Movie Nation

I grade big screen cartoons for kids on a sliding cynicism scale.

They’re all products designed for and marketed to children, and most every studio has a deal with some animation house or other to get themselves a cut-rate piece of that Pixar pie.

The folks who made “Gnomeo & Juliet” figured out a way to make a cheap semi-musical, basically showing British garden gnomes having epic under-sized adventures while Elton John and Bernie Taupin turn Elton’s back-catalog into cash by parking his bubbly ’70s/80s pop-rock at appropriate places in the action.

The involvement of “Rocket Pictures” as producers parks “Gnomeo” and its sequel, “Sherlock Gnomes” somewhere below “Despicable” sequels, and slightly above “Free Birds” and assorted abominations foisted on the under-age public by Harvey Weinstein and others.

It doesn’t have a laugh in it, and the story isn’t worth more than a sentence long summary. London is undergoing mass gnome-nappings, including the clan of Gnomeo (voiced by James McAvoy) and Juliet (Emily Blunt), so the gnome world’s greatest detective, Sherlock Gnomes (Johnny Depp) and Dr. Watson (Chiwetel Ejiofor) are on the case.

Moriarty may be involved.

“Fudge buckets!”

And since Ricky Gervais wasn’t available, Jamie Demetriou takes a shot at impersonating him. 

There’s barely a quotable line. Juliet wants to know, “What are you LOOKING for?”

“An assistant who asks fewer questions!”

But there are two clever visual ideas, so credit where credit is due. The filmmakers took a shot at depicting Holmes’ observation and deduction powers from inside his day-dreamy brain. They’re mimicking what Guy Ritchie did with Robert Downey Jr. This Holmes pieces together his puzzle in his head in black and white Escher-scapes and the like.

The other cute scene? Their quest takes the quartet to Chinatown, where they run afoul of Asian cat garden statuary, porcelain boss, cat statue warriors, etc.  And the voice of the peerless James Hong.

Otherwise, there’s nothing to this for adults, and precious little for kids aside from a disco version of Elton and Kiki Dee’s “Don’t Go Breakin’ My Heart.”

MPAA Rating: PG for some rude and suggestive humor.

Cast: The voices of Johnny Depp, Emily Blunt, James McAvoy, Chiwetel Ejiofor, James Hong, Mary J. Blige, Maggie Smith, Michael Caine, Ozzy Osborne

Credits:Directed by John Stevenson, script by Ben Zazove. An MGM/Paramount release.

Running time: 1:26

Marvel has been taking movies in a video game Easter Egg “nothing but the fun parts” direction for the past decade.

But leave it to the Old Master, Mr. Spielberg, to beat them to the punch and make a movie that’s ALL Easter Eggs, an endless parade of “cool parts” and eye candy that will require repeated viewings to take it all in.

Pay no mind to the assorted lousy TV commercials and trailers for “Ready Player One.” They don’t do it justice. It is jam packed with inside jokes, self-referential sight gags, movie, video game and pop culture history and trivia. All that time you spent in front of the screen, memorizing “The Breakfast Club” or “The Shining,” mastering every generation of video game from Atari to the current state of the art? Here’s a movie that reassures the GameGirls and Gameboys that it wasn’t time wasted.

Conversely, pay no heed to the fanboy nerdgasms that arrive, like a tidal wave, with this film, suggesting a Wakanda-sized cultural and box office tidal wave. The story, based on Ernest Cline’s novel, is simpleton simple. The acting is mostly done by digital avatars which left me cold.

And the dialogue? “Welcome to the Rebellion!” Too often, it’s straight out of every GD YA Sci-Fi P.O.Piffle that’s been trotted out to a Cambridge Analytica’d audience,  market researched down to the atom.

My advice? Just go with it. But maybe after the buzz has worn off consider just how low the bar has been dropped on these Bollywood-length mass market confections, movies that go on and on because they have to give EVERYbody everyTHING that they want. And lots of it.

An opening suffering from exposition-overload introduces Wade Watt (Tye Sheridan), teen tyro of 2045’s mass virtual reality gameworld “The Oasis.” He’s not old enough to remember when America and the world “stopped trying to fix problems.” We’ve all just plugged-in and accepted our impoverished vertical trailer park (“The Stacks”) lot. All anybody needs money for is the latest game gear. And maybe food. Much of that cash is crypto-currency earned playing the multiverse of games woven into “The Oasis.” Get in debt? “Loyalty Center” workhouses allow the slaves to work off the money you owe.

Oasis was designed by the late game guru Halliday, played by Oscar winner (“The Bridge of Spies”) Mark Rylance in an American accent, curly mop of hair and socially awkward nerd-hero Wozniak mode that is within his vast acting range, but still…odd.

Upon Halliday’s death, he planted Easter Eggs (secret clues/prizes) within The Oasis. Find the “three keys” and unlock that one-last egg and you get to take over the game universe that Ate Planet Earth, or at least every spare second of every sentient person’s day. That’s worth so much money that a rival company (EveryVillain Ben Mendelsohn of “Rogue One” runs it) is devoting legions of techs, O-ologists (Oasis experts), “gunters” (egg hunters) professional gamers and Halliday Historians to cracking the puzzle, finding the keys and taking over The Oasis for themselves.

That would be a bad thing, like the loss of Net Neutrality, or trusting all your private data to Google and/or Facebook.

Wade, in the guise of his prettyboy punk avatar, Parzival ( named for Percival, the Arthurian knight who finds the Holy Grail all by his lonesome) is a loner who only accepts help from “H,” a  hulking warrior/tech whiz he only knows in the game.

Wade may have “big plans in the real world” with what to do with the endless cash that will come to him if and when he wins. But the real world is just a place to plug in — in his case, a junkyard van just down “The Stacks” from the creaking double-wide his Aunt (Susan Lynch) and her abusive game/addict boyfriend (Ralph Ineson) and he call home.

That sexy, stand-offish avatar that he’s competing with? That’s Art3mis. She’s played by Olivia Cooke, when they finally meet in the flesh.

The “games” within the Oasis, places where the eggs hide, are first-person shooter epics, casinos, “Death Race” car chase games and the like. So basically this is a PG-13 “Wreck-It-Ralph.” No “Candy Crush” here.

You race in Doc Brown’s DeLorean against players driving the Adam West Batmobile and motorcycles from “Tron” and other pop culture touchstones while a T-Rex and King Kong try to stop you.

Spielberg’s greatest gift to this era and this sort of film might be the visual coherence he brings to these digital brawls, chases and cliffhangers. He does what Michael Bay and whoever takes on this or that “Pacific Rim” or Marvel mayhem hasn’t. He picks camera angles, depths of field and framing that makes the conflicts make sense to the naked eye, no “Transformers/Avengers” blur here.

The actors aren’t quite an afterthought, but compare Cooke’s turn in anything else she’s done — “Thoroughbreds” or even “Ouija” — with this Fury in Fishnets. She’s plucky but in the most generic YAs save-the-world way.

Sheridan (“Mud”) barely registers, and their “chemistry” is strictly of the adolescent game-nerd cliche variety, faintly sexist to boot.

Of the avatars, the funniest impression is made by T.J. Miller voicing the villain’s henchman I-R0k, a hulking Viking god-beast with nothing but nerdy sarcasm for his ostensible “boss” (Mendelsohn) .

“You never lick. You bite…straight to the creamy chocolate center of the Tootsie Pop. ‘Member those TV commercials with the owl?”

Miller is the alter ego for the audience for this movie. Why would a character from 27 years in the future remember a TV commercial from about 1980? For the same reason “Guardians of the Galaxy” classic rock rules this world (Joan Jett, Bruce, Hall & Oates and Twisted Sister’s “We’re Not Gonna Take It”) — pandering to your demo.

I didn’t dislike “Player One,” even if I rolled my eyes at the low-hanging fruit one-liners and cloying characters, the on-the-nose soundtrack tunes (Van Halen?), the cringe-worthy avatars from your favorite horror movies, all introduced to the giggles and applause of an audience sure it’s in on the joke. Because the movie was concocted to elicit just that reaction.

A “Shining” detour dazzles in approach, technique and slavish attention to the film’s legend in film nerddom, but fizzles every time somebody opens his or her mouth.

Just go with it. And every time you go, you’ll see or hear more Easter Eggs. John Williams’ score from Spielberg’s flop “1941?” Check. A magic talisman “Zemeckis Cube” that allows you to go “Back in Time?” Ditto.

But do all those eggs, and a heaping helping of cheese, make an epic cinematic omelet? Nope.

[Did Netflix scoop “Ready Player One” with their raunchy “Game Over, Man,” in one important plot detail?]

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for sequences of sci-fi action, a  violence, bloody images, some suggestive material, partial nudity and language

Cast: Tye Sheridan, Olivia Cooke, Ben Mendelsohn, Simon Pegg, Lena Waithe, T.J. Miller, Mark Rylance

Credits:Directed by Steven Spielberg by, script by Zak Penn and Ernest Cline, based on Cline’s novel. A Warner Brothers release.

Running time: 2:20

Not every deserving person can win the Nobel Peace Prize.

There are other, lesser forms of “laureate,” for instance the Aurora Prize for Awakening Humanity.

But even had Dr. Tom Catena not won that, it seems the least society can do to honor them and shine a light on their good deeds is produce a good documentary about them.

“The Heart of Nuba” is about Dr. Catena’s work as the medical director and only full-time physician in a hospital in the middle of that permanent hellhole of horrors, Sudan. In the Nuba Mountains, a million members of 50 or so African tribes live. And the dictator in charge of the country, a racist Arab named Omar al-Bashir, wants that land, “but not the people on it.”

Catena and Mother of Mercy Hospital are treating thousands of civilian casualties, smack in the middle of not just a war zone, but an ongoing genocide. A handful of foreigners and a growing staff of locals are defiantly doing their work, diving into foxholes during the frequent air raids, while the world frets more about what the Kardashians are wearing or So and So is tweeting.

Ingrid Revaug, who raises funds for the hospital while working on site, notes that “humanitarianism isn’t something you do at work, it’s a way of living your life.” She and Catena are the best representatives of such an ethos that you will ever run across.

They duck and cover at every Antonov An22 that rumbles overhead, a Soviet era cargo plane the Sudanese Muslim regime uses to drop barrel bombs on villages and the hospital compound itself. Dr. Catena wanders the ward, pointing at patients of all ages.

“Artillery shell, Antonov, Antonov, Antonov,” fingering the World Court-condemned culprit behind this primitive region’s woes. Catena takes it personally, because it is.

A local nurse, Sister Angelina Nyakuru, shakes her head. “They want  to kill Dr. Tom? Why?”

He wakes up before the dawn, prays his Rosary, and gets to work. He talks with patients in their native tongue, charms and cajoles them. And he takes photos of every civilian victim of the military, “evidence,” he says, for a war crimes trial to come, a reckoning for al-Bashir.

Catena mentors nurses, nurse’s aids, works with visiting doctors who risk their necks to come in and help. And six days a week, he is physician, surgeon, OB-GYN to legions of Nubans who come seeking his care, and who he travels to see on house calls.

It’s important to touch these people,” he says of the inhabitants of a village of lepers. “Every life has value. Every life holds the promise of hope.”

Director Kenneth A. Carlson’s film starts with a grabber — the age-old routines of grinding grain and preparing food in a village of grass huts. Then, the shriek of fighter-bombers, the cries of children as every they flee to the bomb shelters dug beside every hut there.

From the brutal present of grim choices, bloody surgeries and near-despair over young lives so brutally cut short of circumscribed by grisly injuries, Carlson takes us into the back story of a man whose quotation opens the film, about “each and every one of us” being obligated to make the world a better place, a Tom Catena quote from when he was all of 18.

He was a New York state engineer-in-the-making from a large Catholic family when he turned his attention to medicine. He played football at Brown, joined the Navy and went to med school at Duke. But something in Catena drew him to missions work. After polishing his surgical skills in Kenya, he found his calling in perhaps the worst place on Earth, working himself sick at times, because there is so very much that needs to be done, that won’t be done if he doesn’t do it.

Carlson uses clips from the one news network covering this conflict zone, Al Jazeera, which to its credit condemns the dictator that the World Court finds such a monster. In the main, though, he keeps his camera on Dr. Tom and and small circle of people — proteges and colleagues — at Mother of Mercy. It’s a moving, inspiring choice.

Sure, an uplifting film like “The Heart of Nuba” plays like hagiography, but you’re hard-pressed to find complaints about this saintly, sometimes profane surgeon and healer. Unless you want to interview al-Bashir for your film.

So far as we know, Mother Teresa and Albert Schweitzer didn’t swear. But neither of them were All Ivy League nose guards for Brown U. That makes Catena a fascinating character to study, someone “The Heart of Nuba” more than does justice to.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, graphic surgery scenes, mild profanity

Cast: Dr. Tom Catena, Sr. Angelina Nyakuru, Dr. Corry Chapman, H.E. Macram Max Gassis, Sr. Rocio Sanluz, Ratiba Ibrahim Kodi, Ingrid Revaug

Credits:Directed by Kenneth A. Carlson. An Abramorama- release.

Running time: 1:25

“Isle of Dogs” is the stuff of Wes Anderson’s nightmares.

Anderson’s made a Japanese epic as viewed through the twee lens in which he sees the world. A dark, daft vision of a culture that’s Turned its Back on Dog, it’s easily the most inspired, dazzling and original use of stop motion animation ever.

Is it for children? How about “Take that PG-13 rating seriously,” and read on before you decide.

A prologue tells of us ancient animus between a Japanese clan and dogs. In the near future, that Kobayashi clan sees its moment for revenge. An outbreak of dog flu and assorted illnesses cause Mayor Kobayashi of Megasaki to order all dogs dumped offshore, on Trash Island. There, they’re left to fend for themselves, eat garbage and die of neglect.

To set an example, the mayor nobly makes the guard dog he’s given to his ward, Atari, the first canine exiled to the “Isle of Dogs.”

Months later, that boy (voiced by Koyu Rankin) shows up on the island, looking for “Spots,” his beloved guardian and pet. The pack of “scary indestructible alpha dogs” led by the reasonable Rex (Edward Norton) but held together by the tough street stray Chief (Bryan Cranston, perfect) debate helping him, despite the language barrier. The kid speaks generally untranslated Japanese. The dogs? English, of course.

“Are we eating him, or is this a ‘rescue?‘” Boss (Bill Murray) wants to know.

“Rescue” it is. Anderson, working from a story he cooked up with Roman Coppola, Jason Schwartzman and Japanese actor/DJ Kunichi Nomura, conjures up a grimly whimsical quest about doomed dogs. All of them look worn, injured and uncared for. And all of them devote themselves to a 12 year-old boy from a race that has forsaken them. They help him look for the one member of their canine community who still has a human who misses him.

As onetime showdog Nutmeg (Scarlett Johansson) reminds them, “He’s a 12 year-old boy. Dogs love those.”

Say the title, “Isle of Dogs,” three times fast — aloud. You get it.

The animation is a highly-textured, fanatically-detailed delight, a more exacting looking film than Anderson’s “Fantastic Mr. Fox.” Stitches on injuries, gruesomely explicit surgery, anatomically-perfect dog skeletons (not every dog could survive this), puppy and human puppet eyes that well up with tears, all provide a backdrop to Anderson’s deliciously deadpan dialogue, running gags and sight gags.

As in all of his films, he creates a family. Here, there are two, with one consisting of pro-dog teen resisters (led by “exchange student” Tracy–Greta Gerwig) back in Megasaki, trying to figure out why the dogs were exiled. Cameos by Ken Watanabe and Yoko Ono deepen the mystery.

The sense of place is every bit as vivid here as the fantasy pre-War Europe Anderson created for “Grand Budapest Hotel.” Anderson achieves this not just with large swatches of untranslated Japanese debate (easily deciphered by the visuals), but with thunderous taiko drums and drummers underscoring sumo wrestling, Noh theater interpretations of the back-story and current story, “Hello Kitty” visual puns and haiku, which many a character whips out to explain his or her actions and motivations in just three lines of just seventeen syllables.

“I turn my back…”

“On ManKind!”

“Frost on a window pane!”

It’s clever to the edge of brilliant, and damned funny, start to finish.

But for all the sentimental stuff about dogs, all the DIY delights of animation using cotton balls to simulate clouds of dust kicked up by a fight, or pulled apart to show thin strands simulating fog or vapors escaping from a test tube, is this complex, sometimes grisly and downbeat conspiracy dramedy for kids?

Yes, but only in the sense that “Fantastic Mr. Fox” was. When it comes to children’s stories, nobody was darker than Roald Dahl. But Roald Dahl never met Wes Anderson, a storyteller who found humor in European assassinations in “Grand Budapest” and in animal neglect and animal testing on his “Isle of Dogs.”

Just be glad he chose Japan as his setting, and not China. They eat dogs over there.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for thematic elements and some violent images

Cast: The voices of Edward Norton, Koyu Rankin, Bryan Cranston, Scarlett Johansson, Greta Gerwig, Kunichi Nomura, Jeff Goldblum, Ken Watanabe, Yoko Ono, Bill Murray, F. Murray Abraham with Courtney B. Vance as The Narrator

Credits:Written and directed by Wes Anderson. A Fox Searchlight release.

Running time: 1:41

Martin Luther King, Jr. was often introduced, as he was in his final “I’ve been to the mountaintop” speech in Memphis the night before he died, as “a Moses for our times.”

He was eulogized at his funeral as a man “sent out as a Moses into the wilderness of this nation’s injustice.”

But the last year and a half of his life saw him in his own personal wilderness. He was a leader struggling to keep his 12 year-old movement relevant, straining to get divided America to embrace his more inclusive “Poor People’s Campaign,” arguing with the otherwise supportive President Johnson about the Vietnam War and hoping just to be heard in a country and a community that he felt was tuning him out.

“King in the Wilderness,” director Peter Kunhardt’s fine, moving documentary for HBO, remembers those troubled final days on the 50th anniversary of King’s murder. Kunhardt, known for directing films about Nixon and Gloria Steinem and for producing the Ben Bradlee “Newspaperman” film, assembles the faithful — King’s inner circle and surviving members of the Johnson White House — one last time to summon up 18 months of turmoil, frustration and fatigue.

In late 1966 King, the Atlanta “co-pastor” of his father’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, could look back as he said, “on a solid decade of progress in the South.” His non-violent strategy of marches, protests, boycotts and speeches had paid off  in sweeping Civil Rights and Voting Rights legislation, in a zeitgeist that had turned the tide of historical discrimination and injustice. But the Vietnam War was escalating, economic injustice and the futility of the inner cities was leading to summer riots.

The giddy high of 1963’s “I have a dream” had, “at many points” King told TV’s Sander Vanocur, “turned into a nightmare.”

“The nation had turned against him,” his closest aid, Andrew Young remembers.

His lawyer Clarence Jones calls this period “the most difficult time of his life.”

Kunhardt found shots of King playing pool with poor folks in Chicago, there to help the push for better housing and economic opportunity, a recording of him calmly haggling with LBJ over the phone over Vietnam, and close friends like the singer Harry Belafonte, Marian Wright Edelman and Xernona Clayton talk of an exhausted man who told them, “It  doesn’t matter how long you live, but how well you live.”

Much of that material is familiar, collected in other documentaries (PBS’s “Eyes on the Prize” series is the definitive filmed account of The Civil Rights Movement).

What’s new here is Young recalling King’s first college love, with a white woman who would never have earned the approval of King Sr., how even that pointed him towards his work on equality in America, of goofy pillow fights with his staff in the Lorraine Motel, in Memphis, the day before he was gunned down.

What we forget is the grace and dignity his widow, Coretta Scott King, displayed hours after his death, her touching visit with Jackie Kennedy the day of the funeral and a funeral caisson, a simple wooden wagon drawn by mules, surrounded by thousands. 

Documentaries more than any other genre of film sink or swim due to their subject matter. In King and his last days, Kunhardt has found a rich subject, one that could only be illuminated by that shrinking few still around who remember the highs and lows, fifty years later. Kunhardt and HBO have made a film that’s not just rewarding and quite moving, but important oral and visual history, a movie worth watching even if you think you’ve read or seen all there is to know about this seminal figure in American history.

MPAA Rating: unrated, riots

Cast: Andrew Young, Marian Wright Edelman, Xernona Clayton, Harry Belafonte, Rev. Jesse Jackson, Joseph Califano, Xerona Clayton, and (via archival footage) Coretta Scott King, Martin Luther King Jr.

Credits: Directed by Peter W. Kunhardt, script by Chris Chuang. An HBO release.

Running time: 1:51

Judd Apatow, who regarded the late comic master Garry Shandling as a mentor, produced and directed this documentary — adding interviews with comics who knew Garry and worked with him (Sarah Silverman, Jim Carrey) to vintage Shandling stand-up, “The Larry Sanders Show” clips and that last, memorable “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee” appearance.

The film focuses on the good and the bad of Garry, whose “You’re dead to me” behavior to those who crossed him was legendary, whose quick wit was hard to match.

Shandling looked deathly ill, but sitting in a 1979 Porsche 930 (Seinfeld’s personal brand), riffing on life, comedy, spirituality, the man delivered one of the great live (on tape) epitaphs in comedy history.

“Zen” premieres tonight on HBO.

“Fame” doesn’t mean what it used to.

And that’s just hard for a “talented, really pretty” small-town girl named Katelyn (Meredith Hagner) to accept. I mean, she’s already got her conversation with “Ellen” worked out, the “recording” she has set up with Kanye, the love she has for her boyfriend, Ryan Gosling.

Her ticket out of tiny, backward Liberty, New York is “The Voice.” But she can’t get the cash together to record a demo and get an audition. And every time she turns around, a “Teen Mom” is riding homemade sex videos or her tantrum-tossing Dad (Matt Walsh) is becoming a semi-accidental viral video sensation and stealing the fame that is rightfully hers.

Comic actor and stand-up David Cross wrote-and-directed “Hits,” a hit-or-miss “Call in favors” comic commentary on the viral age, small town provincialism and the delusions the culture is feeding us in an era when “talent” won’t get you anywhere, but “attention,” any kind, will.

Katelyn is absolutely convinced of her due. But Dad’s endless Liberty Town Council tirades have given him what she can’t buy — even when she furiously trades sex for recording studio time with a stoner creep (Jason Ritter, perfect) who makes records out of the non-soundproof living room of his dump of a row house.

If you’ve never been to a small town government meeting, you have little idea what you’re missing. Movies and TV, and even closed circuit TV recordings just don’t do them justice.  There is always a local crank, a self-appointed gadfly, and Dave Stuben (Walsh) fills that bill, when he isn’t working for Liberty’s local recycling center.

“That pain in the ass,” is how one and all describe him.

Snow removal, potholes or changes to the local restaurant menu set him off, burning up his three allotted minutes speaking time before the council in weekly tirades.

“TIME, Mr. Stuben,” Council President Casserta (Amy Carlson) always barks. When he detours into threats and profanities, he gets arrested. That gets the attention of Casserta’s son (Michael Cera), making his way as a craft-weed dope dealer in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

That’s how the DIY home business activist and hipster doofus Donovan (James Adomian) sees the council videos of Stuben, edits them into a hit montage — comparing him to “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” and drawing a Hitler mustache onto Casserta in “A Dave that Will Live in History.”

“The town of Liberty, New York, has become Berlin under Hitler!”

Even the nerdy would-be rapper Cory “C-to-the-Y” (Jake Cherry) who lusts after Katelyn has gone viral, picking a rap fight at a high school beer bust, losing and having a video mocking him posted. And “blowing up.”

“Hits,” as you might have gathered, is a comically cluttered mess of a movie. Donovan rounds up his “Think Tank” acolytes (Derek Waters of “Drunk History” and Wyatt Cenac of “The Daily Show”) to take Dave’s “story” to the world — only to be pre-empted by every other viral video marketing/advocacy organization, including CNN.

Erinn Hayes plays Donovan’s baby-obsessed and frustrated wife. We also get tastes of Julia Stiles, Russ Tamblyn and David Koechner, playing a redneck’s redneck, all about guns and talking guns and bitching about city idiots — “Cidiots.”

“We got ourselves a real Rosa Parks, here!”

Amy Sedaris plays Katelyn’s jaded bar manager boss, the one who asks the tough but slow-to-be-answered question — “Does she have any talent?”

Walsh, a veteran character actor (“Veep”) makes the most of his rare leading man turn, wholly embodying the screamers among us who have deep, dark beliefs of the Alex Jones “Infowars” variety, bigotry that rural echo chambers tolerate and foster.

Random bits are hilarious — the competition between viral “push” organizations, all based in Brooklyn (“Greenpoint?” “Bushwick.”), the inane euphemisms hipsters use for simple works like “toilet,””coffee” etc.

But the problem with rounding up every comic friend you can think of to make a movie is that virtually none of them see their characters properly served. Everybody — everybody funny anyway — gets short shrift.

Still, Cross made this 2014 movie, “A true story…that hasn’t happened yet.” And looking at the America of 2018, one year into the reality star presidency, you’d have to call the man a prophet. “Hits” isn’t a great comedy, but given all that’s come after it, it’s worth a second look.

MPAA Rating: unrated, sexual situations, smoking, profanity

Cast: Meredith Hagner, Matt Walsh, Amy Sedaris, Michael Cera, David Koechner, Julia Stiles, Derek Waters, Russ Tamblyn

Credits: Written and directed by David Cross. An Honora release.

Running time: 1:36

Two Indian-American filmmakers peel back the horrors of “arranged marriage” in their native culture in their incendiary new documentary, “A Suitable Girl.”

Not really.

Sarita Khurana and Smriti Mundhra probably glanced over their shoulders back at the divorce-happy USA, which they call home, and took a sober, sympathetic view of the nuts and bolts of this practice, which lingers in India long after most of the rest of the world abandoned it as “unromantic” and rights-restricting and backward.

One “Suitable Girl” might kvetch about “our idiotic traditions we keep following and following.” But she’s bought in and accepted it.

Amrita is her name, a happy go lucky Delhi 20something with an education, a job and a lovely life of “complete freedom.” Except when it comes to the chance meeting, courtship rituals and sexual gamesmanship that most of the West accepts as “normal” for finding a mate. She’s scheduled to be married to Keshev, and we follow her through that wedding and the suddenly confining life (“Every day I have to wear a saree!”) of being an Indian wife — cooking, caring for in-laws, etc.

It’s no wonder we see her weep (above) on her wedding day. Tears of happiness? Or the acknowledgement of what she’s giving up thanks to “traditions?”

Dipti is a plump 25 year-old from a lower middle class family who is trying everything to close a deal. She goes over the personal ads, filled with appeals for husbands and wives. Her mom notices a particular word turning up in all the men’s “Seeking a suitable girl” ads — “beautiful.”

“In your next ad, say you’re beautiful!”

“Why would I do that?”

“A Suitable Girl” is largely about Dipti’s struggle, a young woman increasingly desperate to marry, suffering from depression when hope seems lost. She tries Indian speed dating, which is very polite, quite formal, and a bit like a job fair where everybody’s particulars are barked out for all to hear.

“Twice-divorced, monthly income of,” as each potential groom is introduced.

Then there’s Ritu. With her deep, confident voice, MBA and a mother who is a matchmaker (Seema), you’d think she’d be the catch among catches.

But Seema (below) is at a loss. She consults a “face reader” psychic who dismisses potential pairings with just a glance at their photo on a phone. Seema, all organized and efficient, running a business where marriages are “deals” with “$500,000, USD” or even “$1 million (USD)” are offered for the right “beautiful” bride, cannot figure out who would want her smart, successful, independent and pretty daughter.

The filmmakers give this entire process a serious, patiently immersive treatment (The film is a little slow.) that bottom-feeding American TV avoids with its sexed-up/hook-up competitions “The Bachelor” or “The Bachelorette.”

Their film was years in the making, but its “conclusion” seems premature. This whole “And they all lived…ever after” feels a bit off. We leave Amrita seemingly accepting the frustrations of her myopic new life and Ritu re-located to a far off land with her arranged-spouse.

Neither feels like we’ve seen the end of her story.

But “A Suitable Girl,” in English, Hindi and “Hinglish” with English subtitles, is still a fascinating look into a custom that the movies and TV have only touched on and mentioned with a raised eyebrow of mild dismissal. The phrase “A Suitable Girl” is so endemic to Indian culture — a famous novel of that title covers some of the same ground, the BBC has the male version of this, “A Suitable Boy” in production–  that you can’t even parse the sexism of the language.

Because maybe “they” are on to something. Because maybe a culture with an entire industry devoted to matchmaking, putting clients in front of vast numbers of potential mates isn’t as arbitrary as the random chance we in the West all romantically accept as the norm.

Leaving us on our own can lead to dating disasters, to “The Bachelor,” or worse. As if there’s anything worse.

MPAA Rating: unrated, adult themes

Cast: Dipti Admane,  Amrita Soni, Ritu Taparia, Seema Taparia

Credits:Directed by Sarita Khurana and Smriti Mundhra. An Amazon release.

Running time: 1:30

Mila Kunis is the half of that Mila/Ashton couple that still has a big screen career.

Kate McKinnon? She’s the star, the glue who holds “Saturday Night Live” together.” Lots of shots at movies, this one is the first that makes her a co-star and expects her to help carry it.

Mila plays a woman whose beau (Justin Theroux) is apparently a spy. That gets the wrong sorts of folks interested in her and her BFF (McKinnon) as they flee across Europe.

Check out the “Americans don’t know how to drive a stick shift any more” scene. It’s a winner.

The movie? August release, lowered expectations because it’s a LATE summer comedy. But it could hit. Got to be better than Kate the Ghostbuster, right?

As I said in my review of Universal’s “150 million worth of stupid,” it’s not really for the North American market.

Like Universal’s “Great Wall,” there’s a shift in the cultural locus of both “Pacific Rim” movies. Whoever the “name” stars are, the real performance/”hero” of the movie is “The Chinese Way” — efficient, cooperative, deferential to all knowing authority.

And that’s reflected in the box office take. Rim” rimmed out in the U.S., earning only $26 million. But in China? An exchange-rate thrilling $146 million, and that’s where the movie — Chinese financed — will turn a big profit.

For me, it was odd to hear an unprompted Jackie Chan or John Woo play up the “It’s important to be friends” idea of dealing with China, unprompted, to emphasize China’s need for “order” over civil liberties, representative democracy and a government accountable to its people. They could see, years ago, the way Hollywood would approach luring China onto their bottom lines.

No more Chinese villains, no hints at corruption, waste, an Army that runs everything and makes illicit billions at home and abroad, no more “Red Corner.” Just pandering to the Pandas.

We first noticed this in the Chinese component of “2012,” in which the world experiences a cataclysm, but authoritarian China gets the job of secretly building smokey, diesel powered (No EPA? No problem!) arks to save chunks of the human race. The all-wise/all-knowing State anticipates the disaster, and has the resources and know how to come up with a plan.

“Pacific Rim: Uprising” cedes the power and influence over the aforementioned Rim to China. As in, “We’re pushing our borders well into the China Sea, right up to the shores of Taiwan, Japan and especially the Philippines, because we know best.”

So they run the show, and Hollywood, craving Chinese chump change, flatters the Chinese market by accepting that.

We are seeing this more and more in action films, “Mission: Impossible” this or that.

We’ve seen our last Chinese bond villains, even though, in global terms, their spreading money and collecting natural resources by “helping” Africa and “removing” big chunks of S. America back to the Motherland has the stench of colonization and power grabs.

Besides, Russians make the best villains because they’ve had a century of practice and know no other way.

But as the Not-Exactly-a-PEOPLE’S-Republic struts and gets more deference from the same corner of American business that fretted first about losing European markets to Hitler, second about the slavery and mass murder that promised, the Chinese should watch “Contact.”

Way back in ancient history — the ’90s — Hollywood got a collective sore back bending over and kissing Japanese feet. “Rising Sun,” “Black Rain,” and in the sci-fi hit “Contact,” it’s an all wise Japanese oligarch who saves the day with a “secret” transport for Jodie Foster to make contact with aliens.

The only thing that’s permanent in any of this is Hollywood’s pursuit of production cash, fresh markets to sell their ways as the U.S. audience steadily declines.

India? You’re next.