Movie Nation

There’s a rigid formula for coming-of-age documentaries.

Pick a group of disadvantaged schoolkids — dancers or mathematicians, athletes or children just desperate to be selected for the top magnet school in the region, ensuring that college is in their future — and follow them as they battle long odds, family shortcomings, the system and themselves.

Some will succeed, and even in the most “feel good” documentaries in this genre, some will fail.

“Wrestle” is a formula coming-of-age documentary featuring high school wrestlers, their fanatically-committed coach, their families, disadvantages and distractions as they try to gain fame and scholarships from the platform of a failing Huntsville, Alabama high school.

It’s a revealing film that doesn’t skimp on the pitfalls facing the four young men who are its subjects and the blind spots of the white coach who pushes, inspires and badgers them through a long, grueling season.

But the jaw-dropping revelation here is in filmmakers’ Suzannah Herbert and Lauren Belfer realizing, and making us realize, that black or white, seniors or underclassmen, raised by Mom or raised by grandparents, these are lives with zero margin for error.

Of course we’re shown arduous workouts, teammates carrying each other up a hill, at night, in the rain, urged on by their fellow wrestlers.

We get a dose of what it takes to “make weight” when you’re a tall, growing kid who likes to eat.

We get a glimpse of J.O. Johnson High School, stuck in a comatose, opportunity-starved corner of Huntsville.

But the camera crew is in the car when easily-distracted underclassman Jaquan drives his buddy, senior Jamario, to his birthday party and the older teen talks about want to smoke (weed) “just tonight,” and not again this season.

The tape is still rolling as Jaquan, later that night, is pulled over by Huntville’s finest for a “dim brake light.” A “trace” of marijuana later, and his mother is praying aloud as she drives to get him out of jail, to calm herself down and “not do nothing to jeopardize my freedom.”

That’s what being black in Huntsville is like.

The smart, well-spoken star of the team, Jailen Young relieves himself on a roadside in even-less-tolerant Montgomery and faces police hassle and arrest.

“Don’t get smart” turns into “Lose the attitude…you’bout this close” and then to the cop snapping at the documentary crew about he hopes the filmmakers captured “how disrespectful this young man is being.”

They did. And they captured the fact that these are good kids whose lives are under a police spotlight every night they’re out of doors, with no chance of “let you off with a warning” from the white cops they confront.

“Scrib” (Chris Scribner), their coach, shakes his head at the fact that he “made a lot of the same choices they did (drug abuse, almost flunking out)…But I was given a LOT of chances. I don’t know how that’s fair.”

Teague, a white 145 pounder on the team, has attention deficit issues and medications to combat that, medications he doesn’t take. We watch him utterly bollix his future — skipping class, buying weed, scrambling up trees and gym walls and improvising his way around the mat with the same manic energy.

“Teague, that wasn’t even a MOVE.”

His mother wishes he’d get busted “to wake him up.” She begins each day’s drop off at school with a “No crazy stuff today. I don’t need no phone calls.”

Jamario, the senior, could be the J.O. Johnson wrestler who wins it all. But he’s overwhelmed by expectations, mood-swings and distractions. He’s got an older girlfriend who wants to sit in on practices (not allowed) and doesn’t see herself as part of the problem.

“That girl ain’t nothing but drama,” his mother, Lolita, warns, but Jamario isn’t big on listening or following advice.

“Wrestle,” better than most sports documentaries or feature dramas, gets at the grueling, attention-sapping nature of high school sports. The season goes on and on, kids have classes and other things to change their focus.

Kids, with little perspective on how long life is, get burned-out or mess up in other ways.

Scrib is an in-their-lives/in-their-business coach, ridiculed by trying to be too much — their shrink, their life coach, their dad.

The kids laugh off his cussing, cajoling, mothering (he tracks down athletes late for matches, skipping practice) and even violently wrestling them (almost certainly not allowed outside of Alabama) with “He’s from New York. Coaxing “role model” Jailen into giving a speech to one of the team’s sponsors, Coach is “fittin'” (his words) to get worked up.

“You know what I’m sayin’? Be FORCEFUL. Be Obama about it!”

“Wrestle” may be a formulaic genre picture, but Herbert and Belfer find lighter moments (Jaquon dozing off on the exercycle), a coach taking on Southern African American patois, an irate mother demanding “Did you SMOKE in my baby’s car, Jamario?”

And the filmmakers absolutely NAIL the straight-and-narrow that these kids must follow just to “make it to 18,” the police attention that gives so many African American youth the sort of “zero tolerance” futures circumscribed by having “criminal” records.

Even kids with someone as hellbent on giving them “First in your family to go to college” ambitions and dreams as Coach Scrib can be pinned before the match even starts.

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast:Teague Berres, Jaquan Rhodes, Chris Scribner, Jamario Rowe

Credits: Directed by Suzannah Herbert and Lauren Belfer. An Oscilloscope Labs release.

Running time: 1:36

An official Marine Corps videographer shot “Combat Obscura,” a documentary of training, combat and down time footage so raw it’s “The Movie The Marine Corps doesn’t want you to see.”

It’s due out in March from the reliably edgy Oscilloscope Labs.

AMPAS, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, has long wanted to shorten their night-long telecast of self-flattery, the Oscars.

Years back, when Oscar expert Steve Pond had a book coming out, we discussed this and he said “As long as they’re handing out 24 awards (plus whatever honorary prizes they add in a given year), the show’s going to be long.” Very long. Some years longer than others.

There’s the nub. You can nibble around the edges of the telecast, but can you shorten it without thinning the actual “awards?”

This year, they took a serious stab at fixing that. They talked about not performing all the nominated songs. And caved.

They long ago ruined the promise of emotional, moving and memorable acceptance speeches by setting time limits and “playing people off” who got carried away.

That cut into the laundry lists of “I’d love to thank my agent, her assistant, the assistant’s driver…” a bit, but not enough. And it ruined acceptance speeches by Hollywood legends like Martin Landau and others.

Their latest idea, create a rotating quartet of awards handed out during commercial breaks, was bound to get REALLY important crafts guilds like the cinematographers, sound mixers, editors and costumers upset when it was their turn to not get their “I’d like to thank” moments.

I’m not using “REALLY important” ironically or sarcastically. These are the people who MAKE the movies we all see and adore.

So it was no surprise when that “be fair to everybody” attempt folded up under a tornado of criticism from both those impacted and those who recognize who MAKES the movies.

No matter who you choose to honor online instead of on ABC TV, they’re going to be irked.

And actors, producers, directors, composers, editors, costumers — all of them have clout via their guilds.

The answer then, is to move the LEAST interesting categories with the LEAST amount of clout — filmmakers who are LUCKY to be included in the Oscars on TV at all — permanently into those TV commercial breaks.

I’m referring to the three Short Film Categories — Live Action Short, Documentary Short and Animated Short.

Move them to the breaks, and do it permanently and from here on out. The telecast feels like its not long for this Earth, as relevance fades and audience interest in the medium and a show celebrating it wanes. Running time will be irrelevant when it’s just a streaming program we watch on Hulu.

But for now, move these three and be done with it. Let the entrants in these categories howl. It needs to be done.

Aside from animation, the winners and nominees in these categories rarely become feature length success stories. It’s a blip on the cinema’s radar when this live action short filmmaker wins. Rare is the “short” winner who gets to turn his or her short into a feature, or finds real success making full length movies.

“Sling Blade” started life as a short. “Some Folks Call it a Sling Blade” co-starred Molly Ringwald.

“Before I Disappear,” the Shawn Christensen dark comedy about a suicidal young man who has to postpone death because his sister needs him to babysit, was another.

There are other examples of that, but not that many.

Animation is different, but the animated nominees are increasingly dominated by the Big Animation Houses, so while winning an Oscar with a short gives you bragging rights and glosses up an animation director’s resume and can lead to feature success, truthfully, those filmmakers have already won the “Pixar/Dreamworks/Warners/Sony” is MAKING MY (short) MOVIE” prize.

Even in animation, an Oscar for a short is not a career-making moment.

I enjoy programs of shorts, and consider them worthy of Oscar consideration. But we don’t need to see these hard-working unknowns on TV, even when Steve Martin and Steven Wright and other famous folks over the years have made a top drawer short.

Shortening the show requires streamlining the awards presented. You can’t do that without pain. Forget “fair,” cut the stuff viewers are least invested in.

Move the shorts off the telecast and see how long the show runs without them.

This year’s Oscars will be handed out Feb. 24, without a host and without the cuts to running time that producers have been dying to make for years.

Who needs ghosts? The past is what haunts us all — what might have been, “the one who got away,” the “path not taken.”

This sets up as a tour de force for J.K. Simmons (Sebastian Stan plans his character as a young man).  “I’m Not Here” opens in limited release March 8.

The greatest monsters are the ones grounded in reality. Long before his character reveals anything supernatural in his makeup, the mysterious antiques dealer played by Timothy Spall has given us a vibe.

Pervert. The sort who lures children into cars and, in his care, shipping containers that he uses as his “shop.”

His character is obviously the villain of “The Changeover,” something we pick up on in an instant. We don’t have to be like Laura, “Lolly” to friends and family, a girl with “a gift” to see it.

“I feel in my bones when something bad is going to happen.”

Laura’s like her dad, someone who sees things, picks up warnings. Mum (Melanie Lynskey) considers that nonsense and doesn’t take her any more seriously than she did Laura’s father. Even though dad saw the Christchurch, New Zealand earthquake coming and knew it’d be the end of him.

“The Changeover” is a moody, menacing thriller with a YA (Young Adult) heroine. It could have been “Twilight Lite” with 16 year old Laura (Erana James) learning about herself, just “what” she is, and about love from the pouty-hunky classmate (Nicholas Galitzine) who seems to have the answers.

From Laura’s understated but chilly voice-over narration, to the driving menace of the movie — her five year old brother’s mortal peril –“Changeover” is a story that works, no matter how familiar and limited — claustrophobic — it feels.

The late novelist Margaret Mahy crafted a smarter, more writerly precursor to “Twilight,” beating the American pulp novel to the shelves by decades. Kiwi filmmakers Miranda Harcourt and Stuart McKenzie have updated the 1984 story, putting Laura Chant and her family in Christchurch, N.Z., not long after its recent catastrophe.

“The earthquake broke our city,” Laura narrates. “It broke our family, too.”

Laura experiences premonitions, and the latest is about her brother. Mom won’t hear it.

“Your paranoia is off the Richter Scale.”

With Mom working all hours, Laura has to keep an eye on young Jacko (Benji Purchase). She’s quite responsible for her age, but he’s at that run-ahead-of-you/escape your sight phase, and Laura can be distracted.

That’s how she finds Jacko in the presence of evil. But she still lets the creep, sixtysomething and awfully solicitous of children, put a stamp on Jacko’s hand.

No, that’s not the butterfly he promised. No, it won’t come off. And no he’s not telling her the truth.

“I’m not going to hurt you, Laura!”

As her brother starts acting out and even speaking in the old creep’s voice, Laura has to seek the help of a good-looking classmate, Sorenson (Galitzine). He’s sort-of flirted. He’s warned her, telepathically. Maybe he has some answers.

And if not him, maybe his spooky mom (onetime “Warrior Princess” Lucy Lawless) or his grandma (Kate Harcourt).

For all its exposition and the novel names for the strange beings we’re meeting, “Changeover” — the title is a transition Laura must make to save Jacko — cannot escape the feeling that we’re watching “Twilight with Witches.” But it instantly feels more real, more lived-in and more unnervingly claustrophobic by means of a production that goes easy on effects and never paints its leading man in glitter.

James makes a fiery heroine, established in an early scene as a bit of an adrenaline junky, fiercely protective of her brother but still a typical teen — in open rebellion against a mother who just doesn’t “get” her.

Lynskey, one of the most versatile actresses to come from New Zealand, wonderfully gets across a mother both overwhelmed and entirely too eager to pass heavy responsibilities on to her teen daughter.

“I’ll be the mom.”

“Do you even know HOW?”

Galitzine seems tailor-made to poster a million teen girl bedroom walls (He starred in a comedy called “Handsome Devil,” for obvious reasons.).

But it is Spall, as he proved in the Harry Potter pictures (Wormtail) and in the recent “Denial,” makes a wonderful villain and as such makes the somewhat over-familiar “Changeover” worth your while.

When he bugs his eyes out and grins that viperous, British-dentistry grin, you know it’s time to hide the kids and cross the street to avoid him. Even before he whips out his hand-stamp.

MPAA Rating: unrated, for mature audiences

Cast: Erana James, Timothy Spall, Melanie Lynskey, Nicholas Galitzine, Lucy Lawless

Credits: Directed by Miranda Harcourt, Stuart McKenzie, script by Stuart McKenzie, based on a Margaret Mahy novel. A Vertical Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:32

If I see one more BS “garbage” assault on Peter Farrelly and “Green Book” or “Bohemian Rhapsody” or any other contender — from Jezebel, Salon, et al — I am going to hurl.

It’s reached insane levels this year.

Where were you infants last year? Oh right, you were cheerleading that ditzy genre junk “The Shape of Water” into the winner’s circle, perpetually celebrated as a global Oscars punchline.

‘”English Patient” and “Crash?” So what? They gave Best Picture to the fish f—–g movie!”

What started with Harvey Weinstein’s media-placed whispering campaigns against his contending films’ competition has become a full on blood sport.

Bill Maher lights into the “B. Rhaps” bashing and nails it. “Roma” can be argued against on its merits  — meandering memory play shot in the dullest black and white ever, not on its grew-up-rich writer-director who is “inauthentic” for making it. “Green Book” blasting — we KNOW it’s those Lady Gaga freaks who’re behind it.

Enough already.

Enjoy.

Box office prognosticators have been warning Fox and theater owners not to expect diddly from the opening of the $170 million “Alita: Battle Angel,” which James Cameron handed to Robert Rodriguez in a “Hold my beer” move meant to expedite his “Avatar” sequels.

Cameron was going to direct the manga adaptation, and his imprint is all over the tin-eared script and generally whimsy free enterprise.

We were told, “Well, it won’t open huge — only $37 million over the Presidents Day Weekend.” A $50-65 opening would have been healthy, considering the budget, with foreign territories carrying it easily into the black.

Not to be. A non-franchise sci-fi fantasy with a hint of ill-fated “This’ll never work” robot/human romance, this reminder of why Japan’s population is shrinking won’t do much better than $27 million, per Deadline.com, based on opening night-before and opening day numbers.

Ouch.

Indifferent reviews didn’t help. It’s joyless and simple-minded, and the fact that its in 3D doesn’t matter. Bombs away.

It’ll barely best an underwhelming “Lego Movie” sequel, “The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part” which on its second weekend is also on track to collect $27 million or so.

Rebel Wilson’s blase rom-com send up “Isn’t it Romantic?” isn’t swimming in Valentine’s Week cash. It did decent business Wed and Thursday is falling off the to point where it’ll fall short of $13 million over the weekend by midnight Monday — $18-19 million since Wed. Nobody’s leaping from the ledge over this one, at least.

“What Men Want” is having a decent second weekend — nothing to brag or cry about.

The other new opening is a desultory horror sequel, wringing the last few frights and laughs out of Jessica Rothe’s sorority girl “Buffy” surviving a “Groundhog Day” of grisly deaths. Hers. “Happy Death Day 2U” is headed towards a $10-11 million opening.

“Cold Pursuit” is headed to an icy grave, and “Green Book” and “Aquaman” are finally long gone from the Top Ten.

Atmospheric and creepy, with characters and a setting far more interesting than the due the movie gives them, “Smaller and Smaller Circles” is a serial killer thriller set in the Philippines.

It’s about two Jesuit priests, amateur sleuths, hunting a monster who is hunting and murdering the nation’s poorest and least visible — pre-teen boys born into poverty.

Father Saenz and his junior partner Father Lucero connect the clues from mutilated bodies being found in garbage dumps, where boys that age and in that financial state — “breadwinners” for their starving families — scavenge.

With a generally inept and often corrupt NBI (National Bureau of Investigation) less interested in these cases than you’d hope — “Father Saenz, you’ve been watching too many Hollywood movies! There are no serial killers in the Philippines!” — grizzled Gus Saenz (Nonie Buencamino) and history teacher and forward thinker Jerome Lucero (Sid Lucero, yes, his name is the same) take it upon themselves to unmask the killer.

As Father Gus has been tracking serial abuser priests transferred from one Catholic diocese to another, part of the worldwide Catholic priests abuse scandal, sleuthing, criminal profiling and psychological evaluations of human behavior and motivation have entered his skill set.

Lucero’s troubled youth (he must have been abused) and sharp eye and mind make him a qualified sidekick.

They trace the string of corpses through Payatas, a district of Quezon City, ponder possible Church connections to the crimes because of the Church’s large presence in the slums — feeding, ministering to and providing medical care to the impoverished — and fight police indifference and eagerness to close the case in “the usual manner” with one of their “usual suspects.”

Director Raya Martin has created a polished, finished film with eerie plainsong (religious choral) music underscoring the grey exteriors and florescent interiors where the priests do their sleuthing, carry out interrogations and reason out a profile of this murderer.

Corruption is meant to be a big subtext here, with Father Jerome lecturing his students about the connection between Marcos Era Philippine excesses and the unaccountable Catholic Church.

If the film feels somewhat starved of drama, excitement and back story, it’s very helpful to remember that journalist Felisa Batacan’s 2002 source novel was the first ever crime novel written in Filipino and published in the Philippines.

We don’t know how the priests acquired specific skills, even if we’re given their motivations and the suggestions that these are an outgrowth of interest in tracking down child molesting priests.

A chat show in which the chuckling, dismissive Cardinal and too-cozy-with-the-Church head of the NBI are grilled and debate plays like local TV you might have watched in the 1960s in the US — primitive sets, hand-held microphones, unpolished.

That’s a nice analogy for the film, being the first-ever Filipino effort in this genre.

There’s a foreign born TV reporter (Carla Humphries) who works with the priests and swaps favors with them, a hunky young detective still idealistic enough to care and other cliches that you’d see on an amateur TV detective series — “Murder She Wrote,” “Monk” or “Father Cadfael.”

One other necessary but missing ingredient for this again FIRST EVER Filipino murder mystery/crime novel is suspense. The film doesn’t give us a potential victim to connect with and fear for, doesn’t discover the magic of the “ticking clock” thriller and sort of meanders towards a solution that, while interesting, is never that engaging.

At some point this story in English, Filipino and French with English subtitles drags and wears to the point where the viewer succumbs to the temptation to treat it as an artifact, not a nail-biting thriller or compelling mystery.

I wouldn’t mind seeing these characters again (Batacam penned a sequel, I hear), because the bare bones of a First Gen crime thriller are here. It’s just that everybody involved needs more practice in the genre to get it right.

MPAA Rating: TV-14

Cast: Carla Humphries, Nonie Buencamino, Sid Lucero

Credits: Directed by Raya Martin, script by Raymond Lee (as Moira Lang), Ria Limjap, based on the novel by Felisa “F.H.” Batacan. An Uncork’d release.

Running time: 1:51

The ancient thespian advice about “Never act with small children or dogs” is borne out with a vengeance in “Patrick,” a romantic comedy with no romance and virtually no comedy — save for the dog.

A cute pug, a dog-hating single woman ill-equipped to cope with him and a lot of absolutely lovely English scenery are the calling cards of this sweet little nothing of a movie. “Patrick” never lets us forget, first scene to last, main character to much of her supporting cast, how Ever so English it is.

If only that was enough.

We meet Sarah (Beattie Edmondson of “Bridget Jones’s Baby”) as she’s being dumped by the nerd-beau she just moved in with.

That latest calamity to befall her contributes to her being late for something shortly thereafter — her granny’s funeral. But she’s just in time for the reading of the will.

No, Granny didn’t leave her a valuable bracelet or real estate. She left her Patrick, the pug we’ve seen the little old lady spoil, coddle and indulge in a montage that ends with her collapse at the dog park.

He has a jumper he wears to the dog park, eats only the finest cuts of meat, for which Granny gave him refrigerator privileges, has his every need catered to.

Of course she had a tux for him, which he wears to the funeral.

Hapless Sarah, who can’t keep a boyfriend, has a new flat with a “No Pets” policy and a new job teaching English at Daneman High School– a never-ending disappointment to her well-off parents and over-achiever older-sister — is “bequeathed” this “match made in Hell.”

“Oh, honestly! I could weep!”

She’s the sort of very proper lump who doesn’t know dogs shouldn’t eat chocolate, has no clue how to modify bad doggy behavior and babbles away at Patrick as if he understands her very proper Received Pronunciation.

The posh twit.

But Granny thought “They’ll be good for each other,” and that’s that.

The script decrees that Patrick destroy her apartment while she’s away at work, and threaten her lease. He is destined to charm her unruly Grade 11 class as it studies “Jane Eyre” — pretty much for the whole semester. He must be a “babe magnet,” entangling leashes with dog-walking Ben (Tom Bennett) and inspiring gallantry and “You’ll wonder how you ever got along without him” from the handsome and gallant jogger (Ed Skrein) who corrals him after the pug has set off to chase deer through a bigger park.

Turns out the jogger is a veterinarian, and he’s sweet on our Sarah. We think.

“Patrick” is a movie of pointless if not quite insipid montages of Sarah’s life, bonding with Patrick and the sunny, green universe these two live in.

The locations are a bucket-list of English outdoor beauty — Chiswick, London, Buckinghamshire, Windsor in Berkshire and Surrey — parks, riverfronts and rivers, all lending a hand because the script conjures up more complications than romance.

But the dog? He will NOT be upstaged, thank you.

Edmundson takes a good pratfall and Jennifer Saunders, in her SECOND Valentine’s Day romantic comedy (as the Home Ec teacher always handing out botched bake goods from the class) is good for a grin.

Nobody else manages much more than suggesting “warmth.”

The dog’s tricks — toting treats to the shopping basket at the pet supermarket, raiding the fridge — are few. He’s just an adorable prop, designed to instigate the action.

Of which there is so very little that you do wonder if the English will finance, film and buy a cinema ticket for ANYthing that has to do with dogs, Windsor and Surrey.

For a “sweet nothing” of a movie, you kind of wish “nothing” wasn’t the most  accurate description.

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast: Beattie Edmondson, Tom Bennett, Jennifer Saunders, Ed Skrein, Emily Atak, Gemma Jones and Adrian Scarborough

Credits: Directed by Mandie Fletcher, script by Vanessa Davies, Paul de Vos and Mandie Fletcher A Screen Media release.

Running time: 1:34

J.C. Chandor directed this Ben Affleck/Oscar Isaac/Charlie Hunnam/Pedro Pascal/Garrett Hedlund action pic about former Special Forces soldiers targeting a drug lord in the No Man’s Land where three borders meet, life is cheap and money is stashed in a safe in back.

A lot of Money.

“Triple Frontier” sounds a little like this Kathryn Bigelow project set in the same area — lawless mid-continental borderlands where multiple countries have claims and no one has control.

Netflix releases this March 13.