Movie Nation

The kids are facing a grim school year, no matter which way  the COVID turns. They could use a little end-of-summer escape. And with most cinemas still closed, it’s up to the Kings of Teen Romance, Netflix, to provide it.

So it’s once more into the “Booth,” dear friends, once more, for Joey and…Englewood?

“The Kissing Booth 2” gives us the “Booth” kids’ senior year, with no social distancing or economy in free fall. It’s a half hour longer than the original film, which was a Netflix blockbuster. It’s about one-third as funny and not even half as charming.

But if you’re all caught up on your summer reading list and braced for distance-learning, what they hey? It’s binge-watching length without the uh, commitment.

Joey King, Queen Bee of this age group and this genre, returns as Elle Evans, the pouty pixie who landed the School Hunk, Noah (Jacob Elordi), for her club’s kissing booth fundraiser, and for her very own boyfriend by the end of “Booth.”

As in all the worst John Hughes movies, she chooses the short-tempered rich jock for the jock’s adorable younger brother, Elle’s BFF Lee (Joel Courtney).

Girls always prefer the “older man” with the Shadow motorcycle to the kid with the vintage GT-350 Mustang. The fools.

“Booth 2” sends Noah off to Harvard and Elle to make up her mind about planning her college life and future — with or without him. Will she go to UC-Berkley like her late mom, and Lee and Noah’s mom (Molly Ringwald) did back in the last millennium? With Lee? Which they’ve been planning to do together and even have a pact about?

Or will she go chasing a man to that icon of Eastern Privilege, which her family can’t afford to send her to?

Complicating that dilemma is the new hunk on campus for their senior year at tony LA Country Day. Marco (Taylor Zakhar Perez) sings, plays guitar and is just gorgeous, “a SNACK indeed,” something Elle blurts out, by accident, over the school intercom.

“Two tickets to the GUN show please, because are those arms, or CANNONS?”

So here are the obstacles the two 30something guys who cooked up the script came up with.

GET Marco for the kissing booth.

GET Elle a solution to her cash for college dilemma.

MAKE Elle choose between last year’s “snack,” and this year’s “snack.” Throw in a sophisticated, sexy Brit “supermodel” Harvard “complication” (Maisie Richardson-Sellers).

And get Lee a girl of his own (Meganne Young), or make Elle see the light about her “bestie.”

Do you see 130 minutes of movie in there? Well, maybe when you’re older you’ll be better at rom-com math, kids.

The school is like an over-decorated version of Hogwarts where adults/teachers don’t figure in the story. At all. Save for a guidance counselor.

The heavy-lifting in this sequel involves putting King and a couple of her co-stars through rigorous Dance Dance Mania (Dance Dance Revolution missed a product placement ad here). The dance game stuff is fun the first couple of times we see it.

The rest of the movie is perfunctory in all the worst sequel ways — briefly referencing the “rules” the two besties play by, briefly giving “Sixteen Candles/Pretty in Pink” veteran Ringwald the “follow your heart” speech, covering everything that happened BETWEEN the movies in a montage. Burying us with other montages — a whirlwind trip to Boston, for instance.

Skipping over the fact that Elle and Noah basically shacked-up between her junior and senior years would feel a cheat. But then, we’ve seen “Summer ’03.” Ms. King left little for us to imagine in that sex romp.

There’s time for pandering to assorted corners of the audience, giving any character that popped in the first film screen time to please fans who connected with them. There’s a little inclusion — a gay couple comes out.

But there’s nothing funny — save for the outtakes. The chemistry between King and Courtney in those is better than anything we feel for Elle’s pairing up with Elordi or Perez in the movie. They’re each a foot taller than her, for starters. Makes them come off as much older than her, and “cute” kind of goes out the window.

Netflix should have hunted around for a hungry young female screenwriter to take a pass at this script. It lacks warmth, a feel for its heroine, who may narrate in voice-over, but comes off as more removed from the proceedings this time.

King’s agent should be holding out for script and screenwriter approval. All “Kissing Booth 2” — yes, there could be more sequels — accomplishes for her is hinting that she could hold her own in a dance movie. Maybe.

MPAA Rating: TV-14, a lot of snogging, some innuendo, a little profanity

Cast: Joey King, Joel Courtney, Jacob Elordi, Taylor Zakhar Perez, Meganne Young, Maisie Richardson-Sellers and Molly Ringwald

Credits: Directed by Vince Marcello, script by Vince Marcello and Jay. S. Arnold, based on the Beth Reekles book. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:10

Regarding “Amulet,” the words of Abraham Lincoln, the First Movie Critic, come to mind.

“Those who like this sort of thing might find it the sort of thing they like.”

I see this horror tale from actress (“Suffragette” and TV’s “The Hour”) turned writer-director Romola Garai as a triumph of tone over terror,  of chilly mood over any sense of malice it’s meant to generate.

Thoughtful, with the trappings of literature, philosophy, refugee politics and a moral person’s obligations and guilt in a time of civil war, Garai wrestles a lot into her story of demons and nuns and plumbing.

What she doesn’t do is give all this a proper shape or particularly arresting narrative. What she never does is frighten us by why we see or expect to see.

Alec Secareanu (of “God’s Own Country”) is Tomaz, a refugee scraping out a living in day work construction in xenophobic Britain. Each night, he squats with other outsiders in a flop, taking care to bind his wrists with electrical tape.

In his dreams, he is clean-shaven and in combat fatigues in the forests of his war-torn homeland, reading Hannah Arendt books as he works as a solitary border guard. Those dreams turn nightmarish when a woman (Angelika Papoulia) flees into his line-of-fire, or when he digs up a carved-bone relic of mysterious origin — an amulet.

The present day can be just as forbidding. He was a Ph.D. candidate back home. A fire in the flophouse makes him homeless and gets him robbed. A kindly nun (Imelda Staunton) is his salvation.

“What we want is not always what we need,” she counsels. “Forward is not the only way.”

She places him in a remote, tumbledown house, where Magda (Carla Jurí) is caring for a dying mother. Tomaz can “help” them. He can fix up the house, remedy the black bile pouring out of the plumbing, cope with the mold and skittering rats. Well, that’s the pitch, anyway.

But the unseen (at first) mother screams in the night, bites Magda in her rages. And the plumbing is beyond anything Drano can cope with.

Tomaz makes a go of it. Dour Magda brightens in his presence, and he gorges on her cooking. It’ll all come to tears, we just know it.

The first two acts — mysterious, cryptically connecting the hero’s past to his present predicament — are far more interesting than the “Oh, let’s explain everything, shall we?” finale.

Merely casting Staunton (Dolores Umbridge in the Harry Potter movies, QEII in TV’s “The Crown”) isn’t the give-away it might be, as she can play saintly or sinister with equal skill. But one does start out with the hunch that the villains on her resume called out to Garai.

The literary touches — Magda quoting St. Hildegard of Bingen — are more of a give-away.

“It is not far from the shores of silence to the boundaries of speech. The path is not long, but the way is deep. You must not only walk there, you must be prepared to leap.”

Magda leaves out the begining of that quotation — “Dare to declare who you are.”

The resolutions to the mystery, the depictions of what we’ve only suspected, are gruesome, conventional and dull and generic.

And that amulet? It’s an afterthought.

MPAA Rating: R for some strong violence, bloody images, a sexual assault, and brief language and nudity

Cast: Alec Secareanu, Carla Juri, Angelika Papoulia and Imelda Staunton

Credits: Written and directed by Romala Garai. A Magnet/Magnolia release.

Running time: 1:38

What qualities makes a children’s book or cartoon series translate across languages and cultures?

Why would anime like “Gigantor” and “Speed Racer,” books and animated TV and films about “Babar” and “The Smurfs” become universal, while “Asterix” and “Arthur and the Minimoys” fail outside of their homelands?

Charm and that Hippocratic Oath of children’s entertainment, “first, do no harm” helps. But if it’s meant to be humorous, you’ve got to have sight gags understandable the world over, dialogue that’s funny in any language, weird voices and characters that tickle.

Whatever the allure of the long-running French “SamSam” books by Serge Bloch, which have inspired a successful TV series, the movie “SamSam” shows this franchise needs some script doctoring before it’ll connect on the continent where Disney and Pixar set the standard.

It’s a lot more “Arthur and the Minimoys” than “The Smurfs,” although for the life of me I can’t figure out why kids embraced the latter, either. The film skews quite young, with primary colors and playfully drawn characters. But there’s not a funny line in it, and barely a sight gag worth mentioning.

“SamSam” is sort of an “Incredibles” and “Monsters Inc” mashup about a little boy from the Planet Sam, a space traveling kid from a race of superheroes.

SamSam (voiced by Tucker Chandler) can fly his retro Jetsons saucer, confide in his Sam. BuTeddy (Connor Elias Andrade). But he’s inept at sports and impatient to start growing up He hasn’t discovered his “powers” yet.

An only child, his parents tell him “Your powers are in you” and that he’ll find them himself. But he feels left out, unheroic, despite his cape, mask, flying saucer and all.

The planet Marchel (or Martial), ruled by King Marthy the First (Dino Andrade) is a mirthless, childless military state, because the self-described dictator in charge can’t stand kiddie mirth.

“Smiling makes you ugly, and laughter gives you headaches.”

He’s projecting, of course, as dictators who. He’s a hypocrite, as dictators are, because he has a little girl while none of his minions are allowed to have children. Mega (Lily SanFelipppo) is being groomed to be an opera singer by her mother, like generations of her mother’s family before her. Dad wants her to go to dictator school.

But when both she and SamSam venture into space to poke around the forbidden zone (minefield) between their planets, she notes that there are other kids playing, that even if they have powers and SamSam doesn’t, the other kids consider him their friend.

“Friend?” This is one of many concepts Mega would like to explore, which is why she connects with SamSam and enrolls in his school, when she’s told Dad she’s at Dictator School and Mom (Michelle Deco) she’s attending School of Song.

Complications ensue, a lie is exposed, friendship is tested. You know the kiddie film drill.

SamSam is cute and open-hearted, and I suppose small children will be able to identify with him. Mega is an empowered little girl, even if she fibs to allow herself to experience friendship, smiling and laughter.

But there’s nothing here that would provoke either of those reactions. The villain is oddly drawn, but flatly scripted and humorlessly voice-acted. There’s barely even an attempt at a funny voice in the cast, and having nothing funny for them to say doesn’t help.

The design has a whimsy, and there’s a hint of Smurf-speak in the way everything on Planet Sam has Sam in its name — SamDad, SamMom, SamTeddy, etc.

But “SamSam” plays like what it is, a quick and pretty but ill-thought-through attempt to cash in on a popular French kids’ cartoon.

MPAA Rating: unrated, child-friendly

Cast: The voices of Tucker Chandler, Lily Sanfelippo, Dino Andrade, Connor Elias Andrade, Michelle Deco, Caitlin Prennance

Credits: Tanguy de Kermel script by Valérie Magis and Jean Regnaud, based on the Serge Bloch illustrated children’s books.  A Canal+ production/Blue Fox Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:18

“I just have this feeling…”

What WILL she do?

Dark and darkly humorous, and full of Neon goodness, “She Dies Tomorrow” streams Aug. 7

Some big themes and social issues are wrapped up in the stylish Indian period piece “Bulbbul,” a thriller that leans far too heavily on “Hound of the Baskervilles” for its own good.

I mean, when you’ve got the law-school bound brother-in-law theorizing and developing suspects about a series of gruesome murders in 1901 Bengal, suggesting he’s “playing Sherlock” would be more of a give-away, had we not figured out where this was going early on.

In a corner of the country wrapped in scarlet foggy nights, a former child bride presides over the manor. Because the Lord, who was a good twenty years older than Bulbbul when he fetched her decades before, has relocated. Or maybe “fled.”

Bulbbul, played with a self-assured smile by Tripti Dimri (“Poster Boys”), is happy to reunite with the brother-in-law, Satya (Avinash Tiwary) who was her childhood playmate when she was “married,” all of seven or eight years old.

Back then, her auntie told her to just keep those toe-rings on. It’s how men “control” their brides, she was told. Now, she’s on her own in a luxurious estate even as the village and surrounding land is bewitched by “the Demon Woman.”

Satya is a privileged, educated young man who sees one murder victim, pronounces that “our British law asks for proof” and says no demon, specter or beast did this.

“What woman is capable of such a brutal murder?” he wonders, in Hindi with English subtitles.

Bulbbul? She just grins.

There’s a doctor (Parambrata Chattopadhyay) who might know more than he lets on, and a sister-in-law (Paoli Dam) who shaved her head and went into mourning after the death of her husband (Rahul Bose), the Lord’s simple-minded twin brother.

Tish tosh, Bulbbul clucks. Around here, a person gets a fever and “the demon” did it. Is she clucking too much?

Lyricist turned director Anvita Dutt shuffles up the narrative order, beginning with the “wedding” decades before, shifting back and forth to give us clues to something we’ve already figured out, “motivations” for the murders, how a “monster” was made.

The performances are properly pitched, the production design is striking, the frankness of the depiction of violence against women (by Indian cinema standards) brutal, but refreshing for its honesty.

Still, messing around with “twins” muddies up the proceedings, and the source material is too obvious to be worth revisiting for the umpteenth time.

The best any critical Western viewer might offer in praise is “Nice try.”

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, violence, including rape

Cast: Tripti Dimri, Avinash Tiwary, Rahul Bose, Parambrata Chattopadhyay and Paoli Dam

Credits: Directed by Anvita Dutt. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:34

Sure, “Little Shop of Horrors” was fun. But Howard Ashman didn’t truly hit his stride until Disney realized animated musicals were the studio’s ticket back to relevance.

I can remember the line where it happened for me, in Disney’s legendary “comeback” cartoon, “The Little Mermaid.”

“When the sardine begins the beguine it’s music to me.”

Here was a songwriter (Alan Menken did the music to their greatest collaborations) who knew the Great American Songbook, and figured finding a laugh here and there with it was a way to write his name in that book, alongside Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers and others.

And he knew that’d sound funny as heck sung in a Jamaican patois.

This OVERDUE documentary appreciation of the Man Who Saved Disney comes to Disney+ Aug. 7.

The new trailer? Yes. It is. Funny, too. Adorably nostalgic.

Movie’s been pushed back once or twice, Sept. 1 now. We’ll see.

A young Nigerian travels to Brazil in search of his missing older brother in “Shine Your Eyes,” a lyrical São Paulo mystery-travelogue that takes us through math, music and into madness.

The search-for-a-missing person story is one of the most reliable in literature and film, and this feature from Matias Mariani (“I Touched All Your Stuff”) is a worthy addition to the canon and another reason to go “Around the World with Netflix.”

Amadi, played by veteran Nigerian actor O.C. Okeje (“Potato Potahto”) has been charged by his mother with finding his brother Ikenna, who moved to Brazil to make use of his beautiful mind.

Amadi, a musician, Internet searches for the college where math-genius Ikenna teaches. It takes him a while to figure out it doesn’t exist. He questions his uncle (Barry Igujie) for clues. Well, Ikenna may have done this, he may have done that. He “lost a lot of money gambling” could be key.

That’s what sends Amadi to the horse track. That’s why he bets on the horse named Schopenhauer.

“Here is not a good place for German philosophers,” an older gambler (Paolo Andre) chuckles. He has a professorial look about him. Maybe he’s met Ikenna? “Serendipity” becomes Amadi’s guiding principle in his search.

From the professor, he retrieves textbooks in which Ikenna scrawled his ideas into the margins. The Internet cafe has a repair shop. Could that be Ikenna’s old laptop?

Amadi’s quest takes him and us into the African diaspora of a huge South American city, stopping to jam or sing reggae karaoke and converse in Igbo (his native tongue), meeting people who encountered his brother — who was quite memorable — tracing photographs packed into that old laptop, lost in montages of thought, science, music and gambling that Ikenna mused about.

The mystery deepens and Amadi’s guilt over his lack of success — symbolized by the message his mother recorded to Ikenna on his phone — worsens. And then he meets a woman who works for his uncle who knew Ikenna.

Emilia (Indira Nascimento) doesn’t speak English or Igbo, Amadi doesn’t speak Portuguese. But they connect via cell phone translation apps and a simple “I enjoy his company” chemistry.

Half a dozen people collaborated with Mariani on the script, no doubt helping with all the philosophical, musical and scientific concepts and dialogue (in English, Portuguese and Igbo) touched on here.

Ukeje wonderfully conveys Amadi’s frustration at not being able to find what happened to his brother, his constant awareness that he’s not “the smart one.” Yet his cell phone, Internet savvy and instincts point him in one right direction after another. Through it all, Ukeje never lets us forget this is a man haunted by a sibling who is in his head with him.

Mariani gives us a tour of São Paolo beyond the tourist sites, into the working world of Africans and Afro-Brazilians in this “white man’s city.”

There are two ways movies like this can turn out, and both outcomes have dazzled in their own way, in classics such as “The Third Man” and taut recent entertainments such as “Searching.”  I thought the payoff here was something less than the story that came before it.

Nevertheless, “Shine Your Eyes” will grab you and take you to a place you’ve never been and into a mystery which only a sibling can solve. It’s the best new film on Netflix this month.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with adult themes that almost get it into PG-13 territory.

Cast: O.C. Ukeje, Indira Nascimento, Paolo Andre, Barry Igujie

Credits: Directed by Matias Mariani, script by Chika Akandu, Francine Barbosa, Júlia Murat, Maíra Bühler, Chioma Thompson, Roberto Winter and Matias Mariani. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:40

“Babysplitters” is the very definition of a “split decision” comedy.

On the one hand, it has funny lines, situations and the odd funny touch in the performances.

On the other, those are spread out over two hours. Only Judd Apatow can get away with that.

The central conceit — couples half-interested in having a child deciding to have one they share, “Babysplitting,” is promising. But there are subsidiary plot threads that have little upside and eat up screen time between laughs.

Danny Pudi, a member of the vast cast of TV’s “Community,” back in the day, makes an amusing leading man. The rest of the cast is more miss than hit.

Pudi and Emily Chang (TV’s “The Bold Type”) are a married couple in their 30s “thinking about” having a baby. As in “SOMEday,” according to him, “soon” by her reckoning. Writer-director Sam Friedlander’s best scene is our introduction to Sarah and Jeff — actu sexus — him fumbling with a condom she wants nothing to do with, him not reading the signals that she REALLY wants this to produce something, right now.

“Sometimes I wonder if you want to have a baby WITH me, or just have a baby, period!”

“Don’t make me choose, Because right now, the BABY has the edge!”

By the way, Chang? Funny.

Jeff’s hangups about a baby start with his unhappy work life, as the grownup at an organic food farm-to-table start-up, FRM2TBL. He’s the “boomer” (“Ok, NOT a boomer!”) always running afoul of what the CEO calls “tee-dubs,” Trigger Warnings among the youth.

“I’m OFFENDED,” one Gen-Z ditz snaps. “I did Ancestry.com, and I’m like, one PERcent Indian!”

It’s “Native American,” dear.

“Whitesplaining. Whatever.”

“Have you SEEN me?” Pudi is of Indian-Polish extraction, and is late learning “I can’t CORRECT someone if I have a penis?”

Sarah and Jeff go back and forth over pluses and minuses of having a child — “It crushes your social circle,” for starters. But have a baby, get a whole NEW social circle, “just like freshman year in college.”

They have the odd nightmarish encounter with free range kids, the product of “CCPP, collaborative constructive permissive parenting.”

But their friends Taylor and Don (Maiara Walsh and Eddie Alfano), a ballet dancer and a gym owner, are stuck in the same dilemma. He wants a child, she’s focused on dancing for a few years more.

Somehow, they talk themselves into this weird “new” idea. Somehow, they find an oddball OGB-GYN (Brian Thomas Smith of “The Big Bang Theory,” amusing) who is judgement-free.

Let the REAL complications begin. And let the movie, which has been witty banter, clever montages (Jeff gets caught in the “Normandy” of water-balloon assaults at a bratty kids’ party), starts to bog down, lumber and limp along.

Jeff has a shrink (Mark Feuerstein) whose therapy involves sending Jeff on a lot of hypnotic reveries that turn into nightmare scenarios.

Sarah’s job, as a meter maid, involves regular run-ins with an actress with kids who is always getting parking tickets.

The “getting pregnant” part of the story has many wrinkles, options and negotiations. Guess which the most awkward would be, and that’s the way they go — complete with four people participating, bargaining and the like.

“Is it OK to talk dirty?”

“COACH her, babe.”

The last 75 minutes of “Babysplitters” doesn’t live up to the promise of the first 45. What is light, snappy and fun becomes labored, cluttered and almost too serious for its own good.

This needed tightening at the screenplay stage, and failing that — merciless editing pre-release. Cut the shrink scenes altogether, for starters.

There’s a cute “reinventing having a baby” comedy here. It just gets lost in all the bathwater.

MPAA Rating: unrated, adult situations, sexual content

Cast: Danny Pudi, Emily Chang, Maiara Walsh, Eddie Alfano and Brian Thomas Smith.

Credits: Written and directed by Sam Friedlander. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:59

Jemima West stars as a British combat surgeon returning from duty to fresh nightmares, nightmares that have nothing to do with PTSD.

This opens Aug. 21, and props to any actress, no matter how fetching, for hanging on to “Jemima” as a first name. A rare name to start with, rarer still thanks to the syrup.