Movie Nation

The come-on for “The Blech Effect” is a bit of an eye roller.

He might “find a cure for Alzheimer’s, IF he can stay out of prison.” Words to that effect “sell” it, but a documentary premised on that is, well, rubbish.

The “hero” here is a bi-polar New York investor who has financed bio-tech companies with such success that he once hit the Forbes 400, worth some $300 million back in 1992.

He’s not worth that when the film catches up with him. He lost it all and was busted for securities fraud/stock manipulation in the ’90s. When filmmaker David Greenwald introduces David Blech to us, the disheveled, medicated and morose Blech is hoping for a “Hail Mary.” He’s got a big piece of a bio-genetic start-up with a genius scientist on board and patents that could lead to a new treatment for Alzheimer’s.

But however Greenwald wants to burnish the guy’s image, giving him “credit” for something people he has invested in might develop, showing us “the roller coaster rides I’ve taken my family on,” a family that includes a long-suffering wife and a possibly autistic son (his diagnosis changes), Greenwald runs up against the same wall Blech does. The guy’s a bore.

Blech’s been a clever investor, at times, and a dope at others. He has “a grandiose vision of who I am.” And he’s a scofflaw, looking at prison time for “playing” with the stock market. He’s at the end of his tether, and whatever Greenwald figured he could get out of this story, he’s basically bought into that “grandiose vision.” We don’t have to.

“I had turned Wall Street into a casino,” Blech admits. Decades ago his illness and choice of career collided and he’s developed a full on gambling addiction, with stock trading his “game” of choice. He’s co-founded or sometimes bought into companies which he always sold before they have a breakthrough and explode in value, earning and losing millions when he could have held fast and had billions.

So yeah, he’s a lot more Gambler’s Anonymous case study than Jonas Salk. As such, he’s modestly interesting as a documentary subject, but never compelling.

We don’t get to sit in on his GA meetings, only hear him work the phones for money and time, listen to his wife Margory lament his “destabilizing influence on the family.”

You feel bad for their then-14-year-old son, whose diagnosis, therapy and treatments would break many a bank account. You feel a little for the wife, who fell for David’s on-the-spectrum directness.

But the guy fretting, from first frame to final judgment that “my whole world could come crashing down?” Jerks like him bankrupted the country. Cry me a river.

No, not interested in your “Woe is me,” pal. No, you don’t get credit for something a company you helped start invented, especially since in most cases you’d already sold out when the “breakthrough” came.

The film’s close focus on Blech might make for a fascinating dissection of a person with a problem. But there’s too little here to illustrate that. A news clipping here, audio from a courtroom there doesn’t tell the story.

Blech’s is almost the only voice heard in the movie, and after a while, the bipolar fallen investor with a gambling problem is all too easy to tune out.

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast: David Blech, Margory Blech, Evan Blech

Credits: Directed by David Greenwald. A Virgil Films release.

Running time: 1:27

I don’t know anyone diagnosed with schizophrenia, but if it’s anything like its visualization in “Words on Bathroom Walls,” it is the quintessence of terror.

Yes, this adaptation of Julia Walton’s YA novel is a warm and fuzzy teen romance, and yes, some of the manifestations of the hero’s illness have more than a hint of “cute” about them. The film is annoyingly burdened with far too much voice over narration.

Maybe that suits someone who’s living and struggling far too much inside his own head. But the Golden Rule of Cinema is “Show us, don’t tell us” and in the name of all that’s holy, don’t narrate our ears off.

But the madness that descends upon Adam, winsomely played by Charlie Plummer ( “All the Money in the World”) would terrify anyone — swirling inky black smoke covering his surroundings, black bile oozing down windows, chem lab class turning into gravity-defying chaos, and every open door an opportunity for The Voice of Your Doom calling to Adam.

His mental safety net is a further manifestation of his condition. He has gang-banger “body guards” (led by Lobo Sebastian, good) in track suits, wielding baseball bats in his mental defense. A raging libido shows up in the bathrobe and underwear clad stoner Lothario (Devon Bostick) full of advice to the hormonal.

And then there’s the real person from the school he’s kicked out of in the film’s opening scenes. AnnaSophia Robb becomes his blonde, romantic ideal, airy fairy sensitive, a dancing hippy vision (“Dalai Lama meets Coachella”) in his hallucinations.

Yeah, all that falls under “cute.” But director Thor Fredenthal (A “Percy Jackson,” a “Wimpy Kid”) and Plummer do a splendid job of maintaining the tension that someone barely clinging to his sanity lives under. This may be a lightweight primer on learning about your illness, struggling with school and family and yet finding love in the middle of all this. But “Words on Bathroom Walls” never lets us forget the “Good Will Hunting moment” in such a life, under such mental pressure, is terrifying.

Stressed but eternally hopeful Mom (Molly Parker) and the new man in her life (Walton Goggins, playing with our expectations, cast against “type”) get “treatment resistant” Adam into a Catholic School and onto an experimental new drug.

Everybody, even a reluctant Adam, is all-in on a last chance senior year, drugged up so that he can get through the day, desperate to graduate so that he can go to culinary school in the fall. Yeah, “stepdad” is a little worried about the kid having access to knives.

Only headmistress Sister Catherine (Beth Grant) is in on Adam’s secret. But she’ll be watching for signs he’s losing it. His parents are in contact with the shrink he’s always talking to (whom we never see or hear). If he can just make it through the year…

Maybe the cutest, smartest girl in school figures into that. Maya (Taylor Russell) is a brutally blunt valedictorian pre-accepted at Duke, running “side hustles” doing rich private school kids’ homework. Adam? He needs tutoring from “the Bernie Madoff of academic fraud.”

And as they hit it off, we wonder, when’s our lad going to tell her his secret? When will we find out hers? And how long before the tightrope of Adam’s existence droops under the weight and he loses it?

The script is a catalog of mental illness similes, all of them revealed in voice-over. “You entire waking life is an escape room with no exit.” It’s “like having a nightmare while I’m awake.”

The romance is understated, slow, with many missteps mixed in with flippant banter. Food and cooking are blended in, as that figures into Adam’s hopes and his greatest fears.

A warm subtext arrives in Adam’s interactions with this new religion that the school exposes him to, all in the confessional with the priest (a twinkling Andy Garcia), who shrugs off the agnostic who sits down and cracks that “the only person who can’t reject you is Jesus, right?”

Whatever precious touches emerge, I have to say “Words on Bathroom Walls” works. The performances are stellar and earn the emotional connection we feel with the characters. The lighter touches — Garcia, Bostick and especially Robb (“Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”), going all Woodstock Stevie Nicks — are a delight.

The fact that this sweet picture is one of the few to reopen cinemas mid-pandemic means it could get a little extra attention. Seeing as how Roadside Attractions, the Witness Protection Program of Film Distribution is releasing it, it can use all the help it can get.

MPAA Rating: PG-13, for mature thematic content involving mental illness, some sexual references, strong language and smoking

Cast: Charlie Plummer, Taylor Russell, Devon Bostick, Molly Parker, Lobo Sebastian, Beth Grant, Walton Goggins, AnnaSophia Robb and Andy Garcia

Credits: Directed by Thor Freudenthal, script by Nick Naveda, based on the Julia Walton novel. An LD Entertainment film, a Roadside Attractions release.

Running time: 1:51

Boy, for somebody who has spent years of his life in cinemas, it’s been an awkward “cold turkey” break.

So what’s new in the experience?

Ticket buying has been migrating to vending machines or cellphone prepurchase. That’s accelerated thanks to the pandemic.

I glanced at the special cleaning gadget they are employing to keep their theaters low risk.

Several theaters on this area are up selling a “private showing,” just you and friends or relatives in the theater with you. Weird.

Staff at this Epic Theaters multiplex is masked, and has no change. Because they want all purchases done by data mining credit card.

All for their overpriced matinee of a movie from the Witness Protection Program of film distribution, Roadside Attractions.

The movie’s about to start, so phone off time. Just a couple of suburban teens and me to watch a drama about a high school kid coping with schizophrenia.

Here we go.

First rate supporting cast. And kudos to the DP who got images out of that murk. Whoo.

Every business in America has been scrambling to come up with a strategy to survive at least until the current incompetent administration and its state and local level cultists are thrown out or emasculated. Cinemas are particularly hamstrung in this regard.

“No public gatherings” hits the heart of their old business model and breaks it. Even as some reopen with reduced capacity and bigger cleaning/staffing costs, the canaries in the movie exhibition coal mines are showing themselves the most endangered of all.

This second run cinema is, like many, starved of content and basically showing kiddie movies already on video just to keep its doors open.

$50 private showings” aren’t just for strip clubs these days. Plan your socially distanced (sure, right) kiddie birthday party at your neighborhood second run house, usually old, the dumpiest theater in town, with the thinnest and most lax staff.

What could go wrong?

Viggo stars as the gay son his reactionary father (Lance Henriksen) never accepted.

Viggo also directed “Falling” which has hit a few festivals.

It’s British, so naturally it’s classier.

“Hallelujah?” Bit strong, as far as reactions go. HBO next year will let us learn if this movie not many liked could be saved by the guy who made such a hash of it the first time.

A terrorist group, a bank where their money was allegedly “laundered,” a sting that wasn’t what it seemed to be.

“The Andorra Hustle” premieres Sept. 4.

“The Sleepover” is a quick and dirty “Spy Kids” spin where the kids aren’t spies at all. They just miss Mommy and Daddy.

Why? Because over-protective Mom (Malin Akerman) and dorky Dad (Ken Marino) have been kidnapped right under the nose of mouthy middle schooler Kevin (Maxwell Simkins), who was having a sleepover campout with his high-maintenance pal Lewis (Lucas Jaye) in the back yard.

And dang-it-all, tonight of all nights! Fifteen year-old cellist Clancy (Sadie Stanley) was in her “tight jeans,” all-dolled-up to sneak out with BFF Mim (Cree Cicchino) to a “senior” party hosted by Mr. “My parents are out of town, you should COME” that Clancy has a crush on.

Clancy has to lead this not-driving-age quartet from Cape Cod to “the city” (Boston), piecing together clues that Mom, who ISN’T who she seems to be, has left behind, intentionally or accidentally.

“Dude, your mom is into some ‘Da Vinci Code’ stuff,” churps Mim, the life of this party.

Mom won that “over-protective” to the point of “pathetic” label from Clancy because she’s the only teen at Harborview High without a cell phone.

“She thinks social media is where murderers and college admissions departments get their information about you.”

Dad’s a dork because he’s a pastry chef who drives a mini-van, exercising his “dough kneading” fingers as he waits in the car pool lane singing along with Paula Cole to “Where Have all the Cowboys Gone.”

But one viral video of Kevin, a polished, fantastical liar and aspiring boy’s restroom dancer, busting a middle school move, and kidnappers show up, shocking everybody BUT Mom.

“Your wife is a very dangerous woman, Mr. Finch. Or used to be.”

The story isn’t as engrossing a mystery as you’d hope, with “clues” and a pursuit that seem pre-ordained and dumb.

The action beats are a study in creative editing, as Akerman must display action heroine prowess that isn’t her forte.

Hey, YOU try to bowl over security guards wearing a tight slit skirt and high heels!

The comedy hinges on Simkins’ goofy, nerdy lies and Cicchino’s droll, mature-for-her-age put-downs.

There’s just enough here that you can see why Akerman and Joe Manganiello (playing Mom’s “ex,” and a peek into her torrid, action-packed past) would take the parts and the cash. No, it doesn’t have even a hint of “edge,” but most parents want their kids’ entertainment inoffensive.

“Sleepover” is cheerful enough that it passes the time, even as that time passes ever-so-slowly as it stumbles for clues, through a Boston sight gag or two and into the “big finish” that’s more a series of minor busts.

Leave this one to the tween-and-unders.

MPAA Rating: TV-PG, violence

Cast:  Sadie Stanley, Maxwell Simkins, Cree Cicchino, Malin Akerman, Joe Manganiello and Ken Marino.

Credits: Directed by Trish Sie, script by Sarah Rothschild.

Running time: