Movie Nation

That oft-filmed and televised mythic Chinese folk hero “The Monkey King” earns a slick, slapshticky animated treatment for Netflix in his latest incarnation.

He’s a classic flawed “hero,” a manic brawler and antic egomaniac, on a quest to join the “immortals” in Buddha’s heaven. And the film, produced by Hong Kong legend Stephen Chow, is an amusing and most-kid-friendly “musical” variation of the tale.

All of the movies I’ve seen — live action and this — find different settings and foes to battle in their assorted quests. But the general idea is the same. He’s a fury in fights with his magic “stick” (staff), and he loves to make everything about him, his wants and his immediate needs.

He needs to learn Buddhism.

A monkey with laser beams for eyes and a few other supernatural survival skills pops out of a rock and grows up to have the wisecracking voice of Jimmy O. Yang and save a tribe of forest monkeys who will never take him in, because he’s doomed to be an “outsider.”

He defeated a baby-monkey-kidnapping Tiger Demon thanks to an “ultimate weapon” staff he swiped from the Dragon King under the sea. The Dragon King hates the “air breathers” on land, travels by means of a tub toted by his minions and REALLY wants that “column” (“stick”) back.

As he is voiced by “Saturday Night Live” breakout Bowen Yang, we know he’ll be entirely too bitchy to let this theft go unpunished. And that he’ll have his own production number “under the sea” somewhere in the second act.

“So watch me rise up, open the skies up and take the world by STORM,” he croons.

But that’s later. The newly-self-crowned Monkey King first figures the way to joining the immortals in heaven is by vanquishing 100 demons. But when he’s done that, he realizes he’s never going to be more than an annoyance to the Emperor (Hoon Lee), who lets Buddha (BD Wong) convince him to leave this “monkey” to “find his own way,” ddiscover his “destiny” and grow into someone worthy of hero-worship and even immortality.

The Monkey ventures under the sea and into hell and up to heaven along the way. The tone of the various quests is just jokey enough, with some laugh-out-loud one-liners and exchanges scattered throughout.

“Hey RED girl,” the Monkey snaps at the Red Demon attacking a remote village. “Levave these poor, unattractive people alone!”

“But the kids are RIPEST this time of year,” she complains.

The “King” takes on an over-eager “assistant,” Lin (Jolie Hoang-Rappaport), who acts as hype-girl and aide who doesn’t think she belongs in the shadows. She paid no heed to the wise old ape who warned his people of this hot-headed attention-hog.

“He doesn’t LOVE you. He only wants you to love him!”

That’s a personality flaw no leader should have, especially not an immortal one.

The animation is sharp, the animated action beats fluid and fun. There are a few songs by Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss of the musical “Six,” pleasantly-silly in a “Who’s the simian you’ll find shimmyin’ to to the TOP” sort of way. One metal number mimics Metallica, probably a first for kids’ animation.

Bowen Yang is the vocal and character highlight, a Dragon King preening and scheming with his minions, providing “sides” (pages of script) for his not-Broadway-ready fake garden/poisoned “magical” peach play meant to trick the monkey into giving up his “stick.”

“Boxtrolls” and “Open Season” director Anthony Stacchi’s film feels Westernized and modernized and yet generally faithful to the source character. There’s even a reference about him taking a “Journey to the West,” the epic novel Monkey King was introduced in, which has also spawned film adaptations.

Netflix has made several animated films that can bear comparison to the very best of Disney, Pixar, Dreamworks and others, even if it has yet to produce one that deserves a place among the true classics on the animated pantheon. The antic-energy attached to slack pacing of this saga’s “quests” suggests Netflix isn’t quite up to producing an animated classic. But “Monkey King” is still as good as anything the major animation studios have released in this “down” year for animation. .

Rating: PG, violence, a urination gag

Cast: The voices of Jimmy O. Yang. Bowen Yang, Jolie Hoang-Rappaport, Hoon Lee and BD Wong as Buddha.

Credits: Directed by Anthony Stacchi, scripted by Steve Bencich, Ron J. Friedman and Rita Hsiao. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:32

“Bad Things” is an intimate thriller about the haunting power of trauma and four women whose messy interpersonal relationships and “history” aren’t done any favors by being in this spooky place.

The place is an empty suburban hotel Ruthie (Gayle Rankin of “The Greatest Showan” and TV’s “GLOW”) just inherited. The messiness is packaged in the fact that she’s here with her lover Cal (Hari Nef of “Barbie”), whom she’s cheated on with Fran (Annabelle Dexter-Jones of “Succession”).

But Maddie (Rad Pereira of HBO’s “Betty”) brought Fran with her. Maddie crushes on Cal, and Fran, who just survived a cancer scare, still has a thing for Ruthie.

Ruthie’s here to “sell this place,” but Cal is all atwitter over “the life” she can imagine here, running the Comley Suites with Ruthie, whom she’s pretty sure “is going to propose this weekend!” To that end, Ruthie is watching Youtube tutorials on running such a business, “Methods in Hospitality,” which we gather Cal has already viewed.

The tutorials on how hotels are “not just a space, but an experience,” are delivered by an expert in the field (Molly Ringwald).

What nobody seems to want to hear, especially the dizzy/bubbly Cal, is that Ruthie didn’t want to come, doesn’t want to hang onto the hotel and only recently reconnected with her (unseen) mother, who only wants a share of the cash. And the random deaths associated with this hotel (most motels/hotels have a few) aren’t the only trauma Ruthie remembers there.

“I don’t feel right here. I never have.”

What ensues is a waking “Shining” Overlook Hotel nightmare of visions of the dead and figures from the past, more cheating, hysteria and violence as this place brings back “Bad Things” and only a couple of these characters are conscious of the threat.

The love quadrangle is barely interesting by itself, despite the lived-in performances and the presence of transgender actress Nef. The visions — of joggers who were murdered, a child, a full dining room for the continental breakfast when no one is staying there — are more promising.

The place is an empty suburban hotel Ruthie (Gayle Rankin of “The Greatest Showan” and TV’s “GLOW”) has just inherited. The messiness is packaged in the fact that she’s here with her lover Cal (Hari Nef of “Barbie”), whom she’s cheated on with Fran (Annabelle Dexter-Jones of “Succession”).

But Maddie (Rad Pereira of HBO’s “Betty”) brought Fran with her. Maddie crushes on Cal, and Fran, who just survived a cancer scare, still has a thing for Ruthie.

“Messy.”

Ruthie’s here to “sell this place,” but Cal is all atwitter over “the life” she can imagine there, running the Comley Suites with Ruthie, whom she’s pretty sure “is going to propose this weekend!” To that end, Ruthie is watching Youtube tutorials on running such a business, “Methods in Hospitality,” which we gather Cal has already viewed.

The tutorials on how hotels are “not just a space, but an experience,” are delivered by an expert in the field (Molly Ringwald).

What nobody seems to want to hear, especially the dizzy/bubbly Cal, is that Ruthie didn’t want to come, doesn’t want to hang onto the Suites and only recently reconnected with her (unseen) mother, who only wants a share of the cash. And the random deaths associated with this hotel aren’t the only trauma Ruthie remembers there.

“I don’t feel right here. I never have.”

What ensues is a waking “Shining” Overlook Hotel nightmare of visions of the dead and figures from the past, more cheating, rising hysteria and violence as this place brings back “Bad Things” and only some of them are conscious of the threat.

The love quadrangle is barely interesting by itself, despite the lived-in performances. The characters have a distance that suggests each is in her own world with her own agenda that makes the quartet unsympathatic.

Was Fran “really sick?” Is Ruthie really as bad as all that? Is Cal deaf to Ruthie’s constant “I don’t want to be here” complaints? Is Maddie just an opportunist?

The visions — of joggers who were murdered, a child, a full dining room for the continental breakfast when no one is staying there — are more promising. But there’s little in the way of building suspense or a rising sense of dread.

Actress-turned-writer-director Stewart Thorndike puts more effort into keeping this elusive and obscure than in making the almost pre-ordained path the “horror” takes anything wholly satisfying or understandable.

Whatever the dynamics of this troubled, narcissistic same-sex quartet, “Bad Things” feels creepier than it is and promises frights or shocks and explanations it never quite pulls off.

Rating: unrated, violence, profanity, alcohol abuse

Cast: Gayle Rankin, Hari Nef, Rad Pereira, Annabelle Dexter-Jones, Jared Abramson and Molly Ringwald.

Credits: Scripted and directed by A Shudder release.

Running time: 1:27

The new “Blue Beetle” embraces its heritage — the proud Latino one and not-too-proud to not have a laugh at its checkered DC comics and TV history .

It’s representational, emphasizing its Spanishness with Spanglish and has laughs at North American Latino customs and culture. It leans into familia. There are backhanded slaps at U.S. foreign policy blunders (Reagan-Nicaragua) and ill-treatment of Mexicans, Mexican-American and Latin American immigrants.

It’s got an edge, thanks to its violence, a big fat stoner joke and an almost refreshing blast of Spanglish profanity.  You heard me right, pendejos.

Jokes land, veteran actress Adriana Barraza almost steals it and would have had George Lopez not gone whole jamón. And there are legit “origin story” life-and-death stakes. Kind of.

But…it’s damned stupid — dumb, even by comic book movie standards. It panders to the fan-chicos and fan-chicas to beat the band. Fine.

The plot is straight-up formula, with the odd deviation from “origin story” musts.

Get beyond the Big Two — Superman/Batman —  and “D.C.” often seems to stand for “Derivative Copies.” If this isn’t a Spanglish “Iron Man” movie, missing much of the wit, I don’t know what is.

The leads — Xolo Maridueña, Bruna Marquezine — are pretty bland. The villainess is Susan Sarandon, la perra loca by reputation on and off screen. But they don’t do anything much with her.

So, a mixed bag? Yeah. Hey, it’s Warners’ and DC. You get what you get. Socially-aware filmmaker Angel Manuel Soto (“The Farm,” “Inside Trump’s America,””Charm City Kings”) gives the genre a little something new, a hint of protest. But not as much as Lopez does.

“Cobra Kai/Parenthood” alumnus Xolo Maridueña plays Jaime Reyes, who just graduated pre-law from Gotham U., forced to job hunt the moment he gets home to Palmera City — Miami meets East LA meets El Paso — because he sees the familia is in dire straits.

Three generations, including his loopy Uncle Rudy (Lopez) and sassy, college-eschewing sister Milagro (Belissa Escobedo) live under their worn, Edge Keys roof. But they may lose it, even though Dad (Damián Alcázar) is full of homilies about how this family gets knocked down, but always gets back up again.

Taking a job suitable for “invisible people” like most of America’s Latin workforce, Jaime is cleaning up for a party at soulless industrialist Victoria Kord’s (Sarandon) mansion and gets fired, but noticed by her anti-weapons-development niece (Brazilian Bruna Marquezine of “God Save the King”).

That’s how he ends up holding this stolen blue scarab thingy of alien origin that she’s stolen from her aunt’s evil development labs. And that’s how “it” ends up “choosing” Jaime — who has to correct many a contemptuous gringo’s pronunciation of his name. After a not remotely funny “testing” the “suit sequence, he becomes the super-hero rival to Victoria Kord, Kord Industries’ minions and her own OMAC (exoskeleton-enhanced super soldier Carapax, played by Raoul Max Trujillo), a “School of the Americas” alumnus.

Uncle Rudy and his “Taco” (pimped Toyota Tacoma pickup), with Cheech and Chong bobble heads, will have to pitch in. And we’ll have to wait for something or some one to prove “The love you feel for your family makes you weak” is the silliest thing any villain ever said to a Latino hero.

The gadgets are laughably pro forma, the fights generic, the strained bits of pandering include Motley Crue scoring one of those battles. There’s yet another super-rich “inventor’s lair.” Give me a break. Promising ideas are introduced and abandoned, shots are held too long, giving weaker players a chance to mug for the camera and the pace drags because the ground we’re covering is so familiar.

But Nana (Granny), played by Oscar nominee  Adriana Barraza, is a woman of “Viva la Revolucion!” resources. Uncle Rudy is a bit paranoid about Big Defense Contractor Kord and U.S. law enforcement, who have “a lot of experience locking up Mexicans.” And cracks about Sarandon’s “Cruella meets Kim Kardashian” presence sting.

There’s just enough here to make this tolerable for 90 minutes. Sure, it goes on for 126, but I’m a gringo, not its target audience. I know that cheesy as this is, this will play for viewers happy to have the representation and the little bit of subversive sass “Blue Beetle” serves up.

If that’s your jam, by all means go, “Vaya con queso” and all that. But as a movie, this isn’t anything new as comic book adaptations go, and it isn’t much better plotted than your average telenovela or luchadores night on the tube.

Rating:  PG-13 for sequences of action and violence, language, and some suggestive references

Cast: Xolo Maridueña, Bruna Marquezine, Adriana Barraza,
Belissa Escobedo, Raoul Max Trujillo, Damián Alcázar, Harvey Guillén, George Lopez and Susan Sarandon.

Credits: Directed by Angel Manuel Soto, scripted by Gareth Dunnet-Alcocer. A DC/Warner Bros. release.

Running time: 2:07

Warner Bros decided, after “The Flash,” to vastly reduce the number of cities they’d preview their products in.

Vast swathes of the country were told “You don’t get to see “Barbie,” “The Meg 2” and now “Blue Beetle” in advance.

NBA cities, NFL, MLB and hockey and soccer cities that weren’t NYC or LA or the like lost our previews.

Permanently? Yo no se.

If Latin friendly Orlando can’t get a showing of “Blue Beetle,” some suit doesn’t know her demos.

But here we are, catching it on an upscale experience, giving it every chance to work.

And if it doesn’t, let Samuel L Jackson channel a review just for the WB.

For a filmmaker who came from the world of editing to create a string of visually striking films, several of them epics and more than a couple regarded as masterpieces, “Madeleine” stands out as a venture that wasn’t as “David Lean” as one might like.

It’s a period piece, and a 1950 melodrama that evolves into a courtroom drama, based on an original script that set it firmly in the era Lean had proven most comfortable — Dickensian/Victorian Britain.

One can’t help but notice its Hickcockian touches — a suspicious death, a desperate suspect who could have been a Hitchcock blonde, incomplete visual evidence of her connection to the crime and a trial that serves up a surprise or two amidst its sometimes tedious details.

“Madeleine” feels like lesser Hitchcock in the viewing, though the visuals manage a Lean touch, here and there. But for a Lean completist, it’s fascinating to see him try to match “The Master of Suspense” in a dry, intimate romance-gone-wrong tale.

Ann Todd, fresh from Hitchcock’s “The Paradine Case,” has the title role, that of a pretty young woman of middle class affluence in 1850s Glasgow. Her father (Leslie Banks) has some notion she’ll marry a suitor of her station, preferably the kind and patient and monied Mr. Minnoch (Leslie Banks).

But being a headstrong (not really) lass, Madeleine Smith fancies this rakish, mustachio’d Frenchman. L’Angelier (Ivan Desny, preening and controlling) sees her after the rest of the family has gone to bed. We don’t know how they met, only that he swept her off her feet. A dandy with a cane that he rattles across the bars of her basement window, he is a wage worker who dresses well with an idea of marrying well.

We figure this out long before poor Madeleine. He is a seducer, an advocate of a secret “engagement” and of her thinking of herself as already his “wife.” If only she’ll broach the subject with her father.

She won’t. She even comes to Emile and begs him to take her away, and that’s where he lays it all out for her, as she’s the last one to get a clue.

“If we marry, we marry into YOUR life, not mine.”

When she makes the break, which she must, he has letters of proof of their affair, a framed photograph. She’d like to get them back and be rid of him once and for all.

Which is why when he dies, she falls under suspicion and becomes Suspect One.

Lean handles all this as deftly as anything this action-starved can manage. There’s a ponderous Scots-accented narration that frames the picture, with a couple of moments of Scottish piping and Scottish dancing to give us a parallel “highland fling” going on across the way as Madeleine and Emile have their own highland fling.

The story’s Glasgow Scottishness is mostly an afterthought, unless you take into account the highlands’ mistrust of the French.

There are some arresting images, but not enough to think of this as one of Lean’s black-and-white beauties. One striking moment has a street preacher inveighing against the sins of the wealthy during Madeleine’s trial. It stands out because much around it is so staid and stale.

One never loses the feeling that subtexts and psychology — personal and Scottish — aside, this is lesser Lean.

But it’s fun watching Lean take one last step in Dickensia — pale imitation though it may be — before turning towards more modern fare. Glory came later in the ’50s with “The Bridge Over the River Kwai” and basically ended only with the great editor and director’s death, preparing a version of Joseph Conrad’s “Nostromo” as a follow-up to “A Passage to India” some thirty years later.

Rating: passed

Cast: Ann Todd, Norman Wooland, Ivan Desny, Leslie Banks and André Morell

Credits: Directed by David Lean, scripted by Stanley Haynes and Nicholas Phipps. A Rank Org. release on Tubi, Amazon, Youtube etc.

Running time: 1:54

“Eye of the Storm” is a Taiwanese disaster movie built around a pandemic and set inside a hospital.

The coronavirus of this outbreak was SARS –Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome — which burst out of Asia in the spring of 2003. But the responses to a deadly, little-known virus will be familiar to anyone who lived through the COVID shutdown, especially health care workers. A quarantine generates responses that range from dutiful resignation to panic and cowardice.

The characters and situations will be familiar to anybody who’s watched a disaster movie or two, and caught a few episodes of “ER” “Gray’s Anatomy” or their clones.

There are young lovers (Chloe Xiang, Jing-Hua Tseng) barely past the “crush” stage but forced to make major life decisions and deal with terrible losses.

A taxi driver (Yung-Cheng Chang) trapped in the locked-down Taipei hospital has to take on the responsibility of a small child whose nurse/mother was one of the first to get sick.

A cynical reporter (Hsueh Shih-ling) trapped with them, tries to find out how many SARS cases, how they’re being treated and how the disease got into the hospital and the country, and there’s a narcissistic, dismissive surgeon (Po-Chieh Wang) forced to do his duty and stay on the job despite family demands, and just curious enough to help that pesky reporter track down the history of this virus getting in.

The film echoes much of what we saw in the early days of COVID-19, a quarantined hospital with the sick, the dying and the trapped — hanging homemade banners about their plight out the window — even as it follows medical drama/disaster movie formulas.

Dr, Xia (Wang) is an aloof surgeon determined to cut out of work early to make it to his daughter’s birthday party. He is curt with callers who want to transfer a patient “too old” for him to treat to their hospital, to staff who hit him with question after question as he’s dashing for the door, to every caller on his constantly-ringing phone, including his wife.

He browbeats the cabbie who “just got off duty” to drive him home, and when he’s summoned to another emergency surgery during what’s left of his shift, he gets the guy to turn around. Xia isn’t moved by the cabbie’s compassion and doesn’t thank the nurse who hands him the belongings the cabbie rushed into the hospital to drop off ,which the doctor had left in his taxi.

A lost little girl, almost trampled as the facility is thrown into lockdown, becomes the cabbie’s next mission. Xia? He’s stuck here doing his job

The lovers may be heading in different directions. Ang’s a male nurse interviewing with “Doctors Without Borders” in Hong Kong. Petite Dr. Lee is ready to turn clingy over that.

And the reporter, always whipping out a camcorder to “document” a hospital whose SARS cases he reported before they did (“educated guess”) is now stuck with a surgeon adamant about not being photographed, but maybe willing to help find the truth that those “pretentious bastards who hide in meeting rooms” (in Mandarin with English subtitles) are covering up, or too inept to recognize.

Director Chun-yang Lin (“The World Between Us”) keeps things moving, although suspense is in short supply. The performances are more adequate than moving.

The inclusion of lots of bloody ER and surgery scenes, complete with background “coughing,” set the story on familiar, foreshadowed ground.

Xiang has maybe the best acting moment in the picture, capturing a bit of human nature not typically covered in tales of hospital heroics during COVID. A furious Dr. Lee, tiny little thing that she is, leaves behind her latest attempted resuscitation to pound on doors on her hospital wing, raging at staff hiding in locked rooms to “stop being cowards,” to come out and “do your jobs!”

It’s all standard-issue medical drama material, with SARS as the “disaster movie” wild card, the instigating action that sets our soap operatic story in motion. And it’s handled with skill, speed and dollops of drama and compassion.

Rating: TV-14, graphic surgery footage

Cast: Po-Chieh Wang, Chloe Xiang, Jing-Hua Tseng, Yung-Cheng Chang and Hsueh Shih-ling

Credits: Directed by Chun-yang Lin, scripted by Tsun-Han Liu. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:58

The true story of a pig farmer who killed hired hands and fed them to her hogs becomes an amateurishly awful thriller in the hands of first-time feature director Adam Fair, as “PigLady” fails in pretty much every way a movie can.

It’s built on that “weekend at my Dad’s cabin” in Oregon formula, four young city folk of the SOTA demographic head off for a vacation amongst the scary rural folks, and find themselves fighting for their lives against a monster and her swine, who have developed a taste for human flesh.

That’s as gross as it sounds, but not nearly as scary as it sounds.

Our “monster” (Sandra Dee Tryon) is a unisex lump we never really see in the face. She’s adept at using a machete like a throwing knife and single-minded in her pursuit of “junkies” nobody will miss to hire and eventually kill on her remote pig farm.

Our traveling quartet — played by Alicia Karami, Karri Davis, Liam Watkins and co-writer/director Adam Fair — are a dull collection of “types,” with Fair giving his SoCal character a gun, a drawl and a Marine Corps background.

There are a lot of ways to save money on a low-budget film, and one of them is staging the entire introduction to your would-be victims in a parked SUV because driving shots are complicated and driving and acting and directing is hard.

Remembering lines like “I have a chronic disorder of ‘douche bag,'” without rolling into the ditch can be tricky. Drawling “I will protect you and I am strapped” with a straight-face just doubles the degree of difficulty.

Despite peppering the footage with hogs wandering through the frame and XCUs of porkers, the pigs never look menacing.

There are continuity errors, incompetent efforts to speed up a sheriff’s dept. vehicle’s response to a call and some of the worst run-for-your-life/pass yourself off as terrified “acting” I’ve seen outside of a student film.

A pig is butchered (killed off camera) for a cookout, there’s gratuitous hot tub scene and a lot of bad dialogue, some of it from their gay/transgender friends, but most of it delivered by the co-writer/director and co-star.

“When I’m done with your man, he’s gonna be shakin’ it with BOTH hands.”

Fair enough.

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

Cast: Alicia Karami, Sandra Dee Tryon, Karri Davis, Adam Fair, Shyvan Storm, Liam Watkins, Lazarus Tate and Geno Romo.

Credits: Directed by Adam Fair, scripted by Adam Fair and Alex C. Johnson. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:40

The f-bomb is dropped 15 times before the opening credits of “Strays,” a raunchy new talking-dogs comedy that’s sort of “The Incredible Journey” without Disney, an “Incredible Journey Through Profanity and Every Vulgar and Gross Thing Dogs Do.”

Will Forte, playing a dog-neglecting, dog-abusing stoner who keeps his cheated-on ex-girlfriend’s border terrier out of spite, plays a game the dog (voiced by Will Ferrell) names “Fetch and F–k!”

Forte gets his 14 of the 15 opening F-bombs out by yelling every time little Reggie fetches that ball, no matter how far off stoner Doug drops the dog, and returns to Doug’s bong-decorated hovel.

All this is BEFORE Reggie meets Buzz, the Boston terrier voiced by R-rated comic Jamie Foxx. So that’s the kind of movie you’re facing, friends. Don’t go bringing Granny because she loves her Boston terrier or the kids because it’s a movie with talking dogs.

This is one foul-mouthed, leg-and-everything-else humping, dog vomiting and dog pooping extravaganza. They don’t hand out R ratings because it’s “ruff.” Ok, actually they do.

Country dog Reggie finds himself alone in the big city, where veteran stray Buzz meets him and helps him accept that Doug didn’t “love” him and doesn’t want him back. With Buzz’s pals Hunter, the Great Dane therapy dog (a “police dog” washout voiced by Randall Park) and Australian shepherd Maggie (Isla Fisher), an ace tracker and smart-enough-to-realize-her-owner’s all about the puffy Pomerian she just brought home, and not her anymore.

Reggie resolves to go back to where he came from, find Doug and bite his (penis) off.

The four friends undertake this quest, facing sketchy directions from Reggie and every dog’s greatest nightmares — dog catchers and fireworks.

They curse, get stoned off mushrooms, plucked up by an eagle and hump all sorts of stuff along the way.

Cute bits include Buzz teaching Reggie the “rules” of being a stray — “Rule number one, you want something, PEE on it.” Foxx’s way with an off-color line lets him steal the movie.

The idea here is to riff on real dog behavior — the more gross the better — and a dog’s eye view of human interactions such as humans “collecting” their poop.

The Dan Perrault script gets gooey and sentimental about every dogs’ sad story, and outraged at the sorts of ways humans abuse, neglect or misunderstand Man’s Best Friend

But the talking dogs effect is pretty much perfected now. And there are juvenile laughs scattered throughout, with the most sophisticated gag a send-up of “A Dog’s Purpose,” with Josh Gad voicing a “Narrator Dog” (Labrador Retriever) and his human co-star in that film spoofing himself.

You’ll avert your eyes from some of the more disgusting stuff. But as a dumb movie that makes you laugh, “Strays” falls somewhere between “Ted,” the cussing Teddy Bear tale, and “Cocaine Bear.” Just don’t go if you’re easily offended.

Rating: R for pervasive language, crude and sexual content, and drug use.

Cast: The voices of Will Ferrell, Jamie Foxx, Isla , Randall Park, Josh Gad and Sofía Vergara, with Will Forte.

Credits: Directed by Josh Greenbaum, scripted by Dan Perrault. A Universal release.

Running time: 1:33

This looks good and damned timely, I must say, an appreciation of a pioneer in his field, Dr Lonnie Thompson, who documented climate history via ice core samples

Sept 15, this comes to NYC and LA. Sept 20, it comes to the world.

You don’t have to have ever been in a Home Owner’s Association (HOA) to be triggered by Jirí Havelka’s “The Owners, (Vlastníci),” a cynical and dark Czech comedy about “democracy” in action.

Basically a real-time nightmare of an HOA meeting about residents/owners of an old apartment building who can’t seem to decide on anything, or decide on deciding to decide, it gave me chest pains.

The characters are “types,” the laughs are scattered and cutting and the parable intended is pretty obvious.

Democracy is difficult to attain, more difficult to maintain and easy to disrupt. All it takes is one obstructionist, dimwit or cunning saboteur and nothing will ever get done.

The “owners” in this one vote per apartment HOA, with one cantankerous old coot owning three and having three votes, meet off property to talk about structural problems, financial limitations and possible improvements to their “pre-revolution” multi-storey mid-city building.

A go-getter on maternity leave (Tereza Ramba) and her placating husband (Vojtech Kotek) are the chairwoman and minutes-taker, respectively, ready to run through their 90 minute gathering, but braced for the fact that there’s no “running” in this building, or anything to do with it.

A pedantic martinet (Klára Melísková) is Ms. Roberts Rules of Order, barking “We have to VOTE on that”(in Czech with English subtitles) about literally every wrinkle in the way the meeting is conducted.

The cranky old man Milos (Jirí Lábus) mutters about “When I ran this” and other reminiscences of Life Under Socialism, repeatedly.

A dolt (David Novotný) sitting in for his dying mother can’t be persuaded not to vote for both sides on every issue.

A dim, reading-and-or-sight-impaired old gossip (Dagmar Havlová) interrupts every train of thought with random complaints, blurting out bits of gossip the way Milos drops casual racial, sexual and gender insults.

“What did you MEAN by that?” she fumes at every comeback and clapback her obnoxious busybudy asides earn her.

As she is prone to malapropisms — “Embola Virus,” “Conflict of Pinterest” — there’s a lot of “explaining” to do.

The gay guy (Andrej Polák) is quicker to exasperate over the state of the meeting than the couple running the show.

There’s a woman subletting her flat out to “six students from Ghana,” her sketchy “business advisor” who hands out a card for a different business every time something needs to be inspected, fixed, replaced or built, a pair of twins who’ve just inherited their late father’s flat and pregnant newlywed newcomers easily bullied into voting this way or that.

It’s a home or condo-owner’s nightmare of sincere, smart and reasonable people outnumbered by obstinate skinflints, greedheads, obstructionists and shortsighted idiots.

Sound like any voting/elected bodies you know?

Actor-turned writer-director Havelka — “Emergency Situation” was his — treats this like a play filmed in real time, with steadily rising frustrations and a few third act fireworks.

The laughs are mostly winces of recognition as we hear unfiltered fools let their inner prejudices out, others respond to those insults and a few HOA members struggle mightily to keep the meeting going so that they can actually get something done.

Ramba, Havlová, Melísková and Lábus are standouts in the cast, displaying varying degrees ot exasperation, stubbornness, concern and blithe dismissals of concern without a whit of expertise.

Havelka’s not-quite-farce reminds us of how important “rules” are,” and how bad actors can bend them into obstruction, how important civility is and how pointless it is for a gay man or anybody else to try and explain “solidarity” and group action to the dogmatic, the dim and the determined-to-do-nothing.

No, it doesn’t make legislative “gridlock” any more appetizing or understandable. But “The Owners” does a good job of reminding us that the alternative to this messy, exhausting, time-consuming business of “every voice” must be heard and every vote should be equal (giving Milos three votes because he has three flats is America’s broken “system” in a nutshell) is almost unthinkable.

Rating: unrated, profanity, smoking

Cast: Tereza Ramba, Vojtech Kotek, Dagmar Havlová, Klára Melísková, Andrej Polák and Jirí Lábus

Credits: Scripted and directed by Jirí Havelka. A Big World Pictures release.

Running time: 1:37