Movie Nation

The world of “The Hunger Games” comes rushing back to you — well, sauntering back to you — not that long into “The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes.”

It’s been eight years since the “original trilogy” wrapped up with its fourth film, so we need that tre-immersion in all things Panem, the song of the Mockingjay and what not.

Let’s have a prequel that sets up the earlier film adaptations of Suzanne Collins’ violent, sexless Young Adult Fiction sci-fi allegories. Jennifer Lawrence is long gone, riding on to Oscar-winning glory. Josh Hutcherson’s just renewed his blockbuster license with “Five Nights at Freddy’s.”

But “Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes” has beautiful new leads, big and broad replacements for the villains and the master of ceremonies, and all those Hogwarts-nonsensical names, fanciful critters, pages of endless clumsy exposition and movies that never ever ever come close to a graceful end.

Still beloved by the fans? We’ll see.

No tolerable climax is complete without a clock-watching anti-climax that so stretches things out that you start to discount the fabulous production design, the pointed parable about America’s rural vs. urban schism and how much fun Jason Schwartzman, in the Elizabeth Banks role, is having with all this.

At least the singing takes a giant leap forward. Casting “West Side Story’s” Rachel Zegler as heroine Lucy Gray Baird, a sort of Appalachian blues chanteuse with fire in her eyes and resistance in her heart, pays dividends as her performance and her character remind us of the role “protest songs” have played in our culture and its many labor, civil rights and anti-war movements before, during and after the American Century.

But this prequel franchise isn’t really about Lucy. It’s about the young idealist city boy who’d grow up to be Donald Sutherland as his most sinister. Young Brit Tom Blyth makes the maturing Coriolanus Snow hard to snuggle up to from the start, even as we’re supposed to see him journey from empathetic child of war and genteel poverty into a version of Shakespeare’s Roman Coriolanus, a man of achievement whose cruel, classist prejudices do him no favors in his quest for power.

A post-apocalyptic war prologue briefly establishes the struggle the very young Coriolanus, son of a military insider, and his older cousin Tigris went through to survive. Years later, he’s in The Academy, she (Hunter Schafer) and their Grandma’am (grande dame Fionnula Flanagan) live in urban poverty, hoping against hope that he’ll win the big cash prize for the best student there.

But the parameters of the prize have been changed to try and juice the sagging ratings of The State’s ten-year TV “Hunger Games” experiment. If Coriolanus wants that cash, that prize and his family to transition back to inside-the-halls-of-power status, he’ll have to mentor a Hunger Games contestant to victory.

As the “tribute” players seized from the assorted “districts” are assigned randomly, and he’s in an Academy class packed with strivers just as cunning as him, with a few compassionate exceptions, that’s going to be a long shot.

Giving him the dainty singing spitfire Lucy Gray to mentor into surviving the dog-eat-dog bloodsport of The Arena makes that seem impossible. There are cutthroats, born murderers and guys big enough to get drafted into the NFL, if that “Hunger Game” was still around. How’s this over-dressed (an embroidered corset over a layered chiffon skirt), perfectly made-up singer/songwriter stand a chance?

Coriolanus will have to manipulate the game — overseen by its creator, Dean Casca Highbottom (Peter Dinklage, looking thrilled to be here) — and the TV audience, making them fall for this rebel Vanessa Hudgens from the Districts, to stand a chance.

Collins and the screenwriters adapting her stick to formula with this book and this film. As in the original “Games,” there’s one main villain and one distinct heavy for this installment. The MC, “Lucky Flickerman,” a “weather man, reporter and host of these Hunger Games,” played by Jason Schwartzman, is the hilarious comic relief.

He always introduces himself as “a man who needs no introduction.” Ahem.

The annual “Games” in these films are always bloody, pitilessly violent and often render the MPAA’s PG-13 rating laughable. This version is even bloodier

Viola Davis is positively venmous as Dr. Volumnia Gaul, the defense dept. chief and inventor of biological terror weapons (snakes, etc) to keep the provincial “districts” in line.

“What are the Hunger Games for,” Dr. Gaul growls at promising young Coriolanus? That’s as close to “What’s this all about” as the franchise gets.

Blyth’s playing of Coriolanus seemingly sees into the future. The way this “works” is that we watch his “saveable” character’s corruption by life, love and the world he’s growing up in. That’s how story arcs work. But even in his softer moments, Blyth’s playing of this guy seems mercenary.

Whatever sparks we’re supposed to pick up on between the leads must have been saved for the sequels. But the reason “Hunger” author Collins isn’t facing book-banning is the loveless/sexless nature of her books, her penchant for violence and her apparent sympathy for rural grievance against “city” sophistication.

Everybody here is hired to wear the costumes, put on the makeup, look menacing and service “the games.” But for most of the players, their chief task is conveying mountains of exposition — explaining this world, its rules, history, hierarchy, etc. That was terribly tedious all the way through the original films, and it can be maddening here.

Whatever the virtues of the books, a stupid amount of time wasted on the arcana of the ever-evolving “rules” and shape of the games, too much of it delivered by poor Peter D.’s character. Dean Highbottom (cough cough) keeps telling Coriolanus that his father “was my best friend,” even as he does all he can to subvert Coriolanus, his efforts to save his fetching “tribute” mentee, “win” the Plinth Prize and ascend in status and power.

For all the explaining this movie does, why the son of his “best friend” does that never made it to the screen.

The violence is often shocking, and usually meted out to characters we’ve only just met and barely had a time to hear their silly multi-syllabic names more than once.

Lysistrata Vickers, Vipsania Sickle and Hilarius Heavensbee, we hardly knew ye.

Director Francis Lawrence, who ushered the Jennifer Lawrence “Games” off the stage, keeps the trains running and the depictions of the fascist designed city and sometimes impoverished, often Edenic countryside measured out.

But keeping track of all the characters, making us empathize for anybody who dies and root against anyone who deserves it becomes a challenge as the movie seems both dawdling and rushed, and never develops — for more than a scene or two — narrative momentum.

Some of that’s attributable to the fact that we keep pausing for a plaintive and moving bit of protest singer-songwriting from Zegler’s Lucy Gray.

Yes, those are the emotional and politically pointed highlights of “The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes.” But they stop an already lumbering, over “explaining” narrative in its tracks every time she tunes up.

Rating: PG-13 (Strong Violent Content|Disturbing Material)

Cast: Tom Blythe, Rachel Zegler, Jason Schwartzman, Josh Andrés Rivera, Hunter Schafer, Peter Dinklage and Viola Davis.

Credits: Directed by Francis Lawrence, scripted by  Michael Arndt and Michael Lesslie, based on the novel by Suzanne Collins. A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 2:37

Orlandoans– some of us anyway — avoid “The Parks” for their traffic, the crowds, the long trips from parking deck to “park,” the prices and, as a local DJ’s hit single described, “God—-d Tourists.”

But it’s rainy and gloomy. There’s a break in the crowds if not the hellish traffic, and Disney Springs and an AMC theater here are as good a place as any for a preview for a new Eli Roth horror pic –“There will BE no leftovers” — and a Katniss free “Hunger Games” prequel.

Don’t wait up!

Yes, this coming Turkey Day we’ll have a spree killing to be thankful for, one that stars Patrick Dempsey.

“Thanksgiving” is next week, literally and cinematically. And that’s the trailer I’ve included below.

“Hunger Games?” This prequel is starting in a hole because of that clunky title. Where’s the wit?

“Hunger Games: First Pangs.” “Hunger Games: Still Have an Appetite?” Etc.

Fingers crossed for both, but we’ll see what we see when we see them.

Our first glimpse of the “Maestro” almost takes one’s breath away. It’s an older Leonard Bernstein — tanned, weathered, familiar mop of unkempt white hair, omnipresent cigarette smoldering within reach, playing a somewhat atonal modern piece at the piano, his hairy (white, also) arms soulfully caressing the keys, his eyes welling up in tears.

That’s not “Lenny” at the keyboard. It’s director, star and co-writer Bradley Cooper, whose makeup-rendered resemblence is so close it’s uncanny and whose interpretation transcends mimicry and achieves something deeper, right in those opening moments.

It’s the performance of the year, in one of 2023’s finest films.

“Maestro” is a conventional musical bio-pic that eschews many of the conventions of the genre to give us impressionistic sketches of the artist at work, and living the “free” of restraints artistic life.

There are no red letter dates emblazened on the screen to tell us when Bernstein gets the last minute call to fill in for the great Bruno Walter at the rostrum, conducting the New York Philharmonic for the first time at 25. Such dates aren’t listed in a chronological parade of touchstone moments of his life.

We don’t see him march towards prominence as a public figure, sample his celebrated “Young People’s Concerts” bringing classical music to the masses and their kids, or watch him slave over his revolutionary score to “West Side Story” with his famous collaborators.

What Cooper goes for here is a tone poem of a creative man’s life, not a documentation of acts of creation.

“Maestro” focuses on the bisexual Bernstein’s love affair and marriage to actress Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan), making us believe in this deep romance of the heart, this “arrangement” constantly challenged by the man’s mercurial enthusiasms and his passionate love for people — especially handsome young gay men — and his efforts to literally never be alone. He even kept the toilet door open when hanging with friends.

But this isn’t a sexual biography of the “Bohemian Rhapsody” or “Rocket Man” persuasion. These are all just elements of the liberated, “unrestrained” creative and personal life without limits that Bernstein embodied.

Whatever his flaws, ego and transgressions, when “Lenny” gushes “I love PEOPLE so much,” we believe him. It’s in the movie. And it flickers up in the memory of those who recall the way he carried himself — a great communicator who took a lot of the pretentiousness out of classical music — his reputation for kindness and generosity, the love he was probably a little too willing to spread around.

“Maestro” won’t be wholly accessible to those too young and disconnected from his era to remember Bernstein and his world, and Cooper goes to some pains to let that be the case. You have to know who “Jerry” is, the great choreographer Jerome Robbins (Michael Urie) who would make his reputation with the 1940s ballet about three sailors on the town, “Fancy Free,” which Lenny scored. Maybe knowing who the “Bruno” was who called in sick at the New York Philharmonic helps, and recognizing the vamping Broadway singers (Mallory Portnoy, Nick Blaemire) as the Great White Way icons Betty Comden and Adolph Greene, entertaining everybody at a party thrown by Bernstein’s socially-connected — thanks to him — sister (Sarah Silverman) enriches the film’s experience.

Aaron Copland, Richard “Dick” Hart of “Rodgers & Hart,” Serge Koussevitsky, another Bruno, a Claudio, all flit in and out of the narrative of Bernstein’s workaholic life, his way of coping with loneliness and depression.

Yes, he was tagged as possibly “the first great American (born) conductor,” and close advisors suggested that “they’d never give (the Philharmonic over) to someone named ‘Bernstein,'” and that maybe Lenny — he’d changed his first name from Louis to the more grand and theatrical “Leonard” at 18 — should bill himself as “Leonard Burns.”

He didn’t change his name, and he made that name legendary, world famous and beloved by generations.

Matt Bomer plays David Oppenheim, a great love who forgave Lenny throwing him over for Felicia by marrying a woman himself and staying friends with Bernstein, giving the gregarious Leonard the opening of an adorable “people I LOVE” and “I slept with both of you” crack when he bumps into them on the eastern edge of Central Park. Bomer gives this small role heart with just a barely-concealed “I’m crushed” look.

Cooper illustrates Bernstein’s playfullness and infectious affection for life and other people in the film’s flashiest scenes such as waking up, with a lover, to that made-his-career phone call, exulting at the news, dashing out of his simple flat and into Carnegie Hall in his underwear. Because he was among the legends who rented an upstairs apartment there in his early days.

Lenny courts Felicia by taking her into the theater, onto the stage as “Fancy Free” is deliriously danced in around them and even bringing them into the ballet, a “rehearsal” that plays like a romantic fantasy.

Cooper dazzles in a performance that gets the superficial things perfect and lets us catch the deeply lived interior life in off-the-cuff moments, and in his marvelously self-analytical remarks in a live TV interview with Edward R. Murrow on “Person to Person,” that “personality difference which occurs between any ‘performer’ versus any ‘creator,'” his grasp of the disconnect between the “glamorous” “public” “extrovert life” of a performer “whereas a creative person sits alone in this grey studio, which you see here, and just writes, all by himself, and communicates with the world in a very private way.”

Mulligan’s acting baggage serves her wonderfully here, playing another intelligent, accomplished woman who knows “exactly who” her would-be-husband and then husband is. She and the screenplay give Felicia a patience and indulgence that turns brittle but never bitter as the older Bernstein gets cockier and less “discrete.”

Mulligan lets us see what she saw in him, bowled over his enthusiasms, which instantly include an enthusiasm for her. And Cooper lets us grasp Bernstein’s recognition of a smart outsider and “kindred spirit,” and everything beyond that — legitimacy in high society, family and children — she represented.

The film very much limits itself to these two, their love story, personal and professional partnership. As it sweeps through the decades, 1940s through the late 1980s, it underscores that “different age,” when homosexuality was kept in the closet and when celebrity had, as a general rule, much higher standards than it does today.

People of great achievement walked among us, inspired us and when featured on the much-more-limited TV viewing palette, became grand aspirational figures, legitimate role models, someone whose life was worth envying, mimicking and sampling, if only at arm’s length and only on their world’s periphery.

Cooper brings all that back in a movie that dares to leave out the Big Biographical Bullet Points and just let us see a stunning performance that revives what it was like to see the animated Bernstein conduct, the passionate Bernstein weep at the music of Mahler, at hearing a great orchestra or chorus bring his musical vision to life.

And even as he covers the familiar ground of a career’s rise and a marriage’s tests, Cooper brilliantly gets across his central thesis, that a creative life is by definition, an indulgent one and one that can only be lived without restraint, self-destructive or unacceptable by current-social-mores as it may be.

Rating: R, profanity, drug use, constant smoking.

Cast: Bradley Cooper, Carey Mulligan, Matt Bomer and Sarah Silverman.

Credits: Directed by Bradley Cooper, scripted by Bradley Cooper and Josh Singer. An Amblin production, a Netflix release.

Running time:2:09

I’ve had a soft spot for Mexican cinema star, director and producer Eugenio Derbez ever since his North American breakthrough, playing a “Dad” out of his depth with a tiny kid in “Intructions Not Included.”

His Hollywood-produced projects have been mostly mediocre in concept (lame remakes of “Overboard” and “The Valet”) or execution.

But his sentimental connection with kids paid off in the excellent awards contender “CODA,” and it’s back on display in “Radical,” a well-intentioned, touching, sometimes funny and somewhat incomplete “true story” of a teacher who dared to care about getting his students to think their way out of their working poor (mostly) lives in troubled, gang-infested and corrupt Matamoros, Mexico.

How bad are things within the inept, corrupt and generally immovable Mexican educational system and those who would oversee it and expose it? “Radical” is based on a North American journalist’s reporting and “Wired” magazine article that revealed this teacher’s part in a revolutionary rethinking of the way we teach children.

Many of the kids in the rundown José Urbina López Primary School in Matamoros, a city on the coastal edge of the long US/Mexican border, struggle to get to school every day in clean clothes, homework done and ready to learn.

Some are better off than others, but the poorest have parents who work split shifts, relying on their children to organize their lives and raise themselves. Another lives on the edge of a dump, her metal-recycler dad barely able to feed and house them as they pick over that dump for junk or broken and discarded treasures.

Tween boys are hitting the age when the local drug gangs are recruiting them to be boy soldiers in their war with rivals and cops in a town where armed police checkpoints and explosions of violence are a daily fact of life.

Those kids don’t know what hit them when they walk into the sixth grade classroom of new teacher, Sergio Juárez Correa (Derbez). He’s upended all the desks and left them in piles. He’s wild-eyed with panic.

“We’re SHIPWRECKED,” he bellows (in Spanish with English subtitles). Come on, kids. Help save us. WORK the problem. How many can fit in a lifeboat? WHY will that lifeboat sink if we overload it?

Thus begins this class of twelve-year-olds’ “real” education, driven by a sad-eyed but determined middle school teacher who’s watched Youtube videos of an educator who reminds us that it’s not just about teaching, it’s about getting out of the way of kids’ ability and eagerness to learn. Sergio’s taken a demotion to a primary school just to try this theory out.

Naturally, this runs Señor Juárez afoul of The Director of the School (Daniel Haddad). There are colleagues more than willing to tell him NOT to rock this imaginary lifeboat that drives the lessons in those first days. Mexican schools, like North American ones, lean on testing to “prove” they’re succeeding.

Aren’t you prepping your kids with the fact-memorizing needed to raise their (teacher bonuses dependent) ENLACE test scores?

“Radical” dares to show us teachers just collecting a check and enforcing “discipline,” a school librarian who stopped caring or even making an effort years ago and a nakedly corrupt administration that won’t replace the long-ago stolen workstations of the computer lab.

This maestro wants his kids to learn to think, to be able to figure out what questions to ask, how to ask them and know where to go and find answers. No computers and a dead weight librarian at school and little support from their parents are just some of the obstacles these students and their teacher will be fighting over the 2011-2012 school year.

There’s no getting around the fact that writer-director Christopher Zalla (“Blood of My Blood”) has made a very conventional Teacher Who Made a Difference drama. “Radical” is a little bit “Dangerous Minds,” a touch of “Freedom Writers” and a large portion of “Stand and Deliver” in the story it tells, the “types” of educators and students shown here and the obstacles they must overcome.

Jennifer Trejo plays the quiet, brilliant child of the garbage picker with dreams of becoming an astronaut or rocket scientist. Daniolo Guardiola is Nico, the tween who crushes on smart Paloma and makes an effort to go to school just to be near her. But he’s starting to have gang responsibilities which his older brother (Victor Estrada) can only help him with, not save him from. And Mía Fernanda Solís plays the short, quizzical kid who frets over matters ethical and — broadly put — metaphysical. She could be a “philosopher” some day, Señor Juárez encourages her to believe.

One great attribute of the film is how the story doesn’t hide much of the ugliness or the helpness despair of minds being wasted and kids who realize they can’t reach for their dreams.

Sergio can ask, “Isn’t everything impossible until it’s done?” But that doesn’t change generations of bad educational practices and grinding existences that come from being born into poor circumstances.

But “Radical” feels incomplete. The film doesn’t really “sell” these teaching methods. It tells us they work and expects the viewer to buy in. We can guess our teacher’s “sad secret” without it being talked about, even if we can’t figure out why the sweets-craving director of the school endorses this “radical” teaching method with too little struggle.

Good performances by Derbez and the kids recommend “Radical.” But wading through the cliches of the genre and stumbling towards that inevitable feel-good finale — blowing any “highs” the picture might celebrate, make it hard to recommend.

They’ve had two hours in this slow, formulaic and manipulative film to make their point. But as much slack as we cut them for their sweet, well-intentioned “hearts are in the right place” effort, they don’t quite manage it.

Rating: PG-13 for some strong violent content, thematic material and strong language

Cast: Eugenio Derbez, Daniel Haddad, Jennifer Trejo,
Mia Fernanda Solis, Victor Estrada, Enoc Leaño and Danilo Guardiola

Credits: Scripted and directed by Christopher Zalla, based on a magazine article by Joshua Davis. A Pantelion release.

Running time: 2:05

In his prime, the 1940s to the 1960s, Kirk Douglas only made a couple of films that would have tipped his fans that he was born Issur Herschelevitch Danielovitch, and that among the things his name-change brushed over was his Jewishness.

By the time he made “Cast a Giant Shadow” in 1966, American anti-Semitism was on the wane, and Israel — whose founding was the subject of that film — was an accepted reality to much of the world.

But in 1953, box office star that he was, making a movie in Israel, playing a disturbed Holocaust survivor on the lam from the Israeli police in the still-new Middle Eastern state had to be risky, or at least raise eyebrows.

“The Juggler” was a production of Stanley Kramer, a filmmaker whose movies about political and social hot button subjects made him the conscience of Hollywood. The Jewish producer who would touch on the debate over creationism (“Inherit the Wind”), race (“The Defiant Ones,” “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner”) and the horrible toll of a nuclear war (“On the Beach”) would only approach the Holocaust indirectly. But he made three films that referenced it and used it as a plot point — the later “Judgement at Nuremburg” and “Ship of Fools,” and 1953’s “The Juggler.”

That first film is both conventional in its structure, and an odditity. It was, according to many accounts, eagerly-embraced and backed by the still-new Jewish state for its potential propoganda value. Currying American favor and maintaining U.S. support (a big subtext of “Cast a Giant Shadow”) was vital.

It’s filled with wholesome images of tough but compassionate Israelis, many of them living there since well before World War II, running an efficient infrastructure for processing and relocating Jewish refugees from Europe and their adorable moppet children.

Characters sometimes speak in that stereotypical shticky Hollywood version of Jewish English, practiced since the early talkies and kvetched through “Seinfeld” and “Curb Your Enthusiasm.”

“Cows we haven’t got. But maybe soon?”

“We need a juggler like a hole in the head. What can you do besides throwing things up in the air and catching them?

Douglas has a role he turns out to be wonderfully suited for — a formerly famous entertainer who survived the camps with his gregarious gift for entertaining children intact, even if he’s vowed to never juggle again.

“I haven’t thrown anything thrown anything up but a bad meal in ten years!”

We soon learn the reason for that. Hans confuses a local woman for his wife and her child for his daughter. A friend from the ship has to shake him and remind him that they died and were “burned in the ovens.” He later confesses that he was sure they’d be fine in Germany. He was famous — “The Wonderful Hans” — and beloved after all. It’s implied that he “juggled” the decision to leave, and waited too late.

And now, in this new place that is to be his home, he is — as we say these days — triggered by all sorts of things, especially cops.

“Israel is a land of POLICE. You’re all NAZIS!”

Fleeing a policeman (Richard Benedict) who wants to see his papers, he is cornered and gravely injures the man to escape. Hans Muller, German Jew who speaks no Hebrew, is on the run in a somewhat friendly country that is still a desert, a war zone and few people’s idea of a “Promised Hand.”

Douglas does a good job with the juggling that we know he’ll inevitably perform, and a great job with the clowning Hans does to entertain children. The emotional scars of this “dangerous” fugitive have all the subtlety Douglas was often associated with — over-the-top, eyes-bulging, bellowing and spitting with emotion — hammy.

An orphaned boy (Joseph Walsh) offers to guide Hans and translate for him. A kibbutz maiden (Milly Vitale) falls for him and urges him to make his home with her in a commune where Jewish folk dances by the bonfire are a regular thing.

“A home is a place you lose,” he says. “A half a heart doesn’t make a full love.”

“The Juggler” depicts an Israel swept up in community and Israeli enterprise, a new nation filled with optimism, with the young woman Ya’el remarking on her mission to visit an “abandoned” (over-run and emptied during the 1948 founding war) to “see if it’s habitable.”

So yes, the “propoganda film” label still fits.

Orson Welles’ pal and Mercury Theatre regular Paul Stewart (born Paul Sternberg) plays a police detective determined to get his man and “get him some (psychiatric) help.” Veteran character actor Charles Lane (born Charles Gerstle Levison) also signed on to a movie that may have had the feeling of a “cause” at the time the company set off for Haifa, its primary filming location.

The soon-to-be-celebrated Kramer entrusted the film to the Ukranian-American (not Jewish) director of the anti-Semitic hate crime thriller “Crossfire,” Edward Dmytryk and director of Kramer’s WWII drama “Eight Iron Men” to handle the shoot, and would bring Dmytryk back to film Kramer’s celebrated adaptation of “The Caine Mutiny” a year or so later.

Keen-eyed viewers will recognize the eyewitness to the assault on the policeman, a Dutch “tourist” played by John Banner, who says everything but “I saw NOTH-ink!” in an effort to get out of helping the police. “Hogan’s Heroes” was still a decade away at this point.

“The Juggler” isn’t one of the great films of Kramer or even of its era. But Douglas’s magnetic performance and the mere fact that this ground-breaking, well-intentioned thriller exists makes it a classic, a peek at an uncomplicated moment in time when Israel could be considered an embattled underdog state set up to right a great wrong and provide a homeland for people hounded throughout history and murdered by the millions as Hitler’s scapegoats.

The messy business of working out whose “abandoned villages” they were helping empty would only come later.

Rating: TV-14, violence

Cast: Kirk Douglas, Milly Vitale, Joseph Walsh, Richard Benedict, Jay Adler, John Banner and Paul Stewart.

Credits: Directed by Edward Dmytryk, scripted by Michael Blankfort, based on his novel. A Columbia release on Tubi, Amazon, etc.

Running time: 1:26

Netflix wasn’t going to get its hands on Disney’s “Star Wars” intellectual property in any form any time soon.

But Zack Snyder apparently had this “Star Wars” pitch that he could rewrite into something “original,” a two-film two part saga, with the first film streaming in Dec.

It’s built around Sofia Boutella, with Ed Skrein, Djimon Hounsou, Jena Malone, Cleopatra Coleman, Cary Elwes, Charlie Hunnam and the voice of Sir Anthony Hopkins.

Check it out, Snyder cultists.

“Sitting in Bars with Cake” is a cutesy but limp rom-com with a heaping helping of “Big Sick” seriousness meant to knock us down off a sugar high it never achieves.

Based on a memoir by Audrey Schulman and thus having hints of a “true story” in its diversified-for-the-big-screen casting (a good thing), that “this really happened” becomes a manipulative crutch for a rom-com that’s not funny or romantic and a dare to not embrace a “cancer scare” movie that clumsily handles pretty much everything that matters.

But hey, the cakes look yummy and Ron Livingston steals it without even trying. So there’s that.

Jane, played by Yara Shahibi of “Blackish,” is the “mail fairy” at the LA music management office where her bestie from Phoenix Corinne (Odessa A’zion of “Hellraiser” and TV’s “Fam”) is kissing up to boss Bonita (Bette Midler, as amusing as the material allows) so that she can become a junior agent.

Jane’s just treading water until she takes the LSATs, so that she can follow her parents into the law. But working at a party-prone office means that she’s designated cake baker. Whatever bar they’re celebrating whozit’s’ birthday or whatszit’s promotion in, baker Jane is there with one of her elaborate cake carriers carrying her latest elaborate cake.

“Fun fact, I actually substituted sour cream and pudding to make the cake more moist!” isn’t exactly a pick-up line, even if Jane is the cutest, skinniest baker of sugary delights in all of Silverlake.

Corinne and her crew are concerned. She impulsively proposes a “bring cakes into bars” strategy to find her bestie a boyfriend, a way to “bait guys with sugar” and her make confectionary skills.

That’s not a bad idea, fake “parties,” offer cake, “meet new people.” But it will be a challenge, as Jane’s wardrobe follows her “If it works for Mister Rogers, it works for me” motto.

But let’s put a map on the wall, cover it with karaoke bars and piano bars, tiki bars and burlseque bars, decide which ones are filled with “actors” or “musicians” or “tech nerds,” and work our way through Jane’s youtube-tutored recipe repertoire.

“Sittings in Bars with Cakes” lapses into montages of the bars, montages of making cakes for the bars, a parade of guys who love the free dessert but who rarely make the leap to digits or (unfortunately) “dick pics.”

You’re thinking, “Well, this might have been ‘Swingers’ from a female point of view, twentysomething female bonding taking us on a tour of (fictional) LA barlife, with a sort of ‘personal growth/find love’ set of story arcs.” OK, maybe that’s just what I was thinking.

But in any event no. And Jane isn’t necessarily pining for the law, if you hadn’t guessed.

Just as that opening act is failing — ever so sweetly — Corinne gets sick, her parents (Ron Livingston and Martha Kelly) show up and Jane’s plans, her cakes, her pursuit of the office crush Owen (Rish Shah), all of that falls into the back seat as the film mimics life in this one important regard. Cancer always has the front seat.

There’s maybe one laugh to go along with the dry giggle or two in the movie’s opening act “cake baking bait” story.

Livingston (most recently in TV’s “A Million Little Things”), playing a body-shop/garage owner with a need to fix every broken or wobbly public chair, water fountain or diner table is funny and nicely complemented by the ever-dry-and-deadpan Kelly (“Euphoria,” “Marriage Story”).

Even making allowances for a man reviewing a film with “young women’s picture” messaging and target audience, there’s no getting around the many examples of botched execution (script and Trish Sie’s direction of it) that “Sitting in Bars with Cake” shows us.

There are laughs left on the table, peripheral characters introduced and ignored and shortchanged cooking sequences in a two hour movie that could use more “cute” stuff like this, more rowdy-barflies-get-cake gags, more of almost everything save for the leads, who click but who never ever set off sparks.

The sad stuff works, just not well enough to make tears well up.

And wasting Midler and Livingston in middling roles with almost no funny things to say or play is just the icing on the you-know-what.

Rating: G-13 for profanity, some drug use, sexual references and thematic elements

Cast: Yara Shahidi, Odessa A’zion, Rish Shah, Martha Kelly, Ron Livingston and Bette Midler.

Credits: Directed by Trish Sie, scripted by Audrey Schulman, based on her memoir. An MGM film on Amazon Prime.

Running time: 2:00

François Ozon’s latest is a period piece about “a bad actress” and a bad or at least unscrupulous lady lawyer who use a false murder accusation as a way to gin up publicity and score feminist points for equality.

Shockingly, the men and “the system” fight back.

Ozon, best known for the musical “Eight Women,” and “The Swimming Pool,” “Young and Beautiful” and the like, cast Nadia Tereszkiewicz and Rebecca Marder as the leads, with Isabelle Huppert, Dany Boon and Fabrice Luchini in the supporting cast.

“The Crime is Mine” opens in limited release Dec. 25.

Composer, Broadway icon, America’s Conductor, champion of orchestral music, New York landmark, poster boy for Tom Wolfe’s “Radical Chic,”Leonard Bernstein WAS classical music in America for much of his celebrated tenure at the New York Philharmonic.

He was the first famous American conductor on the world stage, a regular feature on America TV in the decades before cable, streaming and everything else that atomized the great American “audience” into a million cultural, musical and entertainment niches. And he was immortalized by his thrilling music to “West Side Story.”

He was famously playful, but exacting and deadly serious about the score. Note the “take number” on that recording session.

As I prep for the task of judging Bradley Cooper’s “Maestro,” I thought I’d share some of the background material and video this holiday release film experience prompts me to revisit.

The movie hits theaters and then Netflix at the end of the year, so you’ve got time to do a little prep. There are legions of Lenny biographies and books by Bernstein on Amazon. I recall reading “Dinner with Lenny” and Joan Peyser’s biography of him some while back, fine overviews of a Life Lived Large.

Like a lot of kids growing up in the America far away from the big cities of the ’60s and early ’70s, some of my first exposures to culture were in the dashing, witty, effervescent and effortlessly cool Leonard Bernstein’s “Young People’s Concerts” on weekend network TV.

Bernstein was a great communicator and had a way of making The Great Music understandable and palatable to the young. He was always dressed in a suit or a tuxedo, spoke like a teacher confident that his students would “get it,” and made Great Art, Great Music and his Great City’s Lincoln Center aspirational — a secret code you wanted to master, a nirvana you want to visit or live in.

I hadn’t realized he’d been doing this for over a decade before I was one of the “young people” who caught my first telecast. The concerts themselves continue, even though they don’t have the star conductor/network TV deals they once.

Bernstein’s shows are archived on YouTube, a public service tucked into a sea of cat and cocker spaniel videos.

This is one I seem to remember. The Musical Mister Rogers was talking up the music of “2001: A Space Odyssey.”

The title card/logo of this long-running series gives us an idea that maybe the people raising hell about Cooper’s fake nose in the title role of his movie have a point. Bernstein had a large but not oversized schnozz, and Cooper’s prosthetic seems to come to a more pronouned point in the beak. At least from some angles. But not all.

In college I picked up on something it took a Dick Cavett autobiography which I read to point out to me. The Midwesterner Cavett, who’d later use music from Bernstein’s “Candide” as his chat show theme music, aspired to the high culture and sophistication Bernstein was advertising in his every public appearance. New York could seem like the center of the universe, luring people with a show business Jones like Cavett. I got that. But the city’s brand-in-full was as a place of great museums, great art, great shows and the greatest highbrow music the arts had to offer, something Bernstein became the public face of.

Unconciously, I absorbed that, too. I never particularly wanted to live in New York, but great music is everywhere and at least in the way Bernstein pitched it, merely seeking it out and learning an appreciation of it was an aspiration worth reaching for as well.

No, you don’t have to be a conductor or classical musician or even live in a city where great museums and great orchestras reside. But somewhere between “acquainted” with that world and well-versed in it was something one could read, listen and travel towards.

You could barely pick up a public radio signal where I grew up, but that’s what I went to high school workshops to learn about and what I went to college to pursue as a career. While learning how to pronounce Mahler’s “Das Lied von der Erde” and tortorous names like that of conductor Gennady Rozhdestvensky, I’d go hear the Moscow Philharmonic, the Vienna Chamber Orchestra, the Cleveland Orchestra, the Philadelphia Orchestra and continue doing that in public radio cities where I worked after graduation.

That’s all because of Leonard Bernstein.

As I changed careers and moved into print criticism, I reviewed classical music concerts and interviewed figures from that world — pianists, conductors, flutists and Pavorotti. The first time I went to New York was to cover the New York Film Festival, previewing films at that very same Lincoln Center which was home to the New York Phil. On a long lunch break between films, I took a pilgrimage tour of Carnegie Hall.

All, consciously or subconsciously, because of Lenny.

Bernstein’s sexually diverse personal life was complicated in ways our more accepting and understanding time can barely fathom, and that appears to be the a larger interest of Cooper’s film. I get a little “De-Lovely” vibe from the trailers, remembering that Kevin Kline/Ashley Judd Cole Porter biopic of twenty or so years back, a closeted gay man and the understanding and supportive wife.

But futile hope or not, I hope Philly suburban Cooper “gets” this other aspect of Bernstein, what he represented, striving for a place in a world he didn’t grow up in, aspirations he recognized as his duty to pass on to new generations via humanizing and lionizing “highbrow” music. This Massachusetts-born son of Ukranian-Jewish immigrants looked at high culture the same aspirational way in his youth, an icon who took his stewardship and status as ambassador of “that world” to those who weren’t born into as seriously as he took everything else