Movie Nation

Nothing more instantly-dates an animated film for children than over-earnest efforts to contemporize the dialogue, to render it slangy and to-the-minute current.

That’s all over the script to Disney’s “Raya and the Last Dragon,” where a lot of effort was put into making the dragon, in particular, sound flip and hip.

She’s voiced by the comic actress Awkwafina, so the pale blue dragon lets us know “I’m gonna be real with you, I’m not the BEST dragon,” that “I got water skills that kill!” and “I gotcha girl. WHO’S your dragon?”

“Super sketchy,” if you asked me. “BOOM goes the dynamite,” which even the kids have moved on from, thank heavens. The strain shows, and slang is no substitute for actual humor — sight gags or funny lines.

That said, “Raya” is a pleasant enough kids’ adventure — “Raiders of the Lost Ark” meets “Mulan” who is now a “Tomb Raider.”

The story is a made-up mash-up of Pan-Asian/Southeast Asian myths hanging on learning to “trust” people again, and features a plague that has decimated the land and a heroine whose lifelong pal is a pet pangolin, the pill-bug armadillo which the Chinese government blames for the global pandemic COVID-19.

Timely? Sure. Accidentally a tad on-the-nose, and eyebrow-raising in theme? Oh yes.

We meet Raya, voiced by Kelly Marie Tran (the recent “Star Wars” trilogy), apprenticed to her Guardian of the Dragon Gem father (Daniel Dae Kim). It’s kept in a temple in the land of Heart, one of the five nations of the land that was broken when the last dragon died defending against the Droon (a vividly visual rendition of a plague).

But the gem, a reminder of the dragons’ sacrifice, is coveted by the other states — Fang, Talon, Tail and Spine — which broke up and took the names of the parts of a dragon.

Raya is tricked by the Fang girl Namaari, leading to the stone shattering. Namaari grows up to be a nemesis voiced by Gemma Chan. Five states each keep a shard from the stone, Droon returns to devastate the land and Raya makes it her life’s mission to figure out if there’s a surviving dragon, and if she can piece the stone back together and end the plague.

Raya, riding her pangolin-ish pillbug steed, searches the rivers for the dragon, and finally finds Sisu. But with all the mistrust and treachery, can she and her shape-shifting dragon (Awkwafina) put their world to right?

Their quest puts Raya into many magical martial arts fights, has her stumble into a “con baby,” a cute street hustler and thief in league with thieving monkeys, just one of the legions of orphans in a land wiped out by Droon. There’s a hustling teen “Shrimporium” proprietor (Izaac Wang) and a wizened, one-eyed warrior (Benedict Wong) who have their roles to play.

As thin as the story and themes and comic relief moments are, “Raya” has redeeming dollops of heart — the way even the quarreling five states are awed and religiously respectful at their first encounter with a creature of legend, or the graveyard where so many of the creatures were turned to stone.

And the action sequences, derivative of many a martial arts combat film that they are, dazzle.

“Hand-to-hand, or sword?” “BLADES all the way!”

The film borrows animation tricks from the “Kung Fu Panda” movies — animated rod puppets and shadow puppets illustrate the flashbacks to the “legend” that the movie purports to revive.

“Kung Fu Panda” spawned a recent run of animated films set in Asia, but none — aside from the Jack Black voiced martial arts comedies — have really clicked with me. “Over the Moon” and “Abominable” and “Raya and the Last Dragon” are big on message, one that seems Chinese government-sanctioned (or at least tailored not to offend that government), light on entertainment. This may be pitched as Southeast Asian, but the lands (deserts, snow) aren’t. Vague on purpose?

Younger kids won’t necessarily recognize what they’re missing, but the distinct lack of “Disney magic” shows in “Raya and the Last Dragon.” There’s more of that in the bouncy, touching and lightly charming Disney short “Us Again” attached to “Raya.”

MPA Rating: PG, action violence

Cast: The voices of Kelly Marie Tran, Awkwafina, Benedict Wong, Gemma Chan, Daniel Kae Kim, Izaac Wang, Sandra Oh and (maybe) Betty White.

Credits: Directed by Don Hall and Carlos López Estrada, script by Qui Nguyen and Adele Lim. A Walt Disney release.

Running time: 1:45

May is a self-help author who’s having trouble getting a deal in place for that next book. She can be excused for thinking her agent is patronizing her when he sugar-coats the lack of enthusiasm she’s getting from publishers.

No, she hasn’t been “Lucky” to have female-empowerment books like “Go it Alone” published. She puts in the work, she insists.

She has a brittle but functional marriage, which should be a comfort. But even her husband can seem a tad patronizing. And then she sees a masked man in their backyard in the middle of the night. That crashing sound means he’s broken in.

Ted is slow to awaken, and a lot more blase about picking up his 3-wood and heading out to confront the intruder.

“May, get up. We have to fight for our lives now,” he yawns.

His dispatches the masked man, but there is no body — “Same as the last time.” He’d like to get back to bed, but heck, got to call the police “again.”

May’s shock and fear is replaced with an expression that means the same in the U.S. and Canada, where “Lucky” was filmed.

“What the HELL?”

Screenwriter-star Brea Grant (“12 Hour Shift”) conjures up an intriguing and engrossing horror parable with dashes of feminism and shots at “going it alone,” a story of a writer tormented by the same stalker, night after night.

With a variety of weapons, in varying venues and intervening in murderous scenarios involving this killer menacing her publicist/assistant (Yasmine Al-Bustami) and sister-in-law (Kauser Mohammed), May must fight this demon, who gives a new manifestation to the term “personal demon.”

What’s going on here? May’s husband (Dhruv Uday Singh) takes umbrage at her understandably fraught response to what seems to her to be a new threat in her life, and moves out. That leaves her alone, with golf club or baseball bat, knife, hatchet or hammer, to beat off each fresh assault.

As in other stories where a perceived, persistent, nightly menace makes you and others question if this is all in May’s head ,”Lucky” makes you chew on what’s at the root of this. This cops are quick to tire of her crying “Wolf!” A social worker is brought in.

And yet, like Huple’s cat sleeping on Hungry Joe’s face every night in Joseph Keller’s “Catch-22,” we know that May has to take this seriously. It’s a matter of life and death, symbolically or otherwise.

This “explanations” for all this are less interesting than the mystery, a masked “stranger” (maybe) testing May’s ability to “go it alone,” a woman not taken seriously by men at every turn, and women (the social worker, the sister-in-law) connected to the men in her case, a woman heroically and capably defending herself, night after night, never getting credit for slaying the beast because the body disappears.

What do you think’s going on?  You don’t have to be “Lucky” to decode that. But Grant and director Natasha Kermani (“Imitation Girl,””Shattered”) package their “message” into a pretty clever if not all that ambitious thriller, with Grant our stoic heroine, fighting the good fight, night after night, plainly able to “go it alone” but maybe wondering if it’s worth it.

MPA rating: unrated, graphic violence

Cast: Brea Grant, Hunter C. Smith, Dhruv Uday Singh, Kausar Mohammed, Yasmine Al-Bustami

Credits: Directed by Natasha Kermani, script by Brea Grant. A Shudder release.

Running time: 1:21

Sure. It pretty much always was.

But a couple of things add an asterisk to the already unconventional “Wisdom” of the Golden Globes.

The latest investigative reminders of how corrupt and disconnected from Hollywood and America the HFPA is might have cowed the group into some of their “voted” wins.

Still, Chao becomes the second woman ever to win best picture and director there.

Lest you get too carried away, remember the first. Streisand. “Yentl.”

Andra Day seems a long shot for the best actress Oscar, but she’s the best thing in “United States vs Billie Holiday,” very good in a middling movie. Anybody who remembers Marion Cotillard’s Oscar has to think this Lady Day has a shot.

Pixar’s “Soul” might have been headed to dominating the awards season animated buzz, but with cries of “racism” in the air, the Globes didn’t dare pick last year’s best animated film, “Wolfwalkers.”

The best actress favorites? Still McDormand and Mulligan and Viola Davis.

Daniel Kaluuya? Certainly a contender. Jodie Foster? Probably not.

Does anybody seriously think “Borat 2” is an Oscar contender?

Will “Mank” and “Da Five Bloods” be left out of Oscar contention, with reduced profiles, the way they were at the Globes?

They should be, and I’d leave “One Night in Miami” out, too. Middling script, pedestrian direction, underwhelming cast etc. But you’ve got to have 5 or 10 contenders, so…

Is “I Care a Lot” an outsider with a shot? Late entry “U.S. vs Billie Holiday” isn’t getting any buzz, but with Chadwick Boseman love spreading, “Ma Rainey” is looking a lot better. “Minari” hype may be about to bear fruit.

It’s a thin year for Best of the Best, and “Nomadland” and “The Father” and “Ma Rainey” and “Another Round” and “News of the World” might seem like sure things. Maybe “Promising Young Woman” and “Minari” can elbow their way in

But remember “Green Book.” That Best Picture field is going to seem padded, no matter what. And once you’re in actual Oscar contention, anything could happen.

And as entertaining as the hosts always are, paying no attention to the Golden Globes gets easier, year by year.

One name and artist stood out while watching the new HBO Black History Month doc, “Black Artists: In the Absence of Light.”

Jacob Lawrence, who died in 2000, worked in abstract realism and created this vivid, almost animated impressions of African American life.

Perhaps my snooping Facebook algorithm saw my mention of Lawrence on that review (search box on the right side of this site’s page), because all of a sudden I was bombarded with online ads from the St. Petersburg (FLA) Museum of Art. They have some Lawrences on display, as well as a few other notable African American artists’ work. These are on loan and are in their permanent collection, should you — like me — use films as tips on where to visit, what to read, what to see.

The top painting is “In the Black Belt,” a large cross section of life whirled into a single painting.

The second is “The Migrants Arrive and Cast Their Ballots, @1920.

Here’s Randall Dave

y’s portrait of the great baritone and actor Paul Robeson.

George Luc’s “The Musician “

And Fletcher Martin’s “The Undefeated.”

Lot of money on the screen in this trailer.

Anja looks pained, stricken. And Tomas picks up on that as they take their coats off at a Christmas party.

“If it gets tough, we’ll stick together,” he offers. It’s already gotten “tough.” And he isn’t just talking about this dinner party. She has cancer. Her prognosis is awful.

But as we’ve seen the state of their relationship, we wonder — as she must — if he’s as good as his word or if he’s just expressing platitudes of “Hope.”

Norway’s short-list contender for the Best International Feature Oscar is an intimate drama in which two stars, Andrea Bræin Hovig and Stellan Skarsgård, put on a clinic of how to play people used to deadlines, pressures from all sides, facing the worst thing any of us face — the end.

Anja is a famous choreographer, Tomas is a playwright. They’ve been together for years, have three children together with three others from his first marriage. But work has dominated their lives and thoughts, especially with him. He wasn’t there for her latest opening night. He even skipped out on his assignment for the evening, child care, “letting the older ones look after the younger.”

And now she’s gotten a callback on the MRI she went in for about her persistent, unshakeable headache. For once, Tomas has to drop everything and show up. He is the one who weeps at the news.

Christmas is two days off. Then New Year’s. Getting medical treatments in the works, even medical advice, is tricky. How will they tell the kids? Her elderly father, who lives with them? They want counseling for that.

There are parties planned, New Year’s is coming, and giving everyone “a nice Christmas” passes back and forth between them.

As they maintain their best poker faces and scramble to hit their medical marks, start medication and “jump the line” for possible surgery, there’s barely a moment to consider the blunt “I’m sorry” they get from the few on-duy medical professionals who cannot help them, much less wholly absorb that unblinking diagnosis from her oncologist.

“It’s incurable.”

Screenwriter-director Maria Sødahl paints a picture a big family in the dark and two parents who don’t communicate well in the best of times rushing into action, between consultations, scrambling to find a way and a moment to tell their family and friends this awful news. When they finally find someone who can guide them, his advice resonates with sound psychology and empathetic common sense.

“I often say you should give your children 10% more hope than you give yourself,” he advises (in Norwegian, with English subtitles).

The estimable Skarsgård shows us a man who has to shed some of his self-absorbed tendencies, just this once. The looks on his face tell us he’s not sure he’s up to it. For a moment here and there, we see Tomas wounded and deflated by everything he’s ever done to let Anya down, a string of petty inconsiderations that pile up as this logjam of half-a-dozen days unfolds, with more and more “events” packed into them as they go.

Veteran Norwegian actress Bræin Hovig rushes through the Stages of Death and Dying, giving up and regaining “Hope,” losing her temper at Tomas and callous medicos who aren’t as polished at showing concern over her situation as she needs them to be. The film isn’t a full-bore “weeper,” but she has a couple of absolutely gut-punching scenes dealing with her personal crisis and trying to leave something with meaning to their fragile, impressionable 16-year-old daughter (Elli Rhiannon).

As their lives, their relationship and their family closes in around them, will they “stick together,” with or without “hope?”

Bræin Hovig and Skarsgård take us into their confidence as they make these choices, decisions, promises and compromises. The wonder of “Hope” is how much of that they do without dialogue, just with a look, a gesture, a silent scream of despair or teeth grinding in resignation.

MPA Rating: unrated, adult situations, nudity, smoking

Cast: Andrea Bræin Hovig, Stellan Skarsgård, Elli Rhiannon and Gjertrud L. Jynge,

Credits: Directed and scripted by Maria Sødahl, A KimStim/Picturehouse release opening April 11.

Running time: 2:008

There’s a Hippocratic Oath that anybody tackling the romantic comedy about the mentally ill genre.

You can be moon-eyed, optimistic, maybe a tad unrealistic. But “first, do no harm.”

What, you didn’t realize this was a thing, a whole genre of itself? “Benny & Joon,” “Silver Linings Playbook,” “Crazy/Beautiful,” “Mad Love” — a lot of screenwriters have taken a swipe at it.

The Spanish rom-com “Loco por ella,” aka “Crazy About Her,” is a generally harmless addition to the genre, a movie that sticks to the formula that’s developed around such screen romances.

You can be silly, so long as you remember to include the sad, which means these are by definition “dramedies.” You can’t imply that “All she/he really needs is someone whose love is empathetic and true.” And you can’t sell out with a conventional ending. “Happily ever after” always comes with a fiat, and I’m not talking about the diminutive Italian car.

First, we get a “meet cute.” He’s at a bar with friends, bloviating an how his work at a “clickbait” magazine website has made him an expert on picking up women. She blows in on a motorcycle, a leather-jacketed bad decision if ever there was one.

She takes the initiative, the fake “Oh, I spilled your drink! (in Spanish with English subtitles).” She ups the cynicism ante by asking “What always ruins a perfect (one) night (stand)? The next day.”

No names. No numbers. No small talk. Let’s just…GO. But the guy we later learn is named Adri (Álvaro Cervantes) needs to “RUN.” Because Carla (Susan Abaitua), as we figure she’s called, just stole a helmet for him to wear on her next motorcycle Ride of the Valkyries.

Let’s crash a wedding reception. Let’s pretend we’re relatives. Let’s double down when we stomp in and realize we’ve crashed an Afro-Spanish wedding by offering a toast to the two strangers, dancing and drinking their champagne and stealing their honeymoon suite for a vigorous romp.

“Memorable?” Sure. And then Carla-no-last-name races off into the night, never to be seen again.

Except cynical, never-been-in-love Adri is smitten. Once he figures out who she is, he figures out where she is. But when he visits Los Sauces, he realizes it’s a mental hospital. She’s beyond his reach. That must have been some one-night-stand, because to Adri, those locked doors are “Challenge ACCEPTED” material.

If he wants to get close again, he’ll have to fake his way into a voluntary admission. Maybe pitch it as an undercover story for the mag, after the fact. It’s just that Adri never considers the possibility that sometime escapee Carla might not want to see him again.

Catolonian director Dani de la Orden (“Barcelona Summer Night,” “Barcelona Christmas Night,” “The Best Summer of My Life”) and the screenwriters put a lot of effort into not stepping on anything explosive in this minefield romance they’re navigating through.

That they mostly manage. But the supporting cast of “inmates” is a seriously generic collection of the manic (like Carla), Tourette’s, amnesia and delusional “types.” Only Adri’s new roommate, the paranoid Saúl (Luis Zahera) makes any impact, and even he is rather blandly-written.

Adri’s journey, from self-absorbed to in-love and self-sacrificing, isn’t presented as any great dramatic transformation.

Abaitua, of “Compulsión” and the cute (ish) “4L” has the most interesting role to play, as these stories are inevitably about “the troubled girl.” But the film loses track of her too often after the antics of their “meet cute.” We appreciate the mental issues Carla is having, but there’s too little between that first hot night together and her warming to Adri’s charms. And nothing in the second or third act has the spark and sparkle of those first scenes.

Adri’s interest is driven by…the fact that he’s locked in and can’t get out and has nothing better to do?

“Crazy About Her” isn’t terrible or irresponsible, and the filmmakers do their darnedest to make the unoriginal, medicated rom-com take on “life inside a mental hospital” easy to sit through.

But the “fun” grows thin and the romance never really clicks.

MPA Rating: TV-MA, sex, profanity

Cast: Álvaro Cervantes, Susana Abaitua, Luis Zahera, Aixa Villagrán, Txell Aixendri and Paula Malia

Credits: Directed by Dani de la Orden script by Natalia Durán, Eric Navarro. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:42

Whatever else you can say about the charming and intimate documentary that follows a “Stray” dog through the streets of Istanbul, it’s a rare piece of positive PR for a Middle Eastern country that never makes the news for something good.

Elizabeth Lo‘s narration-free film points out that Turkey and the city tried to “eradicate” its stray dog population all through the 20th century. International outcry is credited with halting the roundups and mass killings. But the evidence presented by “Stray” shows Turks, and Turkmens and Chechens and anybody else among the masses of locals and immigrants passing through being rarely anything but kind to the 100,000 or so dogs who wander the city, its streets, alleys, squares and parks.

Zeytin is the dog we follow here, a tall, beautiful and self-sufficient mutt who makes her rounds, checking trash bins behind restaurants, sipping from fountains, meeting other dogs and occasionally engaging in the one game in the global pooch-on-pooch pentathlon — “CHASE me!”

By day construction workers and shopkeepers call her by name, scratch her ears and give her a pat or a bone. Sure, every now and then a hose is aimed in her direction. And sitting next to strangers in a park can get a spirited cussing-out by foul-mouthed Chinese tourists. But she is tolerated, has the luxury of standing up and stretching before she leaves a parking space a delivery truck driver needs.

The shots are so tight we can wonder if Lo’s camera isn’t a deterrent from the kicks and yelling much of the world greets strays with.

By night, she curls up with street urchins from Turkmenistan, “glue-sniffers” who love dogs and argue with the construction workers at the site where they sleep. The workers are always chasing them off, yelling for them not to be around during work hours. The dogs? The dogs can stay.

Zeytin’s wanderings, catching up with doppelganger mutt Nazar, checking in on beautiful puppy Kartal and her street dog family, confirm a lot of what Elizabeth Marshall Thomas’s book of some years back, “The Hidden Life of Dogs” pointed out. Dogs love to be around other dogs.

Zeytin only is growled at by dogs who figure “These humans are here to care for me, not you. Keep moving, sister.” Pack mentality and violence shows up in one scene, but the only serious fight is over a huge sheep bone she’s just procured. A strange stray with a bone of his own attacks her to get it until a garbage man intervenes.

“A–h–e! Why won’t you share?”

There’s little conflict here, a little fear that something awful may happen to Zeytin or her fellow street animals. Istanbul’s change in laws made it a crime to “hold,” injure or euthanize a stray. They’re protected by mandate, cuddlier versions of the street cattle of Mumbai or the chickens of Key West.

But “Stray” pulls us into their world, filmed from a dog’s eye level (Human faces are rare, human conversations merely overheard.). These dogs haven’t gone feral, and the humans who interact with them meet them on their terms.

Perhaps the Turks have read the ancient Greeks whose thoughts on dogs Lo inserts as intertitles throughout “Stray” to underscore her larger point.

“Human beings live artificially and hypocritically and would do well to study the dog,” Diogenes said thousands of years ago. If he saw a kindred spirit in canines, strays or pampered purebreds, who are we to disagree?

“Dogs and philosophers do the greatest good and get the fewest rewards.”

MPA rating: Unrated, profanity, smoking, canine se

Credits: Directed by Elizabeth Lo. A Magnolia release.

Running time: 1:12

Henry Golding gives his most laid-back, natural screen performance in “Monsoon,” a melancholy Vietnamese travelogue and romance.

The “Crazy Rich Asians” and “The Gentleman” star plays Kit, a Vietnamese expat raised in Britain who has returned to the homeland he barely remembers to scatter some ashes.

While there, Kit reconnects with a childhood family friend Lee (David Tran) who tries to jar his memories of a country and city — Saigon — which has been almost wholly remade in the decades since it became Ho Chi Minh City.

Much of Hong Khaou’s film is just Kit walking the streets, reflecting, riding on the back of motorscooters, taking the train north to the city of his parents’ birth, Hanoi. He’s looking for a place to leave the ashes in the wooden urn he’s brought with him, “somewhere momentous,” and he doesn’t look as if he’s having much luck, or that he’s in a hurry. He takes it all in and tries to remember a past his parents pretty much erased.

This is not a “memory play,” not a reflective story with flashbacks. Simple, spare conversations give away tiny pieces of his story to Lee, and eventually to Lewis (Parker Sawyers). They’re two Westerners who set off each other’s gaydar, and begin an affair.

I can’t remember a Vietnamese travel program that’s shown as much of the city life there as “Monsoon.” The opening image, the mesmerizing flow of traffic at a busy roundabout as viewed from on high, sets the tone. We see what Kit sees. Sometimes it’s a striking bridge, a timeworn neighborhood, a gallery, restaurant or hotel bedroom.

Golding gets across a sense of a man both at home here and adrift, letting the last of the grief that the loss of Kit’s “formidable” mother wash away from him. An online anime artist, he’s a lot more social than the stereotype of that job implies. Lewis isn’t the only friend he makes, or lover that he takes.

If there’s a knock on “Monsoon” it’s that not a lot happens. The drama is light, the unpleasant memories summoned up are watered-down by Kit and Lee, whose family failed to escape the way Kit’s was able to.

But Golding, losing the debonair dash he wore uneasily in “Crazy Rich Asians” and the menace he half pulled-off in “The Gentlemen,” pleasantly drifts through this like someone not willing to look the part of a tourist, confident in his charm and never out of his depth so long as he has it.

MPA Rating: unrated, sex, smoking

Cast: Henry Golding, David Tran, Parker Sawyers, Molly Harris

Credits: Scripted and directed by Hong Khaou. A Strand/BBC film on Netflix.

Running time: 1:25