Movie Nation

My stars and garters, I lost COUNT of the number of times I muttered “They did NOT just go THERE” while watching “Cocaine Bear.”

I haven’t seen this many cocaine jokes since “Saturday Night Live” in the ’80s. And the gore. The GORE. Entrance and exit wounds, a disemboweling, maulings and clawings — early Eli Roth bloody.

It’s “Snakes on a Plane” with a bear. No Samuel L. Jackson, alas. And lots and lots of cocaine.

A hyper, just-addicted short-attention-span mama bear, bear cubs caked in “booger sugar,” children taking big, fat heaping spoonfuls? Heavens!

Comic actress turned comic director (“Pitch Perfect 2,” “Charlie’s Angels”) Elizabeth Banks and the screenwriter serve up a wildly fictionalized splatter comedy based on a real-life Tennessee tale from the mid-80s. And say what you want about the piddling dialogue and middling script, if the horror and coke joke audience was bigger, this bear would mop the bloodstained floor with that Ant-Man. Whatever its actual merits, this beast fills the cheap seats

A jaunty, jokey, life-is-cheap tone is set up in the opening, a montage of TV news coverage of the day (Tom Brokaw‘s finest hour) and the sight of a lummox drug trafficker (Matthew Rhys) dancing and snorting and tossing duffel after duffel stuffed with coke-cakes out of an auto-pilot prop plane, then clumsily killing himself when he bails out over The Smokeys in Knoxville, Tennessee.

Ray Liotta, in what won’t turn out to have been his final film (pity), plays a Missouri drug dealer who wants to get his ditched cargo back. O’Shea Jackson, Jr. and “Solo” exiled Alden Ehrenreich are the subordinates he sends into the Chattahoochee River National Recreation Area to retrieve it.

Isiah Whitlock Jr. is a Tennessee cop out to catch the elusive Syd (Liotta) and his minions.

But others, from local snatch-and-grab hoodlums, to kids playing hooky from school (Brooklynn Prince of “The Florida Project,” and Christian Convery) stumble across the duffels, the wrapped coke cakes or the bear that got to at least some of the cocaine first.

“It’s demented…or something!” Or something it is!

Hapless hikers, embittered park ranger (Margo Martindale), wildlife and biodiversity expert (Jesse Tyler Ferguson) or single mom (Keri Russell) hunting for her kid all find themselves chased by, contending with and/or ripped-up by this Ursa Americanus with a newfound taste for Erythoxylon coca.

“Cocaine Bear” summons up memories of the “cocaine” comedies of the ’80s — not films about the drug or drug dealing per se, but instantly-forgettable high concept comedies made under the influence kind of aimed at those under the influence.

The digital bear is…animated. For the most part.

The biggest running gag here is the title, especially the first word in it. Coke is a joke. F-bombs tart up other lines meant to be funnier. And then there’s the comic gore — stabbings, fingers shot off, teeth and claws tearing at flesh and intestines.

Attention is paid to the syrupy synth-pop music of the era, and the goofy, period-specific (often synthetic) clothing. That’s worth a grin or two.

But the Jimmy Warden screenplay needed script doctoring, a heaping helping of joke-juicing. Sight gags and gore may sell tickets. The wacky news story, covered-to-death by TV in its day, may ensure that the picture jumps right out of the gate in the opening act. There’s just not enough funny business here to keep this from flatlining pretty much from the halfway point onward.

Banks is one of the great screen comediennes of her era. As a director? Did you see “Pitch Perfect 2” or the last and least “Charlies Angels” ever? She gets the easiest laughs, manages a fright or two as we fear for children and other innocent victims of the bear. And that’s it.

The movie loses its buzz too early and drifts into a hangover of a third act thanks to blown opportunities, trite situations, weak set-ups and tame punch-lines.

It isn’t quite “Snakes on a Plane,” a high concept comedy in which ALL of the fun is in the title and the billing. But it’s too close.

Rating: R for bloody violence and gore, drug content and language throughout

Cast: Keri Russell, O’Shea Jackson Jr., Brooklynn Prince, Isiah Whitlock Jr., Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Alden Ehrenreich, Christian Convery, Margo Martindale and Ray Liotta

Credits: Directed by Elizabeth Banks, scripted by Jimmy Warden. A Universal release.

Running time: 1:35

It’s worth applying the Hippocratic Oath when considering the quality, veracity and messaging of any “faith based film.”

“First, do no harm,” Hippocrates preached.

The angry, divisive tone of “God’s Not Dead,” “Left Behind” and too many films that ride on the backs of Kevin Sorbo and/or Kirk Cameron are just for the fanatics, folks who politicize faith and bend Christianity into what is widely considered “Christian Nationalism” and recognized as dangerous to a pluralistic, secular democracy.

Films like “Miracles from Heaven,” “Noble,” “Same Kind of Different as Me” and “Soul Surfer” succeed by personalizing faith, playing up the real world problems and real world relief people take from faith, downplaying supernaturalism and avoiding angry, absolutist Falwellian politics.

There is no “harm” in “corny.” Sentimental and idealized? Why not? And if the story is real-world based, a little “edge” is a welcome ingredient.

“Jesus Revolution” keeps that oath and passes muster in a lot of regards. It’s a generally uplifting account of the hippies and spiritual searchers who turned away from LSD and drug experimenting and turned towards faith, without giving up their tie-dye or VW Microbuses.

It was a brief moment in time — and a Time Magazine cover (in 1971) — as this film, based on Pastor Greg Laurie’s memoir, makes clear in the closing minutes. But Laurie, a big deal in California Protestantism and (documentary) film producing, feels it’s worth remembering and celebrating, and not just for self-promotional reasons.

In the movie’s 1967-68 opening, we meet Pastor Chuck Smith (Kelsey Grammer), presiding over a dying California congregation at Calvary Chapel, tuned out of debates with his college age daughter (Ally Ioannides) at home.

The TV news is filled with Vietnam War coverage, Vietnam War protests and middle-aged reporters talking about kids who live by “turn on, tune in and drop out.”

Pastor Chuck preaches that “this generation is lost, aimless…a generation without restraint.”

But daughter Janette figures what Dad needs is to meet a real hippie. Lonnie Frisbee, played by Jonathan Roumie of the popular series “The Chosen” (He plays Jesus) is just a Jesus look-alike she picks up hitchhiking. But Pastor Chuck hears him out and takes his suggestion that “kids are searching for the real thing,” “sheep without a shepherd.”

That transforms Pastor Chuck and Calvary Chapel. Overnight, Lonnie’s friends and future followers flock to this Woodstock-by-the-Sea, barefoot and unwashed, looking for meaning and wanting to be baptized in nearby Pirate’s Cove.

Meanwhile, military school teen Greg (Joel Courtney of Netflix’s “The Kissing Booth”) is so drawn to hippie chick Cathe (Anna Grace Barlow of TV’s “The Big Leap”) that he finds himself at “happenings,” where Janis sings and LSD guru Timothy Leary speaks, praising the young people for their “relentless search for the truth.”

By the way, MAJOR “edge” and style points for including Leary and taking him seriously here.

Greg follows Cathe and her crowd into a Microbus, into mind-expanding drugs, into flashbacks to his troubled life and childhood with his single mom (Kimberly Williams-Paisley). It takes an overdose and a car crash to wake SOME of them up.

When Greg meets Lonnie, he is ripe for recruitment and definitely in need of something new. But he sees what others were saying then and still say about this movement and its moment, a generation swapping one “addiction” for another.

“What if it’s just another high, another drug?”

Co-directors Jon Erwin (“I Can Only Imagine”) and Brent McCorkle (“Unconditional”) add a reporter with the Biblical name Josiah (DeVon Franklin) to give their story a framing device, the questioning and writing of that Time Magazine cover story, and add a little diversity to the cast.

They capture the birth of the first big faith-based “Jesus Music” group, Love Song, serve up contemporary pop by America, Fleetwood Mac, The Doobie Brothers and Edwin Starr and try to weave the threads of the story into an era-appropriate hippy poncho.

But their movie experiences its 40 minutes in the wilderness as it loses track of Pastor Chuck’s story arc and epiphany, and leans on future Pastor Greg’s journey, which isn’t remotely as interesting. But he wrote the book and produced the movie, so…

The money moment here might be when the 60something preacher listens to the complaints of the church’s elders about bare feet and dirty carpets, and they show up Sunday to see him washing his new flock’s feet as they walk in.

Out of context, that’s a little weird and could be played for comedy. Grammer, bless him, plays it straight and it is simple and moving and Biblical.

Lulls aside, “Jesus Revolution” works in that classic upbeat California vibe way. It’s not any sort of breakthrough as a movie or a “movement” moment. But it makes a nice contrast to the religious rhetoric of today, the pricey Super-Bowl-on-Fox ads funded by shadowy figures who preach tolerance while funding hate groups.

Laurie and the filmmakers have the good sense to step away from that. They know that the Hippocratic Oath isn’t just for doctors, and their movie is richer for that.

Rating: PG-13 for strong drug content involving teens and some thematic elements

Cast: Jonathan Roumie, Joel Courtney, Anna Grace Bellow, Kimberly Williams-Paisley, DeVon Franklin, Julia Campbell and Kelsey Grammer.

Credits: Directed by Jon Erwin and Brent McCorkle, scripted by Jon Erwin and Jon Gunn, based on the memoir by Greg Laurie. A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1:59

Steve Martin’s “Number One is Walking: My Life in Movies and Other Diversions,” is the sort of book that airports should buy in bulk and sell at a discount, so that passengers can give them a quick read and leave them behind for somebody else to pick up before their flight.

It’s a lightly-amusing collection of anecdotes, illustrated “graphic novel” style by Harry Bliss. There are also scores of single-page cartoons for which Martin provided the captions, and Bliss illustrated. It is a 20 minute read, tops.

While perusing it, you might think, “Whoa, a couple of these (there are maybe 60 or 70) might be clever enough to actually make it into The New Yorker!”

And then you read the back cover and realize, “Hey, Harry Bliss does this for a LIVING at The New Yorker.”

Well, I haven’t picked it up in a while, so maybe they’ve had a bit of a falling-off, at least in terms of wit. Or maybe he was just thrilled to get into a book with Steve Martin and didn’t have the temerity or the heart to say “Let’s take another run at this” or that.

It’s a slight book, even by the standards of the short-funny-takes genre that Woody Allen, Martin and others have served up for decades.

Illustrating showbiz lore from his early years with the banjo, the making of “Planes, Trains and Automobiles,” “Roxanne” and other films, relating “How I got into movies” and how he got out — “I lost interest in the movies at exactly the same time the movies lost interest in me” — should have been the template that this enterprise stuck with. That’s what works.

I’d love to see a whole book of illustrated versions of his “SNL” appearances, how “King Tut” came to be, that “Love at First Laugh” connection with Martin Short, his shorter half for decades of stage appearances, TV sketches and the Third Act triumph that is “Only Murders in the Building.”

I know he’s covered some of that stuff in other memoirs, but an anecdote about the first time he went to the Lapin Agile in Paris, inspiring his play, “Picasso at the Lapin Agile,” a few others about early stand-up and the like would be more readable and entertaining than much of what made the cut here.

The guy did a whole Jacqueline Onassis bit when he was the Stadium Stand-up King, preserved on vinyl. Not connecting that to a party at her apartment years later when he did “Waiting for Godot” on Broadway seems an opportunity missed. Or maybe he’s forgotten that, or chose to forget it.

Pages of cartoons illustrating his purchase of an off-the-books, street “caption” because Martin couldn’t come up with anything funnier doesn’t play, nor does the “I blow dried the cat” “hot” caption he “bought.”

I was reminded of the late comic polymath and King of All Media Steve Allen, whom Martin has emulated and bested in some regards — stand-up, stand-up LPs, films, books, plays, music, TV. Any time a Seinfeld or Kevin Hart, Silverman or Samantha Bee takes on a book, a play or a talk or game show, they’re following in the footsteps of the first famous “Tonight Show” host, who tallied films, tunes, multiple series and enough books to keep Ron DeSantis’s censors busy for weeks among his “keep busy” and “use the brand” efforts.

Allen wrote a lot about comedy, and while no one would confuse him with Henri Bergson, he was a superb analyst of the medium, the form and those who practiced it. He astutely took Martin’s off-kilter lowbrow high-wit seriously very early on.

Having had the pleasure of interviewing both Allen and Martin a few times over the years, that’s a label that both men have relished, being taken “seriously.”

But if you’re going to dig at Milton Berle, in his day the most unpopular comic among his peers, widely regarded as a jerk, why would you hold back and sugar coat the one time you worked in a movie with Chevy Chase (“The Three Amigos,” which Martin conceived)? Nobody in show business WANTS to work with Chevy Chase. Sometimes, they’ve been forced to, but the stories about him go back to the ’70s, took flight in the ’80s and led to his exile by the ’90s, until TV folk forgot what an insufferable ass he is and brought him back. Briefly.

A lightweight tome like this might not be the place to address that (Surely he’s got “Chevy stories.”). But recalling that Robin Williams was either “on” or “off” during their “Godot,” a guy who couldn’t help but disrupt rehearsals with manic riffs, suggests that maybe it is.

Martin’s “real people” buying tickets to his movies — many of which were bad — isn’t quite the cop out it seems. He acknowledges how hard it is to make one that works, how many you have to make to get a few really good ones under your belt. “All of Me” with Lily Tomlin and “Roxanne” with Darryl Hannah, greenlit by the one studio exec in Hollywood who remembered who Cyrano de Bergerac was, and the pablum that was “Parenthood” have their moments and memories revived here.

With so many books, memoirs included, on his resume, Martin can be forgiven for not wanting to repeat himself, for running out of things to recall and joke about that he hasn’t passed on in another book. What he can be chewed out for is peddling and packaging this “curated,” rarely-charming piffle from a specialty publisher at premium prices.

If you’re going to write a comic book, why charge for a hard cover? It’s not like you need another Edward Hopper, even if he provides the punchline to one of the better cartoons served up here.

“Number One is Walking: My Life in the Movies and Other Diversions.” By Steve Martin, drawings by Harry Bliss. Caledon Books. $30. Maybe…70 pages of content, mostly drawings with a blank page on the back.

Neve wants to believe it when she says it. She especially wants the person she’s talking with to buy in.

“I’m a proud Black woman,” she says, not even convincing herself. “PROUD.”

But we’ve already seen her immersion in white British suburbia — Castle Combe, is it? We’ve heard Neve practice her posh pronunciations in the vanity mirror before heading out. We’ve caught her donation-shaming a neighbor into supporting her latest cause and overheard another neighbor, a friend, “compliment” her by saying she’s “practically one of us.“

She’s married well, with two teens in the local private school, where she’s taken on classes and assistant head-mistress duties, without ever locating her “references,” her boss jokes.

She frets over wigs, the pricey gloves that she wears to drive the Range Rover, considering every word and the appropriate received pronunciation way of saying it. Even her walk seems studied.

When you’re Black practically “passing” for white in your little corner of Brexitania, every day’s a little more “Stepford” than the last.

And God forbid she see a Black face in town. That’s most triggering of all. Neve is certain, on a gut level, that “The Strays” will be her undoing.

Actor-turned-writer/director Nathaniel Martello-White and his star, Ashley Madekwe of Brit-TV’s “Secret Diary of a Call Girl,” cook up a fine, paranoid thriller about race, the many shades of racism and “appearances.”

That’s what Neve struggles to maintain even as she becomes unhinged by seeing a Black man (Jordan Myrie) in town, and then as the new custodian at her school. It’s a good thing she hasn’t caught a glimpse of him with a young Black woman (Bukky Bakray). Because that, we’re sure, will really set her off.

Neve, her white husband (Justin Salinger) and kids (Samuel Paul Small, Maria Almieda) refer to themselves as “a Black family.” But it’s easy to see signs they’re playing that down. Son Sebastian may play basketball (like a British actor). But he’s keen to minimize the racist bullying he encounters at school.

When daughter Mary comes home with her blondish hair in braids, Neve visibly quakes. Fair-skinned, and all this effort to “fit in” and look white, and the kid does this.

As Neve sees Black people among them, as nobody else seems to notice them (at first), as taped black stick figures turn up on the mirror on her Range Rover, we’re allowed just enough time to wonder just how much of this is in her head, and if she’s over-reacting to a perceived “threat.”

She’s hellbent on not taking in “strays.”

Martello-White peppers his script with the death-by-a-million-cuts racial indignities a Black minority faces even after assimilating into a white society — dinner party “friends” who tactlessly quote some new dog-whistling pundit who “dares” to revive “white flight” as a cultural phenomenon.

Interviewing for a job, the would-be custodian knows to read the room and talk up Liverpool FC to the head master doing the hiring, who breaks the ice with a tone-deaf “The only color that matters — TEAM colors!”

Liberal do-gooderism is chided as a benefit for “the less fortunate” comes unraveled when those “less fortunate” show up.

The third act resolutions to the mystery, and sudden turn towards violence, are more strained and limiting than one might like. But Madekwe plays up Neve’s calculating ways, and the added math she does to identify a perceived menace to her world.

And the smart, subdued finale is the only one that we’d believe and accept — logical, and damning and thought-provoking, not unlike the thriller than precedes it.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, profanity

Cast: Ashley Madekwe, Justin Salinger, Jordan Myrie, Samuel Paul Small, Maria Almieda and Bukky Bakray.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Nathaniel Martello-White. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:40

The job of “High Commissioner” of a set of islands in French Polynesia has to be any bureaucrat’s dream posting.

Wear lots of white linen suits, make the occasional speech, sit down with local politicians and opinion leaders over fresh seafood, chauffeured in a white Mercedes limo with an island-hopping charter plane at his disposal, and drinks at Morton’s nightclub every night, where the wait staff — male, female and mahu — are scantily-clad more for tourist’s gawking than any local custom or tradition.

In “Pacification,” High Commissioner De Roller (Benoît Magimel), seems to have this routine down pat, especially the linen suit and floral shirt uniform. But in the latest “slow cinema” longeur by Catalan filmmaker Albert Serra (“The Death of Louis XVI”), he will be tested by what he sees, what he hears and what he comes to recognize about this island “paradise” and its people in relation to the rest of the world.

There are “rumors” that the conservative French government wants to flex a little muscle and re-start nuclear testing on uninhabited islets in the atoll. He must break this unofficial “news” to the people, and pacify them by assuring them that he’s on their side. De Roller knows the cancer stats that accompanied earlier decades of nuclear explosions.

There’s this hotel that was built on an ancient graveyard, and abandoned. Getting that renovated and opened would seem to be a priority in a world famous tourist destination (this was filmed on Moorea and Tahiti).

A mysterious Portuguese drunk (Alexandre Melo) has been robbed of his papers in a hotel and an island with almost no crime.

De Roller doesn’t trust his state-appointed assistant, and would prefer to recruit a patient local hotel clerk, Shannah (Pahoa Mahagafanau) for the job. He flirts with Shannah shamelessly, getting her “information” (phone, address, etc) because colonialism has its privileges. Shannah is Mahu, transgender in a culture that has been accepting of that sexuality long before it was “cool.”

And why is that submarine admiral (Marc Susini) spending so much time ashore? He’s so lecherous he could be a crewman on the H.M.S. Bounty, so tipsy that the outspoken, unfiltered De Roller refers to him as a “pimp” thanks to his efforts to bring “girls” aboard his (never seen) boat for its crew.

The natives are concerned, forced to consider their position with the renewed threat of radiation imposed by a colonial power, men forced to reckon with (in French and Polynesian) their legacies — “Grandpa, what did you do to defend this land and sea?”

The admiral? He just orders another drink and reassures no one with his “Try to be cheerful, be more lighthearted. Everything will be fine.”

Serra has a reputation for on-screen patience, and films that test ours. There’s no avoiding the fact that he wastes a lot of the viewers’ time immersing us in this world. But the fact that it’s French Polynesia makes that less of a gripe than you might think.

This late colonialism story could have been comic, and never is, could have managed more drama and intrigue as we watch the traditional collide with the new, where the elders are reliably pro-French but the young aren’t shy about threatening the high commissioner with protests where “We’ll get our pictures” and France will look awful on the international stage, “fake news” or not.

Magimel, of “The Piano Teacher,” cuts a dashing figure as our guide to this wonderland that could be disturbed by actions so tone-deaf and lunkheaded they could only be committed by the French. Or the British. Or Italians or Chinese or Americans.

De Roller swans through this story with a puzzled, even-tempered elan, a man out of his element but never disoriented, confident but taking no chances.

Serra says he shot 500 hours of footage on location, 200 hours with dialogue. That may be why he’s released a movie, honored by critics in France, that seems somewhat lost.

The film he’s delivered doesn’t have the narrative drive one typically expects from a movie loosely describable as a “thriller.” It’s not all that coherent either, a filmic piece of flotsam that one and all drift along with, touching on themes but never wrestling with them, glimpsing the sights but never really showing them to us.

Unless you’re speaking of the surf and the bare breasts. Lots of footage of those.

Accounts of the “H,M.S. Bounty’s” visit here always play up the intoxicating nature of this corner of the world, so paradisical that it inspired a mutiny. One wonders if Serra just became the latest Fletcher Christian to get lost there, and do it on his producers’ bank account.

Rating: unrated, nudity, sexual situations

Cast: Benoît Magimel, Pahoa Mahagafanau, Marc Susini, Montse Triola, Sergi López and Alexandre Melo

Credits: Scripted and directed by Albert Serra, dialogue by Baptiste Pinteaux. A Grasshopper film release.

Running time: 2:44

This is a Knoxville TV station’s account of the story that is the basis for “Cocaine Bear,” a little archival footage homework before my next screening, Ms. Banks’ stoned bear horror comedy.

Movies filmed in close-up used to be a hallmark of television, then a medium with budgetary and screen-size restraints that begged for what actors came to term “neck up performances.” In the movies, the full-frame face can create an almost overwhelming intimacy whose effect is somewhat spoiled with overexposure.

That’s the way this shot and how it was used — sparingly — traditionally broke down, anyway.

“Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my CLOSE-up!”

These days, whole movies lean into this most naked form of film blocking, and not just the ones filmed on cell phones.

“Of an Age” is a quietly-intense whirlwind Australian romance about a teen ballroom dancer thrown together with a gay grad student in their hunt for one man’s sister, who happens to be the other’s wayward, trainwreck of a dance partner.

The second feature film of Macedonian/Australian filmmaker Goran Stolevski — “You Won’t Be Alone” was his first — it’s a talky, talking heads meeting of the minds love story, a gay couple’s day-long flirtation and hook-up, and its bittersweet memory over a decade later.

Elias Anton is Kol — short for Nikola — whom we meet frantically trying to fit everything into the day of the big ballroom dance finals. Only his partner, impulsive high school classmate Ebony (Hattie Hook) has spent the night before on a bender and is barely sure of where she is when she calls him.

The last person she wants to bring into this is her older brother, Adam (Thom Green). But that’s who picks Kol up, in full dance costume, to hunt down the wayward, half-wasted Ebony via station wagon.

It’s 1999, and Kol manically despairs at everything that the map of Melbourne and that Adam himself tell him, that there’s no way they can rescue her and get them to the finals in any sort of shape to compete. So saving the trainwreck-in-distress it is.

They struggle through this awkward introduction and through the cross-town drive and we learn that Adam loves Argentinian music — tangos — and Spanish linguistics, which is what he’s pursuing for his PhD. And we see, in the tiniest of facial details, each young man’s gaydar go off at the shared taste in music and the connection to somebody else who knows who Jorge Luis Borges is in brawny, beer-soaked Australia.

We learn that Kol is a Bosnian refugee, living with his mother and uncle, that Adam is planning on going abroad to finish his degree. We get a glimpse of each one’s dreams.

When they pickup bleary-eyed Ebony, blitzed and passed out in a phone booth, we see how oblivious she seems, how spoiled she obviously is and how devoted to her Kol remains, despite the self-destructive streak this pretty girl has indulged to derail their plans.

We’re allowed just enough room to wonder if there isn’t some guilt here, that there may be enough to her history with Kol to suggest he’s one thing this pretty young thing wanted but has figured out she cannot have, which is why she was loathe to let him meet her brother.

As the day drags into a nighttime party, Kol and Adam’s connection deepens, but is already taking on a bittersweet afterglow.

The third act is about the two men returning to Australia in 2010 and finding each other again as Ebony, ten years later, has transformed into a stunning if still spoiled brat bride for her wedding.

Stolevski’s dialogue has only a moment of two of flippant and bitchy, complimenting Ebony’s theatricality as pointing her towards becoming “the next Nicole Kidman.”

“She’s trash.”

“I know she’s trash,” but no conversation with an Australian gay man is complete without lots of love for her holiness, Cate Blanchett. That lighter touch is sorely missed in the rest of the picture.

Any toxic masculinity here is limited to Kol’s Bosnian uncle and male relatives, who judge his disinterest in football as all the information they need.

Stolevski keeps his camera close and his story narrowly-focused on Adam and Kol, their chats and gently revealed status — Adam letting drop that his ex “won’t miss his cassettes,” Kol trying not to blurt out “It’s totally OK to be gay.”

The tests of any romance are basically the same, no matter what the sexuality of the lovers. Do we root for them as a couple? Do we feel the blows that each takes, in turn, as that romantic connection deepens and is tested?

Stolevski’s over-reliance on close-ups gives us detailed maps of each man’s dermatology, but tends to wash away the extra impact we’d feel about bigger moments of connection.

We’re meant to see this hook-up, coming at the end of the AIDS era and before Grindr, as something more meaningful than it feels. The age difference isn’t great, the maturity level is, which is why one takes the nature of this affair harder than the other.

If this was a heterosexual coupling, we’d shrug it all off as much ado about little, with the passage of time not really enhancing that cherished memory.

The big emotional moment is not really about them, only it is. And it’s on the dance floor the night of the wedding. Whatever its intent, its main effect is to show us what the preceding movie has lacked, a heartfelt, swooning and romantic love connection between two men “Of an Age” to truly appreciate that for the first time.

Rating: R for language throughout, sexual content and some drug use

Cast: Elias Anton, Thom Green and Hattie Hook

Credits: Scripted and directed by Goran Stolevski. A Focus Features release.

Running time: 1:40

Well, thank heaven “Linoleum” isn’t about Jim Gaffigan, as a frustrated kids’ TV science show host, building a rocket in his garage and launching himself into space. We’ve all seen “The Astronaut Farmer,” after all. And Wallace & Gromit’s “A Grand Day Out.”

Writer-director Colin West’s soulful, sci-fi spin on taking stock of one’s life may be gimmicky. Why have one Jim Gaffigan role when you can offer your star two parts for the same pay? And it may spoil some of its near-magical effect by overdoing and overexplaining in its serene, Star Child finale.

West, who did the recent no-budget horror tale “Double Walker,” takes on nothing less than life itself, its eddies and the backwash that we struggle to understand as it is happening and only really pick up on after this or that phase has passed. And he does it via a sneaky story that’s just realistic enough to trick you into feeling it’s straightforward, when no, that’s not the idea at all.

Gaffigan plays a frustrated 50ish astronomer, once a young scientist of great promise, now condemned to doing a local kids’ TV show, “Above & Beyond,” in suburban Dayton in the Chevy Chevette/Buick Roadmaster era very early 90s.

Even the cars aren’t a reliable indicator of our time setting. The TV show is cathode-ray-tube/DIY effects cheesy, and cute with an early ’70s vibe.

When we meet Cameron (Gaffigan), his smarmy station program director has just taken that show away from him, demoting him to “consultant” on his own quirky creation. A new fellow with more accomplished science and space program achievements has been summoned. And damned if he doesn’t look just like Cameron (Gaffigan again).

Cameron doesn’t quite let this roll off his back. But considering that he narrowly avoided being crushed when this new guy’s T-top Corvette plummeted out of the sky and crashed, he’s willing to mull over a coincidence when it crashes right in front of him.

His wife (Rhea Seehorn) doesn’t believe him, his daughter (Katelyn Nacon) is a tad more credulous. And his younger son sits this one out.

Perhaps the kid realizes the futility of arguing, that this marriage is ending. Mother Erin is taking a job far away, a giant step up from her local “Air & Space Museum” gig. She’s driving out of this dead-end.

Another coincidence arrives in the form of space junk that plummets into their backyard, forcing them to move in with Erin’s sister. But Cameron, at a loss, takes the new neighbor kid’s (Gabriel Rush) suggestion that he could “build your own spacecraft” out of what crashed, and starts to tinker, hammer and work the problem towards doing one “fantastic” thing with his life.

For once, he won’t let “It’s not that simple” stop him. Nor will visions of a strange old lady he keeps seeing.

The fact that his “I like girls” daughter has taken a shine to the new boy and the new kid happens to be the son of the Corvette-driving jerk who is taking over Cameron’s show? More coincidences, and pretty much par for the course with the way Cameron sees life happening to him, without a whole lot of input on his part.

Gaffigan’s been doing movies since the ’90s, and while he plays a fairly diverse selection of characters — robber baron George Westinghouse in “Tesla,” a darker, drug-trafficking Cameron in “American Dreamer” — his sweet spot might be roles that play into his walking, talking “Dad joke” stand-up persona.

Here he’s put upon and easy to empathize with, even as we don’t have a lot of trouble figuring out why Cameron’s wife is leaving.

The film’s sparkling scenes come from the teens, one shunned in school because of her out-of-the-closet preference for girls, the other beaten down by the expectations of his over-achiever father. There’s a whole other movie in their friendship and unlikely connection.

But there’s also a movie in Cameron and Erin’s failing marriage, and one in his relationship with his scientist-dad, who is now in a home suffering from dementia, treated by an in-house physician (Tony Shalhoub) who would prefer to stay in his lane, but maybe wonders himself about these coincidences Cameron keeps bringing up.

“Linoleum” is hard to pin down, as far as genres in which to classify it. I kept thinking of M. Night Shyamalan’s “Signs,” and the hopeful loser-looking-for-his-moment comedy inspired by that, “Jeff, Who Lives at Home.”

I don’t think all of it works. And making a graceful exit counts for something and is the one place where I think West overreaches.

But maybe his on-screen alter ego has it right, even though he knows that this is just a cop out, just an excuse for not really wrestling with that which must be wrestled into some sort of coherent shape.

“It’s not that simple.”

Rating: unrated, a moment of violence, profanity

Cast: Jim Gaffigan, Rhea Seehorn, Katelyn Nacon, Gabriel Rush and Tony Shalhoub

Credits: Scripted and directed by Colin West. A Shout! Factory release.

Running time: 1:42

The Oscar-nominated “The Fabelmans” showed that there’s still an audience for Judd Hirsch leaning into the Old Jewish Man shtick, which makes the indie comedy “iMordecai” marketable.

So here we are and here he is, a very old man in a “Virginia is for Lovers” hat, paired up with his “Taxi” co-star Carol Kane, shaming his son (Sean Astin) for showing up in a Porsche, “a Nazi sh– car,” jackhammering his condo’s bathroom floor because, “Vot, you vant I should use a toothpick?”

Mordecai Samel goes around telling everyone he’s 80, when we’ve already heard him narrate the animated first act of his life story, born in rural Poland in 1933 ( 90 years ago).

Vot, ve can’t do math?

He survived the Russians occupying his village, escaped the Holocaust, married Fela (Kane) and retired to Florida, a former plumber and painter with his “nudnik” new-father son (Astin) nearby, a “schlemiel” who doesn’t know a pipe wrench from channel locks.

But when the kid insists Dad get a new iPhone, all the kvetching in the world can’t save Mordecai from his fate, to become intimate with Siri and “that brainwashing device by Stalin,” as Fela puts it, in his pocket.

It’s not every iPhone-using senior who gets one-on-one lessons on how to used the phone “with no buttons.” But saleslady Nina (Azia Dinea Hale) takes an interest. And as we gather from her volunteering at the local Jewish Community Center, she’s got a keen interest in Holocaust survivors.

Director and co-writer Marvin Samel begins this story with Mordecai relating (animated) family lore that he was born under a Polish apple tree, and bonked on the head at birth. I’d say Samel leaves no low-hanging-fruit unpicked in this undemanding, comfort food comedy, but the truth is, he does.

The picture tends to peter out as we drift away from Mordecai, relating his life story to Nina in animated flashbacks (Remember, he’s a painter, and not just a housepainter.). His son is a Florida cigar maker, hoping to make that big score and sell his company. But his aged Dad has always been his “jinx.”

We get a glimpse of son Marvin’s (there’s a bit of autobiography here) home life — wife (Stephanie J. Block), newborn twins with Dad plainly pushing 50. But there’s not much that’s funny in that story thread, and the comic legend Kane is kind of wasted in a role that shifts into dementia.

“Her mind isn’t working like it used to.”

“So whose is?”

Hirsch’s storied TV career had him mostly playing the straight man, a reactor to assorted madcap friends and colleagues cast opposite him on shows like “Taxi” and “Dear John.” Here, he carries all the comic weight, advising a young cell phone seller on how to earn laughs from the stand-up stage, attempting plumbing fixes, “jinxing” things for his kid and making his dotty wife jealous at all the women trying to “steal you away.”

It’s a fun performance in a poor-to-middling dramedy. If you haven’t seen “The Fabelmans,” you really haven’t seen him pulling out all the stops, which is something to behold.

Rating: unrated, profanity

Cast: Jodd Hirsch, Carol Kane, Azia Dinea Hale, Nick Puga, Stephanie J. Block and Sean Astin.

Credits: Directed by Marvin Samel, scripted by Rudy Gaines, Marvin Samel and Dahlia Heyman. A Femor release.

Running time: 1:42