Movie Nation

“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

Literary devices and constructions don’t always translate easily to the screen. And the current screenwriter obsession with making many a script play out in “chapters,” denoted in pointlessly distracting onscreen graphics, is one of the clunkiest.

Even when you’re adapting a novel, that novelistic organizational tool tends to get in the way of the narrative, an unnecessary indulgence for audiences used to changing points of view in telling and retelling a story, going all the way back to “Rashomon.”

Five chapter headings labeling differing views and clues about a murder in the Mexican boondocks mute the impact of “Hurricane Season,” an immersive but arms-length Mexican thriller based on a novel by Fernanda Melchor. It’s a slow-unfolding mystery that strains to hide its solution by relying on first a seemingly unreliable narrator, then by adding agendas, motives and suspects to our theory of “whodunit” in a series of profiles built on this or that person’s involvement in the killing.

On the cusp of “Temporada de huracanes” (hurricane season), tweenage boys find the body in a fetid, discolored river, a snake crawling out of its mouth. The whispers tell us that it was “la bruja,” a witch who lived on the edge of town, whom nobody called by name but who threw parties, had clients and connections and friends even.

But when “friends” show up to collect her body from the cop, they won’t surrender it.

Yesenia (Paloma Almvamar) comes in to the police station to give her statement and a theory. She figures her resented cousin Luismi (Andrés Cordova) was involved. The way she throws around how this teen is “grandma’s favorite” (in Spanish, or dubbed), the way she attaches the same gay slur to him that others have laid at the foot of the dead witch — “maricón” (a homophobic slur) — suggests maybe she has ulterior motives.

“Hurricane Season” then begins to unravel what really went down that caused a transgender “witch” (Edgar Treviño) to wind up in a muddy river in the least enlightened corner of Mexico.

The different points of view of the events that led to this murder fold in prejudices, superstitions, abortion and gossip about money, any one of which or combination could have been the witch’s undoing.

When they want to party with no inhibitions, they come to her house. When a teen needs an abortion in Catholic Mexico, there’s a knock on her door. When pretty boy Luismi and others need quick cash, she’s willing to help.

Homophobic name-calling is all well and good, but beware of the dude quickest to bark “maricón,” because we’ve all learned the psychological definition of “projection” over the past seven years.

Any and all of those things contribute to her murder.

“Don’t Blame Karma” director Elisa Miller has some trouble giving the viewer someone to root for or some goal one hopes the story achieves as virtually nobody in this is noble enough or human enough to be worthy of our sympathy and loyalty.

The witch? We’d root for her, but we know she’s dead. We never learn her name. And the script doesn’t let us catch more than a few glimpses of her personality and compassion.

The character I connected with most was the teen girl Norma (Kat Rigoni), fleeing to this town for reasons we can guess, only to be hounded by predatory creeps the minute she gets off the bus.

She has problems and Luismi, living down to his cousin’s appraisal of his character, is a little too eager to take her in. It’s his hooker-mother (Reyna Medizaba) who gives the fourteen year-old the straight dope.

In this town, in this country, in this life, “If you lose your nerve, they’ll crush you.”

The screenplay teases at a sort of insurance company settlement of sorts, this person bearing that much responsibility, that one tying in another way with a greater or lesser share of the blame.

But the structure of the story and the storytelling style muddy our easy grasp of where this is going and what it’s saying when it gets there.

It’s not enough to merely introduce gay characters, gay themes and the pressures exerted by a sexist, macho, patriarchal society. You’ve got to wring a moving story out of their plight. “Hurricane Season” doesn’t.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, sex, profanity, slurs

Cast: Paloma Alvamar, Andrés Cordova, Gustavo “Guss” Morales, Kat Rigoni, Ernesto Meléndez and Edgar Treviño.

Credits: Directed by Elisa Miller, scripted by Daniela Gómez and Elisa Miller, based on the novel by Fernanda Melchor. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:39

Cannot. Wait.

Great cast. Real ambition here. It looks soulful. And I see an unerring grasp of the man’s voice and walk and way of carrying himself.

“This Sporting Life” sets up as a formulaic hardscrabble “rise and fall of a sports hero” drama, the tale of a miner who gets his first taste of success and the “good life” of the English upper classes via stardom on the rugby pitch or “patch,” as ruggers say in Jolly Olde.

But Lindsay Anderson’s 1963 film, based on a David Storey novel, endures because it breaks that formula is ways never seen before and seldom seen since. A classic of the “Kitchen Sink Realism”corner of the cinematic British New Wave of the early ’60s, it embraces tropes and defies expectations at every turn.

The matches are brutish, muddy and bloody, filmed in close-ups and hand-held shots capturing the organized chaos and barely-contained violence of the sport in those days.

The world they’re played in just as brutal, hanging on the ingrained class divisions that dabbling in socialism and the coming “Swingin’ 60s'” would never quitely vanquish.

And the focus, the star of the story is another classic “angry young man” of the British cinema of the day, a brooding, broad-shouldered goon who wonders where “happiness” fits into all of this.

Richard Harris had perhaps his best role and gave his finest performance in this grinding downbeat drama about a bloke from the pits who doesn’t “enjoy being kicked about on a football field for other people’s amusement.” He only enjoys “being paid for it.”

Frank Machin takes it all too personally — the slights on the field, the snobbery off of it. Signing a fat contract and changing his life is meaningless without someone to share it with.

It’s a pity the person he’d love to drag along on this ride is his widowed landlady. Margaret Hammond (Rachel Roberts), mother of two young children, takes him in and lives off the rent he pays. She isn’t grateful for this or attracted to him. Her rebuffs should tell him that. The way she keeps her late husband’s boots polished next to the coal-burning heater in her dumpy flat tells him and us why.

“This Sporting Life” is about Frank’s rise, his stick-it-in-the-face-of-the-posh attitudes that keep him unspoiled, aka “loutish” and “gauche.” And it’s about his grim pursuit of “Mrs. Hammond,” an uncompromising man who has broken through a class barrier and who desperately wants to drag an unwilling woman through it with him.

It’s bracing to watch any “sporting” film of the era, or before, on either side of the pond, and then take in Anderson’s debut feature film. “This Sporting Life” is “the shock of the ‘new'” incarnate. Like the icons of the French New Wave who preceded him, he’d started his working life as a journalist and film critic, taking his shot by making short films, working his way into British TV before making a gigantic splash with this socially-conscious story set against a rugby backdrop.

The sets are working-class/lived-in — dumpy post-war flats, ancient pubs, the mansion and pricey restaurant where Machin encounters his “betters,” chief among them, the team’s vulpine “owner” (Qlan Badel). The games are in-your-face and yet sprawling and utterly credible, unlike Hollywood’s sports movies of the day.

Cinematographer Denys Coop’s black-and-white set-ups are unfussy and realistic, with the odd beautiful composition filled with contrasts and pictorial symmetry.

Harris brings the chip he kept on his shoulder for his best performances, and his very life makes the credibility of an arrogant, brooding, drunken brawler with a soulful streak and impulse control issues credible. The irony of this infamous boozer, nose-buster, lover and singer (he sings in the film, “Here in My Heart,” and late made “MacArthur Park” famous) living long enough to be the first Dumbledore at Hogwarts still boggles the mind.

Anyone not around at the beginning of her career might remember Roberts’ deliciously villainous turn in “Foul Play” or her standing-out the first big budget version of “Murder on the Orient Express” in the ’70s. In her Oscar-nominated turn in “This Sporting Life,” she is fiercely guarded and immovably unlikeable, a damaged woman pursued by a man who will never be the kind and “worried” husband she lost.

Margaret Hammond will rarely be grateful and never really warm to this younger man/suitor, and not just because of his temper, his table manners and his womanizing.

Roberts, who died at 53, has the distinction of appearing in a number of pictures now regarded as classics — “Picnic at Hanging Rock,” “Saturday Night and Sunday Morning,” “O Lucky Man!,” “Our Man in Havana” and “Wild Rovers” among them.

Anderson would make his mark in the ’60s (“If…”) and early ’70s (“O Lucky Man!”) and deliver a final grace note in the late ’80s (“Whales of August”), spending his post-“Lucky Man” career acting, narrating documentaries and making lesser known films for British TV and theatrical release.

Coop, who did yeoman’s work on many a film (“Guns of Navarone”) would go on to light and shoot the gorgeous Christopher Reeve “Superman” movies.

But once upon a time, long before, these future legends joined hands and lent their talents to a watershed film, one that still packs a punch and makes you think over 60 years later.

Rating: unrated, violence, sexual assault

Cast: Richard Harris, Rachel Roberts, Alan Badel, William Hartnell, Colin Blakely, Vanda Godsell and Jack Watson

Credits: Directed by Lindsay Anderson, scripted by David Storey, adapted from his novel. An Independent Artists film on Tubi, Amazon, Youtube et al

Running time: 2:14

At this point in Dreamworks’ “Trolls” enterprise, the adult thing to say is “Just give the kids what they want.”

“Trolls Band Together” has a few chuckles, an inane plot and an NSYNC reunion to top off another sing-along-with-the-living-toys comedy starring the always-committed Anna Kendrick, a somewhat less enthusiastic-sounding Justin Timberlake (who did a lot of work on the soundtrack), with Daveed Diggs, Amy Schumer, Kid Cudi and Rupaul joining the candy-colored festivities for the third film in a trilogy.

The story concerns a former boy band of brothers that Branch (Timberlake) was in who need to reunite because one of their number has been kidnapped by villain singers Velvet (Andrew Rannells) and Veneer (Schumer).

That entails Queen Poppy (Kendrick) and Branch joining BroZone leader John Dory (Eric André) as they set out on a quest to “get the band back together” and take one last shot at “perfect family harmony” so that they can hit a note that shatters diamonds.

Because that’s where their bandmate is imprisoned.

The former bandmates have led far different lives post-stardom, making each visit its own challenge.

The animation gets progressively more ornate and detailed with each passing film, and can be lovely to look at here, despite the risk of early onset diabetes from subjecting yourself to this.

Lots of kid-favorites are back — glittery Tiny Diamond is played by America’s most reliable laugh, Kenan Thompson. Watch out for those “wet willies,” there, chief.

“Wet WILLIAM.”

David Mamet’s daughter Zosia Mamet plays the put-upon servant of the pop star villains of the piece, Velvet and Veneer, and is so buried under their needs that she covers Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5,” and does it justice.

The juvenile jokes are often of a boy band pun variety — with One Direction, Backstreet Boys, etc. referenced.

And Orlando’s most famous boy band shows up as well.

None of which moved the needle for me, but I’m not the target audience here. Heck, parents have been forced to take their kids to a “Paw Patrol” movie and re-releases of “Nightmare Before Christmas” just to introduce a new generation to the movie-going habit.

The Orlando underage audience I saw this with hooted and applauded and sang along when knew to the tune. Not many knew “9 to 5” or “The Hustle.” But they will.

Rating: PG, a bleeped profanity

Cast: The voices of Anna Kendrick, Amy Schumer, Daveed Diggs, Zooey Deschanel, Andrew Rannells, Kenan Thompson, Eric Andre, Kid Cudi, Zosia Mamet, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Rupaul and Justin Timberlake.

Credits: Directed by Walt Dohrn and Tim Heitz, scripted by Elizabeth Tippet and Thomas Dam. A Dreamworks/Universal release.

Running time: 1:32

It’s a Medieval fantasy with Robin Wright, Angela Bassett, Shohreh Agdashloo, Nick Robinson and Ray Winstone.

Netflix is looking to keep itself in the Millie BB biz with this one.

When it’s good, “Journey to Bethlehem,” the latest faith-based film to take a shot at The Nativity Story, is playful and fun with actors who figure their characters are a bit campy, and vamp accordingly.

It’s a musical with plenty of “dramatic license” taken with Biblican accounts of the birth of Jesus. But we aren’t talking Monty Python’s “Life of Brian” blasphemous.

King Herod, for instance. He’s given that smoldering intensity that we’ve come to expect from the great Antonio Banderas. But he’s a vain tippler here, who loves his wine. And when former “Evita” star Banderas vamps through his villainous “Its great to be King” number, a longtime fan can’t help but be tickled.

The angel Gabriel (Grammy-winning Christian singer and rapper Lecrae) manifests himself in virginal Mary’s bedroom and nervously rehearses his lines about her (Fiona Palomo) being “chosen” for this very special assignment from On High.

That’s going to be a hard sell, he figures.

Mary has met the man she is to be married off to — pre-pregnancy. But she and he don’t know who each other are, and fruit shopping in the marketplace he flirts like an ancient Palestinian playa.

“I’m just friendly,” Joseph (Milo Manheim) insists.

And the Magi? They’re the stars of their own show, perhaps the best one-act play Tom Stoppard (“Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead”) never wrote — “Magi Shmagi.” These “wise men” (Omid Djalili, Rizwan Manji, Geno Segers) from the East study, debate, kvetch and joke their way westward, following this mysterious star they figure portends the birth of the Son of God.

Director and co-writer Adam Anders, a veteran composer who wrote songs for Ace of Base and the score for the musical “Rock of Ages,” has made a lightweight faith-based film that’s Biblically loose and historically laughable.

But he serves up a diverse cast — Lecrae wears cornrows, gold lipstick and bright blue contact lenses to play Gabriel — some decent singers, actors who can handle comedy and El Jefe Banderas in a musical that borrows production number ideas from “Fiddler on the Roof” and “Evita” and that bit of Stoppard-esque business with the hilarious magi to give us a movie that even when it panders and stumbles and descends into self-seriousness, remains an adorably lighthearted take on Jesus: The Origin Story.

The leads have pleasant light pop singing voices, with Banderas and Joel Smallbone — playing Herod’s soldier-son — showing off Broadway-appropriate pipes.

The tunes are generally forgettable, with “Mary you’re so contrary…marry Mary marry Mary marry, it’s good for you” representative of the lyrics.

But when Herod and the visiting wise men warily size each other up, and bribes/gifts are offered to grease the wheels of their access to this unknown “pregnant” virgin, Omid Djalili as Melchior’s haughty milking of his, the best of ALL the gifts, “myrrrrrrrrrrrrh,” it’s a genuine spit-take. The laughs here work simply because they’re so unexpected.

The Spanish locations are passable, the costumes entirely too polished and laundered and the cast is never less than competent, if not wholly charismatic, top to bottom. It’s not “The Nativity Story” or “Risen,” the best of the Biblical epics of recent vintage. But whatever one’s expectations, the execution isn’t half-bad.

And as they used to say on the Bethlehem Borscht Belt, “It plays.”

More faith-based films like this and fewer with Kevin Sorbo, please and thank-you.

Rating: PG, threats of violence, “virgin birth” discussions, alcohol abuse

Cast: Antonio Banderas, Fiona Palomo, Milo Maheim, Omid Djalili, Rizwan Manji, Geno Segers, Joel Smallbone and Lecrae.

Credits: Directed by Adam Anders, scripted by Adam Anders and Peter Barsocchini, music and lyrics by Adam Anders, Nikki Anders and Peer Astrom. A Sony/Affirm release.

Running time: 1:38

Yeah, it’s a glamorous gig, isn’t it?

No, the title has nothing to do with social media practices on ExTwitter.

This singing silliness for the very young opens next week. Review to come shortly.