Weary of the whack on the head and the full body blow that is blockbuster American cinema at its mostest?

Tired of the car chase, not to mention the F1 car race, the many, many guns that appear in the first reel and must be fired both then and in the second?

Then “Familiar Touch” is the flick for you.

I was privileged last week to attend one of its premiere Southern California screenings at the Glendale Laemmle along with a theater-full of its co-stars and extras.

That’s because the art-house movie, for a decade a passion project of director and screenwriter Sarah Friedland, was almost entirely shot in the common rooms, the residents’ apartments and the outdoor spaces of Pasadena’s Villa Gardens, the revered retirement community near Lake Avenue and Villa Street. “Familiar Touch” is about a woman with dementia who begins to adjust to her new life in a home for older people. In the film, residents not only play many of the roles — they worked on the crew, and participated in filmmaking workshops prior to the shooting. It earned three awards in the 2024 Venice Film Festival Orizzonti Competition, including the Lion of the Future, best director and best actress for the extraordinary Kathleen Chalfant as a retired Altadena homemaker and chef who can no longer live on her own — although she doesn’t quite understand that until her architect son shows up ostensibly for lunch one day but actually to move her out of her sweet mid-century modern and down Lake to Villa.

“Touch” has opened nationwide, and the reviews show how widespread is the hankering for just about the quietest, least plot-driven movie you’ll ever see.

“Movies about dementia tend to present it like something out of a horror movie,” writes Alison Willmore in New York Magazine. “But ‘Familiar Touch’ is something more generous — an account of dementia not as an end but as a period of transition.” She calls Chalfant’s acting “astounding.”

Chalfant’s performance “feels at once utterly authentic and like the product of long experience,” writes Zachary Barnes in The Wall Street Journal. “A master class” in acting, he calls it, and says the movie avoids sentimentalizing “what it can instead simply and honestly depict.”

Justin Chang in The New Yorker calls “Touch” “quietly wrenching” while at the same time it “illuminates its protagonist’s condition with uncommon concision and grace, and with few of the narrative strategies we’ve come to expect.”

In other words, not only no car chases nor guns — no stupid plot twists that happen only in Hollywood.

Instead, just a performance by Chalfant that is “furiously alive.”

Villa Gardens folks are having so much fun with the success of the movie they helped create. Longtime resident Jean Owen traveled to Chicago to promote it, and heads to Boston soon, after helping to cast it and nailing a speaking role as the MC for a speed-dating night.

Ripples of applause went through the Laemmle as a neighbor would take a star turn. The only complaint from the cast? You can’t believe how cold the food can get when you have to sit at a luncheon table for four hours just to shoot a two-minute scene. That’s Tinseltown, babe.

Wednesday at random

Talk about doom-scrolling. My social feeds this week were filled with six-month anniversary videos from Altadena’s devastation in the Eaton fire, some of which I’d never seen — residents driving through the streets on which I grew up as every house on every block burned down to the ground. An anniversary with absolutely nothing to celebrate. Although we all do appreciate the ongoing work of Supervisor Kathryn Barger, of Altadena Town Council Chair Victoria Knapp, of Rep. Judy Chu, of Altadena Heritage Chair Hans Allhoff and the other community leaders fighting Big Insurance and for the rights of the burned out. I even dug what Gov. Gavin Newsom said Monday at PCC: “It’s about partnership. You want to go fast, you go alone. You want to go far, you go together.” That’s the spirit that has caused USC Annenberg School leaders to create a summer journalism course, the Wildfire Youth Media Initiative, for high school students from Altadena and the Palisades I’ll lecture at next week about learning to craft their own stories of resilience and recovery out of the flames of the fires.

Write the public editor at lwilson@scng.com