Movie Nation

Here’s your “buy in” moment for “Turning Red,” Pixar’s latest animated attempt to break the mold about what cartoons for kids can be about.

Thirteen year-old over-achiever Meilin has been acting weird. She seems distracted at school. She’s peer-pressured beyond her group boy-band worship and into noticing the cute older boy at the corner convenience store. And her mom, Ming, has noticed these changes in “my little scholar.” Mom has just one question.

“Did the red peony bloom?”

Yes, she’s speaking metaphorically. But a Chinese-Canadian mom has just asked her teen daughter if she’s started menstruating — in a Pixar animated film.

It’s not such a stretch, considering the heavy lifting that “Inside/Out” and “Soul” did or attempted. But those “At least it’s not another ‘Toy Story’ sequel or variation” films were more psychological and touchy-feely. “Turning Red” — and boy, that title could spin a lot of ways considering its subject and the Chinese milieu — is inherently more biological, if allegorical.

And if you’re thinking “He is wading into a MINEfield” here, think about what the movie is saying or trying to say. Mei Mei, voiced by Rosalie Chiang, suddenly wakes up one morning as a giant, clumsy red panda, given to throwing her weight around amidst the occasional “triggered” emotional rage.

Her mother (Sandra Oh) and a gathering of elders in her family not only want to perform a ceremony to remove this inherited quirk in her DNA and personality. The message is she’s got to learn to control her inner panda, her emotions, her “mood swings.”

Considering how the acronym “PMS” has been erased from North American culture, that’s a gutsy play. Pixar, pandering to the more traditional Chinese marketplace (with indifferent results), revives something treated as dated — tropes about “that time of the month” and PMS — in the West.

The movie’s a lighthearted and sometimes entertaining odd duck on several levels. It dips into Chinese expat culture and cuisine in Toronto, and is inexplicably set in 2002. I guess that was “Peak Boy Band,” and Mei and her eighth grade BFFs Miriam, Priya and Abby (Ava Morse, Maitreyi Ramakrishnan and Hyein Park) are DEEP into 4Town, a five member (?) pop group of the NSYNC/O-Town school.

Meilin is confused by this change in her life, upset and hiding from her friends. But they’re not judgemental. They think she’s cute and fluffy in her panda guise. And all she has to do to change back is calm her emotions.

Being just-out-of-their-tweens, the kids find a way to exploit Mei’s panda persona amongst their accepting or at least curious classmates.

Yes, there’s more than a hint of “Teen Wolf” in this script by Julia Cho and director Domee Shi, who directed the adorable and Oscar-winning Chinese mom and her baby dumpling short, “Bao” a few years back. And you have to applaud the studio for green-lighting a movie that at least attempts to start “that conversation” between parents and kids.

But ambitions aside, I found the movie’s mashup of messaging, cultural recycling (Mei’s family runs a temple/shrine) of themes about “ancestors” and the origins of the red panda in human form a bit of a muddle — never exactly incoherent, not exactly consequential.

Adult characters are thinly-developed, with more promise than payoff. Even the kids, animated in a sort of digital Aardman style (wide mouths, narrow teeth), are two dimensional, at best.

At least the slapstick — what little there is of it — plays.

“Turning Red” isn’t so much a bad movie as a tentative one. It came to life with grand intentions, some cute characters, a ready-made toy tie-in and a hint of controversy. It plays as focus-grouped and watered-down — not the daring, boundary-pushing children’s edutainment it might have been.

Rating: PG for thematic material, suggestive content and language

Cast: The voices of Rosalie Chiang, Sandra Oh, Ava Morse, Maitreyi Ramakrishnan, Orion Lee,
Hyein Park and James Wong.

Credits: Directed by Domee Shi, scripted by Julia Cho and Domee Shi. A Pixar release.

Running time: 1:39

Recognize any voices in this rotoscope animated film from the director of “Waking Life?”

Maybe Jack Black? Zachary Levi?

Yeah, it comes to Netflix April 1.

Go figure.

Well, this looks sadistic, primal and dare one say it, “fun?”

Catalina Sandina Moreno, Iwan Rheon, Tom Cullen, Inès Spiridonov and Will Kemp star in this Charles Dorfman, the producer of “Honest Thief” and “The Lost Daughter,” now trying his hand at directing.

Here’s a little “Around the World with Netflix” bauble that takes a dip into the lives of Crazy Rich Moroccans in the Netherlands.

Its novelty is that setting, and the way it willfully upends cultural mores and expectations. Yes, it’s a broad and rowdy (ish) rom-com, somewhat predictable and limited in its ambitions. But the simple acts of embracing and poking fun at a “traditional,” patriarchal Islamic culture as it Goes Dutch delivers a few laughs amid the “princesses don’t need a prince to be ‘complete'” lecture.

“Meskina,” as translated here, means “scorned woman,” a Dutch-Moroccan version of “old maid.” That’s how judgmental family and peers regard our heroine/narrator Leyla (Maryam Hassouni). She may be 30 and beautiful, but she’s living with her widowed mom (Rachida Iaallala) and neither supporting herself nor “out there” dating.

Older, married and unfiltered sister Amira (Soundos El Ahmadi) can joke that “Dating is haram,” prohibited under Islamic law. But that’s a joke between sassy sisters. They’re a lot more Dutch than Moroccan. The film’s opening scene, a wedding where our narrator/heroine describes her plight — family expectations, age, agoraphobia — has characters asking each other if they’ve become Hindu. Whatever the ceremony is, the “event” is pure Bollywood excess in attire and “Crazy Rich Asians” in its conspicuous consumption.

Leyla’s “secret” romance with the wildly successful “golden boy” of their circle, the rich record producer Abdelkarim (Olaf Ait Tami) finally becomes public at that wedding, and leads to her own marriage. But that paparazzi-bedeviled match is abruptly tossed away in a scandal “four years later,” putting Leyla back “out there.” She’s discarded as abruptly as that whole “agoraphobia” diagnosis, which is never mentioned again after the first scene.

Yeah, “Meskina” is perfunctory and sloppy like that.

All of this prologue sets us up for Leyla taking a job with her snobby and influential event-planner niece (Jouman Fattal), a montage of the many dates that, haram or not, she struggles through, and the competing efforts of her no-bedside-manner doctor/sister and her nagging mother to set her up.

The sister’s online dating efforts lead to rich, soulful and non-Muslim Fabian (Vincent Banic).

“He’s not Moroccan!” “What ARE you? 1954?”

And mom’s matchmaking pairs her with traditional and equally smitten Amin (Nasrdin Dchar).

Who will she choose? How can she choose?

Meanwhile, she’s still trying to turn this “Dutch Muslim girl who doesn’t need a prince to feel complete” fairytale idea into a children’s book, making her “the Dutch Judy Blume.”

There are scattered laughs in this messy, ungainly comedy’s teasing, flirting, ululating women, trying-too-hard men and the apparently bi Muslim assistant (Bilal Wahib) who tries to give our heroine that gay BFF at work that women in all such tinsel-tainted rom-coms require.

What’s more interesting are the pronounced efforts to upend expectations about Europe’s allegedly insular and unassimilated first and second generation Muslim population. Lip service may be paid to being traditional and dating “Mocre” (Moroccan), but every “date,” every pop-song sing along, the whole glitzy hip hop scene and the sisters’ outspokenness and frank and frequent deployment of the F-bomb blow up that preconception.

There isn’t much to “Meskina” that we haven’t seen presented to better effect in dozens of other “culture clash” romantic comedies. The “clash” here is so watered-down as to deny the picture its one chance at real friction, something a sermon delivered at the climax doesn’t correct.

The performances are pretty flat, although El Ahmadi, playing sister Amira broad and loud, makes a most amusing impression. None of the men register at all, outside of the generic “goofballs I met online” dating montage.

We never buy the gorgeous Hassouni as anything remotely “Meskina,” as if that’s part of the “fairy tale” that is her life. The laughs are too scattered for this to pay off.

And whatever shock value there might be to an Islamic audience — short skirts, suggestive music and dancing, etc. — to Western eyes this is as edgy as Moroccan mint tea. The script puts much effort into being mildly offensive — the F-bombs — which never hides how blandly inoffensive it will play to anybody who doesn’t fret over what is or isn’t haram.

Rating: TV-MA, lots of profanity

Cast: Maryam Hassouni, Soundos El Ahmadi, Rachida Iaallala, Olaf Ait Tami, Vincent Banic, Nasrdin Dchar, Bilal Wahib and Jouman Fattal

Credits: Directed by Daria Bukvic, scripted by Fadua El Akchaoui, Daria Bukvic and Ernst Gonlag. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:38

The cast of “Heckle” includes “Police Academy/Three Men and a Baby” alumnus Steve Guttenberg, nearly 40 years past his heyday, Clark Gable III and Natasha Starkey, daughter of a famous drummer, granddaughter of the most famous drummer.

Seeing any one of those three names in a movie’s credits would raise an eyebrow, as in “this is how desperate the producers were for a ‘name,'” and “this is who the producers consider ‘name’ talent.” Showcasing all three is a very bad sign.

Not as bad as the beard that drifts from “real” to “fake” on our unheralded star from scene to scene. Guy Combes must’ve been called back for reshoots, which is where the grim, Astroturf matte was applied in place of whatever he shaved off. It’s the worst fake facial hair since “Gettysburg,” if not Groucho.

“Heckle” is a horrifically-bad horror tale set in in the world of British stand-up comedy. Everybody in it is at let’s just say “something less than their best.” The script is garbage, the direction, lighting and cinematography incompetent.

Feel free to shout “CUT, let’s go again, and THIS time, Guy, FIND YOUR LIGHT and STAY IN IT” at the screen.

Not that this will do any good.

After seeing Guttenberg, playing a coarse, cruel stand-up comedy “legend,” murdered in the first scene, you figure “He collected a check and maybe a trip to the UK, and got off easy. Good for him.”

But no, he’s here in flashback after flashback, playing the meanest comic in show business, one we never once see or hear do anything remotely funny. By the third or fourth flashback, you start to feel sorry for ol’Steve. And nobody wants that.

Combes, in greasy long hair (A wig? Dunno.), real-and-then-fake beard and cowboy hat (probably to hide the wig), plays Joe Johnson, an abrasive and shockingly popular stand-up who’s just landed the lead in “The Ray Kelly Story,” playing “my idol,” the jerk we see killed (Guttenberg) in that first scene.

But that news has earned Joe a new “”fan,” a heckler who shouts “Knock knock” in the most threatening manner possible in the middle of his act, causing on-stage meltdowns and later paranoid threats on the phone. Somebody has decided to “make destroying your life my life’s mission.”

Perfect time for Joe and his entourage (Madison Claire, Louis Selwyn, Stephane Leigh Rose etc) to dash off to the country, “no cell phones,” to throw an ’80s fashion Halloween costume party.

Naturally, somebody shows up in a red hoodie and killer clown mask to murderously thin their ranks and face down Joe over some grievance, real or imagined.

“I’ll take you to hell, and heckle you there, too!”

The accents are an off-putting mix of American and sometimes indecipherable British. Combes isn’t the only actor on board who forgets to “find your light.” Guttenberg is bad, and while not everybody on board is as bad or worse, enough of them are to make you puzzle over how something this crummy, but not crummy enough to be any fun, ever got made.

Oh, right. “We’ve got ‘Steve Guttenberg…and Clark Gable III! And Ringo Starr’s granddaughter!”

Rating: unrated, graphic violence, sex, profanity

Cast: Guy Combes, Steve Guttenberg, Clark Gable III, Stephanie Leigh Rose, Madison Claire, Louis Selwyn and Natasha Starkey

Credits: Directed by Martyn Pick, scripted by Airell Anthony Hayles. A Shudder release.

Running time: 1:21

The brawny “assemble a team” action picture goes way back, probably predating “Seven Samurai, and is with us still. But its heyday had to be the 1960s, when “The Magnificent Seven” and “The Guns of Navarone,” “The Dirty Dozen” and “The Italian Job” and others chiseled the genre’s conventions in stone.

Richard Brooks’ “The Professionals” (1966) leaned on the tropes, archetypes and “mission/quest” plot as hard as any of them, often too hard. But it distinguishes itself in several ways that let it endure. The violence is brutal. And the cast is so boiling over with charisma that Lee Marvin could take a back seat, Robert Ryan didn’t have to break a sweat, Woody Strode could stand out while staying largely silent (the casting was “progressive,” but not that progressive), and Jack Palance and Burt Lancaster could grin, chew the scenery and devour the tough-guy talk that is this film’s calling card, decades after its release.

“Well, I’ll be damned…” “Most of us are.”

The assemble-the-team business already had its lazy shortcuts, and writer-director Brooks, Oscar winning screenwriter of “Elmer Gantry,” later an Oscar nominated director for “In Cold Blood,” grabbed every one of those he could. Ralph Bellamy is the rich man rounding up “professionals” to retrieve his wife, kidnapped and taken to Mexico in the late 1910s. The character recites each specialist’s resume, “Navarone” fashion, to introduce them to each other and the viewer.

The “tracker” (Strode) will pick up the trail, the horse handler (Ryan) will keep them going, the ex-military man (Marvin) will lead and plan the violence, and his Mexican-experience compadre (Lancaster) will handle explosives.

Because if there’s one thing that changes the odds in a firefight in a B-Western, even one with an A-list cast and director, it’s dynamite.

That team will take ransom money south to where the revolutionary Raza (Palance) resides, holding the trophy bride (Claudia Cardinale) and awaiting the payoff.

“Captain Jesus Raza. Jesus, what a name for the bloodiest cutthroat in Mexico!”

Brooks was an Oscar-nominated screenwriter long before he collected one for directing. The man had an ear for hard-boiled, quotable dialogue. He gives his “Elmer Gantry” star Lancaster most of the best lines, but not nearly all of them.

“So what else is on your mind besides hundred-proof women, ninety-proof whiskey, ‘n’ fourteen-carat gold?”

“Amigo, you just wrote my epitaph!”

“You go to hell!” “Yes ma’am, I’m on my way.”

“Certain women have a way of changing boys into men and some men back into boys.”

The cast is generally in fine form, with Marvin setting us up for “The Dirty Dozen” and “The Big Red One,” ensemble pieces where he was the face and voice of grizzled authority and Lancaster landing his punchlines with particular panache.

Brooks never specialized in one genre, and had his share of misses (“Lord Jim”) to go along with the hits. That’s one reason he’s not mentioned as one of the great filmmakers of his era, and considering his adaptations as writer-director — “Blackboard Jungle,” “Looking for Mr. Goodbar,” “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” and just as a screenwriter (“Key Largo,” “Elmer Gantry,” “The Brothers Karamazov”) — that’s a crying shame.

He had the good fortune of working with great directors of photography and the biggest stars of his day. And if his pictures aren’t showy, they’re memorable for the performances and the distinctly crackling dialogue, either grabbed from the source novel or play, or cooked up by the man himself.

“You bastard!”

“Yes, sir. In my case an accident of birth. But you, sir, you’re a self-made man.“

Rating: PG-13 for violence and nudity

Cast: Lee Marvin, Burt Lancaster, Woody Strode, Robert Ryan, Claudia Cardinale, Ralph Bellamy and Jack Palance.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Richard Brooks, based on a novel by Frank O’Rourke.

Running time: 1:57

Oh yes, a high end horror movie can be a great star vehicle, as Sandra Oh is about to demonstrate in this March 18 release.

A couple of concerns I’m sure theater owners, Warner Brothers and I shared about “The Batman” were — A) it’s too long, and the running time cuts down on the number of showings you can squeeze in, B) “franchise fatigue,” as the Bat has been revived more times than is decent and C) it was never clear fandom was going to accept Robert Pattinson in the role, even if Matt “Planet of the Apes” Reeves seemed like a sure thing as director.

No last gasp of “But, but, Zack SNYDER is the ‘Orson Welles of comic book movies” lunacy.

A lot of that evaporated when tickets — premium priced at AMC theaters and some other chains — went on sale.

It’s not a “Spider-Man” sized opening, not even one of the bigger “Batman/Dark Knight” opening weekend debuts.

But $22 million or so on Thursday and $35 million+ on Friday point to an impression pandemic opening weekend — $128 million+.

Yes, it took up a lot of screens (it earned $15 million from IMAX alone) and took a bite out of “Uncharted,” but that Sony release cleared the $100 million mark in North America by adding another $10 million.

“Uncharted” has racked up over $270 million worldwide, so yes, it’s a video game adaptation and now a movie franchise.

The box office isn’t “back,” and millions still aren’t going to theaters the way they did two years ago, but things are looking up. If you’re a fan of the caped and cowled genre, this one’s a winner.

Never bet against “The Bat.”

“Dog” is holding screens and holding onto audience, as it managed another $6 million this weekend and has cleared $40 million, all in.

“Cyrano,” lacking the Oscar nominations that might have given it an Oscar bounce, fell off the table in its second weekend.

Every place in time since the invention of the boat and everywhere there was commerce being moved over water, there have been pirates. That’s something Johnny Depp, Gore Verbinski and Disney belatedly got around to mentioning in their many rum-soaked “Pirates of the Caribbean” comedies.

“The Pirates,” best remembered as a 2014 “Pirates of the Sea of Japan” take on the genre, has produced its own sequel. “The Pirates: The Last Royal Treasure,” throws bandits in with the pirate queen Hae-rang (Han Hyo-joo) for a lighthearted yet lumbering “romp” around that sea that separates Japan from the Korean peninsula.

These tales are set in the late pre-“Korea” Goryeon dynasty, and there’s quite of a bit of exposition explaining the collapsing kingdom, “traitors” and a “lost treasure” that might allow whoever tracks it down to “claim the throne not with rank, but with power” purchased by hidden royal gold and silver.

Hae-rang and her scurvy crew pick up a fistful of shipwrecked bandits “led” by Wu Mu-chi, a swaggering, cackling blowhard who bills himself as “The greatest swordsman in Goryeo!” When Mu-chi (Kang Ha-neul, pretty damned funny) leaps, spins, slo-mo and fast-motions himself into action, we see that he’s not just talk.

Everybody on that side of the law has heard of the treasure, a treasure map is procured and more clues are wrapped around an elephant’s tusk. But first the bandits have to convince the pirates that they fit in. And secondly, Mu-Chi has to start a comical power struggle with the tough broad with the perfect hair.

“The dragon is master of the sea, but the tiger runs on land!”

“If you say the word ‘TIGER’ in front of me one more time…”

That gets him about as far as you’d guess. But this power struggle, and others, becomes a running gag in the film. Whoever has the best idea about where the treasure might be is worth listening to, and even treating as “captain,” or so it seems.

There’s a power-mad villains (Sang-Woo Kwon) vying for the prize, Japanese pirates to overcome, obstacles both natural (swallowed by a whale, an epic lightning storm) and supernatural, caves and an undersea river reached by whirlpool, cannons and codes and battle junks turned into…junk.

These “Pirates” have a little more sexual tension, even if it is two-fisted and pierced by steel. There’s even a “real” princess (Chae Soo-bin) to set up a “love triangle.”

The fights are great fun, and the action beats — involving terrific stunt wirework — come off. The underwater effects are impressive and the leads are cute in the clenches, or in conflict with each other.

But the plot is convoluted to the point that the picture is almost never not ponderous. There’s a lot more “history” than is probably necessary, and less comedy than was required to make this come off.

Still, it’s kid-friendly and martial arts-happy and almost on a par with the least of the Depp “Pirates” pictures. Worth a look if you’re interested what “Yo ho ho” sounds like in Korean (or dubbed into English).

Rating: TV-14, bloody swordplay, combat-killed corpses

Cast: Han Hyoo-Joo, Kang Ha-neul, Kwon Sang-woo, Chae Soo-bin, Se-hun, Kim Sung-oh

Credits: Directed by Kim Jeonghun, scripted by Cheon Seong-il. A Lotte Entertainment movie on Netflix.

Running time: 2:07

Someday, not someday soon, but someday the phrase “lockdown rom-com” will be alien to a generation that never had to improvise around a life and love life suddenly shut in and limited by a global pandemic.

Here’s a cute-looking relic of that not-bygone era, a sort of “SXSW Special” pairing up a “Bad Education” supporting player and “Deadpool’s” favorite cabbie.

Cinedigm unleashed “7 Days” on March 25.