Movie Nation

Linda Lavin makes her last curtain call as graceful as the material will allow in “One Big Happy Family,” her final film before dying last December.

It’s a generally mirthless comedy that strains for laughs as it struggles to graft a “Maybe I’m not Jewish” DNA test narrative onto a child’s impending bat mitzvah.

Lisa Brenner wrote and stars in “Family” as an actress and mom who’s made being Jewish a central tenet of her life, only to discover that decades of “You don’t LOOK Jewish” remarks are now backed up by science.

Her story is told in a kvetching, klutzy script that botches basic math, struggles to make the whole DNA storyline funny, fumbles the bat mitzvah and saddles the 87 year-old Lavin with a veritable dictionary of Yiddishisms to utter.

“Oy” and “gevalt” indeed.

In a voice-over prologue, Rachel remembers freezing up during her own bat mitzvah, only to have her tactless, tone deaf stereotype of a mother (Lavin) take over her speech and scar her for life. The story then shifts to the present day, “twenty seven years later,” as Rachel struggles with organizing the celebration and with the idea of making a speech at her own daughter’s (Lumi Pollack) bat mitzvah.

She’s supposed to be an actress?

The DNA test thing is pushed on her by her TV chat show hostess bestie (Sabrina Cofield), and that’s when she learns she has a half-brother (Josh Fadem), or at least one half-brother for starters.

That infuriates her Calif-flaky, non-binary, juice-bar server/lesbian folk rocker sister (Kat Cunning, funny). But her Long Island mom isn’t admitting anything. At first.

“Did your sister give you one of her brownies?”

Mom then confesses to difficulties getting pregnant back in “the late ’70s,” until turning to artificial insemination.

That’s where the movie’s math, contorted to put a vibrant, doesn’t-look-it 87 year old in the mother/grandmother role. If Rachel is 40, she was born in ’85. Lavin’s Lenore is overusing Yiddish and talking about “remembering when the Dodgers were in Brooklyn,” when they moved to LA in ’57.

Possible? OK. But “plausible” demands more explanation.

The whole mass insemination story that produces constant DNA test site phone updates (amusing) revealing more and more siblings points to more interesting possibilities than it delivers.

Rachel curses in front of her kids and they curse back. Rachel’s sympathetic Filipino doctor-husband (Dante Brasco) keeps suggesting LA scent and herbal remedies to her stress.

Casting Fadem as her non-Jewish half-brother Bobby just muddies the movie’s ethnocentrism. Bobby’s the most “Jewish looking” character in it.

But sitcom-veteran Lavin navigates the abrasive tactlessness of the archetype she’s playing with ease, even if the Yiddishisms feel forced and dated a generation older than the character she’s supposed to be playing.

Rating: unrated, profanity

Cast: Lisa Brenner, Dante Basco, Lumi Pollack, Josh Fadem, Kat Cunning and Linda Lavin

Credits: Directed by Matt Sohn, scripted by Lisa Brenner. An Electric Films release.

Running time: 1:22

Movies have been tied to dreams from the very beginnings of cinema. The storytelling medium lends itself to the interior world of dreaming. And films from “Spellbound” onward have made serious attempts to recreate and interpret the experience of what our subconscious does in the journeys we take when we dream.

“Daniela Forever” is a movie about grief, undying love and lucid dreaming as a way of clinging to someone you’ve lost. The latest sci-fi from Oscar nominated writer-director Nacho Vigalondo (“Timecrimes,” “Colossal”) is a fascinating dip into lucid dreaming hampered by a DOA love story and the limitations of handsome but often emotionally unavailable leading man Henry Golding.

He plays a star DJ lured to Madrid by gigs set up by his poseur/manager (Rubén Ochandiano) but whose life is upended when he falls for an Italian artist, Daniela (Beatrice Grannò) who then dies in a car accident.

The film’s central flaw is glaring and obvious right from the start. We have no time to invest in the romance, and even as the narrative gropes and meanders its way to a conclusion that maybe “explains” that, we have nothing to cling to but DJ Nicolas and his undying devotion to Daniela.

Golding can’t make the sale, and looking at his other romances, it’s a wonder that he keeps trying his hand at them. As the prospective groom in “Crazy Rich Asians,” he had better chemistry with his best man. Here, we just don’t buy how bereft and lovesick his character is supposed to be.

His friend Victoria (Nathalie Poza) suggests he sign on for a drug trial that she’s been involved with. It’s being tested to see if this pill can enable directed lucid dreaming. Subjects are put on the medication, given instructions that amount to a “script,” what they should be trying to dream about, and then are intereviewed to see if this medication helps someone control their dreams.

Nicolas cheats. He only wants to dream Daniela back to life.

Nicolas enters these dreams in his apartment with Daniela, and ventures with her to where they met, places they went. He focuses on details, notices dead ends — limits to this dreamscape created by his lack of knowledge of this street, this shop (the suits on display have no backs, for instance).

“Everything I don’t know doesn’t exist.”

He tries to master this world and cling to Daniela, who is limited by how he remembers her and what he didn’t know about her. Her friend Teresa (Aura Garrido), whom he met at her funeral, might offer clues. But he’s so wrapped up in dreams that he lets everything in his waking life go.

“I think I get it now,” he tells Daniela, over and over again as he masters this somnambulent rule or that one. But does he?

Golding’s performance is flat, all surface affectations, none of them hinting at the obsession he allegedly has for this woman. Her elusive art — faceless characters, figures with their heads out of the frame, all composed on a computer — gets at the film’s superficiality.

The limits of her character, created from his memory, hamper Grannò, who does nothing to suggest the cause for obsession. She is a boring pixie dream girl.

The film’s one light touch is the one truncated love scene, picked up just as the menage a trois has ended, It’s the most comical and one of its most revealing moments.

But Golding has to carry this, and he just doesn’t. As fascinating as Vigalondo’s fantasy dreamscape with its rules — Nicolas can focus and alter where a door takes them, who they run into and the like — can be, “Daniela Forever” never escapes being a clock-watching romantic melodrama with intriguing sci-fi touches.

The science fiction is solid. The melodrama has you wondering how much longer we have to spend with this unbelievable “couple.”

Rating: R, profanity, one sexual situation

Cast: Henry Golding, Beatrice Grannò, Aura Garrido, Nathalie Poza and Rubén Ochandiano

Credits: Scripted and directed by Nacho Vigalondo. A Well Go USA release.

Running time: 1:52

There’s no cinema within a five day hike from here. So I’ll just be posting streaming or film fest titles for reviews for the next week or so, as we vacation in the gorgeous rainforest of Belize.

Monkeys and Maya ruins and Mai Tais it is!

A chiseled cowboy between jobs and a newly widowed farm wife he takes a message to means a ranch in need of tending and a woman in need of a man around the house in “Where the Wind Blows,” a handsomely mounted Western shot on Montana’s Yellowstone Film Ranch.

It’s a good thing the visuals in this John Schimke horse opera are striking. There’s not much else to recommend a sloppily-plotted meander through Western tropes and cliches which pedestrian direction, shooting and editing do nothing to rescue.

Trevor Donovan, best known for the “90210” reboot of a dozen years back, is our blond hunk on horseback, named Chase (of course) and charged with taking care of a fellow ranch hand’s “heirloom” and cash roll. Because when ol’Nathan (C. Thomas Howell) sits down to gamble at the local saloon/brothel, he’d hate to get rolled.

Gunshots awaken chaste Chase — he’s fended off the advances of the prostitutes — and he finds Nate dead, caught cheating at cards. There’s nothing for it but to take that news to far-off Jessie (Ashley Elaine).

He’s not much on comforting someone who learns her husband is dead, although he’s considerate enough to lie about Nathan’s cause of death.

“These things have a way of working themselves out” isn’t what you say to a woman left to fend for herself on the wild frontier.

And that roll of cash and “heirloom?” That becomes one of the more clumsily-handled plot devices I’ve ever seen in a Western. Did Chase “forget” to give it to her? Is he keeping it for his own use? Motives and “secrets” don’t take us toward any satisfying answers.

All we know is that Jessie has a girl from the orphange she herself came from on her way with a guardian (Don Swayze) to see if she’s fit to raise the child. Will Chase pretend to be Nathan, just long enough to ensure the adoption?

Events contrive to make the possibly thieving cowboy do just that, and accept a teen orphan boy (Cole Keriazakos) in the bargain, with the promise that he’ll skeedaddle as soon as the guardian leaves. Jessie is supposed to manage this place with two kids, no livestock and the kindness of her intrepid storekeeper pal (Michelle Hurd).

And then there’s the creepy, sunglasses-wearing drifter (Rob Mayes) with a rapist vibe who has taken to stalking her with a vengeance.

Will Chase stick around? Is he up for a showdown with rapey Lonnie? And how many chores can he do with his shirt off as he does?

Based on what I am guessing is a romance novel by Caroline Fyffe, “Where the Wind Blows” has the tone and light messaging of a faith-based romance. Characters are sketched in as archetypes, most every turn of events leans on coincidence and cliche and the picture never lets us forget that director Schimke is out of his element, if he has one.

The cast is game but rather drab — even the villains.

And we never doubt for a second that as messy and violent as this tale turns, “these things have a way of working themselves out,” and not in any way a more cleverly plotted script would have delivered.

Rating: PG-13, bloody violence, attempted sexual assault, prostitution

Cast: Trevor Donovan, Ashley Elaine, Michelle Hurd, Rob Mayes, Cole Keriazakos, Lochlyn Munro, Don Swayze and C. Thomas Howell.

Credits: Directed by John Schimke, scripted Mike Maden and John Schimke, based on a novel by Caroline Fyffe. A Level 33 release.

Running time: 1:31

“Running on Empty” is a dark comedy that tests the comic limits of the infamous “Gen Z stare.”

A deadpan rom-com about death, it has reliable comics in supporting roles and co-stars Lucy Hale. And it is stillborn thanks, in part, to the expressionless turn by Keir Gilchrist, our leading man, who plays a young mortician (“post-mortem artist”) who would like to find one last love before his impending death.

Gilchrist, also star of “It’s Kind of a Funny Story” (It wasn’t.) is Mortimer Mortensen, a 30ish bore trapped in the black suit he wears everywhere and every day, even when he’s not prepping corpses in “How they lived their life” poses — skiing, parasailing — for death photos.

“Adventure funerals” is how he and his uncle (Jim Gaffigan) pitch this concept to their Sherman Oaks and Greater LA patrons. And it’s a hit. What movielover or critic wouldn’t want to be captured, post mortem, in a mock up of a cinema, wearing 3D glasses as the way they’d like to be remembered?

Mortimer is engaged to Nicole (Francesca Eastwood, you-know-who’s kid) and house shopping. He’s the practical-minded one. But when she can’t talk him into a house just beyond their means, they’re persuaded to get their “LDCs” to ensure they’ll have decades and decades together to justify this expense.

Your “Life Day Count” is a service provided by a medical science startup that will tell you, with “97.9%” certainty, the day of your death.

No, they can’t anticipate accidents, murder or suicide.

So “How exactly do you figure that out?”

“We just do.”

Nicole has a death date over half a century into the future. Mortimer? He’ll be dead within the year.

Writer-director Daniel André takes a sort of “We just do” to this fanciful conceit, and that spills over into the rest of the movie. Neither we nor Mortimer are told of how he’ll die. No medical condition is mentioned, no treatment suggested. And as André has already scripted himself into a corner — no “accident, murder of suicide” is predictable — he just skips by that.

“Skips” is entirely too merry a word for anything that happens in this stiff of a comedy.

Awkward meals with Mortimer’s family (Monica Potter, Dustin Milligan and Clara McGregor) have no pulse.

There’s not much amusing about the dating service that’s set up to take advantage of this new “We know exactly when we’re going to die” world. Til Death Do Us Part’s interviewer/videographer Kate (Lucy Hale) allows herself to connect with the colorless Mortimer. But not before we endure a generally joyless bad-dates montage of women who either share Mortimer’s predicted-death situation, or who just aren’t interested in “commitment” or anything um, long term.

The film’s big “obstacle” to Mortimer’s dating-until-death plans is a misunderstanding with a sex worker that leads to endless, escalating threats from a pimp (Rhys Coiro). That story thread — which begins with the hooker reaching her “death date” — has promise that the script never realizes.

Comic Jay Pharoah, playing the hearse driver for Uncle Barry (Gaffigan) patters away for laughs that never come. Gaffigan is pretty good at deadpan, but there’s not much funny to work with here.

Mortimer’s profundities about reasons not to fear death aren’t even worth quoting, much less packaging in a fortune cookie.

And through all this humorless flailing in front of and behind the camera — you’ll notice shots literally repeated (the same sailboats pass by Mortimer and Kate as they chat on a Marina del Rey pier) — Gilchrist never delivers more than a shrug or that generational stare.

It’s not wholly his fault that “Running on Empty” is comically empty. But he does nothing to compensate for the inadequacies of script or direction, not that anyone else in the cast could.

Rating: R, slapstick violence, “sexual content,” profanity

Cast: Keir Gilchrist, Lucy Hale, Jim Gaffigan, Rhys Coiro, Jay Pharoah and Francesca Eastwood was

Credits: Scripted and directed by
Daniel André. A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1:31