Movie Nation

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

Is there anything we don’t know about Carrie Fisher’s life, thanks to her own decades of “over-sharing,” in print, in interviews and on stage?

Sure there is. And Sheila Weller’s all-forgiving portrait of the screen icon, daughter of Hollywood royalty, actress turned American wit is here to both dish and reveal — sometimes unintentionally, the “real” Carrie, the one her family, legions of friends colleagues got to see when the spotlight was off.

The overall impression of this, one of America’s most beloved celebrities, celebrated for her openness about her mental illness (manic depressive/bipolar) and her addictions, the traumas and tragedies of her upbringing and adult life, is exhaustion.

It must have been exhausting being her, this wound-up (when she wasn’t crashing), impulsive, mercurial motor-mouth. And it had to be exhausting to the friends she was so fiercely loyal to, people the born narcissist turned into “instant sidekicks” throughout her life.

Keeping up with her antic over-thinking, her whims, coping with her all-night talking jags on the phone, her extravagant and singular genius for gift giving, and her gift for making just about everything about herself had to wear on a body — hers and anyone within her orbit. But few bailed out.

Weller’s peek behind the curtain reveals Carrie in all her glory, and her depressions, minor, major and manic.

She recounts the way Fisher transitioned from “Star Wars,” which she joked off with a shrug for decades, to making people with the franchise that made mom Debbie Reynolds “Carrie Fisher’s mother” to recent generations.’

Weller defends Fisher’s literary rep at every turn, but reveals that her letters and journals were the only writing she ever did on her own. Others came and sat with her, guiding, editing, outlining every memoir-disguised-as-novel (“Postcards from the Edge,” etc.), screenplay (she was more famous as a “script doctor,” joking up/smartening up others work) or one-woman show (“Wishful Drinking”) she ever did.

“High maintenance?” Put her photo next to the phrase in the next edition of the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, aka “DSM”). She was hand-held into publishing and hand-held through every book she produced, many of them critically acclaimed, if aging poorly.

I think of her writing as very much “of its time,” with her autobiography and “history” instantly overwhelming the thinly disguised roman a clefs that “Postcards,” “Surrender the Pink,” “The Best Awful There Is” and “Delusions of Grandma” were.

Weller quotes extensively from Fisher’s books and stage show, “Wishful Drinking,” and the inadvertent result is to diminish our memories of the wit and the work. Fisher was great in interviews (I interviewed her once, and covered a few public Q & A’s). But the endless quotations show a needy, grasping vaudevillian rim-shot quality.

“They say religion is the opiate of the masses. Well, I’ve taken masses of opiates!”

And the crowd goes wild with giggles, because they/we, like Weller, are very indulgent of the poster-girl princess turned gossipy sage.

It’s fun to remember the teen brassiness that she brought to the meeting that led to her “big break,” cast as Lee Grant’s daughter opposite Warren Beatty in “Shampoo.” But Fisher herself had already related everything to do with “Star Wars,” how she got the gig, the British acting school she’d just dropped out of to take the part (explaining Princess Leia’s posh-ish accent, the deep-voiced chutzpah with Fisher’s own) in her memoirs.

We knew Paul Simon, her long-term love, was and is insufferable and could have guessed he made her feel uneducated (a 15 year-old drop-out who toured and sang with her mother’s post-Hollywood nightclub act). We’ve heard about her connection to her fellow coke-head John Belushi, if not of her affair with “Asperger’s” comic actor Dan Aykroyd.

You can find Youtube samples of her singing with Debbie’s act, an unpolished low alto tackling standards, and “Bridge Over Troubled Water” years before she and Simon became a thing. She eschewed a singing career because “That’s Debbie’s thing” and “I don’t want to end up like Liza.” She didn’t. Well, aside from marrying a gay man who fathered her child and left her for a man. Kinda Liza. Ish.

I had no idea how big a role she played in the Oscars, so beloved she was used as a talent wrangler, talking stars into making appearances when all other pleading failed. Yes, she helped Bruce Vilanch with jokes, here and there.

Fisher’s problems became public in the nether years between her pal and fellow addict John Belushi’s death and the infamous “Hollywood Vice Squad,” a Penelope Spheeris bomb where Fisher looked a wreck, and had to be desperate to take on. I remember reviewing that one in the form of an open letter to Debbie Reynolds, saying — without being privy to Hollywood gossip about Fisher’s abuse and mental illness issues — that something was wrong and she needed guidance.

Fisher’s then-unemployability, her reaching “bottom” (a near death overdose), all triggered her (partial) recovery and that film changed titles in “Postcards from the Edge,” a self-help novel written as self-help for Carrie that saved her life, her career and her reputation, even if she never really stopped using illegal drugs.

Despite its constant harping on a “not her fault because she was sick” theme, “A Life on the Edge” is a good book, a quick read and a most sympathetic portrait of a very complicated woman who surmounted serious illnesses and exaggerated “Mommy” issues, someone who gets the benefit of the doubt in ways daddy Eddie Fisher (An addict, narcissistic and impulsive.) never did or for that matter, deserved.

Carrie Fisher: A Life on the Edge, by Sheila Weller. Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 402 pages, with index and notes. $28.00

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Hell hath no fury like a 13-year-old girl scorned. Or crossed. Or given a nickname she’s outgrown.

Or God forbid, one who’s lost her mother, seen her father tortured and witnessed unspeakable cruelty to her DOG at the hands of escaped convicts!

“Becky” is a gory, not-quite-gonzo B-movie thriller about such a teen under such circumstances. And the blood-curdling screams Lulu Wilson (TV’s “The Haunting of Hill House”) unleashes after she’s worked up a fury will, you know, curdle your you-know-what.

The movie, from the filmmakers behind the solid actioner “Bushwick,” kind of lets her down. As do the adult leads. You can cast Joel McHale as Becky’s tortured dad and cuddly Kevin James as her skinhead tormentor, but that doesn’t mean they’re up to it.

I could’ve sworn McHale was fighting back a smirk as he acted opposite “The King of Queens/Paul Blart” as James grabs a hot poker out of a fire for a little branding of his victim.

Neither one believed the other, in character. Why should we?

Wilson is the sullen kid who has her reasons. She hangs onto the video of visits with her dying mom on her cell phone, resents the nickname Dad (McHale) still calls her — “Chipmunk” — and isn’t HEARING this news that he’s ready to re-marry, to the fair Kayla (Amanda Brugel of “The Handmaid’s Tale”), with her little boy Tye (Isaiah Rockliffe) a part of the bargain.

But the house they’re weekending in the country in wasn’t always Dad’s. There’s a reason the savage “Brotherhood” (“Aryan” is implied) guys who made their carefully-plotted escape from prison transport have made their way to it.

Everybody else is trapped when the four of them, led by Dominick (James) and his hulking lieutenant Apex (Robert Maillet), come to the door.

But Becky is off in her playhouse/fort in the woods when this happens. And once it’s established that she’s gotten away and she might have access to what Dominick came there for, it’s gruesome, gory game on.

Becky’s a bad liar — “The cops are coming!” But she proves to be a badass as she faces the racist thugs one at a time.

The script’s cleverness lies in the ways she has of evening the odds, the bloodier the better. The script’s weakness is most everything else.

Armed men come up to the “fort,” setting up the stupidest “stand-offs” ever.

“Go AWAY!” Except when, in the odd moment when a man-mountain of an adult gets his hands on Becky, she changes that to “Let me GO!”

Granted, if you’ve ever been around a 13 year-old girl with a furious/rebellious streak, that’s kind of in-character — irrational and insistently shrill.

James’s lines as Dominick have a polish that prison didn’t give him.

“Prepare yourself, Becky. You’re about to find out what happens when you LIE to me!”

James works so hard to underplay this guy that much of the malevolence we need from the Dominick evaporates.

People are injured, but the players don’t play the agony they must be in from a bullet through the thigh or the loss of an eye.

Brugel is one adult who doesn’t let down the side. But even her little moments of spitting fire can’t fix the Achilles heel of any thriller that doesn’t work.

There’s no urgency, here. Nobody’s in a mad dash to get this thing that they came there for before the cops find them. Nobody panics, freaks out or whimpers in fear and misery. Even the kids.

B-movies as a genre come with a lot of givens, the chief of which is “We know what they’re doing, know where they’re going and have an idea of what’s going to take us there.”

Movies like “Becky” don’t work when the villains don’t go all in and when the pace flags to the point where we notice the clunky dialogue and less than involving performances.

MPAA Rating: R for strong bloody violence, grisly images, and language

Cast: Kevin James, Joel McHale, Amanda Brugel, Robert Maillet and Lulu Wilson as “Becky”

Credits: Directed by Jonathan Milott, Cary Murnion, script by Nick Morris, Ruckus Skye and Lane Skye. A Quiver release.

Running time: 1:33

The myriad twists upon turns in the finale might convince you otherwise, but “Intuition (La Corazonada)” has been an eye-rollingly formulaic police procedural up to that point. Savvy viewers have stayed with it only because it’s from the same director, Alejandro Montiel, who made “Perdida.”

He’s good on the whole “surprise” finish thing, if nothing else. .

The even twistier “Perdida” is based on a novel by Florencia Etcheves, a tale of a cop, Pipa (Luisana Lopilato) obsessed with figuring out what happened to a childhood friend who disappeared in Patagonia years before.

“Intuition” is a prequel that shows us the early years of the detective who would develop that killer “Intuition.”

Manuela “Pipa” Pelari is a mere uniform when she gains notice helping hot-shot detective Francisco Juanez (Joaquín Furriel) crack a religious crank kidnapping case. She’s immediately thrown together with the dark, brooding and mysterious Juanez on a murder case. A teenage girl has been killed in her house. Did her boyfriend or “best friend” do it?

The boss (Sebastián Mogordoy) has another assignment, on the side, for Pipa. The mysterious Juanez lost his wife in an armed robbery, and the guy who did it was run over (in the film’s opening scene) just after being let out of jail.

Did Juanez and his brother cops kill him and cover it up? She’s got to set up her own undercover investigation in the basement of her building while bird-dogging clues in the murder she’s working with Juanez, without letting on she’s put a tracker on Juanez’s car and is digging deeper into the death of this Gypsy crime family member who killed his wife.

As we’ve seen the dead murderer’s mother berate the dead guy’s older sibling with “Your brother is CRYING OUT for revenge” (in Spanish, with English subtitles or dubbed into English),” we expect the hoodlums to be carrying out their own investigation into Juanez.

Only they don’t.

This slow and atmospheric thriller travels in cop movie cliches. The old “Tell me your SECRET” plea to Juanez by the fetching Pipa earns a predicted “If I told you, it wouldn’t be a secret.”

Just as trite an exchange in Spanish as it is in English, I have to say.

Smoldering Juanez is borderline clairvoyant in his crime-solving abilities, and by day he’s trying to pass that on to Pipa, who by night is looking into where he was the night of a murder.

They stand over an exploitively-displayed nude teenage body and Juanez insults the coroner by quizzing Pipa — “What do you see on this corpse?”

The serial kidnapper/killer thing in the pre-credits opening has an urgency and punch — as overdone as Bible-quoting serial killer tales are — that the rest of the movie never comes close to matching.

Montiel’s gloomy production design (including the austere, industrial and chic police station) suits the tone he’s going for in these movies. But it’s not enough.

And all these complications in the finale, betrayals and intrigues within the mystery within a mystery, don’t atone for that movie-long shortcoming.

I like the character, and Lopilato makes her (no off-duty life, no “back story” other than we know she lost a friend in childhood) interesting enough to want to see more. But perhaps she should start fighting for the character’s motives, for coloring more of her in.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, violence, nudity

Cast: Luisana Lopilato, Joaquín Furriel

Credits: Written and directed by Alejandro Montiel. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:53

The roar of the engines is akin to the whine of a vacuum cleaner — not ear-piercing, but high-pitched.

And the only smoke you see on the streets of the cities where Formula E races are run — Zurich to Marrakesh, New York to Mexico City and Hong Kong — are clouds of tire burn, the result of instant torque and high speeds, and that wafting from the cigar of series founder Alejandro Agag.

Every race begins with a brilliant bit of announcer branding, “And we go GREEN in Berlin” or Monaco or Santiago Chile or Punta del Este (Uruguay).

Actor turned director Fisher Stevens (“Brights Lights,” the Debby Reynolds/Carrie Fisher documentary) and Brit director Malcolm Venville (“44 Inch Chest”) turn that phrase, “And We Go Green,” into a jaunty, upbeat and thoroughly entertaining motorsport documentary about the racing series of the future, today.

Agag, the silky-smooth Spanish politician-turned-entrepreneur, is a “racing guy” who kept running into sponsor problems with the global racing series Formula One.

“It is not environmentally friendly,” he heard, over and over again. “The planet is dying.” He decided to start his own series, open-wheel racing in electric cars. It’d be “the best of both worlds,” speed, competition between teams and car companies and dashing, colorful drivers driving not just the pin-your-ears-back-fast cars, but the electric car revolution.

While F-1, NASCAR and others might pay lip service to “innovation,” Formula E would utterly depend on it. The cars couldn’t even complete an hour long race in the streets of Paris or London or Miami when the twelve races/ten teams/20 drivers series started in 2014.

But by 2019, that “range anxiety,” still the biggest drawback to electric car sales worldwide, would be run over. A series designed around “regenerative braking” and electrical power conservation through smart (fast) driving would break that hour at speed barrier.

Stevens and Venville’s flip and edgy film also gets us in the faces and in the helmets of the drivers, many of them Formula One washouts or wannabes.

André Lotterer, a three-time LeMans (sports car racing) winner, crashes into a wall at Hong Kong, the first race of the 2018 season and his first turn in F-E.

“F—! It’s DANGEROUS, man!”

The instant-acceleration thing, the fact that “the sound of the engine is usually a speed reference when you’re going into a corner,” his teammate and friend Jean-Éric Vergne explains, is missing. This car is a whole different kind of racing beast.

The back-stories of the drivers are as colorful as the racers are model-pretty. There’s the son of a famous racer (Nelson Piquet Jr.) chased out of F-1 in a scandal, the “F-1 racing drivers are posh, Sam Bird’s not” working class Brit, the “arrogant, condescending” Lucas Di Grassi.

The helmet-mikes — which should be an unfiltered, uncensored MUST in telecasts — capture the testy complaints, the cursing, the intensity of the rivalry.

Agag and assorted journalists cheerlead the series, which is just as elite (only 20 drivers, just like F-1) and just as competitive at the manufacturing level.

Jaguar had no electric car experience before diving in, and now sells them. Audi is shown failing in race after race on the steep learning curve that ePrix provide.

Leonardo DiCaprio and Orlando Bloom show up for races, with environmental advocate DiCaprio getting a personal walking tour through the garages at Marrakesh, Morocco, asking Agag some of the movie’s most pointed questions.

One BIG question nobody asks — Renault, Audi, Mahindra (India), Nio (China) and Jaguar are represented. Is Detroit about to miss the boat again?

The journalists covering the series marvel at how quickly it seems to be catching on, filling the stands surrounding the courses in city after city. The city-street courses are difficult, often the same ones used by Formula One’s city races.

And the whole affair, from its “glycerine” generator (to charge all the batteries) to the World Wildlife Fund sponsor stickers, feels fresh, righteous and Next Gen fun, auto-racing for people who don’t want to back fossil fuels and the reactionary politics of a Lucas Oil or environmental damage of a BP.

A little more skepticism, a few tougher questions might have been in order. Where DID the fellow in a “I Love Fossil Fuels” t-shirt assault Agag in a bar? Was it New York?

“And We Go Green” is still a thoroughly entertaining look at the future of racing, a future that’s poised to collide with the present any minute now.

MPAA Rating: fisticuffs, profanity

Cast: Alejandro Agag, Jean-Eric Vergnes, Lucas di Grassi, Nelson Piquet Jr., Sam Bird, Hazel Southwell and Leonardo Di Caprio

Credits: Directed by Fisher Stevens and Malcolm Venville, scripted by Mark Monroe. A Hulu release.

Running time: 1:38