Movie Nation

A teenage fencer survived meningitis, which scarred her face and took her arms and legs.

“How can you live without arms or legs?” she cackles, in Italian accented English. Her condition just merits a shrug and a teenaged “S— happens!”

A sprinter survived losing a leg to machete wielding fanatics in the Burundi Civil War, and saw his own mother butchered in front of him.

The archer holds the bow with his feet and draws the string with his teeth.

“This is how I am,” he chuckles. “Merry CHRISTMAS.”

A weightlifter may have no legs, and until Beijing had to host a Paralympics, was among the millions of invisible disabled in the People’s Republic. A wheelchair sprinter was born in the former Soviet Union, which also was reluctant to admit “We have disabled people here.” She came to fame as an American paralympian.

“Everybody has a story,” Xavier Gonzalez, a member of the International Paralympics Committee, says. And in the case of paralympians, that story is going to be touching and triumphant.

Because as the athletes in “Rising Phoenix” put it, they’re the real “superheroes” among us, people who have overcome physical limitations to physically excel, human beings who fight prejudice and dismissal every day, and who aren’t afraid to punch back.

There are athletes all across the spectrum of sport who would kill to have a documentary portray them as heroic, epic and badass as Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui paint the superstars in “Rising Phoenix.”

Ryley Blatt, Australian wheelchair rugby star, the “Blattering Ram” of the sport still called “Murderball,” is one. Ellie Cole, a single-legged swimmer from Oz is another.

“Everybody in Australia has to swim,” she shrugs. It’s just that for her, “I was swimming in a circle” with just one leg “for a while.”

The film is a cornucopia of stories like theirs, legions of athletes shaking off “disability” as a label, donning “cheetah blades” and running with them.

“Phoenix” covers the history of the Paralympics movement, from its German Jewish emigre founder and those first 16 “men injured in the war” (WWII) games in London, to assorted triumphs (London, 2012) and debacles (Atlanta, 96, and Moscow refused to host them during the tainted 1980 Olympics), to the Rio games, which had a little of both.

For a fairly generic sports documentary, “Rising Phoenix” still manages a few thrills, some moving moments and a lot of sports action — blind soccer, armless swimming or ping pong, wheelchair fencing and all manner of other games and races competed on wheels.

And to a one, the athletes get the “superhero” treatment, lit like Greek gods, photographed in stunning slo-motion, celebrated with musical fanfares and profiled in the most delightfully unfiltered and sometimes profane ways.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for thematic content, brief violent images, some strong language, and for brief suggestive references

Cast: Ellie Cole, Matt Stutzman, Jean-Baptiste Alaize, Ntando Mahlandu, Andrew Parsons, Cui Zhe, Bebe Vio, Jonnie Peacock, Ryley Blatt, Tatyana McFadden, Xavier Gonzalez and The Duke of Sussex

Credits: Directed by Ian Bonhôte, Peter Ettedgui. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:44

There’s no mistaking “Tom of Your Life” for anything other than an indie comedy of singular vision.

A daft, sometimes dizzy and occasionally sentimental dash through relationships, parenting, morality, and life experiences packed into a story of a boy born and magically aging “four years, every hour on the hour” through his life over one long day, it is one filmmaker’s One Big Idea for a movie.

Jeremy Sklar goes by “Jer,” here, and for his debut feature film, he wrote, directed and did the music for a picture he also co-stars in, at least for the third act. That’s when he takes over the role of “Tom,” a child kidnapped from the hospital by a manic, unstable and abrasively funny nurse named Jess (Baize Buzan).

The best thing Nurse Jess ever did in her drug-abusing/restraining-ordered life was grabbing this potential science experiment and taking him out into the world for one eventful and often funny day. She stuffed tiny Tom (Levi Emerson Paul) into a garbage can, calmed him as she wheeled him to the parking lot, lying to anybody she met, and lit out.

She feeds him, takes him horseback riding and watches him age through two other actors (Judah Abner Paul and Joshua Paul) at the end of his first and only bicycle lesson.

Next thing you know, Tom (Dominic Rescigno) is in a track suit bugging her about sailboats (he saw a picture) and “maybe trying driving?”

“You’re not old enough…or maybe you ARE!”

He promptly ditches her and races to a strip club — because PUBERTY!

And so it goes through this long day, Tom aging (Sklar takes over at a going-to-seed 30), taking his first ever boat ride, a Chicago river tour, “a floating sidewalk of elderly people,” gulping his “first alcoholic beverage,” first sex, first hit of cocaine, first-ever poker game…

His first ride on the El is his first-ever encounter with a person-of-color. Fiftyish and tactlessly fascinated with “Your skin, what happened?”

All along this fast-moving day of stumbling from one adventure to another via extreme close-ups, we’re given insights into Jess’s fury. She has a purse full of pills and a pipe and has an unhealthy thing for older men — one of whom was her hospital boss (Paul Tigue), the other who pulled the trigger on a restraining order. She’s…unbalanced.

“Need a lift?“

“Not in your purple piece-of-s— RAPE van, I don’t!”

“That was HURTful!”

Buzan gets across the “not really a parent” thing of the early scenes well. But as she indulges little Tom, and then bigger and older Tom, her frazzled turn becomes sympathetic, as if she took Tom at four because she was good at math, and has a heart.

Sklar, as the eldest Tom, looks more and more like Tom Sizemore the older and paunchier and greyer he gets. It’s a fun performance with a hint of mortality to it.

There are more random funny encounters than just the guy trying to give Jess a lift, the foul-mouthed farmer who gives horseback rides and the hooker Tom finds on the Internet.

It doesn’t all work, and “Tom of Your Life” kind of grinds to a halt for a spell. But with every loopy scene, every underscored country-ish ballad Sklar croons on the soundtrack — “This is flyover country. They fly over…the BEST.” — you know you’re in the hands of a filmmaker who knows exactly the message he wants to get across and the tone he wants to set.

And if that means he takes every job in the production save for catering, so be it.

MPAA Rating: unrated, drug and alcohol abuse, sexual situations, profanity

Cast: Baize Buzan, Jeremy Sklar, James Sharpe, Judah Abner Paul, Joshua Paul, Dominic Rescigno and Paul Tigue

Credits: Written and directed by Jeremy “Jer” Sklar. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:31

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.