Movie Nation

“Cringe-worthy” comedies aren’t my favorite way to get a laugh, and “Eat Wheaties!” has a lot more in common with TV’s “The Office” than I’d typically care for.

But Tony Hale makes an interesting “Variation on a Character Played by Steve Carell,” and there are a few laughs mixed in with a lot of cringes and endless examples of callous cruelty. The ending pulled this one off the fence for me, and it was barely on that fence to start with.

Sid Straw is a socially awkward clod who teeters between faintly-annoying and simply irritating with all who know him.

Colleagues at the tech firm where he’s a cubicle drone barely tolerate his quasi-tactless, social-signals-missed interactions. His secretary (Sarah Goldberg) barely looks up from her phone to note that yes, his mail got delivered to the wrong colleague — again.

His very-pregnant sister in law (Elisha Cuthbert) barely tolerates him, and seems to think it’s cute that “Sid who ruined our wedding” takes her insults with a smile and a shrug. That Sid wants to make a little speech at brother Tom’s birthday earns a brusque “No Sid. No speeches tonight.”

When Tom (David Walton) insists, Sid’s blend of sweet praise and tactless “celebrities who died at 34” list is yet another black mark against a nerd who just “tries too hard.”

Dating only goes so well for so long before he’s dismissed. Always. The one “friend” (Alan Tudyck, a bit subdued here) he has from Penn seems to barely tolerate him.

But the day we meet Sid is a good one. He’s been selected co-chair for the West Coast Penn alumni reunion. That means he’s got to join social media for the first time. That means he can reconnect with his most famous classmate, whose sorority sister he went out with in college.

That classmate? Elizabeth Banks. Her catch-phrase in college, which he remembers and adores to this day? “Eat Wheaties!”

It’s just that when social media naif Sid reaches out to Banks’ “fan page,” and then her management, and posts these long, detailed memories of their shared college experience, her “people” freak out. And her manager is quick to conflate “kind of annoying and clueless” with a “restraining order” level threat. That’s when Sid’s life —  lonely and 40something but tolerable — unravels.

Based on a novel by Michael Kun, “Eat Wheaties!” is an essay in the confusing “intimacy” of social media and the blood-in-the-water nature of viral “piling on” that goes on there.

I’ve not read Kun’s book (Heather Locklear was the celeb Sid matriculated with there), but one take-away from the film is that social media has made us meaner. Sid mentions his Banks connection at that same party where “No speech, Sid” was the rule, and prompts another person a bit annoyed with him to offer to fact-check his modest Banks claim with a classmate of hers “at Harvard.”

It’s a pointless bit of cruelty, and the only “correction” to her vocalizing bitch face comes from her date/husband who cracks, “Oh, I’d forgotten you went to Harvard. You hadn’t mentioned it today.”

Sarah Chalke turns out to be perfectly-cast as power-drunk Hollywood management with zero-tolerance for the Sids of this world.

Paul Walter Hauser (“I, Tonya”) is haplessly amusing as the online-degree lawyer Sid retains to regain his life, a guy who might see a little of himself in Sid.

Sid may have “loser” stamped on his forehead. His Mustang may be from The Ugliest Years. But he’s functional and pleasant enough, if seriously tone-deaf.

And yet here are threats from his boss. Here’s another from his bank. Life, thanks to overblown blowback on social media, will never be the same for him because mean people take the mean option at every turn.

Banks? She’s just a beautiful, glamorous face on a Facebook “fan” page, silent and mysterious, never responding to Sid’s friendly casual intimacies, his notes that end with “Eat Wheaties!”

Truth be told, I found this painful to watch, “cringe-worthy” on a whole other level. “Redemption” seems a futile hope. And there simply aren’t enough laughs in those first two acts to lessen the discomfort that this Michael Scott Lite generates and the wincing recognition that “Yeah, that could totally happen.”

But Hale (of “Veep”) and his light touch with the guy make us appreciate why others would be put off, and he lets us see a sweetness that makes Sid’s pain our pain as his harmless dorkiness is met with “the nuclear option” from all sides.

And you know what else keeps you watching? It’s the predictability built into making Elizabeth Banks the elusive classmate all this is swirling around. Her screen persona suggests something is coming, something righteous. Invoking her name makes you hope this meanness will not stand. Just don’t run it by her agent first.

MPA Rating: unrated, adult situations

Cast: Tony Hale, Sarah Chalke, Paul Walter Hauser, Elisha Cuthbert, David Walton, Danielle Brooks and Alan Tudyck.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Scott Abramovich, based on the novel by Michael Kun. A Phillm release.

Running time: 1:28

What an interesting pitch for a movie. Pre-war Japan fights over the MATH of building superbattleships like the Yamato and Musashi.

Color me “intrigued.”

“The New Deal for Artists” was a mid-70s documentary for public television that gathered many of the folks who benefited from Franklin Roosevelt’s assorted New Deal work projects to talk about how that Great Depression “put people back to work” program benefited themselves, American art and America in general.

From New York theater types to Navaho painters, poets and writers sent out to interview Real America to the photographers who documented the Dust Bowl, the impoverished, segregated South and the plight of inner cities, the alphabet soup of acronyms that these assorted programs fell under changed the country, and in a breathtakingly short period of time.

Although Wieland Schulz-Keil’s film reflects the cultural biases of the ’30s, still evident in the ’70s — most of those interviewed are white and male, as indeed many of those benefiting from the programs were back in the Depression — it’s an earnest attempt at getting at the cultural changes such a program turned the tide on.

African Americans and white Americans took to the stage together for the first time in great numbers, Black theater was boosted and celebrated, women and Latin and Native artists were subsidized.

And all over America, post offices and other Federal buildings were adored with brawny, historic populist murals, “forgotten” America was remembered and chronicled and kids who’d never seen a play, often the children of parents who’d never seen live theater, were visited by trailered traveling shows like “Revolt of the Beavers,” a comical allegory about fascism and worker exploitation.

“I played a Gestapo type of beaver,” a chuckling actor John Randolph (“Heaven Can Wait,” “Prizzi’s Honor”) recalled of the agitprop dramedy about beavers going on strike against greedy capitalists.

Here’s Howard da Silva (“1776”) rattling off rhymes and singing a verse or two — from memory — from the controversial Federal Theater Project production of leftist composer Marc Blitzstein’s labor opera, “The Cradle Will Rock,” a show he performed in briefly almost 40 years before he was interviewed for “New Deal.”

Artists such as Andy Tsihnahjinnie recall how they were able to feed themselves, and create art that wasn’t just for the “Navaho trading posts,” art that came to reshape American painting and sculpture for generations.

Writer Meridel Le Sueur recounts the history of populism on the Northern Plains that surrounded her work on the Federal Writer’s Project, the stepdaughter of the former socialist mayor of Minot, N.D. recalling “Non Partisan League” politics of the region testing the idea that became Social Security years before FDR came into office.

And we see hundreds of photographs from the likes of Dorothea Lange and Arthur Rothstein recounting the poverty, the economic and environmental destruction of the Dust Bowl, exposing the rest of America to how little-known corners of it were struggling to survive.

The work “gave the country an unprecedented artistic renaissance,” narrates Orson Welles, remembered for his Federal Theater Project work casting African Americans in the celebrated “voodoo” version of Shakespeare’s “Macbeth,” reset in Haiti and a Broadway sensation when it opened.

We also see the downfall of such projects, hounded and attacked by the racist Klan-defending Texan Martin Dies Jr., who started the infamous House Unamerican Activities Committee ostensibly to defend the country against fascism, but used it to silence those who spoke out against exploitation, fascism and racism too vigorously.

IMDb has this film clocking in at three hours, at one point, something that would have devoured an entire evening of PBS programming in the ’70s. If so, it’s been whittled down to 90 lean minutes for this new Corinth Films release.

An interesting history lesson, as the late author and radio host Studs Terkel enthuses in the film’s introduction, particularly timely as we hear the phrase “New Deal” bandied about again with America in another economic and social crisis wrought by the conservatives who always seem to drive it into inequity and depression in the name of fighting “socialism.”

MPA Rating: unrated

Cast: Narrated by Orson Welles, with Meridel Le Sueur, Will Geer, Carlton Moss, Howard Da Silva, Harrison Begay, Nelson Algren, Bernarda Bryson Shahn, Andy Tsihnahjinnie, John Houseman, John Randolph and Studs Terkel

Credits: Directed by Wieland Schulz-Keil, script by Olaf Hansen and Wieland Schulz-Keil. A Corinth Films release.

Running time: 1:30

May 7, a heist goes wrong and vengeance is mine, sayeth the Stath.

Heroes with skills, stealth and unimpeachable integrity, able to access vast Intel resources without a whole lot of effort, “ops” that go like clockwork until that moment they don’t and murky values and motives from those “On High” — welcome back to Tom Clancyland.

“Jack Ryan” morphing into a TV franchise gave Hollywood the idea that dead Cold Warrior-thriller novelist still has what it takes to entertain. That’s how Clancy’s long-gestating novel “Without Remorse” made it to the big screen.

Michael B. Jordan plays our hero, John Kelly, a special ops commando whose “extraction” mission in Syria turns out to be not what his CIA intermediary (Jamie Bell). Those aren’t Syrian “contractors” they’re shooting it out with. They’re vodka drinkers.

“I don’t see any Russians,” Mr. CIA declares.

“Tom Clancy’s Without Remorse” is about the blowback from that Aleppo slaughterhouse. Other members of Kelly’s team meet with “accidents” when they get home. Kelly’s own house is invaded and his pregnant wife (Lauren London) is murdered.

His raging grief threatens to drown him, but his capacity for revenge is great, thanks to relentless training, vast experience and the endless latitude and luck built into this script.

With Mr. Secretary-of-Something (Guy Pearce) in his corner and his former CO (Jodie Turner-Smith of “Queen & Slim”) watching his six, there’s going to be ad platit’, as they say in Mother Russia — “Hell to pay.”

Director Stefano Sollima, who did a decent job with the “Sicario” sequel, keeps his shootouts good and brutal, his fist-choke-and-knife fights to the death.

Kelly’s first murderous reach for answers involves a gas can and a diplomatic SUV, and the stakes just get higher — absurdly-so — after that.

Jordan, who can still get into “Creed” fighting trim when the need arises, is an arresting presence and a believable “man of action.” Turner-Smith, Pearce and Bell were solid casting choices, too.

But this story exposes lapses in Clancy’s logic, giving the viewer jolts of “Wait, how’d they/he get there/escape that?” And the screenwriters saddle the late author’s story with racial subtexts that play as jarring dead-ends. A righteous speech about serving “a country that didn’t love us back” doesn’t advance the plot or explain Kelly’s enlistment, or even his “We’re playing by MY rules, now” actions.

Clancy wasn’t the most racially enlightened writer, so this casting could be taken as a timely updating and another way to open up a story whose mysteries become too obvious before the second act has settled in.

Still, the longer it goes on, the more over-the-top the set pieces get and the more dated the “geopolitics” of it all seems. Clancy has one big theme that turns up in almost all of his adapted-into-scripts novels, and it’s front and center here, served up without apology by a deliriously successful writer whose every book had a whiff of “His Greatest Hits” about it.

MPA Rating: R for violence

Cast: Michael B. Jordan, Jodie Turner-Smith, Jamie Bell, Lauren London and Guy Pearce

Credit: Directed by Stefano Sollima, script by Taylor Sheridan and Will Staples, based on the Tom Clancy novel. An Amazon Studios/Paramount release.

Running time: 1:49

The director later known as “The Master of Suspense” never lost his sense of humor. But it rather curdled into something dry and droll by the time he filmed “The Trouble With Harry” and his last “action comedy,” “North by Northwest.”

Just before he wound up the British portion of his filmmaking career and was lured to Hollywood by Selznick and good ol’greenback dollars, Alfred Hitchcock pulled out all the stops for the closest he ever got to a knockabout door-slamming farce.

“The Lady Vanishes” is packed with one-liners, stuffed with insufferable Brits Abroad (and those damned “foreigners” they so loathe) and almost frantic in its dive into amusing, implausible situations.

Soundstage-bound, with models and beautifully-rendered painted Alpine backdrops, it gives you the sense that this is about as far as a master-in-the-making could go in the malnourished British cinema, and that he knew it. And that knowing it, dammit-to-heck, he was going to have some fun with it before flying the coop for La La Land.

The first act is genuine farce, a bunch of avalanche-stranded travelers are packed into a snowed-in pan-European hotel in Mandrika, some sort of Austro-Italo-Swiss winter wonderland that to British snobs is just another “third rate country…Fortunately, I’m used to squalor.”

There’s the English “playgirl” (Margaret Lockwood) bound for home to be married because “I’ve been everywhere, seen everything” and done all there is to do — save marriage.

The fussbudget traveling companions (Naunton Wayne and Basil Radford) fret over the lack of “news” from home, “England on the brink” and all. What they mean is, of course, the “cricket test” in Manchester. Let’s just say their relationship isn’t explained, and they use the word “queer” in its traditional sense often enough for modern audiences to chuckle and notice.

There’s a tetchy, married (not-to-each-other) couple on some sort of Grand Tour fling, and this “complete cad,” a snide musicologist (Michael Redgrave as a “blue-blooded chick chaser,” never funnier) who gets under the skin of playgirl Iris.

Then the snow is cleared, they all pile onto a train, including a new friend Iris has made, an elderly English expat (May Whitty) who becomes Iris’s on-train confidante. Until, that is, “The Lady Vanishes.”

Iris asks about her and no one seems to remember Miss Froy ever being aboard. As we’ve seen Iris has had a window-ledge houseplant dropped on her, maybe she’s imagining it.

“If you must know, something fell on my head!”

“When, in infancy?”

And that’s rather the way of things from here on out, Iris and a first-reluctant bounder Gilbert (Redgrave) questioning, finding clues and wondering just what the heck happened to Miss Froy, with other passengers either oblivious or sinister in their reasons for not saying she was ever there.

Paul Lukas, later famous for “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea,” plays the exotically-accented brain specialist who offers opinions and endures jokes, uniformed Mandrikans intervene, pistols are drawn, discharged and never really reloaded.

It’s all a lark and all good, clean (ish) fun, sort of a British take on the “screwball” farces common in Hollywood in the ’30s, with Hitchcockian mystery and villainy.

The director’s cameo comes very late, FYI, the moment our cast arrives back in Blighty.

But if you only know “The Master” for “Vertigo” and “a boy’s best friend is his mother,” this “Lady” is a corker, still hilarious after all these years.

MPA Rating: unrated, “approved”

Cast: Margaret Lockwood, Michael Redgrave, Paul Lukas, May Whitty, Linden Travers, Naunton Wayne, Emile Boreo, Mary Clare and Basil Radford.

Credits: Directed by Alfred Hitchcock, script by Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder, based on a short story by Ethel Lina White. An MGM release.

Running time: 1:35

Truth be told, Christopher Walken has always worn his pants grandpa-high, his hats a little out-of-date. And he’s always grown a mean goatee, even in his silvery “legend of the cinema” years.

So it’s no stretch thinking of him as a grandfatherly Saskatchewan canola farmer getting his back up when pushed around by Big Ag in “Percy vs. Goliath,” a plucky, earnest and winning Canadian drama about One Man vs. Monsanto.

It’s funny how movies often go timid when depicting the wrongdoings of running-amok capitalism, changing the names of chemical, mining, fracking, banking or other gigantic entities.

But not Monsanto. Inundated with TV appeals from lawyers carrying on class action suits against the deadly weed killer Roundup, body blows landed by everyone from John Oliver to “60 Minutes,” they’re widely seen as a too-big/too-heavy-handed/too callous villain, and not just in the United States.

“Percy vs. Goliath” is based on the true story of a 73 year-old farmer sued by the company when its genetically modified canola seeds, designed to resist dying when fields are sprayed with Monsanto’s planet-poisoning Roundup, turned up in his crops.

Percy Schmeiser faced unsympathetic judges, shunning by his fellow farmers and a less-than-understanding media — at least at first and at least according to this script — when he was taken to court over patent infringement.

Environmental groups the world over were sounding the alarm over a behemoth of a company acquiring a patented, genetically-modified monopoly over the food people in every corner of the planet need to survive.

Percy was the grandson of “seed savers,” meticulous farmers going back generations, men who noted which fields produced the healthiest plants, keeping records and saving the best producing seeds going back decades to naturally select what worked best for them on the Schmeiser Grangeland farm.

And just by his casting, you know a threatening letter from Big Ag is going to get Walken, playing Percy, riled. His wife (Roberta Maxwell) backs him, as does his fellow farmer who sometimes pitches in as a hired hand (Adam Beach). There’s nothing for it but to pay a local lawyer (Zach Braff) leery of taking on a multinational corporation with bottomless pockets, endless resources, intimidating “investigators” and much higher-priced lawyers (Martin Donovan plays lead counsel for the bad guys). Using “seeds without a license?” Settle.

So that’s your advice, “offer them a fortune for sending me a nasty letter?”

Nope. Court it is, no matter how long the odds. Christina Ricci plays an environmental group recruiter who wants to back Percy, get the press on their side, if she can make Percy see his “precedent setting” case as one with implications for farmers all over the planet.

Clark Johnson’s film, based on a script by Garfield Lindsay Miller and Hilary Pryor, paints Percy as a maverick, a hustling small businessman who bails out of church if it looks like rain will damage crops he cannily got in the ground before his neighbors.

As Percy profits from his industry, maybe his neighbors resent the guy with the new combine, purchased by the premium price he gets for his first-to-market harvest. Maybe that’s why they turn on him.

“You know I’m not a thief, right?”

The arc of this story is how an inherently conservative man, who thinks “I just need to talk to Monsanto” to solve this “personal problem” or “mix-up,” is bullied, harassed and radicalized into a spokesman for a sacred profession, feeding the world. We see Percy turn into a compelling public speaker, and he sees how far-reaching his quixotic legal battle is when he speaks to a conference in India and visits a farm village there.

“Percy vs. Goliath” is dramatically flat, predictable in its pluck at times. But Walken is magnificent, and the other casting — on the nose as it is (Ricci can still pull off the young activist willing to sleep in her car for the cause) — works.

As this film and the earlier documentary on Percy’s struggle make clear, the villain here is faceless. With Monsanto we never need to see bad guys twirling their mustaches over today’s planned intimidation and shortsighted high-handedness. Thanks to guys like Percy Schmeiser, even farmers are starting to get it.

MPA Rating: PG-13 for some thematic elements 

Cast: Christopher Walken, Roberta Maxwell, Christina Ricci, Zach Braff and Martin Donovan.

Credits: Directed by Clark Johnson, script by Garfield Lindsay Miller, Hilary Pryor. A Saban Films release.

Running time: 1:39

A little behind the scenes footage from the Aug. 27 release. The horror. The horror.

This late May release has Martin Scorsese’s backing.

“The Sleepless” is drama and romance at its most elemental and charming — just two insomniacs, meeting and chatting on a long walk through the empty streets of Brooklyn at dawn.

Sometimes cute, occasionally touching and generally charming, it won’t go down as one of the great “just a conversation” films. The dialogue doesn’t paint glorious word pictures like “My Dinner With Andre” and isn’t tinged with the wistful hope of love of “Before Sunrise.” But the engaging leads make this meet-and-greet-and-debate romance worth losing yourself in.

Separately, they stare at their separate clocks, “3:00 a.m.,” “3:15 a.m.,” “3:45.” He (Nyambi Nyambi of TV’s “The Good Fight”) exercises, she (Rebecca De Ornelas) makes tea. Each resorts to ancient “Dick Van Dyke Show” reruns before they give up and make that 4 a.m. bodega run. That’s where they meet.

Why? Because all-night clerk/owner Vitek (Ajay Naidu of “Bad Santa” and TV’s “Blindspot”) is…helpful.

Zach is “not looking,” but Vitek urges him to open his eyes.

“How else do you find anything of value in this life?”

Sophia is leery, but Vitek’s “nice boy, a bit nervous, perhaps” disarms her.

It’s four o’clock on a Saturday morning. They’re not drunk or hungover or headed to work. Insomnia, fate, and Zach deciding to make an approach throws them together for an hours-long walk into the Brooklyn dawn.

“I’d rather be sleeping,” she confesses. “Always” he agrees.

His insomnia is a recent condition, and with no prodding he confesses “I never really knew sleep without alcohol.”

Hers is chronic and “I got tired of fighting it.” But true confessions time — “You want to know what keeps me up at night? Men. Fear of men.”

Not Zach, who is non-threatening and sensitive. Just men in general.

Over the course of their walk and talk, they will dissect their insomnia, break down what works and doesn’t work in their lives and share sitcommy profundities.

“Instagram quotes don’t work in real life.”

He jokes — “I know everything about you, Sophia.” She’s quick with a comeback — “Too soon.“

The debut feature of Michael DiBiasio-Ornelas isn’t particularly deep, but it gives us characters with shadings and flaws. The black and white cinematography paints Brooklyn in soft, romantic shadows. There are quirky encounters with an accordionist and barrista, and those are as predictable as the bits of bickering that enter our 30something couple’s dialogue.

Simple, inexpensive films like this without a lot of “plot” going on, are often passed off as “film festival movies,” without “names” in the cast or a genre that’s easy to sell (horror, action) to warrant a distributor picking them up.

But “The Sleepless” makes for a sweet, pleasant and thoughtful conversation overheard, and a reminder that people do “meet” each other and make connections, even in the forbidding city, especially in Brooklyn.

MPA Rating: unrated, some profanity

Cast: Nyambi Nyambi, Rebecca De Ornelas, Ajay Naidu, Leslie Silva and Masha King

Credits: Scripted and directed by Michael DiBiasio-Ornelas. A TSF release on Amazon Prime.

Running time: 1:17