Hi, this is Tania Ganguli, Lakers beat writer for the Los Angeles Times with your Lakers newsletter.

It would be an exaggeration to say the Lakers are firing on all cylinders right now (not to mention a cliche), but they have made the best of the early part of the season.

A looming question for this veteran team is one they haven’t yet begun to really grapple with. Will the Lakers begin employing load management?

Technically speaking, the league doesn’t allow players to simply be rested. That hasn’t stopped the Clippers from twice resting Kawhi Leonard this season. The NBA approved the move after consulting with the Clippers’ medical staff who said Leonard isn’t healthy. The league later fined the team $50,000 after coach Doc Rivers made comments about the situation that contradicted the assessment of Leonard’s injury.

The Lakers could use a similar plan for their stars, LeBron James and Anthony Davis, and I think we all assume they will at some point.

Davis has a shoulder injury that he’s admitted would take four or five days of true rest in order to fully heal. But when I asked Lakers coach Frank Vogel if there was any chance he’d rest Davis in Chicago, he shot down the notion entirely.

He deadpanned: “No. And how dare you.”

I don’t think Vogel likes even thinking about playing a game without Davis, and who can blame him? Even on an off night, Davis ultimately made an impact for the team in Chicago. Unless he injures his shoulder again, the Lakers see little reason to not allow him to keep playing through a little bit of pain.

James was given the “load management” distinction a few times last season after he returned from a groin injury. At the time the Lakers said it was a strain, but James has referred to it as a tear this season. Each time he’s mentioned it lately, he’s said once he returned to play after five weeks off, he was still dealing with a tear.

Vogel was asked at Thursday’s practice about protecting James from overexposure this season.

“Yeah, just every way we can,” Vogel said. “Whether it’s off days in practice or minimize his minutes, minimize his load. There’s some things built in scheme-wise that require him to do — to pass some guys off at certain times. Every way we can.”

So far that hasn’t included resting James. Throughout his 17-year career, James has rarely been interested in resting during games, especially while his team is fighting for playoff position.

The bigger picture with both players, though, is their availability will become much more critical after the regular season.

LeBron’s passion project

The LeBron James Family Foundation announced a pretty remarkable next step to the I Promise School project this week.

They’ve partnered with Graduate Hotels to provide transitional housing a few blocks from the school to families facing homelessness, domestic violence issues and other housing-related challenges. James met the CEO of Graduate Hotels, Ben Weprin, in Cabo San Lucas and the idea to do this began then. Graduate Hotels is a chain of boutique hotels near college campuses.

When I visited the I Promise School last year, one of the counselors there, whose job it is to work with parents of students at the school, mentioned that there were students whose families were homeless. The I Promise School prides itself on taking care of the whole student, not just while they are in class. They have a food bank where families can go shopping. They offer job and GED-related services for the parents of their students. They want to take care of any obstacle their students had that would prevent them from truly taking advantage of education.

Housing is an issue that’s personal for James. He and his mother, Gloria, moved between living locations for part of his childhood. They’d move from home to home, sometimes staying where kind neighbors or friends would let them.

“You can have all the support in the world while you’re at school or while you’re at basketball or while you’re playing sports or doing anything,” James said. “But if you go home and it’s not stable, you don’t have any stability there, you’re gonna resort back to the negative things or the bad habits that you might have. Sometimes it’s not even the kids’ fault of why the situations are the way they are. For us to be able to provide that for our kids and for the families, and the adults as well, the parents, it’s a pretty cool thing.”

Here’s what else happened since last we spoke…

—Last Friday, the Lakers played an instant classic of a game against the Dallas Mavericks — and one that had a metaphorical tint to it. The Lakers sent the game into overtime with a buzzer-beating three-pointer by Danny Green, who had a message about failure. He could hit that shot because of all the times he’d failed and tried again.

—Last year Luka Doncic asked for James’ jersey after the teams played. This year, Doncic matched James’ triple-double with one of his own and received an admiring greeting from his idol. My colleague Broderick Turner examined their nights.

—Kyle Kuzma made his debut in Friday’s game, and learned that he had to be patient with himself.

—There was a time when James was a lock for an NBA All-Defensive team each season, and even competed for defensive player of the year. Lately, that’s not been the case. But James’ defense has been called one of the “great surprises” on the Lakers this season. He’s committed and healthy. He’s been challenged by Vogel and Davis. It’s no accident that the Lakers’ defense has been elite so far.

—Avery Bradley had a really nice game before being kicked in the knee area against the Spurs. He missed Tuesday’s game in Chicago but says he will play unless he has a setback on Friday at home against Miami.

—Kentavious Caldwell-Pope got the start against the Bulls while Bradley recovered. Vogel really has liked his defense. But Caldwell-Pope also had a breakout game offensively in San Antonio.

—For his historic week of play, Davis was named the Western Conference’s player of the week for last week.

—Davis has always been curious and willing to learn from other players. He did it when he was young, and he felt comfortable approaching the game’s greats with questions. He still does it now that he is one of the league’s best players. On Tuesday, he returned to Chicago to show the fruits of that in his hometown.

—The Lakers answered this question against the Bulls on Tuesday: Can they survive if Davis and James are both on the bench? A group of reserves — Alex Caruso, Quinn Cook, Dwight Howard, Troy Daniels and Kuzma — pulled them out of a double-digit deficit. Vogel then turned to Davis and James to close out the game.

—James has notched triple-doubles in three consecutive games. He’s the first Laker to do it since Magic Johnson in 1987.

—Just because the Lakers are on a six-game winning streak doesn’t mean they don’t have areas of improvement. They know it and promise they won’t get complacent.

As always, thank you for reading our newsletter. If you enjoy our work, please consider buying a subscription to the paper in order to help support our journalism. Until next time …

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Mike Bohn stood at the dais, an unfamiliar face in a place so profoundly predisposed to the familiar. He wasn’t a former USC football hero, nor had he won a Heisman Trophy. There were no statues or buildings or plaques which bared his name on campus.

Outside of the cardinal and gold tie he wore to his introductory news conference, there were no discernible ties between Bohn and the “Trojan Family” from which USC has hired its athletic directors for a quarter century.

In a stark departure from the traditions which long dictated its direction, USC introduced Bohn as its athletic director on Thursday. He is the ninth ever to assume the role and first to lead the department without previous ties to the school since Mike McGee, who left in 1994 and was succeeded by three former football players.

But as he addressed a room full of administrators, alumni, and coaches, Bohn did his best to ingratiate himself into an institution otherwise leery of outsiders, hitting all the right notes. He talked about the magic of walking on campus and the “gleam” in the eyes of an athlete he met that morning.

As he spoke passionately about the tradition of USC and past glories of the athletic programs he’s now tasked with leading, his voice rose to a boom.

“You like to talk about the Trojan family here, right?” Bohn said, gripping the podium as he spoke. “Well, it’s real. I feel it.”

A longtime administrator with deep experience leading athletic departments at Idaho, San Diego State, Colorado and, most recently, Cincinnati, Bohn is no stranger to stepping in as an outsider. He had no ties to any of those schools before taking the reins, and that “fresh perspective,” Bohn noted Thursday, could be “very, very powerful.”

That is the bet that new President Carol L. Folt is making in Bohn, as she attempts to usher in a new era at USC, where turmoil has been a constant visitor over the past decade. It was Bohn’s vast experience elsewhere, in stark contrast to some of USC’s past athletic directors, which gave her confidence that he is up to that task.

“He has real integrity,” Folt said. “He has run class acts and done it really well in some difficult situations.”

At USC, Bohn steps into a situation that will surely test that mettle. Not only will he be charged with restoring the reputation of a department scarred by recent scandals, but he’ll also soon have to assess the direction of USC’s flailing football program.

Bohn said that he’d yet to meet with coach Clay Helton, whose job, with three weeks remaining in the football season, is believed to be in jeopardy.

When asked if he anticipates making a coaching change, Bohn noted that any conversation about Helton or other coaches was “premature.”

“It’s important to win,” Bohn said. “You heard the president talking about winning. I’m not trying to add more pressure to him or the student athletes that represent him, but we always want to finish strong. Good programs finish strong.”

Still, the specter of Helton’s status and the football program’s direction loomed over the proceedings Thursday, as speculation over a potential, high-profile replacement continued.

The conversation on Urban Meyer, the former Ohio State and Florida coach, isn’t likely to cease in the coming weeks, as prominent boosters continue to push for USC to passionately pursue him as Helton’s successor.

Bohn categorically denied a report that his hiring had been held up because of a disagreement about pursuing Meyer, who has three national titles to his name, but also a record of integrity questions in his past.

Later, when Folt was asked if Bohn had any limitations on a future search, she said, simply, “No.”

Any coaching decision, Bohn said, would not be made alone. As he inherits the stakes of that decision, though, his history of hiring coaches remains decidedly mixed.

His hiring of Ohio State assistant Luke Fickell at Cincinnati has proven to be a success. But over nine years at Colorado, Bohn hired and fired three coaches, while his last hire, Mike MacIntyre, lasted six seasons before his ouster.

In light of those failed football hires, Bohn was forced to resign in 2013. But where that history might cast doubt on his handling of a possible coaching search, Folt said it was how Bohn bounced back from that failure which impressed her.

“What I look for is the person,” Folt said. “You face disappointment. He talked about loving it there. What did he do? He turned around, took another place, and loved it. He took what he learned there and made it even more effective at Cincinnati. That’s the person I want, one that builds from mistakes.”

Atop a department in desperate need of a new direction, Bohn will have plenty of rebuilding to do. But on Thursday, as he was introduced, Bohn held up two fingers in the “Fight On” symbol in a nod to the tradition he was inheriting.

“I didn’t talk about coming in here and, ‘Let’s change this, let’s change that, let’s move this, let’s move that,’ ” Bohn said. “I think that’s why I introduced the concept of fight on to vic-to-ry. It’s more than fight on. It’s fight on to victory.”

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WASHINGTON — 

For much of the United States, invasive grass species are making wildfires more frequent, especially in fire-prone California, a new study finds.

Twelve non-native species act as “little arsonist grasses,” said study co-author Bethany Bradley, a University of Massachusetts professor of environmental conservation.

Wherever the common Mediterranean grass invades, including California’s southern desert, fires flare up three times more often. And cheatgrass, which covers about one-third of the Intermountain West region of the U.S., is a big-time fire promoter, Bradley said.

“I would not be surprised at all if invasive grasses are playing a role in the current fires,” Bradley said, “but I don’t think we can attribute to them directly.”

University of Utah fire expert Philip Dennison wasn’t part of the study, but he said it made sense. “In a lot of ways, California was ground zero for invasive grasses,” he said. “Much of California’s native perennial grassland was replaced by Mediterranean annual grasses over a century ago. This study doesn’t look at invasive grasses in the areas that are burning in California, but invasive grasses are contributing to the fires there.”

Experts say the areas burning now in California are more shrubs and grasses than forests, despite what President Trump tweeted over the weekend.

“This is a global problem,” said University of Alberta fire expert Mike Flannigan, who wasn’t part of the study. “I think with climate change and human assistance, we are moving to a grass world. One region they should have mentioned is Hawaii, where wildfires are increasing in large part due to invasive grasses.”

Invasive species are spreading more because of climate change as warmer weather moves into new areas, said the study’s lead author, Emily Fusco, also of the University of Massachusetts. New England and the Mid-Atlantic are seeing new invasive and more flammable grasses, Bradley said.

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The study in Monday’s journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences looks at the connections between a dozen species of invasive grasses and fires nationwide, finding fires occur more often in places with the non-native grasses. But the study did not find a link between invasive grasses and the size of the fires.

Four of these species, including cheatgrass and common Mediterranean grass, are in California. When these grasses get dry, watch out, Fusco said.

“When you start a fire normally you want kindling,” Fusco said. “The grasses are, more or less, like kindling”

If someone lights a match and throws it in the middle of a forest, it is unlikely a fire will start, but throw it in a field of cheatgrass “and odds are that it’s going to catch,” Bradley said.

“We are the reason that invasive species are here. We are the reason that they get spread around,” Bradley said.

Flannigan noted that invasive plants that are not grasses also feed the wildfire problem.

Most outside experts said the study was important. But wildfire expert LeRoy Westerling of UC Merced said that with wildfires the size of the blaze was key, so he felt this study was less valuable because it measured frequency.

Although size matters in forest fires, study author Bradley said, mid- to small-size fires are the ones “in everybody’s backyard” and affect people and their buildings more.

Every day for a year, Marsha Maus has trekked up Mulholland Highway to tend to her garden.

Her yard overflows with towering sunflowers and creeping vines, so green it looks neon. Her plot looks down on the 1960s-era section of Seminole Springs Mobile Home Park, a tidy subdivision tucked high in the Santa Monica Mountains.

Above it lies a wasteland.

“All this was torched — there was nothing left,” Maus, 75, said as she surveyed the Janus-faced landscape from her burned-out lot. “Every day I come up here, it tears me up. We get a glimpse of hope, but then it’s gone.”

For victims of the Woolsey fire, recovery has been agonizingly slow. The blaze charred 151 square miles and 1,600 structures when it ripped through Malibu, the Santa Monica Mountains and eastern Ventura County a year ago, consuming mobile homes and movie star mansions in what would become one of the most destructive wildfires in California history.

In Seminole Springs alone, 110 homes burned. But unlike their neighbors in Malibu or Westlake Village, some of whom have turned to modular units as a quick way to rebuild, fire victims here have barely set foot on the road to return.

That’s because the park lost not just homes, but the entire network of infrastructure that ran underneath them. Streets, storm drains, sewers systems, water mains, gas and electric lines — all were damaged or destroyed in the fire and its aftermath. Replacing them could take up to a year, and would cost $10 million.

“We’re still in the same place we were a year ago — there’s nothing done,” said Ester Marantz Bruce, a burned-out victim and a member of the park’s embattled board of directors. “Insurance gave me money for a year of rent, but that money is over. We now need to rent homes for another year, and we all don’t know how we will pay.”

Marantz Bruce and others on the board say the park must replace its fire-ravaged infrastructure before California Department of Housing and Community Development will allow new homes to be brought in — work they are struggling to finance. But with insurance money running out and burned-out lots languishing on the market, frustrated fire victims are pushing for a quicker fix.

The divide has pitted neighbor against neighbor in this tight-knit community. Resentment has mounted in recent weeks as plans for short-term repairs that might bring homes in sooner have foundered. On Facebook and Nextdoor, there is talk of betrayal.

“The meetings are getting tenser,” said longtime resident Richard Lohmann, an outspoken opponent of the board’s current plan. “The corporation and our eight board members are stuck on replacing everything — the rest of us want to move in.”

It’s an article of faith that rich communities and poor ones all burn the same in California’s wildfires. In reality, poor ones tend to burn faster, and worse. This is particularly true in mobile home parks, where fires spread quickly and rebuilding is slow, experts said.

More than 100 mobile home parks were affected by California wildfires last year alone, according to the California Department of Housing and Community Development, which oversees 81% of the state’s roughly 4,800 mobile home and “special occupancy” parks. Many of those that burned the year before remain empty even as neighboring tracts have rebuilt.

Residents “are often reliant on the park owners to rebuild the park after the fire before they may install a new home or repair a damaged home,” department spokeswoman Alicia Murillo wrote in an email. “Due to the size of most parks, it can often take longer … to rebuild their utility infrastructure.”

In Seminole Springs, millions of dollars of structural damage to the parks’ roads and utilities has slowed recovery to a crawl.

“It’s kind of a perfect storm,” said board member Jeremy Kerns. “Every time we find a solution, there’s a new wrinkle.”

But beneath the community’s structural crisis lies an existential one: Unlike the vast majority of mobile home parks in the country, Seminole Springs is owned and run by its residents, who have worked together for decades to keep it affordable.

Now, they must grapple together with how to rebuild it, a process that has strained the foundations of a model that experts call “the gold standard” for mobile home parks and “the most secure form of investment the homeowners can make.”

“Privately owned mobile home parks are one of our biggest sources of affordable housing, but they’re also one of the most insecure,” said Esther Sullivan, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Colorado Denver and an expert in mobile home parks. “Eighty percent of households in parks own the unit, but only 14% own the land underneath. You’re living with insecurity inscribed into the land underneath you.”

Seminole Springs was among the first parks in the country to collectivize, forming a nonprofit to purchase the land in 1986 after rent control expired in L.A. County. (It was temporarily reinstated last year, and is expected to be made permanent later this month.)

Of the half-dozen residents interviewed for this article, all were adamant they would not have moved to Seminole Springs if it were not mutually owned.

“It’s a very desirable mobile home park because it’s a co-op and all the residents own an equal share of the land, so you have a low monthly HOA payment,” said Bracken Carter, a real estate agent and mother of three who has been living with her parents in Paradise Cove since losing her home in Seminole Springs.

Assessments at Seminole Springs run between $400 and $460 a month, less than a third of what residents pay at nearby private parks and a boon for retirees. But those same low rates have left the park vulnerable in the wake of the disaster.

“In any [cooperative] mobile home park, there’s always a conflict between the members who would like to keep their rents low and the … responsibility to collect enough money to properly maintain the place,” said David Loop, vice president of resident-owned communities for the Golden State Manufactured Home Owners League. “In many homeowners associations, the reserves aren’t built up like they should be.”

A year after the Nov. 8, 2018, fire, Seminole Springs is still nowhere close to funding its rebuild, residents said.

“There’s no physical reason we couldn’t put our units back where they were before,” said Eugene Donald Michael, a 91-year-old hydrogeologist whose home was among the first to burn. “The only work that should be done right now is restorative, taking us back to where we were the day before the Woolsey fire.”

For those like him who plan to move back, every day that passes is a day he dips into the money he will need for his trailer. But those who’ve decided to leave are equally stranded. “For sale” signs dot the scorched landscape where debris has been removed, but without a clear timeline for recovery, buyers have shied from the park, Carter said.

“This is the time you wish you did have an owner of the park who would make this decision for everybody,” the real estate agent said. “A park like Paradise Cove or [Oak Forest Estates in] Westlake, they’re already ready to put homes back on. The homeowners have the flexibility to do it their way. Whereas in Seminole Springs, we’re stuck following what the corporation needs us to do, because we’re all in it together.”

Despite the park’s slow recovery, many fire victims said they still support the cooperative.

“Right now we have strain, but the moment you give it over to some private entity, forget it,” said Marantz Bruce, who is searching for a cheaper room to rent when her insurance money runs out this month. “We want our corporation to stay. But it’s so hard not to lose hope.”

A graphic video released this week by the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Department shows the moment three deputies opened fire on a man after he gunned down his girlfriend in front of them.

The Sheriff’s Department released video and 911 audio clips from last week’s fatal encounter. The 10-minute compilation video was released on the sheriff’s YouTube channel and includes commentary and a warning about coarse language and graphic imagery.

The confrontation began about 12:30 a.m. Oct. 27, when multiple callers reported that a vehicle had crashed into a tree in Carmichael east of Sacramento and a man was aiming a gun at his female companion.

Private surveillance video from outside a nearby apartment released Wednesday shows a man pulling a woman toward the apartment after the crash.

“When they come, I’m blasting you,” he’s heard saying.

The man, identified as Earnest Easterling, 25, kicks the woman, identified as Channell Brown, 23, as she sits on the ground outside the apartment. He paces in and out of the frame as a dog barks in the background.

While the two are seen scuffling on camera, neighbors help children who were inside the apartment to safety, Sgt. Tess Deterding said.

Brown is heard crying in the video while seemingly trying to calm Easterling. At one point, Deterding says, Easterling walks away before returning with a 50-round drum magazine attached to a handgun, which can be seen in the video.

“None of these events and details were reported [to 911 dispatchers],” the sheriff’s spokeswoman said. “Deputies were unaware of the gravity of the situation as they arrived on scene.”

Deputies arrived about 10 minutes later. In the video, a woman runs from the apartment building to direct them, warning them that the suspect has a gun.

Easterling and Brown are off-camera when deputies initially order them to put their hands up and move away from the doorway. Brown complies and then pauses, calling for Easterling to do the same.

As she walks out of view, Easterling can be seen in the video charging after her and repeatedly shooting. Deputies immediately open fire on Easterling as screams are heard in the background.

Both Brown and Easterling were pronounced dead at the scene. The shooting is under investigation.

According to Deterding, who provides commentary throughout the video, Easterling was arrested in Nevada in 2016 for possession of a concealed firearm, possession of a gun with an altered serial number and possession of marijuana. He had not been convicted of any gun-related charges, which allowed him to purchase a Glock handgun in 2017 and use it in the attack on Brown.

Shortly after Brown’s death, her family told KTXL-TV she had been in an abusive relationship with Easterling.

“My sister was a beautiful person, inside and out, who loved hard and as a result is no longer with us,” Brown’s sister Keonna Brown said.

Sacramento County sheriff’s officials ended the video with a list of resources available to domestic violence victims.

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KINGS CANYON NATIONAL PARK, Calif. — 

Authorities say a man found dead in California’s Kings Canyon National Park matches the description of a missing hiker.

The National Park Service says searchers discovered the body Thursday on a glacier at the base of Mount Darwin in the eastern Sierra Nevada.

Investigators will determine whether it’s 40-year-old Alan Stringer of Huntington Beach. His family reported him missing on Monday.

The peak named for Charles Darwin is in a remote and scenic section of the national park where several mountains are named for promoters of the theory of evolution.

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Tired aphorisms on free will and fate plunge writer-director Oliver Mann’s chaotic crime-drama “Such a Funny Life” into a humdrum groove of situations and reactions from which it never emancipates itself. Three distinct time periods in an aspiring comedian’s troubled existence come up short in their task of characterizing him as a multidimensional survivor of psychological abuse.

Unresolved hurt stemming from a dreadful upbringing courtesy of his bitter, ex-con father still mortifies David Gutierrez (Gonzalo Trigueros), even now that he’s amassed considerable recognition as a stand-up performer. Self-assured in front of the microphone, the bearded jokester crumbles when past sorrows resurface.

Unnecessarily and sporadically narrated by the protagonist’s mentally unstable mother (Nastasha Strang), this stale New York tale teems with flashbacks, including to the antihero’s teenage years, when his drug-dealing friends committed a vile crime for him.

Contrary to the exaggerated inflections and mannerisms of his costars, Trigueros doesn’t succumb to the urge to ham it up. In fact, the movie’s most laudable trait is his feasible transition from scrappy, beanie-wearing scoundrel to virile and creative L.A. resident.

With an air of gritty nostalgia, the hues that tinge the frames and the cinematography in general, generate the illusion of a higher production value. Mann, an emerging Latino filmmaker, exhibits signs of vocation for the craft that could lead to a more fruitful product some day. For now, what he serves is a tortuous trick with a confusingly dark punch line for an ending.

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Writer-director Josh Aronson’s moving documentary “To Be of Service” takes an intimate, respectful look at the effects of post-traumatic stress disorder on U.S. military veterans and the ways in which pairing up with specially trained service dogs dramatically improve their emotional and physical well-being.

Aronson (2000’s Oscar-nominated doc “Sound and Fury”) memorably immerses us in the tough, complex lives of an array of vets who candidly recount their harrowing experiences serving in Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam; the traumas that followed them home (to New York, Wisconsin, Montana, North Carolina and elsewhere); and the painful road to their varying degrees of recovery. Several mental health professionals informatively weigh in as well.

The film also depicts how, if these soldiers’ PTSD never disappears, they can learn to manage it with support from family and fellow veterans, therapy, medication, exercise and more. But it’s the stabilizing and comforting presence of a service dog that uniquely helps ease such injurious consequences of PTSD such as fear, paranoia, loneliness and suicidal thoughts.

It’s hard not to be taken by these beautiful animals’ intelligence and devotion. More specifics about the dogs’ training, care and the costs involved would have been a plus. Otherwise, it’s a stirring portrait of war, duty, sacrifice and the love of a good dog.

“The Tower,” an animated feature by Norwegian writer-director Mats Grorud, is both a political protest and a lament for a lost way of life, reminiscent of “Barefoot Gen,” Keiji Nakazawa’s first-person account of the bombing of Hiroshima.

Wardi, a bright 11-year-old Palestinian girl, lives with her extended family in a refugee camp in Lebanon. She adores her great-grandfather Sidi, who was one of the first settlers there after he lost his home in Galilee when Israel was founded in 1948. Four generations of the family long to return to that home and the prospects of a better life, their hope symbolized by the house key Sidi passes on to Wardi.

Grorud uses stop-motion animation for Wardi’s daily life and 2-D animation for the prolonged flashbacks of her relatives’ struggles against Israeli forces. Although he presents his story passionately, the narrative is undercut by the limits of the animation. Neither the stop-motion puppets nor the 2-D figures express the deeply felt emotions the artist tries to convey. “The Tower” demands nuanced acting comparable to the stop motion in “Kubo and the Two Strings” or the drawn animation in Isao Takahata’s “The Grave of the Fireflies.” Grorud and his artists haven’t reached that level of polish.

“The Tower” is an angry, ambitious and often moving film from an underrepresented group, but its story might have been told more effectively in live action.

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‘Primal’

It’s usually best to approach any B-movie with lowered expectations; but it’s hard not to get excited about the premise for “Primal,” in which the ever-offbeat Nicolas Cage plays Frank Walsh, an exotic animal collector who’s escorting his latest catch on a transoceanic voyage when a rogue U.S. Marine escapes federal custody and frees the menagerie.

Kevin Durand plays the psychopath, who relies on Frank’s spider monkeys and tapirs — plus one rare white jaguar — to distract the ship’s crew, while he evades the U.S. attorney (Michael Imperioli) and the Navy neurologist (Famke Janssen) who’ve been assigned to keep him alive until he can be interrogated back home.

So we’ve got expert hunters and wild game playing cat-and-mouse on the high seas. Pretty fun, right?

Alas, “Primal” ends up being more exhausting than awesome. Cage and Durand chew the scenery like trenchermen; and Janssen and Imperioli are far more charismatic than their roles require. But while director Nicholas Powell is a veteran stunt coordinator, his movie is decidedly lacking in eye-popping action.

For the most part, the jungle creatures end up being a non-factor, as “Primal” devolves into scene after scene of overly serious guys and gals delivering earnest — and static — monologues, while pointing guns at each other. Even the cargo vessel proves dreary. It looks like a typical action movie warehouse, filling the background of every shot with featureless gray metal and drab wooden boxes.

Unfortunately, even by the relaxed standards of trash cinema, “Primal” is dispiritingly tame.

————-

‘Cold Brook’

The veteran character actor William Fichtner makes his directorial debut with “Cold Brook,” an offbeat indie drama he co-wrote with Cain DeVore. Fichtner also stars, as a blue collar small-towner who stumbles into a paranormal conundrum.

Fichtner and Kim Coates play Ted and Hilde, respectively, maintenance men at a small college near Syracuse. Harold Perrineau plays a troubled centuries-old ghost named Gil, who appears at the college’s history museum, looking for some closure that — for reasons that eventually become clear — only these middle-aged white men can provide.

Fichtner has good intentions, tying his character’s mid-life crisis to something meaningful, with roots in America’s racist past and Ted’s own macho short-sightedness. As Ted and Hilde investigate Gil’s story, both men also upset their loving wives (played by Robin Weigert and Mary Lynn Rajskub), whose uncommon tolerance for male bonding doesn’t extend to their husbands risking their jobs, by traipsing around the countryside with a needy apparition.

Ultimately, though, strong performances and a deep level of personal feeling can’t keep “Cold Brook” from feeling scattered and slight. Fichtner’s love for upstate New York — and his interest in exploring the dynamic of longtime married couples — makes this movie easy to root for. But he doesn’t have much of a story, or much of a directorial eye. His passion project is admirable but minor.

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‘Danger Close’

The explosive, action-packed Vietnam War movie “Danger Close” dramatizes a story that even a lot of military buffs don’t know, about the Battle of Long Tan, where a vastly outmanned scouting patrol of Australian and New Zealand soldiers fended off the Viet Cong forces surrounding the ANZAC base. Travis Fimmel stars as Major Harry Smith, a coldly calculating commander who gradually comes to respect the courage and cunning of his inexperienced troops.

Director Kriv Stenders — working from a script by Stuart Beattie — treats this subject with the gravity of such classic Australian wartime dramas as “Breaker Morant” and “Gallipoli,” which both examine a nation’s character via stories of men tested by a battlefield’s moral quandaries. The soldiers here, though, come across as too stock, drawn more from pulp adventures than from history. “Danger Close” lacks the sophistication and maturity of a great war movie.

That said, fans of elaborately staged battle sequences will find a lot to appreciate, given that the actual skirmishes at Long Tan went through several phases, affected by heavy rain, misty mud-clouds and the availability of air support. Anyone interested in the complexities and controversies surrounding Australia and New Zealand’s involvement in Vietnam may find “Danger Close” disappointing. But the movie actually works OK as one long fight scene.

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‘Ballet Blanc’

Some micro-budget horror leans heavy on atmosphere and formulaic jump-scares. Then there are movies such as writer-director Anne-Sophie Dutoit’s “Ballet Blanc,” which aim to upset viewers with unrelenting oddity. Dutoit, though, pushes her needle too far into the red, tilting her film from the bizarre to the inscrutable.

Shelley Starrett plays a raspy-voiced eccentric named Mrs. Willis, who adopts a long-haired orphan boy named Coco (Colter Carlbom-Mann) with a passion for music and dance. The strange new family — and their disturbing penchant for blood sacrifices — attracts the attention of a local pastor and social worker, Wax Crevice (Brian Woods), whose inquiry provokes an explosion of violence.

A curious framing device — which sees these same three characters adopting different personae — gives “Ballet Blanc” a dreamlike quality. But more often than not, it feels like Dutoit uses shock and surrealism as a way to cover up for the movie’s plodding pace, crude blocking and nonsensical story. It’s admirable that she’s trying to defy convention here, but the result is something ultimately too befuddling to disturb.

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‘Acceleration’

The inaptly named “Acceleration” stars Natalie Burn as Rhona, a skilled assassin tracking down her kidnapped son, in a movie that quickly becomes just another plodding, underwritten underworld shoot-‘em-up. Dolph Lundgren brings a little pizazz — but just a little — to the role of Vladik, the crime boss who sets Rhona’s mission in motion, treating it like one big game.

Screenwriter Michael Merino — who also co-directed with Daniel Zirilli — mixes together a bit of “Kill Bill,” a drop of “Drive,” a touch of “Taken” and a hefty helping of “John Wick.” (There’s scarcely a Z-grade crime movie these days that doesn’t rip off “John Wick.”) But while Burn gives an OK performance as Rhona, the heroine’s bloody rampage through various mob dens is mostly tedious, featuring more chitchat than action. “Acceleration” is like a quest story with all the cool complications and nifty narrow escapes removed.