Movie Nation

In the spirit of “It’s animated, let’s dub it with English-speaking voices and see if it’ll sell” comes “Goodbye Monster,” a cross-cultural curiosity from China that loses something in translation.

The director and co-writer of “Bobby the Hedgehog,” Huang Jianming, conjures up an animist fantasy about a world of vaguely recognizable creatures obsessed with medicine and health care.

Seems like a natural for the U.S. market, if not the Canadian one, right?

There are these two islands, famed for their hospitals. Their creed is “There is no sickness that cannot be cured.” And in that spirit, “removing” the “Dark Spirit” from those infected by it is an ongoing quest.

The great and cocky Bai Ze (sorry, the studio didn’t provide any English language voice cast names) is sure he’s conjured up a spell that will banish this “dark spirit” from all who suffer from it.

But he’s reckless and loses the chance to demonstrate this in front of the Four Elders. A rival gets his hands on the incantation, and the banished Bai Ze, forced to take on an orphaned unicorn boy Yi whose horn stopped growing, as a sidekick, sets off on a quest to clear his name and find a real cure, dodging an Owl-headed hunter and his fishy-soldier minions along the way.

Perhaps The Heavenly Thunder Mentor will have a clue?

There’s a three-headed god, Ku-Shan, who needs the cure, and bull creatures, gazelle women and others who somehow figure into all this, none of them all that clearly.

The CGI animation is of decent quality, the color palette is impressive and there’s just enough Taoism to at least ground this unfathomably strange concoction in that culture. But I had a very hard time making much sense of any of this, and remember, I watch thousands of movies and I take lots of notes.

The Dark Spirit, mentioned roughly 11,400 times by characters in the screenplay (there’s a stunning amount of repitition), appears to be the curse of self-doubt, manifested in a black, swirling cloud that consumes characters until Bai Ze finds a cure.

And that’s all I’ve got. Good luck to you or your kids decoding this exotic Mystery of the East.

Rating: PG, animated fantasy violence

Credits: Directed by Huang Jianming, scripted by Li Liang, Wu Xiaoyu, Zheng Xuejia and Huang Jianming. A Well Go USA release.

Running time: 1:39

This A24 release is a sort of Jesus-adjacent/not quite Pythonesque account of the revolutionary ferment of 1st century Jerusalem.

Omar Sy, Alfred Woodard, Benedict Cumberbatch, David Oyelowo and James McAvoy are in this January release.

An Oct 6 release from Lionsgate, et al.

Mel Gibson is Mississippi Mel in this one, which is based on a Michael Farris Smith novel.

Sort of Stockholm Syndromish involvement between the son and an accused cop killer?

Hard to tell from this, but the familial casting seems rock solid.

I have been thinking Liam Neeson and his “Retribution” comrades were lucky to get their picture into theaters before Denzel’s third go as “The Equalizer.” Even though “Retribution” bombed.

But the Oscar winning Mr. Washington is…interestingly attired for this film, suggesting the physical conditioning will fit the “retired” reputation of the character.

Orson Welles did the tent-sized black shirts/trousers thing, with cape and cane in his later years.

I don’t think Sony previewed this much of anywhere. Classic “Labor Day Weekend” dumped title. So I’m seeing it “preview” night — Thursday.

Fingers crossed, in any event.

I was never much of a fan of B-movie maker Monte Hellman, who had a long if not exactly prolific career — 23 directing jobs between 1959 and the 2010s. “Two-Lane Blacktop” is a solid genre picture, and I’m hard pressed to think of another of his films I got much out of.

But Hellman was long associated with King of the Bs, producer, director and impressario Roger Corman, and that put him into business with the pre-fame Jack Nicholson and Harry Dean Stanton and here we are.

Hellman made a handful of films with those two future icons, and the Nicholson Western “The Shooting” might be the best known of his Jack team-ups. But a film they made concurrently with that one — same locations, some of the same cast and crew — is worth a look, as Nicholson turned out the script and concocted himself a starring role.

In “Ride in the Whirlwind,” Jack co-stars with Cameron Mitchell. But Stanton, billed as “Dean Stanton” and a dozen years into a not-yet-remarkable career, has his first chewy big screen role as an outlaw named Blind Dick.

Corman financed the two Westerns, Hellman directed both and neither, truth be told, is all that to look at. The minimal settings are properly dusty and rustic in “Whirlwind,” with arid Yanab, Utah serving as an iconic “The Way the West Looked in Most Westerns” location.

But Hellman’s experiment in trying to film inside or on top of a rolling stagecoach is “Blair Witch Project” shaky. The shoot-outs are competently-handled, and that’s as much praise as they warrant. Technically and artistically, “Whirlwind” is exactly what it looks like — an under-budgeted horse opera.

Nicholson conceived a spare story of three range-riding cowhands “headin’ South” for “Waco” from their last job up along the Snake River.

Vern, Wes and Otis (Mitchell, Nicholson and Tom Filer) are “just passin’ through,” rattlign off names of ranches where they’ve worked or might work, unaware that a gang of five led by Blind Dick (Stanton) but including Injun Joe (future Oscar nominee Rupert Crosse) just robbed a stagecoach, shot the shotgun rider and had one of their number gut-shot in the process.

Nothing is made of their “haul,” but they’re holed up in a range rider’s cabin when the trio ride up to regard them warily, share their whisky and figure out the quintet is lying about why they’re there.

“They don’t want no trouble, we don’t want no trouble” is about a far as that goes. The three will ride out at dawn, they figure. Only the sheriff and posse show up and lay seige to the cabin, trapping the three innocents in the process.

“We waren’t doin’ NOTHING, dammit,” Wes complains, to no avail. He and Vern are the only two to make it out of their encampment and up the canyon walls, struggling for safety on foot even though “This ain’t no country to be set afoot.”

They’re just climbing.

THEN where’ll we be?” “Someplace ELSE.”

Their struggle to escape doesn’t end as the posse “burns out” the cabin. They’ve already had one of their number gunned-down by shoot-first/ask-no-questions lawmen. And they’ve seen a lone hanging victim along the trail, another reminder of the brutal, unjust summary justice of the frontier.

They need horses from the first ranch they get to, and there’s no explaining “We waren’t doin’ nothin’, dammit” to the owner (veteran character player George Mitchell), his wife (Katherine Squire) or their fetching daughter (Millie Perkins, also in “The Shooting”).

The suspense of the hostage situation in the ranch house isn’t handled any better than the desperate shootout in that range cabin. But the players give us a sense of the stakes, even as they pause — at one point — to play checkers.

The script’s parameters are agreeably narrow, but Hellman’s ability to direct and edit into this a sense of urgency leaves a lot to be desired.

What’s fascinating is Nicholson’s reach for a kind of “True Grit” era authenticity in the speech, the slang and the nature of conversations amongst a trio of itenerant cowpokes. Wes remarks, when they stop to take hostages, a meal and hopefully horses, how laid back they’re being about their getaway.

“This is the ‘less work I done on a weekday since I was 4, ‘less’ I was sick.”

Cameron Mitchell, who’d go on to TV stardom via “The High Chaparral” a year later, notes how every crossroads, village and full fledged town in the West has a “Gold Nugget” saloon or hotel or what have you, “every place between here and Rosa’s Cantina,” a nod to Marty Robbins’ 1959 Country & Western hit, “El Paso.”

Stanton is all costume and stubble and screen presence. And the still boyish Nicholson, who’d take a few more stabs at the genre after becoming famous, looks as at home in the saddle and the sagebrush here as he’d later look in shades, sitting courtside at Lakers’ games or in the front row of the Oscars.

I’m still no Monte Hellman fan. But Nicholson, in front of and behind the camera, makes at least two of Hellman’s films intriguing sidetracks for any film buff who considers him-or-herself a Jack completist.

Rating: G, violence

Cast: Cameron Mitchell, Jack Nicholson, Millie Perkins, George Mitchell, Rupert Crosse, Katherine Squire and (Harry) Dean Stanton

Credits: Direted by Monte Hellman, scripted by Jack Nicholson. A Continental Distributing release, streaming on Shout! Factory, Roku TV, Youtube, Amazon, etc.

Running time: 1:22

Well, thank God that “Squared Love” romance is settled and done with. Again.

Those crazy lovebirds, teacher Monika (Adrianna Chlebicka) and high-living influencer Enzo (Mateusz Banasiuk) have had not one but TWO Polish rom-coms to fall hard and tie the knot. And yet here we are again.

How DID they manage to avoid the altar this long?

“Sometimes life has other plans for you,” we learn, in voice over under a parade of botched Big Proposal moments.

The third film — “Squared Love: Everlasting” — is a tad exhausted and a bit of “deja vu all over again,” but at least the “obstacles” to true love are more interesting this time out.

Monika’s about to take over as principal at her elementary school. Enzo’s social media presence is maturing.

Now yes NOW the time is FINALLY right to tie the knot. No, they haven’t worked out that whole “I want a son!”/”I’m not ready to start a family” thing. But surely the stars are aligning…

Except for some problems with Enzo’s birth certificate, which will require him and his brother Andrejz (Krzysztof Czeczot) to revisit Uncle Wiktor, the parish priest in their hometown, and a guy who keeps score and kept receipts.

Enzo has “unfinished business,” he is told. It involves something he did to Ewa (Eva), one of his exes.

Ah, but which Ewa? This one, or that one (met in a montage)? When he finally finds the “right” Ewa (Ina Sobala), the complications grow more complicated. She’s an impulsive, flaky artist and single-mom. Might the little boy be Enzo’s?

In a flash, Ewa has taken over his schedule, derailed his wedding plans and imposed fatherhood on Enzo, with poor Monika facing sabotage in her new job from the jerk principal who just retired, with no support from the baffled and overwhelmed Enzo.

Meanwhile, Monika’s garage-owning Dad (Miroslaw Baka) is finding that courting a wealthy widow isn’t easy when her greedy adult son is involved.

Sobala’s Ewa has a hint of manic-pixie-dream-girl about her, a 30something dervish of irritating impositions, bad decisions, bad mothering, use and throw-herself-at-Enzo irritations.

The messiness piling onto the plot here doesn’t add up to much amusing, just fresh challenges for the drifting-apart couple to try and cope with (in Polish with subtitles, or dubbed into English).

I laughed once, at a church scene, when an organist forced to fill time before a ceremony starts turning to the Scott Joplin songbook.

For just a couple of bars, he is “The Entertainer.”

As for the movie? It’s no better or worse than the first two films, PG-rated pablum at best, a pointless time-suck at worst.

Rating: TV-14

Cast: Adrianna Chlebicka, Mateusz Banasiuk, Ina Sobala and Miroslaw Baka

Credits: Directed by Filip Zylber, scripted by Natalia Matuszek and Wiktor Piatkowski. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:42

Elham was beaten, almost to death, by her abusive husband. When she gets out of the hospital, the only place she feels at peace — normal — is in the sea, swimming. As the daughter of a famous freestyle wrestler, she’s an athlete with great stamina and endurance, and if she swims long enough, she loses herself in the watery moment.

But Elham lives in Iran, and “in an Islamic country, women don’t swim.” And yet, she persists.

“Orca” is a tale of one woman’s resistance to a violently cruel patriarchy, and that patriarchy’s fiercest defender — an officious female martinet appointed head of Iranian women’s athletics. Beautifully shot and well-acted, with Taraneh Alidoosti (“The Salesman”) as Elham and a marveloulsly villainous Mahtab Keramati (“Staging”) as her governmental tormentor, Nazar Abadi, this “true story” is banned in Iran, which might be its best endorsement.

The opening scenes show the frantic efforts to save Elham’s life after the worst beating of a marriage that ends with divorce and an apparently short prison sentence for her never-seen husband. Her mother (Armik Gharabian) suspected, but her ex-wrestler father (Arash Aghabeik) never knew.

Elham struggles with the trauma, and even attempts suicide. But that attempt takes her into the sea, and heavy, elaborate swimming costume or not, she is at home there. She finds her purpose in endurance/distance swimming. She could set records.

But that officious showboat Nazar Abadi, the one we see hosting press conferences unveiling Iran’s many Muslim-modest uniforms for its female athletes, is more than happy to shut that ambition down.

She is the one to dismiss Elham with a curt “in an Islamic country, women don’t swim” (in Persian with subtitles).

“Orca” is about Elham’s years-long struggle to find a work-around, find allies in a repressive state with sexist, violent religious/cultural enforcers of male dominance, The Revolutionary Guards, intolerant goons are willing to call Elham every dirty name in the book, to hurt her and threaten her life if she doesn’t abandon her quest.

In a beach town, she finds a friend in the motherly hotel proprietor (Mahtab Nasirpour) and a spirit animal that might be her inspiration — the Orca. In a flowing, full-body-covering black and white costume mimicking the orca’s coloring, she will swim and batter herself against an intractible theocracy.

Director Sahar Mosayebi (“Platform”) gives this saga, scripted by Tala Motazedi, a stately pace that allows room for Elham’s underwater reveries. The script gives us vivid villains — The Revolutionary Guards try to drown Elham as she swims far offshore — she makes her attempts in the Caspian Sea and the Persian Gulf — and stubborn, plucky allies.

While we don’t see Elham as a devoutly religious woman, the film provides overwhelming evidence that she was always a reasonable one, seeking permission, offering compromises and solutions, polite until she’s finally had enough.

The character and Alidoosti’s moving performance of her make Elham a metaphor for EveryWoman’s struggle in a country hellbent on controlling and repressing women, where even a moment of triumph can be denied by another woman, who uses controlling Elham to express the power of fanatical, all-powerful state.

“Orca” may be a variation on the classic “succeed against the odds” sports drama formula. But Alidoosti, Keramati, Mosayebi and Motazedi leave no doubt what the stakes of “winning” are here. They should wear their “banned in Iran” badge with pride.

Rating: unrated, graphic violence

Cast:Taraneh Alidoosti, Mahtab Keramati, Ayoub Afshar, Mahtab Nasirpour and Arash Aghabeik

Credits: Directed by Sahar Mosayebi, scripted by Tala Motazedi, A Blue Fox release.

Running time: 1:47

“Showdown in Yesteryear” is an exceptionally-pokey indie Old West fantasy about an aged John Wayne-worshipping stable boy who finds himself transported back to @1880, Dogwood Pass.

It’s ambitious enough, making use of an Ohio “Old West” town attraction, but clumsily slow, formulaically-obvious and amateurishly-acted, with many of the players performers from that attraction — apparently.

Darryl (Jeff Grennell) is a just-lost-his-gal (Michelle Snyder), just-laid-off hand at Steve Callahan’s (Mike Montgomery) ranch hand who never finishes that noose he’s a’tyin’ when he spies this old doorway in the middle of a pasture. He walks through it, and danged if he isn’t in Dogwood Pass, sometime after “Dr. Bell” invented the telephone.

It takes him a while to figure out he hasn’t stumbled into a theme park, to see a man gunned down by a no-good hombre (Jesse Marciniak) in a poker game dispute, to intervene and keep “The Beast” from shooting anybody else.

It takes the sheriff (Steve Graf) a while to figure out this fellow calling himself John Wayne or just “Duke” has a laminated driver’s licence with the name “Daryl Dumwoody” on it, that he’s got this cell phone in his pocket “from the FUTURE,” he insists.

“No service.”

Daryl may frantically hunt for “the door” because “I don’t belong here,” but we know he’s going to kit himself out in gunfighter-gear, court the shopkeeper (Debra Lamb) and start manning up to the troubles facing this town, thanks to its murderous Boss Orson (Vernon Wells).

Director Aaron Bratcher (“Pawn’s Volition”) takes forever to get this picture underway, wasting scene after scene with drone shots establishing the windmill-covered “modern” West, never letting a single shot of Daryl’s first tumble on his first-ever horseback-riding lesson suffice when he can cover it from three angles.

Once we finally get to the Old West, “Showdown” slips straight into “stranger in town sets things right” formula, and becomes more of an actor’s picture. And no, that doesn’t improve matters.

Rating: unrated, violence, some profanity

Cast: Jeff Grennell, Vernon Wells, Debra Lamb, Jesse Marciniak, Steve Graff, Michelle Snyder and Mike Montgomery.

Credits: Directed by Aaron Bratcher, scripted by Gregory Lamberson. A Lion Heart release.

Running time: 1:53

An assassin-for-hire tale from the Great Fincher?

Michael Fassbender, Tilda Swinton, Charles Parnell and Arliss Howard star in this assassin-fears-assassination mystery thriller. It reunites Fincher with his “Se7en” screenwriter Alexander Kevin Walker.

October theatrical release, Nov on Netflix.

Screen adaptations of popular Broadway comedies were all the rage during the ’60s, as the cinema struggled to figure out what to do to break the grip of TV. Most of them, even the hits (Neil Simon’s shows), aren’t aging well, because they can’t all be “The Odd Couple.”

Several things work against “Enter Laughing,” the film of the Joseph Stein play based on comic icon Carl Reiner’s semi-autobiographical novel. It’s a clunky coming-of-age-in-show-biz comedy and a period piece to boot. It’s New York 1930s shticky, with characters dipthonging their way into being labeled “types.”

Every time future Oscar nominee Jack Gilford opens his mouth, playing a lower East Side machine shop owner and our hero’s employer, the line’s a groaner.

“Listen to me, David, don’t get mixed up with girls yet,” he says. Only it’s “goy-ellls,” not “girls.” “David, what you do after work is your own business. But, here, in the shop, you have to act like a person with no tuxedo and no fake mustache. Here I don’t need no Greta Garbo.” Only it’s “poy-son,” not “person.”

The role and the performance are throwbacks to the ethnic comedy just then passing from the scene, and it and a couple of other roles dates this long, drag of a comedy like you wouldn’t believe.

Reiner, coming off the triumph of his TV creation, “The Dick Van Dyke Show” and his terrific turn in “The Russians are Coming, The Russian are Coming,” was taking his first stab at directing a movie. He’d get better. “Oh God!” he’d get better — “All of Me,” “Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid” and “The Jerk” better.

And screen newcomer Reni Santoni, replacing Tony winner Alan Arkin who starred as the lead, young actor-wannabe David Kolowitz, on Broadway, would get better — much better. Santoni’s long career included a memorably hilarious (and Italian ethnic) turn as Popi on “Seinfeld.”

David vamps in front of the mirror and is always trotting out impersonations of his favorite screen stars — Ronald Colman, in particular. He’s consigned to work as an assistant in Mr. Foreman’s machine shop, cleaning up, making deliveries. His mother (two-time Oscar winner Shelley Winters, she who brays) and father (David Opasoshu) dream of saving up enough to send him to pharmacy school.

But David tells his girl (Janet Margolin), the fetching clerk at the milliners (Nancy Kovack) whom he flirts with, and his pal from a shoe shop in the same building as the machine shop (Michael J. Pollard, a grinning but puzzling fixture in films of that era) about his dreams of becoming an actor.

He’s never done it. He has little idea of how he’d do it. But he’s in love with “doing something” with “everybody watching you.”

A local theatre company’s classified ad gives him hope, an open audition. His friends egg him on, his boss he begs, his parents he doesn’t tell.

David has no experience and little obvious talent, which makes the grand old man of the theatre, Harrison Marlowe (Oscar winner José Ferrer.) grimace. Repeatedly. But his daughter, the leading lady (the Oscar -nominated comic writer, director and actress Elaine May) wants to pick her leading man — somebody she wouldn’t mind kissing, at length, night after night. And she picks the tall young hunk.

The catch? It’s a “paid” apprenticeship. David has to pay a weekly fee to this free Depression Era theatre company for the privilege of being in their show.

He can’t act, but the grandiloquent Marlowe bellows “The only way to learn to act is to ACT.”

He can’t afford the tuxedo he must own for his costume. He’s begging friends for money, lying to his boss for “prayer shawl for my father’s birthday” cash, struggling to learn his lines and suffering the insults of his director in the one rehearsal he actually gets through, all pointing to an opening night sure to be — um — memorable.

As weary as the “types” trotted out here were, even 50 years ago, one thing that truly trips this production up is the pacing. Only Ferrer and Winters give the banter the snap it needs to come off, and Don Rickles’ angry-antic turn as the milliner who employs the vivacious blonde David lusts after single-handedly picks up the pace. May vamps (not a natural role for her) and gets by. But even as Santini grows into the part and picks up his personal pace, Reiner can’t get out of his own material’s way. I’ve seen more urgency in funeral processions than we’re treated to here.

Looking back on it now, we’re forced to compare “Enter Laughing” to the “making of a stage debacle” shows that bettered this one, most famously “Noises Off.”As stage comedy rediscovered the Door Slamming Farce, such enterprises got on their feet and sprinted by. That crept into coming-of-age-in-showbiz period pieces like “My Favorite Year” on the big screen.

I seem to recall seeing “Enter Laughing” in a local or regional theatre production somewhere and staring at my watch the whole time. The story’s not all that interesting, and the same could be said for most of the characters.

Different era, faster pace. If this film didn’t seem stodgy and old-fashioned when it was new, that’s only because it came out just before the cinema’s late-60s/early ’70s reinvention.

Classic film buffs may get a kick out of Ferrer’s larger-than-life cliche and May’s naive turn as an “I wanna be a man-eater, I think” stage star. But there isn’t much else here that causes “laughing.”

Rating: “approved,” PGish

Cast: Reni Santoni, Shelley Winters, Jack Gilford, David Opatoshu, Michael J. Pollard, Don Rickles, Janet Margolin, Nancy Kovack, Elaine May and José Ferrer.

Credits: Directed by Carl Reiner, scripted by Joseph Stein and Carl Reiner, adapted from Stein’s plays baseed on Reiner’s novel. A Columbia release. 52

Running time: 1:52