Movie Nation

“Crown Vic” is a grounded and gritty cops-on-the-night-shift melodrama built around a tightly-coiled turn by Thomas Jane.

He plays a 25 year LAPD veteran assigned to FTO (Field Training Officer) duty, mentoring a “transfer cherry” (Luke Kleintank) through his first night on the job.

And that set-up inevitably forces a comparison to “Training Day,” because a century of cop films and seven decades of PD-TV demands it. There have been so many police procedurals that it takes a lot to make such a story stand out, to avoid the label “Training Day Lite.”

On a night when the duo deal with a belligerent drunk BMW princess, a punk who throws something at their Crown Victoria cruiser, a domestic disturbance call, a manic mouthy meth-head, a convenience store theft, a burning SUV (with a “crispy” body in it) and lots of “personal” business, all while two armed and trigger-happy bank robbers are working their way across the city to their patrol zone, we see how difficult it is for writer-director Joel Souza’s film (“Break Night”) to break formula. And it’s impossible for it to avoid melodrama.

Jane is Ray Mandel, a twice-divorced loner whose razzing of the “cherry” is profane and not at all good-natured. It’s “I ain’t your f—–g valet, sweetheart” when the rookie from Oakland makes him wait, “genius” this and “rookie” that.

Nick Holland (Kleintank) is the son of a cop, married, with a baby on the way. Everything he says to anybody else in uniform gets him cussed out. Every bit of “us vs. them” advice from Ray seems confrontational.

“Somebody looks guilty? Watch’em. They look innocent? Watch’em closely!”

Ray’s ethos? This car is “home,” dividing the world between “in here” and “out there.”

Their philosophical debates, common to the genre, reveal Ray’s cynicism — “Married? That’s…optimistic.” — and “dark” and defensive worldview.

“The world was dark when I got here,” he grouses.

He orders the kid to watch him, stay behind him, follow his lead. And the kid does.

Even when they see the roid-and-speed-raging plainclothes detective Jack (Josh Hopkins, way over the top) start the evening amped up, and take things to illegal extremes with a suspect — his partner (David Krumholtz) egging him on.

Even when Ray starts dealing with personal matters having to do with his dead partner’s junkie widow (Bridget Moynahan).

The highlights here are a nervy opening sequence, a bank robbery as seen from inside and outside of the getaway car (shots fired out, and into the vehicle), and Jane’s flinty performance and smooth mastery of world weariness.

“There’s the person you want to be when you’re young. And there’s the person you wind up being.”

Jane’s Ray Mandel is resigned to that, a lifetime of being most comfortable on the job, most at home in his Crown Vic.

A few moments like the roid-raging detective and a couple of other encounters took me right out of the picture, which is largely a straight-arrow “Adam-12” (this team is “20-Lincoln-14”) dangers and drudgery of the job drama.

Ray can complain that “They think it’s take-a-free-shot-at-a-cop night,” but we see lots of police restraint, none of this shoot-on-suspicion nonsense that has dominated the news about police killings nationwide. “Blue Lives Matter” doesn’t figure into the thinking either.

But Souza’s film reminds us that being apolitical is a political statement, too.

And after all the movies and TV shows, “Training Day” and “Rampart,” “End of Watch” and “Blue Knight” and years and years of “Cops” and “Live PD,” it’s not just the cops who’ve “seen it all.”

“Crown Vic” isn’t a bad picture. It’s just too unexceptional to stand out.

MPAA Rating: R for strong violence and pervasive language, disturbing content, sexual references, drug material and brief full nudity

cast: Thomas Jane, Luke Kleintank, Josh Hopkins, David Krumholtz and Bridget Moynahan

Credits: Written and directed by Joel Souza. A Screen Media release.

Running time: 1:50

Bound to happen. Cheaper than casting the real thing,beceb the ones who aren’t dead?

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/afm-james-dean-reborn-cgi-vietnam-war-action-drama-1252703

One way to get past that seasonal “holiday movie phobia” thing more than a few of us suffer from is to throw in some Italian-Americans, as writer-director Robert Tinnell does with “Feast of the Seven Fishes.”

Make it a period piece, nostalgic for the days when a lot of your relatives were World War II vets, and one was at D-Day.

Make’em cook, you know, the “seven fishes” of this Italian Catholic Christmas Eve dinner tradition — bacaloa, smelt, whiting, shrimp, oysters, eel and calamari.

Let’em grab each other by the neck, for hugs and brother-on-brother wrestling fights.

Give’em plenty of sassy banter, throw-away lines that are the garlic of any dishy Italian-American comedy.

“What am I, Kojak?”

“You’re an idiot. Not your fault. You take after Uncle Carmine’s side of the gene pool!”

“Very funny. Tell me when to laugh!”

A little wistful romance, a touch of leaving the cozy family nest, all set against a holiday feast — prepping for it, cooking it, bickering, chasing the womenfolk out of the kitchen — that’s a winning combo for a holiday rom-com.

No low-hanging comic fruit is left unplucked in this sentimental easy-going and at times adorable entry in the seasonal comedy onslaught.

“On Christmas Eve in this town, EVERYbody is Italian. Or thinks they are!”

Tony Oliverio (Skyler Gisondo of “Booksmart”) is college age, but stuck at home in Greentown, West Virginia (actually Rivesville and Fairmont, West Virginia). He’s a painter who works in the family meat market his parents run. No chance of accepting admission to a “pretty good art school” in Pittsburgh.

It’s 1983 and his big Italian family is one generation removed from working in the coal mines. They’ll never go for anything as seemingly frivolous as “art school.”

He’s just broken up with his girlfriend since elementary school, and Katie (Addison Timlin), isn’t taking it well.

Cousin Angelo (Andrew Schultz) reminds him that “the chicks that went away to college, the ones we NEVER get to see? They’re back…and horny for the holidays!” That’s how Tony meets Beth (winsome Madison Iseman of the “Goosebumps” movies), a pretty blonde coed who went straight from prep school to the Ivy League.

It being 1983, Beth is resisting her parents’ push toward making more concrete plans with rich preppie Prentice (Allen Williamson), who’d rather be skiing this holiday.

Beth and Prentice, or Beth and Tony? If it’s meant to be, it’s meant to be, right? Que sera sera and all that.

There’s a mouth-watering comic montage of fish cooking as Tony explains the day’s cuisine to Beth.

But a comedy like this lives or dies on its supporting characters and the supporting cast you get to play them, and “Feast of the Seven Fishes” has a terrific one. Sure, they’re playing “types” — the lazy great uncle, the lazy little brother, the grousing patriarch (Paul Ben-Victor of TV’s “Goliath,” shining in a rare comic turn), the gambling, hustling “businessman” brother, given a “Paisano!” twinkle by Joe Pantoliano.

The grumpy great-grandmother (Lynn Cohen) doesn’t approve of the pretty blonde non-Catholic. Beth, one and all agree — when they switch to Italian when talking about her in front of her — is a “Mangia-cake,” a cake-eater. Rich. And the Oliverios? “Not OUR kind of people” Beth’s mother reminds her.

Naturally, she’s dragged into the holiday feast, old men in their t-shirts peeling shrimp, stuffing calamari and frying bacaloa.

Naturally, everybody they know drops by, including Juke (Josh Helman), a bookish, bespectacled philosopher/psychoanalyst who just happens to be a mechanic. “Feast of the Seven Fishes” has a little bit of every family holiday comedy about it, a touch of “Big Night” thanks to the food, and in this one character — Juke — a hint of “Diner.”

Most of the players have their moment or two, but none rings more true than Katie’s, a young woman devastated by her break-up, acting-out to try and win him back — adrift.

“I didn’t just lose Tony. I lost the whole family!”

I can’t stress enough how undemanding, easy-going, predictable and familiar this comedy is. Nor can I stress enough how well its tried-and-true ingredients blend, how much it feels grounded in a place and the people there.

Call “Feast of the Seven Fishes” what it is, Christmas comedy comfort food. And bring your appetite.

MPAA Rating: Unrated, with a little fisticuffs, a little pot, a little profanity

Cast: Skyler Gisondo, Madison Iseman, Josh Helman, Paul Ben-Victor, Lynn Cohen, Addison Timlin, Jessica Darrow and Joe Pantoliano

Credits: Written and directed by Robert Tinnell. A Shout! Factory release.

Running time: 1:37

It takes forever to get going.

“Doctor Sleep” has to give us all this backstory, remind us who Danny Torrance, the kid with “The Shining,” was. It has to recast the kid from that movie, and more famously, his “Here’s JOHNNY!” dad — Jack Nicholson then, Henry Thomas now.

Alex Essoe replaces Shelley Duvall as Mom, Wendy Torrance.

And Carl Lumbly has to fill the shoes of the formidable Scatman Crothers as Danny’s friend, the handyman/cook with “The Shining” himself, Dick Halloran.

They had to recreate the Overlook Hotel (digitally), and put Danny back on a big wheeled trike, tooling down its scary halls, filled with iconic haunted twins and the Walking Dead cadaver in the tub.

But once all that stuff is out of the way, once that ominous Wendy Carlos/Rachel Elkind “Shining” theme has returned to the soundtrack, once the adult Danny (Ewan McGregor) has let us see the miserable, drifting and substance-abusing life he’s lived in the intervening 40 years, Mike Flanagan’s adaptation of Stephen King’s sequel-novel gets on its feet.

And once it (finally) gets going, it has us going, too.

Flanagan, the director of “The Haunting of Hill House” and that Netflix evergreen “Gerald’s Game” is no Stanley Kubrick. His film lacks the stateliness of Kubrick’s tone poem in horror. Nobody’s going to be obsessing over the mise en scene, every minute detail, and turning up in a documentary about such obsessives and their fixation on the Overlook Hotel’s “Room 237.”
But with a good cast, a great villainess and some absolutely stunning and horrific effects, he delivers a perfectly frightening, if ridiculously cluttered, simple confrontation between good and evil.

The set-piece moments — “Shining” practitioners tilting the building they’re in until they slide down the walls and into a precarious situation in another location, characters screaming and gurgling and shriveling and dying and turning to dust right before our eyes — aren’t the real selling point. What sticks with you are the story’s heartbreaking, pitiless and excruciating crimes against children.

That’s what’s giving young Abra (Kyliegh Curran) nightmares. She and her parents have known about her “gift” for years, but in her tweens, she’s shining too much, seeing too much. Children like her, who can read minds, communicate without speaking and see future events, are being hunted and slaughtered.

We’ve already met Rose the Hat (“Mission: Impossible” villain Rebecca Ferguson, silkily scary). She and her “family” (think “Manson” family, with RVs) travel the continent, hunting gifted kids, murdering them and stealing their “steam” — a vaprous representation of the soul exiting the body on death.

Abra’s distress has pierced the ESP void and found 40something Danny. He’s found sobriety and purpose, thanks to AA friends (Cliff Curtis, Bruce Greenwood) in this New Hampshire village where he’s settled.

“Do dying people bother you?”

Noooo, he insists. Everybody’s dying. “The world is one BIG hospice!”

That’s how he’s become “Doctor Sleep,” an after-hours custodian at the local hospice who follows the house cat who “senses” who will be the next to go, comforting the dying as only a man who can see “the other side” can.

Abra reaches out to Danny just as she’s detected by Rose the Hat. Can he protect her? Is she strong enough in “The Shining” to defend herself?

Flanagan’s film rarely bogs down after the long, establishing opening acts, but labors when his script tries to cram in a Hogwarts School Year’s worth of names for types of “Shining,” always brought up in debates between Rose and her chief lieutenant, Crow Daddy (Zahn McClarnon).

Their best moment as characters driving the plot is their “recruitment” of a Jedi Mind Trick teen (Emily Alyn Lind) who has been luring sexual predators into her trap, where she uses psychosomatic suggestion to disable and punish them.

And sure, while some of her glory is just the empathetic badass role she was cast in, young Miss Curran’s screen debut as Abra is a dazzler.

McGregor has a few moments of his own and is most impressive in the early scenes, Danny as down and out drifter, brawling in bars, picking up fellow addicts and irresponsibly stealing from them and abandoning them. That might be the reason old Dick (Lumbly) is still visiting him, years and years after Danny’s dad killed him with an axe at the Overlook.

There’s a lot going on here, none of it terribly deep. But “Doctor Sleep” still makes a worthy successor to “The Shining,” that rarest of sequels driven by genuine curiosity and fascination with characters and their continuing story and not by corporate bean counters and their bottom line cynicism.

MPAA Rating: R for disturbing and violent content, some bloody images, language, nudity and drug use.

Cast: Ewan McGregor, Rebecca Ferguson, Kyliegh Curran, Cliff Curtis, Zahn McClarnon, Henry Thomas and Bruce Greenwood

Credits: Written and directed by Mike Flanagan, based on the Stephen King novel. A Warner Brothers release.

Running time: 2:31

The most shocking thing about “Midway” is how much this Roland “Independence Day/Stargate” Emmerch epic about one of history’s greatest naval battles is how much it gets right.

After seeing Emmerich’s botched history of the “Stonewall” gay rights riot and his “Anonymous” rewriting of who wrote Shakespeare’s plays, that’s a surprise.

Yes, the Japanese plotted the engagement after Col. Jimmy Doolittle’s (Aaron Eckhart) daring land-bombers-launched from aircraft carriers raid on Tokyo.

Yes, American cryptographers had broken enough of Japan’s “Purple” code to figure out the attack was coming, and yes, they planted a clever ruse to determine where the attack was directed.

Yes, the Navy’s greatest fighting (carrier) admiral, Bull Halsey (Dennis Quaid), missed the battle due to a severe outbreak of shingles, which humiliated him no end.

Yes, legendary Western movie maker John Ford (Geoffrey Blake) was on the remote atoll, Midway Island, filming as the Japanese attacked.

Yes, the sole survivor, Ensign George Gay (Brandon Sklenar) of a first-wave attack on the Japanese fleet floated on a life jacket, hiding under a seat cushion, watching the Battle from the middle of the fight.

Yes, one pilot dropped the bombs that sank two Japanese carriers that day in June of 1942. Nobody had to invent a character for Ben Affleck to play who was everywhere at once in “Pearl Harbor” (even in The Battle of Britain).

Yes, American torpedoes were mostly duds that first year of the war, something worth remembering in Military Industrial Complex-era America.

And yes, downed American airmen captured by the defeated Japanese during the battle were summarily executed at sea, something worth bringing up on our annual Wring Our Hands Over Hiroshima Day.

Emmerich brings his BIG EXPLOSIONS style to a subject that fits it, and gets impressive digital re-creations of air-to-air and planes-bombing-ships combat. The ships look right, even if they have the stock-still “Titanic” fakery that robs them of their scale, the sense of the enormous size and weight that was moving through the water.

All that digital animation, with actors acting (flying bombers, etc.) in front of green screens gives the combat scenes an unreal pallor, not wholly unlike “Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.”

Established actors from Woody Harrelson, who lends a teensy twinkle to Admiral Nimitz, Patrick Wilson, earnest as Pacific intelligence chief Edwin Layton, Luke Evans as bomber pilot Wade McClusky, Ed Skrein as bomber pilot Dick Best, Mandy Moore as Best’s wife, Eckhart as Doolittle and Quaid as Halsey, make solid impressions.

But lesser knowns by the score flit across the screen with barely a thought, no matter how pivotal their character might be, and the obligatory pop star turned actor (Nick Jonas) slings a little swabbie swagger.

The Achilles Heel of this “Midway,” unlike the more melodramatic 1976 film starring Charlton Heston, is one of focus and scope, a sweeping film that sweeps up too much to digest, with lots of time for corny dialogue in the bargain.

Halsey: “I got this damn ITCH!”

Screenwriter Wes Tooke of TV’s “Colony” tumbles into the classic show-runner-turned-screenwriter trap, packing too much plot, entirely too much of the context, into a story that really should begin with Doolittle’s Raid and end with the emotional sinking of the lone American carrier to go down that day, after a heroic struggle to save her.

Perhaps showing the U.S.S. Lexington sinking in The Battle of the Coral Sea convinced Emmerich not to attempt it. That’s some of the least convincing digital imaging in the movie.

Tooke starts the picture in 1937, to give us an insipid white-gloved introduction to Admiral Yamamoto (Etsushi Toyokawa) and Layton (Wilson) at a British/American/Japanese naval dinner in Tokyo. His script takes us through the aftermath of Doolittle’s Raid, another sign of Hollywood’s efforts to reach the Chinese market and appease the Chinese government.

We don’t need to see “Pearl Harbor” over again. As the phrase of the day went, we “REMEMBER Pearl Harbor.” The gloom of that attack (less digitally convincing here than in “Pearl Harbor”) is best captured in a single line by a survivor. “See you at the next funeral.”

We know we’re going to hear Yamamoto’s flattering and prescient post-Pearl Harbor prophecy, “We have awakened a sleeping giant!”

Emmerich is plainly more at home with oversized explosions and crowding the screen with screeching planes and anti-aircraft bursts, damn the perspective. His staging and direction of every assembly, be it in a bar, an office, on a flight deck or in a pilots’ briefing, is static. The extras stand rigid waiting for the stars to finish their lines. These scenes don’t work, even as tableaux.

They left out the “forgotten” half of the battle, the Japanese invasion of Attu and Kiska in the Aleutian Islands. But something had to go.

Overreaching and somewhat bloated? Sure.

But chalk it up to “diminished expectations” or the pleasant surprise of dashing back to the office to check this or that fact that I was SURE they’d gotten wrong, only to see it confirmed, this “Midway” isn’t the cut-rate “U.S.S. Indianapolis: Men of Courage” digital visuals, hammy acting and corny dialogue debacle it might have been.

“Not awful” is Emmerich’s victory, here.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for sequences of war violence and related images, language and smoking

Cast: Ed Skrein, Luke Evans, Mandy Moore, Patrick Wilson, Dennis Quaid, Woody Harrelson, Etsushi Toyokawa, Tadanobu Asano, Aaron Eckhart

Credits: Directed by Roland Emmerich, script by Wes Tooke. A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 2:18

Danny doesn’t live here…anymore.. Mrs. Torrance.

Hoo boy.

It’s a little game movie critics play when we’re watching self-distributed or under-distributed indie films. Guess which scene, which moment, which element prevented this picture from winning a better studio distribution deal?

“The Bygone” is a moody, mournful Modern West meets Old West tale of racism, sex trafficking and a meek young man trying to “cowboy up” to save the damsel in distress.

The racism is the Old West prejudice against Native Americans, still in evidence in the New West all along the Fracking Belt, where oil patch money releases dormant greed and ancient hostility.

The sex trafficking comes in the form of young women, many of them Native American, lured or kidnapped into prostitution by ruthless operators looking to take oil rig workers’ money out there in the middle of nowhere.

And the cowboy in question is Kip, given a winning aw-shucks naivete by Graham Phillips, who co-wrote and directed “The Bygone” with his brother Parker Phillips.

Dad (Jamie McShane) has gout and has been slowly but surely going under, and taking the ranch with him, since Mom died. Mom? She was Lakota.

Lonely, lacking any real male guidance in his life other than ranch hand Bear (Tokala Black Elk), Kip winds up in a brothel, which he instantly figures out is NOT the place for him.

But before he can go, he clumsily intervenes in a beating a young prostitute (Sydney Schafer) is taking from a roughneck customer. That leads to him bringing her home with him, not that she’s all that grateful.

“Jus’ tryin’ t’help!”

“Can you buy me a new car, fly me someplace nice?”

Her fleeing earns Kip the ire of the ruthless pimp Paris (veteran screen heavy Shawn Hatosy, most recently on TV’s “Animal Kingdom”). The beating Kip takes when he loses the girl — “Laura” Paris and his other hookers call her, Waniya is her real name — is not enough to persuade him to give up.

He ignores his daddy’s warnings, and enlists the aid of folksy/gutsy sheriff (Mike McColl of “North Woods Law”) and his shady rich uncle, Beckett (Ritchie Coster), a man a little too eager to bail Kip’s dad out of financial hole their ranch is in.

Early scenes set a lovely tone, a world of dust and mud and scratching out a living in a place not suited for growing much of anything. “Bygone” was shot in Oklahoma, and is set in the booming oil patch of North Dakota (Lakota live there, and Williston is mentioned).

We’re set up for “The Rider” meets “Wind River,” a dying profession and way of living, Native Americans in distress, married to a story of that favorite thriller villainy du jour, human trafficking.

An opening title asserts that “sexual violence” was “virtually non-existent” before European settlement of North America, setting up our story of young women enslaved by this pimp, not able to reach the battered women’s shelter run by Ms. Call (Irene Bedard).

But the “messaging” that bookends this tale only reminds us how little attention it pays to that issue in the interest of delivering a compelling chase thriller, where the object is to track down the woman who has been “taken” and deal with the brute who took her.

The Phillips brothers handle the fights and little dollops of suspense well. There’s a bar brawl as expertly-staged, lit, filmed and edited as any I’ve seen. Most scenes have an organic truth about them, most of the characters feel lived-in and real, and the film’s unhurried pace lets Kip learn his lessons slowly, one beating at a time.

“You cain’t go after a wolf, not when you’re a sheep,” one minion chortles at the hero.

And then there’s that moment I mentioned in the review’s opening, the scene and sequence that is so utterly over-the-top and absurd, Message with a capital “M,” that it spoils much of the movie that came before it.

The finale in this damned thing is more worthy of “Silence of the Lambs” with a setting and a ludicrous, chatty villain straight out of “The Wild Wild West” — Buffalo Bill meets Buffalo Bob, or Sideshow Bob.

The picture, which flirts with “They’re blowing it” once or twice before then, goes straight in the toilet right before the closing credits. Didn’t land the big check and wider release? That’s why.  The last thing this movie needs is a NoDak epicurean and Seventh Cavalry history buff who talks us right out of the picture.

MPAA Rating: unrated, graphic violence, drugs, sex

Cast: Graham Phillips, Sydney Schafer, Shawn Hatosy, Jamie McShane, Ritchie Coster, Mike McColl and Irene Bedard

Credits: Written and directed by Graham Phillips, Parker Phillips. An E & E release.

Running time: 1:45

Italian filmmaker Beniamino Barrese confesses to having dedicated his life to “filming and photographing my mother.” He won’t use the phrase “Oedipus Complex,” that is for the viewer to infer in watching his film about Mama, Benedetta Barzini.

“The Disappearance of My Mother” captures the 1960s supermodel turned ’70s (and beyond) Marxist/feminist, a striking figure who raised children by building an afterlife of journalism, activism and education.

Barrese has always found her his most captivating subject. But with “Disappearance,” Barzini is participating in one last flurry of filming in a Garbo snit. She wants to be alone. She wants him to stop filming her, to “leave all this” imagery, get away from the world, perhaps even commit suicide.

Or at least break the weirdly-obsessive son’s camera.

In “Disappearance,” we see archival interviews and footage of young Benedetta striking poses back in her day. We hear her explaining (in Italian, with English subtitles) that modeling means trying to “look indifferent to the troubles of the world,” that with makeup, hair and false-eyelashes she was “transformed according to the desires of others,” just one of those people who “vanish inside the concept of ‘beauty.'”

She’s 76 now, vaping instead of smoking, but her self-awareness dates from her peak earning years, when the budding feminist started rejecting the whole idea of fashion and selling oneself as “beauty.”

We look at her lecturing lovely Italian coeds about this and see and hear how unconvinced they are.

We see Barrese auditioning assorted models (in English), of different ages and different looks — gorgeous to a one — to “play” his mother in recreations for the film. He has them draw on a beauty mark that looks like the big mole Benedetta often covered with makeup during her cover girl days.

It’s just that his insistent filming is driving his mother to distraction. He has let a camera come between them, and she hisses “Assasino!” and “Basta! Enough!” She calls him a “petty bourgeois” and a “pain in the ass” even as she is negotiating with him about how his film will end, with her disappearing.

She wants to catch up with her old pal ’60s and fellow model and actress Lauren Hutton, and he wants to film the whole thing. Both of them chew him out, one a tad more gently than the other.

After we’ve seen the son surreptitiously film her (Blood on the pillow?) while Benedetta is sleeping, skinny dipping (maybe) in the bay, and squatting in the woods, we start to wonder what kind of co-dependent creeper she’s raised.

Like Garbo, Benedetta wants to “close the door,” but not for the same reasons, perhaps. Garbo wanted her image to remain young, sexy, exotic and unattainable, and resisted being photographed for the last 50 years of her life. Vanity.

Benedetta Barzini, still modeling (a special appearance in a show in London’s Fashion Week), but deeply soured on a planet despoiled by fashion and the “men” (and women) who run it, just wants “out.”

Doing this film gives her control of that, she figures, a chance to stage her exit from the scene, “the only gift I can offer myself.”

She laments that with all this cell-phone narcissism and mania for photographing everything, “nothing is left to memory.” But by the end, “I hate memory” is her new mantra.

As for the film, and its testy 90 minutes of bickering over “the ending,” the only thing that could live up to that talked-to-death hype is a suicide, or something proximating that.

Barzini doesn’t want that “violence” on her memory, or in her son’s film. Thankfully.

After watching that son recreate Mom’s famous poses and cover shots with a vast array of today’s young (and unknown) models, maybe she figures she needs to stick around, on or off film. Somebody’s got to pay for the boy’s therapy.

MPAA Rating: unrated, smoking, profanity

Cast: Benedetta Barzini, Beniamino Barrese, Lauren Hutton

Credits: Written and directed by Beniamino Barres.e A Kino Lorber release.

Running time: 1:34

Martin Scorsese has clarified his criticism of the Franchise that Ate Film in a New York Times op-ed, no less.

“Market-researched, audience-tested, vetted, modified, revetted and remodified until they’re ready for consumption”

Why yes, they are. And formulaic and forgettable. Directed by “giants” of the medium, too. Rarely.

Since speaking out, Ken Loach and Francis Ford Coppola have, when asked, added their voices to this “Marvel is killing cinema” chorus.

https://t.co/H4HxcTnoPa https://twitter.com/Variety/status/1191701950036791297?s=17

If you’ve never watched a sporting event that you weren’t sure was “fixed,” you’re probably not much of a sports fan. Things happen on the field, in the ring and on the court that go beyond head-scratching and have you shouting at the TV or booing from the stands.

Three things figure into such conclusions, heated or not. First, the game, fight, etc. is in the hands of the poorest paid people involved — referees, umpires, etc. Second, there’s big money involved thanks to the world’s weakness for gambling. Money corrupts.

And thirdly, the folks who cover sports for a living are more interested in getting a shouting spot on “Around the Horn” than on the hard work of digging deep, querying the league or sanctioning body and law enforcement, ruffling feathers and exposing what “really” went on at Super Bowl XL, for instance.

“Inside Game” is a true story about what seems, on the face of it, the easiest sport to manipulate — pro basketball. There’s a long season packed with games the general public cares little about, leaving it to the gamblers who want to bet “the spread,” the winner and their margin of victory. The players are too well-paid to be easily tempted to toy with that (you’d think). But the referees? An extra foul/free throws awarded at the end, a little look the other way here and there, a motivated “whistle,” and they’re the folks in charge.

The right off-the-books, amoral guys, with the right referee, weren’t that obvious. And if the trio who came up with their “inside dope” scheme in 2007-2007 weren’t clumsy, drug-addled or just plain idiots, they might shaken the sport, the NBA and Vegas to its core.

It’s an “inside gambling” glance at addiction, greed and ethics — essentially a gloss on an age-old story of crooked guys who fly too high and get caught. But its big reach is taking a stab at corruption, the psychology of the addictive personality. And its big stumble is in fixing blame, carelessly tossing it about as if rot like this was ever “a victimless crime.”

That’s how “Baba” Battista (“MadTV” veteran Will Sasso, who was Curly in “The Three Stooges” movie presents it. He’s one guy among his circle of childhood friends who wound up a big time sports bookie, “a mover” (placing bets for high rollers who want to hide their action) with a veritable “war room” in his house — a desk surrounded by TV screens tuned to games and computer moniters logged into global betting sites.

He’s tipped by another suburban Philly friend-since-childhood and bookie, Pete (Nick Cordero) about “line moves,” the betting line on the point spread of particular games, has been jumping around just before tip-off with a suspicious frequency.

More suspicious, it’s on games refereed by another childhood pal, Tim Donaghy (Eric Mabius of “Chicago Fire” and “Ugly Betty”).

And together with their mutual womanizing pot-dealer pal Tommy (Scott Wolf  of TV’s “Nancy Drew” and “The Nine”), Baba tricks Tim into a meeting and arm-twists him into doing whatever he’s doing for others for Baba instead.

What Tim has is access to training rooms at the arenas, the inside word on who’s hurting who’s pouting, who won’t play well with whom, the sorts of things that tip the balance in a basketball game. He’s using that to place bets against the spread, and he’s doing quite well.

With Baba in charge, big money can enter this “sure thing.” Burner phones, with Tommy acting as the paid go-between, a mobster with money called “The Chinaman” (Reggie Lee) and “They’ll never catch us. TRUST me!”

Tommy’s voice-over narration presents these guys as blood brothers for life, bonded since childhood over team-oriented basketball. They have each other’s backs, he says. Forever, he says.

So even though Tommy’s short attention span for short skirts and “action” and getting a buzz on is a warning sign, Baba and Tim have a deal.

The corrupt-to-their-core nature of these guys means Baba won’t let Pete in on this action, that Tommy’s much-younger bombshell fiancée (Lindsey Morgan) doesn’t mean he’s giving up sexual hook-ups in nightclub toilets and that Tim will go any easier on ref colleagues who talk star players into giving them signed journeys as favors. He’s the hypocrite in the crowd. 

Actor turned director Randall Batinkoff doesn’t do much to sell the suspense, the rising risks and potentially deadly consequences that could come from these guys’ mistakes, unnecessary risks and callous disregard for planning ahead or anticipating trouble.

Sasso’s Baba jumps from beer and liquor to pot, “oxy” and cocaine — burning through cash and rubbing his nose incessantly as the stakes are raised. Having him do coke in front of “The Chinamen” and his henchmen suggests how careless he is, having him sniff and rub his nose — we GET it — in every scene is remedial, acting overkill.

Wolf’s Tommy should be funnier, the dolt with the attention span of a salmon who must absorb a phone “code” he’s supposed to use when communicating with the others. Yeah, buying a new Lotus is a great way to blend in.

Mabius has the most to play, a referee who is the son of a referee (Michael O’Keefe) who thinks he can stuff his pockets without actually getting his hands dirty.

None of the performances of these unlikable characters grab you, give the viewer a sense of what’s at stake and why we should care.

There’s also something very “Entourage” about “Inside Game,” both in the “guys from the neighborhood” group dynamic and the toxic sexism that the film practically embraces.

Tim is under pressure from his spendthrift wife (Julie Claire) to put their spoiled “gifted” (yeah, right) teen daughter in Bradenton, Florida’s most expensive private school.

Baba runs hot and cold with hot-blooded, shrewish wife Debbie (Betsy Beutler), who turns a blind eye to how he keeps their brood in upper middle class luxury.

And Tommy’s using every woman in sight the way his pothead girlfriend Stephanie is obviously using him.

It’s just sordid enough to make you feel a little dirty for having watched it, even as the many explanatory scenes, showing the way “the line” can be manipulated, make you leery of ever placing another wager on sports, or even of trusting the various leagues to ensure the integrity of their contests.

There’s too much dirty money involved and too little interest from law enforcement on the sports journalism “jockocracy” to simply take their word for it.

MPAA Rating: R for language and drug use throughout, and some sexual content

Cast: Eric Mabius, Scott Wolf, Betsy Beutler, Lindsey Morgan, Reggie Lee, Michael O’Keefe and Will Sasso

Credits: Directed by Randall Batinkoff, script by Andy Callahan. An iDreamMachine release.

Running time: 1:37