Movie Nation

Hungary’s bid for Best International Feature Oscar is a lovely and poignant animated environmental parable built on Native American mythology.

Director and co-writer Áron Gauder’s “Four Souls of Coyote” would also seem like a natural contender in a very weak Best Animated Feature field, so maybe it has shots at two different Oscar nominations.

Callous capitalists in suits show up to get their pipeline built over and through a sacred mountain, “environmental assessments” be damned. A tribal elder is summoned down from that mountain to join environmentalists and Natives/First Nation people protesting to stop it.

Grandfather (Lorne Cardinal voices the English translation) proceeds to tell his family and the protestors the Story of Creation, as His People understand it.

The Old Creator (Cardinal’s voice as well), directed by the unseen Great Spirit, visits the Earth and ponders its watery state. He is delighted to meet the “first creature,” the duck (Bill Farmer), chat about the place’s possibilities, and send the duck diving for mud, which Old Creator molds into The Land, shaped like a turtle.

He molds creatures, “brothers,” to populate it, as he’s sure he and the duck will run out of things to talk about. The mighty buffalo and others will live on it. And then he makes a mountain for himself to rest on.

But four coyotes, colored red, white, blue and yellow, torment that rest with greedy gripes about having something to eat, maybe someone to mate with.

That’s when the trouble begins. “Coyote” is banished, bashed to bits and burnt in the best Wile E. Coyote fashion over the course of the story. But the clever critter keeps coming back, stealing some of the magic clay to make company for himself — humans.

“Poorly designed and weak,” they may be. But we see human babies experience the Wonders of Creation, and fed meat by the coyote as they grow up, try to ignore the sin that killing is and rationalize their hunger. And we recognize how they gain dominion over the other species, largely through the teaching and intervention of the sneaky trickster Coyote (Diontae Black).

The Old Creator envisions the “progress” that the loin-clothed humans will build, a montage from pyramids to Greek temples onward. And he’s not pleased.

The Satanic “mongrel” Coyote is even blamed for the coming of the White Man, crossing the Big Water by canoe to invite the Spaniards, and by implication, the British, to our shores.

All this is laid out to reinforce the quote that opens the picture, “Only when the last trees have died and the last fish has been caught will we realize that we cannot eat money.”

This “Coyote” tail is both connected to myth and visually reminiscent of a “Simpson’s” episode about a hallucinogenic Homer — he’s eaten the hottest chili pepper of them all — meeting his coyote spirit animal who gives him ideas about his “purpose.”

The animation here has its own color palette, which gives this the look of an Eastern European “Secret of the Kells.” Gauder (He did “Nyócker!”) & Co. have produced a festival award winner that compares favorably to some of the best animation coming out of Europe, including Cartoon Saloon, the people who made “Kells” and “Wolfwalker.”

Watching it in Hungarian (you will have other options when it goes into North American release) underscores the story’s universality and the way Native peoples in general and Native Americans in particular are seen as global guides to protecting the environment and bringing planetary ecology back into “harmony.”

Sure that’s stereotyping. But in this case, when a Hungarian film tells a universal story about how “greed” is dooming us, that stereotype becomes the iconography of change — oppressed, nature-connected people leading the short-sighted back into the light.

An Oscar nomination would earn this lovely and engrossing allegory a chance to reach a wide audience. Because most animation fans realize that another “Trolls” or “Chicken Run,” that “Super Mario Brothers” and the latest Pixar (“Elemental”) or Disney (“Wish”) misfires are not the best thing this medium has to offer in 2023.

Rating: TV-14, violence, nudity, childbirth

Cast: The voices of (English language version) Lorne Cardinal, Dionte Black, Karin Anglin, Bill farmer, Clé Bennett and Jonn Eric Bentley.

Credits: Directed by Áron Gauder. scripted by Géza Bereményi and Áron Gauder. A Juno release.

Running time: 1:46

Next year, the current state of the art of Godzilla CGI design teams up with the latest update of King Kong.

A few actors are on board, too — Rebecca Hall, Dan Stevens, Brian Tyree Henry.

My favorite Neil Simon play is probably “God’s Favorite,” a broad comic riff on a man tested by God…and an obnoxious family. It’s based on the Biblical “Book of Job.”

“The Shift” is a big screen sci-fi spin on that same source material, even more “loosely based” on The Book of Job. Here the faithful man (Krisoffer Polaha of lots of Christmas TV movies) isn’t all that faithful and is tested by Satan, not God, and not Satan bickering with the Almighty over punishing this most faithful servant to see how much he’d take before renouncing or at least rethinking his devout faith.

That’s the theology of writer-director Brock Heasley’s debut feature. The science fiction is a “Looper,” “Jumper” variation, with “the multiverse” referenced and multiverse style “shifting” of our hero from one “life’s choices” timeline to another, struggling to find the version of the wife (Eliabeth Tabish) he left behind or who left him who might take him back. Or even remember him.

It’s tricky and ambitious for a debut feature, and while there’s no shame is your grasp exceeding your reach, this “multiverse” faith-based film comes off as ponderous, glum and muddled. Much more accomplished directors have trouble keeping all the “timeline” nonsense straight and keeping the story compelling, and Heasley just doesn’t.

There’s all this exposition, trying to “explain” how this all happened and happens, weighing down the narrative. The “shifting” and “Deviators” and Vica Vision cinemas where characters glimpse at multiverses that might have alternate versions of themselves are practically sleep-inducing.

But Heasley scored the minute he got veteran heavy Neal McDonaugh to sign on the dotted line. The “Minority Report,” “Proud Mary” and “Yellowstone” alumnus brings the evil as “The Benefactor,” a Luciferish figure who torments our hero, Kevin, and wants recognition for being God’s equal in every way, and at every point.

The story opens with a downbeat “meet cute” in a bar. Kevin’s been sober for years, and losing his job in the Bear Stearns Bush Era economic collapse has him about to ditch his AA coin and sip a beer. Molly (Tabish) comes up, “on a dare” and flirts.

The scene has a montage or two of them thinking ahead, through the life they’ll have together, her pregnancy, etc. But it’s not sweet, well-written or romantically-played.

Next thing we know, they’re married, Kevin’s about to lose another job and then he’s in a car wreck. The last guy you want to see as you awaken out of the fog in a city that’s seemingly been emptied of people is the Face of Satan — aka, our “Benefactor,” McDonaugh.

The people? “They didn’t go anywhere. You did.”

“I’m here to help you, offer you a job.”

The Benefactor needs a “shifter,” for reasons that aren’t terribly clear. The Benefactor manipulates lives and folks in various timelines, sewing “chaos” with all this jumping people about, disrupting their happiness and overwhelming their faith via the multiverse.

Yes. As we all suspected. Satan is ALL about the multiverses.

It’s a somewhat cumbersome, comic book way of explaining in “The Devil Did It” terms how “I don’t know who you are anymore” happens in a relationship.

Kevin fends Old “Benefactor” Scratch off with a prayer, and next thing we know, he’s in a hellscape of a future city, going under another name, “infamous” for the “illegal” prayer he used to save his skin, typing away his memories of banned “scriptures” and befriending an ally named Gabriel (Sean Astin).

Posters of The Benefactor bill him as the Guy in Charge, “Unseen. Ever Present.”

And when that Benefactor comes back, he expects to find and finally corrupt Kevin, who only wants to get back to his wife, his life and maybe even bring back the little boy they lost through, they figure, Satanic intervention.

The weekend after Thanksgiving is “traditionally” one in which no major new titles are rolled into theaters, the box office falls way off because filmgoers did all their movie watching over the holidays.

Yadda yadda yadda…

Not this year. Lots of titles were rolled out, a couple with real promise, and the result is a big weekend when most years feel like filmgoers are just taking a break.

Beyonce’s “Renaissance: A Film by Beyonce,” a concert doc that includes lots of “How we did this tour” with Queen Bey DIRECTING and narrating, did a healthy $5 million in Thursday previews and big business Friday and is opening over $20 million, maybe closer to $21, according to Deadline.com.

To address the elephant in the room, that’s one fourth what “Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour” pulled in when it opened. Beyonce’s audience is older, somewhat more diverse and may take a week or two extra to get to it. Swift’s fans are more fanatical and made that film one of the year’s bigger hits — taking in just under $180 million.

Even taking into account the post Thanksgiving box office pause, Taylor Swift’s plainly more popular, although I am sure Kanye has an opinion on that.

Both films are self-distributed by the artists through AMC Cinemas, and both ladies will make big bank in the end. They’ve connected and conferred on their projects and agreed — I understand — on the timing of these releases, and made the same deal with AMC.

As with Swift’s film, I ducked into Beyonce’s on opening night just to ascertain if it needed to be reviewed.

Neither reinvents the concert documentary or even advances the genre, both are all about the spectacle of their presenting their hits on a huge stage, both are for fans. Critics don’t matter, and panning either film would just be baiting them. Who needs it? Enjoy.

“Renaissance” dethrones “The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes,” which may clear another $14.5 on its third weekend.

A much-praised (over-praised) “Godzilla” installment, “Godzilla Minus One” is doing a decent but underwhelming $11 million, money in the bank for Toho Studios, which has made many killings off the Beast from Below since 1954, and which has already earned $20 million off this film in Japan.

The Indian actioner “Animal” is making big noise on a limited number of screens, maybe $7 million by midnight Monday. I will try to get to that next week. “RRR” whetted the public’s appetite for action fare from the Subcontinent.

“Trolls the Sequel” is beating Disney’s “Wish,” $7.6 to $7.3. Wakeup call for the Mouse?

“Wish” is bombing, another $7+ million means it is plunging over 65% on its second weekend. Disney doesn’t need to respond to conservatives who don’t go to the movies claiming credit for killing a film by Ron DeSantis’ whipping boy company. That isn’t what’s happening. Disney does need to rethink its process of putting projects into production, story conferences, script acquisition, etc. This felt like focus-grouped “product” and no kid needs to see it or buy the Happy Meal that may or may not be part of its promotion.

“Napoleon” is adding another $7 million+ on a “traditionally slow” weekend. Ridley Scott’s epic might stick around until Christmas, but maybe not. That’s a very stepp (65% or so) falloff from opening weekend.

I will have to get to Angel Studios’ faith-based (Faith-adjacent?) “The Shift” later this weekend, as it’s earning $5 million in wide release. Neil McDonagh stars.

John Woo’s return to Hollywood action films “Silent Night” did decent opening night business, but won’t light up the box office overall, a $2-3 million is projected for it. Lionsgate didn’t make enough of an effort to get the word out, held off on previewing it for critics and I still saw it with a decent-sized audience Thursday night.

It’s not bad, not all that either. But for all you folks wetting your Underoos over the Big Fight in Netflix’s Fincher film, “The Killing,” check out how the master stages, shoots and directs his actors in fight-to-the-death brawls. John Woo is almost without peer in this regard, and even if this one doesn’t get me back on his Christmas card mailing list (totally a thing, I got years of them from him in the ’90s), aficionados will want to check it out.

As always, I will update these figures as the weekend progresses and more data comes in.

The puzzle has many solutions, most or even all of them “wrong.”

We’re asked to weigh abuse and bullying, gossip, guilt, grief and pathology, all told via five different points of view.

And whatever the viewer decides, on the screen all anyone cares about is the answer to a question posed by a childhood game — “Who’s the ‘Monster?'”

The latest film from Japanese filmmaker Kore-eda Hirokazu is a return to his “Shoplifters” form. It’s a densely-detailed character study that could pass for a cultural dissertation, a story of a school, a “problem” child, a concerned parent, an accused teacher and an “inhuman,” grief and guilt-stricken principal.

Sakura Ando of “Shoplifters” plays a widowed dry-cleaner raising fifth grader Minato (Soya Kurkawa) by herself. She dotes and indulges her sometimes dangerously impulsive boy, dealing with his questions about his dead father (they celebrate his birthday with a cake and a prayer) and wondering what happened to one of his shoes, where this or that bruise came from and where he got the idea that kids could have “pig’s brains.”

Jumping out of her moving car is the last straw.

“Are you being bullied?” she wants to know (in Japanese with English subtitles)? Is it this or that classmate whose name she’s heard? Or is it the teacher, Mr. Hori?

When she settles on Hori as prime suspect, Saori finds herself “handled” by a school, a system and a culture that practices conflict avoidance, not conflict resolution. The principal flees. A “guardian” council of male teachers meet, gang up on her and do a lot of bowing as they hear her out and dodge her questions.

Did he hit my son?

“We have confirmed that there was…contact between the teacher’s hand and Minato’s nose.”

A non-apology apology from this oddball teacher (Eita Nagayama) and rank lying and unemotional deflecting are all she gets from the principal (Yûko Tanaka). But behind the scenes, they scramble to cover this up and get rid of the teacher, who seems increasingly-unhinged in his dealings with the kid.

Then the story shifts to Mr. Hori’s point of view, and things take on a different tone. We soon see another viewpoint from Minato’s smaller pal from school (Hinata Hiiragi), whom mother Saori met and interrogated and whose hard-drinking, bullying single-dad (Akihiro Kakuta) Mr. Hiro unpleasantly encountered during his efforts to clear his name.

And we drift into the gutted despair of the grieving principal’s life, catching behind-the-scenes manouvering at the school as the faculty attempt to CYA and spare the institution punishment from above and spare the boy, who if he is labeled a “bully” will never be able to transfer into another school.

“Parents,” they all gripe. “They’re more trouble than the kids these days.”

But Mr. Hori’s problems, which escalate into media coverage and a fiance who ditches him over it, are the furthest from everyone’s mind save for his.

A groaning 110 minutes of agenda in search of a laugh, “Lady Ballers” is an “anti-woke” transphobic comedy from the conservative media site Daily Wire. An impotent exercise in attempted “punching down” at the groups hate groups love to hate, it’s a litmus test laugher for fellow travelers.

If you’re laughing, it’s just that they’re hating on the same people you hate on. Because it’s not funny. It’s just ugly.

Even easy eye-rollers — jabs at the overload of “woke” signage in the yards of people who hug, the endlessly-expanding acronyms of “gender fluidity” — pass by as one swing-and-a-miss after another as a cast of little-known-for-a-reasons are put through their paces by a star/director who’s a sort of Charlie Day without the charm working with a script that wouldn’t pass make it past Monday as an “SNL” sketch in the writer’s room.

Remember that movie Johnny Knoxville made about crashing the Special Olympics? It’s a LOT like “The Ringer,” only not as subtle, tolerant and um, high-minded.

Daily Wire impressario Jeremy Boreing directed this first-ever Daily Wire film and stars as Coach Rob, a Greater Nashville high school hoops coach who won a string of state titles in the early 2000s. But today, he’s reduced to rec center coaching, making “Don’t steal my catalytic converter” jokes to the Black kids (all the “teens” in this look like 30somethings) who won’t turn off their cell phones to hear him out.

“I stayed the same and the world changed,” he complains. Yes, even that’s stunningly unoriginal.

He’s split from his wife (Lexie Contursi) and losing control of his daughter.

“How do you even KNOW the word ‘transphobic?'”

“I’m EIGHT YEARS OLD.”

Teachers are a target here, including the one mocked for wearing a mask when Neanderthal Rob picks up Winnie from elementary school. Other slated for contempt?

“I hear Disney’s going to make the new Snow White a neurodivergent lesbian...”

“Neurodivergent BLACK lesbian,” his former player Alex (Daniel Considine) counters.

Getting canned from the rec center for racially insensitive remarks (In Bill Lee’s Tennessee? Perish the thought.) means that no-other-skills-Rob is reduced to taking a waitress job at the drag diner The Doll House. That’s where Alex wound up.

And seeing how good a shape Alex is in, and hearing of some oddball non-Olympic gender-rules-fluid “games” paying out cash prizes has Rob train Alex and take him to a heptathlon competition in his wig and balloon breasts. The joke is that the organizers, and the martinet accepting his/her entry, are so “woke” that no one dares question this giant man entering a women’s sporting event.

“Get out there. Beat those chicks!”

Getting away with that, the prize money and a Bud Light sponsorship — “They’ll give that s–t to any dude in a dress!” — gives Rob the idea of “getting the team back together.” So they round up the siblings who went on to sell used cars (Jake Crain, Blain Crain), the nut who became a survivalist (David Cone) and the towel boy they all bullied, who’s perfectly comfortable changing his “slave name” Felix to “SHE-lix”(Tyler Fisher) as they bowl over the best women’s basketball teams in an America that will “tolerate” no blowback for the idea of tall, lumbering men playing a women’s game.

A venal, unethical and stupid TV reporter (Billie Rae Brandt) conspires with Rob to make them a cause celebre. She’ll win a “Pulitzer” for that. They don’t hand those out for TV airheads, dear.

“I’m a JOURNALIST. I literally cannot be shamed!”

And on and on it goes, saying conservatism’s war-on-women/hatred for gay-transgender quiet parts out loud ad nauseum.

Want to be a woman? “Just shave your legs. Tell each other how ‘brave’ you are for things that require no physical courage. And don’t be afraid to cry at work. Easy peasy.”

No patronizing father/little girl talk in the third act about how women “civilize men” can unring that bell of utter bile.

Well, God and Gromit bless Netflix for signing checks and putting Aardman Animations on the task of serving up fresh stop-motion animated whimsy for us all.

But “fresh” doesn’t really figure in their laugh-starved, half-hearted sequel to 2000’s “Chicken Run.” That movie’s twee delights are sorely missed in “Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget,” another chickens-take-on-Big-Poultry action comedy.

They’ve recast the voice leads of the first film, with Mel Gibson and Julie Sawahla replaced by Thandiwie Newton and Zachary Levi. And instead of the first film’s plucky riff on British WWII POW escape pictures like “The Colditz Story” and “The Great Escape” we get a gadgety spoof of “Mission: Impossible.”

While those changes aren’t deal breakers, they do portend a picture that lacks the verbal and visual wit, the spark and the edge that made the original film a classic.

Directed by Sam Fell (“Flushed Away,” “ParaNorman”) and scripted by “Chicken Run” alumni Karey Kirtkpatrick and John O’Ferrell, with “Adult Life Skills” writer-director Rachel Tunnard brought in to jolt the jokes, it never quite finds its footing or manages to string together sight gags that made the original film cluck along.

Leader-of-chickens Ginger (Newton) and blowhard/big-talker Rocky (Levi) hatch their daughter Molly on the idyllic, uninhabited and KFC-free lake island paradise they settled on when they and their entire chicken farm flew the coop all those years ago.

But idyllic chicken village aside, Molly (Bella Ramsey) longs to see the big wide world. When a massive new operation, Fun-Land Farms, sets up shop across the lake, brave Ginger advises they all hide. Tweenage Molly makes a break for it to see for herself.

She hooks up with a ditz named Frizzle (Josie Sedgwick-Davies) who is determined to get into “the happy chicken truck” to Funland, and next thing they know, they are in the truck and processed into the candy-colored theme park of a poultry farm.

This “farm” seems idyllic, until they notice the way everything looks like a stage set, all the chickens are wearing control collars and they spend their day frolicking on slides and gorging themselves on the feed.

And the two can’t help but notice the Bond villain lair where the humans in charge, Dr. Fry (Nick Mohammed) and his wife, our old nemesis Mrs. Tweedy (Miranda Richardson) manipulate one and all in pursuit of the perfect place to raise and produce chicken nuggets.

Ginger, Rocky, Fowler (David Bradley), Babs (Jane Horrocks) and Bunty (Imelda Staunton) and their scavenger rat-pals (Romesh Ranganathan and Daniel Mays) conspire to “This time, we break IN” and free Molly.

Part of the charm of the films from this very British studio (“Shaun the Sheep” and “Wallace and Gromit”) has always been the oddly English world and worldview they capture and the quirky accents — Scots and Scouse and what have you — that the characters speak in. It makes the zingers quirkier.

“It’s GO time!”

“Oh, it’s all right. I went before we left.”

Levi has little funny to say and seems to have been cast because he can sound vaguely like Mel Gibson at 40. Newton’s playing the straight-woman here, and whatever sight gags the character experiences, it’s the “message” of the movie that Ginger must convey.

“Just because where we live is cut off from the world doesn’t mean we are too” is as nice a slap at Brexit as any animated film will ever manage.

But the most colorful, twinkly voices here belong to Horrocks, Staunton, Mays and the versatile Peter Serafinowicz as a poultry restaurateur.

The animation has a stop-motion with CGI-smoothed-out feel which makes this look more like “Flushed Away” than “Chicken Run.”

Which is to say there’s nothing here that’s actually bad. But every element is measurably inferior to the original film — plot, jokes, sight gags (a clever optical eye-scanner joke lands), voices and design.

Love Aardman. Glad Netflix helps keep their lights on. But let’s hope they can rediscover the DIY hand-made whimsy that made them famous next time out.

Rating: PG, the odd rude Britishism

Cast: The voices of Thandiwie Newton, Zachary Levi, Imelda Staunton, Bella Ramsey, Nick Mohammed, Jane Horrocks, Romesh Ranganathan, Daniel Mays, Peter Serafinowicz and Miranda Richardson.

Credits: Directed by Sam Fell, scripted by Karey Kirkpatrick, John O’Farrell and Rachel Tunnard. An Aardman film, a Netflix release.

Running time: 1:41

We’ve all seen the ads that litter broadcast TV, law firms pleading for potential clients to come forward and join class action lawsuits against Big Pharma, Big Investment, Big Credit Card, Big Chemicals and about the “water” at Camp LeJeune.

Even if you’ve agreed to participate in such cases (and shaken your head over a pitiful payout). you probably mutter “ambulance chasers” at the TV every time another such suit ad pops up.

“Into the Weeds” is a documentary that could change your point of view of the “billable hours” boys and girls.

Canadian documentary Jennifer Baichwal’s film is about the long-gestating, fiercely-litigated case about chemical conglomerate Monsanto, its weed killer Roundup and its “commercial” cousin, Ranger Pro.

Interviewing cancer patient farmers and a California school system caretaker, Dewayne Lee Johnson, lawyers, experts on chemicals, experts on insects and lots and lots of lawyers, Baichwal paints a picture of a “system” designed to protect “us” that’s broken and a company that sold a poison invented to strip metal machine parts that turned out to be deadly to weeds.

Monstanto knew for decades Roundup could cause cancer.

It’s a film almost buried under facts and figures, all the places Roundup is applied — from the clueless labor saving neighbor to Big Power companies that turn thousands of miles of “utility corridor” land underneath power lines into a brown, nearly lifeless desert rather than trimming trees and mowing. All through the food chain, on forests, farmland and on crops, sprayed by hand, by machine or dumped by helicopter all over, Roundup’s active chemical is a nasty ingredient in our eco system and our lives.

But Baichwal — the Tragically Hip music doc “Long Time Running” was hers — finds drama in the courtroom. Monsanto figures are grilled in depositions, caught in lie after lie, researchers bought and paid for (Dr. Marvin Kushner in the ’80s), EPA corruption in the mid-2010s (Jess Rowland, take a bow!).

“EPA has been captured by an industry,” one lawyer fumes, calling Big Chem a “cartel” that is overseeing its own oversight thanks to lax government intervention.

There is a lot to be outraged about as Canadian First Nation natives complain about tree plantation spraying that wipes out forest ecosystems, entomologists tie insect declines (bees, butterflies, etc) to these chemicals, and farmers and Johnson mutter about how they weren’t warmed.

Lurid and tacky enough to be ripped from real (American) life and packaged and scored right up to the edge of campy soap opera, Todd Hayne’s “May December” has that air of sexual transgression that has characterized his most memorable work.

But unlike “Carol” and “Far from Heaven,” the object in telling this story of an actress researching a couple that coupled when she was 36 and he was 13 is almost mocking — equal parts self-serious and ludicrous.

Recycling the unforgettably over-the-top and melodramatic piano score Michel LeGrand composed for the 1971 classic “The Go-Between” kind of gives away the joke.

Built on another fine, brittle performance by Hayne’s muse, Oscar winner Julianne Moore (“Safe,” Far from Heaven,””Wonderstruck”) and a cleverly imitative and “actressy” turn by Oscar winner Natalie Portman, it’s clever in its creepiness even if never quite escapes “soap opera,” to me at least.

And the “camp” only rears itself just often enough to remind us it’s there, adding to the emotional remove of it all.

Moore’s Gracie is a busy bee when we meet her, baking and prepping food to cook at an extended family and friends cookout. We’re bowled-over by the whirl of activity, the children praised, questioned and corrected, the meats handed over to the young grillmaster, Joe (Charles Melton of TV’s “Riverdale”).

Nothing weird here, right?

But Gracie’s conversations, to friends in person and on the phone, give away what’s coming and what happened long ago, at least some of it.

“I told you what happened when I met ‘Judge Judy,'” she burbles. And as this rambling, bayside house is on a coastal George island, we know that “meeting” wasn’t at Ralph’s supermarket.

Elizabeth Berry, a TV star (Portman) is coming, and everybody’s all atwitter. Elizabeth is finishing off a little homework before showing up to chat up, shadow and observe this most unconventional family. And “homework” entails tabloid clippings, book covers, accounts of “giving birth in jail” and everything these two endured — statutory rape charges among them — because then-married Gracie fell for seventh grade hunk Joe when she was 36.

Before playing her in a TV movie, Elizabeth wants to meet them, spend time with their family, question and study them and maybe find “something true” to say about their notorious coupling.

If nothing else, streaming has provided a welcoming home to a lot of holiday films in recent years, with movies ranging from bad to Hall Mark Christmas romance mediocre typically skipping theaters altogether.

Cramming these seasonal-shelf-life pictures in theaters makes less sense with consumers “consuming” this tinseled content at home mostly, anyway.

Eddie Murphy‘s “Candy Cane Lane” isn’t good enough to make its way in the multiplex. It’s of a “Deck the Halls,” “Christmas with the Cranks” quality, not even aspiring to “Jingle Jangle: A Christmas Journey” or “Spirited” time-killer status.

Amazon Prime is the perfect landing spot for this MGM-produced bore over the holidays, kiddie slapstick with scatterings of (director) Reginald Hudlin rudeness, lots of effects and not a single drop of heart.

It’s a supernatural “magic of Christmas” riff on El Segundo, California’s famous (actually a real thing) competitive holiday decorating mania.

Murphy plays a newly-laid-off plastic salesman who wants to go all-in on decorations and finally beat his obnoxious neighbor’s (Ken Marino) store-bought inflatables display, which, with added live-music touches, has won four years running.

Murphy’s Chris Carver makes wooden decorations by hand, even if his two older kids have outgrown all this and the youngest can’t help with the decorating — because he won’t let her.

But he does take the almost-tween (Madison Thomas) shopping for new ideas, which is how they stumble into the freeway underspass “pop up” store Kringle’s. Little do they know that Dad’s about to sign away his immortal soul for that one flashy “12 Days of Christmas” tree sure to win the battle of Candy Cane Lane.

His Kringles-bought tree might be a winner, but he should be getting a bad vibe from the “ignore the fine print” sales elf, Pepper (Jillian Bell, kind of funny).

She asks him “the true meaning of Christmas,” and he rattles off assorted kids’ TV special bromides, “Rudolph” included.

“Unless you wanna go with the religious angle,” he adds.

Pepper, whose real name ought to be “Satan’s Little Helper,” blurts out “Jesus Christ, NO.”