Movie Nation

The Canadian actress Mackenzie Davis was “This year’s tall, willowy and funny blonde” oh, about five years ago — in the midst of a run that included TV’s “Halt and Catch Fire” and movies that peaked with “The Martian” and “Tully.”

She’s the co-star of the next “Terminator,” remade as a new Charlize Theron in action mode.

“Izzy Gets the F**k Across Town” is an LA ramble of a comedy, an indie version of a hundred other “Get Him to the Greek,” “Saving Silverman” romantic comedies.

She plays Izzy. Her ex-fiance is about to marry a former friend. She’s pissed. She’s woken up in a stranger’s bed, her catering waitress faux-tux uniform covered in wine stains. Her car’s been in “the shop,” “shop” here meaning a stoner friend’s off-the-books “garage” for weeks. She has no money, has worn out her welcome with the friends she’s staying with.

And she needs to “get the f–k across town” to this engagement party/pre-nuptials event.

The movie is about that jaunt, and Mackenzie Davis, still in that ruined uniform, calling in favors nobody owes her, collecting a beater of a car that may never get fixed, swiping a Schwinn, refusing bus rides, catching a lift with a onetime client’s (Haley Joel Osment) “girlfriend” (Alia Shawkat), “but first, I’ve just gotta make this one stop (B& E?), shrieking “F–K!” at every fresh foulup, as Izzy.

That’s it. That’s the movie.

Davis is perfectly pleasant to spend time with, has a nice series of meltdowns as we pick up on what brought her to LA, her “peak” moment (years before, a musical showcase at South by Southwest), and the swath she’s cut through a side of LA the movies rarely show.

“Cyrus” and “The Big Lebowski” are two slices of that “dull, sprawling suburbia gone to seed” Greater Los Angeles. But even their versions of the “seedier, duller side” are funnier than this, which looks as if it was filmed, pretty much start to finish, at 7:20 on a Sunday morning.

The video game director turned writer-director, Christian Papiernak, was worth taking a flier on with this close-to-home, shot on the cheap comedy.

But it didn’t pay off. Not many scripted funny moments, and the funny folks involved rarely rise above them.

That makes “Izzy Gets” the classic “Let’s try this” on Netflix, Amazon, Hulu or what have you, a film that starts feebly, gets its feet under it, but never goes anywhere.

MPAA Rating: unrated, adult situations, profanity

Cast: Mackenzie Davis, LaKeith Stanfield, Haley Joel Osment, Alia Skawkat, Carrie Coon, Annie Potts.

Credits: Written and directed by Christian Papierniak. A Shout! Factory release.

Running time: 1:26

It’s no secret that many of the great comics are and were never the most pleasant people to deal with.

I remember a confab of critics I was part of in a hotel bar in LA one time when we started swapping notes on “the worst” interviews we’d ever been a part of. “Early Jerry Seinfeld,” before the vast wealth, before the mellower years AFTER “Seinfeld,” was hands-down the consensus winner.

And that was before I tracked down Jackie Mason for a phoner. Rude, bitter and a bigot, to boot.

Patrick McGilligan’s “Funny Man: Mel Brooks,” punctures some of Mel Brooks’ lovable, “always on” manic public persona. It’s a classic “warts and all” biography, that taps into the published and unpublished memoirs of his “Club Caesar” colleagues — the writers, some of whom became famous a lot earlier than Brooks (playwright Neil Simon, playwright and curator of TV’s “M*A*SH” Larry Gelbart, Carl Reiner and”Bye Bye Birdie” and “Hello Dolly” librettist Michael Stewart) on Caesar’s various 1940s, 50s and ’60s TV shows — as well as court records, letters and reminiscences.

Arrogant, ill-tempered, a “credit thief” without peer, brown nose, “serial cheater” and “deadbeat dad” are the descriptions that make one flinch in the book. Yeah, he’s lovable and now in his ’90s, but maybe the anecdotes and spin that he’s woven into his life story are largely bunk.

Or at least exaggerated.

He got his big break by becoming Sid Caesar’s clingiest acolyte, paid to be a sidekick and eventually Sid’s personal writer even though he regarded many “real” comedy writers as “typists.” He was a “talking writer,” his colleagues (Carl Reiner is the most charitable) suggest, antic while bouncing off the walls of the writer’s room, grabbing others’ ideas and pitches as his own by attempting to “top” them. Couldn’t be troubled to write them down. He was too busy kissing Caesar’s behind.

Sometimes he did top them. A lot of times, he just collected more than his share of credit for the funniest bits. This became his MO throughout his career — cheating other writers out of credits.

But he learned the business on those early TV shows, transitioned to theater, where he failed several times, failed and failed again in Hollywood before he finally created his own breaks and uh, learned to TYPE.

The portrait of Brooks that emerged from the movie “My Favorite Year” and the Neil Simon play “Laughter on the 23rd Floor” was entirely too sweet, naive and charitable, in other words.

He paid his penance, though. He “wrote” for Jerry Lewis. Briefly. Got a taste of what somebody like the man he was then was to deal with from the other side of the equation.

One of Brooks’ biggest breaks was his “2000 Year Old Man” shtick, born as an impromptu party routine with lifelong pal Carl Reiner (check out the “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee” with Brooks and Reiner. Still going.).

That led to sequel LPs that kept him going before his TV and film career and all that followed blew up.

And more directly, it led to his share of the credit for an Ernest Pintoff Academy Award winning short film. This 1963 short is still the funniest embodiment of “Everybody’s a critic” I’ve ever seen, shown on art film cinema screens for years and underscoring Brooks’ lifelong antipathy for critics — TV, theater and film.

He basically improvised the material, did a couple of takes of “watching” the “art film” depicted, and they edited together his funniest responses.

McGilligan points to the role Johnny Carson, a contemporary of Mel’s and a huge fan, played in making the behind-the-scenes “talking writer” famous for being funny before he got Get Smart” (written with Buck Henry, with Brooks taking more of the credit than he deserved), and then his long-dreamed-of “Springtime for Hitler” (the working title) film, “The Producers,” was financed, produced and directed by tantrum tossing Mel.

Carson gets “The Tonight Show,” the unknown Brooks becomes a favorite guest. That helped keep his name out there, his antic funnyman image in the public eye, until his big “Producers” break.

After those breakthroughs, as McGilligan notes, Brooks leaned on all those Sid Caesar shows and their 1950s writers’ room creations — movie parodies, silent film sendups — to become the King of Comedy in the 1970s.

When he ran out of those recycled ideas, including recycling a “Robin Hood” parody for TV, Brooks was lost. A remake (“To Be or Not to Be”) looked like his last hurrah.

Until taking “The Producers” to Broadway made him the grand old man of the theater he’d long wanted to be.

McGulligan has books about Clint and Jack Nicholson, the Hollywood Black List and Hitchcock under his belt. So he’s used to doing research without actually interviewing the book’s subject. Mel’s spun his image so well and so long, that distance certainly helped here.

“Funny Man” (Thorndike Press) is good book, an easy read that is well researched and annotated, and one that benefits from not having extensive Brooks cooperation and “control.” He didn’t kvetch his way out of this one.

Did you see the British comedy “Swimming With Men?” It was a twee but melancholy Rob Brydon/Jim Carter vehicle, a “Full Monty” set against a synchronized swimming story.

“Sink or Swim” is the same movie, more or less, set in France. They don’t credit each other, don’t share a screenwriter and came out at roughly the same time — last year.

They share a story arc, story beats and the characters are eerily similar if just different enough to dodge EU plagiarism lawsuits.

Coincidence or not, if you’ve seen the first (released in the U.S. first), there’s no need to see the second, unless you’re polishing up your French or have an undying passion to see anything Mathieu Amalric or Guillaume Canet star in.

Both are about downtrodden men who bond in the pool, underwater and in the locker room or bar after practice.

Everybody is dealing with something. Men tend to suffer the trials of life — a long bout of unemployment, a failing business, a job that is being replaced by a computer, unhappy or strained marriages — by themselves.

As in “The Full Monty,” their self-esteem is boosted when they are given connections, a purpose and a far-fetched goal.

Truth be told, the best bits of both might get one combined me toscript in the general ball park of “Full Monty.” The French/Belgian co-production tries more ideas out, and is almost half an hour longer to prove it. Like the characters it portrays, neither “water ballet” comedy truly stands up on its own.

Amalric (“The Diving Bell and the Butterfly”) is Bertrand, father of two, long-unemployed, with a most indulgent wife (Marina Foïs) and a far less indulgent, contemptuous teen.

He has to bike to job interviews because his wife is supporting them and needs the car. He’s in the habit of piling his daily depression pills into his bowl of cereal for breakfast.

A flyer recruiting swimmers for this “team” at the local pool gets his interest. He walks in just as Laurent (Canet, recently seen in “Non-Fiction,” but in “Farewell,” “Joyeux Noel,” and many other films) is throwing another tantrum.

Laurent is forever on edge and venting his frustration onto others for it. We get a hint of why when we see him chew out a doctor working with his stuttering son. That marriage is not long for this world.

The chipper Thierry (Philippe Katerine), “Titi,” maintains the public pool, a lonely, loveless man who still manages a smile in a life without hope.

Marcus (Benoît Poelvoorde) is older, delusional about the pool selling business he’s under water in. Simon is a divorced, 50ish rock guitarist who serves at his daughter’s high school cafeteria, embarrassing her no end. And so on.

Everybody here is dealing with something. That includes the upbeat, nurturing (to outside eyes, anyway) coach, Delphine (Virginie Efira). She reads the guys poetry as part of the coaching, and she’s very protective of this support group.

“What the hell are you doing here?” she demands of Bertrand, before counseling all seven swimmers to “find our inner woman.”

Delphine used to be a competitive synchronized swimmer. Her past, “an incident,” is why she’s doing this, now.

The men must develop grace and practice holding their breath. And once they discover, online, that they’re not alone, they have another goal.

This business of men taking up a women’s sport (the subject of some abuse) has taken hold all over Europe (in Britain, too, of course). The “world championships” will be in Norway.

“Swimming with Men” did a much better job of setting up the “discovery” of the sport and the team. “Sink or Swim” is more obvious in its “The Full Monty” borrowings.

Truthfully, the French film manages a grin or two in the first hour. But its first real laugh is when a furious wheelchair-bound martinet (Leïla Bekhti) shows up to take over the training.

Amanda puts the “slap” into slapstick and the tough love into pushing Team France.

“We just want to take part,” they plead. “Miss Ironsides” isn’t having it.

“Sink or Swim” goes down for the second time before she shows up, and founders for the third time despite her arrival.

It’s well-acted and broadly sympathetic, but a time-killer of a comedy that kills too much time for its own good.

MPAA Rating: unrated, profanity, pill abuse

Cast: Mathieu Amalric, Guillaume Canet, Benoît Poelvoorde, Virginie Efira, Marina Foïs, Leïla Bekhti, Philippe Katerine

Credits: Directed by Gilles Lellouche, script by Ahmed Hamidi, Julien Lambroschini and Gilles Lellouche. A Level Film/Studio Canal release.

Running time: 1:59

Here’s a career retrospective documentary that began life as “21 Years: Quentin Tarantino,” and was finished a few years ago (2017) — brushed up, repurposed, re-titled and released on the heels of a very successful run of “Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood.”

Footage from the trailer to “Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood” was added to the coda of a film that considers Quentin Tarantino’s Hollywood films, from “Reservoir Dogs” to “The Hateful Eight.”

It leaves out Tarantino’s first feature-length directing and co-writing credit, 1987’s “My Best Friend’s Birthday.”

“Not canonical?” OK.

So,  he’s nine films into his career — “Reservoir Dogs,” “Pulp Fiction,” “Jackie Brown, “Kill Bill Vol. 1.,” “Kill Bill Vol. 2,” “Inglourious Basterds,” “Django Unchained,” “The Hateful Eight” and “Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood.”

That means leaving out “Death Proof” from “Grind House,” which “QT8″ covers,  and his contribution to another anthology,” Four Rooms,” which “QT8” ignores.

And then there were his “True Romance” and “From Dusk Til Dawn” scripts, the story for Oliver Stone’s “Natural Born Killers.”

So purists will have a lot to bicker about before the credits to “QT8” roll on this Fathom Events Oct. 21 release (at a theater near you).

And I’ve burned through hundreds of words just getting past the inaccuracy/problems with the title.

Filmmaker Tara Wood — she also did a “21 Years: Richard Linklater” documentary — doesn’t interview Tarantino for the film. She uses quotations by him and the barest slivers of footage of him, on sets, etc., and lots and lots of interviews with actors who have worked with him, or owe their careers or “comebacks” to their association with “QT.”

So it’s not exactly a critical reconsideration of the filmmaker’s work, a deep dive into his biography to connect it to the work. Nobody’s here to challenge the assertion that he’s “the voice of his generation.”

But no matter. What is here is fun, enlightening and entertaining.

One Tarantino quotation that sticks out — “If you love movies enough, you can make a good one.” You can’t argue that he doesn’t, and even a hater would have to give it to him that he has.

The actors take us through the Tarantino universe, the connections between this guy in “Reservoir Dogs” and that one in “Pulp Fiction,” the possible kinship of bad hombres from “The Hateful Eight” to bad hombres in films set later.

Michael Madsen, who launched his career with “Reservoir Dogs” and still managed to turn down the Travolta role in “Pulp Fiction,” remembers telling the writer-director, “I don’t want to be killed by Tim Roth! Who’s HE?” (“Reservoir Dogs”).

And Roth taunts Madsen back over the actor’s refusal to do his sadistic little Golden Oldies torture dance in “Dogs.”

The film breaks into chapters — “Chapter 2: Badass Women & Genre Play.”

We get a taste of Tarantino’s influences, Kubrick’s “The Killing” and Ringo Lam’s Hong Kong thriller “City on Fire.”

And stars like Robert Forster marvel over Jackie Brown’s long, romantic walk out of prison towards his character in “Jackie Brown” — “They never DO that.” Christoph Waltz talks of how Tarantino “uses filmic vocabulary,” Jennifer Jason Leigh opines that “He writes strong women like nobody’s business” and more than one performer confirms his on-set demeanor, how he speaks in “movie shorthand.”

A good take will earn an “Ok, we GOT that. But we’re gonna do ONE more. Why? Because we LOVE making movies!”

Eli Roth, Lucy Liu and others speak of screenplays “that read like a novel…He’s adapting his own novels to the screen,” of how he writes scripts in longhand “because you can’t compose poetry on a computer.”

Kurt Russell, the great stuntwoman/actress Zoe Bell, and many others speak.

Nobody talks about the QT crutches, how unwatchable his movies can be merely by removing the offensive language (“American Movie Classics” my arse!) and the easy laughs the Samuel L. Jackson profane and un-PC soliloquies provide.

The indulgent longueurs (most emphatically overdone with Brad Pitt in a car in “Once Upon a Time…”), the inane and dated pop culture debates — in every film save for “The Hateful Eight” — the junk TV and Z-movies referenced.

Listen to Steve Buscemi’s Mr. Pink talk about what he “deems” to be true, and wonder how many low-life thugs you’ve ever heard use words like “deems.”

And Harvey Weinstein hangs over Tarantino and “QT8,” an animated ogre (literally) who was exposed (in Oct. 2017) just as this documentary was being finished, a stain on Tarantino’s legacy that he has acknowledged and been self-critical about.

It’s not the definitive Tarantino documentary in the way works about John Ford, Woody Allen, Hitchcock, Kubrick and others have been. But with Tarantino long threatening to get ten films in the can and make a graceful exit, stage left, it’s good enough to suggest the rough framework of such a retrospective.

Only a smart aleck would point out, “But with ‘My Best Friend’s Birthday’ that makes it ten feature films ALREADY made, without counting the long shorts “Four Rooms” and “Death Proof.”

Because that might deprive us of a Quentin Tarantino “Star Trek” movie.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence and profanity

Cast: Samuel L. Jackson, Christoph Waltz, Michael Madsen, Lucy Liu, Tim Roth, Diane Kruger, Jamie FoxxJennifer Jason Leigh, Kurt Russell, Eli Roth and Zoe Bell.

Credits: Written and directed by Tara Wood. A Wood Entertainment/Fathom Events release.

Running time: 1:40

It was, and remains, the most frightening science fiction film ever made.

“Alien” was a  watershed picture when it hit theaters in 1979, like an anti-“Star Wars” “Close Encounters of the Terminal Kind.”

It had an unstoppable, insectoid monster attacking the working class crew of a damp, dark, grimy working space tug in the remote reaches of the cosmos.

The film’s graphic violence began with an interspecies “male rape,” climaxed with a scene as iconic as “the shower scene” in “Psycho,” and announced the first great female action heroine, in addition to launching a venerable franchise and many imitators.

It was the sort of movie that if you caught it in 70mm, immersed and overwhelmed by the dread and shock and sheer scale of the horror, you just had to round up friends and go back — just to see them jump out of their skin when a monster jumps out of John Hurt’s chest. God knows I did.

And it all began with a “Memory.”

“Memory: The Origins of ‘Alien'” is a deep-dive into the inspirations, history and production of this classic film. Directed by the fellow who gave us “The People vs. George Lucas” and “78/52: Hitchcock’s Shower Scene,” it is broad, informative, opinionated and for the most part, rolls over the omissions and holes in its history.

Mostly, though, it is a celebration of screenwriter Dan O’Bannon, the quixotic writer behind the cult sci-fi comedy “Dark Star,” who went on to write “Blue Thunder” and adapt “Total Recall.”

O’Bannon, who died in 2009, is lauded by his widow and others from the production as the visionary who latched onto artist H.R. Giger to conceptualize both the alien and the film’s alien world and refused to let the movie be made without that visual input.

“Memory” was the title of a script fragment O’Bannon punched out in the early ’70s, thirty pages that became the opening scenes of “Alien.” But where did this story of reluctant “explorers” confronted with pitiless, murderous evil come from?

Alexandre O. Phillipe’s documentary opens in Delphi, Greece, with visions of the Greek Furies, toothy witches avenging and cleansing and prophesying doom.

Academics, fellow filmmakers, friends of O’Bannon and Diane O’Bannon talk about the comic books (“Death Rattle” among them) this was yanked from, the films (“It,” “The Thing!” “Planet of the Vampires,” “Queen of Blood”) that the screenwriter borrowed from in conjuring up this nightmare from the future.

Hanging over it all was the morbid, cerebral gloom and doom of novelist H. P. Lovecraft, whose “Necronomicon” became the common thread of connection among those developing the picture.

O’Bannon’s first connection to H.R. Giger is recalled, Giger’s own obsessions with ancient Egypt and mummies, and the early production history,  when director Walter Hill (“The Warriors,” “The Driver” and later “48 Hours” and “Deadwood”) and his production company tackled the project, is remembered.

Archival interviews with principals no longer with us — O’Bannon and Giger — and director Ridley Scott (whom Phillipe was not able to land) are cleverly projected onto video screens from the actual “Alien” set.

But Hill’s presence is sorely missed. He was not a star filmmaker at the time he left the film, but during his tenure on the project, sole survivor Ripley was changed from a man, in O’Bannon’s script, to a woman. That isn’t brought up, and Sigourney Weaver isn’t here either.

But we get on-set memories from Veronica Cartwright, tumbling over a settee when the “chest busting” scene begins, blasted by fake blood and offal when she stood back upright, and from Tom Skerritt, who played the captain of the Nostromo.

The Joseph Conrad connections — the ship and its shuttle (Narcissus) were named for vessels in Conrad novels — are laid out.

The era the film came out in, post-Vietnam, post-Watergate, cynical and mistrusting, paranoid and feminist — is parked in the foreground. Ian Holm’s Ash character is dissected, a secret android who “must have been programmed by an awful AWFUL misogynist” given his computer-driven behavior.

Scott’s roving camera, the “slow motion…with the occasional stab” pacing, the novelty of those “perpetual motion” bobbing, drinking bird toys (scattered all over the ship), Cartwright’s description of the cavernous “vagina-shaped” pre-CGI sets, covered with “the sense of goo and grit and sweat and steam” that take us right back there, into that world of the movie’s creation.

It’s a real eye-opener, a film that connects with “Jodorowsky’s Dune,” the documentary about a film that was never made (which O’Bannon had attempted to script) and with all the science fiction cinema that “Alien” upended, and the way the cinematic universe has looked (“Guardians of the Galaxy,” anyone?) ever since.

Cast: Veronica Cartwright, Tom Skerritt, Roger Corman, Diane O’Bannon, Dan O’Bannon, H.R. Giger, Ridley Scott

Credits: Written and directed by Alexandre O. Philippe. A Screen Media release.

Running time: 1:35

The offstage moments are the glories of “Judy,” the places where Renée Zellweger truly inhabits the child star turned showbiz legend, a shell of her former self in the last year of her life. It’s all the stuff ON-stage that lets the picture down.

Zellweger and the script — based on a play by Peter Quilter — make Judy Garland a sad and lonely figure, not a tragic one. She is managing, rolling with the punches of an expensive divorce from Sid Luft (Rufus Sewell, playing a man exhausted by her), nearly broke and essentially homeless — if life in hotel suites, where sometimes she couldn’t pay the bills, counts as “homeless.” She is drinking, clinging to her lifelong, studio-mandated regimen of uppers and downers, regal, plucky and self-aware.

She knows she’s a star, a legend even. When she joins daughter Liza Minnelli (Gemma-Leah Devereux, with just the right spark) at an L.A. party, Liza wants to leave, Judy prefers to stay.

“You don’t know anybody here.”

“They seem to know me!”

And she can’t sleep. Ever.

Flashbacks take us to young Judy’s (Darci Shaw) “Over the Rainbow” breakthrough, where the “diet pills” and sleep deprivation began at the insistence of history’s worst stage mother (Natasha Powell) and on direct orders — always purred, rarely threatened — of MGM studio chief Louis B. Mayer (Richard Cordery).

“You’re my FAV-orite, Judy,” he says, noting that the “normal life” he hears in her longing for a regular meal, decent hours and the occasional nap is for other girls, all “prettier than you,” but destined for “small lives. Not Judy, She’s got “that VOICE.”

But “that voice” is unmistakable, big and deep and throaty, with the hint of an edge to the enunciations. Much of “Judy” takes place on the stage of London’s Talk of the Town supper showclub, with Zellweger singing the Garland standards — “Come Rain or Come Shine,” “The Trolly Song” and that one about the rainbow.

And Zellweger, an Oscar winner who masters the fidget, the crooked smile, the speaking voice — a posh affectation not-quite-smothering her Minnesota accent — and does her own singing, cannot make us forget Garland’s unique and iconic sound.

There’s no shame in not being able to replicate Judy Garland in song. Who could, other than Liza? But in recreating someone “you won’t forget,” this shortcoming — a hole in a perfectly servicable screen biography — “Judy” makes Garland sound forgettable.

The director of “True Story,” Rupert Goold, tracks us through Garland’s struggles leading up to and through her storied, and yes notorious final London club engagement.

Michael Gambon is the promoter/club owner who books her, Jesse Buckley plays the club factotum meant to be Judy’s “handler” for this version of “My Week With Marilyn.”

Garland is almost unfailingly polite, unless she’s drunk. Her stage fright, at 47, makes her a helpless and hopeless diva, somebody shoved in front of the microphone, shaken, from opening night onward. She’s worthy of our pity.

Perhaps there’s historical accuracy in the techty relationship between Rosalind Wilder (Buckley) and “the world’s greatest entertainer.” There’s nothing warm about it, either.

The younger man/entrepreneur (Finn Wittrock) Judy hooks up with at that L.A. party and later marries is also someone kept at arm’s length by the script. Was he another gay man, who were historically catnip to the Gumm, Garland and Minelli women?

The warmest scene has Judy connecting with two gay fans at the stage door, going to their place for scrambled eggs when there are no London restaurants open after midnight. That’s a play in itself, and if more of the movie had been this intimate, we’d already be stamping Zellweger’s name on the Oscar. It’s warm, musical (singing like Garland this late in her career is easier than it would have been at her “Star is Born” peak).

The flashbacks resonate, with Judy insecure about her looks, her weight, rejected by Mickey Rooney, hectered by her mother, kept in her place by the creep Mayer. And exhausted, always desperate for sleep.

But there’s no power to them.

Although Zellweger handles the few jokes well — a doctor asks, “Take anything for depression?” “Four HUSBANDS!” — there aren’t enough to make this rather somber picture achieve joy. Only in the finale do we have a bittersweet taste of that.

Despite a good cast and a scattering of big names in it, “Judy” feels malnourished, as if Zellweger’s reduced box office status wasn’t able to attract a more flamboyant Mayer, more charismatic players surrounding her.

If we remember Garland, and she is fading even as a gay icon, it will be due to that voice, those films, the glorious bits of camp and “Show must go on” pluck that you can find in scores of Youtube videos of her TV appearances and the occasional concert.

On a musical bio-pic scale, this isn’t “Rocketman” or “Bohemian Rhapsody,” not “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” “What’s Love Got to Do With It,” “Sweet Dreams” or “Get on Up.” It’s unfortunately a lot closer to “Jimi: All is By My Side.” Uncanny in its impersonation, flat as a movie, forgettable as a biography.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for substance abuse, thematic content, some strong language, and smoking

Cast: Renée Zellweger, Jesse Buckley, Rufus Sewell, Darci Shaw, Finn Wittrock, Michael Gambon

Credits: Directed by Rupert Goold, script by Tom Edge, based on a play by Peter Quilter. An LD Entertainment/BBC Films/Roadside Attractions release.

Running time: 1:58

We can safely assume, from the way Dick Long’s two cover-bandmates dump him in the emergency room parking lot, that the night got plumb out of hand.

We saw the “Pink Freud” band rehearsal earlier, the booze and weed and pranks that followed.

And of course we’ve noticed the film’s title, “The Death of Dick Long.” This story isn’t going to end well for old Dick.

But nothing, no urban legends about the rural South spread in the contemptuous North, no Alabama jokes, can prepare us for what put Dick Long there.

This is no “Tucker & Dale vs. Evil” remimagined as “Tucker & Dale ARE Evil.” It’s dark, and rarely what anybody could call “darkly funny.” It’s a redneck noir thriller, mostly concerned with incompetent criminals involved in a cover-up, and obese, slothful cops “waitin’ for sometin’ that just falls into our laps” to put it all together.

But if it’s not funny, when it could have been, not the thriller it wants to be and and not particularly satisfying in either case, “The Death of Dick Long” still manages to be suspenseful, a rare outing in that subgenre of Southern Fried Film Noir we call “Cracker Gothic.”

Michael Abbott is Zeke and Andre Hyland is Earl, tone-deaf beer-drinkers who’ve been playing together forever, probably never in public. And when the third member of their Power Trio winds up bleeding out in the back of Zeke’s Taurus wagon, they’ve got a choice to make — together.

“Are you gonna help me, or you want to go to jail?”

They’ve got to keep Zeke’s wife (Virginia Newcomb) in the dark. They’ve got to get Zeke’s chatty pre-tween (Poppy Cunningham) to school, without her seeing the stains in the back seat or the blood that’s gotten on her favorite jumper when Daddy “Never Learned to do the Laundry” makes a hash of things.

Earl shows off his poker face when his flirty trailer park neighbor (Sunita Mani) asks him a dozen innocent questions about what he’s loading all this junk into his pick-em up truck for, where he’s headed and who he is going with.

“What’d y’all do, knock over a bank?”

Dick’s wife (Jess Weixler of “It Chapter 2”) is wondering where her man is, if he’s out cheating.

The doddering sheriff (Janelle Cochrane) should be no cause for concern. She’s got a cane and little in the way of urgency of Margo from “Fargo” (the movie, of course) crime-solving skills. Her indolent, convenience-store donuts-loving deputies include a younger version of her (Sarah Baker), new to the force, anxious to get home to a quiche which “the missus” has whipped up.

Probably the wrong person to joke to about how “gay” the station wagon, which Zeke reports stolen, made him feel while driving.

“I guess we didn’t totally think that through.”

That kind of goes for the movie, unfortunately. The suspense that builds as our idiot criminals try to fiigure out how long they can elude our idiot cops works.

The big twist in the crime is head-snapping.

But there’s a sense that the mere creation of the characters, the setting and the crime is enough to get audiences to laugh. Maybe there’ll be some of that, in cities far removed from the South. It’s so half-assed nobody familiar with the region will giggle, or even grimace.

And the third act is borderline catostrophic, with an ending that feels neither natural nor earned.

The women are the red letter performers here, with Newcomb (“Jumanji”) showing Lydia, her character’s fire and fury, veteran character actress Baker playing up the slow-at-math but able to put two and two together Officer Dudley and Weixler bringing pathos to a woman who doesn’t know where her husband, Dick Long, is.

And might not want to know, when push comes to shove.

But there’s more to a dark comedy than a really dark crime, more to a thriller than a slo-motion pursuit and more to the rural South than arch, slow redneck stereotypes.

MPAA Rating: R for pervasive language, disturbing sexual material, and brief drug use

Cast: Michael Abbott Jr., Virginia Newcomb, Andre Hyland, Jess Weixler, Sarah Baker, Janelle Cochrane and Roy Wood, Jr.

Credits: Directed by Daniel Scheinert, script by Billy Chew.  An A24 release.

Running time: 1:40

“Mister America” is a sequel to “On Cinema at the Cinema,” an intentionally bad, vigorously half-assed movie review show that went from podcast to web series, eventually part of the Adult Swim Cartoon Network brand.

It’s pretty much the definition of a “cult series,” cringe-worthy comedy with fans who follow its stars — Tim Heidecker (of “Tim & Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!” and “Tim & Eric’s Bedtime Stories” etc.) and Gregg Turkington (of the dark and offbeat indie film “Entertainment”) — into other, spinoff projects such as “Decker,”  an incompetent action-comedy,  playing versions of themselves, the lazy, delusional and doltish Tim and movie-obsessed, weird and just-as-delusional Gregg.

And I’ve put more effort into reciting their credits than I ever have in digging into their shows. The deep dive dullness (irony) of their comedy never drew me in. I reviewed “Tim & Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie” when it came out and found it excruciating.

But then, I’m too cheap to imbibe or smoke whatever it is their fans are into that keep them tuned in and this “comic universe” employed.

“Mister America” is closer to genuine political satire, a droll but deathly-dull take on the worst candidate and worst campaign for office ever. And lest you confuse Tim for anybody else, he “ran” for District Attorney of San Bernadino, California, in this mockumentary.

This is after “On Cinema,” after “Decker,” after Tim and Gregg have had a falling out. One of Tim’s many details-disoriented later “schemes” was a desert music festival where the Chinese vapes the promoters (Tim) were giving to the crowd left a bunch of people dead.

Tim so resented being prosecuted for mass murder — he got off, thanks to a hung jury — that he’s running against DA Rosetti (Don Pecchia) out of spite and revenge.

Sound familiar?

But everything about this quixotic campaign is a fiasco. He doesn’t live in San Bernadino, so he’s “living” in a hotel, and running the campaign out of a hotel room.

“I don’t have to have lived here my entire life to know the problems” the place has. Those “problems?” “The rat” they have for a district attorney.

He has no volunteers to help him canvass for voters to get on the ballot. So irritable, rude, arrogant Tim is stuck going door to door, hailing people in parking lots, trying to get signatures.

“What’re you running for?”

“District attorney! Sorta like gov’ner,” he drawls. “I’m’o bring CHANGE!”

Punctuated by, “I’ve told you THREE times what I’m running for!”

Charming.

There’s a sucker/press secretary/campaign manager (Terri Parks), stumbling from one media failure to the next. She’s so harried and hapless she can’t even place a newspaper ad, much less take dictation for this or that Tim “statement.”

The DA he is running against is ignoring him. The judge who oversaw the trial where Tim ineptly, angrily and ignorantly represented himself, bullied witnesses and threw tantrums…and won — retired.

Campaigning or strategizing, he can’t keep from contradicting himself within a single breath.

Drunk tweeting his rage at his inability to get attention? Been there, done that.

And then there’s this film crew, following him, mentioning that disastrous musical festival and digging into his past.

That “past” would be Gregg Turkington, who has stories about their TV efforts together, Tim’s general incompetence and the movie Gregg — who spends his days dumpster diving for VHS “classics” — figures that Tim’s campaign “is an unofficial remake of, “The Shaggy DA” (the Disney Dean Jones version, not the one with Tim Allen).

“Good thing you’ll never finish the movie and Tim’ll never see it,” Gregg crows. Gregg knows cinema.

Clumsy but not funny appearances, incompetent cell-phone video “ads” and appearances — also not funny — pad the picture.

This is tedium itself. Want to see this “delusional dunce failing, and dragging others down with him” thing done better? Hunt up the Steve Coogan Brit-series about Alan Partridge, whom we meet as he launches his national TV talk and variety show, and who fails and fails downward, into local radio, personal appearances as a “has been,” voicing over infomercials, the works.

Maybe that’s the ironic difference Heidecker & Co. are getting at here. In America, hustlers and con men like Tim don’t fail downward. They fail upward.

Hell, he might even get to be president some day.

But he has yet to show he can deliver anything the least bit amusing to the big screen.

MPAA Rating: R for language and some drug use.

Cast: Tim Heidecker, Terri Parks, Gregg Turkington, Don Pecchia

Credits: Directed by Eric Notarnicola, script by Tim Heidecker, Eric Notarnicola and Gregg Turkington. A Magnolia release.

Running time: 1:29

First of all, great title. If you’re going to round up a bunch of young people — college coeds, stoners and frat bros — for a “dead teenager movie,” you’re going to need to do a “Head Count.”

The rules of “dead teenager movies” being what they are, frequent head counts are in order. I mean, if they’re picked off, in classic Poe and Agatha Christie style by whatever killer or evil is attacking them, we want a running tally of “Who’s left?” and “Who’s NEXT?”

Great setting, too. “Head Count” takes place in Joshua Tree, California, one of the most beautiful, iconic deserts in America. Tourist friendly, too. College kids rent a house here for spring break?

“Anybody wanna do some SHROOMs for breakfast?”

It’s a natural.

But Elle Callahan’s film upends the “types” and “tropes” of such movies by making the menace familiar. It’s the person sitting next to you, two thirds wasted, during a game of “Never have I ever,” the gal you’re sweet on and sidling up to when the call goes out, “Who’s ready for some SHOTS?”

There is no “one by one” order. Something is slipping in under a familiar guise and spooking this group of ten. Somebody’d better figure it out before it’s too late.

Those are novel twists. It’s just that the movie, which manages some early chills, fails that most basic horrof picture test. It isn’t scary.

Evan (Isaac Jay) isn’t headed to Mexican beaches or Daytona for spring break. He’s off to stay with his wastrel, wandering “free spirit” brother Peyton (Cooper Rowe), who lives, meditates and hikes on the edge of the Joshua Tree National Monument.

Peyton’s the guy who never returns a call, never answers his phone and is lost in his own head. Fun vacation.

Well, it is once the brothers are out hiking and stumble into nine college kids on a boulder-top bender. That’s over-selling it a bit. They’re just…mellow.

“You wanna smoke with us?”

Camille (Bevin Bru) is just looking out for her girl Zoe (Ashleigh Morghan), a photographer who likes keeping this Evan fellow in the frame.

First surprise of the picture, the “responsible” college boy younger brother says “Yes.” Peyton?

“Thanks, but I don’t smoke.”

The invitation to follow them back to their rented hacienda includes tequila. Peyton? “Thanks, but I don’t drink, either.”

Thus does “Oh, this guy’s a Joshua Tree stoner/dropout” expectation get upened. and Peyton will avoid the horrors that await the others, including his brother.

The booze, mushrooms and weed aren’t the issue, though they don’t help. It’s the Internet ghost stories they share around a campfire, the “shapeshifter” Evan mentions and probably shouldn’t — out loud.

The threat makes itself known with the usual “What was that?” Somebody saw something, Somebody heard something. You know the drill.

Callahan, who also came up with the story, treats us to chilling tracking shots, glimpses of the body whose point of view we are seeing the house and its out-buildings from in the dark. Photo bombs let us see what Evan sees. He doesn’t know everybidy there, but there’s an extra blonde in that background, in this doorway.

If he doesn’t get around to taking a “Head Count,” and quick, he’ll never ID the threat, get the others to heed his warnings and make up with his brother.

Because whatever else this kid is, he flunks the Good Brother Test, repeatedly. And the Potential Boyfriend Test, too.

The performances are indifferent, with only a couple of these “Ten Little Indians” in this gathering (Bru, Billy Meade and Hunter Peterson) making an impression, standing out from the crowd.

The dialogue is indifferent, but the plot intriguing.

It’s just that Callahan, a sound designer turned director, broke one horror “rule” too many in this rule-bending genre pic. The menace you believe in without seeing is much scarier than the one a modest-budget thriller can cook up to show us — in the flesh.

Yeah, “Head Count” loses its head in the third act.

Whatever promise it had is long gone by then (there’s little urgency among the stoners, the threat seems more existential than real). And in a crowd of characters we have zero time to develop empathy for (like their director, they’re all beautiful), when the Big Moment comes, the only sane response is “Who cares?”

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, blood, substance abuse, profanity

Cast: Isaac Jay, Ashleigh Morghan, Bevin Bru, Billy Meade, Chelcie May, Amaka Obiechie, Hunter Peterson, Tory Freeth, Michael Herman, Sam Marra and Cooper Rowe

Credits: Directed by Elle Callahan, script by Michael Nader based on an Elle Callahan story. A Samuel L. Goldwyn release.

Running time: 1:30

The scariest clown movie of 2019 is a documentary.

Nothing’s hiding in the sewers, nobody is bullied and beaten until he becomes Batman’s nemesis.

“Wrinkles the Clown” is about an aged “retired” party clown who offers “behavioral services” to parents. They are clients stretched thin by work and life in a gig economy where social safety nets and family support have eroded, distracted adults who aren’t so much raising their children as looking up from their phones long enough to see how out of control those kids are.

Kids acting out, throwing tantrums, flouting parental authority? Call Wrinkles the Clown to scare the bejesus and Beelzebub out of them.

It started in Naples, Florida, where Wrinkles stickers offering his services papered telephone poles and beach bathroom toilet stalls. A video popped-up on Youtube, showing a clown in a despairing, horrific mask, polka dot jumpsuit and elbow-length rubber gloves, crawling out of a sleeping little girl’s trundle bed on the bedroom’s closed-circuit TV.

Filmmaker Michael Beach Nichols tracks Wrinkles to the van where he works and sometimes “lives” — between nights in the occasional budget motel. He samples Wrinkles’ work, some of it available online.

We’re shown the wave of local, regional and national news coverage that swept the country when this guy with a gimmick first broke out, and get a taste of what being in the middle of a tornadic national phenomenon is like.

He lets us listen in on scores upons scores of calls from reporters, booking agents, and from little kids and alleged adults, asking Wrinkles who he really is, wanting to know if he’s killed children, small kids leaving graphic death threats about what they will do if Wrinkles ever dares to show up to correct their out of control behavior.

“It never ends,” the clown sighs. Here he is, just an old man “living out my last years” in Florida, “trying to contribute something to society” and receiving “multiple death threats a day” from gullible strangers (children, mostly, but not entirely).

“It’s kind of disheartening to hear,” Wrinkles says, his white-bearded face hidden, his voice masked.

Director Nichols interviews a child psychology professor (“Misguided,” he calls Wrinkles, and the people who “hire” him.), the author of a “Bad Clowns” book, a folklorist and others, including a children’s party clown.

“Real clowns aren’t scary,” the happy clown declares, slathering on the greasepaint, as old video of news anchor David Brinkley intoning his intro to the story of the December, 1978 arrest of Chicago clown and mass murder John Wayne Gacy.

But the scariest and yes funniest material in “Wrinkles the Clown” comes from online videos, where parents have let their 10 and 11 year old kids have their own Youtube channel, or concoct a video where a little girl discusses Wrinkles with her discipline-averse Dad, who listens and laughs when she says “I know where the gun is” when the idea of a Wrinkles visit is broached for her bratty behavior.

The film travels to Jonesboro, Georgia and Wytheville, Va., Knoxville, Tennessee to several points in Texas, capturing kids — many entertained by this clown mythology that consumes them, more than a few on the Honey Booboo media and junk food diet.

“I really don’t think of it as ‘child abuse'” one lamentably dim procreator says of Wrinkles and the services he wants provided by him.

The Wrinkles presented here is both a product of groupthink — a myth that enters modern folklore like Bloody Mary and Slenderman (also discussed) — and cultural preconceptions.

Nichols does a ride-along with Wrinkles as he hits the strip club. Because he’s a creepy old loner living in Florida. What else is he going to do?

He’s a cross between “The Simpsons” cynic, Krusty the Klown, and Pennywise — the monster of “It.” Because that’s descriptive shorthand we all understand.

Wrinkles stages and acts-out video horror child-abduction fantasies, complete with a lynch mob in hot pursuit. Law enforcement officials talk about dangers to public safety posed by such figures who incite such mobs.

And then, the copycats sweep the land — pranks and stunts and alleged crimes and hysteria, swept along by CCTV videos all over the Internet.

Fun, fun stuff. And scary? Yes, but not necessarily in the ways you might think going in.

I used to have an editor at a newspaper where I worked who recited her grandmother’s favorite aphorism every time such proof of human manipulation, ignorance, gullibility and cruelty surfaced.

“Fall of Rome,” she’d say. “Fall of Rome.”

MPAA Rating: unrated, with horror images, threats and profanity

Credits: Directed by Michael Beach Nichols, script by Michael Beach Nichols and Christopher K. Walker. A Magnet release.

Running time: 1:18