think we know, incompetent Westside comes back up to bat.

How do we SCORE that, kids?

Logic dictates that a lousy team with one distracted coach and another enthusiastic one, neither of whom has fathered kids who can play, should be named all star team coaches, with the ability to fill their league’s team with bad players from their own squad, including their kids.

Then screenwriter Garrison and director Roberts skip other steps as this motley crew abruptly plays its way out of their corner of Texas, out of Texas and into Williamsport, PA.

The kids are “types” — the Romeo, the half-blind catcher shifted to one position after another, the coach’s kid they nickname “Rocket” because of how slow he runs the basepaths, the Hispanic kid who is their best player, but works — at 12 — to save for college.

Hey, they need him because this may be the least diverse Little League movie since the Truman administration (I know, Fort Worth).

Parker’s (“Small Crimes,” recently seen n TV’s “Lost in Space”) the wife who won’t let Coach Jon let Coach Bobby down.

“Laughter is like Prozac without side effects.”

Gadon (“Enemy,” TV’s “True Detective”) classes the joint up as the wife who would rather her husband concentrate on treatment.

They and Wilson and Kinnear do what they can with the material. But Roberts and Garrison stumble and fumble through a melodramatic version of real events, one so cut and dried that it should have been easy to render at least tolerable.

One kid speaks for us all when he chirps “What in the name of Willie Mays are you doing now, Coach?”

God only knows.

Rating: PG, tweens brawling, mild profanity

Cast: Luke Wilson, Greg Kinnear, Sarah Gadon, Michael Cash, Etienne Kellichi and Molly Parker.

Credits: Directed by Ty Roberts, scripted by Lane Garrison. A Well Go USA release.

Running time: 1:45

After decades, not just years, of battling brain cancer, San Francisco apartment finder/rental agent Jack Tuller decided to take charge of the one thing he could still control, the way his life ended.

Married, pushing 60 and with a circle of family and longtime friends, he’d throw a party and “go out with a blaze of glory.”

And as Jack had been a musician, artist and band manager in an earlier life, with at least one documentary filmmaker friend, he decided getting his “death with dignity” on film might be a way of battling the void and an eternity of anonymity.

“Jack Has a Plan” is his friend Bradley Berman’s documentary about Tuller’s life as it wound down, and his death and funeral. Tuller’s tale — years in the making — is a reminder that everybody has a story, and it’s rarely the one they “expect” to tell. “Jack” is engaging, even if this account of death and dying meanders a bit and plays as more emotionally flat than you’d expect.

Jack, it turns out, is estranged from his mother. Berman is there with his camera as Jack tries to rectify that. He’s there when Jack meets the father he never knew, witnesses their efforts at reconnecting after lives spent apart. Berman is there to document the cognitive decline, including older home videos the artistic Jack made about the earliest days after his diagnosis, the hope of “remission” and the bad news that he greets with the finality of “I’m not doing chemo.”

And he’s there right up to the end, and then after the end, with a charming funeral service that may be the most “San Francisco” thing about this movie.

Berman is a character in the film, debating this decision with Jack and other mutual friends and marveling at the fact that Jack knows he’s dying “and he’s cool with it.”

There have been other “death with dignity” documentaries, feature films and plays going all the way back to “‘Night, Mother.” This film is informative, letting us see the neighbor who shows Jack this choice, a neighbor who helped write California’s “End of Life Options Act.”

The film underscores Jack as a charmer who was well connected enough to pull all this together and pull off this “plan” — party, pharmaceutical suicide, funeral, all of it filmed. We all want to be remembered, and Jack seems oddly obsessed with that.

But there’s a utilitarian side to things as that “end of life care expert” (Torrie Fields) explains how it all works, and medical care professionals facilitate Jack’s plan, telling him and wife Jennifer (Jennifer Cariño) how it all will go down.

There’s poignance to Jack asking friends and family if they want to touch his skull (indentations from surgeries), his wife grappling with a hard and fast approaching date for her impending widowhood, and the father (Jack Ferrell) who does what he can to make up for lost time with a son he’s recently met and soon will lose.

Still, I’ve seen more moving accounts of such exits over the years. The “debate” in such stories always seems settled before the camera rolls. Otherwise there’s no movie. There’s pathos, but little drama or genuine confict.

But the subtext of many such documentaries is more keenly felt here. “Why doesn’t every state allow this?”

Rating: unrated

Cast: Jack Tuller, Jennifer Cariño, Jack Ferrell, Torrie Fields, Jonathan Lemon and Bradley Berman.

Credits: Written and directed by Bradley Berman. A PBS release.

Running time: 1:12

Andre Taylor, John Earl Jelks, Andra Day and Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor star in the debut feature of writer-director Titus Kaphar, a taste of the African American experience that touches on parents and children and trying to learn from the mistakes of your parents as you take on parenting.

Wide release this awards season from Roadside Attractions.

This lovely, moody Irish period piece from Quiver stars Agnes O’Casey, David Wilmot and is based on a 19th century novel by Sheridan Le Fanu, who wrote an early “Vampyr” novel and other fiction that has been adapted for the screen over the years.

“Lies We Tell” has been a festival darling, is a sort of “Jane Eyre” guardian tale of intrigues, blood relation and a whiff of “evil,” was directed by Lisa Mulcahy, of “The Legend of Longwood” and TV’s “Red Rock,” and was scripted by Elizabeth Gooch, which suggests the feminine point of view of the protagonist was in good hands.

Coming soon.

The great British filmmaker John Boorman announced his presence in Hollywood with authority with 1967’s “Point Blank,” a brutal, blunt-instrument of a thriller starring Lee Marvin.

“Deliverance,” “Zardoz,” “Excalibur” and “Hope and Glory” were to come. But here was a guy who plainly knew his way around “hard boiled.”

“Point Blank” is based on a novel by Hollywood’s favorite crime fiction specialist Donald E. Westlake, stars Marvin as Walker, an underworld figure whose involvement in a robbery of “The Alcatraz Run” — a weekly cash handoff at the closed island prison — ends with his betrayal by the “friend” who begged him to help pull off the job.

John Vernon plays Reese, who not only stole Walker’s $93,000 share of the take, he walked off with his wife (Sharon Acker) after shooting Walker and leaving him to die in a long-abandoned cell on Alcatraz.

A year later, Walker wants revenge. And he wants that damned $93,000 he’s owed. He starts mowing through his contacts in his former life, starting with his wife — who kills herself — always hounded by a mysterious and manipulative “Fed” played by Keenan Wynn.

They aren’t just dealing with The Mob or A Mob. This is the revolutionary 1960s. Crime is more organized. It’s Reese and “The Organization” that Walker must batter and bludgeon to get his money back.

Lloyd Bochner, Michael Strong and Carroll O’Connor play members of the mob food chain Walker must contend with. His wife’s sister (Angie Dickinson) might be some honey trap help in getting his revenge.

Yeah, they could have a fling. If Walker can answer Chris’s question — “What’s my last name?”

“What’s my first name?” he shoots back.

Odd that Walker wouldn’t know the surname of his WIFE’s SISTER, and that she wouldn’t know his first name.

What’s striking, coming back to “Point Blank” after many years, is how much this violent, generic but impressionistic thriller forshadows the arty, dreamy touches Boorman brought to his later Camelot (“Excalibur”) and wilderness (“Deliverance,” “The Emerald Forest”) epics. The film’s sometimes surreal flashbacks have inspired some to see it as “a ghost story.”

Stylized sound, bizarre plot twists interspersed with memories conjured up in flashbacks, I can kind of see that.

Boorman had befriended Marvin upon his arrival in Hollywood, and they’d make their mark in two of Marvin’s best — this film and the primal, one on one WWII thriller “Hell in the Pacific,” co-starring Toshiro Mifune.

With “Point Blank,” remade in 1999 as “Payback,” a Mel Gibson revenge vehicle, they created an Urtext of the underworld revenge thriller genre. Themes, ideas, scenes and settings (the LA River basin) from “Point Blank” would show up in many a similar thriller in decades to come.

For instance, one of the people Walker wants answers from is a slimy “connected” used car dealer played by Michael Strong. Walker interrupts the creep leering at his salesman’s latest blonde customer, and they take out a ’67 Imperial convertible.

Walker proceeds to demolish the car, injuring and abusing the dealer — torture-by-test-drive — in a scene Walter Hill reprised for “The Driver.”

Dickinson gives one of her best big screen performances as a woman who doesn’t overtly grieve her dead sister until she takes out her fury on the overbearing Walker, a tiny waif of woman pummeling and slapping this gray-haired hulk until she collapses in tears.

“You’re a pathetic sight, Walker, from where I’m standing. Chasing shadows. You’re played out. It’s over. You’re finished. What would you do with the money if you got it? It wasn’t yours in the first place. Why don’t you just lie down and die?“

Vernon, later to gain a measure of immortality as the vile Dean Wormer of “Animal House,” may talk tough in a bass voice that rivals Marvin’s own. But Reese can be reduced to whimpering panic and tears, the classic “tough guy” who isn’t.

Future “Hill Street Blues” star James Sikking drops in and impresses as a pipe-smoking mob assassin.

A hallmark of great film noirs is the hardboiled dialogue, and “Point Blank,” with three credited screenwriters adapting Westlake’s prose, has lines that sing and resonate through the decades.

“Well, Cinderella, I was beginning to think you’d never come for your shoe.”

Boorman retired a few years ago, after a career that launched Burt Reynolds and Brendan Gleeson as film stars, that gave Nicol Williamson, Helen Mirren, Ian Bannen and others grand showcases, and that set up Lee Marvin for life with a late career comeback, thanks to “Point Blank” and “Hell in the Pacific.”

But for all the cult following “Zardoz,” “Excalibur,” “Deliverance” and “Hope and Glory” gave him, “Point Blank” remains his masterpiece, 91 minutes of a tough-as-nails anti-hero so single-minded that he seems anything but heroic, an anachronism dealing with an “organization” that he barely comprehends, save for the fact that the bastards still owe him $93,000.

Rating: TV-14, graphic violence, sex, nudity

SCast: Lee Marvin, Angie Dickinson, John Vernon, Keenan Wynn, Lloyd Bochner, Sharon Acker, James Sikking, Michael Strong and Carroll O’Connor.

Credits: Directed by John Boorman, scripted by Alexander Jacobs, David Newhouse and Rafe Newhouse, based on a Donald E. Westlake novel. An MGM release on Tubi, et al.

Running time: 1:31

The ever-devolving horny teen party comedy continues its progression from “Sixteen Candles” to “Just Can’t Wait” to “American Pie,” “Superbad” and beyond with “Incoming,” a rough and tumble cut and pasting from every teen movie to precede it.

Nepo baby brothers Dave and John Chernin, sons of former Fox chief and Hollywood mega-mogul Peter Chernin, leap to the front of the “my film gets made” line with a more-raunchy-than-amusing farce whose cleverest touch might be the title. As in “Incoming” freshmen have no idea of the barrage that’s “incoming” from unsympathetic upper classmen.

Any sexual element to that pun title is probably unintentional.

Mason Thames, Ramon Reed, Raphael Alejandro and Bardia Seiri play four of Waymont High’s class of 2028, kids contending with mean older siblings, mom’s creepy new boyfriend and unrequited crushes on upperclasswomen which cause one and all to look forward to reinventing themselves for this new environment.

“High school’s gonna murder you,” is older LGBTQ sis Alyssa’s (Ali Gallo) threat to mop topped younger brother Benj (Mason Thames). Judging from his assigned senior carpool/orientation “buddy, low-rent drug-dealer Adam Ruby (Thomas Barbusca), that might very well be the case.

Luckily, pals Eddie (Ramon Reed), Connor (Raphael Alejandro) and Koosh (Bardia Seiri) are here for moral support and advice. Eddie’s the kid whose mother’s latest love is as trustworthy as a Trump. Connor is barely 15 and looks so young he’s labeled “Fetus” by the bullies who were themselves bullies their freshman year. And rich kid Koosh can’t use the cool moniker “Koosh” because his tougher, cooler older brother denies it. “Danah” it is.

Koosh-the-elder (Kayvan Shai) is the one throwing the “Mom and Dad are going out of town” rave that chould change everybody’s high school future.

“Who you are in high school is basically who you’re going to be forever.”

As Koosh the younger is only allowed a single “plus one” for his brother’s blow-out, fat chance of that.

The night-long kiddie baccanale will see two of the quartet steal mom’s creepy boyfriend’s Tesla, forced to contend with the beautiful, drunk and “This IS my Uber” influencer (Loren Gray). Tik Toking Koosh the Kid will test his “Operation Meet Cute” suave rich-kid-on-his-home-court “moves” on an older girl. And Benj will try to remake himself from the theatre kid he was in middle school and confess his crush on his sister’s bestie, Bailey (Isabella Ferreira) as his “carpool” drug dealer’s fraud comes home to roost.

There are snatches of dialogue that amuse — “I just didn’t identify with my ‘birth nose.'”

But shock and “ewwww” was what the Chernins were going for — peeking in on raw dogging same sex coupling, graphic toilet humor and the lonely, just-divorced chemistry teacher (Bobby Cannavale) who decides to drop by for “just one drink” and turns the evening into a string of “Who’s ready for a science lesson?” moments.

What does the “proof” in alcohol mean? And how does that relate to its flammability, for instance?

Cannavale plays this “teacher who shouldn’t be partying with kids” stuff as clumsy and pathetic, when the idea of including it was plainly creepy and transgressive.

The snorting drug abuse, nudity, sex and fussilade of F-bombs (parents and children included) have a whiff of “Superbad,” but experienced movie watchers will pick up attempted hints of “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” “Can’t Hardly Wait” and “Sixteen Candles” in the more graceful moments. Not that there are a lot of those.

But if you’re wondering what your kids are sneaking off to watch and take notes on as this school year begins, here it is — freshman year as envisioned by Hollywood scions whose experience of high school was R-rated and stolen from a lot of other movies.

Rating: R, violence, drug abuse, sex, nudity, near constant profanity

Cast: Mason Thames, Ramon Reed, Isabella Ferreira, Ali Gallo, Raphael Alejandro,
Bardia Seiri, Thomas Barbusca, Caitlin Olson and Bobby Cannavale

Credits: Scripted and directed by Dave Chernin and John Chernin. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:31

One of the reasons I always regarded journalism as the ultimate continuing education job was what you learn about, by necessity, to cover your beat.

For me that could mean reporting on Native American arts and cultural affairs in Alaska and North Dakota, prairie populism and hockey mania on the Northern Plains, labor, race and civil rights history in NC, Tennessee and points South.

And in Winston-Salem, NC, covering the National Black Theatre Festival, I met the major figures of African American theatre, profiling the great August Wilson among many other august guests of that festival.

There was a TV movie version of this iconic play in the ’90s, and you’d be hard pressed to round up a better cast than Charles Dutton, Alfred Woodard and Courtney B. Vance.

Netflix’s “The Piano Lesson” features Samuel L. Jackson, John David Washington, Erykah Badu and Danielle Deadwyler.

Oscar worthy? Nov. 22, we find out.

One thing that makes a film a “classic” is how modern it feels, no matter what decade produced it.

By that measure, William Wellman’s “The Story of G.I. Joe” (1945) is the “Citizen Kane” of combat dramas, the “Saving Private Ryan” of its day.

Wellman & Co. may have shot many scenes on soundstages and used rear projection to fake driving sequences. But this North Africa/Italian Campaign grunts-eye-view drama feels real, lived-in, with little in the way of heroics or melodrama. With its mud and rain, authentic ruins and realistic firefights, it doesn’t look like any contemporaneous combat film. And within a couple of years, the entire genre would bend towards imitating this version of many an America’s World War II combat experience.

Director “Wild Bill” Wellman (“A Star is Born,” “The Ox Bow Incident”) earned his nickname as a French fighter pilot during World War I. But “G.I. Joe” gently mocks the “glamour boys” of the Air Corps, and presents infantrymen as its inspiration — the Pulitzer Prize winning war correspondant and columnist Ernie Pyle — saw them, in their element.

“It was chaos, indefinable,” Pyle wrote, in voice-over narration performed by the great Burgess Meredith, who plays him in the film, with “each boy facing the worst moment of his life — alone.”

Pyle might be in a quiet but fraught forward command post as the first major American battle of the North African campaign — Kasserine Pass (unnamed) — goes wrong. But his bread and butter was embedding with a platoon, seeing what they saw, experiencing what they did, a “little guy,” over 40 who “doesn’t have to be here” giving these other littleguys a voice in the pages of America’s newspapers.

“Hey Ernie, tell Cleveland Joe McCloskey’s winning the war single-handed!”

The script, by three credited writers, can sound like overheard foxhole conversation, with Pyle listening in, maybe taking notes, and typing out dispatches adorned with authentic G.I. speak.

“You know, when this war’s over, I’m gonna buy a map and find out where I’ve been.”

The G.I.s depicted here may look the way movie soldiers did back then, played by actors older than the “boys” they’re meant to portray. But they are three dimensional human beings — flawed and petty, noble and heroic, stoic and grumpy.

“If this war don’t kill me first, my feet will.”

And Pyle was their poet laureate, relating the lives they left behind and the life they might very well lose to worried and empathetic “folks back home.”

“For those beneath the wooden crosses, there is nothing we can do, except perhaps to pause and murmur, ‘Thanks pal, thanks.'”

We meet Pyle as he joins up with a green infantry platoon let by Lt. Walker (a very young Robert Mitchum, hard and charismatic as hell) in a combat zone that looks little like Algeria or Tunisia (So.Cal. locations, of course).

Pyle, like the soldiers whose experience he is documenting, will learn to travel light, to sleep on the shovel he dug his foxhole with. He will watch Walker age into a man hardened by death and inadequate rations and sleeplessness and misery as he is promoted captain. Pyle will see the G.I. whose fiance became a combat nurse to be near him treated to a G.I. field wedding. And he will watch Sgt. Warnicki (Freddie Steele, a standout in the cast) hunt all over Italy for a Victrola that will play the record his wife back home made with the voice of the son he’s never met.

And Pyle will take on his share of the responsibilities of looking after the North African mutt the guys name “Ay-rab” and adopt as a mascot, which Lt. Walker orders them to ditch until “the press” shows up.

Walker gets it. Only draft dodgers with bone spurs hate dogs. That won’t look good in print.

There are plot elements and characters that were combat cliches before “The Story of G.I. Joe,” but Wellman treats it all with a dogged determination to grimy everything up so that this all feels documentary real — burning tanks, battered Jeeps, soaked, stubbled and bloodied soldiers.

Battles and place names are left out as Pyle follows this fictional corps from North Africa and the Kasserine Pass to Monte Cassino and the road to Rome.

As the firefights pass by and the stalemate at Monte Cassino kill some and wear on all, we’re set up to sense something tragic is coming, with the only mystery being who it will happen to, and when. Yeah, the Lt. growls, “the first death’s always the worst,” a nameless G.I. killed in a random bit of strafing. But every death here will sting, especially the final one.

Perhaps the most modern thing about “G.I. Joe” is the fact that Wellman knew this world and this story and these emotions well enough to know when to drop the mike. The film finishes with that death, and well before the war is over, months before these men and Pyle know if they will survive this theater of action and then be sent to the Pacific.

The film came out in the summer of ’45, before Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The war’s outcome was no longer in doubt, with just the final death toll to be determined, who would survive and who wouldn’t.

So Wellman ended his film without music, without credits, without one second of flag waving. He just had to hope Ernie Pyle would approve.

Rating: TV-PG, violence, combat, sexual situations, smoking

Cast: Robert Mitchum, Burgess Meredith, Freddie Steele, Wally Cassell, Jimmy Lloyd, William Murphy and John R. Reilly.

Credits: Directed by William Wellman, scripted by Leopold Atlas, Guy Endore and Philip Stevenson, based on the writings and career of Ernie Pyle. A United Artists release, restored and on Tubi and available from Ignite Films.

Running time: 1:48

Every cinema is its own microcosm of your typical weekend at the box office.

If you catch a lot of films on opening night — Thursdays, most of the year, thanks to Marvel pushing “previews” into the mainstream — you can get a sense, in most of the country, what’s happening nationwide just by gauging the audience you’re sitting with.

My moviegoing companion and I were almost all alone for a 730 showing of “The Crow” in a small city cineplex in Virginia. One other paying patron. Yeah, that’s not going to make $10 million on opening weekend. Half that? Don’t blame August for this lack of turnout. Reviews have been terrible, and not just mine.

Perhaps people don’t want producer Edward R. Pressman to pocket one more dime off the corpse of Brandon Lee. The original “cursed” comic book adaptation led to a lawsuit, a settlement and no criminal charges. But a cost-cutting production/non-union shoot led to the inept armorer leaving a dummy bullet head in a blank-firing pistol. And decades of sequels and reboots label Pressman a ghoul for continuing to find ways to profit off this notoriety and tragedy. He should have sold the rights, or passed them on to Brandon Lee’s family, and moved on.

When your movie can’t crack the top five on one of the weakest weekends of the moviegoing year, maybe get a clue.

“Blink Twice” had a few more butts in the seats for a late afternoon matinee. It will be lucky to clear $7, per Deadline.com. It’s not “Get Out,” but its a satisfying spin on that theme with “Believe women” messaging. Is that scaring off the male audience? Maybe fans will find it before the weekend is over. It should crack the top five.

The faith-based drama “The Forge” is filling screens, if not seats, in rural America. It won’t make more than $6 million on its opening weekend, which is still better than “The Crow.” That’s good enough for fifth place.

“Alien: Romulus” is on track to lose the top spot to “Deadpool & Wolverine,” which is back on top after the latest chest-buster reboot is spent. But with school back in session and the summer over, the last two weekends of August are traditionally a dumping ground for crap (“Crow”) because nobody is going to the movies as we start to look ahead to all the distractions of all — school, football, baseball playoffs, etc.

“Romulus” is falling off a cliff after a $42 million opening last weekend. The $16 million take proves that there’s only so much audience for “the same old ‘Alien’ doing the same old stuff.”

And there’s no “Barbie” this year, not that VanCityReynolds didn’t do his darnedest to change that (“Deadpool/Wolverine” will clear close to $18 this weekend, and will wind down and probably end up just over $625 as it sheds screens and audience).

“It Ends With Us” keeps the bragging rights battle alive in the Blake Lively/Ryan Reynolds household. It’s cleared $100 million and will stick around the top five until September, adding another $11.5-12 million by Sunday night.

“Twisters” falls out of the top five.

I’ll update these figures as the weekend unfolds, although nobody will be all that worked-up to report “We’ve got a new hit” as nobody really does.

Dad wants them to be “men,” “tough,” ready for a world that won’t cut them any breaks.

“When things get tough, press on.”

The tween/teen brothers take that seriously. Too seriously.

This period piece “true story” features Caitlin Fitzgerald and Paul Sparks and actors even less known than they are.

But Sly Stallone produced it, so he saw merit in the non fiction book it’s based on. Probably.