Movie Nation

Today’s version of the “Hero’s Journey” is a Chinese folktale rendered into an impressive-looking mess of a mashup — part medieval fantasy, with Minatours and shape shifters, “Mad Max” post-apocalyptic car chases, firearms and flesh.

“Green Snake” is like the cover of a Robert W. Howard “Conan” book rendered in CGI anime animation — violent and lurid, with lots of action and a little skin.

The story? Well, let’s just say it’s more impressive to look at than to try and follow and absorb.

“Green Snake” is a sequel to a GKids animated folk tale of a few years back, thus the new film’s full title in Chinese — “Bai She 2: Qing She jie qi,” aka “White Snake 2: The Tribulation of the Green Snake.”

One of our heroines, Blanca, was trapped in a magical purgatory by an evil sorcerer. Her sister Verta is obsessed with freeing her. That’s how she winds up a thousand years removed from her Song Dynasty world of magical powers — she could fly, armed with a light sabre with tendrils for blades.

Verta wakes up in a ruined China of the future, a blasted wasteland called Asuraville, populated with humans, demons, spirits, as well as Ox Heads, Horse Heads, “Raska” and octopi.

Verta’s journey to free Blanca means she must find a way out of this place, partly by using her wits, fighting and parkour skills to survive as she’s lost her powers, largely from asking every human (ish) person she meets to lay out another long chapter of exposition.

Is this punishment? Who ends up here?”

“People who cannot accept reality,” she is told. It has to do with obsessions, “unfulfilled desires” that take over your life. “If you’re here, it’s clearly because you can’t let go.“

Verta can’t let go of Blanca. Her odyssey leads her to all sorts of ways out of Asuraville, into all sorts of fights with a shifting series of alliances.

It’s easier to follow than it it so explain as a movie plot. “Green Snake” isn’t awful, just kind of nonsensical, a time-sucking quest tale that has little that’s original mixed in with all the derivations.

The fun bits are a montage of Verta being shown how to cope with cars, flashlights, motorcycles, laptops and soda cans.

We don’t have to wonder if she’ll transition to a warrior’s halter-top sports bra. That’s a given.

I kind of like the Eastern mysticism floating through the odd bits of dialogue. Even the villain, Fahai, has his moments.

“I am not worthy,” he admits. “Dharma is eternal…The pursuit of illusion bars the way to Nirvana.”

You don’t say? Changed my life. Actually, “Green Snake” just sucked a couple of hours out it.

If you stay through the credits, which do NOT list the English language (Netflix) voice cast, there’s a hint of more “Snakes” to come.

Rating: TV-14, fear, violence

Credits: Directed by Amp Wong, scripted by Damoa. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:13

Half a century into his career, and the king of Spanish cinema is still working on his Mommy Issues.

‘Parallel Mothers” gives us Pedro Almodóvar in his 70s, past the rambunctious, liberating and boundary pushing cinema of his “Women on the Verge” youth, a gay filmmaker who grew up in the fascist Spain of Franco coming to grips with his own legacy and his country’s.

He does it by marrying a story of single-motherhood and the loss of a child with a family history of single moms, the first of whom was given that status when a fascist hit squad made her husband disappear. It’s a brilliant conceit that invites us to read in Almodóvar’s own history and what he himself sees as his legacy — movies, many of them brilliant, but no children to carry on the family name.

Almodóvar considers this through his protagonist, Janis (his longtime muse Penélope Cruz), and cleverly compares the loss she feels in the present day with the lingering pain generations of her family carry over the lack of closure with their murdered ancestor in a country that’s tried to reconcile its murderous Catholo-fascist past and move on.

Janis is a fashion and magazine photographer in Madrid who meets a forensic anthropologist (Israel Elejalde) on an assignment, and proceeds to tell him her family’s tragic history, the ancestor taken from his home, shot and buried in a mass grave outside of the small town where she grew up.

She knows where the bodies were buried. Everyone there does. But no one — official or informal — has dug up the dead, identified them and given them a proper burial, leaving this an open wound that has spanned generations for everyone related to someone buried in that grim, unmarked memorial to the Spanish Civil War.

Arturo can help. It doesn’t hurt that Janis is a knockout. That’s how these two, thrown together by tragedy and work, wind up in bed with an “accident” putting Janis in a shared maternity room with teenaged Ana (Milena Smit) some months down the road.

Ana is also facing childbirth as a result of an “accident.” But Janis doesn’t “regret” hers. Ana does.

They bond, with Janis pitching in on the mothering that Ana’s self-absorbed actress-mother (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón) isn’t doing, and give birth to babies with just a hint of “complications” that put them in the observation ward.

It isn’t until Arturo, now out of the picture, asks to see the baby that Janis starts to wonder about the tyke that her best friend (Rossy de Palma) has already described as a bit “ethnic,” code for darker Latin American “Indian” genetic traits.

“I don’t recognize her,” Arturo tactlessly declares. He doesn’t think it’s his. Janis is furious. A flashback shows how she made an earlier break from Arturo on telling him the news of her pregnancy. She wants nothing from him.

“I will be a single mother, like my mother before me, and her mother before her!” (in Spanish with English subtitles).

But as angry as she is, she has eyes and Internet access. One genetic test kit later, she has her answer. It’s just that she doesn’t tell anyone. She simply cozies up to Ana, and changes her phone number to avoid telling Arturo he was right.

Almodóvar’s films, even the comedies, have soap operatic melodrama woven into their stories. “Baby switch” is classic soap stuff, and much of what follows only “works” in that sort of par-for-the-course soap universe.

But keeping his camera tight on Cruz, he tells the story of her agony with her eyes and the occasional tear. If she’s manipulating Ana and keeping Arturo at arm’s length, she has her reasons.

And every reminder of the lone “connection” she has with her baby daddy — that hoped-for uncovering of, identifying and re-burying her ancestor — reminds us of the legacy of pain and loss that is her shared lot with millions of present-day Spaniards.

Almodóvar does an adequate job of marrying these two disparate stories, even if he has to skate past gaps in the logic and clumsily-handled flashbacks.

But he hitched his wagon to Cruz wisely, all those years ago. She makes us feel every gut-punch loss Janis faces and bears up under. That keeps us going through the absurd and ever-so-Almodóvar sexual twists and turns in the tale, and keeps us engaged until the picture’s intensely moving payoff.

This isn’t one of the filmmaker’s great films, but it is a serious return to form and a movie that makes us feel the pain of women — in childbirth. in disappointment and in loss — as intensely as he does.

And that, for those who’ve been paying attention, is his legacy.

Rating: R, for some sexuality

Cast: Penélope Cruz, Milena Smit, Rossy de Palma, Aitana Sánchez-Gijón and Israel Elejalde

Credits: Scripted and directed by Pedro Almodóvar. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

Running time: 2:03

Star Ethan Hawke introduces, out of character, Abel Ferrara’s latest film with a little reminder of “what we’ve been living through” the last couple of years, and a professed “I can’t wait to see” what Ferrara’s come up with this time.

That tells us several things about the movie, “Zeroes and Ones,” that follows. Its star either didn’t get to see the finished film, or he did and he’s not going too far out on a limb endorsing it, either from doubts about it or confusion as to its point.

And Ferrara himself felt the need to “cheat” with this sort of prologue, telling a viewer how to best appreciate his minimal-but-not-quite-minimalist exercise in movie making under limited lockdown in Italia. He’s asking us to grade-it-on-the-curve.

That’s sort of like sticking a cute Sigourney Weaver cameo in the closing credits of your slick but empty “Ghostbusters” money grab, hoping to at least spin your way into a better movie.

Ferrara needs this “how to watch it” help because the paranoid tale he sets out to tell is neither wholly coherent nor particularly compelling.

Hawke — as he’s explained in that prologue — plays two roles, that of a US soldier in Rome and that of the soldier’s brother, a terrorist or “revolutionary” imprisoned somewhere undergoing “enhanced interrogation (water boarding, drugging) to try and prevent an attack from his “group.”

There’s a lot of wordless hiking, in COVID mask, fatigues and combat gear, through the empty streets, along empty rooftops and down darkened passageways. Soldiers get their temperature checked, embark and debark from trucks, sweep across empty parks — searching.

As a woman (Valeria Correale) soldier Hawke (distinguished by having his hair tied back) knows asks, “Have you figured out what you’re doing in my country?”
The soldier gives the filmmaker’s answer to her. “Working on it.”

We glimpse, either live-streamed and recorded, Islamic terror threats that “call on you (the West, the US, etc.) to be people of principle.” Or else.

An interrogator (Valerio Mastandrea) asks a two word question of the unkempt, raving, hair-down prisoner Hawke.

“What? Where?”

“Your enemy won’t be gone when you kill me,” the terrorist growls between water-boardings.

Drugging him turns his aversion to answering questions into free form Woody Guthrie quoting, rants about that ultimate act of protest, the one that was the beginning of the end in Vietnam, and the beginning of the Arab Spring.

“How come no one is setting themselves on fire?” He’d do it, he screams. With a pandemic, the rise of fascist nationalism and America descending into Trumpism, it’s time, he figures.

The soldier and others have an idea of the target — Rome itself, Vatican City specifically, “the capital” of Christendom, “Death to the infidels,” another shot in a “3000 year war,” our soldier opines. “Thousand year war,” a Muslim prisoner later corrects him.

Ferrara wants brownie points for faking all this under extreme filmmaking conditions, as does ever other filmmaker who told a “pandemic story” during the pandemic.

But the obscurant strain of it all shows. Most of what’s here would be filler in a better film, or bullet point scenes in a story more wholly-shaped and worked out.

Ferrara fans will recognize hints of his recurring themes, and the increased concerns of his dotage (he moved to Italy/got out of America for a variety of reasons).

And you’ll spot his wife, Cristina Chiriac, laughing in a couple of scenes, and their little girl Anna with the mysterious woman in another.

I think that’s a Ferrara cameo as a masked, cowled monk.

But none of that, or the not-special-at-all effects and self-consciously “arty” touches. really matter. If it weren’t for that “think of what I did, and under what conditions” prologue, none of us would give this a second thought. Including the picture’s star.

Rating:  R for language, some violence, bloody images, sexual material and drug content

Cast: Ethan Hawke, Valerio Mastandrea, Valeria Correale, Cristina Chiriac, Anna Ferrara

Credits: Scripted and directed by Abel Ferrara. A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1:26

Nastiness coming our way Jan.4.

Beware.

Gorgeous lesbians stripping down and working up a sweat, enterprisingly making their own sex toys because Amazon didn’t exist then, threats and scheming and intrigues.

Let’s just say whoever told that cinematic sinner Paul Verhoeven to “Get thee to a nunnery,” quoting Shakespeare, did us all a favor. Because he did.

“Benedetta” is a gripping, graphic and shockingly moving film biography of Benedetta Carlini, a 17th century Italian nun who claimed to have visions, spoke in what sounded like an otherworldly voice during trances, displayed stigmata and even took over the Theatine convent where she lived, driving the Catholic Church a bit mad with her hijinks but beloved by the good people of Pescia.

Because this woman said she was a literal “bride of Christ,” and that was good enough for them. Carrying on a torrid affair with a fellow nun? Well, nobody’s perfect, not even somebody some 17th century Italians were sure was a living saint.

What an odd subject for the director of “Showgirls,” “Black Book” and “Basic Instinct” to take on. But the whole enterprise is odd.

It has a Belgian actress actress (Virginie Efira) in the title role, another Belgian (Daphne Patakia) as Bartolomea, her “sister” and lover, and the Great Brit Charlotte Rampling as the Abbess at their convent.

It’s an Italian story, acted in French and directed by a Dutch blasphemer.

Verhoeven veers between low comedy camp and religious ecstasy in this often entertaining period piece about someone who really lived and apparently really believed, although there were plenty of “sisters” who were sure she was just faking it, even back then.

The movie’s first “miracle” comes when she’s 12, her wealthy family is on the way to the convent and robbers steal her mother’s jewels. Little Miss Holier Than Thou — literally — isn’t having it.

“The Blessed Virgin will PUNISH you,” Benedetta (Elena Plonka) threatens. And sure enough, the leaves in the tree above them bustle, and a bird poops right in the eye of the offending robber. The jewels are returned. Even brigands know an Act of God when they see it.

Taking residence with the Theatines, the child prays to a statue of the Blessed Virgin, which falls on her, pressing a bare wooden breast in her face.

Another miracle? It supposedly really happened, but Verhoeven has fun with it.

Years later, Benedetta’s eccentricities come to the fore when she intervenes and gets an abused local girl, Bartolomea, admitted to their order. In an instant, the pious and pretty nun is tested and tempted by the uninhibited, unfiltered and uncouth farmgirl.

“I’m beautiful,” the newcomer wants to know? “We had no mirrors.”

Come “see your reflection in my eyes,” Benedetta tells her. “Closer. CLOSER.”

For a movie that plays reasonably straight and fair with this true story, Verhoeven can’t resist having a laugh, here and there.

But in between the japes and some “Showgirls in a 17th century convent” sex scenes, the picture is as serious as “Saint Joan.” Benedetta’s visions can be beatific — summoned by Jesus (hunky Jonathan Couzini) as a flock of sheep parts to invite her in where he gives her the Good Word.

And then there’s the time he’s nailed to the cross and he asks his “bridge” to come close and get, well, intimate.

Yes, there have been protests.

Efira, probably best-known abroad for the French-speaking version of the middle-aged men’s synchronized swimming comedy “Sink or Swim,” ably gets across the fanaticism, the clear-eyed true believer in Benedetta. At times, she might be playing cagey over her “miracles,” at others an innocent, lured into sex with this wild-thing that’s been moved into her cell at the convent.

Both Efira and Patakia seriously sell the heat of attraction, with Efira playing passive, at first, and oh so “thirsty” later.

Rampling’s Abbess, Sister Felicita, is the most nuanced character in this — patient and compassionate, but seriously skeptical about all this supernaturalism ruling her world.

“Miracles sprout like mushrooms,” she coos, in French with English subtitles. Best not be too hasty striking those silver “Saint Benedetta” medals, sisters.

The well-traveled Lambert Wilson (“DeGaulle,” the early “Matrix” movies) makes a fine villain of the piece, the papal nuncio sent to investigate this possibly heretical charismatic.

Whatever playful touches Verhoeven indulges in, the entertainment value in “Benedetta” is seeing his mixed feelings about her unfold over the course of the film. He’s lightly mocking, then seriously considering her “condition,” going for crowd-pleasing lesbian love scenes and pondering the dangers of “coming out” in that age, and the power and influence Benedetta was able to accumulate between what seems to have become an open secret.

And there’s something unutterably moving about someone facing death at the stake.

Sitting on the fence about the character makes this a more measured movie than a younger Verhoeven might have given us, less of a lampoon. As that’s what he does best — well, that and sex scenes — his ambivalence holds “Benedetta” back. He hasn’t lost his touch, although in sports terms, we can see he’s lost something off his fastball.

But it’s still a fascinating story, told with enough period detail, humor, compassion and nudity to hold our attention for two hours. Paul Verhoeven never bores.

Rating: unrated, graphic violence, explicit sex, nudity

Cast: Virginie Efira, Charlotte Rampling, Daphne Patakia and Lambert Wilson.

Credits: Directed by Paul Verhoeven, scripted by Davie Birke and Paul Verhoeven, based on a book by Judith C. Brown. IFC release.

Running time: 2:11

Love that Almodovar. Don’t you “Vote for Pedro?”

https://youtu.be/cL6JDYkRa2g

A sophisticated Spanish comedy about “swingers” and “swinging,” wrestling with the emptiness of such pursuits, the dehumanizing nature of orgies among the anonymous and the coarsening of the culture that results from such pursuits?

Nah. “More the Merrier (Donde Caben Dos)” is just about the sex, the skin, the exchange of…fake names.

It was directed by “Paco Cabellero.” Tell me that’s not a porn pseudonym, and no, I’m not looking up his “credits.” That would spoil the joke.

“More the Merrier” is pitched as a sex farce, and it sort of delivers on that labeling. Well, not the “farce” part. The script — which never quite crosses the line into “piggish,” even though all the screenwriters were guys (A Netflix Miracle!) — follows five different trips through the swinger experience, ranging from too predictable to be funny, to “real romance” (yeah, that happens in swinger clubs) and AWKward.

And that’s not even counting the one that celebrates copulating cousins.

Here’s what works and has the most promise. Alba and Liana (María León, Aixa Villagrán) wake up so hung over they don’t remember the night before. Mid-binge, Liana dragged her about-to-marry pal to Club Paradiso, where the “Leave your ‘feelings outside,'” and “the sexual revolution begins here and now” owner/hostess (Ana Milán) presides.

Alba lost her engagement ring on the eve of her wedding and they have to sober up (and clean up) enough to go back and find it.

The hostess doesn’t want to re-admit them, and they have no idea why. What on Earth could they have done to get “banned?” What were they on? And where did she lose the ring — in the pool, the pick-up-your-partner bar, in the “labyrinth,” a BDSM Room, some other “private” and consensual corner, by the “Glory Hole?”

The mind reels.

Their odyssey through a night-long search includes stumbling into a guy they left nearly naked, bound and gagged the night before, encountering smirking strangers who plainly “knew” them in the Biblical sense, and so on.

As conventional as that “Hangover” in a swinger’s club storyline might feel, that at least worked.

The couple (Raúl Arévalo, Melina Matthews) dragged there at “her” insistence, only to hook up with a couple that secretly includes his ex (Verónica Echegui) doesn’t amount to much.

The two long-married couples (Pilar Castro, Ernesto Alterio, María Morales, Luis Callejo) who start an evening in which the guys are conspiring to turn into a wife-swap begins with “truth or dare” and goes downhill from there.

The two gay guys (Álvaro Cervantes, Ricardo Gómez) who hook up in “The Glory Hole” and find themselves chatting and connecting on opposite sides of that wall with holes in it has promise, as a sketch maybe.

But this business of a woman (Anna Castillo) who drags her formerly-close, buttoned-down businessman/cousin (Miki Esparbé) to the club, where she works, to loosen him up, only to…never mind.

Spain, amIright?

The only scenes that produce chuckles are the ones with our intrepid bride-to-be and her mouthy, brash pal Liana — stirring up bad memories, bad behavior and bad feelings about an impending marriage as they hunt for a lost ring.

The rest are an explicit skin-on-skin wash, too talky to be all that titillating, too shallow to say anything important about such places, modern love and what not.

But if you want to know what your kids are sneaking behind your back and watching on Netflix, there you go.

Rating: TV-MA, explicit sex, nudity

Cast: María León, Aixa Villagrán, Raúl Arévalo, Melina Matthews, Álvaro Cervantes, Ricardo Gómez, Pilar Castro, Ernesto Alterio, María Morales, Luis Callejo, Anna Castillo, Miki Esparbé, Ana Milán and Verónica Echegui.

Credits: Directed by Paco Caballero, scripted by Daniel González, Eric Navarro, Eduard Sola and
Paco Caballero. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:52

The video director of the last newspaper I worked for was the first person who admitted to me he and his wife were watching evey movie they viewed at home with the subtitles on.

That was probably a dozen years ago. And I recall thinking “We’re all getting older, soooo… “

But that made me notice how many movies were burying the dialogue in the sound mix, not forcing retakes from mumbling actors, not allowing screenwriters on the set to defend the idea that their words matter.

Then we started hearing what Christopher Nolan was doing with his sound mixes.

I didn’t feel so bad for turning on the subtitles for everything I watch. It helps if I’m quoting dialogue on the review. That’s my excuse, anyway.

I stream three or four movies a day, and I have to stop and rewind more and more of them if I want to get the quoted dialogue right. Watch enough classic films and you notice the difference.

Are directors, often listening to a take through headphones on the set, that clueless about the mumbling and whispering?

Are they too timid to ask for “One more take, LOUDER and more ARTICUCULATED?”

Here’s a good piece from Slashfilm about the state of the problem and the wide range of reasons for it. And no, it’s not because Hollywood is hiring deaf or incompetent sound mixers.

Steven Spielberg opens his take on “West Side Story” on a construction site where New York’s famed West Side landmark, Lincoln Center, is under construction. It’s the mid-1950s, and he’s reminding us that the musical was capturing a moment in time, as Manhattan wasn’t just transforming ethnically. The neighborhood where this “Romeo & Juliet with Songs” is set was literally being torn down.

America’s most successful filmmaker brings back Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony winning (EGOT) triple threat Rita Moreno, the breakout star of the 1961 film of “West Side Story.” Tony Kushner (“Angels in America,” “Munich,””Lincoln), adapting and modernizing “West Side Story,” created a new character for her and Spielberg gave this new character one of the signature songs from the iconic musical.

And what emerges from this “modern audiences” version, this recasting and resetting, is a “story” that brings us closer to Shakespeare’s tragedy of young love, the inspiration for the original show. If anything the new film, with its mostly-little-known cast singing the classic songs, packs even more of an emotional punch.

Whatever we’ve always taken from “West Side Story,” Spielberg makes damned sure we remember it’s heartbreaking. He’s always been good at stories with “heart” and movies that deliver tears.

But Spielberg doesn’t reinvent or even improve on the great Robert Wise film of 1961. It’s still a show that hangs on the lyrics of just-passed legend Stephen Sondheim. How do you improve on this?

“Maria! Say it loud and there’s music playing,
Say it soft and it’s almost like praying.”

The new “West Side Story” gives us a dazzling new Anita, the role Moreno immortalized on screen. Ariana DeBose (“Hamilton”) sizzles in the part and pops off screen and takes over the movie.

Just. Like. Rita. If you’re casting a film with song or dance in it and DeBose is not your first call, get in another line of work.

Ansel “Baby Driver” Elgort doesn’t embarrass himself as Tony, the “white boy” who falls for Maria, even if he’s not looking at a record deal after this. Newcomer Rachel Zegler makes our winsome heroine Maria a convincing heartbreaker and showcases a lovely, light soprano singing voice.

Their lock-eyes-across-a-crowded gym dance floor moment lets us buy into their romance.

David Alvarez, as Bernardo, leader for the Puerto Rican gang The Sharks, has the build and machismo to be instantly credible as a tough guy with a little boxing in his background. But the Sharks/Jets gangs look even more like corps de ballet than the dancers from back in ’61 — lithe, athletic and fey.

That’s fine, as we remember even the climactic gang “rumble” always leans more on choreography than being credibly violent-looking. If you’re going for “reality,” casting real dancers as gang bangers is always going to trip you up.

An interesting wrinkle — I didn’t hear anyone refer to the character “Anybodys” by name. Iris Menas plays the character as more obviously transgender than the mere “tomboy” that came across in 1961. Kushner serves up fresh and frank gay-bashing abuse for Anybodys from the Jets, whom the police lieutenant (Corey Stoll) scathingly labels “the last of the can’t-make-it Caucasians.”

The “Dance at the Gym” dance-off is the first number that lets Justin Peck’s updating of Jerome Robbins’ original choreography truly shine.

“America,” Anita’s sassy, sarcastic ode to Puerto Rican reasons for moving from the island to the mainland, is still a show stopper and just as hilarious and politically pointed as ever.

“Immigrant goes to America,
Many hellos in America;
Nobody knows in America
Puerto Rico’s in America!“

Be it 1961 or 2021, “West Side Story” still works.

The new “Story” is a little more visually razzle-dazzle oriented, as you’d expect. Extreme closeups, arresting camera angles, swooping shots that “open up” the big production numbers, using real streets to amp up authenticity.

If you’ve never seen the original “West Side Story,” you must’ve been living under a rock with the rest of Musical Haters Anonymous. And updated or not, I’m not sure Spielberg will reach a new audience with this. It isn’t “Hamilton.”

What Spielberg does for fans of the show and the film is create a new appreciation for what a towering, enduring achievement this musical is. I also came away with a new sense of awe at what Robert Wise was able to accomplish with giant, unwieldy film cameras on soundstages and a few perfectly-chosen locations sixty years ago.

Spielberg finds more grit and reality, even if there’s no improving on the show’s topicality or untoppable tunes. It’s a good film. Will families gather round whatever video streaming device extant to watch it 60 years from now, the way we have with the 1961 film? No. This “West Side” is good, not great.

But the joyous, moving and racially-charged show “West Side Story” has always been still makes this a must-see movie for the holidays and a worthy successor to a classic.

Rating: PG-13 for some strong violence, strong language, thematic content, suggestive material and brief smoking.

Cast: Ansel Elgort, Rachel Zegler, Ariana DeBose, David Alvarez, Mike Faist, Josh Andrés Rivera, Iris Menas, Corey Stoll and Rita Moreno

Credits: Directed by Steven Spielberg, adapted by Tony Kushner from the musical by Arthur Laurents, Stephen Sondheim and Leonard Bernstein. A 20th Century release.

Running time: 2:36

It’s not uncommon for first time writer-directors to make movies about a “hero” they identify with — at least a little — and a situation seen from the point of view of someone like them.

That’s not necessarily a good thing.

Editor turned first-time writer-director David Beinstein’s “Are You Happy Now” is built around somebody with mental health “issues” and a relationship that makes no sense on paper, but somehow is supposed to work. The characters are young, urban and Jewish and have a big (ish) Jewish wedding, only to figure out that “makes no sense on paper” thing afterwards.

Without knowing him, one cannot know how much Beinstein “identifies” with his aimless, impulse-control slacker hero, Adam. But he must. Because that’s who his film follows, who he gives most of the scenes and attention to. Beinstein pretty much forgets his leading lady Gina for over half the movie.

That makes for a film with a few scattered laughs in a story that’s so myopic as to be dull, with whatever “heart” it might have had left wherever Beinstein parks Gina for most of the movie.

We don’t expect that, as Gina (Ismenia Mendes) is the voice-over narrator of the opening scenes.

“He was broken,” she says of Adam (Josh Ruben). She doesn’t have to say “I thought I could fix him.” It’s implied.

They’re cute together, but the moment she says “I need intimacy, REAL intimacy,” the “intimacy issues” come to the fore. Gina is constantly bucking Adam up, even though he has no purpose, no aim in life beyond being with her. Her go-to “fix” for him is acupuncture, which she’s “learning.” He goes along with it because “You LIKE it when I’m bossy.”

Adam is an inept waiter/food delivery guy for this too-tolerant chef/cafe-owner (Blake DeLong) who turns out to be his brother. Brother Leo stops chiding Adam about “f—–g up” his relationship, about how “She’s GOOD for you” and the like to finally kick his brother to the curb.

Adam leaves the job he’s just been fired from by stealing a cake and hurtling out the door.

During his deliveries, Adam had stumbled across this acting class whose teacher (Danny Johnson) seems like a nice enough fellow. That leads to Adam calling himself “an actor” when asked, for a bit. Job hunting only plops him in an even worse restaurant situation, a fast food dump called “Just Chicken.”

Because basically Gina is all he’s got. He’s been planning to propose, and failing, one of the reasons Leo says he’s “f—–g up.” But one of their arguments ends the way we know it must. He pops the question. Gina, Ms. “Matrimony is a LIE,” isn’t having it. At first. But Adam can be persuasive.

“I don’t want to OWN you. I want to DIE with you. Or be there when you die.”‘

That’s kind of funny, and that’s about as funny as any of the dialogue gets.

Gina? She slips into the background and then out of the scene altogether as Adam spends more and more time with new, needy sibling-issues “Just Chicken” boss Walt (David Ebert).

What does hapless Adam have in common with downtrodden Walt? They lack confidence, perhaps induced by older, more successful siblings. What can they do about that, aside from bonding over Walt’s pet chickens? Maybe they both could use an acting class.

Ebert’s the funniest player in this, with Ruben — playing a scatterbrained character who spent a few weeks in a “mental health facility” — reduced to being a disheveled reactor to everything that’s going on around him in their scenes.

That doesn’t make for much of a movie. “Are You Happy Now” feels random, with sequences and situations sort of slapped together in a less than wholly logical order. Not exactly what you’d expect in a feature film made by a film editor.

There’s a funny bit here and there. The father-in-law (Ed Jewett) gives Adam a check at the wedding, post-dating it twenty years. “It’s a wedding gift…from the FUTURE.”

But there’s little to grab hold of and embrace in this comedy. Ebert may be the funniest actor on set but Mendes is the most interesting.

And who does Beinstein make the movie about? Adam, another “cute” mentally ill person, played with an aimless, abortive mania by Ruben. Looking at the wrongheaded-from-inception finished film, we can only wonder “Why?”

Which brings me back to my opening point. If we’re destined to see movies about characters filmmakers see themselves in, “Are You Happy Now” is a poster-child film for diversity. That mediocrity like this gets made, financed and distributed is a great argument for “Let’s see what that Latinx, Asian, African American woman or young man has to pitch.” It has to be better than this.

Rating: unrated, sexual situations

Cast: Josh Ruben, Ismenia Mendes, David Ebert, Blake DeLong and Danny Johnson.

Credits: Scripted and directed by David Beinstein. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:35