Movie Nation

“Miraculous: Ladybug & Cat Noir, the Movie,” also titled “Ladybug & Cat Noir: Awakening,” is an animated film film kids that falls on the wrong side of the “catering to/pandering to” line, in terms of children’s entertainment.

That should be no shock to anyone, considering that the movie is based on “Zag Heroez” branded French TV series dubbed for showing on The Disney Channel, with doll sales and all manner of merchandising is built into this exercise in entertainment “world building.”

The CGI animated characters and action sequences are sharp enough. The cutesy dialogue is cute-ish.

“Don’t be bemused. It’s just the news!”

The tunes our heroine, hero and villain sing are innocuous and pleasantly forgettable.

The messaging — “Stop worrying about what others think. You just have to believe in yourself” and “Who saves a life saves the world” (borrowed from Jewish and Islamic scriptures) — is generally positive.

But the prefabricated nature of it all feels focus-grouped, cut-and-paste “borrowed” from comic book and other “universes.”

Kids may find it a passable time-killer, but grownups should smell the cynicism of it all, despite the French settings, “bourgeois” jokes and baguette references.

There are these “Miraculous” gemstones, we’re told, which can be used or misused, and as one of them contains “the ultimate power,” guess which one falls into the hands of our villain, Gabriel (voiced by Keith Silverstein)?

“Chaos will REIGN today!”

Yes, he’s from that most evil tribe, most villainous profession among professions. He’s a fashion designer. Oh, and he’s mourning his dead wife, so all this evil is carried-out to bring her back.

Two of the other “miraculous” stones must fall into the hands of “heroez” fit to “work together” and save the world from this new menace.

That’s how Marinette, the baker’s daughter (Cristina Valenzuela) comes into possession of “Ladybug” earrings which transform her into a “water melon” suited (red, black polka dots like the bug, but you can see how people would make a mistake) super heroine, complete with “genie” advisor and a magical yo-yo that makes her into more of a Spider-Girl than Ladybug.

And that’s how the blond hunk from her school, Adrien (Bryce Papenbrook) puts on a cat gem ring and becomes Cat Noir, “the new hero in town.”

“All you have to do is follow my lead, sidekick!”

Sidekick? Who’re you calling SIDEkick?

Can two bickering teens foil the machinations of Hawkmoth, who just happens to be Adrien’s obsessed, grieving, neglecting-his-son Dad?

Jeremy Zag of “Zag Heroez, Inc” directed, composed the songs and co-wrote this, which is aimed both at fans of the TV series and at introducing new fans to the franchise.

Because that’s what “Ladybug & Cat Noir” and their movie really are, a franchise, just “content” conceived by marketers and executed by decent animators, voice-actors and crew.

Limp one-liners, derivitive characters and action set pieces remind us every minute or so just how little originality ever figured into it.

Rating: TV-PG

Cast: The voices of Cristina Valenzuela, Bryce Papenbrook, Carrie Keranen and Keith Silverstein.

Credits: Directed by Jeremy Zag, scripted by Bettina Lopez Mendoza and Jeremy Zag. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:45

“Hidden Strike” is a bad movie that’s easy to endorse. A buddy comedy co-starring the master of the genre, Jackie Chan, here paired with that jock joker John Cena, it’s action for those who like their cheese paired with some fine…whines.

“Fasten your SEAT belt!”

“You let go!” “No, YOU let go!”

Yeah, it’s like that. But it doesn’t start out even that entertaining. This Chinese-financed XYZ Films actioner fills its first act with straight People’s Republic agitprop.

In the “oil wars” of the future, a Chinese refinery in the Middle East is under siege. “Volunteer” security forces led by Feng “Dragon” Luo (Chan) are efficiently dispatched, load a dozen buses with Chinese employees, their children and the refinery’s scientist/director, Professor Cheng (Jiang Wenli) for a dash down the Highway of Death to a “Green Zone” of safety.

But an American mercenary who lives among the locals (Cena) is persuaded to hit that convoy by a merc who turns out to be his brother (Amadeus Serafini, and much respect if that’s the stage name you came up with, my dude.). Chris wants revenge on some malefactor in that convoy. That might have something to with his dead dad.

“Quit,” the punk kid brother hisses. “Just like you did on our old man.”

Dragon promises to “protect” the young woman (Ma Chunrui) who rides in the front of his bus with him.

“You are here to be a hero,” she fumes, in Chinese with subtitles. “But not for me. For THEM.”

Yup. She’s his estranged daughter.

For over half an hour, we’re caught up in that bit of soap opera amidst a “Mad Max” raid on the convoy, mid-sandstorm — bloody shoot-outs between helicopters and desert warcraft. And then the leading couple finally has its “meet cute.”

Things really pick-up after that, with bro-to-bro throwdowns as one guy shouts “You killed my people!” and the other protesting “It wasn’t ME.”

Yes, they must work together to take down the real villain. I”ll pull the pin, YOU throw the grenade. And yes, they make a LOT of wisecracks as they do.

“You keep a MACHINE GUN under your seat?”

“I’m American…guns everywhere.”

Chan gets in a soap bubble brawl. Cena leads Arab kids in “Old McDonald Had a Farm.” Chan interrupts to correct his impersonation of a monkey.

Cena’s Chris speaks just enough Chinese to flirt with the old Chinese man’s daughter and sound like an idiot to a native Mandarin speaker. Chan lands his one-liners like a pro.

Movies about fighting over future oil in the first “Global Broiling” summer of 2023 seem seriously passe.

Jackie Chan is using stunt doubles these days, along with CGI. Some funny stuff, some outrageous stuff, little of it believable — especially the amusing bits — results.

But his ability to generate rapport with any buddy pic co-star, Chris Tucker to Owen Wilson to Cena, is undiminished. He still plays the “safety first” straight arrow to whatever joker’s sharing the frame with him.

And for all this film’s failings, something this international star has stressed in interviews with me and others over the years about East and West “getting along” eventually underscores this big budget Chinese-made B-movie and makes it at least tolerable.

Sure, the U.S. and China cooperate to shoot up a big part of the Middle East and a lot of Arabs in this movie. But the villain (Pilou Asbæk) is a Dane playing an amoral, pan-national Brit, who hires bad guys from all over the world.

So maybe we’ll “get along,” as many Chinese stars and filmmakers I have interviewed have stressed, as if repeating some national or at least show-biz career-preservation talking point. And maybe we’ll do that before the “real” shooting starts.

Rating: TV-14

Cast: Jackie Chan, John Cena, Ma Chunrui, Pilou Asbæk, Chunrui Ma, Tim Ma and Jian Wenli,

Credits: Directed by Scott Waugh, scripted by Aresh Amel. An XYZ release on Netflix.

Running time: 1:43

Seth Rogen’s take on the franchise, lots of animation styles, endorsements from the usual low-rent quote whores of criticism.

Could be good. Might be the same-old/same-old in a new CGI/stop-motion etc. wrapper.

“TMNT: Mutant Mayhem” opens Wed. — Aug. 2.

File “Natty Knocks” under that broad horror film rubric “I’ve seen worse.”

It’s basically a screenwriting exercise, “Write another ‘Halloween’ without inviting a copyright infringement claim.” That makes for an unsurprising trek through suburbia in a Town With a Dark History, a burning witch’s threat, a mass murderer who prefers makeup to masks and a baby-sitter.

Decent production values, a couple of horror icons in the cast, a couple of decent jolts, and you’re in the black — or barely in the red. I haven’t had a look at Vertical’s books.

The opening shot is the scariest one in the movie — a female figure hanging like a scarecrow.

A blonde witch is interrupted, mid-coitus, by a lynch mob. Natty Knocks (Joey Bothwell) is given a stark choice by the lady-folks — “HYPOCRITES!” she screams — of Fillmore.

“She’ll talk or she’ll burn.”

The mob shouts “Burn the witch, burn the witch” until the flames comes for Natty, screaming “I’ll wait for you in hell! as she expires.

That was back in ’76…1976. The ’70s, man. You had to be there.

Cut to 2022, Halloween’s a’coming, and a stalker is on the loose. A trio of kids “ditching” school for the day (Thomas Robie, Noen Perez and Channah Zeitung) play the “Natty Knocks” game on the wrong house. You know how it goes. Knock nine times, repeat a long chant that ends with “Hide under your bed or she’ll take off your head.”

They see the brutish killer (Bill Moseley, whose 134-credits-and-counting career includes “Repo: The Genetic Opera” and “House of 1000 Corpses”) pummeling a girl. They flee, and as they ponder telling the cops, we see that our murderer loves face-painting and movies on real celluloid (Who doesn’t?) projecting drive-in B-horror movies via an ancient Bell & Howell.

They can’t tell Mom, or let her boss (Robert Englund sans Freddy Kruger hat and gloves) know. And the baby-sitter (relative newcomer Charlotte Foountain-Jardim) is just mad that they skipped school.

How will they ensure this creep doesn’t catch-and-kill again?

The mundane complications are just as generic as the basic plot. The two siblings, played by Robie and Zeitung, are coping with a break-up of the family, the other kid (Perez) has a mother who’s been married four times and a sketchy new beau (Amit Sarin, not bad).

And the baby sitter is anxiously awaiting college acceptance, using that as an excuse to fend off her douche-bro beau just a little bit longer.

The story, after that prologue, takes too long to get going and the pacing throughout is gassed, even though it’s 12 minutes shorter than the listed IMDb running time, suggesting a longer cut existed at some point.

The violence is jarring enough. And Moseley’s as creepy as ever.

But if you’ve literally EVER seen a horror movie, you’ve seen the plot-points “Natty Knocks” borrows — all of them from 366 versions of the same film.

Still, as I said at the outset, “I’ve seen worse.”

Rating: unrated, violence, f-bombs

Cast: Bill Moseley, Charlotte Fountain-Jardim, Thomas Robie, Noen Perez, Channah Zeitung, Amit Sain, Joey Bothwell and Robert Englund.

Credits: Directed by Dwight H. Little, scripted by
Benjamin Olson. A Vertical release.

Running time: 1:34

Many of us dream of making that “escape to the country,” finding a pastoral piece of rural wherever to get away from it all, get back to the land and experience a little peace.

But what did Sartre warn us? “Hell is other people.” No, he wasn’t talking about Jason Aldean’s idea of “small towns.” But he could’ve been. No matter where you are in the world, that “get away from it all” move is wholly dependent on how friendly or unfriendly the locals are where you move.

Set aside your Hollywood preconceptions about psychological thrillers when you take in “The Beasts” (“As Bestas”), a Spanish tale with a hint of “Straw Dogs” about it, although “Jean de Florette” was an obvious inspiration, above and beyond a true story told in a 2016 documentary.

Director and co-writer Rodrigo Sorogoyen serves up a tense, suspenseful tale of French “outsiders” facing rising intimidation, taunts and worse from hostile locals when they move to a remote mountain village in the north of Spain.

The long opening scene, in the bar in this tiny “ghost town,” introduces bullying blowhard Xan (Luis Zahera), and it quickly becomes obvious why he’s always dominating the conversation over drinks dominoes. If he lets anybody else get in a word edgewise, his intellectual limitations will stand out all the more.

He lords over his simpler brother Lorenzo (Diego Anido) and buries one and all in BS and abuse.

But the guy he really hates is the burly farmer he nicknames “Frenchy.” Antonoine (Denis Ménochet) is a bear of a man who avoids confrontation with this big mouth as he sips his drink. But he can’t even leave in peace. The Francophobic Xan finishes off his dimwitted insults about the French and Spanish history with an “In this country, we say hello” and “goodbye” when entering or leaving a bar (in Spanish, with English subtitles).

Antoine gives the impression he could pound this Okie-lean 50something lout into the tiled floor. But he was a school teacher. He’s just mastered the language. He and his wife run an organic farm and sell their wares at the farmer’s market and at street fairs. They need to get along.

So Antoine takes it.

There’s bad blood, we learn. Wife Olga (Marina Foïs) isn’t all that committed to this place where “We break our backs and empty our savings.” And those Anta brothers aren’t going to leave them in peace and aren’t going to ever accept them, no matter how many abandoned, ruined old houses they restore to livable in a dirt road village where no one else would ever move.

Sorogoyen tells this story of steady, tense escalation with great patience. Antoine can’t get the local cops interested in the various violations the Antas visit upon. So he starts secretly recording them.

The brutish brothers may not be sophisticated, but they know how to mess with a fellow farmer.

And on and on it goes.

When Claude Berri told this sort of story, he made it a two-film saga of ancient grudges coming home to roost — “Jean de Florette” and “Manon of the Spring,” two of the great French films of the ’80s.

Sorogoyen boils this saga down to a single story, with subtle twists and steadily rising suspense. You think you’re guessing where it’s going, but you don’t. This may have hints of “Straw Dogs,” but the real world isn’t a Sam Peckinpah movie. This may lean on Berri’s films, but it diverges from those in fascinating ways.

Zahera loses himself in Xan, a fuming jerk who is just smart enough to know that his fury is all he can count on when he’s looking for someone else to blame for his life.

Ménochet gives Antoine a delusional trust in his instincts, in common sense, reason and his ability to read people and especially his trust in Spain’s version of “useless rural cops'” concept of right and wrong.

Foïs keeps Olga’s deepest thoughts secret even if her deepest fears are something she isn’t shy about expressing to her husband.

The scenery, the seasons, even the worn and emptied-out mountain village have a hypnotic beauty in “The Beasts.” But Sorogoyen’s film reminds us that scenery and the nature walks it invites aren’t everything, and that “escape” is illusory. Out in the country, you’re on your own, and you’re at the mercy of other people and other people’s values and limits of how far they’ll go in a feud.

If you don’t know that grudge isn’t going away, and that neither are they, you’re smart as you think.

Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Marina Foïs, Denis Ménochet, Luis Zahera, Diego Anido and Marie Colomb.

Credits:Directed by Rodrigo Sorogoyen, scripted by Isabel Peña and Rodrigo Sorogoyen . A Greenwich Entertainment release.

Running time: 2:17

Dublin’s North Circular Road isn’t anything the casual tourist might pick up on, even upon glancing at a map when visiting the city. It’s not a North American idea of what such a name might imply — an interstate loop or pre-interstate U.S. highway bypass.

But in Dublin, it’s a dividing line between “downtown,” the historical, touristy part of the city, and the northern suburbs. It’s very old, dating from when British engineers conceived it in the mid-18th century. And it’s historic, a way of telling the story of the city, the people and their struggles and the music they made to preserve that history.

“North Circular” is an elegaic black and white documentary that has singers and assorted locals remember that history through ballads and laments, and who tell of what is here and what used to be here — from Mountjoy Prison and St. Brendan’s asylum in Grangegorman, to long-gone O’Devaney Gardens housing estates, the famed Cobblestone folk club and a football (soccer) pitch where the “Bohs” (Bohemians) face off with their hated rivals, the (Shamrock) Rovers to this day.

Writer-director Luke McManus takes us from Phoenix Park and its monuments all the way east to “the docks,” which terminate the road (more or less) at Dublin Bay.

The music is simple and unadorned with studio refinements — a capella singers, pipers, tin whistle players reviving ancient ballads and more modern tunes recalling the ways the authorities (the Brits) in their historic zeal for “institutionalizing” the Irish, trumped up charges against women to imprison and then ship them to “Van Dieman’s Land” (Australia) because the new British colony “needed women,” other hardships and love stories and history.

“North Circular” is geographically and emotionally evocative, just gorgeous to see, to hear and to immerse yourself in, enveloped in an ancient city’s lore via its music.

Rating: unrated

Cast: Lisa O’Neil, Gemma Dunleavy, John Francis Flynn, Johnny Flynn, Ian Lynch, Eoghan O’Ceannabháin and Séan Ó Túama

Credits: Scripted and directed by Luke McManus. A Lightdox release.

Running time: 1:25

The look is as lurid as black and white cinematography ever got, New York after dark “Photographed,” the title tells us, in a novel way of giving credit, by the great “James Wong Howe.”

The music is jazz at its sleaziest — brassy, brazen, squawking in protest to be heard over the din of the dialogue. And those words pure poetry, straight from pens dipped in poison.

 “I’d hate to take a bite outta you. You’re a cookie full of arsenic.”

“Mr. Falco, let it be said at once, is a man of 40 faces, not one. None too pretty, and all deceptive.”

And then there’s the best dismissal in the history of the movies — “You’re dead, son. Get yourself buried.”

Maybe “Sweet Smell of Success” isn’t Hollywood’s highfalutin version of Shakespeare in 1950s New York. It’s more Moliere — cruel, quippy, lacerating with characters as venal as any the screen ever served up, one and all as mean as hell, and quotable in the bargain.

“Stop tinkering pal, that horseradish won’t jump a fence.” “The cat’s in the bag and the bag’s in the river.”

Based on a novella by famed screenwriter Ernest Lehman (“North by Northwest,” “Sabrina”), it was turned into purple-in-the-face prose — 1950s Broadway-ese — by Lehman and revolutionary playwright Clifford Odets (“Waiting for Lefty,” “Golden Boy,” “The Country Girl”).

“Match me, Sidney.” “Come back, Sidney! I wanna chastise you!”

Lehman, a former assistant to a columnist and press agent, ensured that “Success” is a sizzling Cabaret Life portrait of Manhattan when it sizzled, when Broadway/showbiz newspaper gossips like Walter Winchell, Ed Sullivan, Leonard Lyons and Dorthy Kilgallen published daily accounts of who was stepping out with whom, was at this play or that concert, dining at The Stork Club or tying one on at Toots Shor’s.

Ethically slippery, morally amoral, these high-and-mighties would sit in said nightclubs at their own booth and have singers, comics, actors, politicians and boot-lickers pay homage and fealty and hope to get noticed and “in the column.”

And lot of this intel and club owner promotion and bon mots attributed to the famous and want-to-be-famous was served up to those columnists as “tips” from press agents. If the columnists were “monsters,” willing to do anything for a scoop, to build this unknown up or knock that famous personage down, press agents were the monsters’ minions, paid to “place” attention-garnering tidbits in the columns by clients who hoped that it’d lead to a bigger crowd, a better gig or a new role.

“It’s a dirty job,” one disgruntled comic grips,” but I pay clean money for it.”

Tony Curtis, in one of his finest performances, plays nervous, nail-biting eager-beaver press agent Sidney Falco, a guy with an office that has his bedroom right behind it, handy for a night owl prowling the clubs for clients and working the phones and the club booths to get something “in the column.”

Sidney’s “so pretty” that you’d think he was a star. But he’s a hustler on the margins. He skips wearing a hat and coat out to save “tips” to every hat-check in every club that’s part of his rounds. Sidney needs the attention of a “monster” he calls his “friend,” J.J. Hunesecker.

Burt Lancaster, the ostensible lead and producer of this film, gets a real “star entrance” over 20 minutes into the picture, photographed from below, his glasses adding a sinister shadow to his eyes, his voice a pitiless, unfiltered insult of brusque dismissal. Senator or showgirl or groveling Sidney, J.J. makes no distinction.

“I love this dirty town,” he growls. It’s people he’s not crazy about.

But his MUCH younger sister (Susan Harrison), 19 and living in his big apartment, has taken up with the guitarist (Martin Milner) of The Chico Hamilton Quintet. And J.J. isn’t having it. Sidney’s been given the task of busting them up, and he’s failing.

“Sweet Smell of Success” is about what Sidney will do for the all-powerful/grudge-holding J.J. to bust up this “innocent” girl and this jazz man of “integrity, and what it will cost everybody involved.

The great Scottish director Alexander MacKendrick keeps the picture on the move and the banter, monologues and debates push it towards a sprint at times, with the legendary cinematographer Howe empashizing the darkness of the street scenes and shadowy tight-quarters of the clubs, with every conversation rendered more violent by the close-ups and dense compositions.

You don’t have to meet the dirty cops, get lectured on the unsavory connection between “lying” press agents and compromised columnists to smell and feel the corruption.

Curtis and Lancaster set off sparks, and all by himself Curtis keeps a bright sheen on smiling and backbiting Sidney, who always finds new depths of sleazy, self-serving narcissism to get him closer to his goal, a life of ease and being “Somebody.”

Pimping out that cigarette girl (Barbara Nichols) and regular booty call? He doesn’t give it a second thought.

“Sweet Smell of Success” sounds as modern as a 1950s drama can while still being very much a time capsule — newspapers and typwriters and cigarettes and “high balls” at “my regular table” where a phone is brought each time someone who knows how to reach J.J. or Sidney makes a call.

MacKendrick is best known for his classic British (Ealing) comedies “The Man in the White Suit” and “The Ladykillers.” Delightful as they are, this American outing his has to be his best film.

Lancster and Lehman and Burt’s producing partner James Hill knew what they were doing when they enticed MacKendrick and DP Howe, Lehman and Odets and Curtis and The Chico Hamilton Quintet into taking this on, and talked club owners into letting them into the legendary locations that this masterpiece preserved forever on film.

There never was a better portrait of “this dirty town” in this, one of its many gilded ages, than the movie that gives us just a whiff of the “Sweet Smell of Success.”

Rating: approved

Cast: Tony Curtis, Burt Lancaster, Susan Harrison, Barbara Nichols, David White, Emile Meyer, Edith Atwater, Martin Milner and The Chico Hamilton Quintet.

Credits: Directed by Alexander MacKendrick, script by Ernest Lehman and Clifford Odets, based on the novella by Lehman. An MGM/United Artists release on Tubi, Amazon, Youtube. etc. .

Running time: 1:36

Writer-director Greg Pritikin’s “The Mistress” is a slick and servicable if somewhat unsurprising thriller about traumas newlyweds unearth and unleash when they move into a gorgeous old Queen Anne house in LA’s Angelino Heights corner of Echo Park.

Pritikin apparently based the film, which he wrote and directed, on the history of his own Angelino Heights home, which served as the movie’s primary location. It makes a properly baroque and eccentric setting for a paranoid tale with stalker/supernatural touches.

Parker (John Magaro), a writer, and costume designer Maddie (Chasten Harmon of TV’s “The Good Fight” and “Elementary”) don’t get bad vibes from the Victorian era house the moment they move in. Well, aside from their pushy, over-sharing and sexy neighbor Dawn (Kat Cunning).

But weird things start happening, and Parker’s the first to pick up on it. As his new bride is a tad rattled by any hint of “haunted,” he keeps “incidents” to himself — the swing that’s swinging by itself, the visions of violence that might have happened here.

As these begin right about the time he finds an ancient glass-plate camera, complete with a preserved, undeveloped negative of a woman who used to live there, and a cache of 100 year old love letters from a “Rebecca” to her lover turn up, Parker is just the first to wonder if it’s her (Aylya Marzolf) who is sneaking in and sneaking around.

Because it’s not their on-the-make neighbor, is it? Or could it be this ex that Parker took out a restraining order on?

Thrillers like this get by on their jolts — which here are modest — and their clues and how easy or tricky they are to figure out. Those are…pretty obvious.

Magaro, recently seen in the sublime “Past Lives” and in “Showing Up,” manages a bit of the mania we’d expect from someone confronting the supernatural, or merely hoping his new wife doesn’t freak out about the various unpleasant possibilities as to what’s going on.

Harmon’s got less to work with as a character but plays panicked and irked well.

There’s a bit of suspense, especially in the bang-up finale. And if the plot’s unraveling isn’t all it needed to be, that’s how we wind up with “servicable.”

And at least one can say to Pritikin, who previously did the wheezing Netflix AARP comedy “The Last Laugh,” “Hey, nice house.”

Rating: R, violence, sexual situations

Cast: Johyn Magaro, Chasten Harmon, Kat Cunning and Aylya Marzolf

Credits:Scripted and directed by Greg Pritikin. A Blue Sky release.

Running time: 1:45

Let’s get the words “ragtag team” and “feel-good” and “uplifting” out right at the beginning of a dissection of the Korean soccer comedy, “Dream.” Because you know if it’s an underdog sports comedy, all of those words apply, at least in intent.

It’s about homelessness, a problem everywhere, even in places that try to pretend it isn’t (Florida, where I live, has the third highest homeless population in America, with a government more interested in covering that up for the dictatorial governor than addressing it). And it’s about Homeless World Cup of soccer, and yes that’s a real thing.

This story of homeless people, how they live and how they became homeless in Korea is saddled to a boilerplate plucky “ragtag team” “feel-good” sports comedy, a formula older than “The Bad News Bears,” malleable enough to apply to any sport — hockey (“The Mighty Ducks”), American soccer (“Kicking & Screaming,” The Big Green”), British (“Mean Machine”) or Spanish futbol (“Holy Goalie”).

It’s a simple, formulaic comedy with cute bits and funny characters, a quarrelsome male-female relationship and uplifting messaging, enough to fit in a passable 75 minute film. This being Netflix, the damned thing staggers around for 125 minutes instead.

Yoon Hong-dae, played by singer/actor/variety show host Park Seo-joon, is a troubled second division soccer player for Korea’s Red Champions team. He’s something of a star, but hounded at press conferences because of the fact that his scammer mother is on the lam.

He has a very Korean sort of meltdown on the pitch — not demonstative, just self-destructive as far as play goes — gets abused by the press one more time and pokes some nagging reporter who just “had my eyes done” in those “fixed” eyes, and becomes internet infamous.

His management team figures his career in football is over. “Looks are your real talent,” so maybe a record deal, a variety show hosting gig or a spot in a reality (“Survivor” ish) series is in order, they suggest.

First, though, they need “a rehab project” that could get him established in the entertainment industry — a public appearance with a hint of humility and atoning for his sins about it.

Young documentary filmmaker Lee So Min (Ji-eun Lee) is summoned, as she’s working on a TV doc about Korea’s Homeless World Cup team. Yoon Hong-dae can take over as “volunteer” coach, show a little selflessness and lead Korea’s street people to victory over the world’s best homeless teams at the World Cup in Budapest.

Yoon isn’t having it. Yoon won’t agree. Yoon is then seriously put-out when he takes the gig and the tee-hee-hee pixie filming him keeps making him do retakes, with suggestions and the like to heighten “the reality” of this non-fiction film.

“What kind of documentary is scripted?” he gripes, in Korean with subtitles, or dubbed.

“The kind with plot twists!”

She films back-stories of the players, who are “cast” in “try-outs” that have as much to do with their “story” as their soccer talent.

Somehow, Yoon is supposed to turn some troubled, mostly older and often on-the-spectrum men into athletes and competent soccer players, travel with them to Budapest and conjure up a happy ending for Lee So Min’s movie.

“Dream” is a filled with training session and soccer match montages and brief back-stories about the players — this one has a daughter about to move to Australia with his ex-wife’s new family, that one has a mentally ill woman depending on him, another is hunting for a “missing” long-lost love.

Where the sparks might come in is in the relationship between the cute, girlish filmmaker and the cynical footballer, who is prone to flipping her off for being a nuisance.

Yes, everyone’s playing a “type,” but my favorite moment comes when Lee So Min lets down her deferrential, tittering Korean “girl” mask and lays it on the line.

“I’m finding it harder to keep smiling the older I get,” she admits, before throwing a few hard truths at Mr. Who Does He Think He Is, “a K-Pop star?”

That’s where this movie could have gone, an edgy “meet mean and cute” relationship that cuts through cultural niceties and gets down to brass tacks, as we say here in soccer purgatory, the U.S.

The cynicism of the “real” documentary and of personal management team’s “K-Pop/Reality TV or chat show host” “handling” of Yoon is potentially hilarious. Yes, his one asset if he quits playing is his looks. They’re bankable fame in much of the world, especially in Korea.

But the picture bogs down in showing us Yoon forced to help this player or that one make enough money selling magazines on the subway to be able to take a break and play and lots of game footage, the effort it takes for him to be a “nice guy.”

A better performance might have sold those scenes. Our leading man isn’t convincingly mean.

There are “Shaolin Soccer” level rough matches, with cheating and tripping and baiting and the like, injuries even. No, they’re not all that intersting aside from the up-close violence and occasional well-choreographed, filmed and edited “play.”

And the film-within-a-film element is blown from the get-go, with Lee So Min not capturing “the good footage” even though she’s there to witness this fight, that bit of humanity. Ji-eun Lee doesn’t play the “instinct” TV news and documentary film photographers have to raise the camera to her face the instant something interesting might happen.

Many oof these problems could have been addressed with a script that hunts for fun off the pitch and ruthless editing that eliminates the endless dead stretches that make this “Dream” something of a nightmare.

Rating: TV-14, violence, vulgar gestures

Cast: Park Seo-joon, Ji-eun Lee

Credits: Directed by Byeong-heon Lee, scripted by Mohammed Abdullah and Byeong-heon Lee. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:06

Oh to be a tweenage girl with access to Disney+ this weekend.

“The Slumber Party” is a brisk, breezy and often-amusing riff on that old fashioned teen and pre-teen ritual, the last sleepover of summer. Well-cast, with some properly snarky one-liners and a lot of creativity shown in making this young-kid-appropriate, it’s a cute variation of an “I don’t remember last night” comedy built for kids too young to drink.

I mean, you’ve got to make our narrator, Megan (Darby Camp), her besties Paige (Emmy Liu-Wang) and Anna Maria (Valentina Herrera) and Valentina’s dorky soon-to-be-stepsister Veronica (Alex Cooper Cohen) “forget” everything that happened the night of Anna Maria’s birthday sleepover.

Screwy Veronica’s way of ingratiating herself with the daughter of the man her mom is about to marry? Hire a hypnotist for Anna Maria’s birthday. He puts them under and waking up with a bloody nose, wearing the hoodie of a guy one girl crushes on, hearing a tub full of baby ducklings, seeing a “pooh painting” on the wall (“It’s Ok. It’s NUTELLA!”), one missing an eyebrow and one 14 year-old MIA, these ladies have questions — lots of them.

If only they can track down the missing Anna Maria, who is very upset at her father remarrying. If only they can get that pooh– Ok, “NUTELLA” — off the walls. If only they can track that danged Magnificent Mesmer down so that he’ll give them the “trigger word” that lets them remember their night of being “your most authentic selves.”

Did I mention that the flamboyantly funny Tituss Burgess of “The Unsinkable Kimmy Schmidt” is “Mesmer,” if not exactly “Magnificent?”

“Look kid, let me in or I’ll use my magic to make you grow a mustache that your Mom won’t let you bleach!”

Yeah, THAT Tituss Burgess.

The three girls hunt for their missing fourth for a hectic day of breaking into school, Veronica falling hopelessly in love with Paige’s prankster/hustler older brother (Dallas Liu) because it turns out both of them are nuts about “High School Musical,” getting trapped in the “Onion Munch” onion-eating contest at the Chattahoochee Onion Festival and remembering stealing a rival high school’s hedgehog parade float.

The one-liners come pretty fast in this Eydie Faye script. Megan swoons over dreamboat Jake (Ramon Jose Rodriguez) and his “toothpaste commercial teeth,” and laments how she may never like to “try new things” with good reason, taking a shot at a (non-Disney) local theme park.

“Does ANYbody truly ENJOY being at Six Flags?”

Megan tried lots of new things, as did everybody else. Otherwise, why are there ducklings from the school science lab filling Anna Maria’s basement tub?

“What the DUCK?”

Smart-mouthed Paige has put-downs handy for every occasion. That trash-talking good’ol boy at the “Onion Munch?”

“I’m sorry, did somebody say ‘BEETLEJUICE’ three times?”

If there are film execs in Burbank with senses of humor, there’s probably some grumbling about how this Atlanta-set low-budget made-for-streaming comedy could be funnier and more of a romp than the big budget/name cast “Haunted Mansion” opening in theaters this weekend.

It’s 40 minutes shorter, for starters. It just flies by. AndTituss Burgess makes EVERYthing funnier.

I won’t oversell this, but a climactic chase in an out-of-control hedgehog float pretty much pegs the middle-school mirth meter, and that’s the target audience here. “Slumber Party” is for kids wanting to see a girl-bonding movie about slightly older kids learning to handle a scary new and bigger school “like Taylor Swift.”

‘Shake if Off.”

Rating: TV-PG

Cast: Darby Camp, Emmy Liu-Wang, Valentina Herrera, Alex Cooper Cohen, Dallas Liu, Ramon Jose Rodriguez and Tituss Burgess

Credits: Directed by Veronica Rodriguez, scripted by Eydie Faye. A Disney+ release.

Running time: 1:22