Movie Nation

Let’s get this out of the way right out the gate.

The Best Films of 2017 are “Dunkirk,” “The Florida Project,” “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri,” “Lady Bird” and “Brad’s Status.” Yeah, “The Disaster Artist” can be in that conversation, “The Post,” “Darkest Hour” too.

Many of those films are at least in the chatter right now. “Only the Brave” should be. “Brad’s Status” too. “Stronger” I’d throw in, for the perfection of the performances,

But not all of them are, and many are being swamped in “buzz” for a lot of late-season “The Best movie of the Year, THIS week” swooning by critics and critics’ groups and whatever the hell the National Board of Review and Hollywood Foreign Press Association actually are.

For all the box office woes of this year — holes not totally filled by “Wonder Woman,” “Thor,” “The Last Jedi,” “Coco” “Beauty and the Beast” and “Logan” — reading reviews, you’d swear we’ve entered a new gilded age.

Based mainly on Rottentomatoes scores (with a few inflated Metacritic ratings backing this up), we should be talking about the movies listed below — “Star Wars: The Last Jedi,” “Blade Runner: 2049,” “Wonder Woman,” “Logan” the Sundance-hyped “Mudbound,” with acting Oscars locked up for “Last Flag Flying,” “Battle of the Sexes,” etc., as the “real” Oscar contenders.

Audiences, and Hollywood insiders (who pick the best work in their respective guilds) are saying otherwise. Tickets aren’t being sold, movies praised to the high heavens are being forgotten — especially by the nimrods who took the vapors praising them to high heaven back when they were released and who hope nobody remembers their misguided raves.

Wherever you stand on what a “critically-acclaimed” movie ought to be, whatever you think the Oscars SHOULD stand for, no matter what your stance on “a reviewer writes for the audience, a critic writes for the ages/the artist,” a 3-4 star review should be for a movie somebody/ANYbody recalls two months after its left theaters.

A lot of 2.5/3-star movies have been lifted onto this or that week’s ephemeral pantheon of Great Pictures. “Get Out?” Get real.  A good genre pic that has the smarts of darkly-comic satire going for it, not much else. Is there a performance in that you remember? Brian Williams is excused from that question.

What’s going on? There’s a generation of established Big Media critics who fret too much over seeming irrelevant. You pan a movie everybody goes to see, your editor realizes how out of touch you are. That’s the fearful thinking, anyway. This has been a guiding light in the ongoing accident that is Peter Travers’ career at Rolling Stone, in my opinion. And he’s not alone. Not by a long shot.

A generation of critics and reviewers were culled from the ranks by the Great Layoff of 2005-2015, legacy magazine and newspaper critics by the scores disappeared.

Who’s replacing this fading-forgotten Boomer/Buster legion of opionators? Fangirls, fanboys, and a pretty callow crew, over all. Whatever stand-out voices this new guard has produced, they are drowned out by short term short-timers who haven’t put the time in to see, develop and defend an opinion on genres, directors, screenwriters and classic films. Most won’t stick with this vocation or avocation long enough to get good.

Their handiwork is evident every weekend — junk, derivative horror, sci-fi and fanboy favorite directors, screenwriters and actors praised to the hilt, good to great work undervalued based on the flimsiest grudges, with “logic” and critical judgement and defensible fact-based opinions rarely figuring into it. SXSW, Sundance, Cannes and Toronto groupthink sets in. That’s one thing film festivals are good at — pack mentality reviewing.

Some of this is just a generational sea change, of course, older critics grousing about “What the KIDs love these days,” etc. But take away the gatekeepers who used to ordain who was good enough at the craft of reviewing — debating, using evidence in arguments, etc — and this is where we are.

Most of these movies weren’t BAD, per se. Just indifferent, forgettable. Below, let us remember the forgotten, the middling movies that were the best thing since sliced-bread, according to some (MANY) — for a week, a month, or a summer — and have disappeared, with extreme prejudice — now that “Awards’ season” is upon us.

“Blade Runner 2049” — No Ridley Scott, no “Blade Runner.” Not Rutger Hauer? No pathos. If audiences had trouble embracing a movie in which hardboiled Harrison Ford falls for a replicant who looks the way Sean Young used to look, how can we warm to an over-hyped sequel with Ryan Gosling as a replicant we’re supposed to root for in a future where love, sex, etc. is digital, simulated, VR? Beautiful, chilly and heartless.

“Colossal” — There was a huge run on Depends when this dull, dim limited release reached fanboydom back in the spring. “Hey you guys, it’s a KAIJU movie! With Anne Hathaway! And that Sudeikis guy playing another douche!” And you thought “Pacific Rim” was unworthy.

“Mudbound” — Granted, the Sundance Film Festival comes very early in the year. And the films are screened at…high altitude. So breathless praise for flawed features comes with every year’s festival. Here’s a USA Today headline — “‘Mudbound’ could bring historic diversity to 2018 Oscar race.”  A well-intentioned but murky, over-boiled, meekly-directed, badly-edited obvious and misshapen melodrama, it’s still getting some Oscar buzz for Mary J. Blige, who is pretty good at playing an Depression Era archetype. She plays grinding poverty, in scene after scene (not all), in stylish period sunglasses. Sharecropping paid better than you thought.

“Logan Lucky” — A lack of Southern film critics in this new generation of big city hobbyist reviewers and unworldly appointees (I think NPR gives movie passes to interns, and lets them call themselves “critics.”) meant that this limp, stereotype-stuffed rube comedy from Steven Soderbergh earned plaudits worthy of Soderbergh’s best, and not the notices a cut-rate, cleverly-negotiated NASCAR caper comedy deserved.

“Logan” — A gritty, fitting send-off to The Wolverine. Jackman was as good as he’s always been in these movies, Patrick Stewart plays the hell of out facing one’s mortality. Brutally violent, clumsily-plotted, fulfilling to the fans. A great movie? No. A solid 2.5/3 star movie.

“Wonder Woman” — No, Patty Jenkins isn’t being unjustly dismissed because she’s the WOMAN who directed one of the year’s biggest hits. She’s being ignored because there’s little to this that constitutes directing, not a lot of originality to this distaff “Captain America” riff with vivid cut cut-rate World War I battle recreations, and a passably fierce Gal Gadot in the title role made this a perfectly serviceable, admirable in its empowerment aims, comic book movie. Nothing more. Jenkins’ best work, on Charlize Theron’s Oscar-winning “Monster,” was “directed.” Not “WW.” It was “produced.”

“The Meyerwitz Stories” — Netflix is being painted as a major player this awards season, with “Mudbound,” Angelina Jolie’s passable foreign language film, “First They Killed My Father,” and this bit of Noah Baumbach directed Adam Sandler re-invention. Not hardly. It was a mediocre talkathon long before everybody realized what a sexist heel Dustin Hoffman has been. For decades. Insular, dull and pre-digested.

“Call Me by My Name” — I’ve reviewed and endorsed a lot of queer cinema over the decades, enjoyed the langorous scripts of James Ivory (“Remain of the Day,” “A Room with a View”) as much as anybody. But what inspired the NYC Critics and LA Critics to soil their knickers over this turgid, slow, leaden, gay apologia (older man, teen boy romance) melodrama escapes me. Did they all come out of the closet in the same Scarsdale or Van Nuys synagogue?

“It” — Hollywood wore out Stephen King’s welcome back in the last millennium, repetitive hack-work horror with usually just one really good idea per book as that book became a film. This dark ode to lost childhood wasn’t bad. It wasn’t “Psycho,” either. Splitting it into two movies makes the upcoming sequel, really just the second half of a story told as a single piece, seems an act of greed, not narrative thrift. Reviewers seemed grateful it wasn’t any worse than the decades-old TV version. So?

“Alien: Covenant” — No Ridley Scott, no “Alien?” Wasting Scott’s last vital years as a director on this movie got “Covenant,” a dank stinker in this long, wildly uneven series, graded on the curve. Step away from the chest-busters, Ridley.

“Red Turtle” — Not every animated film to pop out of Studio Ghibli is a masterpiece. This certainly wasn’t, though you’d never know it from the reviews.

“Thor: Ragnorak” — Cute. Fun. Meh. Hemsworth should have played Gaston in the live-action “Beauty and the Beast” remake. Self-aware, muscle-bound and silly when he wants to be. The movie’s a forgettable exercise in fights and effects and inside Marvel jokes. Will anybody be watching this five years down the road? How about six months down the road?

“Star Wars: The Last Jedi” — A tidal wave of effusive reviews (not mine), a sea of black ink at the box office, and a tidal wave of irritated “fan” reviews — on IMDb, on Rottentomatoes, on reddit, comments on my review. It’s gutless, heartless corporate piffle, a middling yet shiny bauble for the faithful, who appear to be losing faith.

“The Shape of Water” — An Oscar contender? Why, exactly? Guillermo del Toro’s derivative little sci-fi romantic fantasy has a look, a very good cast which was parked in roles so on-the-nose as to be eye-rollable (Sally Hawkins as the lonelorn, lovelorn mute? She’s so much better in “Maudie.” Michael Shannon as a psychotic technocrat? Richard Jenkins as a sad, lonely closeted gay neighbor, Michael Stuhlbarg as a Rosenberg-ish traitor?). I found it a tad dull, a touch “icky.” And it’s seemingly derived/ripped-off from a widely circulated student film from the Netherlands of a few years back. Let it contend. Will anybody remember it otherwise?

“Last Flag Flying” — Whatever debt we owe veterans in this country, what we don’t owe them is this vapid, criminally over-praised “Last Detail” road dramedy about old men paying a debt to a misused comrade. Bryan Cranston brought the holiday ham out early for this one.

Pardon my tardiness in catching up with the Barden Bellas one last time. I strongly suspected that these “pitches” had run out of ideas with “Pitch Perfect,” and “Pitch Perfect 2” pretty much confirmed it.

But here it is, “Pitch Perfect 3,” a few more not-exactly a cappella renditions of pop classics from George Michael to Pink, songs they keep singing even when they’re singing Shut Up and Dance.”

A few more “Fat Amy” jokes, told mostly by Rebel “Fat Amy” Wilson herself. Her character’s graduated from Barden U. and is pushing a one-woman show, “Fat Amy Winehouse.” She leaves her “Make America Eat Again” hat out of the costume, alas.

There’s more of the silent comedy of Hana Mae Lee, thend  scary-strange and exotic Asian in the multi-cultural 10-member Bellas.

Brittany Snow and Anna Camp treat us to a handful of fresh “We’ll never have it as good as we had it in college,” takes, remembering when they were “famous,” at least to those two commentating clowns (Elizabeth Banks, John Michael Higgins) who have worked their way down the media food chain to making a self-financed Youtube documentary about “Where are they now?”

“We’re gonna CLING to you like mom-jeans on a camel toe!”

And there’s more of Anna Kendrick, sweet-voiced lead singer Beca, who gets much of the attention and all of the breaks, but has too much “integrity” to keep producing no-talent poseurs like Pimp-lo (Moises Arias), so she quits.

“Pitch 3” is a movie as predictable as the big explosion and escape that opens the picture, as the lame script-crutch “Three Weeks Earlier” flashback, as the assorted “love interests” cooked up for this installment, as trite as Fat Amy’s description of how she became estranged from her “dodgy” crook of a father.

“I had to run away, which was a real bitch…because of the chafing!”

But that “father” turns out to be John Lithgow, who sings a little Chicago (the band, not the musical) and does it in an Australian accent. Because — Hugh Jackman, and fair is fair…dinkum. He’s a semi-bright spot in a movie we’ve seen before, cuter and fresher and five years ago.

The twist this time is that the long-graduated Bellas are frustrated with their large animal veterinary aid, juice truck, flight-school flunking real lives, and more than thrilled to dive into a European USO tour, entertaining the troops and feuding with the other bands on the bill, especially the skinner and can-actually-play-instruments all-female quartet, EverMoist.

Ruby Rose (“Orange is the New Black”) is their skinny/scary lead singer.

That nothing here is new isn’t a fatal failing. That nothing here is funny, is.

Wilson has run out of variations on her girth jokes, even though the script tries to find ways Fat Amy can surprise us.

Even taking into account that I’m not its target audience, I was pleasantly surprised by the first film in this trilogy. This? It’s piffle.

Whatever these “Pitches” have done for Kendrick’s singing ambitions, in the movies she’s the perky straight-man, the one who sees hilarity all around her. It’s not a good use of her talents.

As for the rest of the film, if you’ve seen one leggy, twerky, over-choreographed, polished and auto-tuned cover of Sia’s “Cheap Thrills,” you’ve seen enough.

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for crude and sexual content, language and some action.

Cast: Anna Kendrick, Rebel Wilson, Brittany Snow, Elizabeth Banks, John Michael Higgins, Hailee Steinfeld, John Lithgow

Credits:Directed by Trish Sie, script by Kay Cannon and Mike White. A Universal release.

Running time: 1:33

There’s an almost unnerving self-confidence in aspiring filmmakers. Directing is not for the meek or shrinking violets. Egomaniacs are drawn to it like alpha flies.

Spend any time around clusters of committed filmmaker wannabes and you’ll pick up on a shared confidence bordering on mania, arrogance mixed with a fanatical belief that you have a story that begs to be told and that you’re the only person on Earth who can tell it.

Amplify that passion with the cockiness of a combat veteran deluded by what he’s sure is his unique experience of war, and of his government at its most dangerous. Insulated first by the bubble of his service and then by the echo chamber of far-right fanatics who only listen to other far-right fanatics about “what’s REALLY going on in this country,” that’s David Crowley, a young guy with a mission, a message and a pitch — for a movie he knows MUST be made and that he must make it.

“A Gray State” is an A & E/Netflix documentary about Crowley, whose dream to make a thriller about a FEMA/Blue Helmets/Black Helicopters/New World Order assault on the liberties of “patriots” like himself led to his death, and the death of his wife and daughter.

A quick online search shows the internet marketing of his idea, “Gray State,” a planned $30 million film tying together what he’s learned in a business school’s afterthought “film program” with what his worldview tells him is happening in America.

He had a poster, a complex Joseph Campbell “Hero’s Journey” script, which he structures on note cards in an obsessive/complusive version of Spike Lee’s “How To” guide to making a movie. He had a trailer, and he had an online following.

What he didn’t have was $30 million, a fact that trips up many a movie dreamer. Erik Nelson’s documentary is about Crowley’s single-minded pursuit of that dream, his and his family’s deaths in Minnesota and some of the folks who smell a fresh conspiracy in the tragedy of a man who plunged deep into the rabbit hole and did not come back out.

Yes, “Infowars'” Alex Jones has a cameo. We see Crowley’s extensively self-filmed appearances at Ron Paul “Fests” and protests at the Republican National Convention, his pitches to a sea of disaffected white men like himself.

And Nelson, interviewing Crowley’s sad but undeluded father, his friends and filmmaking partners, friends of his wife (who shared his delusions) and TV and alt-weekly reporters who covered this “mysterious” death in Apple Valley, peels away the layers of doubt that Crowley’s online alt-right crowd want to sew into a murder-suicide that they’ve taken up as a furtherance of his cause.

We see a youth a little too into playing Army dress-up in paintball, moved to enlist after 9/11 and sent first to Afghanistan and then, a disillusioning “stop-loss” deployment to Iraq. We hear and see his mono-mania turn from soldiering to songwriting, and then to filmmaking.

And we listen to his high-speed patter, a breathless, evolving movie pitch that got a prospectus trailer filmed and edited to raise money for a film he hoped would “prevent” a bleak future he saw coming, “by consent or conquest.”

He talks in the glib alarmism of conspiracy buffs, connecting dots that he and other “right thinking” people see point to a moment when “the oligarchs take over” and “society fails,” when his fellow armed-and-patriotic types are all that stands between freedom and FEMA enforced slavery.

Then we watch the myriad notes, the twists and Post-It note turns he tries to weave into his epic script, index cards covering a wall in his production office.

Tell me you don’t see echoes of “A Beautiful Mind.” Nelson lets us see Crowley’s fleeting dream of filmmaking glory, this ache to tell a story he believed in above all else, consume him.

If there is a light moment in the movie, which is punctuated by disheartening footage of his wife, Kolem, and daughter Raniyah, it’s Crowley’s rehearsals for a pitch meeting with two Hollywood “types” he hopes will produce his movie. He taped those rehearsals and his conclusions, that these two small-timers with almost zero credits were at best a long shot at being able to keep any promises they made, are played back for these two, whom like David we’ve sized up as poseurs, and who get offended at how Crowley characterizes them.

What happened at that point may not have been inevitable — a wife, isolated by her control freak husband (directors are the ultimate control freaks), unable to connect with her family or any support system that could save her, a husband spiraling down a hole his friends and family can’t pull him from, a film project going nowhere threatening humiliation in front of all these people he’s convinced to believe in him and donate to the project.

But for a guy trying to absorb the lessons of story theorist and guru Joseph Campbell, the tragic arc is there, the tragic flaws that will be the hero’s undoing plain for all to see.

Nelson might have pursued mental health professionals who like popping up on TV speculating on the mental state of narcissists who document their lives fully enough for at least a textbook “opinion” on what ailed them. Instead, we get a local Fox TV reporter willing to comment out of his pay grade about the madness that followed chasing a dream just beyond Cowley’s reach. A & E documentaries have a deserved quick-and-dirty reputation that leaves out voices of real authority weighing in on Nelson’s conclusion.

“A Gray State” is still an engrossing peek into a world few connect with, an echo chamber where “truth” comes to be only the shared delusions its adherents repeat to each other, and a “hero” in their ranks who died, not from the conspiracies of “dark forces” they see in every corner, but from the madness of failing in front of his fellow fanatics.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with violence.

Cast: David Crowley Jr.,  Kolem Crowley, Mason Hendricks, David Crowley Sr., Danny Mason

Credits:Directed by Erik Nelson . An A & E/Netflix release.

Running time: 1:32

It’s safe to say that the on-the-road/on-the-lam thriller “The Strange Ones” was conceived and filmed in a different time.

We’re a lot more sensitive to hints of an age-inappropriate sexual relationship than we were mere months ago. That’s a key element to “The Strange Ones,” a slow-moving mystery that reveals itself in the tiniest of dollops. You wonder if anybody would have ever put up the money for this, post-Weinstein, post-Spacey.

You wonder if even the most myopic and greedy stage parents would have let their child take a part in it.

There was a fire. Now Nick (Alex Pettyfer of “I Am Number 4”) and Jeremiah (James Freedson-Jackson) are on the run, calling themselves “brothers” even though we suspect, in an instant, that’s not the case.

The kid is haunted by what he’s seen and reassurances from the adult Nick are no help.

“The things inside your head, they’re only as real was you want them to be.”

The script gives us odd “clues” as to what’s really going on — TV news reports glimpsed, the two “brothers” sleeping in the car, laying low until they have a Volvo breakdown and Nick has to sweet-talk an out-of-the-way motel manager (Emily Althaus) into letting them stay.

The boy mutters “Just go ahead and kill me. I don’t even care where you bury my body,” but Nick has this place in the far-off woods he wants them to go, woodlore (shooting, etc.) he longs to pass on.

The sexual hints are overt — in a shower, in the twin beds of their motel room. But “Jeremiah” isn’t trying to escape from Nick, and the sweet-faced kid has a cruel streak that pops out here and there. Who’s calling the shots here?

Co-writers/directors Christopher Radcliff and Lauren Wolkstein treat their script as if it has great secrets, and dole them out so grudgingly that the picture lurches from “When will this get going?” to “Will this EVER get underway?”

More problematic is the film’s attempts at being sexually daring. If Louis C.K.’s now-stillborn movie, with a similarly cavalier attitude towards age (and incestuous) sexual impropriety, and with Kevin Spacey’s career ended and director Bryan Singer’s is in mortal peril, what do we do with movies that suggest a boy’s Lolita-ish hold on an older man?

Granted, the New York and LA critics are insisting that “Call Me By My Name,” with a similar sexual mismatch at its heart, is the year’s best picture, grading on some sort of gay pedophile curve.

With all we hear about Woody, with more Roman victims coming forward, with all the heat Spacey took for suggesting, in his “apology,” that he was a gay man and well, somebody’s got to give potentially gay boys their initiation, how do we reconcile films like “Call Me” and “The Strange Ones” with the zeitgeist?

Maybe we shouldn’t. And perhaps this slow and generally dull and opaque picture never should have seen the light of day.

MPAA Rating: R for some disturbing violent images, and brief sexual material

Cast: Alex Pettyfer, James Freedson-Jackson, Emily Althaus, Gene Jones

Credits:Written and directed by Christopher Radcliff and Lauren Wolkstein. A Vertical release.

Running time: 1:21

I’m only just now getting around to “Okja” because, well, the thought of a two hour dark Korean comedy about a digital built-in-the-lab superpig of the future holds little appeal.

I loved “The Host,” liked “Snowpiercer” and “Mother,” so filmmaker Joon-ho Bong’s resume should have overcome any reservations.

All the cool kids are in it; Tilda Swinton, Jake Gyllenhaal, Paul Dano, Giancarlo Esposito and Shirley Henderson among them.

But the stills I’d seen of the digital “Babe” in this sci-fi animal rights satire made it look sillier than it is. Not that it isn’t entirely.  Digital critters have been comfortably enjoyed on screen since the first “Jurassic Park” and original “Jumanji,” with the big improvement here being a young actor (Seo-hyun Ahn) literally crawling over something that (more or less, as they used fabricated models) simply doesn’t exist.

And Netflix got into the business of extending the career of Adam Sandler, which cheapens their “Made for Netflix” brand.

Watching it didn’t overcome these pre-viewing biases, alas. It’s alternately wacky and bleak, and despite stunning Korean scenery and a passable chase or two, it feels small-screen. It’s also obvious, with an ending you can guess in the first ten minutes.

But anyway, onward.

Swinton (“Snowpiercer”) plays a supposedly kindly corporate CEO who announces to the world a solution for the growing global food shortage. Her MIRANDO (Monsanto, anyone?) corporation has stumbled across (right) this freak pig, they say, who uses less resources, produces more that’s edible and whose poop literally doesn’t stink. They’re sending samples of this pig to the far corners of the world for a contest to see who does the best job of growing it.

“We needed a miracle. And then we got one!”

Naturally, the porker parked in the play than invented Korean BBQ is a winner. Young Mija ( Seo-hyun Ahn) has bonded with her pig, named her Okja and romps in the forests with her.

Then the company’s resident TV zoo show host (Gyllenhaal) arrives with a crew to film her and select her for the Grand Finals in the content, to be held in New York.

Mija is naturally very upset by this.

But a humorously fanatical band of Animal Liberation Front (Hah!) activists pig-nap Okja en route. Dano plays their passive-aggressive leader, with Steven Yeun, Lily Collins and Devon Bostick in their ranks.

They promise Mija that they’ll save Okja, if she’s OK with them letting her go to the States so the pigs-in-a-test-tube lab can be exposed for the sham it is. They’re VERY committing to protecting all animals, even ones invented by Big Agribusinesses. And they’re so deep into the cause that some of them only eat anything with the greatest reluctance. Reducing their footprint, as it were.

Joon-ho Bong has fun with culture clashes at every turn, making a movie for Netflix yet messing around with translations with jokes only Koreans will understand.

Pitching this as a “children’s fairytale, with an edge” is a serious understatement. The pig is cute enough to be a toy, but the film is “Babe 2” dark and foreboding.

There’s tomfoolery with Swinton’s character having an evil twin (More evil, twin?). Giancarlo Esposito makes an amusing, clipped and emotionless corporate “fixer,” Gyllenhaal takes the opportunity to crank up the wacky as his short-tempered, utterly-compromised “friend to animals” TV host who’s caught up in a slaughterhouse conspiracy.

The animal rights gang’s competence in the pignapping is undercut hilariously by their passivity once they’ve completed the job.

“He still hasn’t eaten anything?”

“No, he’s, uh… still trying to leave the smallest footprint on the planet that he can.”

All in all, very much a mixed bag of a movie. Kudos for Netflix for writing the check that let Joon-ho Bong make a movie available to a much wider audience, but it’s as if he’s hellbent on showing he’s entirely too cool to “sell-out” like that.

And that flattens the comedy in a comic thriller that already lacked suspense. He lost himself in the message, and undercutting that message with a wink.

(The most over-rated movies of 2017? They’re here.)

MPAA Rating: TV-MA

Cast: Seo-hyun Ahn, Tilda Swinton, Jake Gyllenhaal, Paul Dano, Giancarlo Esposito, Shirley Henderson

Credits: Written and directed by Joon-ho Bong. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:00

All this back and forth over “There’s no REAL backlash to ‘The Last Jedi,'” “Everybody LOVES it,, exit-polling PROVES IT. Just like Disney SAYS!” and “It’s the fanboys/alt-right, hate-bots that have gamed the user-reviews on websites” have been rather vexing to those of us who have chewed on the film, discussed it on comment forums, etc, and know there is a HUGE section of the fanbase that is indeed irked with what Disney, J.J. Abrams and Rian Johnson have done to it.

I see it partly as late blowback for “The Force Awakens.” There’s an ebb and flow to film series, and if fans felt burned, in retrospect (and upon further reflection on a movie that isn’t aging well), they sometimes vent upon the sequel that follows it.

But all this talk about illegitimate complaints on Rotten Tomatoes is laughable. Rotten Tomatoes is itself gamed. The days when it was filled with an elite corps of time-tested critics ended when most of America’s magazine and daily newspaper film critics were purged over the past decade and a half.

So some of what’s linked to on the site these days is some clerk or stringer or copy editor  at a legacy media organization (NPR appears to be making interns critics, for instance) who has convinced an editor to “Let me take this free pass and review ‘Star Wars,'” etc. A vast sea of no-names and callow kids join established to make up RT’s critical mass. There’s simply not as much institutional memory and the lifetime of comparison points in criticism any more. And a lot of older critics clinging to their jobs by a thread turn into cheerleaders for whatever piffle is popular with the public right this second.

Metacritic’s aggregate critics’ score is a little lower, but again, a changing of the guard is partly responsible for that.

I have seen Youtube videos of would-be Alex Jones types blaming the backlash on “SJW” decisions in the plotting and casting. “Social Justice Warrior,” aka the Political Correctness Police. I don’t buy into that (One gets the feeling they’d much rather be typing JEW instead SJW), but the Abrams-Johnson Skywalker saga has a wimpiness (Let Leia Go! She’s not going to survive that!) and a feminization of the story’s drama (not solely casting, softening the “WARS” half of “Star Wars”) that is taking the teeth right out of it.

I knew there’d be plenty of love for it when it opened, and figured I’d be an outlier among America’s critics. But I’m not alone, and acting as if “This backlash never happened” is denying a voice to a lot of fans I am hearing from. And it’s a lie.

The damned movie is losing audience, hand over fist, in its second weekend — 77% down, Friday to Friday, 67% weekend to weekend). Is that made up, too?

What do those who insist “There’s no real backlash” do when Mark Hamill disowns the film’s portrayal of Luke Skywalker? Mark’s Luke learned from the ever-patient Obi Wan and even MORE patient Yoda, and yet in “Last Jedi” tried to off Han Solo’s son on a hunch, flicks non-existent debris off his shoulder like some Ice Cube sidekick in “Ride Along,” and generally seems reluctant to pass along the sacred training that Obi Wan couldn’t wait to pass to him, a Luke and Mark out of character and out of his depth in a movie series he knows like the back of his hand because of Rian Johnson’s facile take on this universe?

“Jake Skywalker” is how Hamill refers to this guy, “He’s not MY Luke Skywalker.”

My complaints about the film had to do with a whole variety of things — casting, for starters — and not Luke’s “transformation.” The original video has been yanked. The Long Arm of the Mouse?

Maybe the Alt-right put him up to it. Or maybe mainstream organizations need to seriously consider the lightweights and fraidy-cats they’re putting their institutional weight behind when they don’t have the critical facilities to know what’s good and what’s all surface sheen, tone-deaf dialogue and satisfying but limiting PC casting/story decisions. Maybe what Rottentomatoes REALLY needs to do is stop assigning “top critic” status to institutions, and label top critics that instead.

Beware of the actor, preacher or politician a little too in love with the sound of her or his own voice.

And be leery of a writer enamored with the clatter of his own keyboard.

Aaron Sorkin made his reputation on TV (“The West Wing,” “The Newsroom”) and film (“A Few Good Men,” “The Social Network,” “Steve Jobs”) as a writer of wordy and witty dramas — immensely quotable exercises in the dramatic writers’ art.

Given free rein by a new-ish studio to adapt a book about a bombshell poker “game runner” to the rich and famous, he gives us two hours and twenty minutes of over-written, endlessly-narrated and dramatically flat drama about Texas Hold’em and a woman making her way in an underground, cutthroat world of ruthless men in low-cut dresses.

“Molly’s Game” has a mesmerizing quality, and an exhausting talk-your-ear-off air that is almost shockingly uncinematic. I filled a notebook with examples of Sorkin’s camera showing us a long line of high-end booze labels, or card players entering a room, taking their seats and looking at their cards, as Molly (Jessica Chastain), in redundant voice-over narration, RECITING EXACTLY WHAT WE’VE JUST SEEN WITH OUR OWN EYES.

It’s bloody maddening. And it goes on and on and on, the laziest screenwriter’s crutch of them all. The guy’s got Oscars and Emmys. He should know better.

Molly Bloom was an aspiring Olympic skier, pushed by a hard-driving psychologist father (Kevin Costner, the best thing about the movie) until she wiped out one time too many and lost her chance at glory. Prodded and raised in bright, challenging conversation that augmented her schooling, she could have done anything with her life.

What she stumbled into instead was high-stakes poker among the rich and show-biz powerful of L.A. She transitions from working for tips, running her creeper boss’s
(Jeremy Strong) weekly game, to “The Poker Princess,” running her own well-oiled gambling enterprise, first in Hollywood, then in New York.

We’re given a fascinating peek inside this world, a “Guys and Dolls” of actors, producers, hedge fund managers and — as the film tells us in the beginning when Molly is arrested by a platoon of F.B.I. agents — Russian mobsters and money-launderers. She ran with a fast crowd, wrote a book about it, and got busted for who she knew and what she knew.

As her lawyer (Idris Elba. terrific) incredulously asks, “Did you commit a felony and then write a book about it?” Um, maybe.

The narrative skips back and forth, to her “on the couch” childhood of skiing and interrogations by her analyst father, to her assorted dealings with bullying men in her business to the court case this hustler with “integrity” — she refuses to name-names — prepares with her lawyer.

There’s no romance. Her assorted clients (Chris O’Dowd, Justin Kirk) lust after her with professions of undying love. They fall for the cornucopia of cleavage she uses as a calling card.

“You look like the Cinemax version of herself,” her lawyer complains.

Michael Cera is interestingly cast against type as a particularly ruthless, unnamed famous actor who doesn’t particularly care for this game he’s mastered.

“I don’t like poker. I like destroying people’s lives.”

It’s a mini-series’ worth of colorful characters — losers, card sharps, gambling addicts and Feds — and too-too clever banter of blisteringly smart exchanges. But when every remark is the prologue to a speech, nobody takes a breath and no character dares so much as stammer, clear her or his throat or break eye contact as they declaim, orate and speechify, it’s  a bit too much about too little.

This is a small-scale scam, hyped and typed into Great Drama. Which it isn’t. If the real Molly Bloom wasn’t a bombshell plying her trade in Hollywood (a “Hollywood madam” of poker), she’d have never gotten the book deal for a memoir “that ends before the GOOD part.” Take away the “Decolletage: The Movie” element, and Chastain’s brittle, aloof performance would be getting no more notice than her equally chilly turn “Miss Sloane.”

For all his big-screen success, and really, nobody re-watches “Steve Jobs,” Sorkin has tailored his talents for the small screen, a close-up medium of faces where lightning-quick banter is what you need to hook viewers in between commercial breaks.

A great give-away in that regard is Chastain’s wardrobe, which is stacked (ahem) on top of the skinniest stilettos ever filmed. Sorkin frames her, in scene after scene, in medium to long shots, something TV cinematography would avoid. So we see her ungainly, broken-hip march through scene after scene, a powerful, focused woman who can’t walk in these damned things to save her life.

TV would have hidden her feet and preserved her character’s athletic grace. On the big screen, Sorkin has Chastain just charge ahead, chattering away as if she’s paid by the syllable, hoping nobody’s eyes leave her chest long enough to wonder what’s with the arthritic gait.

(The most over-rated movies of 2017? They’re here.)

MPAA Rating: R for language, drug content and some violence

Cast: Jessica Chastain, Idris Elba, Kevin Costner, Michael Cera, Bill Camp, Chris O’Dowd

Credits:Written and directed by Aaron Sorkin, based on Molly Bloom’s book. An STX release.

Running time:

Wow.

This is what comic purgatory looks like. Actors, trapped in a laugh-free road comedy called “Father Figures” — a paying (gullible) audience, slack-jawed in dismay, trapped there with them for two hours.

It co-stars Owen Wilson, with the fresh tailwind in his career that a supporting loving-dad turn in “Wonder” gives him, decided he just had to play one more surfer-doofus/free spirit.

Ed Helms plays Wilson’s character’s twin brother, an uptight proctologist who can’t find a laugh, even in the obligatory up-your-bum jokes. He’s got “The Ben Stiller Role” in this buddy comedy, twitchy, irked, the same facial tics. Hell, he even looks like Stiller in a couple of scenes — Stiller on stilts, anyway.

Whatever one thinks of Wilson’s aging, desperately-preserved screen persona, the only words that come to mind for Helms are, “What the hell HAPPENED to you, man?”

You’ve seen the trailers or the TV ads, so you know basically the whole movie. Mom (Glenn Close) finally admits to her 40something boys, on her wedding day that she’s lied to them about the father they never met.

Pete (Helms) has felt this void keenly, taking up his profession because Mom always said their father died of colon cancer. Funny. Divorced, bled by his ex and hated by his tweenage son, he can’t keep the bile down for long.

Kyle (Wilson)? He never really cared, just a lucky free spirit who stumbled into being the label model for a best-selling brand of barbecue sauce, lives in Hawaii, has a newly-pregnant young Hawaiian girlfriend.

But if finding their Dad will make his brother happy, he’s down. Mom’s first lead is this affair she had with footballer Terry Bradshaw, thrilled at the thought he might have two more sons (More proof of the NFL’s CTE cover-up?).

But he wasn’t the only Steeler of the ’70s she entertained. Ving Rhames plays a retired linebacker with equally explicit memories of Mom’s mammaries.

“We only cuddled.”

Their cross-country odyssey then takes them to a hunkered-down ex-Wall Street baron (J.K. Simmons) living holed up with his mom (June Squibb) and so on.

Some potential dads get misty-eyed over Mom, others launch into explicit descriptions of her sexual specialties.

“It was the ’70s!”

The script is all random encounters, “traveling shots” set to music and dead-end scenes — getting urine soaked in an interstate men’s room, picking up a sadly-subdued Katt Williams as a hitchhiker and getting hit by a train, a bar hook-up.

And hell’s bells, none of it is the least bit funny. You’ve seen the trailer, you’ve seen the movie. No, the trailer’s not funny either.

Cinematographer-turned-director Lawrence Sher took a job from any  number of unemployed directs with talent. Screenwriter Justin Malen wrote “Office Christmas Party.”

And in a just universe, they’d be the only ones in two hours of comic purgatory, not us, and not the should-know-better Helms and the ever-hapless Wilson.

MPAA Rating:R for language and sexual references throughout

Cast: Owen Wilson, Glenn Close, Ed Helms, Christopher Walken, J.K. Simmons, Ving Rhames, Terry Bradshaw

Credits:Directed by Lawrence Sher, script by Justin Malen. A Warner Brother release.

Running time: 1:53

Well shucks, before this past weekend, I’d not given a thought that might be a sequel even in the works for the all-star, Greek location-filmed adaptation of that big, cheesy ABBA musical, “Mamma Mia.”

But you know, they barely cracked the ABBA songbook with the first film. And even though Meryl Streep NEVER does sequels, and Cher was supposedly retired, the gang’s all back for ouzo and good times in “Mamma Mia 2.”

Apologies if you saw the pirated version of this making the rounds of the Interwebs last weekend before Universal pulled them down. I did. Not that I’m all ABBA on the brain or anything. That’s my story, sticking to it, etc.

Sappy, not a laugh in the trailer. But we’ll see.

What everybody wants to know about “All the Money in the World” is if Christopher Plummer, plugged into the “villain” role when disgraced star Kevin Spacey was edited out, pulls it off.

Of course he does, with venomous, flinty flair.

Movies and performances in them are modular affairs, and even a big part like that of miserly millionaire J. Paul Getty can be replaced, a new actor slotted in for close-ups, a few recreated location shots and the occasional multi-player scene.

Heck, check out Plummer in “The Man Who Invented Christmas.” This was a no-brainer.

The great, Oscar-winning Plummer, who takes on hints of Ebeneezer in every villainous turn, makes Getty the greatest real-life Scrooge of them all. His Getty is an owlish, avaricious, cunning and cheap SOB not inclined to part with “MY money” — even for a kidnapped grandson and heir.

Ridley Scott’s thriller is about an infamous kidnapping in the even-more anarchic and corrupt of Italy of the 1970s. John Paul Getty III (Charlie Plummer, no relation) is a beautiful teen getting into all the trouble a lad with impulses and the means to indulge them could get into in 1973 Rome.

“Got home, don’t worry your mother,”  a hooker lectures him.

“I can take care of myself,” he sniffs. Yeah, that’s the very moment when he’s kidnapped. The Red Brigades, a terrorist organization, want $17 million for his return.

The trouble with that, we quickly learn and they (Romain Duris is their leader) never do, is that “Paolo” isn’t a teen “of means.”

“There IS no money,” his mother (Michelle Williams, brilliant) shrieks into the phone. Even though she might have BEEN a “Getty,” that’s long-past. Her ex is off, stoned out of his gourd, partying in Morocco with whores and Mick Jagger.

And Grandpa? He’s “the richest man in the history of the world,” ensconced in a vast English manor house, living like the Lord of Oil he is.

“Everything has a price,” in his eyes. “The great struggle in life is coming to grips with what that price is.”

How much WILL the man with “All the Money in the World”  pay for that grandson?

“Nothing.”

Scott, working from a David Scarpa script (based on John Pearson’s book about the Gettys and the kidnapping), paints a quick history of the family’s staggering wealth in broad strokes — ancient deals with the Bedouin of Saudi Arabia — and of Abigail Harris’s history with those same Gettys.

Gail (Williams) married an alcoholic heir (Andrew Buchan) estranged from a father who never made time for his family. Money was and remains J. Paul’s obsession. His few flashback dealings with his son, daughter-in-law and grandchildren are little life lessons in obscene wealth and what comes with it.

“To be a Getty is an extraordinary thing.”

He’s most intent, not on making more money (though he’s pretty intent on that, using the new OPEC cartel to make his holdings more valuable). The trick, he says, is “staying wealthy.”

“If you can count your money, you’re not a billionaire.”

A lot of Getty’s philosophy is imparted to the audience via  his chats with our surrogate in all this, Fletcher Chase, Getty’s ex-CIA “fixer,” a negotiator Getty hurls at every difficult deal or security matter in his empire. Mark Wahlberg gives this guy a compact confidence and easily-accessed cynicism as Chase takes the place of the ransom money, a “gift” from Getty to Gail who will retrieve her son for her.

Chase deals with the overmatched Italian police and the increasingly impatient kidnappers, who spirit young Paul to a semi-abandoned farm in remote Calabria, where the corruption runs deep and no local — cook or cop — can be trusted to do the right thing.

Months and months pass as the increasingly steely mother matches wits and will with a rich old man too cheap to pay for laundry service at the four-star hotels he sometimes visits, much less any ransom that would cut into his art collecting budget.

That time passage works against the picture’s “ticking clock” tension. We dread Paul’s fate, even if we don’t remember the history of how this all unfolded. It’s just that his fate comes at us in slow motion.

What Scott’s film does well is capture the near-anarchy of Italy in the ’70s, with violent paparazzi, terrorists and criminals run amok and a justice system straight out of a Third World country (It was a kidnapping capital long before Colombia and Brazil got into that game).

Williams amazingly transforms Gail from the faintly-patrician young woman who married into this empire into an impoverished but defiant negotiator whose accent has grown more posh and her spine stiffer, all from combat and interaction with the richest man on Earth.

Wahlberg, toned-down, underplaying it, still has one lay-it-all-out-there/tell-the-boss-off scene that feels far more Hollywood than realistic. It mars a near pitch-perfect performance.

But Scott and Plummer conspire to give us the ultimate portrait of greed, pettiness and the deep psychological holes in the souls of those obsessed with acquiring wealth and maintaining it.

I love the way Plummer gives us this side of the old man, his grandiloquent sense of self even when he’s being sentimental (in flashbacks) with the grandson he now refuses to ransom.

“You’re a Getty, Paul. You have a destiny.” 

One got a sense, from the early trailers, that Kevin Spacey’s take on Getty was sinister and somewhat the product of makeup. Plummer? He manages his avarice and villainy with nothing but a great performance.

It’s that disconnection from “The Real World,” that sense that “We look like you, but we’re not like you” that makes “All the Money in the World” feel so timely. As the super-rich seize, at long last, absolute power in America, they reveal just what this movie lays out for us — untrammeled greed, and a heartless calculus that allows the top tier of the One Percent to loot without conscience, to accept that the deaths of others are just a price they’re willing to shrug off to achieve that singular desire — “more.”

There have always been Gettys, and the world has always tried to rein them in. But it’s rare in our history that we’ve actually decided to surrender what little control we have over them so absolutely. Expecting anyone with “All the Money in the World” to maintain a conscience is the height of folly.

MPAA Rating:R for language, some violence, disturbing images and brief drug content

Cast: Michelle Williams, Mark Wahlberg, Charlie Plummer, Romain Duris, Christopher Plummer

Credits:Directed by Ridley Scott, script by  David Scarpa, based on the John Pearson book. A Sony/Tristar release.

Running time: 2:12