Movie Nation

The Grateful Dead may be dead, but Deadheadism lives on in the global “Let’s try Ayahuasca, ‘shrooms, (hallucinogenic) sage and toads” set — the “consciousness” pathfinders among us.

Well, the idle, entitled and easily bored among us, anyway.

“Wetiko” is a short, strange trip into the land of the Maya and the toads that you’re just supposed to lick, man. It’s about a young man of Mayan ancestry lured into delivering toads to an “Empire of Love” commune founded by a South African cult leader in the mountainous, cavernous back country of Mexico.

It’s “inspired by a true story,” but really, what is “truth?” In the cinema, that’s a slippery concept. In cults, it’s whatever Dear Leader says it is.

Aapo (Juan Daniel García Treviño) doesn’t wrestle with deep thoughts like that. He works in his mother’s pet store and patiently listens to her explain the restrictions on toad sales and toad “use” to the slim, sexy customer (Dalia Xiuhcoatl) who flashes a lot of cash in an effort to “rent” toads when buying some is out of the question.

Her local shamanka’s name is all Mom needs to hear to agree to the cash deal. But our customer uses her feminine wiles to talk Aapo into “delivering” the toads. He, like his mother, knows how to “milk” them? Right?

Next thing we know Aapo’s ripped-off some yankee tourist’s Honda 250 and screwdriver-started his way into the back country. He figures he’ll deliver the toads, making sure Yavetzi the shamanka is around to handle them, collect the cash and maybe ogle — and more — the female acolytes of the Empire of Love.

The bearded Afrikaans, English and Spanish speaking Zake (Neil Sandilands) is a dictionary of New Age doublespeak, psychobabble and gobbledegook. He talks up the “portals of remembrance” and “the interfade” to his “star being” acolytes — with some new paying customer “Tiktok shaman” influencers on board for a special “Moon” ceremony.

He doesn’t want to hear Aapo is “just the delivery boy, not the medicine man.” He wants the kid to milk the toads. And maybe “listen for the sound of our ancestors, calling us home.”

The Maya’s ancestors? Zake’s South African. Patronizing contempt for “native” people is in his DNA.

“They don’t know they’re special. That’s exactly what MAKES them special!”

Zake, his bait Luz (Xihcoatl), Ms. “perfect abs” muscle Sasha (Bárbara de Regil) and “climatologist turned influencer” Frankie (Jordan Barrett) and assorted Mayans named Maria or Felipe seem determined to pull this ceremony off. As Aapo is drugged, threatened, robbed and injured, we wonder about his role in this “ritual” and if he told Mom he wouldn’t be home for dinner.

Writer-director Kerry Mondragón maintains a sinister tone through much of “Wetiko,” and we fear for Aapo the moment he gets on that bike that he steals. These cultists have heat-vision goggles for chasing escapees through their caves and firearms along with a lot of airy-fairy sales pitches in their “free yourself” mantras.

Mondragón’s script strains to deliver anything particularly surprising — a bug in the ear calamity, the repeated suggestions of “We have no secrets here” and what might happen to one’s tongue if the wrong secret is exposed.

I liked the ironic needle-drop of The Tremeloes’ one-hit in the opening and finale. But the odd bit of distorted lens tripping or heat-vision chasing doesn’t pay off, and there’s no attempted visualization of the “whiteout” nature of toad toxin drug trips.

The logic of it all — Mayans repeatedly warn Aapo not to “stay for the ceremony — works. And Sandilands makes a decent enough archetypal cult king.

“It’s OK, Luz. I talk to God!“

But sinister as this often feels, the pedestrian direction, sloppy confusion of “frogs” and “toads” and the third act’s parade of perfunctory script beats bogs the film down. “Wetiko” never quite escapes the feel of genre pic that doesn’t quite come off.

Rating: unrated, violence, drug abuse, nudity, profanity

Cast: Juan Daniel García Treviño, Neil Sandilands, Dalia Xiuhcoatl, Jordan Barrett and
Bárbara de Regil

Credits: Scripted and directed by Kerry Mondragón. A Dekanalog release.

Running time: 1:31

The many unattractive faces and personality traits of deeply flawed humanity cross the screen in “The Ugly,” a Korean murder mystery and human nature parable from the filmmaker of the zombie thrillers “Train to Busan,” “Seoul Station” and “Peninsula.”

It isn’t the undead who are hideous in this one. It’s petty people lacking self-awareness and — to bend Hannah Arendt’s most infamous phrase — “the banality of cruelty” that writer-director Sang-ho Yeon holds a mirror up to.

Yeong-gyu (Hae-hyo Kwan) has been a fixture in his Seoul neighborhood for decades. He’s a blind artisan who gives the lie to the “misconception” that “the blind” have no idea of what consistutes “beauty.”

Yeong-gyu carves lovely, tiny embossing stamps with a person or business’s name on them, using just his fingers to spell out and shape the Korean language characters. He and his small shop have been the subject of feature stories and TV profiles over the years. We meet him as another perky, persistent TV producer (Ji-hyeon Han) is questioning him and the sighted, 40ish son (Jeong-min Park) who has taken over the business.

But the lightly inspiring feature story the TV gang has in mind takes a turn when son Dong-hwan gets a call from the police. They’ve found his mother’s body. Dad always told him that mom “ran away” from them. Now bones, buried on a nearby hillside, reveal her fate forty years ago. Or some of it.

The ugliness starts at the funeral, where Dong-hwan and producer Kim are abruptly subjected to surviving members of his mother’s family. They are rude and blunt about the “inheritance” he won’t be getting. His mother “stole jewelry” when she fled the family, they say. As a cruel kicker, they mention that no there are no photographs of the late Yeong-hee and for good reason. .

“She was ugly,” the most callous aunt to attend declares, in Korean with English subtitles.

The family who hated her and the blind husband who may have lied about why and how Mom “left” are the first two suspects in what becomes the new focus of the TV crew’s documentary — “Who killed Yeong-hee?” The dazed and grieving Dong-hwan is dragged along as he’s too polite to demand one and all back the hell off while he mourns and absorbs all he learns.

They meet former co-workers and Mom’s old boss, with producer Park smiling and questioning one and all and secretly recording the interviewees. Dong-hwan would never have found these people without the resources of the TV journalists. But he’s haplessly caught up in this sketchy “secret” taping, forced to pass himself off as a disinterested “writer” on the show while one tactless creep after another trashes his mother, her appearance and who had a reason to kill her.

Lengthy flashbacks take us back to the ’70s sweatshop where Mom worked, taunted by colleagues with the nickname “Dung Ogre” and ill-used by one and all. Only one person who “knew her when” seems the least bit remorseful about how she was treated and her final fate.

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You don’t need a wine buzz to “appreciate” “The Napa Boys,” a vulgar, lowbrow and clumsily unfunny send of up “Sideways” and lots of pop culture of similar vintage. But it probably helps.

There have been good reviews of this double-shot of diarrhea. Not many sober ones. Me? I could not be more disappointed if it had been about anarchic 40ish auto parts clerks on a bender in Motor City.

The novelty of it is its exercise in world-building, creating a sequel to a movie that neither needs nor could withstand one. We’re dropped in, mid-fame, on the careers of the (way-too-old) sons of the characters Paul Giamatti and Thomas Haden Church played for Alexander Payne back in 2004. The “Juniors” have become famous comic book creators and wine lovers, with podcasts obsessively devoted to their hijinks and a hint of mystery about whether their “graphic novel” adventures are fiction or “We LIVE the story” real.

Long in the tooth Miles Jr. (Armin Weitzman) is still mourning his late wife and unnamed (No room on the tombstone?) “little girl.” Jack Jr. (Nick Corirossi) has his Toyota FJ wrapped as a “Wine Wagon” for, we assume, tours of wine country. And he’s grabbing Miles Jr. “to get you laid” up Solvang way.

The first big “joke” of the movie — after that tombstone side-splitter — is the vanity plate on that Toyota — “IH8MRLT.” If you bust a gut over that, have I got a film festival “midnight movie” for you.

Sarah Ramos plays The Napa Boys’ “biggest fan,” an “investigative podcaster” who’s decided to follow them as they reunite with their other mates and recruit “Stiffler’s Brother” (Jamar Malachi Neighbors) to join their ranks for a quest supposedly plotted by the unseen, all-knowing and mystical “Sommelier,” whose emerald set tastevin will be their guide.

Their “grapes before gals” ethos may go out the window with Puck around. Not sure how that ever played into “get you laid,” in either “Sideways” or this abortive stepchild.

They roll up on gay vintner “Boy” Mitch (Mike Mitchell) as he’s stomping grapes in a grape barrel, with one and all sampling his raw grape juice with Dr. Scholl’s undertones and pronouncing it grand.

Mitch’s Winery is to compete in The Great Grape Festival’s wine-judging competition, which Jack Jr.’s sudden bout of intestinal distress sabotages via a drawn-out, butt-naked bowel movement over the submitted competition barrel. And that low point in the movie might win the Boys’ vintner nemesis, the racist/homophobic (but effeminaate) Squirm (Paul Rust) of Squirm Vineyards another blue ribbon.

What one hesitates long and hard before labeling “story beats” follow “Sideways” about as much as they mimic “The Lord of the Rings.” “Random” is the rule of the day as the picture could not set out to get more things wrong and be a bigger bungle.

Makeout music for the two waitresses Jack and Miles Juniors pick up (Vanessa Chester and Chloe Cherry) involves putting on an LP by The Chipmunks. Riffs on :American Pie,” “Fergully: The Last Rainforest” and the oeuvre of Kevin Smith, who makes an AARP-ready cameo in the third act with his other half, Jason Mewes, play like blind men groping for a laugh in the dark.

The acting isn’t up to carrying off jokes that FanDuel wouldn’t give odds of ever coming off and ranges from amateurish to adequate. Ray Wise, is that you?

The picture is artlessly shot and edited as well, with Corirrosi and Weitzman scripting and Corirossi directing. Scene after scene, starting with the opening “Ah, Napa Valley in the vine-barren browns of winter” shot, begins with dead space — pointless, paceless footage — and is cut well after the shot or the scene’s payoff.

Perhaps that, like the very basic blunders about wine and the protocols of wine-judging, was intentional. Smith goes all “Ratatouille,” daring anybody to criticize the movie because “We’re all just trying,” or CYA platititudes to that effect. He looks a little embarrassed. With cause.

Because somebody had family or whatever connections to get this flailing, winded lower-than-low comedy out of film festival midnight showings, where it belonged, and into distribution. More’s the pity.

Rating: unrated, sexual and scatalogical humor, profanity

Cast: Armin Weitzman, Nick Corirossi, Sarah Ramos, Jamar Malachi Neighbors, Chloe Cherry, Mike Mitchell, Vanessa Chester, David Wain, Raul Rust and Ray Wise, with Jason Mewes and Kevin Smith.

Credits: Directed by Nick Corirossi, scripted by Nick
Corirossi and Armin Weitzman. A Magnolia release.

Running time: 1:32

Generations have been introduced to the no-named stranger who is quick to kill or maim and even quicker with a quip through the Clint Eastwood Sergio Leone Western “A Fistful of Dollars” (1964), the Bruce Willis/Walter Hill Depression Era Western “Last Man Standing” of 1996 or other variations on that theme.

But even the “original” version of “Let’s you and them fight” is a Western with samurai, and no sagebrush. “Yojimbo.” one of Kurosawa’s greatest collaborations with his muse, Toshirô Mifune, has brothels and sake breweries instead of saloons, silkworm farming instead of cattle ranching and swordfighting instead of shootouts.

Theres a body count, and laughs to go along with it — wisecracks to a coffin builder/undertaker, geishas and bungling bosses and their hapless minions. The musical score has jaunty Western touches in the orchestration and arrangment.

And as it’s set @ 1860, a pistol is introduced and the undoing of the samurai era and code are foretold as the tale is tied to the “end of an era” movies Hollywood has put on horseback since the beginning of cinema.

Action comedies have been around since Keystone Studios unleashed mayhem and its famed Keystone Cops on the (silent) moviegoing public. But the genre didn’t really find its template until Hitchcock’s 1959 classic, “North by Northwest.”

Kurosawa raised the stakes, the violence and the body count and established many of the tropes of these films with his tale of a Rōnin who wanders into a divided town and figures out how to manipulate the combatants for bloody fun and profit.

Our rogue warrior (Mifune) wanders into the (black and white) wilderness frame and decides where to go next by tossing a stick in the air at a crossroads. That’s how he winds up in a frightened town where a brothel owner, Seibe (Seizaburô Kawazu) is at war with a former lieutenant, Ushitora (Kyû Sazanka).

The men have armed goons to carry out their fight for control. Everybody else has to live with the consequences of this mayhem and ongoing murderous threat.

That’s what our stranger learns from the “old man” tavern keeper (Eijirô Tôno) who is resigned to struggle on here, and to serve as the deliverer of much of the narrative’s exposition. He’s the one who eventually coaxes a name out of our swordighter– Sanjuro.

Crooked mayor to sake brewer, everybody’s entangled in this fight, even those who refuse to take sides. Only the cooper/woodworker/coffin maker (Atsushi Watanabe) sees profit in all this conflict.

One and all can tell from our Rōnin‘s confident and belligerent stride that he’s “tough.” So it takes no time at all for one and then both of the factions to try and hire him as a “bodyguard,” aka “yōjinbō.” But a smart samurai sees all the angles, and not just the ones he knows from swordfighting. There’s more money to be made by convincing one and then the other boss that he’ll sign on to their gang.

Brawls, killings and kidnappings ensue, threats and hostages are exchanged, schemes are hatched and who will get the better of whom is very much in doubt.

One gangster has a violent, hulking monobrowed goof of a son (Daisuke Katô). One gang has a “giant” (the Lurch-sized Tsunagorô Rashômon). And only one gang can up the ante when a sadistic son (Tatsuya Nakadai) shows up, a preening punk with a pistol — a revolver he’s quick to set off to end any fight or argument.

In this maelstrom, who will live, who will die and who will double cross whom are the burning questions this much-copied plot will answer. We hope.

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The two old men bickering on a bench could be there in “2030, 1984, 506” or whenever, an opening title of “Strangers in the Park” tells us.

This tale is “timeless” is the message. This movie is an “I’m Not Rappaport” writer-director Juan José Campanella is a lot slower to admit.

It’s always been a talky two-hander, a very static and melodramatic “filmed play,” in this case, with the filming taking place in a Buenos Aires park.

But a lot of the comedy — old men lying, puffing up their past or having no tolerance for those who lie, the old “I’m not Rappaport” comedy sketch at its center — translates well enough. And veteran stars Luis Brandoni and Eduardo Blanco are spot-on as the two leads, elderly “strangers” who meet and bicker and recall their pasts as they do.

Antonio (Blanco) has the tremors of a very old man, one content to sit on his favorite bench, take in the air, the sunshine and the solitude as he reads his paper.

Abel — Or is it Mobutu, Leon or some other name he trots out? — won’t have that. He (Brandoni) is a colorful character with lots of indentities and “careers,” stories about Rwandan liberation, his legal work, psychiactric expertise and recruitment — in his dotage — to be a secret agent.

“‘He’s an old man,'” Abel says his recruiter marveled. “‘No one will notice him.'”

Antonio, an 80something still maintaining the ancient boiler at his apartment building, is over it when we meet these two. He’s not listening to this pathological “liar” any more.

They’re not lies, they’re “alerations,” the not-quite-mysterious “stranger” Abel shrugs. “Sometimes the truth doesn’t fit me.”

Abel lies on the fly, passing himself off as a lawyer, a police official, a shrink and a mobster as their day and evening of chat progresses.

He is, we think, a Jewish leftist of the Old School — labor and civil rights protests, “an old Polack” who moved to Argentina and agitated against the injustices and political and civil rights crimes of the past half century there.. Abel isn’t having shrunken Antonio’s timid state, nor his rosy reminiscences about the past.

“Nostalgia kills more old people than heart attacks,” he intones, in Spanish with English subtitles.

Over the course of their long day together, Abel will pass himself off as an expert in this or that, intervene in Antonio’s impending forced-retirement and eviction, lie to his concerned daughter (Verónica Pelaccini0 and enlist Antonio in a scheme to save a young damsel (Manuela Menéndez) in the park.

“All pretty girls have a glow about them,” he swoons. “Now all I see is the glow.”

“I don’t KNOW this man,” Antonio insists to any who will listen.

Brandoni — recently seen in “The Weasel’s Tale” but whose career the started in the ’60s — has the more colorful character to play, and he oozes charm as the aged hustler and teller of tall tales. I was more impressed with Blanco (“Son of the Bride,” “20,000 Besos”) grappling with the affectations of the extremely-aged, and never losing the tremors, the squint or outrage.

“Rappaport” was always just witty enough to get by, although I’ve yet to see a stage production or film version of it (Ossie Davis and Walter Matthau were in the ’96 movie) that didn’t drag drag drag. Campanella’s film is 20 minutes shorter than that one, and still never quite shuffles up to speed.

But it’s fun to realize this most big city American of plays still hits its notes in Argentine Spanish, in an Argentine park, with English subtitles — even if the characters are little more than “types,” even if the indignities and infirmities of old age vastly limit the shtick that’s possible.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, smoking, profanity

Cast: Luis Brandoni and Eduardo Blanco, with
Manuela Menéndez and Verónica Pelaccini

Credits: Scripted and directed by Juan José Campanella. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:55

Disney/Pixar’s “Hoppers” bounced out of the gate Thursday and sprinted through Friday for a $13 million dollar “opening day,” a harbinger of a $46 million opening weekend.

That’ll be at least $15 million more than the non-Disney “GOAT” hit when it opened Valentine’s Day weekend. But that’s a far cry from last November’s blockbuster–still in cinemas — “Zootopia 2” debut. That’s a Disney Feature Animation release.

Pixar, which has lost its box office mojo as the platinum standard for blockbuster openings, hasn’t had a hit this big since “Coco” some nine years ago. And that opened at a pre-Trumpflation $50 million.

Reviews have been more mixed than you’d think if you took moviegoing advice from the compromised cheerleaders over at RT. For an eco-friendly film with an “Avatar” twist on the old “If I could talk with the animals” trope, it’s seriously lacking in decent laughs.

“The Bride!” is looking like Warner Bros. last waltz, and a bust. As the studio starts the process of being devoured by evil Larry Ellison and Paramount, an ill-advised “Joker” take on “The Bride!” of Frankenstein will play its part in their demise as an “independent” media empire.

I joked in my review of this frenetic, chaotic screech of rage that Netflix must have caught an early preview and decided it wouldn’t up its bid for WB based on the bomb-in-the-making. It only rang up $3 million Thursday night and Friday.

Deadline says its on track to earn $40 million, worldwide, on its opening, but only $7 million here, good enough for a third place finish on its debut weekend.

Will it clear more than the $80 million it cost? Will it cost Jessie Buckley her “Hamnet” shot at an Oscar? Absoluately not and probably not.

I saw it in an empty theater in Flyover America at 7:15 on Thursday night. Empty.

“Scream 7” is on track to come in second this weekend, taking in just over $17. Weak reviews and Palestinian protest replacement of its leads controversy didn’t ding its opening last week, but nobody’s seeing this one twice. If it hits $18 million, that’d be a 72 percent plummet. Day-em.

“GOAT” took $6.6 million weekend and fourth place.

“Wuthering Heights” is still in the top five, earning another $3.75 million. That may put it just shy of $80 million, and added to its over $200 million worldwide take. Whatever it does on weekends, this Margot Robbie/Jacob Elordi sexing up (more of a heavy-breathing tease, I thought) take on Emily Bronte’s novel is keeping the lights on in cinemas on weekdays, where it has been #1, #2 or #3 pretty much since it opened.

“Crime 101,” “Send Help,” “I Can Only Imagine 2” “EPIC: Elvis Presley in Concert” and and the re-release of that “Demon Slayer” anime thing finshed off the top ten.

“How to Make a Killing” exited the top ten, as did “Zootopia 2.”

We can all stop fretting over Margot Robbie’s long-term cinematic prospects. She finally has a bonafide star-vehicle romance/blockbuster on her resume, a smash that isn’t the epic “movie of its moment” event that was “Barbie” or a “Suicide Squad” comic book fan film.

Three weeks into its run, Robbie’s remake of that romantic warhorse “Wuthering Heights” has cleared $200 million at the international box office.

But Robbie’s reputation for bringing sex and sin and skin to movies that beg for that level of commitment aside, a serious film buff can be forgiven for dawdling about getting around to this latest “Wuthering.” There’ve been something like 30 different film versions of the tale of the girl-and-boy raised as near siblings whose adult love takes a back seat to marrying money, with the attendant frustrations of passion denied.

What’s “new” about this take? Aside from the Charlie XCX soundtrack? What more can the gloomy moors hold for us?

This might feature the hottest pairing of leads in the roles ever, with Robbie’s sex symbol of her moment status. Co-star Jacob Elordi (“Saltburn,” “Priscilla”) is properly brooding and hunky, and certainly the furriest Heathcliff the screen has ever seen.

Catherine’s “Oh, you are handsome, you brute” never seemed more redundant. Nor does her “You are a dog in a manger” description of her true love, whom she abandoned when she married well to escape her “ruined” circumstances, the dank of her family’s Wuthering Heights mansion and the alcoholic gambler father (Martin Clunes) who brought them to that state.

Actress turned Oscar-nominated “Promising Young Woman” writer, director and producer Emerald Fennell has hyped her film as “hyper-sexualized,” with a lot of the palpable longing of Emily Brontë’s heroine and hero rendered in turgid tones and panting performances.

But watching “Wuthering” as the hype fades just underscores what a tease the entire tale has been turned into. More sensual than sexual and far less sexy than it seems to take itself for, this rainswept, fog-choked “Wuthering” withers on the production-designed-to-death vine.

It is an act of kindness attributed to the dipsomaniacal Mr. Earnshaw (Clunes, TV’s “Doc Martin”) that brings the sullen, silent and beaten down young Heathcliff (Owen Cooper) to Wuthering Heights.

The struggling household, led by housekeeper/companion Nelly (Hong Chau) may grouse about the extra mouth to feed. And they know their boss’s “kindness” is a mood, one dependent on how much alcohol he’s imbibed.

But young Cathy (Charlotte Mellington) is delighted with this new “pet.” She attends to him tirelessly and are pair-bonded forever in their tweens and teens.

When years pass and Catherine is “well past spinsterhood,” their connection is tested. There’s a rich new neighbor in the mansion across the nearly-treeless moors, a Mr. Linton.

“I suppose he shall fall in love with me” the breathtaking blonde sighs. But when she can’t get a rise out of Heathcliff with that, and after one more sizing up of her dissolute dad?

“I suppose I shall have to throw myself at Mr. Linton after all!”

They marry. Heathcliff leaves, ostensibly for some final polishing into a “gentleman.” And when he returns, well-off, clean-shaven and groomed to Jane Austen’s exacting standards, it’s time to truly test the limits of their affection and the fear of “the fires” nipping at their feet from Hell as they give in to Satanic temptation.

Truth be told, as this latest “Wuthering” staggered along, failing to reach anything like new “Heights,” it wasn’t the Charlie XCX Muzak I was hearing. It was the coquettish Kate Bush singing her breathrough single inspired by this timeworn tale.

The 1978 Bush interpretation of Brontë was deep enough, although palpitating (male) critics of the day tended to cut the young Brit singer a lot of slack because she was 18, beautiful and hitting notes and striking poses like a theatrical high schoo baby doll as she sang.

That’s the tease that writer-director Fennell seems to be updating here, not so much historical Brontë as a Brontë fit for the Pornhub age. And while we can be relieved nobody went all that far here, there’s little reward in tarting up “Wuthering Heights” and then losing your nerve halfway in.

Fennell’s “Wuthering” is gloomy and gorgeous, breathlessly anxious to undress but unwilling to because that wouldn’t do for a film from the director of “Promising Young Woman/” And perhaps she also figured out that going carelessly carnal would leave her take on this story with no place to go.

Rating: R for sexual content, some violent content and profanity.

Cast Margot Robbie, Jacob Elordi, Hong Chau, Shazad Latif, Alison Oliver and Martin Clunes.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Emerald Fennell, based on the novel by Emily Brontë.

Running time: 2:16

Unlike the kids who’re the target audience for most Pixar pictures, I’m supposed to know better.

I know that Pixar long ago lost its animation mystique, a combination of hype and media management that had unwary reviewers manipulated into singing the praises of even the early films that signaled Pixar was running out of jokes and ideas — the “Cars” movies, for starters.

They still turned out intellectually ambitious fare — “Inside Out,” the first one, anyway — and films that introduced the whole culture to little-explored subcultures (“Coco”). They still took chances (“Seeing Red”). But Disney Feature Animation films not labeled Pixar stole the march on them with “Moana,” “Wreck-It-Ralph” and “Encanto” in recent years.

Noting the limited appeal and very limited shelf life of reviews of animation, I’d pretty much decided to leave this parade of diminished ‘toons and the diminishing returns on reviews of “Zootopia 2” and “GOAT” to others.

But I fell for the “best Pixar movie in years” blurb (Indiewire, LOL) and “funniest Pixar movie ever” (I think Disney made that one up, LOL) hype and ducked into a “Hoppers” screening last night. I know, rookie mistake. Never buy the hype.

I think I chuckled once, maybe twice in the first 45 minutes. Things didn’t really improve much from there.

As the thin “preview night” audience of kids paraded in and out of the theater all through a movie that wasn’t holding their short attention spans all that well, I was reminded of the way the great Jerry Orbach told me that he decided to give himself a Disney career by taking the job of singing Lumiere in the original, traditionally-animated classic “Beauty and the Beast.”

“My wife and I took the grandkids to (a re-release of) ‘Snow White.'” Orbach said. “Before the credits, all the kids in the crowd were doing what kids do — fidgeting, running up and down the aisles, yelling and laughing.” And then, he said, “the movie started. And…silence. Rapt attention. They couldn’t take their eyes off it.”

That’s not going to be the case with “Hoppers.”

It’s the story of a little girl — Mabel — who grows up fanatically devoted to animals. The picture opens with her trying to pull off an almost-amusing jail-break of all the ill-used “class pets” in her elementary school.

She got this from her Grandma Tanaka (Karen Huie), who taught her to “be very still, watch and listen” to what nature has to show and tell her, that we’re all “part of something bigger” than our own simple lives.

Years later, in college, Grandma’s gone and her favorite glade in the woods outside of town is endangered by a politically ambitious mayor’s (Jon Hamm) plans for a bypass that will “save people four minutes” on their commute around town. College student Mabel (Piper Curado) is hellbent on saving that glade and pond, even though the mayor insists all the wildlife is gone.

It has. As Mabel’s professor (Kathy Najimy) explains, the beavers that once built a dam on the creek were the “anchor species” that held that ecosystem together. Mabel resolves to bring the beavers back.

But it’s only when she stumbles into the professor’s robotic beaver and her mind-hopping experiment — putting a person in a helmet that hops their mind into robotic animal form and sending the robotic critter off to study wildlife up close and even “talk to the animals” that Mabel’s plan has a prayer.

“It’s just like ‘AVATAR,” she shrieks in delight. “It’s NOTHING like AVATAR,” her prof shrieks back.

But swiping that robot and donning that avatar helmet lets Mabel meet beavers and bears, question the snakes and squirrels, learn where the wildlife has gone, how they have a hierarchy and a Beaver King (Bobby Moynihan) who leads everybody in “Madagascar” like beaver pond jazzercize.

And from the king, Mabel learns the “pond rules.” That’s how Ellen the Bear (Melissa Villaseñor) rationalizes her desire to eat a fish or a beaver or whoever.

“When you gotta eat, EAT!” So sayeth the Beaver King and The Pond Rules.

Mabel’s got to use what she learns and her own native cunning to figure out a way to motivate the woodland creatures into helping her save her granny’s glade from the shifty, ambitious mayor and his minions.

Veteran Disney artist (“Bolt”) and “additional crew” (“Lightyear”) member Daniel Chong directed and co-wrote “Hoppers,” which is next-gen gorgeous in the way the tall grass waves in the wind and the vivid colors of nature, which grows more hyperrealistic with every animated film set there.

The animals and the people are stylized and not all that realistic, but that’s a smart choice.

But the problems of these “comedies” are writ large in “Hoppers,” starting with its less than original premise and running through the characters and dialogue. There are funny people in the voice cast, with Villaseñor and Moynihan, two of the funnier people to have been on “Saturday Night Live” in recent decades, standing out .

Meryl Streep’s a voice, and Najimy and Isiah Whitlock Jr. and Laraine Newman were also recruited, people who know how to make a funny line FUNNY. And they don’t have anything all that funny to play or say.

Which begs the question, what does a Disney careerist from the background settings creation, image-cleanup, “in betweeners” animation department know about WRITING COMEDY? How about “Not much?”

The slapstick doesn’t slap — not that often, anyway. And the one-liners don’t land. Even the “funny” voices aren’t funny, and the wacky character design seems lacking in the wacky.

Is there no institutional memory at Disney that allows anybody to relay the story of how Robin Williams’ in-the-recording-booth riffing made “Aladdin” a blockbuster? Bring funny people in, give them a notion of what you want their character to be like, talk like and say, and let THEM make something funny for you?

Build and joke-up your movie by letting professionally funny people doctor your scripts.

There’s something wrong with Pixar’s “process” at this point. Even the “Inside Out” sequel was gassed and could have used a lot more Amy Poehler et al input on finding laughs within the insights about the human psyche.

Change your process. You’re never going to honestly earn “Funniest Pixar movie ever” or “Best Pixar movie in years” plaudits without making them up yourself otherwise.

“Hoppers” and the like may have wholesome and even important messages. But they don’t hop without the wit and the wit isn’t coming from scripts this tame.

Rating: PG

Cast: The voices of Piper Curado, Jon Hamm, Bobby Moynihan, Kathy Najimy, Dave Franco, Melissa Villaseñor and Meryl Streep.

Credits: Directed by Daniel Chong, scripted by Daniel Chong and Jesse Andrew. A Disney/Pixar release.

Running time: 1:44

Job one, aka all Maggie Gyllenhaal had to do in her ambitious, inventive take on “The Bride!” of Frankenstein, was not stink up the screen so much that she blows Jessie Buckley’s best shot at an Oscar.

Not for this movie, mind you. Buckley’s up for “Hamnet” and might even be the favorite. Or rather “was.”

Because while edgy actress-turned-writer-director Gyllenhaal doesn’t do a full “Norbit” on her star, she damned sure doesn’t do her any Awards Season favors.

Buckley plays “the mad scene” pretty much from the first moment to the last in this chaotic, cacaphonous screech into the abyss. She rattles off strings of semi-related words and phrases like an early effort at AI trying to form a coherent thought out of randomly collected blurts in English.

“Shipmate, shipMENT…consummate CHECKmate,” her title character prattle-shouts, among her scores of ranted word-salads, all of them entailing constant shifts of accent — American flapper, British aristocrat, street-walker, novelist, all of them personalities trapped in her brought-back-from-the-dead mind.

She plays the part to the hilt, which doesn’t help the character or the utter hash of a movie around her make a lick of sense. Whatever random “madness” envelopes The Bride’s mind, Gyllenaal gives us a jumbled peek at her stream of consciousness, too.

A character mentions a movie and Marlene Dietrich’s name comes up and that unleashes a vamp of “Falling in Love Again (Can’t Help It),” complete with accent.

You can almost taste the indulged, self-destructive, gun-metal-in-your-mouth fatalism in this two hour stomp and stumble through the Great Depression, 1930s movie fandom, monster movies and monster “reinvigorations” of the dead. Gyllenhaal references #MeToo “Barbie” empowerment and every “Frankenstein” story ever told including “Young Frankenstein.”

Characters reprise “Puttin’ on the Ritz” from that Mel Brooks classic with a society ball that turns into a literal “Monster Mash” dance-off.

What’s worse, Gyllenhall slaps that ’60s pop kitsch on the closing credits. As if we didn’t get it. Or all the dopey film stars of the ’30s and ’40s references in character names — “Myrna Malloy (Myrna Loy), “Ida” and “Lupino” and so on — and newspaper headlines capturing feminine fury in recent pop music “movements” and bands — “Rrrrriot Girrrls!” and “Violent Femmes.”

No, that doesn’t make her movie “smart.” But nobody plays contemptuous and patronizing on the screen like Maggie G., so it’s no surprise that spills over into her directing.

Still, she got her brother Jake Gyllenhaal to play an early talkies matinee idol, showcasing his dancing and singing talents in clips from the films of Ronnie Reed — “The Dubious Detective,” and so on.

And Gyllenhaal’s husband Peter Sarsgaard plays a hardboiled Chicago cop on the trail of the “monsters” who catch official attention for being hideous as well as leaving a trail of bodies from Chicago to New York and back.

The movie may be an unfocused mess, but it’s got two Oscar winners, lavish production design and more fog than a century of cinema set in London towne.

The story — “Frank,” aka Dr. Frankenstein’s Monster (Christian Bale) has been wandering the Earth for over a century, a solitary and miserable figure reanimated from pieces of more than one corpse.

He hopes a Chicago scientist and theorist, Dr. Euphonious (Annette Bening) can help.

“Intercoursing” may be on both their minds. But “This is about loneliness,” Frank insists.

As we’ve met the mouthy sex-worker Ida (Buckley) breaking into mad rants in a public bar where her mob boss/trafficker hears his “Lupino” name dropped, we know she’s not long for this world. Her “accident” becomes the grave Frank and the not-quite-mad doctor dig up. And aside from multiple personality issues and tattoo-like stains she gets all over herself when she spits up the formula/elixer that brings her to life, their recreation of the late Dr. Frankenstein’s “work” works.

But Ida, the woman Frank eventually names Penolope Rogers — not Ginger — isn’t sure she’s down for this renewed life business. Where’s her choice, her free will, her agency as a female character?

She is “too beautiful,” Frank insists. She not only looks like Jean Harlowe, she’s got a sassy, foul mouth on her. And even as she warms to Frank’s company, that mouth gets her and them into trouble as Frank sneaks her out of the lab and into society, where mayhem and self-defense labeled “murder” by trigger happy cops puts them on the lam, skipping from city to town, hitting any cinema showing a Ronnie Reed (Gyllenhaal) film or location where a Ronnie Reed movie was set.

The cop and his secretary with sleuthing skills (Sarsgaard and Cruz) are hot on their trail. So’s a mob killer (John Magaro). We know the climax will be tragic. It’s just a question of what cinematic riff will inspire where it’ll take place — Kong climbing the Empire State building? A tumble over Niagara Falls? Or a parade of torch wielding villagers hunting them down?

The film comes to life in its New York sequence, where a 3D movie screening is interrupted by “real” monsters and a glorious riot ensues. That’s where the “Monster Mash” dance-off happens, too.

Other sequences summon up “Bonnie & Clyde” headstrong criminals on-the-road references and the like, our writer-director’s way of showing us she’s seen a lot more movies than the ones she’s been in.

Maggie G. has Buckley’s confused and furious character rage, rage at the dying of the light, at the patriarchy, at a corrupt system that features cops as deadly as gangster, at a woman’s limited options in those times and ours.

Buckley-in-character narrates the film as a combination of Ida the sex worker, “Frankenstein” author Mary Shelley and others — fuming, fulminating, intoning, rhyming, over-enunciating, announcing and denouncing.

Frankly, the picture’s a lovely mess, and I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised to learn that Netflix got a gander at it and refused to raise its offer for Warner Bros. A studio recently famed for “taking care of talent” has had plenty of examples of “over-indulging” talent in its vaults.

And if Buckley doesn’t win the Oscar for her luminous turn as Shakespeare’s grief-stricken wife in “Hamnet,” Gyllenhaal’s second feature film as director — Remember “The Lost Daughter?” — just might be to blame.

Rating: R, graphic violence, sex, nudity, profanity

Cast: Jessie Buckley, Christian Bale, Annete Bening, Jake Gyllenhaal,
Penélope Cruz, Peter Sarsgaard and John Magaro .

Credits: Scripted and directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal. A Warner Bros. release.

Running time: 2:06

“Runt” is a sweet and ever so slight Aussie farm country comedy in the “Babe” tradition.

There’s a drought. A family might lose their farm and sheep to it or the greedy old neighbor with the onomatopoeia name “Robert Barren.”

Then along comes a stray mutt of a terrier who happens to be a natural at agility trials. If only this adorable “Runt” can win the Big Prize…

Saying the formulaic script writes itself is a disservice to screenwriter Craig Silvey or the AI template he decorated with details like the Mum (Celeste Barber) who’s an awful cook, amateur botanist Dad (Jai Courtney) and the plucky, freckled little daughter (Lily LaTorre) he keeps taking out of school early because her inherited gift for tinkering means she’s the only one of the lot who can fix anything on this farm way out in the interior, a place playfully called Upson Downs.

Can daughter Annie “fix” the drought? How about their money problems? She’ll need Runt’s help for that.

There’s “breeding doesn’t matter” and “Sometimes it’s OK to tell a lie if you have good intentions” messaging. Nobody wants to be the one to tell Mum her humble pies are godawful, after all.

There are villains aplenty in this edge of the Outback town, starting with the dog catcher who never quite nabs the mutt Runt as he steals from the butcher’s shop. Oz film legend Jack Thompson is the robber baron “Earl Robert Barren.” Matt Day is the bedazzled “Best in Show” refugee Fergus Fink who has made winning the world agility trial title his dream.

The always formidable Deborah Mailman (“The Sapphires”) turns up as a former queen of agility trials whom Annie visits for advice.

The movie’s littered with cute running gags. Annie’s brother Max (played by Lily LaTorre’s brother Jack LaTorre) is a ten year old would-be daredevil. Mum is always cooking more pies. And there are all these names sound like what they are — Fergus Fink, Robert Barren, the sheep raising Shearer family, a town aptly named Upson Downs.

Director John Sheedy ensures that there’s just enough suspense between scenes with the cute bundle of personality who is the film’s title character to keep the young audience “Runt” is aiming for interested. And then one and all find their way to a finale that is almost shockingly touching and affecting.

“Slight” implies there’s not a lot to this “Runt.” But what there is should delight small children and give their parents a giggle or two, and maybe even a tear.

Rating: TV-PG

Cast: Lily LaTorre, Jai Courtney, Celeste Barber, Jack LaTorre, Matt Day, Jack Thompson and Deborah Mailman.

Credits: Directed by John Sheedy, scripted by Craig Silvey. A Samuel Goldwyn release on Amazon.

Running time: 1:33