Movie Nation

“After” is based on an Anna Todd novel about a freshman year college romance.

But actually, Shakespeare beat her to it, leaving out the college part. He titled his version “Much Ado About Nothing.” But if his romantic comedy had been as limp as this, he’d have titled it “Much Ado About Absolutely Nothing.”

It’s a serious-minded first-real-love/first sexual experience coming-of-age drama which takes forever to make anything happen, and when it does (the “big reveal”), it’s so lame as to make you weigh your life up to this point, and what inspired you to waste 105 minutes on this drivel.

Josephine Langford of “Wolf Creek” and “Wish Upon” is Tessa, whom we meet as she’s delivered to Atlanta’s Rossmore University by her helicopter divorced mom (Selma Blair) and still-in-high-school beau Noah (Dylan Arnold).

Tessa has been sheltered, dating her mom-approved “nice guy” boyfriend since forever and she and mom and that boyfriend are all blown away when she moves into a dorm room with worldwise, sexually omnivorous upperclasswoman Steph (Khadijha Red Thunder), all fishnet stockings, piercings, tattoos and promises of getting Tessa into all the clubs where you “don’t even need a fake” (ID).

Mom freaks, but Tessa is confident she can resist the temptations of Satan herself. And to the movie’s eternal damnation, little if anything is done with this struggle.

Except that Steph is how Tessa eventually meets a faster crowd — mean-girl flirt Molly (Inanna Sarkis) and brooding Brit-hunk Hardin (Hero Fiennes Tiffin).

He is Every Romantic Antihero of British Fiction rolled into one — the rude Mr. D’Arcy of “Pride and Prejudice,” sulking, sad Rochester from “Jane Eyre,” man-with-a-secret Heathcliff from “Wuthering Heights.”

He can quote, at length, from those books. And he is catnip to smart but naive Tessa.

Let’s invite her to a frat party.

“I’m trying to picture this one at a party,” he sneers. “Just not seeing it.”

Naturally, they are fated to be together. A skinny dip here, a midnight sneak-into-the-library to read her romantic literature there, signs of trouble — warnings from interested third parties.

“He’s complicated…Be careful.”

It’s right there, in English Literature 101. Hardin lays it all out for us.

“Elizabeth Bennett needs to chill…Love is just a transcation…”

Not plain enough.

“I don’t date.”

Langford, to her credit, makes this work. She sells the heat, the attraction, the confusion. Up to a point, anyway.

Tiffin should stop using his uncles’ (Ralph and Joseph) “Fiennes” as his middle name. He’s letting down the side. As Tessa wanders through campus, through bars, in parties, more attractive, more lively guys pass her one after the other.

Tiffin isn’t up to making this guy as interesting (ahem) as he’s written (cough cough).

A tantrum here, a piece of his tortured past there, a ’65 Chevelle SS, Peter Gallagher as his university chancellor dad — nothing enlivens the character and better explains the attraction.

Slack direction (this takes FOREVER to get going) doesn’t help anybody him or anybody else. Only the women acquit themselves with honor, and with a little luck each of them — especially Langford — will find something more worthy of their talents next time around.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for sexual content and some college partying

Cast: Josephhine Langford, Hero Fiennes Tiffin, Selma Blair, Inanna Sarkis Peter Gallagher, Jennifer Beals

Credits:Directed by Jenny Gage, script by Susan McMartin, based on an Anna Todd novel. An Aviron release.

Running time: 1:46

I think I posted this trailer a while back, or an earlier trailer for “After.”

It’s been tagged onto releases like “Five Feet Apart.”

Teen love and lust interrupted by…”his dark secret.”

Aviron didn’t preview this one, so I will catch it first show tonight. There’s another “Fiennes” in it — not Ralph, not Joseph, but Hero Fiennes Tiffin is Ralph and Joseph’s nephew. The brooding comes naturally, I guess.

Josephine Langford plays the smitten young Tessa, and Selma Blair plays her mom. Anna Todd wrote the novel “After” is based on.

“Travel,” Mark Twain said, ““is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.”

So why not round up a bunch of people who never got to “broaden their minds” via travel — the working class, many of them of the “Make America Great Again” persuasion — and let them see a part of the Middle East that no church-sponsored tour would take them to.

Canadian-Egyptian producer Tarek Mounib did just that for this documentary, “Free Trip to Egypt,”visiting sections of America where it was too easy to find prejudice (sees the clips in the trailer), dragging narrow minded Christians and Jews and taking them to a country where, well, an authoritarian runs the show and crazed fundamentalists threaten to seize power, one day or another.

One thing we can get from the trailer to this doc, getting one of those “one night only” releases June 12, is that Mounib is a big believer in getting people to talk and listen to one another.

Without knowing the film’s backers, it’s hard to know if there’s an ulterior motive beyond the one that seems to sunny on the surface. But I am intrigued.

The story’s a non-starter, generic in the extreme.

And the performances flat, stiff and lock-still theatrical, when the players aren’t throwing punches left and right, up, down and sideways.

But those elements are not what we come to “Ip Man” movies for, are they?

So let’s get down to what matters in “Master Z: Ip Man Legacy,” shall we?

There’s an epic showdown above the streets of Hong Kong, martial artists going at it while leaping from marquee to neon sign along Bar Street — swapping punches from the moment they scamper up that favorite prop in Hong Kong martial arts movies, bamboo scaffolding.

When our hero, the “underground brawler” Cheung Tin Chi (Jin “Max” Cheng) meets the leader of the Triad Gang, the formidable Michelle Yeoh (“Crouching Tiger,” “Crazy Rich” you-know-what), he’s a waiter and she’s “testing” him with a beautiful, laugh-out-loud I’m-gonna-spill-this-drink-on-you/Like-Hell-you-are hands-on-glass tango.

And for the “big finish,” which doesn’t really finish the movie because it’s kind of clumsy with all the plot points and political points (the Chinese want to show how bad things were in Hong Kong under the corrupt, racist Brits), Cheung Tin Chi and Fu (Xing Yu) storm into an attempted gang coup.

A banquet hall into which 100 or more machete armed thugs turn their heads and shoulder in perfect sync, with that “whoosh” sound effect such movie moments have in martial arts movies. The fight that follows is a two-fisted stitch, but…that TURN and GLOWER.

Sure, the machetes and swords in the fights are often too-plainly fake, with the extras in that group scene plainly swinging square-tipped fakes to make the fight choreography less dangerous.

There’s wire work sending fighters up walls and over bar counter tops.

And there’s all this jerky fast-motion action in many of the brawls, especially the ones involving man mountain Dave Bautista (“Guardians of the Galaxy”) or Yeoh, who is 20 years past “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.”

“Legacy” is another in the ostensibly endless sequels and spinoffs of the Donnie Yen film franchise about the Wing Chun master who taught martial arts to Bruce Lee.

These films are usually about the earlier life adventures of the master, but “Master Z” is a spin-off, built around a fighter, the aforementioned Cheung Tin Chi, who was defeated by Ip Man and went off with his little boy in search of “a simple life.”

As if.

“Master Z” is set in 1960 (judging from the cars, fashions) Hong Kong, and the dazzling neon of Bar Street is recreated on a sound stage for this tale of the man of violence who has eschewed violence forced back into violence by violent gangsters who mean to do him violence.

The tropes of such stories are all present and accounted for, the murderous tests — “Which is faster? Your fist or my gun?” (in Mandarin, with English subtitles), and the friendly “tests.” Any conversation, friendly or unfriendly (Kevin Cheung makes a good heavy), sitting casually in a bar or on a rooftop, can turn into the “Let’s see how good you really are” throw-down.

“Impressive.”

Tony Jaa of the “Ong-Bak” Thai martial arts thrillers shows up as a wild card, a man of mystery and violence who could throw in with either side in the growing “war” between our hero, the Triad and the corrupt British-led police.

Actor, fight choreographer (“Kill Bill Vol. 2,” “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”) and director (“The Iron Monkey”) Yuen Woo-Ping does a great job with the fights, pretty much any moment of violence.

The picture doesn’t have time for intimacy and romance, unless you count the white U.S. Navy sailors trying to get Hong Kong taxi dancers like Julia (Liu Yan) drunk enough to cross the line at her brother Ju’s bar.

The father-son stuff is predictably dull, save for the moments when the kid is menaced as their tiny grocery is firebombed (A fight with Molotov cocktails!).

But you know what they say about most martial arts movies, come for the fights, stay for the fights.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violent

Cast: Jin “Max” Zhang, Michelle Yeoh, Liu Yan, Dave Bautista, Kevin Cheng, Tony Jaa

Credits:Directed by Yuen Woo-Ping, script by Edmund Wong and Chan Tai-Lee. A Well Go Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:47

It didn’t happen by accident. It never does.

With gay marriage rights off the ballot, a civil right endorsed by the states and ratified by the Supreme Court, conservative think tanks needed something to rile and fire up “the base” in 2016, a new “craze” to bring out the crazies.

That’s when, all of a sudden, “bathroom bills” turned up in state legislatures all over America. An “issue” that most Americans never realized was indeed “an issue” suddenly ate up a lot of the country’s attention at a time when we should have been demanding to see Trump and Bernie Sanders’ tax returns.

Those bills, the Human Rights Report said at the time, made 2016 “the most dangerous year” for transgender individuals. The bills, virtual carbon copies of one another, passed from Red State to Red State legislature, most infamously in North Carolina, where a bill passed and the state had to deal with its repercussions.

But supposedly liberal, more urban and more educated Washington state was also dragged into the fight. It’s not the most representative state to use in a film about this subject, and “The Most Dangerous Year” can seem one-sided in the voices it uses in discussing a basic human right and the “fears” that others bring to that discussion.

Filmmaker Vlada Knowlton documented not just the step-by-step battle over SB6443, the “Bathroom Bill” in questions there (one among many attempts. She not only filmed and conducted interviews for the movie. She lets us meet the families that felt the need to fight against this legislation. And she narrates it, because this story hit at the very heart of her family. She lets us meet her transgender daughter.

“When she was three, she began to tell us she was actually a girl,” Knowlton narrates, and the five year old girl we see and hear on camera bears this out. We hear her telling her parents how she wants to grow up to be a fashion designer, photographer, and maybe a chef when she grows up.

The “fight” part of the movie is engrossing enough — snippets of advocates for the bill, interviewed on local TV, losing a touch of their moral superiority when pressed for “specific examples” of pedophiles dressing as someone from the opposite sex to prey on women or children, or pressed for data that backs up claims and fears about what having transgender people using means to the fearful.

Here’s Cyrus Habib, the state’s Lieutenant Governor, putting it bluntly — “Let’s be clear, there’s no clear evidence” that transgender people are any more likely to be sexual predators than anybody else in the population. He decries the effort, the scare tactics, “getting people to see a boogie man where there isn’t one” and recalls urging legislators on “the other side” to “take this opportunity to be on the right side of history” THIS time, “from the start.”

We follow Joe Fain, a Republican state legislator who weighs in against this bill and the voter’s initiative that follows, and watch him grimace through a generally civil (one red-faced man threatens to punch him in the mouth) but increasingly testy town hall meeting where he tries to calm fears, remind people of the laws on the books and avoids telling anyone they’re mistaken, lying or just plain wrong.

We’re given a glimpse of why people feel threatened by transgender men and women, a montage of movie and media representation of transgender people — murderers like Buffalo Bob in “Silence of the Lambs,” Norman Bates in “Psycho,” objects of fun such as “Saturday Night Live’s” “Pat.”

But the real value in Knowlton’s film is letting us meet some of the children and parents of transgender children, who lsay the issue is “a matter of life and death” for their kids. And unlike their opponents, they have statistics to back them up.

Parents, to a one, recall a STEEP and reluctant learning curve that hit their household when a child tells them she is really a boy, or a girl, in a body that wasn’t made for that identity.

“It’s not a phase,” one mother gripes. They all expressed alarm, dismay and then determination to support their child, even as the “bathroom bill” backers express sympathy for “the confused.”

Scientists weigh in on the latest research, chromosomes that determine sex now seen as filled with “variations,” the “mosaic” of “maleness or femaleness” in the brain that has nothing to do with genital development.

“I would like people to know that my daughter is NOT a threat! She just wants to use the bathroom. That’s all.”

Suicide among young people experiencing this realization and the difficulties they have with a society that won’t accept them is the harsh cost of “people confusing gender identification with sexual orientation,” the one that gets all the publicity.

But there are urinary tract infections, kidney issues, that stem from the fearful refusal to use public restrooms.

A chant on the state capital steps pretty much gets at the heart of the matter.

“Trans women are women, too. And need to pee, JUST like you!”

Whatever else Knowlton’s film captures, and no matter what its shortcomings in setting and balance, etc. (misspelled graphics on sources of data, for instance), “The Most Dangerous Year” can be appreciated for that simple explanation.

Using a bathroom is a basic human right, and some people have issues with it that scar them for life. Unless you’ve got specific police report examples or hard data to back up your latest phobia attached to the larger issue of gay rights and homophobia, find something else to get worked up about.

MPAA Rating: unrated, sexual subject matter

Cast: Erika Lorentz, Meghan Hebert-Trainer, Huddle Morris Blakefield, Joe Fain, Cyrus Habib

Credits: Written and directed by Vlada Knowlton . A Passion River release.

Running time: 1:28

All these people gravitated to Laurel Canyon until the canyon walls were lined with the likes of Jackson Browne, members of The Byrds, Mamas, Papas, CSNY, The Beach Boys…all giving birth to “The California Sound.”

Jakob Dylan is our tour guide in this documentary, “Echo in the Canyon,” which opens May 24.

A truism — actors want to play Jesus. All of them. It’s practically a complex.

Joaquin Phoenix gets to go where Willem Dafoe (the best actor to tackle the part) went before in this version of the story of Mary Magdalene, a complicated woman who followed and befriended Jesus of Nazareth.

Garth Davis directed this for IFC, not a studio known for faith-based cinema. “Mary Magdalene” is getting a TINY Easter weekend release, which is a shame, as poison peddlers Pure Flix can get their angry little odes to conservative Christian martyrdom in America into thousands of theaters at a time.

Oh. Right. Chiwetel Ejiofor is playing Peter. White conservative American Christians might have trouble having an Afro-British Londoner as an apostle.

You hear the movie’s about a “caveman” cloned to life in modern America, and the jokes pretty much write themselves, right?

You see the image of Will Brittain in Neanderthal makeup and you giggle, maybe just a little.

But “William,” the film that we’re talking about here, is a surprisingly sober and sensitive spin on a subject that’s been spoofed and goofed in everything from “Encino Man” to those “so simple, even a caveman could do it” TV commercials. It’s far fetched and melodramatic, but also thoughtful and touching, every now and then.

It’s a Michael Crichton “Jurassic Park” premise. What if we could bring back a human species that went extinct 40,000 years ago, and has had a bum rap ever since?

That’s what these two doctors — one a charismatic, push-the-envelope paleontologist (Waleed Zuaiter, intense), the other a physician with the sort of credentials that allow her to say “That’s doable” (Maria Dizzia, soulful) — discuss when they meet over drinks.

Dr. Reed (Zuaiter) has a killer Power Point presentation he hits his Wallace U. students with as he introduces them to “Neanderthal Man.”

“Kinda cute, huh? But stupid…a brute. A caveman…short, stocky.”

His thesis? Our “primitive caveman” notions about Neanderthals are “completely wrong.” He makes his case, tracing the bum rap to a racist 19th century scientist who first labeled them that way.

Meeting Dr. Barbara Sullivan (Dizzia) means his far-fetched hopes of “meeting a Neanderthal, face to face” and studying one are within reach. They become “an academic power couple” at the college, “The Neanderthal Project” is born, in secret, and faculty, ethicists and administrators weigh in on “the Mary Shelley-esque” nature of the work.

Not that Dr. Reed and Dr. Sullivan don’t bull straight through, swap egg proteins and DNA and give birth (via Dr. Sullivan) to a baby boy, whom they name William, after the nickname given the specimen who provided the tissue with the DNA that allowed them to do the cloning.

“I thought it was against the law to clone a human,” one faculty member gripes.

“Not in Nevada,” where Sullivan married Reed in an Elvis-impersonator chapel (“Do you promise to never leave Barbara in a ‘Heartbreak Hotel’…and always be her ‘Hunka Hunka Burnin’ Love?”) and where the child was “conceived.”

“William” tells the “research subject’s” story out of order, in a flashback experienced as the young man rides a ferry crossing a sound in the Pacific Northwest.

Mom may marvel at his pre-teen appetite, but to always-clinical Dad, that’s just his
“body mass and metabolism” requiring more protein.

Bullied as a tween (not a good idea) and subjected to endless aptitude and IQ tests all his life, William grows up as a reserved, shy “on the spectrum” type who defies conventional views of what such humans were like.

He speaks plainly and clearly, but has trouble with abstract ideas like “metaphor”  — not that he doesn’t understand them, but because “it feels like something is being taken away from me.”

Director and co-writer Tim Disney (Roy’s son) shows us the kid reading about himself on the Internet, becoming self-aware. But he makes friends, co-stars in the high school musical and endures a pal’s relentless abuse of puns as jokes.

“Didya hear about the stewardess who backed into a propeller? Dis-ASSED-her.”

“That’s so sad.”

“Hey Will, how do fish get high? Sea-Weed! Get it?”

“No.”

We see the rift that opens between his parents and get a hint of the crisis of identity that hits him, as it does many teens — only harder.

Disney carefully steers “William” clear of mockery (“Encino Man” is referenced), even if he has a harder time avoiding the “misunderstood monster” tropes (“King Kong,” “Frankenstein”).

The picture finds touching moments in Will’s rejection by one pretty girl (he looks brutish), but can’t avoid tumbling into Pure Plot Device traps.

It’s a modestly-budgeted affair, which explains its intimate scale, if not its passivity. There’s no media stardom or even media attention for Will, even though his birth was announced with a press conference and great fanfare.

But that suits the picture’s quiet tone and blue mood, complemented by a grey-skied production design.

“William” lacks the fireworks or even high drama that would give it scale or stakes, that would make it more consequential. And its moral parable feels underdeveloped. But Disney still has managed to tell a thought-provoking story on a subject worth viewing through a lens of ethics and morality, even if he can’t quite break free of “Planet of the Apes” parallels.

MPAA Rating: unrated, some profanity, violence

Cast: Will Brittain, Maria Dizzia, Waleed Zuaiter, Susan Park, Beth Grant and Paul Guilfoyle

Credits:Directed by Tim Disney, script by J.T. Allen, Tim Disney. A William Productions/Dada Films release.

Running time: 1:39

Whaddaya think? The critters are still animated. James Earl Jones is still Mustafa.

Great voice cast, as you’d expect. Looks lovely. And…pointless? July 19,  a “Lion King” without Nathan Lane and Ernie Sabella and Jeremy Irons hits theaters.

I had higher hopes for “Little” than the movie that wound up on the screen.

A “Big” flip  with a “Black-ish” vibe, it’s built around Issa Rae, destined to be this year’s Tiffany Haddish breakout Black funnywoman thanks to her TV series, “Insecure,” and a movie with “Girls Trip” bloodlines.

But “Little” doesn’t um, measure up. The best comedies are aggressive, quick and close-up, in your face and flippant. “Little” has moments where director Tina Gordon (“Peeples”) gets this. But when your picture limps along the way this one does, you can’t blame everybody in the cast for coming off as “trying too hard.”

Regina Hall (“Girls Trip,” “The Hate U Give,””Support the Girls”) dials it up several notches as Jordan Sanders, our anti-heroine narrator.

She was a smart kid, and bullied for it. But her dad gave her some sound advice.

“Nobody bullies the boss.” Grow up, be a success and you’ll never be pushed around again. It’s just that Jordan took that several steps further. The bullied grew up to be the bully.

She may have a hot Atlanta tech company and a world-beating personal assistant of the “Alexa” variety called “Homegirl” (voiced with a little sass and a lot of flava by Tracee Ellis Ross) about to hit the market.

But she terrifies the valet who watches her BMW i8 supercar at her apartment. And rolling up to the office makes her minions scatter. “She’s here! TAKE COVER everyone!”

Issa Rae is her long-suffering non-digital assistant, April, who copes with a 24/7 beck-and-call job by listening to the audiobook “So You Want to Slap Your Boss” as she bicycles to work.

April makes eyes at every man she meets, gives her name as “April, A-as-in-AVAILABLE” and has no time for office romance or any other kind of romance because of that low paying job for a bullying boss.

Jordan keeps her booty call (Luke James) at arm’s length (“D-boy” is his nickname on her phone), imperiously cuts in line at the coffee shop, shoves kids, insults neighbors, employees and others and insists she’s 38.

“Girl, byeeeee.”

But she picks on the wrong little kid, one who waves a store-bought magic wand at her and wishes back to “my age.” Jordan wakes up 13, rich but unable to prove who she is or assert herself in her usual manner.

The out-of-control hair, peers who pick on her, she’s back in her middle school misery, played now by Marsai Martin, one of the kids in TV’s “Black-ish.”

April, who has app ideas of her own, is forced to work for a child, but flips the script on the power trip because Jordan can’t return to the office as herself and close the Big Deal (with Mikey Day as a jerky entrepreneur), drive or frighten people or sleep with Trevor any more.

A social worker (Rachel Dratch) insists the kid enroll in school, and that’s kind of the last straw — for Jordan, who resists, and for April, who has had enough of this child “embarrassing me in front of these white people.”

Her solution? A “BMW situation — Black mama whipping.”

“SPANK your kids!”

Tracy Oliver, who scripted “Girls Trip,” co-wrote this with director Gordon, and what they were up against is stark and obvious if you remember “Big.”

A child gaping in wonder at the adult world, reveling in the new power and open doors life offers when you’re “Big” is a LOT different from an adult going back and re-living childhood.

Jordan needs her glass or three of rosé.

“Just a couple of sips to take the edge off.”

Yeah, a kid saying that is funny. But the movie’s most trangressive moments — and comedy is supposed to be transgressive — have young Miss Martin coming on to Jordan’s side piece, or her new teacher (Justin Hartley). A 13 year-old making “bedroom eyes” is funny for a second, icky every second after that.

And Martin is fine in an ensemble sitcom, but not really up to carrying her third of a Major Motion Picture. She doesn’t have the chops yet.

Hall works the aggressive-and-mean comic angle hard. But “Little” misses Issa Rae every second she’s not on screen. She’s flippant and funny and as on her TV show, a veritable dictionary of up-to-the-minute Black slang, fashion, mores and attitudes.

Here, she scores the occasion laugh with a line, calling the kid “Chocolate Hogwart,” but has to make do with a lot of mugging for the camera. When she mouths “Bitch” at bossy boss, it’s worth a giggle. There are too few moments like that.

And all the Return to Middle School scenes are lame and stop the movie in its tracks.

Funny people –and a lively hip hop and R &B soundtrack — can cover for a lot of screen comedy sins. But in this one, the sins aren’t “Little” and the players too hampered by script and direction to put out the dumpster fire this very nearly is.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for some suggestive content

Cast: Issa Rae, Regina Hall, Marsai Martin, Rachel Dratch, Mikey Day, Justin Hartley, Eva Carlton with Tracee Ellis Ross as the voice of “Homegirl”

Credits:Directed by Tina Gordon, script by and Tina Gordon and Tracy Oliver. A Universal release.

Running time: 1:48