Movie Nation

Some comedies get bonus points for merely existing, for the simple fact that somebody thought the idea of a Wiccan, a witch running his own coven, being outed as his high school homecoming king and voted “most likely to succeed” would be funny.

No, he’s not the Goth Gone Wild/social misfit/”free thinker” and rebel we associate for this fringy and funny (Are we allowed to laugh at it?) belief’s adherents.

That’s “King Knight” in a nutshell, a movie in which this tattooed, garlanded witch married to a witch Jesus figure has his “walkabout” and faces his past and his moment of truth — at his high school reunion.

Scripted, acted and edited on that sliding “Napoleon Dynamite” deadpan scale, it’s filled with the ad hoc DIY Wiccanry rituals, practices and healing herbs and spells that Thorn (Matthew Gray Gubler of “Criminal Minds”) and his wife Willow (Angela Sarafyan of “Westworld”) instruct their coven of eight (including themselves) in.

It’s got a handful of laugh-out-loud gags, lines and reactions. But mostly, owing to the slack pace and thin collection of one-liners, it lets down a game cast playing a broad collection of eccentrics, true “believers” shaken by this revelation about their leader and prophet.

All isn’t well in the coven, with the gay tow truck driver and his partner postal worker and pretty much every other couple dressed in black (or white) having romantic troubles.

Thorn and his smarter, potion-and-herb prescribing (RN) wife, hear them out, offer counsel and “traditional” cures.

But as he impatiently reboots his emails, waiting for that next order for his line of homemade bird paths, Thorn is getting these persistent notes from another woman. Is he cheating? Considering it? He always deletes them.

Willow wonders what’s off about him. He keeps bringing up starting a family, and he’s acting a little shifty.

“Have you been taking those male enhancement pills? The ones from the gas station?”

No. Opening his email reveals all. She is shocked and appalled way beyond that “I don’t know who you are” thing. He was a poster boy for the kids who picked on her and pretty much everybody else in their coven in high school. His defense is Renaissance Faire/Wiccan, but weak.

“Beneath cloaks of Ralph Lauren, blood flows in their veins–just like the rest of us!”

As he faces shunning at home and in his coven, Thorn — his real name is “Thornton! It might as well be CHIP!” — must walk and wander, open his third eye and face his past.

The framing device is a sort of explainer, not quite a documentary but a tale narrated by Thorn, Willow and Thorn’s spirit guide, “the coolest wizard of them all,” Merlin (“Twin Peaks” and “How I Met Your Mother” alumnus Ray Wise).

Tarot cards introduce chapters — “The Lovers,” “The Hermit.”

And the most deadpan sequence of all is the presented-without-comment survey of “our traditions,” from the “Morning Cleanse” and “Beltane” to “May Baskets” and “Vow Renewals.”

Who knew Wiccans were so big on making happy couples?

A lot of the one-liners are of the crude “I’m glad to know I’m more than just a hole to you” variety, low hanging fruit of the stoner comedy school.

Is that the intent here? Sit around with Snoop, smoke and imbibe and giggle at the dorkiness and sheer inanity of these suburban “good witches” (no dark magic or “drinking babies’ blood”) and their cosplaying?

Maybe. Stone cold sober, “King Knight” is a bit of a sweet-spirited grind, funny intent delivering funny moments that are so scattered the picture never gets up a comic head of steam.

Rating: unrated, profanity, sexuality

Cast: Matthew Gray Gubler, Angela Sarafyan, Andy Milonakis, Kate Comer, Emily Chang and Ray Wise.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Richard Bates Jr. An XYZ release.

Running time: 1:21

Channel surfing Valentine’s Day lured me back into “Two for the Road,” a sophisticated and sweet “road comedy” that altered the genre for half a century afterward.

Sure, “It Happened One Night” was the Ur film of this genre, dating from over thirty years before. But Stanley Donen’s sleek, smart take on a romance seen through the years in a montage of their drives around “the continent” is what a film fan sees when one closes one’s eyes and imagines “the definitive road picture.”

I’ve seen it many times, mostly in chunks as it’s on many of Ye Olde Movie Channels I drop in on. I always joke that “Let me check again.” Because I still can’t believe Albert Finney would ditch Jacqueline Bisset for the regal human clothes hanger that was Audrey Hepburn.

But “Jackie,” as she’s called in the movie, a traveling companion in the early “hitchhiking” episode of the history of this couple to be, caught the measles. So grumpy architect Mark is fated to be with Joanna (Hepburn), for better or worse.

The pairing of the rising star Finney with the long-established (and a few years older) Hepburn works swimmingly, because to paraphrase what people always said about Astaire and Rogers, “She gave him class, and he made her younger.”

Hepburn isn’t exactly an ingenue here. But she’s pretty bubbly and madcap, something we hadn’t seen her attempt since “My Fair Lady,” and mostly much earlier.

The couple — hitchhiking as they first meet — share a ride with a crowd in a VW Microbus, tour in a 1950 MG-TD (which catches fire, spoiler alert), travel later with obnoxious American friends (William Daniels and Eleanor Bron) and their insufferable daughter crammed in a Ford Country Squire, successfully age and trade up to a Mercedes 230 and always make their way through France (mostly), taking in the pre-EU/pre-superhighway era scenery as it was meant to be experienced.

They drive the paper-roadmap blue highways and pigpaths in the great motorcars of the ’50s and ’60s. Renaults and Citroens and Opels pass them, and when Mark gets a new red British ragtop to replace the torched MG, that’s a sign he’s reached a midlife crisis cheating episode.

The situations — lost keys, spoiled brats, rushed tours of cities (Chantilly), car trouble, fights, flirting and seductions, fine French dining, French price gouging, and foreshadowing the life they’d lead together in the future — have become road picture cliches.

The dialogue is crisp and light, with the occasional cutting line drawing blood.

“Just wish you’d stop sniping!” “I haven’t said a WORD.” “Just because you use a silencer doesn’t mean you’re not a sniper.”

Joanna is the queen of “I LOVE you” and mistress of “I HATE you.” Mark gives her reason for both.

Mark is bossy in ways no modern woman would tolerate this side of a Promise Keepers convention would stand for today.

“The trouble with women is they try to label you – put you in a pigeonhole. What they don’t realize is – the only thing that fits in a pigeonhole is a pigeon.”

“Two for the Road” underlines virtually every single rule that every single romantic comedy must follow to work, starting with “You’ve got to ROOT for them as a couple,” even as everything comes apart, to some degree, in virtually every era of the relationship. That’s one thing most rom-coms get wrong, and if Netflix’s teen romances have an Achilles Heel, it’s that.

“Road” is like a time capsule now, back when travel was more seat-of-the-pants than planned by Expedia or Costco, when credit cards were for the rich, the Riviera wasn’t overrun, when gender roles were more rigid and restrictive — but loosening — and cars were a lot less reliable, and a lot more stylish.

Love this, and yes it still holds up. But damn, it’s a pity about that MG.

Rating: unrated, “ruined virgin” innuendo, mild profanity

Audrey Hepburn, Albert Finney, Jacqueline Bisset, William Daniels, Eleanor Bron, Claude Dauphin

Credits: Directed by Stanley Donen, scripted by Frederic Raphael. A 20th Century Fox release.

Running time: 1:51

It may be simplistic in the way it covers an infamous mass industrial poisoning and cover-up, in tidying up the untidy “relationship” part of the story.

And “Minamata” may star Johnny Depp, an actor given to making drunks “cute,” and someone who has “fallen from grace” and lost much of his career due to a messy divorce and a British court deciding he was an abusive drunk during that marriage.

It was filmed as a planned release by another studio and abandoned, probably because of Depp’s legal troubles and ongoing court battle with Amber Heard.

But “Minamata” is far too worthy a film to go unreleased. It’s still a fascinating, moving and pretty much by-the-book true account of what happened to the Japanese villagers who lived too close to a chemical plant that dumped mercury into the sea where they got their fish.

Like Love Canal, New York and Bhopal, India, Minamata is a town whose name became infamous thanks to a major corporation’s callous attitudes towards pollution and human life. The Chisso Corp. dumped mercury into the bay for decades, and for a decade and a half covered up what they knew they were doing to people who ate fish there. The film is about the struggle to get the world to pay attention in the pre-Internet media provincialism of the 1960s and 70s.

The locals noticed their pets sickening and dying of this “cat dancing disease.” They saw birth defects in their children and adults developing tremors and life-shortening health issues. But in media-controlled “rapid growth” post-WWII Japan, the government refused to act and the company kept on covering up and refusing to acknowledge its guilt.

It wasn’t until a legendary photographer/photo-essayist, W. Eugene Smith was talked into visiting that the story became a global scandal.

Depp plays Smith as the beret-wearing iconoclast that he was, something of an alcoholic burnout when we meet him in 1971. His Life Magazine editor (Bill Nighy) has lost faith in him for all the usual journalistic burnout movie reasons — flouting deadlines, alcoholic unreliability.

“Don’t waste what time you’ve got left,” the editor hisses as he escorts Smith to the door.

But Smith agreed to do this short Japanese commercial for Fujifilm, and the translator on that endorsement, Aileen (Minami, of “Vision” and “Battle Royale”) mentions this awful thing going on in Japan. That’s the last place the ex-combat photographer wants to go. Still, there’s a pitch even a “dumb–s” editor couldn’t turn down.

Once there, Smith is immersed in village life, trying to pry photographs out of people who don’t want to rock the boat, who fear Chisso and their government and who feel a personal shame in letting themselves or their children be photographed.

Local activists (Hiroyuki Sanada among them) know that “if we make a noise loud enough,” the company and the government “won’t have a choice” in terms of hearing them out. That’s where Smith comes in. If only he could photograph some of the faces.

“Seeing what’s going on behind the eyes, it’s an empathy thing” he explains to one caregiver.

As Smith and the translator visit protests and befriend victims, sneak into the heavily guarded “company” hospital, as Smith is dragged in to meet and be charmed by the company chairman (Jun Kunimara), as the police harassment and beatings begin, with Smith drinking from a handy flask or brown bag all along the way, we wonder if this “noise loud enough” will ever be turned into the photographs that will shake the world.

Depp’s probably played too many drunks for his own good — professionally or legally. This one is charming, almost cute but plainly haunted.

“You hands shake,” a local notes. “Do you have Minamata disease?” “No, I just drink a bunch.”

Minami’s not given much to play with, and her English enunciation is a bit tough to plow through at times. Sanada gives us a blast of righteous fury, and Nighy’s just here for the curmudgeonly chewing outs.

But the victims are sympathetically-portrayed by a wide selection of actors (Akiko Iwase and Ryô Kase stand out). And co-writer/director Andrew Levitas (“Lullaby”) gives his stars the proper heart-breaking set-up for “the shot” that the name Minamata is famous for.

I had never seen the photo, but the name of the town lives on, in updates to the tragedy (the Japanese government is well-practiced in denial, when it comes to WWII or corporate crimes) and in documentaries like “The Cove,” where one can wonder why the Japanese keep killing dolphins in their waters because they’re contaminated by mercury.

“Minamata” doesn’t have the punch or paranoia of “Silkwood.” But I’d say Levitas, Depp & Co. have delivered a “message movie” with as much pathos and righteousness as the pollution lawsuit drama “Dark Waters.” And at least this one isn’t about a heroic lawyer.

Rating: R for language (profanity) throughout

Cast: Johnny Depp, Minami, Hiroyuki Sanada, Akiko Iwase, Ryô Kase, Jun Kunimura and Bill Nighy.

Credits: Directed by Andrew Levitas, scripted by David Kessler, Stephen Deuters and Andrew Levitas. A Samuel Goldwyn release.

Running time: 1:51

Few movies have ever made as an abrupt a turn as Mexican filmmaker Michel Franco’s “Sundown,” a downbeat melodrama about dissipation, its causes and its consequences.

It features a performance of perfectly poker-faced ennui by Tim Roth, a desperate breakdown and meltdown from Charlotte Gainsbourg and a sobering portrait of the seemingly sleepy but dangerous Mexico beyond the gates of its fortified resorts.

And when it flips, from a Tennessee Williams sojourn, getting lost in booze and languor in a foreign clime into something more climactic, it will make your head spin.

A family is vacationing at a posh Mexican resort. Alice (Gainsbourg) and the drinking-age kids (Albertine Kotting McMillan, Samuel Bottomley) are trying to settle into the siesta atmosphere of Aculpoco.

Neil (Roth) is way ahead of them. He seems lost in his own thoughts, adrift and bored and patiently waiting on that next hand-delivered Dos Equis or marguerita. The one “active” thing he does is notice 20ish Colin’s (Bottomley) budding alcohol problem.

A call makes Alice violate her “no cell phones/no work” policy. “START PACKING.”

Her mother’s going to the hospital and they have to fly home to Britain. They don’t even make it to the airport before the second call comes in.

And they don’t all get on the plane together because Neil, whom she thanked for coming, lost his passport. Weeping and yelling Alice & Co. board. Neil promises to locate his passport or procure a new one and get home ASAP.

But he doesn’t ask to go back to their hotel. “Hotel” is all he tells the driver, and thus he’s deposited at a waterfront dive. “Call me you need anything” is the driver’s broken-English offer to help with “chicas” or what not. That won’t be the last come-on, sales pitch or arm-twist the non-Spanish speaking Neil will face in the coming days.

His blank-faced response is both passive and dismissive. He’s not hearing you, or not listening. He’s got his head in the shade, his feet in the surf and another Dos Equis working. He’s not talking, not even to Alice, whose incessant calls and then “ding ding ding” text messages when he doesn’t answer speak to her frantic state.

“I need your help with the decisions.”

More empty promises of “”I’ll do my best,” more Dos Equis.

Whatever’s going on, Neil won’t engage in it. Whoever among the locals — who can seem predatory, even the fetching bodega owner Berenice (Iazua Larios) who comes on to him — has him “marked,” he’s not concerned.

Even when events go sideways, Neil reacts with a Zen, or zoned-out calm.

Franco, who made “After Lucia” and “Chronic,” does two things to wrong-foot the viewer, little “revelations” I won’t give away. Suffice it to say that the relationships between one and all and the delayed hints at what might drive Neil’s passive response to everything around him and all that happens have rich payoffs and contribute to the film’s sense of misdirection and surprise.

“Sundown” lulls you into thinking it’s one thing, taking on the perfect “Leaving Las Vegas” tone of a sad, solitary man who has checked out. And then it trips you up, even as its anti-hero never breaks his ambling, “whatever” stride.

Roth underplays Neil to the point where we read layers of meaning into his passivity. The actor never lets us see the man concerned or even wholly-engaged in whatever befalls him or those around him. “What is Neil’s game,” we wonder? “What’re his priorities?” Or “What is Neil’s tragic secret?”

Like the master big screen poker player than he is, Roth never ever shows his cards.

And Franco, managing the not-easy feat of making “Mexico away from the resorts” so languidly, liquidly attractive, and yet tragically dangerous, has delivered the first wholly original, instantly memorable movie of 2022.

Rating: R for sexual content, violence, language and some graphic nudity

Cast: Tim Roth, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Iazua Larios and Henry Goodman

Credits: Scripted and directed by Michel Franco. A Bleecker Street release.

Running time: 1:23

A deep bow of respect to the folks who cooked up “Love Tactics ( Ask Taktikleri),” a shiny and somewhat modern Turkish romantic comedy that, via Netflix, might show the world how Turkey itself is somewhat modern and shiny. This is a great idea.

And who, outside of Turkey, has ever seen a Turkish rom-com?

The conceit here was to take a tale from Turkish literature, the romance of Asli and Kerem, and pile every Hollywood romance and rom-com cliche on top of it, just for love and laughs.

Have the characters, naturally a perfect match who are courting each other as a dare/to-prove-a-point (“How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days,” “Think Like a Man” etc), joke about the “cliches” of romance and romantic movies. And then have them fall for those cliches, because people (in the movies) always do.

We don’t just see tableside fiddle serenades. We get the full “Ghost” making pottery come-on, “The Ugly Truth” about getting a woman into a hot air balloon.

It’d be hysterical if two of the most gorgeous actors in Turkish TV and cinema, Demet Ozdemir, Sükrü Özyildiz, cracked jokes and pointed out where these ideas came from. Turkish audiences might be (or might not be) as familiar with the romances of Mathew McConaughey and Kate Hudson as the rest of us.

Alas, there aren’t nearly enough jokes to make the “comedy” part of the rom-com truth in advertising. The producers seem intent on getting the same message across as that jarring Super Bowl ad for Turkish Airlines. Turkey is “Westernized,” “secular,” sexy and fun. And if we shove the Turkish flag into the background of more scenes than one can count, maybe foreigners will buy in.

Turkish TV star Ozdemir is Asli, the man-wise/man-wary designer at a seriously sexy clothing company. She also writes a blog, in secret. It’s called “Love Tactics,” and that’s where she shares her “truisms” about men — online, and not just with the just-ghosted colleague who slept with a guy on the first date.

“Men rule the world, women rule men and hormones rule women,” she declares, because feminism hasn’t wholly taken root there. “A woman desires to be loved…A man desires comfort,” and is thus “always looking for the next conquest.”

So let’s play a game. She’ll lure some hapless guy into a trap to prove a point, and drive traffic to her blog.

Kerem (Özyildiz, a veteran of Turkish TV and film, little of it exported) is similarly sure of himself with the opposite sex. A cocky ad-man who wants that clothing firm’s account, he’s sure enough of his ability to not just “pick someone up,” but that he can “make her fall in love with me,” that he, too, will take a dare from his mates (in Turkish with subtitles, or dubbed).

Kemer and Asli plot their schemes, but then coincidences and misunderstandings, “jealousy” and what not complicates their “Never call him/her back right away” “tactics.”

The “cute” stuff never quite gets the job done and the jokes are too few to make an impact, even if the romance kind of clicks in that “They’re so gorgeous they belong together” way.

Looking at their credits, each actor’s been in rom-coms in Turkey before, so while the genre might be “New Girl” level new in that corner of the Islamic world, even Turkish viewers will have other films/shows to compare this to.

It’s not the least bit original, which is no cardinal sin. But without the laughs, “Love Tactics” plays like a travelogue with kissing. Turkey looks posh and affluent and inviting. It’s just that you can’t say the same about these two, and without that there’s no “rooting for them,” the one absolute must in any romantic comedy.

Rating: TV-MA, adult situations, alcohol, sexual discussions

Cast: Demet Ozdemir, Sükrü Özyildiz

Credits: Directed by Emre Kabakusak, scripted by Pelin Karamehmetoglu. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:38

Ivan Reitman didn’t direct a lot of films, just 20 features over a career that spanned over 40 years.

But his imprint on screen comedy was enormous, launching actors to stardom and fellow filmmakers who followed in his irreverent, sweet and distinctly Canadian sensibilities style to reshape the way we looked at the big screen and laughed in his heyday.

Ivan, directly of “Ghostbusters” and “Dave,” father of Jason and producer of “Up in the Air,” died over the weekend. He was 75.

“Meatballs” was the movie that really announced him to the world, a fact sort of lost in the way he made this goofy, sexist, post hippy and definite summer camp comedy the perfect vehicle to launch Bill Murray’s stardom.

He tried making more sophisticated movies here and there, but dopey comedies we’re his specialty — Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito as “Twins,”

I think “Dave” was his best film, with the ensemble farce “Ghostbusters” easily the most popular and most durable. He loved long enough to see his son Jason make an inferior, mostly humorless “Requel.”

It’s east to look over that filmography and see a lot of big name cast/high concept crap in there, with most of his finished features earning poor reviews, and for good reasons.

But I dare say most of us have a soft spot for his work, for the punchlines, the pre-meme “memes” he added to the culture.

And there’s a lot to be said for his brand of juvenilia, the dopey Peter Pans who never grew up (Murray, mostly) and the silliness of the situations he created.

Jason Reitman made “Juno” and “Up in the Air” before losing his mojo. Harold Ramis out Reitmanned Reitman with “Groundhog Day.” But neither of them, or the legions like them, could have had success without the groundwork Ivan laid in the ’80s, the stars he created or got funny work from.

After last year’s Oscars announced the “arrival” of director Lee Isaac Chung, those clever celluloid archivists at Film Movement rounded up the Korean-American filmmaker’s earlier works and released them as DVDs and on Film Movement+.

Seeing “Munyurangabo,” “Abigail Harm” and “Lucky Life” could give away the style, tropes and ensemble that Chung would call on for “Minari,” his most personal film, a drama about family, culture shock and the Korean-American immigrant experience in rural Wisconsin.

“Abigail Harm,” a modern day fairytale of romance, love and loneliness in an empty/not-entirely-empty New York, features future “Minari” co-star Will Patton as a wounded stranger who grants a lonely woman who reads to the blind (Amanda Plummer) a wish for saving him from pursuers. Patton also narrates the film in self-consciously arty voice over.

“It is when she is face to face with someone that she feels most alone.”

“Self-consciously arty” applies to the film as well. It’s a somber, downbeat and slow meditation on love and loneliness, and one can see the patient storytelling style that has become Chung’s trademark on this 2012 release.

We meet Abigail as she goes about her routine, making visits to blind clients, reading from books and newspapers and sorting through their mail, if they so desire.

The picture’s tone is set in its abrupt but quiet open. Abigail reads aloud a long passage from “Alice in Wonderland.”

Burt Young plays a tetchier “new client” who insults her voices and barks/pleads, “Left to right, OK? Left to right” about how he wants to experience his daily newspaper.

Abigail is also fielding calls from the nursing home where her father is “always going in and out.” She won’t be browbeaten into another “emergency” visit.

“It has nothing to do with how much I love him or don’t love him.”

She walks through the seemingly empty city, wandering abandoned apartment buildings or along disused piers. Abigail “spends her days never being seen by anyone,” our narrator admits, a play on the fact that there is no one in the streets, and her clients can’t see.

And then the narrator shows himself. He’s got a gash in his gut, he’s manic and somewhat panicked. And he pleads “Please, hide me!”

When she does, and when the danger has passed, this disheveled stranger prattles on and on about this and that in rushed stream of consciousness whisper. He wants to repay her, and cash won’t do.

“Have you ever been in love? I can arrange it.”

And that’s how, on one of her daily rambles, she stumbles across the naked, silent young Japanese man (Tetsuo Kuramochi). Abigail drapes a wrap over him, takes him home and proceeds to feed him and talk to this silent stranger, beaming all the while.

What Chung and co-writer Samuel Gray Anderson give us is a truncated relationship, the highs, lows and abrupt breaks and make-ups of a love affair, much of it with only one character talking.

It’s freighted with slender, sometimes obvious metaphors, and whispered about via narration.

“Abigail Harm” is somewhat pretentious and entirely too slow and self-conscious to be of more than passing interest to a casual film fan. And even the cognoscenti might find the labor to plumb its meaning spoils any joy that could spin out of another Amanda Plummer eccentric.

Of the three features Chung made leading up to “Minari,” this is by far the dullest. Munyurangabo” was a fascinating and ambitious debut, but the films — years apart — that followed were internalized bores, lacking incident or much in the way of dramatic tension or novelty — “film festival movies” that could only exist in the rarified air of film fanatic gatherings.

Perhaps that’s why film festival goers were so bowled over by “Minari,” as it has far more incident, drama and pathos than his earlier films. It’s Chung’s great leap forward. Watch “Abigail Harm” only if you want to see how far he had to leap.

Rating: unrated, nudity, sex

Cast: Amanda Plummer, Tetsuo Kuramochi, Burt Young and Will Patton.

Credits: Directed by Lee Isaac Chung, scripted by Samuel Gray Anderson and Lee Isaac Chung. A Film Movement release.

Running time: 1:20

Here’s the TV commercial for this summer release.

Yup, “Nope” looks cryptic and creepy and big and outdoorsy. Daniel Kaluuya costars, with Steven Yuen and Donna Mills and horror mainstay Michael Wincott.

Love that Keke.

Well, at least they kept “the cute.” Some of it, anyway.

The sequel to the glib and engaging “Tall Girl,” telling of the trials and tribulations of a towering beauty at her Louisiana high school settled on a theme — self-doubt — and added a few cast members.

But “Tall Girl 2” never manages to surprise as it skips semi-merrily down the same primrose path as its predecessor.

Jodi (Ava Michelle) is still tall, still a bit awkward and clumsy. But those traits only come out as she’s rehearsing for the spring musical. She’s landed the lead in “Bye Bye, Birdie.” She high fives her way down the hallway every day. Insecure kids come to her for advice.

And a lot of people are still talking about her big Homecoming Dance speech.

She’s still with Dunk (Griffin Gluck), still mad at Swedish exchange-hunky/dorky Stieg (Luke Eisner), still pals with aspiring designer Fareeda (Anjelika Washington), still in a heated rivalry with mean girl Kimmy (Clara Wilsey), still getting self-absorbed advice from her shorter beauty-pageant contestant older sister (Sabrina Carpenter).

“Harper! This is not ABOUT you!” “I always forget that.”

We know pretty much everything that’s coming here, from anxiety attacks over her big role on the stage, more rivalry from back-stabbing Kimmy, a contrived break-up with Dunk, a possible new love interest. Only now that’s this voice in her head sewing one doubt after the other about her self-worth, her acting, her place in life, the works.

Oh that’s nothing, says Harper. Everybody has that.

“It’s just a horrible part of life that never goes away…like Maroon Five.”

That’s pretty much what we come back for, why sequels are cinematic comfort food. We know what we’re getting, and we like the clever quips, the funny-cute parents (Angelina Kinsey from “The Office,” and Steve Zahn).

Maybe some viewers check into this movie for affirmation, and in what almost passes for an edgy scene, the drama teacher/director of the play challenges Jodi’s victimhood.

“Being tall’s not a real problem!” Lady, didn’t you see the first film?

We did. And “The Kissing Booth” movies and other teen rom-coms that Netflix has all but cornered the market on. Thus, the lack of any real surprises. What’s worse, even the “mean” characters have their edges rubbed off.

I’m pretty sure they dubbed Michelle’s singing voice (few of us can sing well enough to carry a movie about doing a high school musical).

As in the first film, Carpenter, Kinsey, Wilsey and Zahn carry it. The leads are OK, but kind of weak, and their relationship is some sort of short male wish fulfilment fantasy.

About the best one can say about “TG2” is that in addition to never surprising and never moving us emotionally, it never offends.

Rating: TV-PG

Cast: Ava Michelle, Griffin Gluck, Anjelika Washington, Sabrina Carpenter, Luke Eisner, Clara Wilsey, Angelina Kinsey and Steve Zahn.

Credits: Directed by Emily Ting, scripted by Sam Wolfson. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:44

It’s not Valentine’s Day yet, but the big room com released this weekend — almost all ROM and no com — is already being called a flop.

“Marry Me” is sweet and it plays, but it didn’t manage much on Thursday night or Friday and looks to be an $8 million opening weekend. Maybe VDay Monday will turn it around.

But Jennifer Lopez isn’t box office any more, and she and Owen Wilson are much older than the rom-com movie going demographic. Light charm like this may be more of a streaming ready movie than anything that will pull couples into theaters during a pandemic.

“Death on the Nile” is doing better, a movie that is ok but not remotely as much fun as “Murder on the Orient Express.”

There’s money on the screen, very convincing digital effects, riverboat and scenery to go with the stunning costumes and less expensive cast. It is on track to open with @$13 million ($12.8), against a $90 million budget. It earned another $20.7 million overseas.

“Blacklight” bombed, pulling in $3.6 million.

“Jackass Forever” will be in a race with “Marry Me” for second place — $8 million and change ($8.05 million).

E