Movie Nation

You can see the logic here in Scott Eastwood’s mind. Or his agent’s.

“Dad broke through in Westerns. Why don’t I do a Western?”

Thus, “Diablo,” a violent and grimly obvious frontier thriller that Clint Eastwood might have made during his Spaghetti Days.

But Eastwood the Elder would have famously dirtied up, worn stubble, not a beard. He’d have chosen his hat with care, and crossed out much of his dialogue and told the story with his character’s actions, and his squint.

And truth be told, Clint already had years of TV work behind him before Sergio Leone came calling. Scott hasn’t got the screen presence of a leading man, not yet anyway. And Lawrence Roeck, safe to say, is no Sergio.

“Diablo” is that classic Western trope, the abduction odyssey. Eastwood plays Jackson, a rancher whose beloved Alexsandra (Camilla Belle) is taken by Mexicans, who shoot up his house, torch his stable and yell “You will never keep her” at the gringo.

That sends Jackson on a quest — to find his woman and avenge himself on those who took her. Are they marauders, her family? Considering the tale’s title, are they her coven?

Jackson meets a Chinese settler (Tzi Ma), an Indian boy who fires arrows at him.

“That wasn’t very nice!” If that’s not a line Clint would have X’ed out of this script, I don’t know Clint.

Walton Goggins (“The Hateful Eight”) has the best lines and the most presence, playing a murderous highwayman who kills, seemingly for pleasure.

“Sometimes I can’t help myself.”

Adam Beach plays an Indian who nurses the wounded Jackson, Danny Glover an old Army friend.

So Eastwood was gifted with a good supporting cast and at least the solid bones of a classic Western. The striking wintry Alberta settings are a bonus.

But it doesn’t work, partly because we figure it out too quickly, partly because Eastwood just isn’t anybody to hang a film on. He’s OK in the saddle, not commanding. He’s a bit uncomfortable with a gun, a real handicap.

And he’s overmatched, in every scene in which he’s paired with another player. They seem to steal his thunder without even trying. The camera-savvy charisma, the economy of gesture that the great Western heroes manage, aren’t written into the character or played by the actor cast as him.

In Westerns, his daddy could tell Scott, “The diablo’s in the details” — striking a match, pulling a pistol, swinging a rifle into the frame, the way you sit a horse. Eastwood’s director doesn’t help him with the little things.

And in an archetypal tale like this, the details matter more than the big themes.

MPAA Rating: R, violence

Cast: Scott Eastwood, Camilla Belle, Danny Glover, Joaquim de Almeida , Walton Goggins, Adam Beach
Credits: Directed by Lawrence Roeck, script by Carlos De Los Rios and Lawrence Roeck. A Momentum/Orion release.

Running time: 1:28

Any fan of cinema has to have a passing knowledge of the German movies of the Weimar Era. That’s the democratic respite between the autocratic horrors of Imperial Germany, broken by World War I, and the rise of National Socialism to power in 1933.

The arts flourished and German cinema from that era invented genres, pushed the limits of the silent and sound film art through Expressionism and — decades before the Italians were credited with inventing it — Neorealism. The thesis of the documentary “From Caligari to Hitler” is that perhaps this vibrant age of moviemaking predicted  the rise of the Nazis and by extension, Fascist art.

Filmmaker/narrator Rüdiger Suchsland, working from the writings of Weimer thinker and critic Siegfried Kracauer, digs deep into the culture and the movies and filmmakers of this Gilded and famously hedonistic, or at least permissive age.

So we revisit the famous and the lesser known movies of F. W. Murnau, G.W. Pabst, Ernst Lubitsch and Joseph Von Sternberg. We remember that long before he was the villain of “Casablanca,”  Conrad Veidt was the original somnambulist-puppet and murderer of “The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari.”

Marlene Dietrich is captured as her sexually voracious peak in “The Blue Angel,” Peter Lorre breaks out in German cinema with “M” and German society faces its hard reflection in the assorted movies about the criminal mastermind “Doctor Mabuse.”

Good documentaries like this one are a Film Appreciation/History of Film course unto themselves. And despite some clumsy subtitling of the German language narration, “From Caligari” makes you reach out — for online versions of Curt Siodmak’s “People on Sunday,” basically a French “New Wave” film (four young people flirting and heading to the seashore) made 25 years before the French got around to it.

Louise Brooks and Dietrich did their greatest work under the Weimar Republic, as did most of the filmmakers. And to a one, they fled the country when the armed oompah-music loving bumpkins seized power.

The films can be stunning in their art — achieving Expressionist effects straight out of “Inception” by tilting entire sets rather than digitally leaning buildings to and fro. But they’re also prophetic.

“Metropolis,” with its impersonal future city run by oligarchs, taken down by proletarians, “M,” the original Film Noir, we know these. Others are more obscure.

As Suchsland narrates, in the mid-20s German films were depicting stock market crashes and backlash against city elites, sentimental attachment to German mythology and the rise of the Alpine cinema that Leni Riefenstahl came to embody.

Remember, fascist art, as Susan Sontag taught us, reveres nature, physical beauty and the Motherland. The Weimar films predicted Hitler by showing up in the pop culture preceding his rise to power. Hitler, it can be inferred, tapped into something he saw German culture was already embracing, assisting his rise to power.

Most fascinating of all are the close readings of the “Doctor Mabuse” movies, celebrating a criminal elite, suggesting a day when the rule of law might be replaced by criminals writing the laws.

What IS the sick, twisted and above all Evil Doctor Mabuse writing in the sanitarium in Fritz Lang’s coda to the series, “The Testament of Doctor Mabuse?”The analogy is clear. It’s “Mein Kampf.” No wonder the Nazis banned it before Lang could release it.

Movies are much better at reflecting their era than predicting the future. Hollywood’s “This time we win” Vietnam allegories of the Reagan presidency managed that, though you could say the crime films of the ’70s (“Dirty Harry”, “Death Wish”) predicted America’s turn to the right.

“From Caligari to Hitler” suggests that the most perfect example of an artistic, social and cultural synthesis coming together to warn the present and predict the future had to be Germany in the “Cabaret” era 1920s and 30s.

The film is on Netflix Streaming now.

MPAA Rating:unrated, nudity

Cast: Fritz Lang, Volker Schlöndorff, Siegfried Kracauer, Elisabeth Bronfen, Eric D. Weitz
Credits: Written and directed by Rüdiger Suchsland, based on the writings of Siegfried Kracauer. A Widehouse release, now on Netflix

Running time: 1:58

Equal parts damning and infuriating, “Concussion” can be appreciated for being that rare movie that takes on the business/game that has utterly swallowed American sport.

Here is a film that goes after the National Football League, that shows game footage and uses actual team logos in telling the story of the NFL’s dubious handling of a problem it has known about for decades — traumatic brain injuries caused by the collisions on the field.

Conspiracy-buff filmmaker Peter Landesman (“Kill the Messenger”) tells this story through the heroic, foreign-born pathologist who discovered CTE —Chronic traumatic encephalopathy — a degenerative brain disorder caused by repeated blows to the head — concussions.

Will Smith plays Dr. Bennet Omalu, a Nigerian over-achiever who treats his dead patients with the same care he would treat living ones. He’s a neuro-pathologist, a coroner. And he talks to the dead.

“OK Rachel,” he’ll say, “I need your help.”

Cute. Cuter than cute. Drives his Pittsburgh coroner colleagues crazy cute.

His boss (Albert Brooks) piles on the adorability, joking that Omalu (“DOCTOR Omalu”) needs to find an outside interest, a girlfriend, “be less of an artist” on the job.

But a detail-oriented artist and a scientist is what is called for when Omalu tries to figure out what caused beloved Hall of Fame center “Iron Mike” Webster of the Steelers to go mad and die at 50. Omalu pays, out of his own pocket, to get Webster’s brain sliced and put on slides. And he discovers something awful.

Omalu is depicted as being idealistic and naive, handy arrows in Smith’s quiver. That lightens the story, somewhat. But sterner stuff is called for as Omalu takes on the mightiest corporation in American sports, trying to show the NFL his findings, trying to get them to “work together” on a solution to a problem he has given a name to. More than tears and a lightly-accented “Tell the TRUTH!” is called for as he is rebuffed, threatened and intimidated — by the league, by the fanatical fans, by colleagues.

And then he finds an ally (Alec Baldwin).

Smith is the one actor to pull a Golden Globe nomination out of this film, and that’s an injustice. His performance borders on adorable, as Omalu over-explains everything, enjoys the sound of his own voice a tad much and clumsily courts a Kenyan (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) his church fixes him up with. I kept wondering how far Chewitel Ejiofor would have knocked this character out of the park.

David Morse turns himself into Webster, a lovable hulk we see inducted into the Hall of Fame in the opening scene, a physical and emotional wreck a short while later when we see him, living in a truck, huffing ammonia and ranting, twitching and flailing at what is going on in his head. It’s a stunning transformation and performance.

Eddie Marsan gives the movie gravitas as a rock star brain surgeon who recognizes — instantly — that Omalu is onto something.

“You have my attention.”

Richard T. Jones and Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje are impressive as ex-players Andre Waters and Dave Duerson, high-profile victims who helped push this story into the headlines, despite the NFL’s best efforts.

The film is on shaky ground as it veers into persecution and some paranoid “Silkwood” touches.

And I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that this “inspired by a true story” conflates events and make suppositions that history and in some cases medical statistics don’t back up. Suggesting the FBI could be talked into threatening the doctors after the first study was published is not true. And the halo Landesman puts on Omalu is not without a hint of tarnish.

When you have characters in your script who note that if you’re going after an institution “that owns a day of the week,” you’d better get it right, the same holds true for your movie.

But the bigger picture, that the NFL has known concussions are doing deadly things to its athletes and fought, for decades, to cover it up, holds up. The late Coach George Allen made this “inconvenient truth” a personal crusade after his career ended. And yet little — especially equipment, his personal push (he wanted helmets padded on the OUTside) — has changed, even as the, game and the conditions under which is it played have grown more violent.

“Concussion” will open and close without making much of an impact on a sport that is generating enough money in gambling, TV and merchandising rights to purchase its own country. But see it, watch Smith/Omalu shake a jar with a peach and a little liquid in it to illustrate what happens to the brain during a blow to the head, and you might re-think what sport you let your children play, and how much of your time to donate to this business as sport “any given Sunday.”

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for thematic material including some disturbing images, and language

Cast: Will Smith, Albert Brooks, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Alec Baldwin, David Morse.
Credits: Written and directed by Peter Landesman. A Sony release.

Running time: 2:03

Mark Wahlberg and Will Ferrell go at it again in “Daddy’s Home,” a bio-dad vs. stepdad romp that rarely romps, despite the considerable comic chops of the two leads.

Ferrell is the hovering, nurturing step dad to two tykes whose mother (Linda Cardellini of TV’s “Mad Men” and “New Girl”) he married.

Brad is all about the tucking in, the volunteering at school and singing the praises of his practical Sport Maternity Vehicle (a Ford Flex).

The kids’ often-absent “real dad” is named Dusty (Wahlberg). Tough, menacing and sexy, he’s “like Jesse James and Mick Jagger had a baby!” And he’s angling to get back into his kids’ lives and his ex-wife’s bed.

Not that he comes right out and says so. He flatters, disarms, and THEN attacks. Brad has “cracked the code,” so much respect he says. Only respect is the last thing on Dusty’s mind.

Brad tries not to let Dusty’s pushiness, his rudeness and his gamesmanship rattle him. He’s just “a rascal.” All Brad needs to do (according to “Step into Step Fathering,” his self-help book) is “set up a loving fence.” Create some boundaries, preferably ones that Dusty won’t roll over like Putin in Crimea.

The conflicts here are obvious, the bones of contention even more so. Brad advocates a non-violent approach to bullies. Dusty?

“Check your history books. Almost everything is solved by violence.”

The reality of the set-up — kids who don’t respect “not my real dad” — is undercut by patently ridiculous scenes. Dusty comes along to the fertility clinic where his doctor pal (Bobby Cannavale) might help the less masculine Brad procreate?

But Thomas Haden Church scores some funny lines as Brad’s boss at the “Smooth Jazz” station where they work.

Director Sean Anders (“We’re the Millers,” “Horrible Bosses 2”) is satisfied letting this play out by rote, a comedy whose laughs are more irritating than anything else. You feel sorry for Ferrell’s character, then Ferrell himself. He still can deliver, but this script is watered-down lite beer.

Watch for the Go Pro skateboarding half-pipe scene for the movie’s one clever visual touch, an effect that looks pasted-together on Youtube.

The dead spots — and there are many — let you wonder if this might have worked had they tried what Fey and Poehler did in “Sisters,” playing against type. Make Ferrell the butch tough guy and Wahlberg the wuss.

By playing it too safe, “Daddy’s Home” never finds that comic sweet spot and never rises above, “Well, it’s not awful.”

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for thematic elements, crude and suggestive material and for language.

Cast: Will Ferrell, Mark Wahlberg, Linda Cardellini, Thomas Haden Church
Credits: Directed by Sean Anders, script by Sean Anders, Brian Burns and John Morris. A Paramount release.

Running time: 1:36

An epic poem carved in flesh and written in blood, “The Revenant” is the American frontier myth as it really was — venal and brutish, murderous and vengeful.

It makes for a great film, an American classic and one of the best movies of 2015.

Director Alejandro González Iñárritu (“Birdman”) transforms Leonardo DiCaprio into not just a mountain man, but a man in full — hoarse, battered, broken, but kept alive by one thought — avenging himself on the man who left him for dead.

DiCaprio is Hugh Glass, guide for a team of trappers who are ambushed by Indians in the West of the 1820s. He is no superman, and is no more responsible for the survival of those who escape than their captain (Domhnall Gleeson) and sheer luck.

Glass once took an native woman for a wife, and his son (Forrest Goodluck) is the only survival of that union. But as the party is chased by natives and races the coming winter, misfortune dogs Glass. A horrific bear attack, and that should be all she wrote.

“What you holdin’ on to, Glass? You ready to take the Sacrament?” trapper John Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy) wants to know. “I could do that for you.”

The racist and murderous Fitzgerald and Glass have been feuding over everything bad that has befallen the company. The guide’s grievous wounds are the only excuse Fitzgerald needs. If he can just get the man’s son out of the way.

The burly, surly Hardy has instant credibility as Fitzgerald. It is DiCaprio, and the vivid, horrific and realistic (digital) bear attack that are the picture’s hard sells. The actor, whose character is rendered almost mute by his ordeal, benefits from the silence and the hoarseness that follows.

The survival epic takes Glass across the wintry wilderness, into contact with friendly (and unfriendly) natives, and DiCaprio is convincing in every frame. The boyish voice and baby face, evident even in “The Wolf of Wall Street,” disappears behind grimaces, torn skin, blood and fur.

Gleeson is considerably more at home here than in his villainous supporting role in “Star Wars: The Force Awakens,” a performance that required him to do a lot of pacing with his hands behind his back. The British actor Will Poulter (“Son of Rambow,””We’re the Millers”), playing another member of the fur trapping party, is the very embodiment of greenhorn — slow to lose the values, and the baby fat — of the civilization he left behind.

This is the most fascinating corner of frontier history, before the trails had been blazed, before civilization stuffed cattle, cowboys, school marms and men with guns, some with badges, into the West. Inarritu revels in the simple wildness of it all — tall trees, raging rivers, snowswept prairies.

The color palette is all rustic browns and red blood as befits the primal story being told. This is Biblical, a world before law, where justice is “an eye for an eye.”

And Inarritu gets that, delivering a riveting saga of pain, grit and the brute moral relativism of revenge, the first law of all, and the only one that mattered back then. “The Revenant” is one of the best pictures of the year.
MPAA Rating: R for strong frontier combat and violence including gory images, a sexual assault, language and brief nudity

Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hardy, Domhnall Gleeson, Will Poulter, Forrest Goodluck
Credits: Directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, script by Mark L. Smith and Alejandro González Iñárritu, based on the Michael Punke novel and the 1971 film “Man in the Wilderness.” A 20th Century Fox release.

Running time: 2:36

“The Hateful Eight” is Quentin Tarantino’s latest genre mashup, a violent, profane and funny updating of the Golden Age of TV Westerns.

Horses pulling a stagecoach pound through the snow, hard men threaten, curse each other and slap the tar out of a hard woman, shots are fired and blood is spilled. They all pile into a roadhouse, a saloon, Minnie’s Haberdashery, and ride out blizzard — “Ten Little Indians” style. And they’re killed off. One by one. Sometimes two by two.

Stretched to three hours, including a pointless (old fashioned) overture and intermission, a little afterthought narration, does it live up to the “Cinema Event” Tarantino has hyped it as? Hell no. It’s just a minimalist Spaghetti Western suffering from auteur bloat — sometimes entertaining,  with not even remotely enough story or action to support its insufferable length and “gravitas.”

It’s like an R-rated riff on “Six Characters in Search of an Author,” or more exactly, an episode of the late 1960 TV series “The Rebel,” whose episode “Fair Game” apparently provided the narrative framework for the film.

Kurt Russell heads this cast of archetypes. He’s the bounty hunter, John Ruth, “The Hangman,” hell-bent on delivering this “dangerous” woman, Daisy Domergue, (Jennifer Jason Leigh, in the best role she’s had in decades) to justice. Just how dangerous is she?

“She ain’t no John Wilkes Booth.”

Samuel L. Jackson is the dapper, overdressed and well-armed Army vet, Major Marquis Warren, who stops their private hire stagecoach.  He can ride with them, providing he drops his guns, slowly, “molasses like.”

A racist badman turned lawman (Walton Goggins) also hitches a lift. And then they arrive at Minnie’s to wait out the storm. That’s where “The Cow Puncher” (Michael Madsen, looking nothing like a cowboy, playing with his hair the whole time), the English Fop (Tim Roth, perfect) and The Confederate Officer (Bruce Dern) are already ensconced, with only the Mexican, Bob (Demian Bichir) to look after them.

Nowhere in sight? Minnie.

The wary new arrivals wonder about this set-up, John Ruth especially. And in this drafty, roomy “haberdashery,” schemes and intrigues will turn up, bullets will fly, anecdotes about the late war (men from both sides are here) and “The Cause,” will be related.

And pretty much one and all find some excuse to drop assorted N-bombs on Jackson’s Major. Dapper or not, he’s still barely half a step up the social ladder from the hateful Daisy Domergue, and not just in Tarantinoland.

The pleasures are in those anecdotes — about the late President Lincoln, atrocities committed during the war, desperadoes doing desperate deeds — Tarantino cooks up. Characters speak in a more modern vernacular than you’d like, a common Tarantino failing.

The drafty, more expansive than claustrophobic  saloon makes an interesting crucible.  The mystery is less mysterious than you’d hope, and some of the plot twists, introduced in “Chapters” that break the three act piece into smaller fragments, are clumsy. But the cast — several of whom are Tarantino veterans — is game, with only Madsen standing out as a weak choice. Russell bites off lines with gusto, Jackson is…well, Jackson. And Leigh delivers menace and true hatefulness in every brown-toothed close-up.

After an opening act (the stagecoach ride) that shows promise, the picture settles into a watchable bloat that should have you planning your bathroom breaks with care. The novelty of making a nicely-detailed Western in this day and age loses its bite if you’ve seen Russell’s low-budget indie thriller, “Bone Tomahawk,” or Adam Sandler’s spoof of this film, “The Ridiculous 6.” Hollywood can still manage a convincing Horse Opera on a budget.

But there simply isn’t enough here to justify this long a wallow in Tarantino-land. An overture? For a movie with very little music actually in it? Talk about overkill. “Kill Bill,” this ain’t.

MPAA Rating: R for strong bloody violence, a scene of violent sexual content, language and some graphic nudity

Cast: Kurt Russell, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Samuel L. Jackson, Tim Roth, Demian Bichir, Michael Madsen, Bruce Dern, Walton Goggins, Channing Tatum
Credits: Written and directed by Quentin Tarantino. A Weinstein Co. release.

Running time: 2:48

Our friends at Continuity Errors Inc., also known as Moviemistakes.com, have named “Furious 7” as the most mistake prone (aka sloppiest) film of 2015.

As if that was its only sin.
“Jurassic World” also earned their ire.

Both terrible movies, in their own way, with or without lapses in logic and booboos by people writing, dressing the set, editing, acting and directing them.

And both critically-lauded, by and large, “great” movies to judge by the Rottentomatoes tomatometer and to a lesser degree, the more sober (and accurate) metacritic scale. Monster hits at the box office, too.

Think back to watching the films, or better yet, poll your friends. Anybody want to admit loving them now?

News flash, they were crap. The “Hunger Games” finale, equally lauded, bit hit for a month. Seriously, who thinks that’s anything more than a tepid curtain call for a generally mediocre franchise?

“Creed” is likewise just another formula “Rocky” movie with a new (30 year old) “kid” tutored by Rock Balboa, played by Sly Stallone with the distant memory of how he used to play this character (same hat, same wardrobe, 40 years later). Also praised to the hills by critics, a decent sized hit. People are talking up Stallone for an Oscar nomination. Mush-headed comfort food for filmgoers who don’t want to be challenged.

And then there’s “Star Wars: The Force Awakens,” essentially a much less thrilling remake of “A New Hope.” It’s supposed to be a sequel, but follows almost exactly the same storybeats, narrative and location management as “A New Hope.” Starts and ends EXACTLY the same. Acting? Uninspiring.

Praised to the roof. Through the roof.

What the hell?

I was out of step with the critical mass on all of these films, so believe me, I get the “The gall of him” nature of pointing out how I think I was right and “they” were wrong, of how wrongheaded the great majority of reviews seem to be for these popular and critical hits (at least the day they opened). But seriously. What. The. Hell?

Is it just sentiment? I mean, do reviewers get lumps in their throat of recognizing “Spectre” as a limp farewell to Bond for Daniel Craig, or “Furious 7” as a “tribute” to died-too-young Paul Walker? Are fond memories from our youth coloring the “Jurassic World” plagiarism, the “Creed” resuscitation or the “Force Awakens” photocopy?

Reviewing gigs are scarce, and there’s risk (with your employer) to being out of touch with what’s popular. I know. A generation of curmudgeonly, “The hell with the consequences” critics raised in journalism have died out or been forced out. Fear makes you go with the flow, confuse “popular” for “enduring.

Then there’s the way lowered expectations work. Many friends have said “Not half bad,” and some reviews have read that way. People were a little scared of what Abrams would do to “Star Wars.”

The answer? Nothing that would surprise you.

The proliferation of fanboy (and fangirl) sites are tilting the reviewing aggregate into something more disposable. “A critic reviews for the artist, and the ages,” an old saying goes, “a reviewer reviews for the audience.”

And reviewers, most with little experience and zero staying power, are foaming at the mouth over movie garbage. There was a time when the mere label of “sequel” denoted “lazy” and “cynical.” A sequel is still both of those things. But the number of professional people who can tell the difference between a product and an out-of-body-experience marvel, or a moving work of movie art, has shrunk.

So every minor variation of that Young Adult “chosen one” called to save us from a sci-fi dystopia earns attention from the masses, and an unsettling under-reaction from critics. “Divergent” and “Maze Runner” “The Giver” and what not are merely the worst of the lot. Until they get hugely popular, critics may have the guts to say so.

But let “Divergent” get bigger and bigger, and the reviews soften, even as the films themselves devour and recycle their own backstories.

I can “just go with it” with the best of them. I cut Lucas a lot of slack with the “Star Wars” prequels because he was at least expanding the universe and its species, and trying to advance the plot by backfilling into the original films. That isn’t happening with the myopic clone “Force Awakens.”

We are endorsing nostalgia as a dominant expectation of movie art. We have become movie going versions of Britain, forever remembering “Their finest hour,” stuck in the warm and fuzzy past, lining up for inferior copies by inferior directors of films that were regarded as disposable popcorn pictures in their day. Beloved, but not ambitious.

The Russian Formalist Vladimir Propp said their are basically 27 plots, something echoed by Joseph Campbell in his “The Hero with a Thousand Faces,” required reading for the likes of George Lucas. So there are only so many basic plot structures, and the reason these simple pictures entertain is that they work by those Formalist rules.

But I got the distinct impression, interviewing the pretty pixie who cut and pasted together the “Divergent” abortion, that she wasn’t even reach George Lucas’s interpretation of Campbell. Why bother?

All the wondrous reviews and the staggering box office of these five retreads of 2015 ensures is that we’ll get more unchallenging, unoriginal comfort food — “branded” entertainment of the “Walking Dead”/”Avengers” variety, in the future. And thus do generations that once outgrew genres and got bored with “the same old story” sit, ensconced on the comfy chair of their self-shrunk horizons.

Above, please see the only decent sight gag in “Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Road Chip.” Alvin, Simon and Theodore pose as exotic sports car hood ornaments to hide from a Federal air marshal chasing them between LA and Miami.

Cute.

Whatever slim charms were in the first film of this singing/chatting/pranks-pulling chipmunks revival have utterly been wrung out of it, at this stage. The comic pickings are slim, even by the reduced standards of movies aimed at the smallest of the small fry. There’s barely a laugh in this thing.

Jason Lee tries not to look humiliated to be taking money for playing “Dave,” the dad to the three orphaned critters. Dave’s producing a pop starlet’s new record. She’s played by the leggy Bella Thorne, and the record release party is in Miami. Dave can go. He takes his new girlfriend (Kimberly Williams-Paisley, years removed from “Father of the Bride”).

The chipmunks, and the girlfriend’s bully boy son (Josh Green) try to crash that party, but create mayhem on the plane and are forced to make their way to Miami by other means. Sounds like trouble.

“If by trouble, you mean irresistible, GUILTY as charged!”

A stop at a line-dancing Texas honky-tonk, a sing-along in New Orleans, chased by this vengeful Fed (Tony Hale, given nothing funny to do) every step of the way.

They sing “I like big BUTTS and a I cannot lie,” and “Iko Iko” and a few other tunes.

Alvin swaps insults with kinky filmmaker John Waters on a plane.

“Don’t judge ME! I saw ‘Pink Flamingos!'”

A fart joke, a rodent pellet gag, all harmless enough.

Why even bother reviewing these? Well, the first one had a few adorable moments and worked well enough for its tiny tots audience. Movies like this serve a function, raising a new generation of young filmgoers as they transition from cartoons to live action. I’m just not sure setting the bar this low is doing them, or their suffering parents, any favors.

MPAA Rating:PG for some mild rude humor

Cast: Jason Lee, Bella Thorne, Josh Green, Kimberly Williams-Paisley, Tony Hale and the chipmunked voices of Justin Long, Jesse McCarthy, Kaley Cuoco, Anna Faris, Christina Applegate
Credits: Directed by Walt Becker, script by Randi Mayem, Adam Sztykiel. A 20th Century Fox release.

Running time: 1:26

Flip, furious and hilariously chilling, “The Big Short” is a comical primer on the global financial meltdown, as engineered by the “idiots” and “morons” of Wall Street, and the toadies who failed to rein them in.

It explains, in deliciously campy side vignettes, the how and what of all these acronyms and euphemistically-named “instruments” by those we sometimes to remember to focus our outrage upon.

Based on the Michael Lewis (“Moneyball”) book and script, it features a compact and pithy supporting performance by Brad Pitt and scintillating star turns by Ryan Gosling, Christian Bale, and Steve Carell, as the loud-mouthed outsider-insider who fumed and fulminated about the “fraud” he saw taking over Wall Street — even as he was hedging his bets about how to cash in on the collapse he saw coming.

Gosling’s swaggering Jared Vennett narrates the story, taking us back to when banking and bankers were boring and middle class. Ancient history by the mid-2000s, when greed that led to bad practices and spread from suddenly richer and hipper Wall Street, down to Main Street, where any schmuck could stack up loans to load up on real-estate, all under the lax oversight of the George W. Bush administration.

Christian Bale briliantly interprets the eccentric genius fund manager Dr. Michael Burry, who first realized that banks were heavily into bad home mortgages, and got those banks to invent and sell him credit swaps that allowed them to insure against the apocalyptic mass default that he was sure was coming, allowing him to “bet short.”  It doesn’t happen, they keep his premiums. It does, and he makes his reluctant –sometimes hostile — investors filthy rich. And the banks go bust.

Vennett was another bank employee in-the-know who peddled these credit swaps as a way to make money when the world was about to crash  down around their ears.

Carell is Mark Baum, a rude rageaholic and fund manager who blows his fuse at every fresh proof that evil banks are screwing over working people and ignoring the time bomb that they’ve created with these subprime mortgages.

And Brad Pitt is the ex-broker who helps a couple of young Turks (John Magaro, Finn Wittrock) play with big boy money at the same credit swap game.

“Talladega Nights” director Adam McKay was an odd choice, but the right one, to turn Lewis’s anecdote-and-economics book into a film. Gosling’s Vennett pauses the picture, here and there, to get “Margot Robbie, in a tub of bubbles” or “Here’s world famous Chef Anthony Bourdain” in a kitchen full of spoiling fish, or Selena Gomez at the blackjack table, to explain this or that arcane bit of financial tomfoolery — what those acronyms that brought down other acronyms (AIG) and famed banks (Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, etc.) are. It’s flippant, but it works as a device.

Diatribes are cut-off, mid-sentence. Montages serve up a blizzard of context, a post 9/11 America that was too distracted by Barry Bonds cheating, Britney Spears melting down and assorted reality TV shows, to say nothing of assorted wars, to “pay attention” to high finance.

Characters are forever saying “How come nobody’s talking about this?” and “They call me ‘Chicken Little,’ they call me ‘Bubble Boy,'” for pointing out “THEIR stupidity” and fraud. Carell is best at this name calling, Gosling smirks and takes abuse because he knows he’s right. Bale bangs on drums and suffers, patiently, as he waits for the ratings agencies to admit the market has collapsed and thus make his lucrative prediction come true.

There are no heroes here. Nobody goes to the Feds or the press until the rigged system threatens to mask its meltdown and keep them from cashing in.

Thus, “The Big Short” becomes not just amusing and explanatory, a real tour de force for its fast-talking cast. It’s an election year caution flag. “Nobody is talking about this” applied then, when the end was in sight. And it applies now, when few  of those who wrecked the world’s economy paid a price, and the lessons not learned seem to be re-inflating the bubble awaiting another handful of mavericks to see Doom and figure out a way to make it pay.

MPAA Rating:R for pervasive language and some sexuality/nudity

Cast: Christian Bale, Steve Carrell, Ryan Gosling, Marisa Tomei, Brad Pitt
Credits: Directed by Adam McKay, script by Michael Lewis and Adam McKay. A Paramount release.

Running time: 2:10

The universe has gotten a lot more diverse in the decades since we first visited “A galaxy far far away.” And less sexist.

There’s a Republic, and plenty of reminders — crashed warships, grizzled veterans — of the war that brought it back.

But evil has reared its ugly head. The First Order is less subtle than the evil Empire about its affection for fascist optics, fascist storm troopers and fascist practices — massacring civilians and what not. But perhaps there are people with souls underneath those scary white (and black) helmets.

So a Resistance has formed, led by The Usual Suspects. And the war among the stars begins again.

J.J. Abrams’ “Star Wars” reboot,  “The Force Awakens,” begins with smuggled plans. OK, it’s a map this time. There’s an adorable droid entrusted with the map. He gets away on a desert planet. Advice from a sage of the desert — warmly played by the great Max Von Sydow — is taken.

Escaping from the planet involves a dazzling dogfight and the Millennium Falcon. Old friends show up, and the map makes its way toward people who might be able to prevent this big round thing from blowing up planets.

Sure, it’s still a fun ride — shootouts, getaways made via hyperspace, wisecracks. But pretending “The Force Awakens” is anything more than a glib facsimile of “A New Hope,” the original “Star Wars” movie, is delusional. It’s dull because it is achingly unoriginal. Abrams,  at every turn, plays it safe, with multiple “takes me right out of the movie” lapses.

In Disney’s hands, it’s a small galaxy, after all — billions of people, with a choice few just stumbling into each other in the most bizarre coincidences, fewer quest story plots to choose from (the same one), desert planets that have the same sorts of critters, bars with the same barflies, etc.

The new villains are  Kylo Ren, a black-helmeted brute who throws hilarious tantrums, shorting out all manner of electronics with his Crusader broadsword light saber. Adam Driver is Hayden Christensen reborn, in essence, a somewhat amusing menace with the helmet on, that tall, skinny, curly-headed funnyman from “Girls” and “This is Where I Leave You” with the helmet off. Miscast.

His best line? “We’re not done here.” Kind of lacks…something.

And there’s a Supreme Being, another digital creation acted out by Andy “Gollum” Serkis. At least he’s kind of scary.

The desert planet heroine, Rey, is a scavenger of Jakku played with pluck by Daisy Ridley. She’s waiting for “my family. They’ll be back, someday.”

She is no damsel in distress.

“I know how to run! Let go of my hand!”

The most interesting addition is the Storm Trooper with a heart. John Boyega shows the character’s humanity. Raised to blindly follow orders, the blood of his first combat makes him crack. Boyega lets us see the remorse, and maybe a little cowardice. He comes to be called “Finn,” because the First Order gave him no actual name.

The guy who names him that is crack Resistance pilot Poe, cartoonishly played by the normally reliable Oscar Isaac (“Ex Machina,””Inside Llewyn Davis”). Poe is captured and tortured, making feeble wisecracks all the while. He must sense that a Storm Trooper will turn traitor (for the first time EVER) and help him escape.

But the moment Han Solo shows up, this becomes a Harrison Ford movie. Han’s a single-again grumpy old man a little flattered that Rey quotes his legend (“the Kessell run”) back to him, still bickering with Chewbacca, still reluctant to get involved until the chips are down. Even if Leia (Carrie Fisher) is the one asking for his help.

Ford’s easy comfort with a cheesy line has never faltered, and Abrams leaves the picture in his able hands for the middle acts.

The effects are sharper, 40 years more developed. Why does Abrams do so little to show them off? The chases, dogfights and set-piece battles are static and recycled. The Big Pause for a Big Death is just an eye-roller.

Even the aliens are oh-so-familiar, right down to Admiral “It’s a trap!” Ackbar.

The earliest reviews of this are all glowing, as indeed they were for this past summer’s “Jurassic Park” clone — “Jurassic World.” This will certainly make billions. “Brand” above all, right?

But “The Force Awakens” boils down to a couple of genuine lump-in-the-throat moments, and those are due to nostalgia. The rest? Seen it, done it, been there, and remember it — even though it was “a long time ago.”

(UPDATE — Now EVERYBODY realizes “Force Awakens” is a “glib facsimile” of “A New Hope.”

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for sci-fi action violence

Cast: Harrison Ford, Daisy Ridley, Jon Boyega, Carrie Fisher, Adam Driver, Domhnall Gleeson, Lupita Nyong’o, Andy Serkis, Max Von Sydow
Credits: Directed by J.J. Abrams, script by Lawrence Kasdan, J.J. Abrams, Michael Arndt. ALucasfilm/Walt Disney release.

Running time: 2:15