Movie Nation

The warning signs are there.

“Uglydolls” is an animated film from a studio start-up with no history in the medium.

The financing is mostly Chinese, with “The Chinese Amazon.com,” Alibaba, in a lead role. Why does that matter? Who does Hollywood never fail to take to the film production cleaners? “New Money.”

The selling point is the music, tunes by Christopher Lenertz and others, sung by big names like Kelly Clarkson, Nick Jonas, Janelle Monae and Blake Shelton.

So there’s every reason to expect this to suck, completely and utterly. But the tunes become a sort of saving grace, the animation’s not bad and the there’s enough slapstick to keep tiny tykes distracted.

And their parents could use a nap, which this death-itself screenplay delivers for anyone over the age of 10.

It’s about a happy, cardboard box town where discarded toys live and laugh and sing.

But Moxy — yes, a LOT of the names are “literal” and on the nose — longs to fulfill every doll’s destiny, to “get chosen.” Since she’s voiced by Kelly Clarkson, she sings about that longing, to be in “the Big World” where “there’s a child for every doll, and a doll for every child.”

Mayor Ox (Blake Shelton) can’t shake that belief. Pals like Wage (Wanda Sykes), Babo (Gabriel Iglesias), one-eyed Ugly Dog (Pitbull) and Lucky Bat (Leehom Wang) can’t dissuade her from exploring the mysterious “flower” from which new residents of Uglyville arrive.

It’s a garbage chute. She can’t see that, but we can. And when she convinces her pals to see if the Big World is on the other side of it, they tag along.

That’s how they end up at the Institute of Perfection,” where beautiful, cookie-cutter Bratz-styled dolls are lorded over by teen-idolist Lou (Nick Jonas).

Lou preaches “Pretty makes perfect,” and he sings “You’re U.G.L.Y., and that’s the ugly truth” to the new arrivals, among other tunes.

Moxy and her pals have to pass “quality control” and run “The Gauntlet,” run by Lou and his Mean Girls, to acquire “the greatest experience a doll can know,” being loved by a child.

The plush “ugly” dolls are rather formless felt concoctions. The “perfect” dolls has lovely yarn-texture hair and dazzling dance moves.

As I said, the songs here do the heavy lifting (“Spy Kids” creator Robert Rodriguez cooked up the story). We get the longing song, the villain’s obstacle song, the makeover song, the fulfillment finale.

A cute cover? Hall & Oates’ “You Make My Dreams Come True.”

One of the handful of laughs is a concert cliche from the rock Dark Ages. Lou inspires “MARRY me, Lou!” screams from his admirers every time he sings. Save for one, who shouts “Freebird!”

The other “As I said” here is this skews very young. If they’re old enough for school, the kids are old enough to be bored here.

But hey, it’s better than “UglyDolls on Ice” or “Uglyville’s Got No Talent.” Theoretically.

MPAA Rating: PG for thematic elements and brief action

Cast: The voices of Kelly Clarkson, Nick Jonas, Janelle Monae, Pitbull, Blake Shelton, Gabriel Iglesias, Wanda Sykes, Lizzo and Emma Roberts

Credits:Directed by Kelly Asbury, script by Allison Peck, story by Robert Rodriguez. An STX release.

Running time: 1:27

Veteran character actor Aldis Hodge has the title role, that of an aspiring football star arrested and unjustly convicted, losing his dream and a good chunk of his life to “a broken system.” Freeman is an inmate who gives him the perseverance to endure the unthinkable, Kinnear leads the “Innocence Project” legal time trying to clear the name, “Brian Banks.”

An August Release, a true story.

So funny. So cute. So very Canadian. Pikachu uses… Foot Massage? “Detective Pokemon Character” opens May 10. https://youtu.be/bo1YKTvM2Uc

Two truths quickly emerge from “The Intruder,” a thriller about buying a house from the wrong guy.

First, director Deon Taylor (“Traffik”) and editor Melissa Kent should be first chair at the symphony orchestra of their choosing. They play the audience like a fiddle, hurling close-ups, jarringly loud sound effects and scare-by-DEAFENING music at us when they want us to jump.

The finale is a beautifully shot, in-your-face/cage-fight-to-the-death, visceral and heart-pumping.

And the second truth is that Hollywood REALLY missed the boat by not giving Dennis Quaid a shot at playing The Joker. He’s had the demonic grin all along. He just had to apply it to the right demon.

Put those two together and you have the makings of an entirely too manipulative, too obvious couple-in-jeopardy thriller, and a fun “bad” movie.

There is no doubt that his Charlie Peck is “not right” when young couple Anna (Meagan Good) and Scott (Micheal Ealy) get him to show his gorgeous, remote 1905 Napa Valley villa tucked into verdant acreage. They’re ready to leave their San Francisco penthouse for the country, and all they need is $3 million+ to buy the house that Anna falls in love with on first sight.

Scott? He was as shocked as we are that they meet Charlie (Quaid), the Master of Foxglove — beware of houses with names — as he shoots a deer, right in front of them.

“POW!”

Charlie, the “Bambi killer,” has an off-putting laugh, a grin that can change into a scowl in a flash and an uneasy vibe about him. Scott sees all the guns, catches a hint of racial tactlessness, notices the way the man dotes on his wife and identifies a threat.

Here’s a manly man of the country who loves this house, his guns, doing stuff with his hands and the woods. Scott’s in advertising. Yeah, he’s intimidated.

The script may set us up for a “She won’t see him the same way…at first” scenario familiar to such thrillers. Quaid ensures that she has to be blind not to pick up the signals, the lip-smacking malice that oozes out of Charlie as they start to redecorate “my house.”

Security cameras require drilling holes “in MY house,” and totally unnecessary.

“What is necessary is that I protect my way wife, Charlie.”

“Want to protect her? Get a gun!”

The performances mesh nicely, though Good (the “Think Like a Man” and “Anchor Man” movies) has little more to play than big, naive smiles for Charlie, and sex appeal. Ealy (“Sleeper Cell,” “For Colored Girls”) has a nice offhanded sarcasm about house buying, wife-pleasing, etc.

And Quaid is worth every cent they paid him to go Full Joker on these Frisco Buppies.

The paranoia rises with every time Charlie, supposedly “moving to Florida” to be with his daughter, drops in. The nerves fray every time he pops into the frame, unexpected, often accompanied by a LOUD music cue from Geoff Zanelli’s strident score.

That’s not totally fair. I mean, there might have been music and sound effects that I missed, because the more impressionable members of the audience I saw this with were shrieking in alarm at every string the fiddlers in charge played.

The very hallmarks of a “fun bad movie.”

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for violence, terror, some sexuality, language and thematic elements

Cast: Meagan Good, Michael Ealy, Dennis Quaid

Credits:Directed by Deon Taylor, script by David Loughery . A Sony Screen Gems release.

Running time: 1:42

We take The Big Idea for granted these days, the way we do a lot of big ideas.

This notion that the balance of nature is thrown off when biodiversity is upset is widely accepted, but had to start somewhere. And it came to life with one college professor, wondering at the interconnection between predators and healthy ecosystems, watching a planet where such eco-systems had been altered and seemed to be crashing.

Writer Sean Carroll’s “The Serengeti Rules” is about that professor and the generation of 1960s scientists, his “dynasty” of researchers, who adapted and tested his “keystone species” theory in the far corners of the world.

Nicolas Brown’s film based on that book is a striking nature travelogue that breaks down the theory, recreates the test cases that first supported it and profiles the University of Washington professor, Bob Paine, and four influential researchers Carroll found who “went out into the world and followed their passions,” and grabbed hold of Paine’s “kick it and see” experiment.

That’s how Mary Power describes Paine’s idea of altering an eco-sytem, in the laboratory sense, to see see how things work by ‘changing nature.'”

Paine came up with the idea of a way to “test the importance of predators” globally by looking at tide pools with starfish.” If the “apex predator” of a tiny system disappears, the tidal pool or a prairie stream, an Aleutian Island, a part of a Venezuelan national park or the African Serengeti, everything changes, and usually for the worst. In a tidal pool, you can easily remove the starfish and observe what goes haywire when that happens.

Using actors in recreations, Brown shows how Power, drawn to studying the ecology of rivers and ponds in childhood, sees the role large mouth bass play in creating green, healthy algae-filled pools in an Oklahoma stream. They eat the minnows who would otherwise turn such pools barren.

Jim Estes became a Paine devotee as he undertook the study of sea otters on Amchitka Island, with no expertise in them or even the branch of science that encapsulates them. He noticed that the one island on Alaska’s Aleutians chain that had no otters left also had no large stands of kelp, the undersea “forests” that are a vital part of a diverse and healthy system in that part of the ocean.

No sea otters means there’s nothing to eat the urchins which devour the kelp.

John Terborgh, a lifelong “bird man” sees the desolation in parts of Venezuela caused when all the jaguars and eagles are gone. Species that eat leaf cutter ants are harmed, and the soaring ant populations in turn defoliate the place.

Tony Sinclair is the fellow who’s spent decades on the Serengeti, trying to figure out why Wildebeest populations were swelling, competing with buffalo, only to “level out” at a healthy, sustainable population for reasons the film reveals.

Often their areas of expertise did not line up with the work the various ecologists ended up doing. But observing, testing and studying are gifts they all shared as they grew in understanding this new idea, that predators at the top of the food chain “drive the system from the top down,” which Carroll notes was “a whole new way of looking at nature.”

The personal stories give the picture a sentimental side. Paine was interviewed just before his death in 2016. Power recalled her life changing, as a tween, when her myopia — she hadn’t yet gotten her first pair of glasses — disappeared when she got her first mask and snorkel and discovered the world in a pristine New Brunswick pond.

Terborgh remembers a trek to see a Bachman’s Warbler “a mythical bird” even in his in youth, and starting to wonder then at all the natural world going “under the bulldozer” and “about to disappear from the Earth.”

Sinclair, a Brit, is shown climbing aboard a zebra-disguised propeller plane to aid in a wildlife count as he wondered (back then), “Can a bird man study buffalo?”

Carroll’s hook, that these researchers who got their start in the “follow your bliss” 1960s, were more open to dabbling outside their specialties, more open to new ways of looking at nature and thus pioneers, is in here.

But what sticks with you are the beautiful shots of kelp forests and otters, ponds seen from the bottom up, Africa and South America both threatened and, when “corrected,” healed. That’s the upbeat message that Carroll identifies in the opening moments of the film.

And then there’s Paine’s mantra, worth repeating even though it’s been a part of our thinking about nature, ecology and the need for biodiversity.

“Predators DO matter”

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast: Tony Sinclair, Mary Power, John Terbough, Jim Estes, Bob Paine, Greg Kriek, Ashlyn Jade Lopez, Samantha Nugent, Johnathan Newport, Mathieson McCrae, Jaime Excell

Credits: Written and directed by Nicolas Brown. An Abramorama release.

Running tie: 1:24

One of the great films of the ’80s, perhaps the greatest, is now coming to the small screen in series form.

Leonardo DiCaprio and folks with “Game of Thrones” credits are taking another shot at Tom Wolfe’s epic account of the prehistory and then early days of the U.S. space program.

The film version of “The Right Stuff” covered two major fields of play, the Edwards Air Force Base and Kennedy Space Center accounts of test pilots like Chuck Yeager (Edwards) and Co., and the Mercury Seven astronauts who rendered those guys obsolete with their own version of “The Right Stuff.”

The book allows for a lot more of that era to be covered than just the film’s focus on the personification of “The Right Stuff,” cool under pressure Yeager (played by Sam Shepard).

The Space Race, the sleepy ’50s displaced by the go go/can-do ’60s.

Unlike George Clooney’s remake of “Catch-22,” the TV version of “The Right Stuff” will be competing with a classic film, one of the greats of the genre, a career-maker for the likes of Ed Harris and Dennis Quaid. Mike Nichols’ “Catch-22” was a bust, ambitious and well cast, but not beloved the way Phil Kaufman’s space race epic was.

Not sure how much credence to lend to the stories in The Sun and The New York Post (linked below) about what a “pain in the arse” Daniel Craig is being about having to do one last James Bond film, when he assured us years ago that he was done after “Spectre.”

The stories remind one of the Craig bashing that emerged when he first took on the role, that he “cannot drive a stick shift” and the like (A “blonde” James Bond?) that came out during the filming of “Casino Royale.”

A lot of it was crap, then. One suspects some of it is crap now.

He is supposedly getting $66 million to do one last film, “Bond 25.”

After Danny Boyle’s script was abandoned and he left the project, they have no finished script and Cary Fukunaga directing. He did “Sin Nombre” and “Beasts of No Nation,” and got a screenwriter credit for adapting Steven King’s “It.”

No, he’s no Danny Boyle. Yet.

Craig supposedly has his own chef and personal physio therapist on the shoot (three weeks in Jamaica, Ian Fleming’s old stomping grounds, then on to London and elsewhere). These are all Travolta level demands perhaps made by a guy who was hoping Ms. Broccoli would finally give up and let him go. She did not.

Of course, every Bond actor gets hurt, so that last line item isn’t unreasonable. Even the Bonds who relied heavily on stunt men broke this or twisted that.

They’re shooting scenes in Jamaica with Jeffrey Wright, back as CIA agent Felix Letter. “Bond Girls” have been profiled.

But thanks to all the negative press, the bar has been lowered for expectations for the April 2020 untitled “Licensed Renewed” take on a retired agent brought back in. Smells like “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service” to me. In every way.

And truthfully, even that Bond wasn’t bad.

Let’s see if the woman they hung the “Star Wars” universe on has the goods for a new take on Hamlet’s sad, misused lover.

George MacKay is Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, in this, with Tom Felton as Laertes.

“Ophelia” also stars Naomi Watts as Queen Gertrude, Clive Owen as King Claudius and opens June 28 (and comes to VOD the same day, NOT a good sign for Daisy Ridley).

Dennis Quaid as the creepy old guy who never quite “moves on” after selling his house to Meegan Good and Michael Ealy.

Looks sinister enough. “The Intruder,” directed by Deon Taylor (“Traffik,” “Meet the Blacks”) opens Friday.

Let’s not bury the glories of “The Convent” deep in the review, lost in the credits.

Production designers Maria Dagher, Tony Noble and Julian Luxton should take a bow for this beautifully conceived period piece ghost story.

And let’s not leave out art director Hattie Gent, whose color schemes bring the drab, superstitious and bloody 16th century of Britain to life, or cinematographer Neil Oseman, who paints this world in pools of darkness pierced by smoky-spooky beams of filtered sun or unfiltered moonlight.

The story may be horror-movie simple — novitiate nuns stuck in a “cursed” convent, hounded and slaughtered by…well, something. Or someone. Someones?

But makeup and prosthetic designer turned co-writer/director Paul Hyett‘s ghoulish stroll through the nasty nunnery is lifted by its detail, its grim in-your-face intimacy and very good performances.

No, legendary Canadian character actor Michael Ironside may not even attempt a British accent in his lone scene, a cameo as “The Magistrate” when sentences our heroine, “another necromancer,” to be “lashed to the stake and put to the blaze.” Everybody else picks up the slack.

And he manages the one thing his character must possess — loathsome cruelty.

Persephone, she is called. Named for the “Queen of the Underworld,” she (Hannah Arterton, yes the younger sister of Gemma Arterton) is to be burned as a witch, only to be “saved” by an outspoken, no-nonsense nun.

” I provide purpose to the fallen,” Sister Margaret (Katie Sheridan) of The Sisters of the Eucharist declares. “A penitent soul holds more value than kindling for a fire.”

Persephone and her “HEATHEN name, one that has no place here,” move in. But there’s something seriously off about this place. And not just the creepy Margaret or monstrous Mother Superior (Claire Higgins), the gloomy lighting that penetrates its cells, chapel and kitchen, day and night.

The infirmary is insanely busy. A fever? The villager Ellis (Freddy Carter), who pines for Catherine (Emily Tucker) is asking a lot of questions. All he gets is a warning from the scary Sister Margaret.

“A greater infection than their faith draws close!”

Hyett and cinematographer keep the camera even closer; tight shots for interiors, capturing the fright in close-ups and medium shots, even tighter shots outdoors (limiting how much 1659 production you have to “design” and decorate.

The dialogue has the tone of incantations — “Praise be! We have been blessed with a new soul!” “I have found only doubt between these walls!” “Must you find Perdition so…tempting?”

Yes, “There is a wretchedness here. Something lurks between these walls.” Persephone may be just the one, the “new soul” to figure out what it is.

I can’t say it was all that scary, and that’s a major shortcoming for a horror movie.

But that’s not all we drop in on these fright-fests for, is it? The effects — fiery/blurry nightmares, gathering blackness that suggests “an entity,” gore and blood and knives that draw such blood — are as good as a dimly-lit picture like this needs them to be.

And the eyes, the EYES!

Like most movies of this genre, you find yourself wishing it was better, more horrific or more despairing, maybe with a message of some sort, ANY sort.

We really only get to know Persephone, and can only fear for the other characters by type-casting — winsome, cute and cosseted young English roses, caught up in “a higher calling,” fated to be bloodied, doomed unless Persephone can figure out a way to save them.

Still, this cast gives fair value and the production team is punching WAY above its budget. Not bad.

MPAA Rating: unrated, graphic violence, blood and gore

Cast: Hannah Arterton, Katie Sheridan, Rosie Day, Clare Higgins, Dilan Gwyn, Ania Marson and Michael Ironside

Credits:Directed by Paul Hyett, script by Conel Plamer and Paul Hyett. A Vertical Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:21