Movie Nation

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

“The Vast of Night” is a mystery wrapped in an enigma and boxed up in an homage to “The Twilight Zone.”

It’s a beautiful, gloomy and nostalgic film whose “The truth is OUT there” answers may be obvious, and whose long, monologue-driven set-up will test your patience. Seriously.

The first twenty minutes, a series of showy, walking/chattering tracking shots through small town America in the late 1950s gathering darkness, is marred by one of the epic under-enunciations of the post-Brando era. Co-star Jake Horowitz rushes and mutters his lines, and being photographed from behind and like everybody else, in shadows, you can’t make out more than a quarter of what he says.

Plucky teen switchboard operator Fay (Sierra McCormick) breathlessly tags along with him and blurts out “Why do you CHANGE your voice” when he’s on the radio?

Because, dear girl, no manager, even at WOTW in BFE New Mexico, would let him on the air if he can’t be understood.

The opening frames this story with a Rod Serling impersonator introducing tonight’s installment of “Paradox Theatre,” and for the first time, first time feature director Andrew Patterson transitions from a chic ’50s cathode ray tube showing us black and white images to our New Mexico setting (in widescreen, dimly-lit color).

It’s the opening game of basketball season, and “everybody in town” is eating take-out in their car in the parking lot, waiting for Cayuga High to take on an Indian reservation school in the town’s tiny Quonset hut gym.

Cayuga Falls, by the way, was where Rod Serling lived. It was the name of his production company, the one that made “The Twilight Zone.”

Everett (Horowitz) is the cock-of-the-walk in this tiny berg, swaggering in with his Buddy Holly glasses and Ricky Nelson vest to set up the radio station’s recording of the game, maybe help with a wiring problem that may be a repeat of “that time a squirrel chewed through it,” every single person in town wonders.

Fay, in her cats-eye glasses and ponytail, eagerly tags along. She’s got this new tape recorder and wants Everett to show her how it works. They proceed to “interview” people in the parking lot as practice, for her and him. She’s sweet on Everett, and he indulges her prattling on about several years of articles from various science magazines — “radio controlled cars, vacuum tube transport” — all of which will be around before “the year 2000.”

Eventually, she drops back in for her nighttime town switchboard operator job, and “Everett ‘The Maverick’ Sloane” drops behind the mike to spin records on the “Highway Hits” show.

“That’s the word from the bird.”

Fay hears it first, this mechanical, rhythmic static on her switchboard. Everett records it and plays “a sound bouncing around the valley tonight” to his listeners, looking for answers. Maybe they’d rather hear a live broadcast of the game which for some reason the station is tape delaying. But when we hear the rube in charge of recording and reciting his version of “play by play,” maybe not.

But this is when “The Vast of Night” settles in to solve its mystery. A long call from a guy who used to be in the military recognizes the static, but “everybody only knows ‘pieces’ (of any military secret) in the military, so nobody would know the whole thing.”

Something is “out there,” in the sky, at “Sputnik heights.”

Everett and Fay abandon their posts and dash around in the dark, looking for answers.

Patterson’s movie, working from a script by newcomers James Montague and Craig W. Sanger, cloaks all this mystery in 1950s small town nostalgia. The camera captures the eeriness of empty streets and the hominess of a place where everybody knows everybody else, and person-to-person gossip was the Snapchat of its day.

McCormick and Horowitz, suggesting a young Sam Rockwell at times, have great chemistry, with Fay’s fangirl babbling the quintessence of smart girl/small town girl charm.

The great achievement of “Vast of Night” is to revisit how utterly “out there” Serling’s “Twilight Zone” would have been in its day, even in the Atomic Age, when UFO mania was born and peaked.

But the film is a triumph of tone over substance, of aural aura over clever writing. Patterson blacks out the screen, here and there, or zooms in on an old wooden radio cabinet, letting us swim in the storytelling we’re hearing over the air. The most coherent moments are like a filmed radio play.

Still, even back then, mysterious radio (or phone line) sounds and “lights in the sky” would have people wondering if “The Day the Earth Stood Still” was coming.

That said, it works, sucking you into its “vast night” and taking us all back to an innocent time where the future was endless possibilities, “radio” was how a small town kid punched his “ticket out of here,” and TV took you to “another dimension…the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition.”

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for brief strong language

Cast: Sierra McCormick, Jake Horowitz, Gail Cronauer

Credits: Directed by Andrew Patterson, script by James Montague, Craig W. Sanger. An Amazon Studios release.

Running time: 1:31

Everybody’s got a story of when we first recognized the addiction — usually other people’s and not our own.

A concert where phone alerts interrupted the music, church, classrooms overrun with teens unable to keep the screen out of sight.

For me, it was a Toronto Film Festival in about 2002. I’d be in previews of movies destined to open around the world over the next few months, screenings packed with industry officials and filmmakers, and you could barely focus on the action on screen without this sea of tiny blue-greenish screens.

“Crack-berries,” we called them. They’re remembered, even today, in Jon Hyatt’s new documentary, “Screened Out,” about what some medical experts and academics are loathed to call an “addiction” (“compulsion,” a few call it) but ALL agree is a rising social ill of our age.

Hyatt’s legion of experts, advocates, pediatricians and others fret over how “screens” are eating up everybody’s time, but most especially our children’s. “Neglectful” distracted parents can’t bother to watch Missy’s swim lesson or focus on Junior on the swing-set — checking that screen.

And the kids? They are literally “rewiring your children” (Dr. Nicholas Kardaras, teen addiction expert) through the engineered dopamine rush of cell-phone apps purpose-built to hook us with “the bottomless feeds” of new thoughts, information, “likes” and the like, and video games “that go on forever.”

In just a few years, first world cultures (at least in this hemisphere) have seen attention spans — our ability to focus without having a gun held to our heads — have shrunk from 12 seconds to eight seconds.

A handful of Facebook alumni — higher ups such as Sean Parker — have sounded the alarm in public appearances (Hyatt gets no one from the industry on camera himself).

Dr. Hilarie Cash of the screen-addiction center Restart in Seattle (clever, clever name) declares “If they hold our attention, they can sell us stuff.” So the Twitters, Facebooks, Instagrams and Snapchats hire behavioral psychologists and others to ensure that each new piece of their “experience” is designed to do just that.

We meet no one who admits to doing this work.

Hyatt’s film starts out as a personal memoir, a voiced-over “Super-Size Me” about trying to get hold of his own addiction and convince his wife to limit or eliminate screen usage by their small children.

After all, the cream of Silicon Valley — where most of this addictive-app innovation is achieved — send their kids to the pricey Waldorf of Peninsula School, where screen access is severely limited, an ethos the educators send home to the tech titans whose little darlings they’re turning into the Next Elite.

But this personal memoir idea and home enforcement thing is played down as Hyatt, hitherto a writer and director of short films, loses himself in his experts.

He talks to teens and gets some revealing admissions about the Fortnite addicts in their ranks, the ways screens are eating up their study (concentration) time and their sleep.

The advocates he interviews are from Common Sense Media and Screenstrong–Families Managing Media, and echo what the academics and medical professionals say about what this removal from direct social interaction is doing to our empathy and ability to connect, relate and understand others.

Are we headed into a dark age when everybody is “on the spectrum,” thanks not to a genetic condition but to all the cunning manipulation by companies with the resources that billions of subscribers and the advertisers that come with that audience have at their disposal?

The jury’s out on that, but not on the growing concern “Screened Out” scratches the surface of. It may feel one-sided, cursory or incomplete, lacking focus (put the phone back down, Hyatt) and myopic. But it lays out the parameters of the problem, the “social validation feedback loop” of effort, attention and “rewards” that these successful cell phone app businesses manipulate in ways that are insidious and destructive to society.

And “myopic refers to the cross section of America Hyatt devotes his film to. Either there are no children and parents of color concerned with this, and no Black experts in the field, or Hyatt neglects to talk with them. Maybe 100 voices, and scores more faces, and the only Black people in this are models — illustrative faces in playgrounds or what have you.

I sense a wide-open field (Minority Communities and Social Media Use and Addiction) for enterprising researchers to dive into. And if there already are members of Latin and African American communities researching that, maybe Hyatt will figure out a little “inclusion” makes a universal concern seem actually, you know, universal.

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast: Jon Hyatt, Melanie Hempe, Nir Eyal, Nicholas Kardaras, Alex Pang, Jean Twenge, Hilarie Cash, Michael Rich and Sid Bolton

Credits: Written and directed by Jon Hyatt. A Dark Star release.

Running time: 1:11

Suicides that might be…murders?

Shawn Ashmore, Daniella Alonso, Gary Cole and Lin Shaye are the names in the cast.

June 12.

Hallucinogenic drugs such as LSD and mescaline, the active ingredient in Peyote, aren’t addictive.

They don’t kill people.

And in studies, only now being renewed after decades of criminalization, they show promise in helping with anxiety, depression and other forms of mental illness.

That’s the serious side of the argument that “Have a Good Trip” Adventures in Psychedelics,” a new Netflix documentary by veteran “Simpsons” writer Donick Cary.

But aside from all that, as our “brown-acid” lab-coated host Nick Offerman reminds us, “they can also be hilarious.”

The film, using interviews with comics, musicians, actors (overWHELMINGLY white), a single academic expert, and that snakeoil salesman Deepak Chopra, comic reenactments and animation, proceeds to have people like Sting, Rosie Perez, Ben Stiller, Judd Nelson, Nick Kroll, Diedrich Bader, Natasha Lyonne and A$AP Rocky, revisit their acid/magic-mushroom etc. trips.

Sarah Silverman describes “the tipping point,” that moment that “always (arrives) when you say, ‘I don’t FEEL anything.'”

Sting remembers “trees WAVING at me,” on his farm, before being summoned by a farmhand to help a cow give birth.

Nick Kroll roars with laughter at the tripping friends who buried him in sea kelp, and he tripped over how much he enjoyed the experience.

And Ben Stiller is here to point out that “a few minutes in, I knew I never wanted to do this again.” So he didn’t.

You remember that there’s a reason nobody ever saw The Grateful Dead straight. We laugh at the old cautionary government instructional films that “exaggerated” the dangers.

There’s even a recreation of an “After School Special” (this one starring Adam Scott) and the warnings that sort of programming passed on. People are always “jumping through windows” on acid, the oft-repeated myth goes.

The “one with the universe” and “connected to the Earth” and “your hand becomes translucent” commonalities are explained.

We’re told that the movies and their many LSD trip simulations (“Across the Universe” had my favorite) “never get it right,” except for that moment in “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” where Hunter S. Thompson (Johnny Depp) sees the casino carpeting turn into a moving melange of paisley and purple.

But then we hear the now-dead Anthony Bourdain’s story, of idolizing Thompson and wanting to take same risks as a teen, going on a “road trip” and picking up hitchhiking exotic dancers and one of them “Pulp Fiction” dying on them in their motel room (she didn’t, actually).

And the now-dead Carrie Fisher talks about how LSD takes planning, setting aside time, finding a safe space and “friends” you actually know to take it with, that “it’s a very HARD drug to take” and that she went so far as to have “outfits that went with acid, MUSIC that went with acid, makeup that went with acid,” the amusing humiliation of being nude and blitzed on a tourist beach in the Seychelles (“Travels with Acid”).

She mentions John Belushi first turned her on to the drug. And others talk about Dead concert experiences and Jerry Garcia, and you remember, “That dude’s dead, too.”

And you think, “Donick Cary, maybe if you weren’t tripping when you edited this, you’d figure out that all these DEAD people don’t really make your ‘legalize it/harmless’ case for you.”

No, it wasn’t LSD that killed any of them. But, well, not one of the dead confined their mind-altering substances to mushrooms, soaked sugar cubes or coated tabs of paper.

Instructions include “cover all your mirrors” if you don’t want to over-scrutinize your appearance. Always a mistake. And while one and all preach “Don’t DRIVE high,” here’s Judd Nelson and Silverman and soooo many others talking about their experiences in automobiles “tripping my balls off.”

Mixed message?

Suggestions of “psychotic episodes” (bad trips) that make this mind altering or consciousness “expanding” experience “not for everyone” are cautionary, but glibly passed-over. The idea that “retreats” could be set up for people (with money) to commune with nature under the influence and under supervision is endorsed.

The earlier era of legalized experimenting is remembered, fondly, by Timothy Leary’s son and folk rocker Donovan.

But as anybody will tell you, hearing about other people’s benders or drug trips has its own tolerance level, and for most of us, it’s “OK, you stared at your hand for six hours. Great. Now, how about this weather?”

Maybe pitching this right now, with democracy in peril and American carelessness getting a lot of people killed, is, you know, messed-up. It’s flippant and glib, sure. But there are too many dead people in it for it to make its “so very safe” point.

MPAA Rating: Unrated, drug use, profanity

Cast: Sting, Sarah Silverman, Nick Offerman, Ben Stiller, Rosie Perez, A$AP Rocky, Deepak Chopra, Donovan, Anthony Bourdain, Carrie Fisher.

Credits: Written and directed by Donick Cary. A Netflix Original.

Running time: 1:25

“Proximity” is an alien abduction thriller that’s more about the time travel. The look, the paranoid vibe and the music scream “late ’80s,” and seeing as how it’s from a guy whose visual effects credits include “Tron: Legacy” and “Stranger Things,” that’s literally by design.

The movie? There’s a cheerful cheesiness about some of the effects and a few jokes are tossed into the early part of the third act. But the cast is a collection of bland unknowns, the plot is buried under nonsense, the dialogue often tin-eared and the entire enterprise gets worse the longer it goes on.

And it does. Go on. And on.

Ryan Masson stars as a young signal researcher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratories in Pasadena. Isaac Cypress is a geek among geeks (Kylie Contreary and Max Cutler play colleagues) , cycling to work, seeing a shrink, quick to trace signals from space to their (often) Earthbound origins.

His “hobby” is playing around with what looks like a bulky late ’90s camcorder. The psychotherapist thinks he should do a video diary with it.

That’s how the kid happens to make a recording of his alien encounter and abduction. Since everybody in Southern California saw the mid-day fireball streak across the sky and crash (more of a “touchdown”), running this video through channels at his workplace won’t do.

Isaac uploads the video the video onto the Internet. Very cool “skinny alien out of ‘Signs’ followed by the camera tracking Isaac’s ascent into the flying saucer (No saucer shots, lad? Sloppy.) and going to static.

He endures a TMZ’d media feeding frenzy, does one TV appearance where he’s asked dumb questions and all-but-mocked by the blonde reporter stereotype. And that’s when “others” take an interest, even as there are plenty of people going on TV to discredit him. He has barely met the oddball Sara (Highdee Kuan) and un-credentialed but suspicious “writer” who “stumbles” upon him when he and Sara are abducted again.

Agent Graves (Shaw Jones) does NOT consult a lawyer before nabbing these two or interrogating them.

“We have detained you, against-your-will,” because he and his “people” see Isaac “as a danger to society.” I mean, the liabilities in that admission are through the roof.

At some point, a lot of what comes out of characters’ mouths starts to sound like a “Try again” English-as-a-Second-Language writing assignment.

At no point do our players look as freaked-out and alarmed by any turn of events as your normal human being would.

I mean, Isaac and Sara are interrogated in classic, featureless sci-fi “white rooms.” They’re guarded and chased by Storm Trooperish robots with C3PO heads and no digital ability to properly aim a laser blaster.

There’s a mysterious “expert” helper (Christian Prentice) who knows what’s going on and who’s doing it, an earlier abductee to flee to and laser fire to dodge all along the way.

Eric Demeusy is the effects specialist turned writer-director behind “Proximity,” and he gives us a few quite-cool effects — a pickup truck lifted skyward and flipped, humans tractor-beamed up towards a generic flying saucer, and a carriage-roof chase on a train as seen in infra-red.

But this clunky movie is more fun to play the “Wait, why?” game with than to actually watch.

Why would people on the run be making their getaway on a Canadian short-run steam excursion train? Why would Isaac think a “writer” would have access to a “lie detector” app for his laptop, and that such an unprofessional version of that procedure would have any value in making his case?

Why would a UN alien-research agency (ISRP doesn’t just mean “International Society for Respiratory Protection” any more.) deploy cumbersome robot soldiers straight out of “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy?”

Why would translated alien space messages include directions to “the solar system” and “Earth?” I mean, both are on ALL the star maps.

Those head-scratchers wouldn’t stand out if the cast could make us care, fear for their future, declare that “The truth is ‘out there'” and demand that we hear about it. They don’t.

Masson may have the right, odd look — — a skinny/gawky, less-butch and Americanized Eddie Redmayne. But there’s little to this performance, and Kuan’s character is so under-written that even a good performance (nope) would be hard-pressed to make her interesting.

The promising premise here, that whole encounter and media frenzy, is tossed aside. The effects are worth noting because they’re the stand-out trait of “Proximity.” Making the aliens generic and un-menacing while the hilariously-flawed and easy to elude UN robots are the villains? Kind of a Mick Huckabee-inspired blunder.

MPAA Rating: Unrated, some violence

Cast: Ryan Masson, Highdee Kuan, Christian Prentice, Shaw Jones, Don Scribner

Credits: Written and directed by Eric Demeusy. A Shout! Factory release.

Running time: 1:55

A little moving picture history was made this week.

Tiny little also-ran independent Vertical Entertainment, which won the Tom Hardy/Linda Cardellini/Matt Dillon”Capone” biopic pretty much by default, is at the top of the current iteration of The Box Office.

It’s the top dog indie film streaming on iTunes, and I dare say elsewhere. Exacting  and David “Lynchian,” dark and brooding and obscurant, “Capone” is getting attention that Warner Brothers wouldn’t mind going to “Scoob!” which they refused to screen for critics.

The star had been a stunt man for most of his career, and an occasional bit player.

The rest of the cast was the very definition of “unheralded” at least in Hollywood.

The screenwriter is mostly forgotten, with no other credits of note.

The director was green and Canadian, with only a couple of shorts to his credit, and would only live long enough to make four more movies, none of highly regarded.

“The Grey Fox” is a 1982 indie Western that could easily be overwhelmed by its myth, the near miracle confluence of talent rising above its station and pure luck. But it’s so good, a minor classic in its timelessness, that it stands on its own, without any “little engine/movie that could” back story.

It’s grand in scope and intimate in feel, so beautifully shot and edited as to make you miss celluloid. And it’s been restored and is streaming on Kino Lorber Marquee (starting May 29) to support your local art cinema.

Richard Farnsworth has the title role, of “Gentleman Bandit” Bill Miner, a veteran hold-up man whose specialty was robbing stagecoaches. But that world had passed him by during a long sentence in prison. Getting out of San Quentin in 1901, he was a man pushing 60 and entering a changed world.

“A man of my age, the future doesn’t mean too much,” he says in a genteel drawl, “unless you’re talking about next week!”

He gets a sales pitch on “electrification” changing the world from a salesman he sits with on the train, marvels at the puttering “horseless carriages.” And after staying with his sister and considering his limited options, he ducks into a Far West moving picture show. “The Great Train Robbery” is playing — 12 minutes that made motion picture history, 12 minutes so jolting to the naifs who saw it that one fires his pistol in the storefront cinema where Bill sees it.

Bill kicks around oyster digging and sawmill jobs, until he decides on his new specialty.

“A professional always specializes.”

But he and his impromptu gang botch a holdup in Oregon. A lot of blood is shed.

And that’s how he winds up in British Columbia, meets his new sidekick Shorty (Wayne Robson) and makes his legend, the first hold-up man to use the phrase “Hand’s up!” and a robber so polite he cautions a railroad engineer “You be careful backing up, now” as he leaves and the railroad man has to re-couple cars in the dark, carriages Bill & Co. have disconnected.

Farnsworth would go on to lend his wry, sentimental twinkle to films like “The Natural,” “Misery” and most famously, “The Straight Story.” Here his easy going charm sells the romance he strikes up with the feminist labor agitator and photographer Kate (Jackie Burroughs) and his flinty Old West competence lends authority to defending himself from fellow ex-cons, handling a horse and even attempting something he’s never done as he’s coerced into horse stealing.

“Rustling isn’t my line.”

Borsos blends his scenes of rustic, Western Canada, the Kamloops, Monte Creek and Silverdale where Miner made his name, with grainy footage of silent Westerns, including “The Great Train Robbery.” This is a glorious effect, a real-life relic of that era pursuing his “line” in an age where people were looking back, with nostalgia, on such criminal exploits in the flickers — early cinemas.

The script takes ridiculous liberties with “the real story, but Borsos makes them feel real and Farnsworth lets us shrug that if this wasn’t the way it was, it sure as shooting is the way it should have been.

Cast: Richard Farnsworth, Jackie Burroughs, Wayne Robson, Ken Pogue, Gary Reineke and Timothy Webber

Credits: Directed by Philip Borsos,  script by  John Hunter. A Kino Lorber (streaming) release.

Running time: 1:30