Movie Nation

One cannot help but marvel (cough cough) when pondering how far popular culture has come and how much more visually sophisticated the “Transformers” franchise has grown over the decades.

Generations have literally never outgrown this.

Toys that first inspired a 1984 TV show, revived on the small screen and then Michael Bay’d to the big screen in 2007, movies and billions of box office dollars later and the robots have a metallic CGI sheen and their brawls a visual coherence that far exceeds anything Bay was able to do in the past.

In “Transformers: Rise of the Beasts,” you might actually believe a transforming robotic Fairchild Flying Boxcar plane like the one used in “Flight of the Phoenix” lands at the base of the Machu Picchu World Heritage site, that Autobots and Maximals (robotic animals) battle sinister Terrocons in the Peruvian Andes.

Real stunt drivers barreling about in a Freightliner semi, a Porsche 964, a ’70s Camaro, a Ducati 916 motorcycle and a 1970ish TV Microbus are seamlessly blended into those machines transforming into sentient, armed and armored robotic knights, battling evil to save themselves and prevent the world or the universe from ending, I forget which.

But oh my God these pictures are stupid and getting dumber and more derivative by the installment. Even by empty summer popcorn pic standards, stupid.

Five credited screenwriters and the director of “Creed II” tackled the “new” origin “story” of how the Maximals — robotic apes, cheetahs, eagles and rhinos — and Autobots were run off of their planet Cybertron, hiding out on Earth until 1994 when this magical “transportal key” thingy is uncovered inside The Maltese Falcon, and coveted by a new planet-consuming threat — Unicron — and hunted by his robotic lieutenant Scourge (voiced by Peter Dinklage) and Scourge’s minions deep into the heart of Indiana Jones South America.

You’d think the writers were struggling to make an original (fat chance), compelling, witty and emoptional movie out of a line of toys or something. And yes, they make it look…as hard as it no doubt was.

The human elements in these stories have become more and more of an afterthought. Humans are the ones who are “more than meets the eye,” here. Perhaps because these movies aren’t bothering to cast the likes of Shia and Megan and The Artist Formerly Known as Marky Mark, Josh Duhamel et al. There’s no cachet to being in a “Transformers” movie. Just cash.

Here, Anythony Ramos of “In the Heights” plays an unemployed ex-GI conned into trying to steal the Porsche that turns out to be the Autobot Mirage (Pete Davidson). Dominique Fishback of “The Hate You Give” and “Judas and the Black Messiah” plays an archeological intern at a New York museum who is handy to have around when ancient texts need translating.

They take a back seat in most scenes, some more than others.

Oscar winner Michele Yeoh and Ron Perlman now adorn the voice cast, with the Liam Neesonesque tones of the Canadian Peter Cullen being the one and only Optimus Prime, the idealistic leader always sacrificing himself for his kind, or our kind, in most of these pictures.

The jokes are the usual Bumblebee blurbs from movies — “You can’t HANDLE the truth” and “I came here to Kick Ass” — and Optimus complaining “I don’t want you to go to that drive-in theater any more.”

Pete Davidson goes after that PG-13 rating once or twice.

The violence is cartoonish and make-believe, with the occasional machine-beheading or impaling to give the fights some edge.

And it’s harmless enough, just noisy, jokey robotic mayhem beloved by going on three generations now.

But the half-hearted attempts to build a hero’s quest story about these increasingly collectible toys and ongoing campaign to wash the humanity right out of the franchise is something all the shiny, tactile and identifiable Freightliner, Porsche or Ducati parts in humanoid robotic form cannot hide.

They’re still just selling toys, kids.

Rating: PG-13 for intense sequences of sci-fi action and violence, and language

Cast: Anthony Ramos, Dominique Fishback and the voices of Michele Yeoh, Ron Perlman, Pete Davidson, Peter Dinkage, Liza Koshy and Peter Cullen.

Credits: Directed by Steven Caple Jr., scripted by Joby Harold, Darnell Metayer, Josh Peters, Erich Hoeber and Jon Hoeber, based on the Hasbro toys, the TV show based on the toys and the earlier movies based on the toys. A Paramount release.

Running time: 2:07

Rating: PG-13 for intense sequences of sci-fi action and violence, and language

Cast: Anthony Ramos, Dominique Fishback and the voices of Michele Yeoh, Ron Perlman, Pete Davidson, Peter Dinkage, Liza Koshy and Peter Cullen.

Credits: Directed by Steven Caple Jr., scripted by Joby Harold, Darnell Metayer, Josh Peters, Erich Hoeber and Jon Hoeber, based on the Hasbro toys, the TV show based on the toys and the earlier movies based on the toys. A Paramount release.

Running time: 2:07

Warner Brothers and DC are all in this version of “The Flash,” throwing Keaton, Affleck and others into the cast alongside problematic star Ezra Miller.

Sasha Cole, Kiersey Clemens, Michael Shannon, and they landed “It” director Andy Muschietti from Argentina.

The trailers sell it. It would seem like a slam dunk if Miller hadn’t had multiple meltdowns post production.

But we’ll see.

Every night this week, it seems, something else is previewing that’s expected to dominate at least its opening weekend.

“Operation Mayfair” is an Indian serial killer thriller set in London, a film meant, no doubt, for domestic consumption on the Subcontinent and never really intended for prying, judging, non-Hindi-speaking eyes and ears.

It’s dreadful by most any measure — violent, tin-eared, clumsily-staged and uncertainly-acted. And it’s head-slappingly stupid as a police procedural. Honestly, I think all the “research” the screenwriters did was watch old serial killer episodes of 1970s TV.

But there are times it is amusingly quaint in conception and execution, a film in English with generous helpings of Hindi that has the great Indian diaspora in British policing take over a high profile mass-murderer-on-the-loose case, with the bloody butcher also one of the British investigators of Indian descent.

The film opens with a murder straight out of a ’70s porno — a hooded killer slips into the unlocked home of a model, takes her hostage, paints “black teardrops” (think Tammy Faye Baker after a crying jag) on her face, whips her to score her back, snaps her neck and lops off a finger.

All the time, he’s raving, flashing back to some unpleasantness from his youth, letting us see the stepmom (we learn) who abused him and called him a “MORON!” so many years before create this monster.

The nature of the crime, the “pose” of the victims, means there’s a previous Mayfair murderer back in business. Or a copy cat. Detective Chief Inspector Lisa Varma (Vedieka Dutt) begs her boss (Bryan Lawrence) to “bring back Det. Amar,” who failed to crack the first case and now teaches architecture at Oxford.

Sure. That scans.

Veteran Sikh actor Jimmy Shergill (Indian TV’s “Your Honor”) plays Amar, a sleuth who can read a crime scene or a crime scene photo for clues like no one else, although we see little evidence of this. Again, he had one crack at this supposedly dormant killer who has become “active” again. Perhaps Amar, with a wife and child at home, was distracted. You know, by the subordinate cop Sonya (Hritiqa Chheber) he was having an affair with.

Now that he’s abandoned academia (!?) to return to the case, he’ll need lots of chaste, non-case-related meetings with Detective Constable Sonya just to reminisce over their affair. Apparently.

That’s a shame, because he needs to focus on the case. And as we’ve seen who the killer is in the opening scenes, we know he’s the FORENSICS expert (Ankur Bhatia) assigned to the “operation” task force. Catching this guy will take a Sikh/British Columbo.

“I think the killer is doing all this to deviate our attention,” Amar suggests. “This is a MURDER case, not some petty pickpocket stuff!” he rages.

“”I’m sorry sir, but if I’m not allowed to flex my muscles, then what is the use of bringing me down over here?” he complains.

The picture’s never quite what one would call incompetent, just off in ways anybody who’s ever seen a serial killer thriller or a movie set in London will recognize.

An assignation scene uses what looks like a storefront to pass for a cafe, with an outdoor table and the inclusion of a paper Union Jack in the window the only decor the budget would allow.

Bhatia renders every murder lurid with silent cinema-styled eye-bugging, eye-rolling hysterics. Every “clue” seems invented, every argument or obstacle contrived, every interlude with the lovely Sonya a tease.

A multi-cultural society like Britain should certainly portray a police force with senior, accomplished Sikh, Pakistani and Hindi cops. But running off to teach architecture at Oxford after a falling out over a case, “joining” an investigation without being hired or sworn back into the force, quibbling over working for “my former” junior colleague, there have to be more graceful ways of introducing characters, more believable plot points and an effort made to avoid laughable “plainly an out of town production” blunders.

What a debacle.

Rating: TV-MA, graphic violence, suggestion of sex crimes

Cast: Jimmy Shergill, Vedieka Dutt, Hritiqa Chheber, Bryan Lawrence and Ankur Bhatia

Credits: Directed by Sudipto Sarkar, scripted by Anthony Khatchaturian and Sudipto Sarkar. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:55

Pasquale Marrazzo’s “The Neighbor,” titled “Hotel Milano” in Italy, is a melodramatically tragic gay romance about two lovers kept apart after one is beaten into a coma by gay bashing skinheads.

The comatose Luca (Jacopo Costantini) has no idea his conservative Catholic family won’t let his “We are going to get old together, don’t forget that” partner Riki (Michele Costabile) visit and try to comfort him, because his parents are grieving, but still fully capable of blaming Riki for “luring” their son away and is thus responsible for him being in the hospital.

Luca’s sister (Luisa Vernelli) is tolerant and compassionate enough to give the frantic Riki updates, but she won’t tell him which hospital Luca’s in and “can’t” broach the subject of him visiting with her docgmatic parents.

Marrazzo’s film begins with the bullying the leads to the beating, and as Luca lies in the hospital, unresponsive with his doctor bracing everyone for “the worst” (in Italian with English subtitles), Riki’s flashbacks flesh out their romance and the ugly history he has with the gang leader who beat his lover almost to death simply for being gay.

Luca’s mother (Lucia Vasini) is unbending, disapproving to the point of being tactless when the two men have their mothers over for a meal. Riki and his clingy, weepy, substance-abusing mom (Rossanna Gay) slip out rather than deal with the attitudes of Mrs. 1955.

The flashbacks are more expositonal than emotional, and the same holds for the shifts in point of view. We see much of the story from Riki’s angle, but sister Rachelle finally getting up the nerve to ask her parents gives us their post-coma state — guilt-ridden, but still angry. We see the arrested thug visited by his own father, and simplistically note the way violence is taught, not inherited.

And we meet an uncle Riki is unusually reliant on, and get clues about a different cause-and-effect in play there.

Queer cinema has differing degrees of sophistication, depending on how far along the road to tolerance this or that film culture has been. Marrazzo’s downbeat, slow and repetitive tale — with shouting-match fireworks in addition to depicting the savage beating –feels like an American indie of the late ’80s.

The structure gives the picture a diffuse feel, as if the writer-director hopes to lay on backstory that will distract us from how short a distance this story covers and not allow the viewer to realize how thin the text is, with or without these subtexts.

The performances, verbal explosions aside, share the picture’s generally flat tone.

Neither of the movie’s two innocuous titles resonate or have any explained meaning, although we’re allowed to conjure up explanations in our heads. And whatever style points Marrazzo thought he was scoring with his “daring” finale left me cold.

Still, with gay bashing on the rise around the world, this Pride Month release seems timely, if not exactly novel in its plot, characters or unaffecting storytelling.

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

Cast: Michele Costabile, Jacopo Costantini, Rossana Gay, Lucia Vasini and Luisa Vernelli

Credits: Scripted and directed by Pasquale Marrazzo. A Dark Star release.

Running time: 1:36

The most daring thing about “Missed Connections,” a chaste social media romance from the Philippines, is the conclusion it comes to.

Maybe social media isn’t the cure for dating ills and loneliness that it’s made out to be. No, it’s that’s not exactly a hot take. And this spineless, often insipid screenplay kind of walks back from that.

But considering how lifeless, charmless and predictably pointless everything that’s come before it is, that’s a straw we’ll grasp, if only for a moment.

This Around the World with Netflix rom-com is about 20somethings missing and then misconnecting via an app. They’re in their mid-20s, but the movie about their “relationship” might be deemed junior high juvenile in much of the rest of the world. Not every Filipino film has to have an edge, but come on.

Mae (Miles Ocampo) is a fresh-faced custom t-shirt maker trying to make a go of it despite being disorganized, unfocused and perhaps even a tad lazy. We meet her as she’s laying another excuse on a customer, and finally just giving up and telling him off.

Mae is self-absorbed and lonely, desperate for a boyfriend but so lost in her phone that she barely notices the cute guy (Kelvin Miranda) she brusquely treats as an employee at the supermarket. But notice him she does, and gushing and batting her eyes she basically runs through a low-comedy silent cinema repertoire of “female and thirsty” “indicators to impress him before he leaves the store.

He seems too polite to tell the annoying chatterbox with the stringy, Garfield-orange hair he’s not interested.

But she posts an inquiry about the “Mister Green” she missed paying back for the muffin he inadvertantly treated her to at the cash register on this “Missed Connections” app — a PG-rated Grindr for tracking down someone you might have “had a moment” with, but not long enough to get a name, number or actually to confirm interest.

Sure enough, there he is, a guy looking for “Grocery Girl.” It’s only when they actually meet for lunch that she realizes it wasn’t her he was looking for. That doesn’t discourage Needy Mae or warn off Too-Polite “Norman” before he finds himself coming home with her…to redesign her website and help her rethink her business.

He’s a neat freak, especially when comes to plates and eating utensils. She’s an inveterate procrastinator and slob. Is she a hoarder?

“Things hold memoires only the owner can see” (in Filipino with subtitles, or dubbed). That’s basically another warning sign Norman ignores.

One thing he’s not too polite to do is to insist on meeting the woman he was looking for in the first place, a gorgeous influencer (Chienna Filomeno) and hair salon owner — organized, ambitious and easy on the eyes.

Mae doesn’t listen to her aunt’s advice about caution, and ignores her pesky ex (JC Santos), who isn’t in her life but is so in her head that he’s always popping up to warn her, when he’s not teasing and taunting her about “He’s just going to leave you like everybody else.”

Mae becomes a stalker, and worse. Social media doesn’t just build people up. It can tear them down.

The dialogue is sickeningly cutesie, with Ocampo vamping “I’m looking for a partner, if you’re interested” lines about her business to ensure Norman can’t miss how INTERESTED she is in not being alone.

The acting is broad, the messaging is demure and conservative, about “things that we’re unable to let go of” and the “two types of women” in the world.

“There are women to be taken seriously, and women to be taken for a ride.”

Whatever cultural mores “Missed Connections” is operating under, there aren’t many parts of the world where this tepid, tame adults-flirting-like-tweens rom-com will be seen as romantic or comic.

Rating: TV-14, profanity

Cast: Miles Ocampo, Kelvin Miranda, JC Santos, Matet de Leon and Chienna Filomeno

Credits: Directed by Jelise Chung, scripted by Jelise Chung and Gilliann Ebreo. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:47

A one night-only horror event?

“Mad Heidi” stars Alice Lucy, Max Rüdlinger, David Schfield and Casper van Dien.

Swiss-timed to play at a theater near you on June 21. Don’t forget the chocolate!

This June 30 Dreamworks animated coming-of-age action comedy is anti-mermaid, and arrives after “The Little Mermaid,” and not Pixar and shows up after “Elemental.”

Seems like a bit of a comical reach, but you know kids. Maybe they’ll connect with it.

You take one look at these kids, and your first thought might be “Does the orphanage have anybody else we could adopt?”

They’re albino-pale, white-haired blondes with eager-to-please smiles. But golly, who wouldn’t say, “Childrens of the Damned” the moment they see them?

“Tin & Tina” is a seriously slow-footed Spanish thriller about a couple that adopts two convent-raised-kids and starts to wonder if the children’s literal take on the Bible is something they can survive, much less rationalize having under the same roof.

First-time feature writer-director Rubin Stein conjures up this middling tale of terror in the Spain of the early ’80s. The attempted coup of 1981 plays out on TV, at one point, along with cheesy kids’ shows, ’80s styled news and landmark soccer matches.

I guess he’s nostalgic? The reasons this is a period piece aren’t crystal clear, although perhaps they have something to do with Spain shedding its Catholic-endorsed fascist past at this moment.

Lola (Milena Smit) grew up a convent herself, or so husband Adolfo (Jaime Lorente) tells the barefoot Mother Superior (Teresa Rabal) when they come hoping to adopt. We’ve seen their big church wedding, and the blood-stained wedding dress that tells us Lola has lost the twins she was carrying during the ceremony.

“Are you sure about this?” doesn’t dissuade Lola, once she meets the two pre-tweens. These kids need love, and she has it to give.

But from the moment they get home to the big, remote mansion tucked into the middle of orchards, the children — both named for Saint Augustine, Tin (Carlos González Morollón) and Tina (Anastasia Russo) are just…off.

They decorate the walls with crufixes, to guard the house against “The Exterminating Angel.” They freeze-up if a meal begins without saying grace. Their conversations, plays and drawings have a Biblical literalism about them that is worrying.

But you’d think the adults would REALLY freak out by their little “Talk to God” game. It involves suffocating each other until they commune with The Almighty, beckoning them through the Pearly Gates, I guess. A great time to ask God for a favor, Tina suggests.

I mean, when they do that to a strangely unmoveable Lola, you’d think she’d get a clue, or at least start teaching right from wrong, dangerous from safe and how to separate reality from a book of mythology without pro-punishment Adolfo, an oft-absent airline pilot, telling her that’s what she needs to do.

The foreshadowing has as many red herrings as genuine threats, but the threats escalate in all the easily-anticipated ways. The family’s pet Alsatian is onto these kids by instinct, barking away at the damned.

Uh oh.

There’s something to this motivating subtext, kids who are either naive Biblical literalists or “evil…justifying their evil actions (in Spanish with subtitles, or dubbed)” with Old and New Testament punishments, “justice” and revenge.

But nobody in this movie reacts in normal, human ways to danger or threats or mortal sins.

Smit makes Lola seem medicated, depressed and broken almost from the start. She lost a leg in her miserable childhood and seems downcast and distracted, the perfect “mom” to two rambunctious and possibly evil niños. Lorente’s Adolfo isn’t much more on the ball.

The kids are cardboard caricatures of pale-faced angels/demons.

Stein takes forever to get the picture on its feet, and when it does it never manages more than a slow, hobbling gait, and yes, I know the Devil’ll get me for that analogy.

Rating: TV-MA, violence

Cast: Milena Smit, Jaime Lorente, Carlos González Morollón, Anastasia Russo and Teresa Rabal

Credits: Scripted and directed by Rubin Stein. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:57

You think you’ve got a handle on “The Golden Age of Screwball Comedy,” after finishing your survey of the films of Lubitsch and Sturges, Capra and Wilder and the occasional fun outing by Hanks, Fleming, La Cava and Cukor.

And then another one pops and damned if you don’t have to reconsider the lightly-regarded resume of MGM mainstay Jack Conway, and MGM’s place in the screwball firmament.

Metro Goldwyn Mayer was the embodiment of “The Dream Factory” — emphasis on “factory” — back then. But every now and again, something supremely silly got through “the genius of the system,” its lunacy intact. And chances are, that wiseacre William Powell was in it.

Powell, of the clipped mustache and clipped, razor-edged voice, was made for “screwball” — a fast-talker among fast-talkers, a sassy sage in a sea of wise-crackers.

“Libeled Lady” was one of Powell’s many teamings with Myrna Loy. While I like a couple of their many “Thin Man” comedies, I never quite fell in love with those movies. They’re an uneven series that seemed to fall off entirely too steeply for my taste.

And the fact that Powell and Loy play a tippling, dog-loving crime-solving married couple waters down the series’ appeal, too. The banter is the polished patter of two longtime equals, but lacks the edge of folks who don’t get along and work their way towards romance. The films aren’t “predicament” rom-coms, which offer more possibilities than the simple crime busting couple game.

But in “Libeled Lady,” they square off, Spencer Tracy and the iconic blonde Jean Harlow go toe-to-toe, Powell trades shots with Harlow and Tracy and Tracy gets into it with Loy. It’s an embarassment of bantered riches.

“Gladys, do you want me to KILL myself?”

“Did you change your INSURANCE?”

Screenwriters Maurine Dallas Watkins, Howard Emmett Rogers and George Oppenheimer cooked up the plot, about a newspaper that blunders into a libelous smear of socialite Connie Allenbury (Loy). Newspaperman Warren Haggerty (Tracy) abandons his latest wedding day with the long-suffering Gladys (Harlow) to try and save them.

There’s nothing for it but to track down that reporter he fired, smartassed Bill Chandler (Powell). There’s nobody like Chandler for scheming them out of a libel suit. But he’s nowhere to be found.

“Maybe that guy’s dead!”

“Yeah, it’d be just like him to die at a time like this.”

But find him they do, and Haggerty begs and bargains the high-living/free-spending Chandler back into the fold. There’s nothing for it, the shifty hack says, but for him to go to Europe, woo Miss Allenbury into a honey trap and scandalize her out of suing.

Chandler’ll need a quicky marriage before setting sail. Who’ll agree to be his wife to ensure “cheating with a married man” headlines? Only Gladys is at hand.

Haggerty begs — “Would I ask you to do this thing for me if I didn’t consider you practically my wife?

Gladys demurs — “Would you ask your wife to hook up with that ape?”

Chandler weighs in — “The ape objects.”

But they marry and he sprints off to Europe to pass himself off as a fellow swell, to pretend to be a published expert on fishing to impress Connie’s dad (Walter Connolly) and maybe sweep cynical Connie right off her feet.

“That man is a first class angler!”

“If he’s first class, I’m traveling steerage.“

The romantic complications are deliciously Byzantine, as Chandler repels/charms Connie and Gladys, almost in spite of himself. Their exchanges crackle, but on different wavelengths as Connie is plainly out of his league and Gladys isn’t as “dumb blonde” as she seems.

This escapist romp takes place on those gorgeous dream factory soundstages — save for one Sonora, California trout stream interlude that is pure slapstick and probably inspired the ’60s rom-com “Man’s Favorite Sport.”

One definition of “screwball” is “a sex comedy without the sex.” And one shared characteristic of “screwball” is how well so many of these films age. The wit, the pace, the loopy predicaments, they hold up better than many a stage comedy of that era, even when you know where all this is heading.

And what we’re “heading” to is a finale when everybody has to explain to everybody else just what the hell has been going on here, and why. As knotty as this plot has been, we know it’s not going to be easy.

“She may be his wife, but she’s engaged to me!”

Powell, Tracy and Loy would go on to legendary careers. But Jean Harlow would be dead within a year, one of the great tragedies of Hollywood’s golden age.

Silent screen veteran Jack Conway would find success with Clark Gable, Robert Taylor and MGM ensemble pictures like “Saratoga,” “Boom Town” and “Honky Tonk,” with one more Powell-Loy romp (“Love Crazy”) thrown in.

And screenwriter Maurine Watkins would write the play that the movie “Roxie Hart” and the musical and blockbuster film “Chicago” were based on.

But on the screen, you’d be hard-pressed to find more fun that any of them were associated with than this classic of the screwball school.

Rating: “approved”

Cast: William Powell, Jean Harlow, Spencer Tracy, Myrna Loy

Credits: Directed by Jack Conway, scripted by Maurine Dallas Watkins, Howard Emmett Rogers and George Oppenheimer. An MGM release on Movies!, Apple TV, Amazon, Vudu, etc.

Running time: 1:37