Movie Nation

Sept. 2.

Beware of tiny mean girls.

A romantic comedy with “Wedding Season” as its title kind of gives away the game.

There are going to be weddings — maybe “Wedding Crashers” weddings, perhaps “27 Dresses” weddings. Since it’s rated TV-PG and more Indian than Indian American, you can guess which end of the spectrum it skews to.

There’ll be a cute couple who “meet cute” and of course meet testy, because where’s the fun if they’re “destined to be” if it’s too obvious they’re destined to be? You can’t set off sparks without a little friction, right?

But the thing about rom-coms that work isn’t just that they get you in ways you expect. They sneak up on you with a surprise turnabout, little dollops of heart that hit you like a wet slap.”Wedding Season” catches you coming and going.

It’s an Indian American diaspora comedy with the usual nagging, badgering “Why aren’t you MARRIED?” mothers, Americanized “just living my life/get off my back” offspring, with a dash of culture clash and a tiny serving of the “biggest gossip in Little India” bitchiness.

It’s just adorable.

Asha, played by Pallavi Sharda, is a 30ish economist working with an Asian microloan investment fund, a workaholic in a workplace that could not be more diverse.

But her relentless and irritating mother (Veena Sood) is hellbent on marrying her off. She’s wearing out the DesiDream dating website, a place where interfering parents can throw up idealized profiles of their Indian children so that they can attract a proper Indian mate.

Yes, it’s a tradition that smacks of patriarchal/matriarchal “control” with a hint of enthocentrism. But mother Suneeta has already got one daughter (Arianna Asfar) about to marry a whiter-than-white doctor (Sean Kleier). With Asha having having blown up her engagement to “New Jersey’s most eligible brown bachelor,” and having no interest in pursuing another, what’s a mother to do?

Somebody wrote Ravi’s (Suraj Sharma) online profile as well — “spelling bee champ” and”
MIT” and “start-up” are all Suneeta needs to see.

It takes pressure just short of threats to get Asha to meet Ravi for a date. That empty place setting at the family Sunday dinner table?

“This plate is for the husband who should be here!”

But the “nerd” profiled online turns out to be laid back, over 30 and able to give as good as he gets in the cutting banter dept. Still, she’s not interested and Ravi simply walks away.

It’s just that they travel in the same socio-ethnic circles. There are a LOT of weddings coming up. And at one of them, they hear “We promise not to give up on you until we’re sure you’re HAPPY” and married one too many times. Asha armtwists Ravi into being her fake date for the season.

“I’ll just tell them we broke up at the next wedding” becomes an arrangement, and even though she keeps bringing her work laptop to each of the 14 weddings they’re both attending, “arrangements” have a way of becoming something more romantic once the “getting to know you” gets underway.

Sharda, an Indo-Australian actress (“Lion”) sparkles and gives us a hint of (respectful) spitfire in her performance. She makes Asha’s offhanded ABCD complaint while trying to don a sari — “How do half a billion women WEAR these things?” — the film’s lightest laugh.

Sharma, of “Umrika” (STREAM that one!), affects the breezy air of someone more troubled by what Ravi knows he isn’t telling Asha than any brushoff she tosses his way.

The reluctant couple charms, and the supporting players deliver cute laughs hither and yon — the gossipy “aunties” and other older folks complaining about this or that “rascal,” the white boy brother-in-law-to-be who keeps flailing away at Indian cultural appropriation.

“Keep calm and curry on!”

It’s a slight comedy, delicate as kheer with nothing remotely weighty about it. The biggest surprise about that might be the light touch veteran director Tom Dey brings to Shiwani Srivastava’s sweet and simple script. “Wedding Season” is her first produced screenplay. And there was something about its patience, pace and just-edgy-enough sweetness that made a filmmaker 16 years removed from “Failure to Launch” remember how it’s done and how it’s done right.

Rating: TV-PG

Cast: Pallavi Sharda, Suraj Sharma, Veena Sood, Arianna Afsar, Rizwan Manji, Damian Thompson and Sean Kleier.

Credits: Directed by Tom Dey, scripted by Shiwani Srivastava. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:39

The “In Bruges” team in front of and behind the camera, Ireland’s finest, take us into a very personal feud in an Ireland of the recent past.

Funny, with a nasty edge, as you’d expect from the director of “Three Billboards” and “In Bruges.”

This Searchlight release is headed our way in October, and being a Gleeson, Farrell and McDonaugh fan, I can hardly wait.

“Easter Sunday” is a sentimental, lighthearted star-vehicle built around Filipino American comic Jo Koy.

With Koy playing a stand-up comic trying to mollify his Filipino-American (Catholic) family and cope with their foibles, it’s a cute, occasionally amusing, no-heavy-lifting-required peek into another culture as seen through a comedian’s eyes.

It’s strikingly similar to the recent indie comedy “The Fabulous Filipino Brothers,” covering some of the same Filipino work ethic, values and comic blind spots (endless Manny Pacquiao jokes). Letting Koy “play” a comic just makes this “The Hollywood Version” of “My Crazy Filipino American Family.”

Koy is Jo Valencia here, a stand-up whose peak moment might have been a series of Bud Zero commercials. He even had a catch phrase, “Let’s get this paaaarty STARTED!”

How original.

Jo’s 40something, divorced, and still chasing every standup’s dream, getting a “pilot” for a TV series. He’s auditioned for one in which he’s to be the colorful neighbor/pal and he’s “this close” to landing it, according to his ever-distracted agent (“Super Troopers” actor and director Jay Chandrasekhar, hilarious in every scene). But Jo won’t buy the “Accents are funny, funny is money, DO the accent” thing to land the role.

That’s hanging over his head as he grabs his teen son (Brandon Wardell) to drive up to Daly City, part of Greater San Francisco and a veritable Little Manila of Filipino-Americans. That’s where his mother (Lydia Gaston) and the aunt she’s feuding with (Tia Carrare) are throwing the big family Easter celebration.

A weekend of church and catching up with relatives is the order of business — assorted aunts and uncles (Joey Guila, Rodney To) and the dopey cousin Eugene (Eugene Cordero) Jo gave a lot of money to start a taco truck business with, who has instead decided a “HYPE truck” (assorted fashion accessories) is the way to go.

Jo’ll bond with the son he’s always too busy for, the kid he constantly interrupts with “I’ve got to take this” call. Unless, of course, he has to fly back to LA mid-meal just to “salvage” the pilot.

The added stress of Mom and Tita Teresa’s feud, some shady stuff Eugene has gotten into, being called on to take over the sermon in church thanks to a loud whisper/argument with Eugene and trying to help his shy kid charm a cute girl (Eva Noblezada) should make things…interesting, in the “A I having a stroke?” sort of way.

Koy’s stand-out moments are that sermon he takes over and turns into a stand-up act, and assorted antic exchanges with a low-rent low-altitude mobster (Asif Ali, over the top) and a cop who happens to have been an ex.

She’s played by Tiffany Haddish, and she knocks her two scenes right out of the park, as can be expected.

Chandrasekhar might be playing a weary Hollywood “type,” the agent always “going into a tunnel, losing you” and hanging up. But he’s so good at it that he puts on a clinic in comic timing.

The script’s low-hanging-fruit laughs and trite Hollywood choice to have Koy play a struggling comic gives the film the feel of a sitcom pilot. He’s forced to be the reactor, and while’s OK, the few stand-up bits here are lame enough (aside from the “sermon”) to make you wonder how he ever landed this star vehicle in the first place.

The more working class, “scruffy” “Fabulous Filipino Brothers” did a FAR better job of immersing us in the culture and — this is important in culture clash comedies like this — the CUISINE. We see a lot of food in “Easter Sunday,” and pretty much no prep. What’re they eating? How’s it prepared? What role does that food play in the culture and its Easter traditions?

The chuckles and occasional flashes of charm make “Easter Sunday” a perfectly watchable if generally underwhelming comedy. But hey, maybe this sitcom pilot will be picked up after all, with or without the funny accent.

Rating: PG-13, threats of violence, profanity

Cast: Jo Koy, Tia Carrere, Lydia Gaston, Brandon Wardell, Eugene Cordero, Eva Noblezada, Jimmy O. Yang, Carly Pope, Jay Chandrasekhar and Tiffany Haddish.

Credits: Directed by Jay Chandrasekhar, scripted by Kate Angelo and Ken Chang. A Universal release.

Running time: 1:36

“Wild Men” is a deliciously deadpan Scandinavian farce about the crisis in masculinity, skewering poseurs, shortcut-taking criminals and lazy, incompetent cops in a slow-walking pursuit thriller that really isn’t about the thrills.

Every decision a man makes in it seems idiotic, stupid or not wholly-thought-out and wrong. That’s what it’s about.

Danish filmmaker Thomas Daneskov wraps a goofy spoof of delusional Men’s Movement ideas in a tale of smugglers and cops colliding with a primitive, off-the-grid Viking lifestyle. Sometimes dark and often hilarious, it’s a comedy well worth the subtitles.

A burly, fur-covered mountain man (Rasmus Bjerg) stalks a mountain goat with his bow but fails to kill it. So he stalks a frog instead, feasting by the fire and paying the abdominal price for it later. It’s only when this Neolithic Nordic hunter stumbles across the empty candy wrapper that the game is up.

He’s off to the Shell convenience store to load up on groceries, smokes, maybe some beer.

“I forgot my wallet,” he whines, which tells the clerk he’s Danish and us that the movie’s set in Norway. “We need to work something out.”

No cash? No Spam and potato chips, chief. That’s the rule. Our Great Hunter can’t be blamed for the scuffle that breaks out, or how it ends. He’s hungry, loads up a basket and flees into the mountains.

That’s when we see his modern tent, his iPhone and the way he cooks beans in the can over the fire. And that’s where the injured smuggler with the backpack (Zaki Youssef) stumbles into him, a guy with a bloody gash that Martin, as our homeless “for about ten days now” hunter is called, offers to “stitch up.”

Musa was traveling with two mistrustful companions when they ran into an elk. He left them for dead and staggered into the woods, and he too notices Martin’s Danishness, that he’s adeptly sewing his leg up but with the filthiest hands Musa’s ever seen.

“Let’s hope it doesn’t get infected,” the jovial Dane reassures him.

The gas station robbery draws the interest of the seriously unmotivated local police. Old Øyvind (Bjørn Sundquist) seems more interested in scoring a free “French hotdog” than taking the clerk’s statement. And talking his two subordinates into tracking this “Viking” into the woods is a hard-sell.

“I have to pick up the kids. My wife’s made a roast. Can’t this wait until tomorrow? There’s more to life than WORK!”

“Protect and serve” is just as much of a myth in Norway as anywhere else.

Meanwhile, Martin’s dodging calls from his wife, who thinks he’s on a “team building retreat,” and unloading his reasons for abandoning his family and society to Musa. “I never need to open a mailbox or computer again.”

And a quarreling couple, whose pregnant wife is chewing out her husband’s lack of “altruism” stops to pick up hitchhikers — at the husband’s “Here’s your altruism” insistence — only to be carjacked by the survivors of Musa’s crash.

Director and co-writer Daneskov (“The Elites”) follows three, sometimes four threads and points-of-view in this slow and patient comedy. Everything and everyone points towards a coastal village where Musa and his mistrusting mates need to catch a ferry and Martin just might find his “tribe.” There’s an encampment of Viking reenactors living as “off the grid” as Martin, or so Musa promises him, if he’ll just get them there.

The Danish director knew that if he was mocking Norwegian cops and poking at anti “immigrant” prejudice he’d best make the biggest idiot here a Dane.

Bjerg’s Martin is beautifully befuddled and insecure. He’s pompously pure in his mid-life crisis “natural man” dream, incompetently delusional about that and downright judgmental when he discovers that the Guddalen Viking village takes Visa or American Express.

Youssef’s Musa is the audience’s surrogate here, puzzled at why anybody would want to live a primitive life as hard as that and impatient with the plainly racist (they pay him no mind) Norwegian cosplayers, led by Viking poster-boy character actor Rune Temte (“Captain Marvel,” “The Last Kingdom”).

Sundquist, Wotan on Netflix’s “Ragnarok” TV series, brings a lovely world-weariness to his tiny town police chief performance. Øyvind’s every deflection and change-the-subject distraction can be taken as a funny Danish dig at Norwegians. He’s literally “too old for this s—” and barely lets himself get put-out over his subordinates’ unwillingness to do their jobs, and their ineptitude when they finally do get around to the hard and sometimes dangerous work.

Sofie Gråbøl plays Martin’s understanding but increasingly frazzled wife, dragging their two kids and their pet rabbit up to Norway to find the father and husband who’s “lost his mind” as he got lost in the mountains.

“Wild Men” is a comedy of slack-jawed chuckles and slow-burn laughs, a movie that immerses us in that “O’Horten,” “A Man Called Ove” Norwegian style of deadpan, here married to a story that isn’t afraid to go “In Order of Disappearance” dark.

It’s “toxic masculinity” made light enough for mockery. And it tickled me, first scene to last.

Rating: unrated, violence, smoking, profanity

Cast: Rasmus Bjerg, Zaki Youssef, Bjørn Sundquist, Sofie Gråbøl, Håkon T. Nielsen, Tommy Karlsen and Rune Temte.

Credits: Directed by Thomas Daneskov, scripted by Thomas Daneskov and Morten Pape. A Samuel Goldwyn release.

Running time:1:44

Jackie Moore has the title role, and this bad girl is on VOD now.

Hostages forced to tunnel into a demolition job, this one looks promising. Emile Hirsch with a drawl?

Sept. 23.

In the words of Simon Pegg‘s mother tongue and mother accent, what manner of “jobby-flavored fart lozenge” is this?

Two Oscar winners in the cast, plus Pegg and Pixar’s good luck charm John Ratzenberger, and “Luck” turns out to have none.

It’s an almost utterly-joyless animated exercise in tedium, a botched “Inside/Out,” “Arthur Christmas” or “Monsters, Inc.” “on the factory floor” treatment of the concept of “luck,” how it is manufactured, what prevents bad luck and the like.

A sweet but blander-than-bland lead teen character, Pegg voicing a black cat — “In SCOTLAND, black cats are considered very lucky!” — barely a sight gag in 105 minutes and nary a joke, you’d think Apple had apps that could concoct a better script. Better get on that, and donate it to Skydance Animation.

The three credited writers set out to teach kids what a movie that’s all exposition is like. The cat accidentally leads clumsy “unlucky” orphan Sam (Eva Noblezada) into “The Land of Luck,” where she visits the Research and Development Dept. “where real luck is created” — “Happy Accidents,” “Right Place, Right Time,” “Lucky at Love,” etc.

Luck is manufactured with the aid of a “randomizer,” thanks to “good luck stones” and “bad luck stones.”

Pegg’s cat character, “Bob,” is better as a sight gag. Otherwise, he’s stuck limply reciting expositional drivel such as “GRAVITY shift! Luck’s gravity is the opposite of ours!”

Baszinga!

Sam follows this black cat into the luck netherworld in search of a lucky penny to give her fellow orphan — a little girl who still has the hope of finding a “forever family.” You know the drill. So does your kid.

“Find a penny, pick it up. All day long, you’ll have good luck.”

Sam? She just aged out of the orphanage, never adopted, and she wants to make sure little Hazel doesn’t suffer the same fate.

The cat’s part of a sort of Luck, Inc., and that’s where the lucky pennies are made, kept and polished. Unlucky Sam had one and lost it. Thus, she follows the cat.

Whoopie Goldberg voices the boss, a leprechaun. Jane Fonda plays the dragon overlord of it all.

The animation is…adequate — inexpressive faces, for starters.

There’s no real conflict, no heart and not much point to a movie that aims to remind us that luck doesn’t exist, or at least doesn’t matter.

“It wasn’t all fun, but I wouldn’t change a single thing.”

Oh sure. Me, too. Except for this movie. I’d change the rhymes-with-white out of this dafty bowfin of a film, ye’bampots.

Rating: G, ever so inoffensive

Cast: The voices of Eva Noblezada, Simon Pegg, John Ratzenberger, Lil Rel Howery, Whoopie Goldberg and Jane Fonda

Credits: Directed by Peggy Holmes, scripted by Kiel Murray, Jonathan Aibel and Glenn Berger. A Skydance Animation release on Apple TV

Running time: 1:45

It’s considered one of the most righteous acts on Earth, the simple planting of a tree. But can it be an act of destruction as well?

The Canadian playwright and screenwriter (“After the Ball”) Jason Sherman ponders that question in “My Tree,” his new documentary about charitable tree-planting in the Middle East.

Sherman says it all started when he wondered where a tree that was planted in his name after his 1970s Bar Mitzvah might be. That tree was to be planted in Israel.

“My Tree” became his documentary quest to figure out who talked his parents into buying him that gift, what sort of tree was planted, where it was and why it was placed in that particular spot.

As his film makes clear, there’s been pretty extensive media coverage in Canada over the years about the trees of Israel’s Canada Park — a place that the Jewish National Fund (Keren Kayemet L’Yisrael) designated as a fund-raising magnet for their decades long “Greening of Israel” campaign. Sherman’s film would be about the nature of that campaign and its agenda, an “innocent” asking innocent questions of folks who run a long-established charity familiar all over the Jewish diaspora.

But getting someone involved in it to talk about it proves shockingly difficult.

“Why was it so hard to talk about trees?” may be his rhetorical question. But we can guess he knew the answer before ever starting “My Tree.”

We can take Sherman at his word about this documentary’s origin story, or assume he’s being disingenuous for the camera, that he knew enough going in to ensure he’d have a compelling film on his hands. Considering the earlier reporting on the subject which explains seriously suspicious behavior by the JNF here, whose officials dodge interviews with him, guiltily drive up on him in the various Israeli planted-forests he visits and even shoo him away from their big Israeli tree nursery — which he’d arranged, with them, to visit — I have a feeling the latter is more likely.

They’ve been up to something a lot less righteous and more unsavory than is commonly known, and they know it. And he knew it going in.

“My Tree” is a damning reminder of the true nature of this “make the desert bloom” operation, which has a “facts on the ground” purpose, covering up — with parks, a “Martyr’s Forest,” groves of trees — forcibly-evacuated Palestinian villages like Yula or Imwas. The JNF has worked hand-in-glove with government and the IDF (Israeli Defense Forces), which knock down houses and chased out families that had lived there for hundreds of years. The planted trees are literally erasing Palestinian history in an effort to burnish Israel’s 1948 founding myth, the later “Six Day War” “miracle” and the decades upon decades of state-sponsored “settlements” being established on seized Arab land.

Speaking to a gardener/arborist, historians, investigative journalists, his Israeli relatives, Jewish activists in Israel and Canada, a Canadian rabbi and just a couple of actual Palestinians with a stake in the contested lands, Sherman’s film paints a picture of a greening-over “cover-up.” Words like “war crime,” “ethnic cleansing” and “apartheid” turn up in discussing these “no democracy does this” practices.

Starting with a brief history of Israel and the Zionist movement, Sherman works in home movies and the search for that Bar Mitzvah “certificate” promising the tree had been planted as he unravels what was really being sold — a cash donation and piece of paper that forged a connection between the Jewish diaspora around the world, and the “idea of the State of Israel.”

His Israeli relatives decry the ongoing “planting” and its connection to the country’s decades-long slide towards authoritarianism that followed the Rabin assassination. A Palestinian-American remembers returning to the village he was forced out of as a child and Sherman interviews the one retired JNF official who will talk to him, pressing him on his sunny “official version” of history and how Canada Park and other “parks” came to be, coming back again and again to that one central question that defines “My Tree.”

“What was here before a forest?”

“My Tree” makes for an eye-opening documentary about propaganda’s role in the founding of Israel and continual efforts to immunize the controversial Jewish State from criticism, partly by having donors plant 240 million trees there. And it adds another voice to the choir of people protesting the ignorance of what’s actually going on, with “trees” roles in the Apartheid necessary to carve a monocultural “Jewish” state out Palestine.

Rating: unrated, profanity

Cast: Jason Sherman, many others

Credits: Scripted and directed by Jason Sherman. A Level 33 Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:42

Two unutterably gorgeous Mexican actresses dressed in assorted sexy dresses are about all there is to recommend the perky but drab romantic comedy “Don’t Blame Karma!”

Aislinn Derbez and Renata Notni play siblings, Sara and Lucy. A harmless “incident” in childhood has convinced Sara (Derbez) that she’s “cursed,” that all the luck in the family went to her sister.

Seeing as how Sara’s a T-shirt shop owner in sleepy Mérida and Lucy is a world famous runway model, maybe she has a point.

But only in the movies is anyone who looks like the stunning Derbez (“A la Mala,” “Miss Bala”) presented as a shrinking violet, the not-quite-as-pretty older sister to The Face of Fashion.

The reason Sara has believed this all her life is that her “first love” in high school, the one she tried out her light-sensitive dye clothing designs on, brushed her off way back when. And now Aaron (Gil Cerezo) is “Aaron Starr,” a global pop idol.

This all comes back to her as Lucy stops by the house Sara inherited from their grandmother to announce her engagement…to Aaron.

The “romance” here is Sara pining for Aaron, Aaron secretly treating her as his muse and Lucy wondering if this famous-model/famous pop star match is “the one.” I mean, even an influencer wants there to be fireworks.

The “comedy” comes from their parents, who might be splitting up thanks to Mom’s passion for an “open marriage,” and from Sara’s own romance with Roberto (Giuseppe Gamba), who is better at phone sex than the real thing.

The “purge my bad karma” plot is strictly a non-starter, with this Elisa Miller (“The Pleasure is Mine”) film foundering as it searches for something else compelling to hang this story on.

It’s a timid TV-MA outing, so the sex farce possibilities are left mostly unexplored. The “fashion” and “influencer” elements are undeveloped, and the whole “pop star” idea is a bust, as are the tunes that our Aaron is supposed to make the ladies swoon over.

Scene after scene lacks spark or fire or heart. I’d quote a great line from it (either in Spanish, or dubbed into English), but there are none, only this one which may explain everything.

“In Mérida, time doesn’t matter.”

Indeed. Time stands still for the 85 minutes it takes “Don’t Blame Karma!” to play out.

Rating: TV-MA, sex, profanity

Cast: Aislinn Derbez, Renata Notni, Gil Cerezo

Credits: Directed by Elisa Miller, scripted by Fernanda Eguiarte and Marcelo Tobar. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:25