Movie Nation

Netflix puts Steve Carell in charge of “Space Force ” Seems so right.

About six minutes into “Funny Pain,” a stand-ups-talk-about-stand-up documentary focused on Wendi Starling, I thought — “Wait, did she die? Is that what this is, a tribute?”

The Jorgy Cruz film is slap-dash, and seems locked in on Wendi’s life and work in 2015. She rushes her words, frantic, almost exhausting to listen to off-stage. Another sad clue?

And if you know anything about her, what she’s famous for, it’s the “manic, mentally-ill and in a mental hospital” material, riffed from real life, or it’s the “gang rape story.” So thinking she passed away isn’t mean or completely out of left field. Lot of tragedy in the news. Might have slipped by me.

Hearing her breathlessly patter on about “the first time i was hospitalized” and the “I’m so tired” mantra of people who burn the candle at both ends, then listing what she did the last 36 or 48 hours, mention her “black out” drinking and how cocaine used to be a part of her life and her act, then launch into some semi-vicious hatred for the audience (a stand-up ethos) and acknowledging her bipolar tendencies with what her teachers and parents USED to think — “I just get hyper, sometimes” — you think, “messed up.”

How can anybody be that wired and survive? Perhaps exhaustion got her, or worse. She’s had a few series shown in places, well I couldn’t tell you where they aired. “High Land Parking?” “Recycled Babies?” She’d have to be close to 40 now, right? A lot of comics have psychic damage and this insane drive and some don’t get out of there alive if they fall short of their “make it by 35” dreams.

Then the film shows Starling riffing on suicide, onstage and off, and how using that word impacts your involuntary hospitalization and you figure “Yeah, that’s it. This is going to be like a Bill Hicks thing.”

You check Wikipedia for an obit, and hell, she has no page. Sad.

But no, the morbid thoughts just come from the way she comes off in “Funny Pains.” We see her manic and we see her when she’s down. VERY down.

It’s a relief when the film’s last few minutes catch up with her in 2019, co-hosting a sort of sketch comedy dual act, hitting all the podcasts, writing and co-writing, working hard to never use that dated Every Comedian’s Dream cliche — “I just want to get a pilot.”

Still, Starling does kind of recede into the background of her own “film,” which fills a lot of screen time with the thing everybody from Woody Allen to Seinfeld has taught us that comics live for, the group BS session after a show, in a friend’s living room (Shabby chic and IKEA?) or in an empty New York Comedy Club.

With Nikki Glazer and Rick Vos and Yamaneika Saunders and Mehran Khaghani and Krystyna Hutchinson around, even if one or two of them say, with Starling present, how “real” she is and how “brave it is to do a bit” like her more-chilling-than-funny “rape story,” she gets a lost in the mix.

As some of these sessions have people speaking off-mike, and the film’s organizing principle is feeble and we get the idea that the “2019” material was an afterthought, we come back to “slapdash.”

So my apologies to the artist for thinking she was dead. But entrusting your image to director Jorgy Cruz? Maybe not the safest bet.

The biographical stuff, slipping in here and there, has some interesting anecdotes. There are hints of an unconventional childhood, mother abandonment, then lying her way onto a stage in Boca Raton for the first time (by accident) where she used the little she learned watching “Seinfeld” to good enough effect (recreated in a murky blur) that she realized this was where she belonged.

The analysis of when to trot out “sure thing” openers, how to read the room by the degrees of enthusiasm that “sure thing” generates, when an audience is so touristy (maybe not even native English speakers) that this is when you “try out new bits,” new jokes, because “Who cares about them?” at this point, are all interesting and astute takes on the craft of stand-up.

We hear about her “two day jobs” but never what they are. We don’t see enough of her working to get the sense of how she generates material, but she recognized early on that “When I’m talking about super-real stuff, it works.” Hearing her generic New York vs. LA banalities is enough to make you hope something “real” is coming up soon.

She’s self-aware enough to realize she can’t let the “rape story,” the “mental illness” stuff, her acknowledgement of her “black out drunk” years (We even see her giggling drunk, at one point.) become “gimmicky.” What else ya got?

The film is so all over the place that the comedy seems that way, too. “Funny” gets at her various “issues,” but doesn’t have enough good, solid comedy to make us care.

And since she’s already confessed that “I don’t like crowd work (questioning the audience for bits) “because I don’t give a s— about you guys,” we’re starved for some reason NOT to return the favor.

Cast: Wendi Starling, Nikki Glaser, Krystyna Hutchinson, Yamaneika Saunders , Jim Norton, Bonnie McFarlane

Credits: Directed by Jorgy Cruz. A Passion River release.

Running time: 1:30

“American Trial: The Eric Garner Story” is a righteous cause supported by a very bad idea, but a bad idea (a docu-drama) executed about as well as could be expected.

The “cause” is getting us to take another look at a 2014 case, an unarmed, overweight black man tackled, arrested and put in a choke hold by cops intent on arresting someone for selling loose cigarettes on a Staten Island street corner.

It was, as lawyer, legal scholar and Fox News talking head Alan Dershowitz says, an “alleged offense so trivial” as to beggar belief, with consequences — Garner died from injuries suffered during that illegal (NYPD banned “choke hold”) — that could not have been more dire.

A Staten Island grand jury elected not to recommend prosecution of NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo, the man who applied the chokehold, and has never released the transcripts of the evidence seen and heard and their deliberations.

If you’ve seen the video of the arrest, four officers surrounding the gigantic, protesting Garner, nobody once saying “I’m gonna have to write you a ticket,” taking the man to the ground to the shouts of “I didn’t do NOTHING, no no no NO NO I can’t breathe, I can’t BREATHE,” a phrase he gasps out eleven times, you can’t ever forget it.

“Excessive force,” you think, at the very least. “I just saw a man murdered” might be a reasonable conclusion, too.

The case, one of a distressingly large number of such cases (continuing to this day) of armed cops killing unarmed civilians, became a national flashpoint. “I can’t breathe” T-shirts made it all the way to the NBA.

Anything that brings attention back to this seeming injustice is justified, right?

But filmmaker Roee Messinger elected to do it via a movie, a “What if there’d been a trial?” take on the case. This is the “very bad idea.” Messinger decided to make a docu-drama, not a documentary.

Using the known evidence, attorneys hired to prosecute and defend the case, a lawyer hired to play a judge, real witnesses — Garner’s widow, Esaw, a friend, retired NYPD officers and medical examiners speaking on behalf of the defense and the prosecution, and an actor hired to be Pantaleo (Anthony Altieri) — inventing pre-“trial” interviews and a rented courtroom, Messinger runs a mock trial.

And while that can be a most instructive exercise for training law students, it makes for generally dull and a disastrously deceptive “what might have been” made in pursuit of “justice.”

Blending in actual news coverage of the trial, footage of LeBron James and teammates in Garner “I CAN’T BREATHE” jerseys, then-President Obama speaking out, TV talking heads talking up the subject, just amplifies the crime against objective truth.

If you don’t remember who said what (Republican Rep. Peter King is here), how do we know what was really said, and what’s imagined for the cameras? An opening “nothing was scripted” here explanation doesn’t cover it.

What can we believe?

Compounding the film’s problems is the fact that most of it consists of this mock trial. Legal junkies obsess over big cases — Casey Anthony and George Zimmerman here in my (Florida) neck of the woods, for instance. But like most court cases, this is visually and dramatically dry and dull, with factually defensible testimony and spurious “objections,” cursory opening remarks and perfectly logical and believable closing statements.

You’re here to try decide the guilt or innocence of “Danny,” the actress/lawyer playing the defense attorney intones, “NOT here to decide ‘Black Lives Matter.’ They do.” She quotes Martin Luther King Jr. and Gandhi, too.

I could totally see and hear that happening. But it didn’t. It hasn’t. And “American Trial” seems a blundering attempt to change that fact.

Movies have turned a spotlight on injustices before, and some — the various documentaries on the West Memphis Three, Errol Morris’s “The Thin Blue Line” — have led to justice being done. Such films often include recreations of the crimes being discussed.

But here’s a tip somebody should have passed on to filmmaker Messinger before he rounded up the GoFundMe cash to make “The Eric Garner Story,” which really isn’t” The Eric Garner Story,” by the way.

You want to move the legal system, you stick with the facts and the compelling tragedy and grave injustice those facts support.

Nobody EVER got a new trial, a re-hearing in the bright light of public opinion, via a docu-drama.

MPAA Rating: unrated, disturbingly violent video

Cast: Esaw Garner, Alan Dershowitz, Anthony Altieri

Credits: Directed by Roee Messinger. A Passion River release.

Running time: 1:40

We got a glimpse of the stage dancer’s hard, short professional life in “A Chorus Line.” But for a taste of the serious wear and tear, the brute strength, debilitating injuries and career-crushing ageism facing the women and men in tights and leotards, check out “The Aerialist,” one of the most revealing movies about the dancer’s life ever made.

Gymnast, dancer, aerialist and actress Dreya Weber and her director/ex-husband Ned Farr made this sequel to “The Gymnast,” which captured the dancing and Vegas acrobatics after-life of a former Olympic hopeful Jane Hawkins (Weber).

That film captured Jane at 43 — well-past the average show dancer’s lifespan. In “The Aerialist,” the woman her colleagues nicknamed “The Hawk” is a veritable legend, “the oldest aerialist in rock’n roll,” her neighbor Dan (Stef Tovar) jokes as he gives another life-saving massage. “You know how dumb that sounds?”

She won’t accept that. Jane has rejoined “The Family,” the longtime stage dancers and aerialists who liven up the concerts of rock-pop legend Aurora (Monique Parent) on her “last tour.” This tightknit group, reminiscent of Taylor Swift, Beyonce or Madonna’s accompanying dancers (Madonna’s even called themselves “The Family,” if memory serves), has been together 20 years. All they need to do is rehearse the routines and get in tour shape with choreographer Spencer (Bernard White), and on the road they go — subletting their LA and/or Vegas apartments, traveling the world, one venue at a time.

But Spencer’s short-tempered and panicked, yelling even at his aerial director and friend, Jane.

“It’s fine,” she says.

“It’s not. ‘It’s’ back.”

He’s too sick to carry on. Jane is put in charge of getting everybody ready, but that lasts for just a day as a hot new choreographer with “the vision” shows up. Xavier, “Call me Z” (Kelly Marcus) has zero experience dealing with the safety issues and physical demands of rope, ring and Spanish Web performances. He starts getting people hurt the minute he walks in the door.

The Family is in open revolt. Jane is humiliated and enraged and more physically imperiled than anybody else, being the oldest. Something’s got to give. Does Aurora know about this?

But the generic and only mildly-interesting surface intrigues are not what lift “The Aerialist.” It’s the story of a dancer on her last legs, shoulders and fingers that holds our interest.

Given a lift home by her “Gymnast” aerialist co-star Serena (Addie Yungmee) lets them compare wounds and war stories. Seeing Serena limp off shows Jane as she’s not yet willing to see herself — practically crippled by work she’s barely able to manage any more.

The massages, consultations with a doctor, tape she covers up and injuries she hides from the punk “Z” are an extra level of “performance” that goes into her day.

There’s no HR department in rock’n roll. Z can get away with his snide “back in the day,” cracks, suggesting how dated they and their dancing are, his  “This is no longer The Dinosaur Tour” and “Eat your Wheaties, lose some weight, drink your Ensure” insults.

Some won’t put up with that. Some will. Don’t take that “Family” nickname too seriously. Because business is business, ESPECIALLY in show business.

The romantic/marital/sexual wrinkles in “The Gymnast” are replaced by those provided by a reporter (Morgan Bradley) demanding that The Hawk “let me IN” to her inner secrets for a too-revealing profile. Others tell the reporter bits of Jane’s story, and Jane herself summarizes her career — a 1980 Olympic hopeful, but the Olympics were boycotted, hopeful again in ’84 and ’88, “But life for me started when I learned how to fly!” — when she can spare a second.

And then there’s the singing star’s daughter (Victoria Meade), a go-fer during rehearsals until Jane finds more appropriate work for her to do.

But the melodramatic script isn’t the draw here. It’s the demanding artistry, the behind-the-curtains peek at how the dancing/flying sausage factory of pop concert tours are pieced together.

What’s worth watching and considering is the athleticism, bravery and calling of the dancers, just needing that next gig, just wanting to hang on to their careers a little longer, just wanting another chance to show “what I did for love.”

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast: Dreya Weber, Morgan Bradley, Kelly Marcus, Victoria Meade,Thunderbird Dinwiddie,  Grasan Kingsberry  and Stef Tovar

Credits: Written and directed by Ned Farr. An Indie Rights release.

Running time: 1:4

Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon reunite for one more comic travelogue in “The Trip to Greece,” retracing the steps of the mythical Odysseus in a land steeped in history.

As indeed are our co-stars — retracing ancient steps and an ancient relationship. That’s the joke these four “Trip” movies — the long-standing, easy-going (sort of) hate-love relationship that’s developed over the decades between the relatively famous but insecure funnyman Coogan (“Philomena,” the recent “Greed,” filmed in Greece) and the less-famous, needier and “always on” Brydon (“Blinded by the Light,” “Swimming with Men”).

They first worked together (and with director Michael Winterbottom) on “24 Hour Party People,” Coogan’s first big break in film when it came out in 2002. Brydon also appeared on one of Coogan’s Alan Partridge TV series (Coogan played a hapless, self-important and downwardly mobile chat show host, then DJ, etc.). But it was their semi-improvised rapport-rivalry on Winterbottom’s hilarious “Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story” (2005) that inspired Winterbottom to pair them up for these travelogues.

Put two funny, competitive comics — with egos and a rich store of celebrity impersonations at their their disposal — in a Land Rover, Mini Cooper or what have you, and send them on “a newspaper travel assignment” to The Lake District of Britain (“The Trip”), and later to Italy and Spain.

They eat, drive, experience relationship or personal crises as they travel from one tony hotel/4-star eatery to the next, bickering and mimicking and competing along the way.

That lengthy prologue feels necessary on this review because that “history,” invented basically for the cameras, is THE running gag in these films, the thing that makes them hilarious to the initiated.

If you don’t know that history or don’t like the prickly Coogan or exhausting Brydon, this isn’t for you. There isn’t enough scenery and history (and there’s a bit) to make this a proper travelogue, even though it is scenic and is historic and there may have been more of “that” in the TV version of this decade of British TV specials-turned-into-feature films for the international market.

I find them hilarious, and I think this fourth and “final” outing in their “trilogy” is the funniest since the first.

The “odyssey” they set out on barely holds their attention as they bring an “Innocents Abroad” disdain to overly-ruined ruins, straight off.

“There’s not to lot to see here, when you think about it.”

They begin in Troy, in Turkey, and trek to Ithaca by sailboat and Land Rover, ferry, on foot and even swimming as they visit the Temple at Delphi, Nestor’s Palace, Pylos, Lesbos, Stagira and the Caves of Diros.

The jokes kick in with a recognition of Coogan’s recent (mild) success playing Stan Laurel in the “Laurel & Hardy” bio-pic. We’re treated to his impish Laurel and Brydon’s wheezing Batman villain Bane in in a “Laurel and TOM Hardy” gag.

The dinner table banter devolves into dueling Roger Moores, Sean Connerys and Dustin Hoffmans, Brydon (a better mimic in most cases) “casting” Coogan as they do.

“Try it AGAIN Steve. I REALLY want you for this part.”

The obligatory reference to the role that Coogan used to worry (in “Tristram Shandy” AND “The Trip” films) would be all he’s remembered for is a shouted “A-HAAA,” Alan Partridge’s signature sign-on. Yes, even in Greece he gets that.

But as they remember Lord Byron’s most proud moment, swimming the Hellespont, Coogan’s left that fear behind.

“Thing you’re most proud of…?”

“My SEVEN BAFTAs (British Oscar/Emmy prizes)!”

“I think the thing I’m most proud of would be my children…”

“Because you don’t have ANY BAFTAs, do you?”

And on and on it goes, Brydon intoning poetry and snippets of “The Odyssey” (or maybe the Roman epic “The Aeneid”) in what he insists is Sir Anthony Hopkins’ voice, but which sounds more like Richard Burton.

They riff through “Mutiny on the Bounty,” make male member “salami” jokes about the naval Battle of Salamis,” and reach for a Bond villain baritone, or Roger Moore as James Bond, every chance either of them gets.

“I think, Mr. Bond, you enjoy staying in the Hotel Lesbos as much as I!”

The little jab of “reality” here is Coogan’s updates from back home about a “Damien Chazelle film” that he’s up for, and the health of his dying father. Brydon, the more settled family man (unlike in one earlier “Trip”), is angling to get his wife (Rebecca Johnson) to fly over and join him after the “assignment.”

That “Who is happier?” contrast has merely to be suggested, as it has been a subtext of all their films. Is the “star” content, or is it the minor star/settled family man?

Coogan revives his “stop motion animation” and “dubbed soundtrack” tricks, Brydon his infamous “little man in a box” voice.

And there’s singing, because of course there is. Here, it’s a definitive rendition of a certain British Olympics film’s title tune, as well as a debate on the falsetto merits of the vocal stylings of Frankie Valli and Barry Gibb.

“Grease is the time, is the place, is the motion
Grease is the way we are feeling…”

Because what else would Rob Brydon hear in his head when Steve Coogan offers him a free trip to the birthplace of Western Civilization?

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast: Rob Brydon, Steve Coogan, Rebecca Johnson, Claire Keelan, Kareem Alkabbani

Directed by Michael Winterbottom, An IFC films release.

Running time:

Sometimes, I swear, it’s like the creators of these limited-run series are paid per minute of screen time that they convince the streamer to give them to tell their story.

A woman learns that her beloved brother — missing for over 20 years — was murdered. She flies to Spain to see the body, and to the isla of sin, Ibiza, the last place anybody saw the handsome young DJ alive.

If feature filmmakers could get to the solution in 100 minutes, what’s the extra incentive for the creator of “Money Heist,” Alex Pina, to spread it over 500?

Yes, another rant about filler, teasing and wasting screen time to get to a story that would be more compelling if told in a much more brisk pace.

But call “White Lines” a guilty pleasure, a decadent dip into Ibiza affluence, drugs, night club/casino turf wars undertaken by rival families, reopening old family wounds, and run-ins with the law. Because every single episode has one or two big grabber moments, even if they’re surrounded by lapses in logic, soap operatic excesses and twists designed to do nothing more than, say it with me, “Drag this out.”

Here’s the first grabber, 40ish Manchester librarian Zoe (Laura Haddock of the “Guardians of the Galaxy” franchise) turns away from the Spanish police inspector who has just told her that they don’t investigate suspicious deaths more than 20 years old, and runs to weep over the mummified corpse of her missing brother.

Axel was supposedly in India, his friends said. But here he is, buried in Almeria, not that far from Ibiza, where he’d become a star DJ. How he died will become clear soon enough. Who did it, or who knows who did it in the focus of “White Lines.”

Zoe was shattered by her older brother’s abandonment. She sends her husband by to Manchester alone, blows off the protests of her retired cop dad (Francis McGee) and starts tracking down those still on the island of Ibiza (filmed on Mallorca) who knew Axel.

Flashbacks to “Manchester, 1996” relate the life and sister Axel (Tom Rhys Harries, last seen in “The Gentlemen”) left behind, and pick up his early days, making his mark and meeting friends and lovers in in Ibiza.

A running gag — everybody and I mean EVERYbody, from monied power brokers to old mates to the families that struggle for real-estate (and nightclub) dominance on the island asks “Do YOU know who killed Axel?” to pretty much everybody else.

Zoe isn’t even there, and unless all these people are lying, they’re wondering the same thing she is. Her showing up just amps up pressure of the uncomfortable questions.

A second repeated gimmick — Zoe Facetimes with the shrink (Maggie O’Neill) she saw for years after Axel disappeared. She’s not just talking about recurring issues. She uses her chats with Yoana to bring us up to date on all emotional barriers she’s breaking through, laws she’s breaking and the “white lines” she’s straying from in her new “be brave” ethos. Kind of a cheat way to “bring the viewer up to date,” but there you are.

She wonders what aging fellow DJ Marcus (veteran character player Daniel Mays, the LAST guy you’d think of as a club DJ, but convincing) knows, what the club-connected/family “enforcer” Boxer (Portuguese actor Nuno Lopes, all silky menace and sexy machismo) might be able to tell her, and what Kika Calafat, of the rich club-owner Calafat clan (Boxer’s employer) might have to say.

Marta Milans of “Money Heist” makes Kika a sexy “wild child” pushing 40, remembering her “first love,” Axel. A hole in her story? Axel seduced her away from another young Ibiza prince of two turntables and a microphone. “First love? Umkay, SECOND love!”

There are other characters, further intrigues. And every episode’s “Well, not seen THAT before” moment adds to the collection of grabbers.

Intimations of incest, a murder with a claw anchor, dogs stoned on cocaine that a dealer has spilled on the lawn, a “white line” he hides by putting a child’s soccer goal on it, an insane car chase (on an ISLAND) hurling cocaine out of an ’80s VW Golf convertible, a torture session or three, a drug trip in a sweat lodge filled with hallucinogen-laced frogs, a harpooning to end a torture session — I mean, you can’t say this doesn’t have a lot of fun or jolting moments.

“Nervous?”

“Yes. To be honest, it’s my first orgy.”

And as dull as the endless trips BACK to the club, to the office ABOVE the club, to beaches, the ancient lookout tower/fortress, to marinas and mansions, can be, as banal as much of the dialogue is, there are pearls that pop out of the filler.

“If you live like a god when you’re 20,” aging DJ Marcus sighs, “how can you be happy after that? Good times are always behind you.”

I appreciate the scattering of laughs, the novel, over-the-top dips into violence (Romanian drug dealers are the scariest) and the sheer loopiness of certain decisions, actions and leaps of illogic. And Haddock conveys a nice sense of pluck, damage and recklessness as Zoe.

I can’t say I think “White Lines” (in English, and Spanish with English subtitles) is “Golden Age of Streaming TV” material. But I can say it kept me around.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, graphic violence, drug abuse, sex, nudity

Cast: Laura Haddock, Nuno Lopes, Marta Milans, Daniel Mays, Belén López Angela Griffin, Francis McGee and Tom Rhys Harries.

Credits: Created by Alex Pina. A Netflix release.

Running time: 10 episodes @ 50 minutes each

The unalloyed delight in dropping into “Tommy” 45 years after it cinemas is hearing and seeing Jack Nicholson sing (respectably on key) and vamp his way through “Go to the Mirror!”

Only Ken Russell (“The Music Lovers,” “Altered States,” “Lair of the White Worm”) could pull off that coup.

The “rock opera” that surrounds it? It’s as lurid, weird, dated and prophetic as the day it came out.

The highlights for young film/Who/rock fans way back when, clinging to the familiar in an obscure, allegorical and trippy musicals, aren’t the treat they were in 1975.

Tina Turner‘s “Acid Queen” pulls out all the stops, and then some — WAY over the top. Elton John as The Pinball Wizard, the second, third or fourth choice for the role (depending on who you read) that produced the movie’s hit single is so confined by the platform boots/stilts of his costume that he becomes a still-life.

The “story” is murky enough to allow for interpretations that don’t match creator Pete Townsend’s intent. The precipitating incident, for instance, young Tommy’s WWII bomb pilot dad’s “death” at the hands of his mother (Ann-Margret, all-in) and Mom’s replacement (Oliver Reed) for five-years-dead Dad (Robert Powell), works better as a metaphor than a literal murder.

I mean we’ve seen the plane go down, seen no warning that he’s been alive but badly-burned for years and years, Tommy sees him in his sleep then stumbles across him being “killed” by Frank (Reed) and Mum? Metaphor. Tommy could still be rendered “deaf, dumb and blind” by the double trauma without a literal murder.

So much of the rest of the movie is already allegorical, most prophetically The Preacher. Russell cast Eric Clapton — of the “Clapton is God” graffiti of the day (late ’60s, when Townsend composed the two-LP opera) — as The Preacher, guitar slinging leader of the Cult of Celebrity (Marilyn Monroe, specifically).

Tommy’s (Who lead singer Daltrey) walled-off-from-the-world soul finds his one means of expression, pinball in that pre-video game era.

His image and fame are exploited by Frank (Reed has a couple of songs, and hits no recognizable note in any of them), a veritable Mama Kardashian of his day, as Tommy’s Mom suffers, clings to her boy and spirals into addiction.

Russell, a filmmaker who became famous for his excesses concurrent with the making of “Tommy,” wallows in them throughout — vibrant (’60s) colors, Ann-Margret’s character rolling around in chocolate and baked beans mid-breakdown, spectacles great and small cataloguing British history from The War through the ’50s, into the ’70s marching cultishly towards 1984.

The film, like the album on which it is based (and which became a more coherent (well, somewhat) Broadway musical in the ’90s, earned brownie points for its ambition at the time. Not many loved it, but a few appreciated it.

Now, as eye-popping as it remains, as charmingly wretched in its excesses, it feels quaint — like a snapshot of the ’60s taken with ’70s technology viewed nostalgically from the Reagan/Thatcher era.

They don’t make’em like this any more. And the only person to let Jack Nicholson sing since was Nora Ephron in “Something’s Got to Give.” More’s the pity.

MPAA Rating: PG, drug content

Cast: Ann-Margret, Oliver Reed, Roger Daltrey, Tina Turner, Elton John, Eric Clapton, John Nicholson, Keith Moon, Pete Townsend, John Entwistle

Credits: Directed by Ken Russell, script by Ken Russell and The Who.

Running time: 1:51

Writer-director Karen Maine’s first gained notice with the short film that became the feature “Obvious Child,” a comedy about an abortion. So a movie about a Catholic schoolgirl’s intellectual and sexual awakening during the AOL era is pretty tame stuff, by comparison.

“Yes, God, Yes” doesn’t have the built-in laughs that casting a comic (Jenny Slate) as its star pretty much guarantees. But Maine still manages to find gold, silver mostly, in the over-mined teen “coming of age” genre. It’s a comedy of nervous giggles of recognition, a few good laughs and enlightened compassion in the darnedest places.

It may seem as if Alicia’s “problems” start with a high school rumor. You know the type, the ones that sully or exaggerate somebody’s sexual reputation with a “she put out at a party.” Skinny, shy Alicia (Natalia Dyer of “Stranger Things”) is told by her prettier and judgier best friend Laura (Francesca Reale of “Stranger Things”) that everybody is saying Alicia “tossed salad” with Ward in a stolen moment at a party.

“It’s all over school!”

As “school” is a Catholic high school where 16 year-old Alicia is a favorite of the teacher’s, that’s a problem. The daily messaging, delivered in “Morality” class — “Have you watched the ‘partial birth abortion’ video yet?” — and everywhere else, is “God is always watching!”  The most sophisticated lectures on sexuality are passed along by Father Murphy (Timothy Simons of “Veep”).

“Guys are like microwaves,” always ready to go and over and done with in a flash. “Ladies are like conventional ovens. They require…preheating.”

But as naive as Alicia is — “I don’t know what salad dressing even MEANS” (it’s defined in an opening title) — she’s not as behind the curve as she seems. When he gets homes, she boots up her personal computer and drops in on AOL Chatrooms.

There, she can hide her inexperience and ignorance behind a screen name, and get in over her head in a flash with the likes of “hairychest1956” or “backseat lover81”

“Wanna cyber?”

A world of shared porn and self exploration awaits.

But peer pressure at Alicia’s high school points her in the opposite direction. You’ve got to go to a four-day “Kirkos” retreat with classmates, upper class group leaders and nuns and priests supervising group sessions, beatifically smiling peers (Alisha Boe and Wolfgang Novogratz) confiscate phones and watches (“You’re on JESUS’ time here!”) and conformity is practiced, urged and enforced with little side servings of Catholic guilt.

Maine doesn’t turn any of the adults here into cartoon ogres. There are Catholic martinets (Donna Lynne Champlin) and stern, judgmental clerics, and parents who just sort of do what they’ve always done, “for the sake of the children,” of course.

But bus-riding to camp with “a reputation” makes Alicia a bit of a rebel. She hides her second-gen cell-phone (this is set pre-9/11 2001 or so) because, you know, it uh, vibrates.

And being an outcast lets her see things, that the straight and narrow aren’t always straight or as narrow-minded as they seem.

The kid cast do well by the collection of high school “types” they play, but Dyer is a wide-eyed revelation. She’s meek on the outside, Aubrey Plaza (sexually carnivorous) on the inside, and for all the judgment heaped on her for something she hasn’t done, she’s not going to let that cow her as she’s figuring out what she wants to do, and whether or not she should care what dogma or authority thinks of it.

It’s a terrifically drawn character and Dyer lets us believe she’s figuring it out as she goes, harboring less guilt every step of the way.

“Yes, God, Yes” (streaming in July) doesn’t tackle a trigger topic like abortion. But Maine’s still made a teen sex comedy with heart, smarts and subtlety that Netflix, which owns this genre, rarely bothers with.

MPAA Rating: R for sexual content and some nudity

Cast: Natalia Dyer, Francesca Reale, Timothy Simons, Wolfgang Novogratz, Donna Lynne Champlin and Alisha Boe

Credits: Written and directed by Karen Maine. A Vertical release.

Running time: 1:18

Actress/actor turned director Lynn Shelton, whose “Humpday,” “Your Sister’s Sister” and “Laggies” helped define to chatty/semi-improvised subgenre called “mumblecore” by some, has died.

A blood illness, undisclosed, took her at a far-too-young 54. That’s her with “Mumblecore” Godfather Mark Duplass, her “Humpday” (2009) star.

She did a lot of TV (“Mad Men,” “Love,” “GLOW”) and enough indie films to make her mark in her few years as a director.

Her final series was “Little Fires Everywhere,” a Hulu hit just last month.

She collected “Someone to Watch” and John Cassavettes Awards at the Indie Spirits.

She worked with Kiera and Reese and Kerry and Alison Brie and Rosemarie DeWitt and I cannot recall a bad performance in anything she ever directed.

The last film of hers I reviewed (I also watched and reviewed “Little Fires”) was her Marc Maron (her life partner) collaboration, “Sword of Trust” just last summer.

And when I say “classic actress/actor turned director,” I mean somebody who came to Hollywood to work in front of the camera because they knew they were beautiful enough to get casting directors’ attention, who never broke through to stardom but paid attention on sets and used what they learned to move behind the camera.

Go on any set and you see gorgeous men and women location managers, ADs, script supervisors and the like. Ask them their story and it is not unlike Lynn Shelton’s. But she learned the craft and had a fresh take on what dialogue should sound like.

“Mumblecore” was the result — improvised, natural chatter.

She fit that actress-turned-director mold to a T, and helped invent a whole new generational style of dramedy that launched Greta Gerwig and the Duplass Brothers to fame, among others.

Well done.

We’ve probably lost our ability to be shocked by allegations of sexual abuse that turn out to be true.

The American statistics are staggering — one our of four girls are molested before they turn 18, one out of six boys.

So the revelations, when they come in “Rewind,” don’t have the jolt that they did in “Capturing the Friedmans,” or even in the mini series about the widely-publicized crimes of R. Kelly and Michael Jackson.

But this film, directed by one of the victims in a family torn apart by generations of abuse, gets to you from the haunted home video images of a seriously unhappy little boy.

“I don’t want to curse my parents,” little Sasha, who looks to be nine or ten, pouts to the camera. “I don’t want to HATE my parents!”

But Sasha, a once-promising child identified as “gifted,” suddenly acting-out, lashing out, hurting his little sister Bekah, has gone through something. “Rewind” uses those home movies, hours and hours of them shot by his PBS videographer father Henry, to piece together the unhappy events that flipped that switch in Sasha.

As Henry remembers in Sasha’s film, “You didn’t film things that were bad” in your home movies. “You filmed celebrations, happy occasions.” You could only find the unhappiness and the sinister actions creating it “in the background.”

The adult Sasha interviews his parents, mother Jacqui, a graphic designer, and father Henry and paints a portrait of suburban dysfunction that prefigured the tragedy that hangs over Sasha and little sister Bekah’s lives.

Jacqui complains that Henry was tuned out — showing up very late to her Sasha’s premature birth because “he was out buying a video camera.” Henry’s obsession “became a wall tween my husband and my family.”

Jacqui acted-out against Henry’s obsessive video recording, bowing out of the shot. We also hear her cursing her little boy in one instance.

The “mystery” is set up as Henry was so intent on documenting everything, he’s either some sort of pervert, or he was blind to what was happening to their very young kids at the hands of someone the children know.

That’s the MO of pedophiles. They prey on children they know, have access to, family members included. Henry got LOTS of video of the criminals.

“Rewind” has Jacqui take the role of the parent who catches on, who questions her son, questions the first doctor they take him to with signs of sexual injury. Talked out of “reporting” that by her pediatrician, she tries to draw Sasha out. And failing to get through, she takes him to a therapist.

Dr. Herbert Lustig kept the kid’s files, and we see them as Sasha revisits the man who who told him, “If you can’t describe what happened, can you draw it?”

“Rewind” is a textbook case of what happened, how it played-out within a still-callous legal system (powerful people get involved), the injustice money can buy perpetrators, and how the molested often turn into molesters themselves.

There’s nothing wrenching on screen, no grim confrontations with the criminals, just sobering memories from guilt-ridden parents, members of the legal system remembering the case and helping recreate Sasha’s gutsy, blunt tweenage to teenage testimony.

The revelations come relatively early, and the trauma of a child having to go through what any accuser has to endure — endless repetitions and re-interrogations (traumatic, and case-damaging in many instances) — becomes the focus of the film’s final third. Sasha, keeping most of the focus on himself, lets that become the movie.

“Rewind” arrives at a point in time where we’re beyond being shocked, where we despair that even the heroes aren’t heroic enough or quick enough to act, and real justice for the victims seems an illusion.

But films like this are important reminders that we’re not doing enough, that the social stigma that prevents us from acknowledging the extent of the problem is still there, and that no amount of brushing aside, “normalizing” or letting off with probation the sexual predators among us should let us forget how horrific and traumatic these crimes remain.

MPAA Rating: Unrated, graphically described sexual abuse subject matter, profanity

Credits: Directed by Sasha Neulinger.  A Grizzly Films/PBS “Independent Lens” release.

Running time: 1:26