Movie Nation

“I Used to be Famous” is a sweet little nothing of a feel-good comedy, a sometimes cloying wish-fulfillment fantasy about a pop music has-been and his new drummer, an autistic prodigy with the sticks.

It’s built around a winning turn by Ed Skrein and a little movie magic — or magical interpretation of “on the spectrum,” something screenplays bend and over-simplify because they can and because they must if they’re to have their onscreen “wish” fulfilled.

Skrein, of “Midway,” “Deadpool” (he was Ajax) and the “Maleficent” sequel, plays a 40something veteran of Stereo Dream, a Brit boy band that was all the rage in the early 2000s.

Vinnie D used to be blond and “used to be famous.” Now he’s reduced to towing his keyboards around on a cart as he hits up bars around his Peckham, South London neighborhood, begging for a gig.

His noodling at the synthesizer sounds amateurish, in that “anything that comes out of a synthesizer sounds musical” way. We’re not surprised when we learn he was “self taught.” Even in his heyday, his actual skillset was limited to his looks, his swagger and the way his average voice blended in with others.

Busking inane notes at a street market, powering his keys with a car battery, insulted by the one local who remembers who he used to be, Vincent finds himself accompanied by a teen who won’t make eye contact, and won’t take a hint that his impromptu drumming on the metal railing of a bench isn’t wanted.

But the kid finds his groove and the duet takes something like a pleasant form. That’s when Stevie (Leo Long) is finally hunted down by his worried single mom (Eleanor Matsuura of “The Walking Dead,” “Wonder Woman” and “Justice League”). He’s spirited off before Vinnie can finish thanking him.

Someone, of course, recorded that duet and it’s almost going viral, which has Vinnie pursue more gigs, and hunt for the mysterious DIY drummer — whom he stumbles into at a drum-circle/music therapy session at a local rec center. All he’s got to do is convince mother Amber to let him drag her special needs son on stage, in front of crowds, to play his drums…and pans and pots and whatever.

Director and co-writer Eddie Sternberg makes his feature directing debut an expansion of a short he filmed earlier, and I like the way he depicts the creative process and the chemistry Skrein and Long develop. Their “first gig” is encouraging and uplifting, right up to the point when a single audience member brings it all down, an all-too-common occurrence, even before our boorish era blossomed.

But the movie is so predictable as to be drab and dispiriting. Vinnie hits up his still-famous former bandmate (Eoin Macken) for help, there are “management” issues, and all the while, Amber is bristling at the situations this selfish stranger is putting her vulnerable child in.

Stevie isn’t the easiest sale for Vinnie’s “let’s get famous together” pitch.

“It’s not about being you, is it?” Vinnie believes. “It’s about being SOMEone.”

The subtexts, of meeting your potential, regrets over selfishly putting yourself first, paths not taken (Amber used to be a dancer) are just as predictable as the glib way the film treats autism and drumming as something that will transform Stevie.

Maybe. Maybe not.

The music is mostly forgettable. Skrein has a nice, flat, unschooled crooner’s voice.

Coupling those not-exactly-assets to a story without a single twist you can’t say you didn’t see coming, the best one can say about “I Used to be Famous” is that, all things considered, it’s harmless, and not entirely charmless.

Rating: TV-14, profanity

Cast: Ed Skrein, Eleanor Matsuura, Leo Long, Eoin Macken

Credits: Directed by Eddie Sternberg, scripted by Eddie Sternberg and Zak Klein. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:44

Heartfelt, animated to look like a comic book in motion, zany, trippy and multiverse.

The dot matrix style of animation gave some folks vertigo and headaches (me among them). Same deal, you think?

Here’s a movie that opens a theme park in every 3D cinema in the world.

James Cameron’s “Avatar: The Way of Water,” is a stunning and immersive big screen experience pretty much without peer in cinema history. Its beautiful, digitally-realized other-worldly visuals are eye-popping, detailed down to the thread count in uniforms, so crystalline as to be disorienting. You lose track of where the screen ends and the tactile, physical cinema you’re watching it in begins.

Pandoran birds and Pandoran fishes — recognizable, yet distinctly alien variations on species we see on Earth — fly at us, float right into our faces. And in firefights, Cameron has us ducking arrows, spears and tracer-bullets in that time-honored 3D gimmick, only more realistic than it’s ever been.

Disney was wise, you think, to devote real estate and cash and technology to “Avatar” as a burgeoning theme park attraction. As striking as this movie makes the place look, one can’t help but think all it lacks is a themed Disney “world,” or Disney World hotel.

“The Way of Water” not only bests the Atlantean sequences of the “Black Panther” sequel, it represents a quantum leap improvement from the images the first film in the “Avatar” franchise.

The story? Well, it seems to unfold somewhat smoother this time around, although it’s just as prone to grating lapses in logic and groaningly obvious plot contrivances, conveniences in aid of lazy storytelling. The dialogue isn’t as cringe-worthy, and the film overall doesn’t seem as silly, although it bears the fresh burden of being repetitive.

When you’ve pieced together an action epic of well over three hours, with huge action beats in between scenes primarily calculated to generate “Oooohs” and “Ahhhhs,” even the very pretty pictures and vast explosions take on a “Seen that, and?” quality.

Cameron taps into “Terminator” tech and “Titanic” perils at sea, as if to show us how much better he could have made those blockbusters with the computer power behind today’s special effects. But the “Avatars” and actors playing the digitized Na’vi peoples of Pandora, who now include Oscar winner Kate Winslet and the wonderful character actor Cliff Curtis, are still too plastic to have the subtlety of facial and body expression to break our hearts.

From the sounds of her character, Zoe Saldana gives one of her most empathetic performances, full of rage and grief. But the animated Na’vi version of her doesn’t really get across the what the voice is conveying. Winslet (you’ll recognize the mole to the right of her nose) and especially Curtis have an easier time of it, playing Pandora’s version of “The Reef People” (a Sea People), a tribe built out of whatever Cameron knows about the Maori of New Zealand.

Even their whales have Maori-styled tattoos on them. Because in this movie, the whales are confidantes and conversationalists, every bit the equal of the blue (or seafoam green) biped anthropoids with magic tails.

The plot — over a decade has passed, and Jake (Sam Worthington), the paralyzed Marine reborn via an avatar clone of a Na’vi, and his native wife Neytiri (Saladana) had some good years, giving birth to two sons and a daughter, raising the spiritual, inquisitive half-human daughter (Sigourney Weaver) of the scientist Dr. Grace Augustine (also Sigourney Weaver), with a “feral” human kid, Spider (Jake Champion) left behind when the natives ran off the rapacious American miner/capitalists and their soldiers years before.

Now, the “Sky People” have returned for more exploiting and despoiling. The Na’vi resistance, primarily Jake Sully and his family, have their hands full. And the invaders have a Na’vi version of Marine Col. Quaritch (Stephen Lang) and a crack commando team that fly in with them. They’ll hunt the train-wrecking Na’vi (French) Resistance, with Quaritch’s avatar hellbent on capturing and killing the treasonous ex-Marine Jake.

That’s why the family flees their floating mountain hideout and jungle stomping grounds for the islands and the Sea People. The Sullys are fish out of water and thus have to have this new way of life explained to them — and for the viewing audience’s benefit. The chief of the Reef People (Curtis) just wants to save the Sullys, and their quarrelsome teen boys, from “the shame of being useless.”

But Quaritch’s commandos are relentless, and are not above commandeering a gigantic hydrofoil whaler to track down their quarry. With those Sully kids constantly ignoring adult direction, things are about to get real.

Before visiting Pandora again, I went back to look over my review of the 2009 film that launched this blockbuster franchise. Back then I called Cameron “a visionary tour guide,” but a filmmaker who painted himself in a corner with a “predictable story, clichéd dialogue and logical lapses.”

Sadly, that hasn’t changed. “The Way of Water” is a better film, to me at least, because the effects are that much more impressive and it’s set on and under the water, with sea creatures just close enough to jellies, manta rays, whales and orcas and Loch Ness monsters (for riding) to be recognizable. The sea setting makes it more interesting.

Cameron and his co-writers take shallow digs into anthropology and biology, never quite coming up with creatures we don’t recognize. The people are tall, green alien Pacific Islanders, the creatures mildly exotic variations on an Earth theme.

The dialogue, also tribal and anthropological, when it isn’t using current slang (this or that somebody is “seen”), is kind of world traveler tourist trap T-shirt mumbo jumbo.

“The way of water has no beginning and no end.”

The environmental subtext gives us glances of the waste of resource-devouring capitalism, from the way the “Sky People” clear ground for “Bridgehead City” in the jungle — a giant explosion and fire — to whaling, which they devote military campaign resources to carry out. That’s still topical, although the screenwriters adds bits about American troops taking hostages and engaging in acts of cruelty for cruelty’s sake, very much a topic of conversation among those watching conversative politics around the world these days.

The stakes could have been higher, the deaths could have had meaning and the script could have added layers to the villainy, even added a villain or two. But it doesn’t.

With all these images, all those storyboards, all that digital rendering and compositing going on — from creatures to crab-submarines and the like — who has time for story meetings?

So this “Avatar” looks better without improving the shortcomings that made the original, the blockbuster among blockbusters, so narratively frustrating. Every time you think, “This is SO much better than ‘Avatar,'” some stupid turn in the plot makes you roll your eyes, some dumb bit of dialogue makes you slap your head in frustration and you wish Cameron had added a fourth writer just to have three voices shouting him down from his more juvenile indulgences.

His storytelling crutches and quirks can seem almost quaint, now. How quaint? How many movies do we watch in 3D, now, 13 years after “Avatar?” That quaint.

Rating: PG-13 for sequences of strong violence and intense action, partial nudity and some strong language

Cast: Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Sigourney Weaver, Kate Winslet, Stephen Lang, Cliff Curtis, Edie Falco, Jemaine Clement and CCH Pounder.

Credits: Directed by James Cameron, scripted by James Cameron, Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver. A 20th Century release.

Running time: 3:12

As the world girds itself for the next-level immersive experience cooked up by “Avatar” impresario James Cameron, now would be a good time to remember “how we got here.”

In this digital effects world, Cameron may be the reigning king. But the people who put him there are less heralded visionaries, the people who really fought for this revolution.

One guy in particular might be the DaVinci of computer-animated special effects. Canadian-born animator and computer effects guru Steven “Spaz” Williams is the quirky, brawny, biker/blacksmith who got water to form face shapes in Cameron’s “The Abyss,” the fellow who let the mercury-in-motion T-1000 Terminator walk through fire and take human form, who let us believe that dinosaurs were again roaming the Earth.

Call him the “Jurassic Punk,” because no other nickname fits.

Director Scott Leberecht’s eye-opening and memory-jogging documentary is a Spaz Williams — an ironic geeky nickname, because “Look at me. I’m Popeye!” — appreciation and in many ways a rehabilitation project.

Williams was a key figure in changing how movies are made, a resident genius at the Oscar-winning Industrial Light and Magic effects house that George Lucas launched to bring movie making into the computer-assisted 21st century.

But clips of assorted Oscar-winning special effects speeches reveal that others, old school “film” (analog, hand-made, in-camera) effects supervisors, often his computer-naive bosses, got the credit for his innovations and “kept the little statues” for his stunning, hands-on/computer-assisted creations.

Still photos and home movies from his working years on films like “The Abyss,” “The Mask,” “Terminator 2,” “Jurassic Park” and the like show why that might have been. Williams is seen as a rebel in permanent arrested adolescence. He flips the bird at whoever was filming him scores of times in this brisk and entertaining trip through modern effects history.

“I’m not a diplomat,” Williams, now in his late ’50s admits. “Never have been.” Not that we haven’t figured that out. “I’m not political. No good at it.”

Old school stop-motion modeler Phil Tippett, a guy working in the Ray Harryhausen puppet effects style that dates back to the birth of cinema and the original “King Kong,” appears here. He’s someone whose craft Williams helped render obsolete during the making of “Jurassic Park.” Tippett was among those who shared Oscars for “Jurassic Park,” even though Steven Spielberg — upon seeing Williams’ spare-time renderings of how he could animate dinosaurs into more natural motion via computers — made “Jurassic” an all-digital effects shoot, never using Tippett’s planned models.

Williams’ ILM nemesis, the oft-honored Dennis Muren, who won many Oscars despite not knowing much at all about computer effects, is only seen in old interviews. It’s hard not to see Muren, who seemed to go out of his way not to “thank” Williams in his “boss man gets the statue” speeches, as the villain of “Jurassic Punk.”

It’s also easy to see Williams himself as a villain, his own worst enem. He’s a self-defeating maverick who drank to excess, chasing away the mother of his child, wrecking a later marriage, threw wild parties in the ILM effects “pit” (room where animators work together), crashed into Lucas’s office at Skywalker Ranch during a celebratory dinner, and generally flipped-off authority at every turn. Obviously being brilliant and a good “team player” and colleague to his peers, even if never quite fit in with them, wasn’t enough.

“Art is about always questioning established systems,” he lectures digital art students. “Authority” makes him bristle, even today, because “When you think differently, you’re seen as a ‘heretic.'”

The film has Williams lamenting the way this reliance on big effects houses has “destroyed filmmaking,” with movies like “Scooby-doo” and “Casper” and others (Marvel’s many CGI-heavy outings are ignored, as are the “Transformers” movies) abusing the new “magic,” and running up costs so much that film is no longer an artist, actor’s, creator’s or “director’s” medium, but a corporate one.

True enough. But “Jurassic Punk” is great when it recaptures the days when Spaz Williams, his fellow computer effects “punk” (and “Spawn” director and collaborator) Mark Dippe’ and others were showing up to work at ILM and asking “How’re we gonna do THAT?” When nobody else had the answer, they came up with one, and then others.

Williams notes how many months it took to film “75 frames” of this piece of “Jurassic Park,” and we see the gridwork drawn on actor Robert Patrick so that they could do what had never been done before in “Terminator 2,” “building a human in data” via motion capture cameras that would pick up on every muscle movement that needed to be replicated to make molten metal walk like a human being in a police uniform before that uniform ever forms on screen.

Spielberg, speaking in a 2013 interview about the history of the “Jurassic” shoot, remembers saying of Williams’ test-animation of a T-rex skeleton walking and nibbling through “Jurassic Park,” “That’s the future…That’s the way it’s gonna be from now on.”

He was right. And now we have a documentary to tell who we have to thank for all the wonders that the movies have shown us since.

Rating: unrated, smoking, profanity

Cast: Steven “Spaz” Williams, Mark Dippe’, Phil Tippet, Adrienne Biggs, Hannah Williams, Jody Duncan, archival interviews with James Cameron, Dennis Muren and Steven Spielberg

Credits: Directed by Scott Leberecht. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:21

I’m all for everyone working as long as they’d like, doing whatever they love so long as they can still get the job done. But Nick Nolte as a DEA field agent, fighting the drug wars along the border? The highest mileage 81 year-old on the face of the Earth? That’s a bit of a reach. I mean, it’s obvious why they wanted him, and not just the Nolte “name” to help get “Blackout” financed and filmed. Sure, his voice is shot and has a bit of a quavering shake to it. But if you’re looking for a character who gets good and irked when an undercover agent played by Josh Duhamel has had a car crash and lost his memory and is trapped in some sort of clinic with armed goons coming at him from every side, not everybody can bark these lines to a subordinate with the comical gravitas of Ol’Man Nolte.”How many 6’3″ Ken dolls just SHOW up, with bumps on their heads, within a 100 mile radius of Tucson, north OR south of the border? C’MON! What do I PAY you for?”

He plays John Cain, who somehow survives a point blank range machine gunning of his car, which then rolls in what appears to be the very definition of an “unsurviveable” wreck. That’s the “Ken doll” who wakes up not remembering who he is.

But he’s not buying that. And those orderlies. They look like extras from a drug wars movie. And so they are. John has to fight off that next injection and punch, choke, stab and shoot his way out of this Sonora clinic because somebody — maybe several somebodies — want him. And not all of them want him alive.

Eddie likes his shirts dark and his overcoats slung over his shoulders, like a Bond villain, Deutsche banker or ballet artistic director.Cliches abound in this nicely claustrophobic and mercifully brief slug-fest. Basically, all John does is try to get out of that clinic and reach out to people who might have known him, including the dogged DEA man hellbent on tracking him down.The stunts — Alex Krimm was the LA stunt coordinator, with Julian Bucio in charge south of the border — are good enough to make 50 year-old Duhamel a credible action star and make us believe Cornish is not to be trifled with either. But the long list of effects credits point to the trickery it takes to have a guy who allegedly just groggily staggered out of a hospital bed run up a wall or plunge into a little parkour.

Don’t expect much out of the story. And cherish Nolte while we’ve got him. Neither he nor Keith Richard is going to live forever, no matter how things look.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, profanity

Cast: Josh Duhamel, Abbie Cornish, Omar Chaparro and Nick Nolte.

Credits: Directed by Sam Macaroni, scripted by Van B. Nguyen. An XYZ film on Netflix.

Running time: 1:22

The Ukrainian Olga Kurylenko is in on the joke in “High Heat,” a glib, action-packed and surprisingly-amusing riff on the time-honored “I am NOT a person you’re gonna want to f— with!” thriller.

It’s a straight-up B-movie, and like a lot of them it tries too hard to be jokey. But all involved have a little fun with it, which pays dividends in the damnedest places.

Kurylenko wears her long Bond Babe locks loose in the kitchen as executive chef at EToile Rouge, micromanaging and somehow avoiding getting hair in the food. She barks orders, as a Russian chef in a high end French eatery should.

“I speak four languages and you’re telling me about MISCOMMUNICATION?”

Her husband Ray (Don Johnson) and co-owner is the glad-hander, a bourbon sipping charmer who runs the front of house, making every diner feel special.

“‘WALK-ins?’ NO. I’d rather be in the red than take ‘walk-ins!'”

It’s opening night and he’s got a framed four-star review in The New York Times to give her, which should tell us something, and not just that the screenwriter doesn’t know how restaurant reviewing works.

Because Ray’s got these “serious” guys who want to be seated. Actually, Mickey (Ivan Martin, going for a Vince Vaughn with glasses thing) needs Ray to come see Dom, his dad. And Ray is brushing him off.

Not good. And when the goons show up at closing time and Ray sees his maître d gunned down, he’s a little rattled. Not a lot, because this murder is never spoken of again. But things just got ugly.

It’s just that Dom’s son and Dom (Dallas Page) himself must not speak French. The name of the restaurant translates as “Red Star,” mon amis.

One testy telephone exchange of “I am NOT a person you wannas” later, and it’s go-time. How many made men does it take to take down on ex-KGB cook?

The lithe, athletic Kurylenko has long looked at home with fight choreography, and the right editing makes her a credible kick-ass here. Granted, she is playing a chef and a kitchen is filled to the ventilator fans with lethal weapons.

Director Zach Golden, whose other big screen credit is the Ron Perlman Western “The Escape of Prisoner 614,” keeps this more or less on its feet, if never entirely at a sprint. And everybody, including the “specialists” the mobsters summon when the chips are down, is in on the joke.

We’re talking “overtime rules” here, Dom.

But we need to take a little time to get to know the reinforcements Chef Anna (Anya) calls in. Things didn’t end well the last time she saw her old pal (Lover? Maybe?) Mimi. And now her fellow ex-spy is racing in from the suburbs, testing her in-counseling marriage and dragging along their teenage twins because “We don’t TRUST you!” alone in the house.

This whole story thread, with shades of “The Americans” and “RED,” in an unalloyed hoot. Whatever first-produced-screenplay writer James Pedersen put on the page, the casting of this flip and funny sidebar makes barely routine action picture just a smidge better than routine.

They cast real, snide and “Shining” scary twins (Chiara D’Ambrosio, Bianca D’Ambrosio) to play the girls annoyed at mom’s latest “bring your daughters to work” night. Chris Diamantopoulos of TV’s “Silicon Valley”) plays the patient sniper who takes his sweet time cleaning his rifle, riffing on the couples therapy speak their “on her THIRD marriage” marriage counselor fed to them on their many visits.

“I won’t let your stress disrupt my peace!”

But it is Kaitlin Doubleday of TV’s “Empire” and “Nashville” who really brings the funny to “High Heat.” Her face is a mask of intensity as she’s racing her family to the shootout in her sport maternity vehicle. Watch her “after school pick-up” face when she’s stopped by a “construction worker” who won’t let them through.

Listen to her the way she plays her reaction when Mimi’s loving husband suggests she cut someone they’ve captured “some slack” when the lady NEEDS some information.

“I wouldn’t exactly be a TORTURER if I ‘cut him some SLACK, Tom!”

“High Heat” isn’t remotely as gonzo as the funniest films of this genre. It’s limited, a B-movie with no prayer of ever having the resources, cast or comic rewrites of a “RED” or “Free Fire.”

But it is what it is, and it knows what it is — not a particularly novel or life changing experience, but not all bad either.

Rating: R, graphic violence

Cast: Olga Kurylenko, Ivan Martin, Dallas Page, Kaitlin Doubleday Chris Diamantopoulos, Chiara D’Ambrosio, Bianca D’Ambrosio and Don Johnson.

Credits: Directed by Zach Golden, scripted by James Pedersen. A Saban Films release.

Running time: 1:24

Billy Eichner came close to killing the gay rom-com back in September with “Bros.” Which was at least funny, even if nobody saw it. Now, here’s Jim Parsons driving a stake through the doomed gay romance.

Quite the fall. Pun intended.

“Spoiler Alert” is a weeper without tears, a dramedy with the dramatic edges rubbed off and nothing particularly funny about its “Disease of the Week” tragedy. It’s based on a memoir by a former TV Guide writer, and structured for the screen as a flaccid, endlessly voiced-over stunt in which our melodramatic memoirist remembers his childhood as the unhappiest sitcom this side of “The Conners.”

The great love of his life has died, but this is all about “me.”

And Parsons, lacking the “ba-DOOM-boom” rhythms of sitcom writing, is outclassed by “Fleabag” alumnus Ben Aldridge most of the time, even as he holds his own opposite Sally Field, who is off her game playing the mother of is character’s love interest.

It tells the story of a tepidly romantic thirteen-year love affair from the starting point of the our narrator’s other half dying. And here’s the spoiler alert about “Spoiler Alert.” It just doesn’t work.

Parsons plays Michael Ausiello, a TV Guide writer immersed in his craft — pitching “Every ‘Gilmore Girls’ character” in reverse order of obnoxiousness stories, “listicles” we call those in the trade.

Oddly, for a guy with a USC degree (we learn) he’s constantly having to have words like “chattel” and “atelier” explained to him by the hunky, “confident” ad man Kit (Aldridge) whom he meets at a gay club.

Lucky for Michael he’s “totally “Kit’s type,” a pale skinny dweeb.

They hook up and then date, and eventually Michael cannot put off inviting Kit to see his Jersey City apartment. It’s stuffed with Smurf collectibles.

“Oh God, it’s not a fetish,” is just what a guy who collects this stuff would say.

This relationship’s second biggest test will be Kit finally coming out to his parents — played by Bill Irwin and Sally Field. He’s pushing 30 and he’s never told them.

That’s another big moment of drama that isn’t in a movie that isn’t dramatic, a serious failing in a film in which we’re meant to invest in a relationship, see it tested and go “Terms of Endearment” tearful when cancer enters the picture. It doesn’t get us there.

Periodic flashbacks which can’t have worked all that well on the page take us back to Michael’s FFK (formerly fat kid) and gay childhood, sit-com scenes with a laugh track because nothing sentient would find so much as a chuckle in them.

And don’t get me started on the interminable fiasco of a third act.

Parsons was better in the sharper if dated “Boys in the Band” remake of a while back, but here he’s exposed as a classic TV “waist-up” actor, not knowing how to give us something in a close-up, but not bad at playing ungainly, seeing as how many years he had to master that via “The Big Bang Theory.” There is a romantic sparkle in his eyes you never picked up on the sitcom, and he sells his character’s attraction to the pin-up gym rat that Aldridge is typecast to play.

I’d be inclined to cut this picture some slack, as I enjoyed Parson’s run with “Big Bang,” and if anybody can make a mainstream, PG-13 gay romance palatable to the public at large, it’d have to be him.

But with every “No Longer Young Sheldon” dollop of voice-over, every moment that summons up memory’s of Cher’s greatest and most narcissistic “performance” — at Sonny Bono’s funeral — every place conflict was called for (Kit has a wandering eye, the parents potential disapproval)”Spoiler Alert” fails.

By the time the interminable finale reaches, over-reaches and gracelessly makes its exit, we’ve lost track of anything we found sweet, funny, charming or touching that came before it. Which is why I take notes, which in this case didn’t help.

Rating: PG-13 for sexual content, drug use and thematic elements

Cast: Jim Parsons, Ben Aldridge, Bill Irwin and Sally Field

Credits: Directed by Michael Showalter, scripted by David Marshall Grant and Dan Savage, based on a memoir by Michael Ausiello. A Focus Features release.

Running time: 1:52

“Jumping from High Places” is a sugary sweet, lightweight take on living with anxiety, a movie that gets credit for tackling the subject and showing off pretty people in a very pretty place — Bari, in Apulia on the very heel of the boot of Italy.

But as its framed as a 25 year-old’s decision to check off a bucket list of phobias left to her by her best friend, we know better than to expect anything particularly deep or wrenching, whatever the gravitas of Alice Urciuolo’s source novel.

Federica Torchetti of “Mondocane” is sad and winsome Sole, a young woman whose life is wholly circumscribed by her anxieties. She dropped out of art school because she’s afraid of “water, boats, amusement parks, bicycles, flying on planes, dogs” and so on.

There are levels to anxiety, she informs us — speaking to the camera in Italian, or dubbed into the language of your choice. “And I am proud to report that I am at the very top!

She’s off her meds, in therapy and getting a little better. But the return of the hunky brother, Massimo (Lorenzo Richelmy) , of her the best friend who left her a couple of years before throws anxious Sole for a loop.

A wealthy classmate Miriam (Celeste Savino) who has just gotten her Phd and who barely gave her the time of day back in school takes an interest in her. But Sole can hang with the former cool girls now cool young women all she wants. She has to get drunk to be able to remain at a party, and can’t even watch the region’s famous cliff divers plunge into the azure blue Mediterranean without a mid-level freakout.

When Massimo passes on a note sister Emma left for Sole, she starts thinking. And when Miriam and her crew get hold of it, they have a mission. Help Sole conquer a few fears. Check off this phobias list.

Her shrink endorses the idea. So will she make it on a plane, travel to Rome for art school, show others her sketches and make a pass at her age-old crush, Massimo?

Sole turns to the camera for many deadpan or cutesie reactions to this or that situation or suggestion, not quite minimizing her fears that “everyone is in on a secret” and that secret is judging and mocking her in everything she says or does.

The cutest little neighbor dog sends her fleeing in the opposite direction.

There’s only one attempt to visualize with the camera what’s going on in Sole’s head, to let us see her world upended by being in a crowd, stepping on a boat or the merest frown from a stranger (she takes on a waitressing job…for one scene).

As I noted, the film gets credit for tackling the subject, but not much more than that. This is superficial in the extreme, more of a teen rom-com treatment than a suffering adult’s wrestling with the disease.

Still, the scenery’s swell, the cast is so very Italian — gorgeous and effortlessly stylish. The costumer could only go so far to give Sole a repressed nerdy look — dresses and blouses buttoned to the very top.

I didn’t find “Jumping from High Places” offensive, or particularly illuminating. But it does seem harmless enough for what it is, and that’s not exactly an endoresement.

Rating: TV-14

Cast: Federica Torchetti, Celeste Savino, Cristiano Caccamo and Massimo Di Lorenzo

Credits: Directed by Andrea Jublin, scripted by Chiara Parenti, based on the novel by Alice Urciuolo. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:29

Let’s find out if James Cameron still has his “King of the world” mojo.

Three hours +, in new immersive 3D, a long long delayed sequel in multiplexes starved for a blockbuster.

Let’s hope it’s not all wet.

This is the Philippine trailer, BTW

“Twisted” is a lukewarm, slow-walking thriller built around a co-dependent relationship between a widowed mother and her troubled, introverted teen daughter.

It’s not helped along its merry way by clumsy plotting, slack direction and stiff performances, which seem more amateurish the further away from the leads that you get. But you can see the promising seeds that gave birth to it, even if they weren’t nurtured all the way to harvest.

Hannah (Madeleine Masson of “Karma”) is 18, trying to find direction, focus and love in a rural town in the timbered far west. Her mother Silvia (Karen Leigh Sharp), dotes on her to the point of clinging. She expects this devotion to be reciprocated. Mom wants a backrub after a hard day working as a doctor in the local clinic.

Is that Mom spying on Hannah as she meets her new beau for a little make-out session under the underpass? And Dr. Mom can get downright crude when questioning her daughter’s sex life.

“I don’t know how many snakes you’ve invited into your cave!”

Lonely Hannah’s making some sketchy friends at school. Raven (Lexy Ronning) and Victor (Joshua Malekos) are awfully keen on getting her to “come hunting” with them. That’ll entail sneaking out and making out, and a bit of drinking as they have fun with firearms and shoot mostly inedible wildlife, apparently for trophy mounting.

That “secret hunting society” means raccoon and pheasant gutting. Good times.

But when the guy Hannah claims she’s “not that close to” winds up dead, she finds herself questioned by law enforcement and having flashbacks to her childhood, which she turns into disturbing sketches for art class.

All that first act exposition and action points the viewer towards one conclusion, no matter how many other possible suspects are considered. The movie is about Hannah’s response to all this as she meanders through adolescence with questions about boys, conflicted loyalties and the seriously creepy vibe her hypodermic-happy mother (diabetes) puts out there.

There are night sequences in “Twisted” in which one can barely make out the action, and most every scene that’s meant to build tension and suspense just mopes by until the third act, where we get a taste of competently-handled action.

As I said, the leads are OK, but several supporting players don’t bring enough to the table to make their performances compelling or believable. But that may tie into pacing and filmmaking other issues which point straight at Danish writer-director Sofie Vibeke Muasya.

She did a little-seen kidnapping thriller, “Lost in Africa.” Was it better than this? Because the evidence from “Twisted” is that she’s not very good at the thriller basics, clear and concise storytelling or the craft of directing actors.

Rating: Unrated, graphic violence, sexual situations

Cast: Madeleine Masson, Karen Leigh Sharp, Joshua Malekos, Lexy Ronning

Credits: Scripted and directed by Sofie Vibeke Muasya. An Alarm Films release.

Running time: 1:25