Movie Nation

A tweenaged girl growing up in a beautifully-cluttered and weather-worn Japanese coastal village narrates the story of her mother, and her life with her, in the delightful “Fortune Favors Lady Nikuko,” an anime coming-of-age confection based on a YA novel by Kanako Nishi.

Director Ayumu Watanabe (“Space Brothers,” “Children of the Sea”) serves up a bubbly, touching tale of a skinny and pretty child learning to love and more importantly appreciate her mercurial, roly poly single mom and the life’s she’s had raising her.

To hear Kikuko tell it, her over-the-top, over-eater waitress/cook mother has been something of the town character every place they’ve lived. Kikuko is prepubescent, she tells us, but mature for her years. A fortune teller on TV makes her wonder about how her mother Nikuko’s “fate was sealed” by past lives, because her current one is something of a tale of woe.

There was “The Casino Dealer, “The Bar Tender,” “The Married Man” and “The Novelist” — men who used Nikuko, borrowed money from her and left her holding the bag, over and over again.

Mom traveled from a small village to Osaka, Nagoya, Yokohama, Tokyo and beyond, working until she was “worn out” at bad jobs, often working to pay down debt some feckless man left with.

They wound up in their current town, with Mom a fixture at Uwogashi’s Grill, serving “Meat, meat, meat MEAT” and rice or noodles dishes to the ravenous working class customers. They live on a rusting houseboat. And at school, Kikuko dreads any occasion that will expose her classmates and their families to this barrel-shaped barrel of fun who raised her.

Mom is fond of puns of many varieties, most of which don’t translate that well (“Fortune Favors” is in Japanese with English subtitles). But her very name is a pun. There’s “meat” in it.

What will a maturing Kikuko figure out about Mom’s life, via clues and hints related in flashbacks, that will explain her struggle and their current lot?

The sight gag above tips us as to Watanabe’s approach here. He’s taking just a little inspiration from Miyazaki’s “My Neighbor Totoro,” about the best friend a child could have, but a “friend” who’s something of a puzzlement.

Nikuko is a walking sight gag who morphs, in her daughter’s mind, into a chocolate Michelin Mom force of nature in her moods — bouncing, twirling, grinning constantly, entertaining customers, loud and not shy about her unchecked appetites.

Food and its prep are a big part of the animation — French toast for breakfast, “Meat Spag” (spaghetti) from a can, “meat meat Meat, MEAT” grilled, broiled or boiled.

Does that explain Kikuko’s thinness, her constant stomach aches? How is a girl who is “sweet on” a shy, face-making boy in class ever to get a boyfriend with a mother like this, she wonders?

The film has frankly adult suggestions about pieces of Nikuko’s past, not just her menial jobs, but connections with exotic dance clubs and sex work.

But “Fortune Favors” suggests that when a child’s old enough to care about and ask frank questions about her or his parents’ past, they’re old enough to understand them.

The physical comedy might appeal to younger viewers just getting hooked on anime. Nikuko’s rotund shape has its graceful and clumsy moments such as when she’s romping through the local aquarium until she practically passes out from joy, and a penguin squawks “DEATH to you ALL” in judgment.

Yet the ideal audience for this film is going to skew older, better able to appreciate the themes and the higher-end anime art that Watanabe and his team achieved.

Rating: PGish

Cast: The voices of Shinobu Ôtake, Cocomi, Natsuki Hanae, Ikuji Nakamura

Credits: Directed by Ayumu Watanabe, scripted by Satomi Ohshima, based on a novel by Kanako Nishi. A GKids release.

Running time: 1:37

Jean-Claude Van Damme’s career second wind, the one that showed up when he turned out to be pretty darned good at playing himself, a washed-up action star, in “JCVD,” has pretty much run its course.

He got a short-lived TV series and about a dozen years of B-movies out of that 2007 resuscitation. Watching him fade to black all over again has been painful for him and for us.

“We Die Young” is a new nadir, even for the star of too many awful “Kickboxer” sequels to count. It’s a reckless, ridiculous and borderline racist thriller about a silent man who fights against the infamous disgraced-ex-president/Fox News-hyped MS-13 gang to help a couple of kids escape Washington, D.C.

A gang leader even complains about his fears of “MAGAs” in one scene, just so you know the American-born Israeli documentary filmmaker Lior Geller’s politics.

Still, he films a nervy hand-held camera chase or two, and other unnecessary handheld and jumpy sequences to try and animate this corpselike thriller.

With a script that requires Van Damme to act without his voice — he plays a combat veteran managing his pain with legal and illegal drugs, “speaking” through a text-to-talk phone app — Geller pretty much reduces his star to an unemotional, inert supporting player.

That gives Geller free rein to dive into every Latin gang stereotype under the sun as we see a young drug runner Lucas (Elijah Rodriguez) try to save his even younger brother (Nicholas Sean Johnny) from that “life” and the influence of Shakespeare-quoting Salvadoran gang leader Rincon.

David Castañeda of “The Umbrella Academy” and the “Sicario” sequel plays Rincon with a flat menace that works for a scene or two, and bores for more that follow.

“I wasn’t always the biggest drug dealer in D.C.,” he tells his 14 year-old star delivery boy. “But I was the one who shot them!”

The story takes place over a couple of days on the “bad side” of D.C., with young Lucas, our narrator, scrambling to save his annoying sibling Miguel from being “jumped in” to the MS-13.That entails a group beat-down that the kid may survive, with a membership that follows that will almost certainly kill him.

As we’ve seen the boy persist in pursuing this, Lucas’s protests are to no avail, and make less sense than he thinks.

“It’s too late for me, but you’re smart.” No, he isn’t.

Van Damme’s drugged, battle-scarred veteran works in a body shop and is something of a neighborhood character — a soft touch for beggars, a pity case for a single mom (Joanna Metrass) who befriended the bullied, often-stoned “chavalo” in the ‘hood.

Events conspire to put Lucas, dragging his little brother, in the path of Daniel the Mute as the siblings try to escape Rincon and his minions.

We follow the kids mostly, identifying with their plight. Van Damme is just here for some sort of third act rescue, and is both misused and under-utilized in the process.

Geller embraces several racist Latin and Black tropes as he serves up his plate of ultraviolence. Rincon is a poorly-sketched-in character who loses the “color” invented for him (Shakespeare spoken through a face full of tattoos) and gives way to a lieutenant (Charlie MacGechan) who is less interesting, if more menacing.

The climax is a pitiless slaughter that suggests a “kill’em all, let Jesus sort’em out” ethos.

Still, the car and foot chases sparkle, even if the blur of edits undercut every other action beat, never letting the eye settle on an actor, an action or an emotion.

Rating: R for violence, language and some drug material

Cast: Jean-Claude Van Damme, David Castañeda, Elijah Rodriguez, Joanna Metrass, Nicholas Sean Johnny and Charlie MacGechan

Credits: Scripted and directed by Lior Geller. A Lionsgate film on Netflix.

Running time: 1:32

Man, you know times are hard at Netflix when it all comes down to this.

“Interceptor” is the marquee new release on the embattled streamer this week, a cheesy C-movie polished up to look like a B.

It’s about terrorists about to fire Russian nuclear missiles at the U.S., and a lone Army officer holding out at a missile interceptor station that’s under assault.

The premise might be one a lot of us can buy into — treasonous sellout American conservatives in league with the Russians. In this fictional future, #MoscowMitch, More Rubles Rand and the disgraced and treasonous former president aren’t in the picture, but “topical?” Close enough.

Elsa Pataky of the “Furious” and sometimes “Fast” franchise, and Luke Bracey (“Point Break,” the junky remake) are the stars.

And truth be told, I could have gone along with it — missile shield stations attacked, cities targeted for destruction, right wing grievance airing by the attackers with no identification of the Future Koch suckers financing the whole enterprise. It’s a version of an early ’80s all-star TV miniseries of some repute — “World War III” — with no stars.

Then, with Captain Collins (Pataky) barricaded in the launch control center of a floating mid-Pacific interceptor base, almost everybody else slaughtered by a hilariously overstaffed and treasonous “cleaning crew,” a ninja drops in. And Spanish-accented Captain Kickass must take him out to save us all…for now.

The sheer absurdity of the moment overwhelms the cornball tough-talk dialogue.

“Let millions of Americans die? I don’t you realize why someone joins the Army.” “Today, America dies in a PAROXYSM of FEAR!” “If you’re gonna kill me, just KILL me. No ‘mansplaining!'”

Worst of all, the ninja check-out scene happens in the first act, early in “Interceptor.” The dung flows downhill from there.

The brawls are decently-staged, and Pataky holds her own in them. She’s no MMA veteran or Noomi Rapace, but she’s a credibly compact combatant.

Bracey fights to hide his Oz accent, but oddly-chosen/oddly-pronounced words do him no favors.

The “messaging” — about the reasons her captain has been exiled to this outpost, the sorts of grievances the far right buys into on behalf of the far rich, Russian bad intent, etc — is broadly laid out and laid on thick.

But Australian novelist turned novice-director Matthew Reilly has no sense of screen pace –NONE — and no willingness to acknowledge the absurd in situations, set-pieces or dialogue.

“Did you just stab that dude in the eye with your GUN?

Throwing huge amounts of money at filmmakers and stars for overblown B-movies was obviously unsustainable for Netflix. “Bright,” “Triple Frontier,” “The Old Guard,” “Extraction” and “Extinction,” wholly-financed or even purchased at a cut-rate price when theatrical studios realized their misguided product wasn’t worth releasing, is a quick way to go broke. It’s also a quick way to lose subscribers when the house “brand” is “makes decent teen romances, but uniformly crappy action pics.”

One fears that this “brand” is further tarnished by business-model-that-works C-movies like “Interceptor.” A cut-rate cast, green director and a script so bad it wouldn’t attract betters actors or directors is no way to rebuild public confidence in your business, or its “Netflix Original” movies.

Rating: TV-MA, graphic violence, profanity

Cast: Elsa Pataky, Luke Bracey, Mayen Mehta, Zoe Carides, Aaron Glenane and Marcus Johnson

Credits: Directed by Matthew Reilly, scripted Stuart Beattie and Matthew Reilly. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:39

A Rochester, New York synagogue and Hebrew School is the setting for the coming of age/coming-out dramedy “Tahara.”

Teenage girls Carrie (Madeline Grey DeFeece) and Hannah (Rachel Sennott) prattle on about crushes, sexual experiences and desires, tactlessly commenting on the day’s ceremonies, traditions and participants the way self-absorbed teenaged girls do.

But the film’s title should tell you just how inappropriate and heartless this is, in a “today of all days” sense. The synagogue is filled with teens. One of their classmates has died. Samantha took her own life.

Olivia Peace’s film, based on a Jess Zeidman script, is aggressively transgressive, sometimes hilarious and occasionally even tender. But not over the dead girl, who apparently wasn’t popular and lived under a sort of mean girl shunning isolation.

So when teacher Morah Klein (Bernadette Quigley) takes the kids into a classroom for some formalized (pre-printed handouts) “grief counseling,” and lectures that “as the Babylonian Talmud tells us, all Jews are responsible for each other,” it kind of falls on deaf ears. And not just because Ms. Klein has the bedside manner of a militant West Bank settler (she boasts about service “fighting for Is-RYE-el”).

In this insular world, teens will be teens. “Performative” grief runs up against eye-rolling narcissism. I mean, who has time for self-reflection?

That’s just the backdrop for the day-long conversations/confessions of Cassie and Hannah. Their banter ranges from who’s had a nose job to comparing their near-sexual experiences to crushes and talking dirty about their high school chemistry teacher. “Would you ever kill yourself?” even comes up.

Yes, they’ve been friends forever. So Hannah has license to go on and on and on about her lust for tall classmate Tristan (Daniel Taveras) and Cassie is obligated to listen, or pass notes back and forth right in the middle of the service.

Sennott, of the even-more outrageously sexual Jewish funeral comedy “Shiva Baby,” is as “out there” as ever, giving us real in-the-moment teen plotting and fantasizing and stumbling like the clumsy, thoughtless she’s playing. DeFeece (of TV’s “Blue Bloods”) is the reactor here, subtle enough in getting across the more-guarded and sensitive Cassie’s differences from horny Hannah.

She listens and indulges her friend, takes in everybody else’s reactions and identifies with any peer with the temerity to admit, “Today I feel so fake.”

But when Hannah stops prattling and playing with her zits in the mirror long enough to wonder if she’s a good kisser, the two swap spit to compare notes. And whatever self-assessment Hannah assigns her skills, Cassie’s world is rocked to the core.

Queer filmmaker Peace uses drawn or stop-motion clay animation to illustrate the erotic delights and flights of fancy the girls experience in their dreams — Hannah’s lust for Tristan — or the moment — Cassie’s hormonal eruption at locking lips with someone she wishes was more than just a friend.

There are laughs in the awkward ways Cassie tries to get a repeat performance, and universally recognized winces of recognition as we fear for her feelings about where all this is going. Sennott has mastered this sexually ravenous young woman “type,” and effortlessly finds the laughs built into her character. But DeFeece makes the most of every close-up, wringing pathos and laugh-at-her-pain longing out of scene after scene of this talky but mercifully brief day-I-came-out tale.

Peace shot the film in a cellphone-friendly 1:1 aspect ratio, which balloons out to Academy 1.37:1 to underscore the moment Cassie’s world opens up.

The boxy look doesn’t add to the movie, and feels like a young filmmaker’s semi-misguided “experiment” when whispered or note-passing scenes require subtitles. That creates technical issues rendering the titles into tiny fine print and emphasizes the movie’s unpolished indie pedigree.

But Peace and the cast create an amusingly complete “world,” with the class’s biggest cynic also its most passionate vaper/poseur (Shlomit Azoulay), the performative weepers and even a couple (Keith Weiss, Rachel Wender) bickering over a cell phone video that “proves” the Earth is flat.

And short conversations or long, tasteless or touching, DeFeece and Sennott make their conversations a fascinating hour of teen eavesdropping — repellant, ridiculous and risible all at once.

Rating: unrated, profanity, teen smoking

Cast: Madeline Grey DeFeece, Rachel Sennott, Daniel Taveras, Shlomit Azoulay, Keith Weiss, Rachel Wender and Bernadette Quigley

Credits: Directed by Olivia Peace, scripted by Jess Zeidman. A Film Movement release.

Running time: 1:18

Sort of a “Game of Thrones” vamp on Disney “Princess” fantasies?

Pouty princess Joey K of “The Kissing Booth” is told she’s got to marry that damned Dominic Cooper — twice her age — and she ain’t having it. Nossir.

From 20th Century pictures, July 1 on Hulu. Maybe they’ll pitch it, mention it’s coming up and offer a screener before I forget the damned delight is headed our way.

Gay icon Billy Porter made a PG-13 movie?

Looks adorbs and inclusive.

July 22.

Domino learned to paint from his famous painter mother, and learned about love from his famous painter father.

Love is “when you see colors you’ve never seen before” you’ll know, father Fidel counsels.

Ino may have had that very experience in high school. But being forever slow on the uptake, he pretty much missed it when Cara had a “red panda” experience in class and he saw “a new shade of red.”

That seriously awkward moment in remembered in a flashback in the Filipino teen romance “Love is Color Blind,” a mild-mannered and oh-so-slow/low-heat-or-no-heat affair that reinforces the notion that girls mature faster and young women “figure it out” long before hapless boys and men.

Because Cara (Belle Mariano) has crushed on Ino (Donny Pangilinan) since high school, obsessively emailing, texting and tagging him as she studied in Hong Kong.

Brooding Ino, juggling jobs and struggling to pay the bills as a tattoo artist, isn’t getting back to her. She has to stalk him and literally throw herself in his arms to get his attention.

He explains his philosophy to kid he’s tutoring in English online.

“Sometimes you have to let go of that person for their own good.”

Something happened to Ino, and all of Cara’s flirting, courting and “take you back to 2013” school reminiscing to jog his memory, his creative passion and his sense of color won’t work.

Ino had an accident.

“Love in Color Blind” is a classic short-story-long, the opposite of a long-story-short. That simple set-up is drawn out, dragged out, giving up its secrets in teeny tiny dollops. Complications such as the guy (Jeremiah Lisbo) who crushed on Cara way back when is now a hunk and still interested, and a pretty stranger (Angelina Cruz) falls under Ino’s unhappy, irresistible spell interrupt Ino’s slow journey from reconciling himself to what happened, and why he’s having so much trouble creating a centerpiece for a tribute art exhibit to his mother.

The young lovers are pleasant enough together, but there’s not much in the way of sparks. It’s a chaste romance that only bubbles to life when Cara gets tipsy at a campfire party because Ino has taken up with another girl.

The film has a little Harvey Fierstein novelty bit. John Lapus plays Cara’s Aunt Vicki, the baker in the family who has little usable advice for her niece, just a lusty appreciation of the newly hunky Sky (Lisbo) who has shown up to make her forget about Ino.

The screenplay is so seriously Cara-Ino centric that most supporting characters have almost no purpose and make no impression. But if you don’t add complications, flashbacks that gradually fill in the blanks of Ino’s shortcomings as a beau and sad solitude as a young adult, and the like, “Love is Color Blind” might have been a brisk 75 minute romance. And we can’t have that.

Co-star Mariano even croons a “For Your Eyes Only” love ballad (not the Bond movie theme) on the soundtrack at one point.

Movies from the less sexually charged corners of the world cinema can’t help but play as tame, tepid and flat in the West, and “Color Blind” never escapes this trap. It’s not charming, cute, sweet or sad enough to shed the dull straightjacket the screenplay straps it into.

Rating: TV-PG

Cast: Belle Mariano, Donny Pangilinan, Angelina Cruz, Jeremiah Lisbo, Eula Valdez, John Lapus and Ariel Rivera.

Credits: Directed by John Leo Garcia, scripted by Kristine Gabriel and Simon A. Arciaga. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:55

I recall seeing the trailer for “Keeping Company” and thinking, “Pushy, competitive insurance salesmen meet a serial killer? That could be funny.”

And while there are some laughs, and one doesn’t get the sense that there were can’t-miss possibilities that the cast and “creatives” ignored, that initial hunch holds true with the finished film.

It “could be funny,” and certainly is amusing, here and there. But maybe they wrung all the laughs that were in it out of it, and this is all there ever was to it.

Ahmed Bharoocha and co-writer Devin Das co-star as long paired-up partners who hit would-be customers with a one-two punch of Caste Insurance pressure.

Never-pleased-his-dad Sonny (Das) is the fear-mongering, fast-talking “close the deal” guy. Orphaned never-knew-his-dad Noah (Bharoocha) is Mr. Empathy, telling enough of his sad personal story to make him relatable and the customer feel they’re meeting a kindred spirit, or guilted into buying from the guy who found out he was getting married and having a baby the very same day.

Ahem.

Their high-pressure/high-roller boss (Gillian Vigman) is all about her new boat and bullying the company accountant (Rex Lee) into making the write-off and balance of payments fit, even if that means they never pay out on a policy again. Putting customers on hold with a “wait time is twelve hours” message helps.

Yet we notice missing person signs around town, in Sonny’s dad’s (Bernard White) non-vegetarian restaurant, The Faithful Cow. The TV ads for the local DA, up for reelection, frankly admit to “chaos” on the streets that only he can clean up. In other words, don’t blame him. Re-elect him.

“ANGER is what runs the world!”

And we’ve caught a glimpse of this bespectacled creeper (Jacod Grodnik), cruising the bad side of town in his ancient Mercedes, grabbing people and polishing his meat grinder.

So that’s what we’re dealing with here. Somehow, super-competitive rageaholic Sonny and super sensitive Noah have to cross paths with the customer from Hell, and either convince him to sign on the dotted line, or at least make it out of his basement fiberboard dungeon alive.

Jokes include the serial killer’s “It’s not personal” reassurances, with both victims on brand in their responses.

Sonny — “Yeah, well it feels KINDA personal, a–h–e!”

Noah — “Everybody’s crazy for a reason!”

Noah is a little slow…at picking up on their peril. Sonny’s a little too focused on work to save them.

“This is worse than that time I dropped my phone in the toilet right before a flight,” vs. “I swear, if this lunatic gets me fired…”

But mean boss riffs and “We’re not friends, we’re just co-workers” partner tirades and the like make this short movie feel like its shown its entire hand early in the second act. And there’s still one whole act, with unsurprising surprises — twists that anybody could see coming — left.

Das and Bharoocha are funny enough as a pair, until they run out of amusing things to say and do as they scheme to make their escape.

So sometimes, a promising comedy pitch is all there is. Annoying salesmen, meat-grinding serial killer, who do we root for?

“Keeping Company” reminds us its what you do to flesh out and funny-up that pitch that matters more.

Rating: unrated, blood violence, profanity

Cast: Ahmed Bharoocha, Devin Das, Jacob Grodnik, Gillian Vigman, Bernad White, Andy Buckley and Suzanne Savoy

Credits: Directed by Josh Wallace, directed by Devin Das and Josh Wallace.

Running time: 1:22

The whole movie is in the headline in this carefully-observed but low-heat Indonesian melodrama from writer-director Robby Ertanto.

“Ave Maryam” treats us to the quiet routine of a convent whose chief duties seems to be caring for elderly nuns. Sister Maryam (Maudy Kusnaedi) is dutiful, but young, shy and pretty.

Then handsome Father Yosef (Chicco Jerikho) returns to his hometown to direct the convent school (Probably, although we see no classrooms.) orchestra and choir. He doesn’t leer at or seriously come-on to Sister Maryam. But discrete or not, he’s obviously interested in ways he shouldn’t be.

“I’d like to take you out to find rain in the middle of summer,” he suggests (in Indonesian, with English subtitles).

“Father, it’s late” is the only proper response, and that’s the one she gives.

But he is vibrant, full of life and fun, making beautiful sacred music with his charge and dancing with the sisters in the convent after hours. If he makes a point of running into her, here and there, being in his company alone may be cause for confession.

Not enough happens in this brief (Netflix is streaming a shorter version than played film festivals), not terribly dramatic melodrama.

Too many shots are framed from a respectful, chaste distance. The big emotional close-ups are only in the latter part of the film’s third act. That doesn’t let us don’t connect with the characters or embrace their struggle.

The big payoff is a flame that flickers out, nothing with any sizzle and only the barest suggestions of pathos and struggle about it.

It’s as if Ertanto is intrigued by this situation, but as tentative about approaching it as he would be doing anything on Islamic clerical misbehavior in a country that is overwhelmingly Muslim.

The early scenes of the caregiving life routine of these nuns, taking in their own elderly and seeing to their comfort in the retired sisters’ last days are interesting, but only up to a point.

Rating: TV-PG

Cast: Maudy Kusnaedi, Chicco Jerikho, Tutie Kirana, Sendy Febrina and Olga Lydia

Credits: Scripted and directed by Robby Ertanto. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:12

A canny eel diving teen gets in the middle of mind games between her strict dad and his rich friend.

This scenic drama with thriller elements opens July 8.