Movie Nation

Well, maybe we don’t all have as much time to kill as we did a month or three ago. A lot of people are going back to work, after all.

So two and a half hours of a dawdling wank of a heist thriller from Olivier Megaton (“Taken 2,” “Transporter 3”) wasn’t the worst way for Netflix to spend its production money. But it’s close.

“The Last Days of American Crime,” based on a “very near future” comic book tale, is about pulling off the last big robbery before API, a new “signal” that will stop criminals from committing crimes, is switched on.

Clocks are counting down, the TV yakkers are debating the morality and Constitutionality of it all. The People? They’re running wild in the streets, getting it out of their system, with the One Percent (pro jocks included) trying to flee to Canada.

Yeah, it’s “The Purge,” with no social commentary, no conscience, no soul and very little entertainment value.

Edgar Ramirez is Brick, a bank robber in Detroit, I guess (on the border), a guy we meet as he tortures somebody so we don’t feel so bad when he himself is tortured later.

Anna Brewster (TV’s “Versailles”) is Shelby, skinny young thing attached to crime-boss son Kevin Cash (Michael Pitt of “Rob the Mob” and TV’s “Boardwalk Empire,” amped-up as ever). But she’s more than arm-adornment. Shelby is our narrator, because Shelby dreamed up the caper.

They’ll hit “The Money Factory,” grab a bundle and make for Canada just before the API signal ends crime in America.

“Last Days” is a movie of indeterminate settings (I didn’t hear anybody say “Detroit”), bit players with unexplained European accents, lots of shouting and odd moments of shooting.

South African Sharlto Copley, doing his best American accent ever, is kind of lost in the mix as a cop about to be — in essence — made obsolete for a high-pitched “signal” that removes “free will” (the will to be a crook), discourages, punishes and can even kill.

Everybody has “one week left to make your own choices,” which means they’d all best get a move on.

Megaton — “Colombiana” was his best film — is a great big pile of bad directing, and the action beats here don’t hide that. He relies too much on voice-over, and can’t quite tell when a sentence an actor utters makes no GD sense whatsoever.

“Like I told you, if you don’t have a contract on your head in my family, it means they don’t like you.”

There’s a little “getting too old for this” you-know-what, a dash of “Sometimes you get to see the bullet that has your name on it,” a lot of neon blended in with the urban wasteland that passes for production design.

The caper is routine, the twists don’t — twist. “American Crime” just lies there, a corpse awaiting reanimation that never comes.

Pitt does this loopy, deranged, gonzo criminal thing as well as anybody and gives us something to look at.

Brewster’s big break includes some tough talk, short skirts and the obligatory sex-in-the-filthy-bar-bathroom scene. How I long for the day actresses aren’t subjected to that degradation.

I like Ramirez, of “Hands of Stone,” “Point Break,” “Joy, “The Girl on the Train” and “The Liberator.” And I will like him again once I’ve forgotten this, which will be any minute now.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, graphic violence, sex, drug content, profanity

Cast: Edgar Ramirez, Anna Brewster, Michael Pitt and Sharlto Copley.

Credits: Directed by Olivier Megaton, script based on the graphic novel. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:29

The problem with “Mr. Topaz” is underlined, under-scored and trumpeted at approximately one hour in to this “lost” Peter Sellers comedy. That’s when Sellers’ “Pink Panther” foil, Herbert Lom bursts on the screen, jolts the lethargic back to life and hints at the years of glorious toe-to-toe moments that would begin the second time they teamed up on screen.

He “sets up” Sellers’ simple, righteous French school teacher (the title role) as a front for some shady businesses he runs. He bowls Sellers over with his bluff presence, his (faux) French charm, his “My dear Topaz” reassurances.

And when someone (John Le Mesurier) shows up to threaten Topaz with exposure, ruin and prison, it is the oily menace of Castel Benac (Blom) who sizes him up and deals with the problem.

“Tell me, is this your first go at blackmail?” he purrs.

This legendary 1961 bomb was Sellers’ first and (supposedly) only go at directing a feature film. He was nearing the peak of his stardom, fresh off the success of “The Millionairess,” on his way to “Lolita” and “Doctor Strangelove.” And the myth about it was that Sellers retrieved every copy of this 20th Century Fox (which released it as “I Like Money” in the US) Cinemascope/Eastmancolor bust and burned them, so great was his shame.

Well, he didn’t get them all. The British Film Institute held onto it, and restored it for BluRay last year, and now it’s here for Sellers completists to pore over and debate.

He may have been playing another incorruptible, honest man (as in “The Millionairess”). But he was his own worst enemy, too distracted as director and star to find the laughs, too vain to notice there weren’t any.

Mr. Topaz is a provincial French school teacher between the wars, happy enough in his work with the pranking little boys in his charge, hopeful that the flirtations of a fellow teacher (Billie Whitelaw, who went on to do “Frenzy,” “Start the Revolution Without Me” and “Hot Fuzz”) aren’t just because she wants him to grade her papers for her.

She’s the daughter of the greedy, imperious headmaster (Leo McKern), which makes it unlikely that there’ll ever be wedding bells. Not that Topaz’s pal Tamise (Michael Gough, Batman’s butler when Michael Keaton wore the cowl) lets him give up.

There are lengthy scenes where Tamise bucks up Topaz, tells him “that’s what women) want — a man.” He reassures him that he’s handsome — “You know, from certain angles, you look positively leonine!”

And Sellers, as Topaz, eats this up even as these laughless scenes drag on for an hour. Encounters with the wealthy nightclub and musical theater singing “aunt” (Nadia Gray) of a little boy Topaz tutors (Michael Sellers, Peter’s little boy), debates with Tamise about the righteousness of teaching small children, all delay us from getting to the movie’s point.

Which is tempting and testing the naive idealist with corruption. Children “shield us from all the greed and selfishness in the world.” When temptation arises, Topaz declares “There is no profit in ill-gotten gains!”

Original playwright and screenwriter Marcel Pagnol must’ve been a communist. I jest. Because somebody has to.

The weakest Sellers films always showcased him as guarded, too dignified to do that pompous-man-made-the-fool thing he mastered as Inspector Clouseau. That wasn’t the only trick up his sleeve, as “Being There,” “The Party” and “After the Fox” proved. But the formerly fat funnyman let his “I’m a dashing ladykiller” delusions get in the way of the fun in many a film he didn’t feel challenged him.

He hired McKern (“The Mouse that Roared,” “Help!”), John Neville (“Baron Munchausen”), Lom and Whitelaw and got barely a laugh out of any of them.

Sellers comes off as earnest, committed but lost trying to figure out how to shape this thing into a funny parable, so lost he can’t tell he’s boring us to death with an hour of establishing Topaz is a teacher of “unimpeachable integrity” before he gets to anything even remotely promising.

Since he only got to make 50 or so movies, and only directed one (he’s credited for directing some of his final film, “The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu”), that’s the tragedy of “Mr. Topaz.” We want every Sellers film to be “The Ladykillers” or “The Mouse That Roared” or “The World of Henry Orient.” And too often they weren’t, even though the paydays were growing.

“I Like Money” — the American title seems to suit, now — is for Sellers completists only.

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast: Peter Sellers, Nadia Gray, Leo McKern, Herbert Lom,Billie Whitelaw, Michael Gough and John Neville.

Credits: Directed by Peter Sellers script by Pierre Rouve, based on the play and later screenplay by Marcel Pagnol. A Film Movement Plus streaming release.

Running time: 1:37

The best of the “bingeworthy” dramas in this, the golden age of streaming, are true “limited series.”

They’re the TV equivalent of a good genre novel, a “page turner.” They give you a beginning, a layered, ever-more-revealing, twisty middle, and an end — a conclusion.

The Belgian bank robbery/hostages thriller “The Day (De Dag)” gives you a lot to wrestle with in its introduction and challenges you right up to the series finale. So many characters, so many intrigues, the occasional competing agenda, the odd “Wait, she’s WHAT?” make it the quintessential crime “page turner.”

It’s about “The Day” of a crime, and is seen from the point of view of both the police, mustering outside, summoning hostage negotiators (Sophie Decleir, Lukas De Wolf and Willy Thomas) and the handful of hostages and the criminals “trapped” inside a Belgian bank. These points-of-view are explored semi-separately, in alternating episodes.

Yes, that’s gimmicky and repetitive. But the viewer’s perception is altered in each episode — the negotiator who may be “green,” the distraught and grieving heiress (Maaike Neuville) accidentally trapped inside, the hatefully rebellious teen girl (Imani De Caestecker) who shows she can redirect her rage when her kid brother is threatened.

North American viewers should find its differing police tactics, even if the SWAT armor and tiny cameras drilled through the walls (the gear) seems the same. Reading the Dutch word for police, “Politie” and seeing cops interact with criminals, victims, family and rule-benders in the press, the “polite” contrast with American law enforcement is stark.

Masked gunmen have slipped into a scaled-down branch of FidesBank, grabbing an employee or three, and whoever was hitting the sealed-off lobby ATM, by accident.

A cell-phone is left dangling at the door to speak to the cops with as they seal the place explosive devices and settle in for a siege they plainly came prepared for.

Or did they? As “The Day” unfolds (in Dutch with English subtitles), we may think “inside job” only to be steered away from it in the next episode. We rightfully wonder, “Why is there a vault in a store room hidden behind cardboard boxes?”

Did the crooks mean for the fabric firm’s heiress, grieving from the recent suicide of her brother, to be there? What will they do with teenage Noor (De Caestecker) and her baby brother Basil?

The most intriguing bits to me were in the hostage negotiator van, where Vos (Declair) is letting new guy Ibrahim (De Wolf) handle the phone calls, and where senior man Roeland (Willy Thomas) pieces together a profile of who they’re up against just by the demands, the language used, the tenor of the voice and their responses to this counter offer or that bit of “pressure.”

You watch as many movies and TV series like this as I have and you can’t help but place a premium on any that serves up a big dose of “What the hell is going on here?”

Straight hostages-for-cash caper? Money laundering? Blackmail? What is it they plan to do with the cash? How will they make their getaway?

It takes two episodes for the first “cop movie/TV show” cliche to show up.

“When did you start smoking again?”

The repetition may be wearing, and the penurious way plot, motives and simple character names and relationship are explained — there are a LOT of moving parts here — is challenging.

But the way all these people, pieces and plans are integrated and broken down will keep you on task for all 12 episodes of “The Day.”

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence

Cast:    Willy Thomas, Imani De Caestecker, Johan van Assche, Maaike Neuville, Lukas De Wolf, Bob Snijers, Geert Van Rampelberg, Sophie Decleir

Credits: Created by Jonas Geirnaert. Streaming on Topic.

Running time: 12 episodes @38-48 minutes each

Some movies lay it all out there, up front. Jam everything they’re about into an opening scene and force the viewer to decide, “Nope” or “Let’s see where they’re going with this.

It’s a great strategy for “film festival” movies, cinema that won’t ever reach a large audience but which might find ITS audience, given a little notoriety.

“Mope” opens with a circle jerk, and leaves little to the bodily fluid imagination as it does. Right then and there, you’ve got to commit.

“Am I interested in this look at the lowdown low-lifes of porn, or am I at least willing to sit through it?”

Lucas Heynes’ “actual events/names changed” film is a dark comedy that isn’t really comic, an expose that isn’t intended as such and a sobering look at porn as it pretty much is now (the setting is 2010), with none of the gloss, rose-colored glasses and gorgeous movie stars of “Boogie Nights.”

It’s about two friends who meet and become “partners” in that mob of homely men “acting” with one naked blonde opening scene. Tom Dong (Kelly Sry) is an IT/tech whiz (sorry) who gave it all up for the chance to become a porn star. The bragging blowhard (sorry) Steve Driver (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett) is equally delusional, and manic to boot.

Both are lonely shrimps, but figure their lives will change if “the ladies” know they’re so good and uninhibited at sex that they’re “porn stars.”

“Every woman wants what a porn star can give her. Stability...and the ‘best lay on Earth,” etc.

And when Tom whispers non-sexy words of encouragement into Steve’s ear during their group scene — Steve’s having performance issues — they bond.

They’re into the same kinds of porno pics, reveling in a shared love of this actor’s “butt cycle,” and classics of the genre — “artful anal, but shot on VHS.

They idolize “The Hedgehog,” hardcore fans’ nickname for porn star Ron Jeremy. They dream of becoming “The Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker of Porn.” And they’ll do anything to get in on the ground floor at Ultima Studios.

Brian Huskey imagines camcorder director and studio chief Eric as Stanley Tucci taking on a new career. He’s funny, tough, flexible, and just like the two “kids” who want to get their start — a bit off. Their “audition” is an improvised “sleepy cheerleader” scene that climaxes (sorry) with a high kick to the groin.

Maybe “ball busters” are “the next big thing in the adult entertainment industry.” Probably not. But Eric is all-in on the possibility, calling out directions as he videos.

“STOP looking at the camera! Check out those SHOES!”

Neither young man is well-built or “well-endowed.” Neither has much personality. But they beg their way into place to stay and a pittance for pay, even though Steve (living in his car, with “hygiene issues”) and Tom give Eric doubts. Are they like, gay?

“I can’t afford to have anything WEIRD here.”

But they’re hired, two “actors” and custodians for the price of one, “one ‘mope’ and two bodies.”

That’s what a “mope” is, the lowest employee on the porn totem pole, a needy wannabe who has no other sexual options but this, and is willing to clean up the mess — sexual and scatological — that comes (sorry) with the territory.

Tom shares Steve’s mania for “learning the business from the ground up” and both say they’re willing to do things no other men in this business will do.” It’s just that they’re no good at at it. And Steve? He’s not quite right.

They shoot a “cuck” scenario (a gang-bang with the hapless boyfriend/husband there to watch and be insulted) and Eric calls for his mopes — Fisting Bill, Johnny Panties, Jerry Brokehammer and uh, Dick Tracy — to taunt the “husband” as they service his wife.

Steve. Doesn’t. Get. It.

He declares that the best part of having sex “with her is cuddling afterwards.”

“Mope,” again based on a true story, shows these two failing their way into chance after chance. A more legitimate director, Rocket (David Arquette), is willing to give these“Bukkake Boys” with their “Chris Tucker and Jackie Chan of porn” idea a go. Only in the most humiliating ways.

“Come on, guys! This is COMEDY. Stereotypes are funny!”

Arquette’s Rocket gives the Chinese-American Tom lessons on how to do a racist Hollywood Japanese accent. He shouts at Steve — “Why are you talking so WHITE? Channel your inner MANDINGO!”

But all along, we’re getting a weirder than weird vibe from one of our two heroes. What can seem random and off-the-wall in his improvisations during scenes (“MONSTER hands! Chicken hands!”), his explicit letters home to a NASA father he wants to impress, suggests something darker.

Sry, of TV’s “Awkward,” doesn’t make much of an impression as the shrinking violet of the cast. British actor Stewart-Jarrett dazzles and discomfits in scene after scene, playing a man who may demand respect but seemingly willing to accept any humiliation. And Huskey (“Veep”) gives an openly mercenary but indulgent reading of Eric, a turn that never lets you stop thinking “He’s doing Stanley Tucci!”

The real value in “Mope” is stripping the sheen and the glamour off of porn, still shot, as it was in the pre-Internet “Boogie Nights,” in the unfashionable San Fernando Valley (Van Nuys and environs).

A walking tour of a low-rent porn studio is amusing — “Here’s our ‘hospital’ set. That’s the ‘interrogation room.’ In there’s the ‘lube room.'” Don’t ask what’s in the vending machine.

But everything in this, from the seedy locations to the homely men and high-mileage women “performers,” down to the junkie-hooker brought in for day work, makes you feel dirty for just having watched it.

And that’s kind of where “Mope” leaves you, not quite embarrassed for laughing at these two dopes trying to find a place in what is a laughably odd “business,” but wondering if you should be. Heyne never really reconciles that, content to get his shocks and his laughs until things aren’t that funny any more.

MPAA Rating: unrated, sexually explicit to the point of gross.

Cast: Nathan Stewart-Jarrett, Kelly Sry, Brian Huskey, Tonya Cornelisse, Nash Carter and David Arquette.

Credits: Directed by Lucas Heyne, script by Lucas Heyne and Zack Newkirk. A Quiver release.

Running time: 1:46

Pretty young performers struggle to get that first break in The Big City in “High Strung Free Dance,” a Broadway music and dance melodrama that, like its predecessor, “High Strung,” has most of its edge rubbed off.

This is a “Fame” version of the gritty reality of “cattle calls,” dead-end jobs to make your rent, big dreams that haven’t turned jaded because they never could in this fairytale version of “My first Broadway show.”

And when I chose “Fame” instead of “A Chorus Line” as an analogy here, I mean the various watered-down TV versions of “Fame,” not Alan Parker’s sex, abortion, “coming out” raw talent finding its way drama.

Barlow (Juliet Doherty) is the dancer who can’t quite get that ballet break and has not gotten that “ballerina’s build” (willowy, not voluptuous) talk from anybody who might discourage her from modern or Broadway dance ambitions.

Charlie (Harry Jarvis) is the dedicated pianist who practices practices practices when he isn’t delivering pastries from the Artistry Deli, like other singers, dancers and musicians. He sees a Steinway in the apartment of an aged recluse, and he’s just got to dip into a little Chopin.

The knowing voice from the other room seems annoyed. But Madame Le Tour (Kika Markham) is the first person to say anything positive to any of the aspiring stars in this “High Strung.”

“Next time you come, play Schubert!”

That’s kind of the vibe, here. “Free Dance,” which takes its title from the new revue planned by the imperious tyro choreographer Zander Raines (Thomas Doherty, no relation), sets up a love triangle. Being super square, the romantic tug of war is between Zander, who picks up on Barlow’s skinny pale chutzpah, and Charlie, who meets her the night Zander’s taxi knocks him off his delivery bike. Two bookend pretty boys and they’re both interested in Barlow, who you just know if going to steal the show.

Charlie ends up as show pianist — like Prince, Zander casts his onstage musicians for their “look” as well as their playing. Barlow ends up being everybody’s second choice when pop starlet-dancer Kayla (Jorgen Makena) plays coy about taking the starring role in “Free Dance.”

Zander wants what’s best for the show, and likes to come on (gently) to his leading ladies. He’s a cross between Bob Fosse and Tommy Tune — rude, aloof, hetersexual in a largely gay world, but fashion show pretty.

Charlie is the more wholesome guy, which in a movie that aims to paint this world beige, is saying something.

So there’s little conflict in the love triangle. When Barlow’s roommate absconds with the rent money and she needs to share, non-competitive fellow members of the chorus Paloma and Keke (Nataly Santiago, Kerrynton Jones) invite her in. Curvy women of color who are very much the energetic, hair-flinging modern Broadway dancer incarnate, they should resent not being the choreographer’s favorite and Barlow’s skinny white dance privilege.

She’s the daughter of Oksana (Jane Seymour), the dance teacher and only carry-over from 2016’s “High Strung.”

It’s a formula dance movie that puts minimal effort into deviating from that formula. But every so often, “Free Dance” threatens to take flight — a dish washer at the Artistry Cafe sings and dances along to his favorite jams (on headphones) on his way to work, Charlie’s first paying gig is with a Zoot Suit revue built around Kid Diamond (Manuel Pacific) and flapper-dancers.

And Zander drags Barlow to Kayla’s club show, featuring her in skin-baring Babylonian gear fronting a backup corps from her harem.

The club scenes are the way club sequences have always been in the movies — too elaborate to ever be anything remotely practical (from a cover-charge perspective).

The dancing is vivacious and arresting, “PG sexy” given the film’s rating.

The music? Think John Tesh.

It’s one thing to make the sex appeal teen friendly. It’s quite another to rub all the edges off pretty much everybody so that there are no real villains and there’s little you could actually call “conflict.”

Whatever “High Strung” was, by “High Strung Free Dance,” the tension’s left the strings, and the movie conjured up to fit that title.

MPAA Rating: PG, some skin, some kissing, one swear word

Cast: Juliet Doherty, Thomas Doherty, Harry Jarvis, Kerrynton Jones, Nataly Santiago, Jorgen Makena,  Kika Markham and Jane Seymour

Credits: Directed by Michael Damian , script by Michael Damian and Janeen Damia. An Atlas release, on Netflix

Running time: 1:43

He plays the old guy who let’s the kids get into underground brawling in this one.

A man loses his wife and daughter in a car crash and seeks solace on his Ducati Scrambler X riding the mountains, beaches and deserts of California in the somber, largely dialogue and incident-free “A Thousand Miles Behind.”

I liked the way actor turned writer-director Nathan Wetherington treated this treatise on grief, checking out of the misery, responsibility and reminders of what just happened as an interior journey. Little talking, minimal interaction, no overt explaining.

A guy (Jeffrey Doornbos) lies in bed, kisses his wife (Bre Blair) goodbye with his tweenage daughter waiting in the car. Next thing we know, a cop in a suit is there, Preston’s (Doornbos) in his suit as well, and his cell phone is ringing, beeping and burping with texts, emails, unreturned calls — expressions of grief, little errands (picking up his daughter’s things from school) that he simply cannot face.

A friend walks in on him sleeping in his back yard. He can’t bear to be in the house. And a motorcycle with a note on it shows up in the driveway.

Even that isn’t explained. His old bike, returned? A loaner from Wes (Scott Kinworthy)?

After a day or so more of letting his hair and beard grow and leaving his phone off, he’s packed up and hits the blue highways of California, riding the salt flats (It’s an on or off road bike.), camping at Joshua Tree, “where the streets have no name.”

But the gaping hole in “A Thousand Miles Behind” is that there is literally nothing more to it than this. It’s a rolling ad for the Ducati — except when he lays it down in loose sand and has a devil of a time getting it back upright.

The odd “Where ya’headed?” query from a cute store clerk, a sympathetic pour from a fetching bartender, and that one other solitary soul (Vanessa Campbell of “The Lovers”) who hits him with “What’re you running from, Preston?” Even she cackles at that cliche. It’s a joke. In the way of such movies, she just KNOWS his story.

There was a similar movie about grief starring Josh Lucas a few years back, “A Year in Mooring (Hide Away).” That was built around the cliche of the middle-aged man retreating into a bottle and a boat due to grief. I rather liked that (Lucas, James Cromwell and Ayelet Zurer make for a more interesting, charismatic cast). But I’m into boats, not bikes.

This “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Grieving” left me wanting a movie to go with the 70 minute Ducati ad.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, alcohol abuse, profanity

Cast: Jeffrey Doornbos, Bre Blair, Vanessa Campbell and Greg Evigan.

Credits: Written and directed by Nathan Wetherington. A Level 33 release.

Running time:

Never have I ever wanted to reach through a screen and give a screenwriter a good, hard “What the hell is the MATTER with you?” shaking. Until “The Dinner Party.”

An exasperatingly amateur and funereal “Satanic ritual sacrifice” horror outing, sitting through it is like watching the wax melt on a candle, like seeing your life ebb away at the slow-poke slow-witted slow-motion trainwreck that co-writer/director Miles Doleac hath wrought.

Why do we read the credits when we go to the movies, kids? Why, to remember writers, directors and stars we want to hear from again. Or avoid ones who are a sure-fire, guaranteed waste of our time.

Doleac did “Hallowed Ground.” He’s just churning out the chum from the bottom rung of the horror feature film ladder. And his latest invites comparisons to one of the most infamous names in film — Uwe Boll.

“The Dinner Party” is about an aspiring playwright Jeff (Mike Mayhall) and his wife Haley (Alli Hart) who’ve been invited to an exclusive meal at the home of wealthy, eccentric and bitchily rude Sebastian Todd (Sawandi Wilson of Netflix’s “House of Flowers”) and his drawling epicurean partner Carmine (Bill Sage of TV’s “Power” and “Orange is the New Black”).

Jeff wants backers for his play. He just needs Haley to charm their hosts, but “no hospital talk and no crazy talk tonight,” he says. He’s got her pills. So they’re all good, right?

Others invited include the put-on posh-accented Vincent (Doleac himself), the faux feminist Tarot card reader Sadie (Lindsay Anne Williams) and the mystery novelist Agatha (Kamille McCuin of “N.O.L.A. Circus”).

Agatha makes the most memorable entrance. Haley stumbles into her at the upstairs bathroom, randy and stark-naked. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

As this is a “no cell phones” party, we can guess what’s coming, what’s in the wine, what’s on the menu and just what belief system these fey rich inbreds call their own.

How one gets a 113 minute movie out of a 50 minute idea is pacing. Every gesture, every drag on a cigarette, is so theatrical as to almost be in slow motion. Every sentence of incompetent dialogue is drawn out, freighted with pregnant pauses and…meaning.

The alleged swells debate opera like neophytes who got all their snobbery from a quick Wikipeda glance, tell assorted unsuitable-for-dinner stories from operas, legends — Bluebeard, for instance. And they read “the cards.”

“Hurry up and shuffle the cards before I get BORED!”

Too late for that. Too late, too late.

“Sebastian, if you will, my cleaver. Oh, and my apron!”

No glance is without lingering, cartoonish contempt, no dialogue isn’t dull beyond measure, no murder lacks the state film industry subsidized gallons of fake blood.

This is utter garbage, from conception to closing credits.

Miles Doleac? If you can’t do better, consider stopping. Uwe Boll runs a pretty good restaurant in Vancouver, we hear. But considering “The Dinner Party,” maybe that’s not for you, either.

MPAA Rating: unrated, graphic gory violence, nudity, profanity

Cast: Alli Hart, Bill Sage, Sawandi Wilson, Kamille McCuin, Lindsay Anne Williams, Mike Mayall and Miles Doleac.

Credits: Directed by Miles Doleac, script by Miles Doleac, Michael Donovan Horn. An Uncork’d release.

Running time: 1:53

A filmmaker creates an imaginary letter to his daughter in dreaming of a world where best current practices and technology are applied to solve climate change in “2040,” an almost tearfully optimistic take on a subject that has long lived on “gloom and doom.”

Aussie Damon Gameau (“That Sugar Film”) and wife Zoe plant a tree with his then-four-year-old daughter Velvet, and then take us to visit legions of school children from much of the world, listening to their concerns. Then Gameau takes us to experts and academics, and hands-on engineers of soil, power, ocean and planet “regeneration” to see how things might be for 24 year-old Velvet (Eva Lazarro).

We hear another version of the economic/environmental “donut” theory of how to rethink the global economy to make it more planet-friendly and equitable from Cambridge economist Kate Raworth.

We’re shown what can be achieved by decentralizing the economy and the power grid with the “bottom up” solar home microgrids of Bangladesh, where villages without power have been brought into a healthier, more stable 21st century by adapting solar-roof/battery setups that have revolutionized life for the better.

Gameau hangs with Paul Hawken of Project Drawdown to learn how vital rethinking agricultural practices (killing “Big Ag”) to improve farm practices, soil regeneration and reap the rewards of carbon sequestering that come with that.

Gameau goes to see where near-futurists envision offshore kelp farms that start the process of healing the oceans as they create whole new sectors in a post-fossil fuel economy.

And we hear one other “Big Vision” idea that “We need to have now” — the global empowerment of girls and young women. Education, sexual independence (freed from forced marriages and pregnancies) and adding millions of great minds to throw at the world’s problems might be the single most important thing we can do about climate change.

Illustrated with digital effects and whimsical stop-motion animation, “2040” is the opposite of the decades of documentaries built on the dire warnings about the future that is already here — climate disasters on the rise with rising temperatures, rising sea levels, mass extinctions and spreading droughts.

And it’s more upbeat and less cynical than the cautionary “Planet of the Humans,” pulled from Youtube for attacking the less-than-stellar record of those in the forefront of the environmental movement, misguided champions of “biomass” fuels and the like.

Gameau takes it as a given that things have to be done, and now, and that we’ll do them. Maybe that’s as naive as leaving the short-sightedness of human greed out of his film’s calculations. The swipes at Big Ag, Big Fossil and Big Banks aren’t going to be enough to break their stranglehold on this century.

But in showing us the upside of turning a deaf ear to those with the money to amplify their self-interested voices of doubt, Gameau and “2040” give us the tiniest of hopes that maybe things will get better soon enough for us to escape the very worst.

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast: Damon Gameau , Zoe Gameau, Velvet Gameau, Eva Lazarro, Helena Norberg-Hodge, Kate Raworth, Paul Hawken, Colin Seis, many others

Credits: Written and directed by Damon Gameau. A Together Films release.

Running time:1:31

The idea is that “Just!Mercy” free rentals is that they “encourage “systemic racism” education.” https://t.co/OmG4M46qKe https://twitter.com/Variety/status/1267823593322213376?s=20