Movie Nation

In these troubled times, which are looking more and more like End Times for Hollywood and movies in theaters, it’s heartening to realize that whatever dies, indie cinema will endure. Movies like “The Planters” pretty much guarantee that.

An insistently oddball romp, it was cooked up by two actresses-turned first-time filmmakers, Alexandra Kotcheff and Hannah Leder. It doesn’t amount to much more than some winsome smirks and a chuckle or two, but its mere existence is a delight.

And it was co-written, co-directed and co-stars the daughters pretty well-known Hollywood filmmakers. Even in Indieland, there’ll always be Hollywood nepotism to help the offspring get a leg up.

Martha (Kotcheff) is a poker-faced ponytailed loner in BFE Southern California, bicycling to and from the town’s closed general store (converted into a gift shop), obsessing over snowglobes.

Orphaned, a creature of routines, she supports herself as a telemarketing seller of Clear Breeze air conditioners. As everyone hangs up on her, it’s a good thing she has a side hustle.

Then Sadie Mayflower (Leder) drops into her life. She’s a tad off — more “off” than Martha, anyway — in a dirty wedding dress, with a helmet chained to her head. A runaway bride? Maybe. She’s just “trying to make right with Jesus.”

Martha takes her in and almost instantly almost regrets it. A call to a nearby mental hospital confirms her fears.

“Oh yeah. We’re releasing our patients. Bankrupt…slight case of embezzlement.“

The last thing Martha needs — “This is why I don’t ‘do’ people.”

But Sadie is upbeat, and starts coaching Martha on her cold-calls, where she befriends a lonely older man who doggone it, will be the first ever to buy a Clear Breeze air conditioner from her. So Martha confides in Sadie about her side hustle — which involves a shovel, old fashioned candy and cookie tins and trips into the desert, down the beach, beside the railroad tracks.

“I bury treasure for the lucky person who gets to it first!”

Sadie is confused, has hallucinations involving Biblical figures inside the tins (stop-motion clay animated crucifixion and Red Sea parting scenes). And that’s when Martha first picks up on the fact that Sadie is multitudes. There’s more than one person/personality tumbling around in that sometimes-helmeted head.

Kotcheff and Leder play off each other wonderfully — deadpan vs. bubbly, infantile or in one incarnation — profane drunk. The timing in their dueling eccentrics exchanges is quick and quirky.

As odd and mismatched as they are, introducing a third character (Phil Parolisi) doesn’t add much save for stirring the conflict up just a smidge.

As I said at the outset, “The Planters” doesn’t add up to much. But the mere fact that it summons up the oddballery of many a prior indie comedy — the works of Wes Anderson and others — is its best recommendation.

Winning laughs and grins by association is fair play.

MPA Rating: unrated, profanity

Cast: Alexandra Kotcheff, Hannah Leder, Phil Parolisi

Credits: Scripted and directed by Alexandra Kotcheff, Hannah Leder. A 1091 release.

Running time: 1:19

The filmmakers who brought us “The Secret of Kells” and “Song of the Sea” bring another Irish myth to vibrant, animated life in “Wolfwalkers,” an environmental fable about spirits who protect the forests from the Ruin of Man.

The vivid, saturated color palette and thick Irish brogues may be the same. But the setting and the politics are new — Ireland under the thumb of the Puritan “Lord Protector” of England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales, a Cromwellian oppressor of the 1650s.

The heart, action and sophistication of the artwork make this folk tale the best animated film of the year.

An English hunter (voiced by Sean Bean) and his daughter (Honor Kneafsey) have come to Kilkenny so that he can rid the nearby forest of wolves so that it can be cleared and the land worked for profit.

Young Robyn longs to help her Dad, and even has her own falcon and crossbow for the job. But he won’t hear of it. He sets his traps and snares alone.

The Irish kids pick on her for her “fancy dancy accent,” and won’t join her in song — “Wolf wolf, kill the wolf, til all the wolves are done for.”

The locals know that their woods should be preserved, lest the wolves come to town for dinner.

But when Robyn slips away to the woods to spite Dad, she has an accident. And a wolf cub is her salvation. That’s how she meets the shape-shifting girl-by-day/wolf-by-night Mebh Óg MacTíre (Eva Whittaker). Mebh is a spitfire, a sassy Irish dynamo of ferocious energy and voluminous flaming red hair, just like her Ma (Maria Doyle Kennedy of “The Commitments”). And she’s curious about the “smelly townie.”

“Give us a LOOK atcha!”

The child, bless her wee heart, explains the way of things to the townie, in spite of her smell. “I’m no girrrrrrrrrrl! I’m a WOLFwalker!” A mere mention that “the woods are gettin’ smaller by the day” and she sends Robyn home, where the townie tries to convert Dad with her tale.

But the Lord Protector (veteran character actor Simon McBurney) has his plans, and figures he can keep the peace and make Ireland great again if he can just finish clearing the woods, if Bill the hunter just finishes clearing them of wolves.

The animation is simpler, more stylized and far more striking than the Pixar/Dreamworks/Netflix state-of-the-art. And it comes alive in this story of scary wolves, fearful townsfolk, ferocious soldiers and what happens when they’re all hurled into conflict.

There’s an early Disney simplicity to this violent, primal tale, which has a whiff of “Bambi” about it. The Irish magic that co-directors Tomm Moore and Ross Stewart specialize in is illustrated sparingly and beautifully by their team. All of their traditionally-animated movies have the most striking design and stunning chiaroscuro painting style — rich tones, dark shadows, swirling images.

I love just about everything about their work, especially the Irishness of it all. In a year when Pixar and Netflix seemed set to CGI their way into an awards monopoly, Cartoon Saloon and Apple TV’s “Wolfwalkers” seems sure to crash the party, and with any luck they’ll win the Oscar they should have for “The Secret of Kells.”

MPA Rating: PG, violent action

Cast: The voices of Honor Kneafsey, Eva Whittaker, Sean Bean, Maria Doyle Kennedy and Simon McBurney

Credits: Directed by Tomm Moore and Ross Stewart, script by Will Collins. A GKids/Cartoon Saloon film on Apple TV+ (Dec. 11)

Running time: 1:43

One of the cleverest touches of “Coded Bias,” the new film from documentarian Shalini Kantayya (“Catching the Sun”) is the faces we see and the voices she chose to give a platform to. The film — about the destructive biases in the algorithms that drive facial recognition and other computer software — is filled with experts and activists tackling this Big Tech/Big Brother coup head on.

And they’re pretty much all women. We go almost an hour into the film when we see and hear from the first male participant, a Hispanic Texas “teacher of the year” school teacher ID’d by buggy/racist software as a “bad teacher.” Almost everybody at the forefront on this war on “weapons of math destruction” is a woman. It calls attention to itself and makes you think about the gender biases in tech and tech journalism in a film about the biases built into the data and the software that culls it.

Kantayya’s film centers on the work of MIT student turned scientist/activist Joy Buolamwini, a young Ghanaian-American who figured out, in school, that the new facial recognition technology that’s sweeping the world — “capturing,” labeling and identifying us everywhere — can’t see Black people worth a damn.

The technology that police departments and ad-targeting companies in the West and the entire government of the People’s Republic of China are buying into, with little to no discussion about the freedom and civil rights implications implied, is buggy and, like a lot of algorithms — biased.

Kantayya takes us to a New York apartment complex that is abusing the tech to spy on tenants and “harass” them — via flawed IDs, in some cases.

“What did the Nazis do? They put tattoo’s on people’s arms,” one outraged tenant complains.

We meet Silkie Carlo of Big Brother Watch UK as she’s handing out fliers warning pedestrians that a green police van parked on the street nearby is capturing their faces, archiving the images and being used to compare with police databases to identify threats.

“Great” you think. An open, international city under near-constant terrorist threat is using the latest tech (Amazon is a leading purveyor) to keep everybody safe! Then you see a 14 year old Black kid in a school uniform surrounded and grabbed by plain clothes cops, searched and finger-printed, ending with not so much as an apology for their “Whoopsie. Wrong lad” from the Bobbies.

Authors of “Weapons of Math Destruction” (Cathy O’Neil) and “Algorithms of Oppression” (Safiya Noble) fill in the myriad ways this harvested “biased” data — facial rec. included — is being used to discriminate, limit lives, decide who gets a job, who deserves a loan, who should be loaned money because odds are they’ll default on that loan, etc.

“Powerful people are scoring (and preying on and oppressing) poor people,” is the upshot. There’s no debating “the black box,” no accountability for its mistakes, biases and flawed finalty as arbiter. And there’s little oversight on these chilling developments until recently, until Joy Buolamwini and others came along to point out the sexist, racist, ableist biases in the data being harvested on a vast scale on every person within reach of a computer or computer-trackable transaction.

We really are, as Carlo demonstrates reading a passage from a famed novel by George Orwell, living in “1984” and barely even realizing it.

But Kantayya’s film gives us hope — scenes of protestors in Hong Kong figuring out that laser pointers blind the facial rec cameras the Chinese state is using to ID and hunt “trouble makers” — Buolamwini, author Cathy O’Neil and others give Congressional testimony that points to the first actions by the US to rein in Big Tech in its pursuit of the vast layers of information necessary to manipulate people into behavior in everything from purchasing to voting.

That makes “Coded Bias” the best “wake up” call documentary of 2020, a movie filled with warnings discussed by the very smart women sounding those warnings, the very smart women doing something about this very real threat.

Cast: Joy Buolamwini, Silkie Carlo, Cathy O’Neil, Tranae Moran

Credits: Scripted and directed by Shalini Kantayya. A 7th Empire Media release.

Running time: 1:30

There’s a whiff of a half-interesting screen romance in the multi-character episodic rom-com “Love, Weddings & Other Disasters.”

Oscar winner Jeremy Irons plays a stiff, snobby Boston caterer who is “set up” with a “blind date.” The date is played by Diane Keaton, playing a photographer (like Keaton herself). And she is literally “blind.” That’s the gag.

“Are you handsome?” she chirps in that beloved, scattered way of hers.

“No,” he intones. “I’m ancient!”

They go out, under duress. He makes all manner of blunders — from rearranging her furniture to leaving her a note on the pillow in the morning. Perhaps, she fumes, she’s dating “the dumbest guy in history.”

We don’t really find out as that intriguing December romance is lost in the coarse hairs of this Dennis Dugan dog. He’s the sometime actor — he takes a role he’s 25 years too old to pull off, here — turned director of the comedies of Adam Sandler, and he directed and scripted (from others’ story ideas) this meshuga mess of a movie.

Dugan tries — hard — to play it sweeter, but he can’t help but lean into the lowbrow. It’s in his Adam Sandler comedy DNA at this point.

Maggie Grace plays a young woman with catering ambitions inexplicably hurled into a career as wedding planner when the demanding young bride-to-be of the guy who might be “your next mayor” impulsively makes her the fifth wedding planner they’re giving a try — just eight days from the big, splashy wedding.

But Jessie (Grace) has an open secret that everybody in Boston — save for candidate and bride and candidate’s staff — seems to know. She broke up a Boston TV anchor in mid-skydive (his call) and became the viral video “Wedding Trasher” when she dumped him in a lake and floated into/tackled the entire wedding party, standing on a dock.

OK, that’s funny.

Jessie could find love when she hires a bar band (Diego Boneta). It’s underdeveloped and set up as dull, although there’s a musical payoff in it that at least makes this romance worth pursuing.

Then there’s the mayor’s brother (Andy Goldenberg) who has signed on to this “Crash Couples” reality TV show (Dugan plays the host), literally chained to a woman as one of several couples competing to see who lasts longest and wins a million bucks.

Svetlana…or Olga…maybe Natasha? (Melinda Hill) claims to be a Harvard lawyer, but is actually a pole dancer with an angry Russian pimp on her case. Time to tap out and break the chain?

“Don’t be poosy,” she fumes, in worst Russian accent ever.

Andrew Bachelor of “To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before” plays an amphibious duckboat tour guide whose “hysterical history” isn’t actually — unless you count his boner reference to “Betty Ross.” He meets someone he decides is his soulmate on such a tour, and his search for the young woman with a glass slipper tattooed on her neck becomes a Boston cause celebre.

A nice touch? Casting bluesy singer songwriter Elle King as a Greek chorus offering interludes between story threads

A couple of random laughs die of loneliness here. None of the romances are developed and have time to register, much less click. And here’s Dugan, squinting at the cue cards, energetically serving up the awful double-entendres as host of a show no one would watch unless creepy grandpa the host was a LOT creepier and funnier.

Keaton and Irons? They keep their dignity, do their romantic best, enjoy their stay in Boston and cash the check.

Cast: Diane Keaton, Jeremy Irons, Maggie Grace, Andrew Bachelor, Diego Boneta and Dennis Dugan.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Dennis Dugan. A Saban Films release.

Running time: 1:30

One thing Woody Allen didn’t cover in his new “the REAL me/my side of things” autobiography is the nearly 20 years he cultivated a mystique by avoiding talking to the press.

It took the scandalous 1992 revelation of his affair with his longtime lover Mia Farrow’s adopted daughter, Soon Yi Previn, to break that spell and put him back in the public eye — uncomfortably — and forced him to start talking to the press again.

I remember the first time I met him, in a small group interview setting, promoting a film for the first time in decades (might have been for “Manhattan Murder Mystery,” though I more clearly recall chatting with him for “Bullets over Broadway”). He looked cowed, deer-in-headlights spooked. He claimed to see no benefit in promoting his pictures, as it never impacted his box office, something he repeated many times in many chats over the years, including the last one, when I got him to reveal his favorite spots in Barcelona for a wire service travel piece related to “Vicky Cristina Barcelona.”

We’ve learned a lot more about him — or think we have — in the years since. The relentless attacks from Mia Farrow, her daughter Dylan and her journalist son Ronan – who may be Woody’s offspring, or Frank Sinatra’s, according to Mia — ruined his reputation and may have permanently derailed his lifetime of releasing a movie a year in his home country.

But the essential works to recall, for me, in approaching “Apropos of Nothing,” his new autobiography, are Mia Farrow’s 1990s memoir “What Falls Away,” about her time with him and the scandal, and the Allen-approved PBS jazz band tour Europe documentary, “Wild Man Blues,” which captured the phobias, on-the-spectrum routines etc. Allen wove into his mystique over the decades — afraid of “entering” parties and crowded places, manic about where the drain was on the floor off the shower.

Farrow’s book declared that a lot of this stuff is just an act. He’d spend a fortune on his frumpy look, those floppy hats and tailored shirts and khakis he’d made his “uniform.” He’d play the simple man of letters and art, chauffeured in his Rolls Royce, ensconced in his penthouse Upper East Side-Central-Park adjacent penthouse apartment.

He sets out to puncture a lot of his own myths in “Apropos.” There’s false modesty about his status as a “genius” or “intellectual” peppered with scores of writer, painter, jazz legend or classical music composer references. He’s just “an anonymous little giggle merchant.”

He says he doesn’t read reviews and never has, and quotes from reviews and mentions his friendship with Time Mag fangramps Richard Schickel and New Yorker critic queen Pauline Kael, who used to call and beg him to hire her friends to do catering or what have you on his productions.

He goes to some pains to list scores of classic films he hasn’t seen, and mention that he never watches his once they’re finished.

And he professes to not care a whit about his reputation, when the entire point of the book is to salvage it from the latest onslaught of Dylan Farrow accusations. Perhaps 25% of “Apropos” is Apropos of Affair/marriage to Soon Yi.

But long before he gets to that, the book gives us a hint of the Woody we might have held onto had he never taken up with a teenager whom he’d allegedly been a father figure to. It’s a funny memoir about his kvetching mother and not-quite-mobster/hustler father, an expanded and allegedly factual account of his “Radio Days.”

Allen doesn’t break into chapters, but rolls through anecdotes, little breaks and bits of advice, big breaks — triumphs and disappointments. I had forgotten who his first wife was, but he is generous to her and especially to Louise Lasser, the manic depressive comedienne he was wed to when his TV writer-turned stand-up career was venturing into theater and the movies.

He litters the page with low-down archaic showbiz/comedy/Brooklyn/jazz slang mixed with snooty pretension, trips to the thesaurus (“Tergiversation” anyone?) and snobby connections between him and America’s artistic elite. It’s meant in fun, and in that way the book reads like his screenplays. I laughed out loud more than twice.

He escaped the draft via “nail biting.” He supplemented his pay for appearing in “Casino Royale” by hustling poker money out of the tough guy cast of “The Dirty Dozen.” Old showbiz tours of the city with New York newspaper “Broadway” columnists before he got famous, reveling in the tony New York eatery Elaine’s for the celeb encounters — “Fellini, a Kennedy, Gore Vidal, Steinbrenner, David Hockney…Simone de Beauvoir.”

“It wasn’t the food, it was the atmosphere. A clean, well-lighted place. Well, a well-lighted place.”

Allen lets us see the ferment which movies like “Broadway Danny Rose” sprang from, the European trip to film his first produced script, the “butchered” “What’s New, Pussycat?” leading to “Don’t Drink the Water.” and he speaks of his passion to be like his true idol — playwright Tennessee Williams.

That’s been an ongoing gripe of mine. His dialogue has sounded more stilted and out of date the older he gets. It’s as if he hasn’t overheard a normal human conversation since the ’70s. His run of more-bad-than-good movies started at about the time “the scandal” broke, and I’ve found it easier and easier to dismiss him — with the occasional “Midnight in Paris” fantasy exception — ever since. Largely based on his “take the vapors” dialogue and the arch ways his actors have to deliver it.

Then there’s all the scandal-explaining he does, puncturing the Farrow narrative, replacing it with his own. But even if you buy his version, the best you can say for him is he’s tone deaf and expects us to be credulous.

Creeping out very young Mariel Hemingway, frankly leering in print over Scarlett Johansson and others — it’s as if he thinks his “lovable lecher” shtick still works.

It doesn’t. And you don’t have to buy into Farrow’s fury to feel that way. He’s made “icky” part of his brand and that’s not aging well.

We may never know the “true” story of what went on between Woody and the Farrow brood. But if she’d lie about who Satchel/Ronan’s real father was, if other evidence of her flaky/needy/clingy connection holds up, if the court-provided evidence of “no molestation happened” but “coaching” did, then somebody other than Ronan Farrow will have to get at that.

As for Allen, perhaps his movies will endure — the best of them — and perhaps more of them will return to TV someday. Perhaps he’s permanently “canceled.” “Apropos of Nothing” gives us just a taste of how we might have felt about the funny dirty old man in his dotage if he hadn’t quoted the poet with “The heart wants what it wants.”

“Woody Allen. Apropos of Nothing. Autobiography.” Arcade Publishing. 499 pages. $40.

Lily James, Johnny Flynn and Ben Chaplin also star in this Jan. 21 Netflix release.

Man of action, man of violence, man of “particular skills.” A little “No Country for old Men” meets “Gloria.”

This LA-set “friends take stock of life after a tragedy’ was produced by basketball star Victor Oladipo.

“If Not Now, When?” streams and hits some theaters Jan. 8

Film buffs salivating over the prospect of David Fincher taking on the making of “Citizen Kane” may be left a tad dry-mouthed by “Mank,” his Netflix bio-pic of “Kane” co-writer Herman J. Mankiewicz.

Filmed in digital video black and white, it’s a mostly sizzle-free blend of fact and fiction based on Fincher’s late father Jack Fincher’s screenplay. “Mank” is a fair-enough revisit of the writing credit battle over that “Kane” screenplay, a fine buffing of the image of actress and William Randolph Heart mistress Marion Davies and another acting showcase for the great Gary Oldman.

Oldman — who is terrific in the part — had his own battles with substance abuse — like the wit/screenwriter he portrays in the title role. He’s a high-mileage 62, playing a higher-mileage 43 year-old. Pairing him up with Tom Pelphrey as brother Joseph Mankiewicz and Tuppence Middleton as Mank’s long-suffering wife, “Poor Sara” Mankiewicz, both actors half Oldman’s age, makes that gap obvious and worth wincing over.

But Amanda Seyfried is Brooklyn streetwise and warm Davies, a reinvention not unlike what Tarantino did for Sharon Tate with “Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood.” And Charles Dance brings the upper class menace to newspaper baron and “Citizen Kane” villain Hearst.

“Mank” is built on two timelines — the writing of the first draft of “Kane” in a remote ranch in Victorville, California, where Welles’ producer and confidante John Houseman (Sam Troughton) drops the easily-distracted alcoholic Mank off with a German nurse (Monika Gossmann) and an English typist (Lily Collins). His orders? Write the first draft of “American,” the working title that would become “Citizen Kane.”

Houseman is worried sick about losing his job for not getting this piece of work done.

“I’ve never BEEN fired.” To which Mank quips, “I’ve never NOT been fired.”

The second timeline is Mank’s Hollywood history, a former New York newspaper drama critic who came to California and struck it rich as a screenwriter and uncredited “script doctor.” Well, he would have struck it rich if he hadn’t gambled and drank away his paychecks and pissed off everybody he ever worked for.

We too-briefly see his place within the mob of New York journalists he helped lure to town at the end of the silent film era — S.J. Perelman, Charles MacArthur, George S. Kaufman and Ben Hecht.

And we see him run afoul of studio chiefs, most famously Louis B. Mayer of MGM. Arliss Howard is a fine actor who suggests too little of the monstrous, bullying weeper Mayer, although he manages a fine tirade or two.

The Jack Fincher script’s conceit follows the Hollywood lore that Mank’s social mixing with Hearst, Davies and Mayer inspired his take-down of Hearst et al with “Kane.” Mank’s sharp tongue — loosened when he drank, which was always, led to cutting wisecracks. He insulted one bigshot too many too often and was banished, so the legend goes. He took what he knew about the Hearst story and circle and scandalized it into a movie.

He even named the sled after Hearst’s nickname for his girlfriend’s genitals. As Marian was fond of saying then and says often in the film, “Aw, Nertz!”

The story wanders far from facts as it pinpoints political differences as the source of this friction, making the Hollywood division over the 1934 California gubernatorial race — with union guys like the nascent Writer’s Guild pulling for socialist author Upton Sinclair in his battle with the Republican establishment candidate, backed by the Big Studios.

And the film compresses the efforts to suppress “Citizen Kane” into furtive and fervid calls and visits to Victorville. Mayer, his pal and sometime backer Hearst and others fretted over Mank and Welles “hunting dangerous game” in sending up Hearst. There’s even the suggestion of remorse as Davies sweetly confronts the writer in a scene that never happened.

Yes, Welles first used Mankiewicz for radio scripts, and tried to take sole credit for the Kane screenplay. But decades of exhaustive research have demonstrated his contribution to the rewriting was substantial, and that his direction was paramount to the film’s reputation. Robert Carringer’s “The Making of Citizen Kane” settled that argument 40 years ago.

Fincher creates a detailed if somewhat visually washed-out milieu of smokey executive suites, baroque Hearst Castle (San Simeon) parties and nightclubs contrasted with the “dry” austerity of Mank’s desert writing retreat.

Oldman is compelling, first scene to last. Yes, the man can play a convincing wit and convincing drunk. I wanted more twinkle from him, but the decision was made to play this Mank as a cynic and alcoholic burnout. Even his younger scenes lack the “court jester” personality to match the zingers.

At least Seyfried and Dance sparkle in support.

The passing parade of witty writers and Hollywood legends is given seriously short shrift, with lightweight casting to match. The players, by and large, aren’t up to making a cutting impression playing larger-than-life figures in tiny character actor roles. A decent Houseman impression here, a hint of Norma Shearer there — that’s about it.

The uptempo jazz that dominates the score cannot disguise the film’s stolid pacing.

And “Mank’s” abrupt finale, at the end of a meandering story of writing and remembering (Welles, played by Tom Burke, is barely in this), leaves something to be desired as well.

The funny lines are here. But where’s the fun, the breathless/childish conspiracy it took to make the movie, the boyishness Mankiewicz claimed Welles (who was just 24) brought out in him writing “Kane,” which Mank enthusiastically realized would be the defining work of his career?

Fincher’s made a sometimes fascinating/sometimes plodding recreation of film history, perhaps with its own share of Oscar bait attached. But his richly-detailed movie just reminds us that the more modest “RKO 281,” about the actual filming of “Kane,” and “The Cradle Will Rock” and “Me and Orson Welles,” about Welles’ days shaking up New York theater, were a lot more entertaining.

MPA Rating: R for some language

Cast: Gary Oldman, Amanda Seyfried, Lily Collins,
Tom Pelphrey, Tuppence Middleton, Tom Burke, Arliss Howard and Charles Dance

Credits: Directed by David Fincher, script by Jack Fincher. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:13

Disney goes back to the “Enchanted” well for “Godmothered,” a Jillian Bell comedy that casts her as a dizzy fairy godmother-in-training trying to make one little girl’s wish for a “happily ever after” come true.

Bell is in fine (PG) madcap form here. Isla Fisher plays that “little girl” who stopped believing in fairy godmothers not long after writing her “meet a cute boy” wish on a note. And June Squibb and Jane Curtin are almost amusing as the elder sisters in a sort of Hogwarts for wand-wishing pumpkins-to-carriage training school, “Motherland.”

But a script that scrimps on laughs — not enough zingers or pratfalls — and relies on sentiment to get by lets them down.

Bell, of “Brittany Runs a Marathon” and “Rough Night,” is Eleanor, youngest student at Motherland, where Curtin plays the head mistress and Squibb (“Nebraska”) the narrator/mentor and school DJ.

The school hasn’t had a “mission” for a fairy godmother in ages, and rumor has it if SOMEbody on Earth doesn’t believe and have her wish come true, they will close their doors and be retrained “as tooth fairies.” So klutzy Eleanor takes it on herself to grab a letter and fulfill its author’s fondest wish.

“Knock’em dead, kid,” co-conspirator Agnes (Squibb) says.

“Oh, if everything goes right, nobody’s gonna die!”

It turns out the letter writer, Mackenzie (Fisher) wrote that note decades ago. Now she’s a single mom and very jaded TV news producer who sees “fairy tale constructs” as teaching the dark lesson that “normal life is not enough.”

“Mac” can’t convince this whack-job to leave her be. A few inept waves of the magic wand later, Eleanor’s moved in and with a little help from Gary the enchanted raccoon, is out to change Mac’s life, and the lives of her tween Mia (Willa Skye) and stage-frightened teen Jane (Jillian Shea Spaeder).

Can she find love for Mackenzie, maybe that cute Hugh Prince reporter (Santiago Cabrera) at work?

The under-trained fairy godmother creates chaos in a pumpkin patch, wrecks the power grid and gets on TV and goes viral with a sledding accident.

Has Bell ever done a horror movie? The lady’s got a blood-curdling scream for the ages.

The Boston settings shine in this winter wonderland, the cute bits are somewhat cute, the flying and wand effects post-Potter polished and the soundtrack peppered with hits from Kool and the Gang, Nilsson, Steppenwolf and the Julie Andrews songbook, including a sweet sing-along in front one particular Boston landmark.

The brief glimpse of Motherland, where the rules about wishes and “true love” are covered, is blessedly brief. That’d be the perfect place for it to bog down in “myth making.” But the story proper is a letdown — recycled and drawn out.

What they were going here was a quick and cheap (ish) made-for-TV “Enchanted,” and that’s how this plays — light on the charm, far fewer laughs, heavy on effects. And blood-curdling screams.

MPA Rating: PG (beer)

Cast: Jillian Bell, Isla Fisher, June Squibb, Jane Curtin, Santiago Cabrera, Utkarsh Ambudkar, Jillian Shea Spaeder, Willa Skye

Credits: Directed by Sharon Maguire, script by Melissa K. Stack. A Disney+ release.

Running time: 1:49