Movie Nation

He’s the teaser advert video revealing the theme, the vibe and the ’70s music (of course) that makes it “Guardians” branded.

C’mon. You’ve gotta visit Disney World before Governor Il Douche shuts it down.

Fresh out of college, I used to conduct and produce interviews for public radio stations. And one thing one quickly picks up on from such a job is an instinctual skepticism when chatting up say, the head of MUFON, the Mutual UFO Network of “researchers” and enthusiasts (located in Lincolnton, N.C., at the time) or a North Dakota Native American college professor and his son who talk about being abducted by aliens.

One has to be on guard against the logical fallacies people use to make cases for something that lacks concrete proof, and yet has thrived in Conspiracy-minded America for the better part of a century. Because the last thing you want to come off as is a gullible rube.

Such worries never seem to cross the brow of “investigators” and co-hosts of these “On the Trail of UFOs” documentaries, Shannon Legro and Seth Breedlove. They take in every bit of hearsay, some of it backed up by under-credentialed “experts” with the authoritative “many people say” or “there’ve been reports” when describing “hollowed out mountain” UFO or “top secret government bases” where the “black helicopters” hide.

In “Night Visitors,” they speak with “experts” whose idea of “well-documented” isn’t backed up by any source they cite. The filmmakers blend in animated recreations of UFO “visits” and “events” with grainy footage of lights in the night sky purportedly captured by eyewitnesses, without distinguishing between the two or even making note of which is which.

Perhaps they had copyright issues dealing with such material, and if they’d spent the cash they blew on a slick, sci-fi “truth is out there” score, this wouldn’t have been a problem.

And that’s shame, because the thing is, someone or something is mutilating livestock and apparently has made it a habit of hitting this small King family cattle ranch in the San Luis Valley of Colorado repeatedly over the years. There’s been a lot of reporting on such incidents, with explanations, as Legro and folks she interviews here claim, ranging from occult rituals to “government experiments” to aliens.

Even taking into account the range of much more logical and plausible reasons — animal attacks to neighbors’ revenge, gruesome farm country pranks to insurance fraud — we still don’t know what’s happening. And the waters have been so muddied by the unsubstantiated and unsubstantiable that the Wikipedia page on the topic is a self-admitted “fringe theories” mess.

“Night Visitors” lapses into humorless/charmless self-parody as the “experts” are limited to fellow true believers in the “high strangeness” of this corner of Colorado, a place that Breedlove and Legro compare to their West Virginia “investigations” of “cryptids” like the Mothman, in earlier films.

I hesitate to toss the label “charlatans” at these two Youtube-ready amateurs. But in never seeking genuine, credentialed academic experts who might offer real pushback to their “far out” or “farther out” solutions to mysteries, by never expressing any skepticism at that what they’re being told is just self-aggrandizing causal fallacies delivered by “fake” authorities, they are, at best, “gullible rubes” selling cow patty theories of cattle mutilations to other gullible rubes.

And where’s that all end up? In a DC pizza parlor, where the suckers seek the nexus of a Big Conspiracy fomented by obvious con artists and hustlers who have preyed on the naive and dull witted since time immemorial.

It’s all harmless “X-Files” fun until people get hurt, a treasonous con artist hustles the suckers into electing him and reality reveals just how poor at parsing fact-from-BS you have to be to consider snake oil salesmen “authorities” on anything. “Critical thinking” never figures into it. Any of it.

There’s a reason learning how to identify fallacious arguments is called “healthy skepticism.” It’s healthy, and it’ll make you demand proof from obvious frauds who have no interest or ability providing that.

Rating: unrated, some graphic cattle mutilation imagery

Cast: Shannon Legro, Seth Breedlove, others

Credits: Scripted and directed by Seth Breedlove. A 1091 release.

Running time: 1:21

An American Japanophile’s deep dive into the Tokyo underworld becomes an entertaining and intriguing mob mystery in “Tokyo Vice,” a new series on HBO Max starring Ansel Elgort, Ken Watanabe and Rinko Kikuchi.

It’s immersive and engrossing, if more conventional than you might expect. “Heat,” “Last of the Mohicans” and “Collateral” filmmaker Michael Mann directed the pilot, which has just enough design, style and panache to remind us that he brought “Miami Vice” to TV much earlier in his career. He sets the tone for the show — more procedural than flash — start to finish.

Set in 1999, we get a taste of Japanese mob rituals and a peek inside the workings of one of the world’s largest newspapers, here named Meicho Shimbun (if the subtitling is correct) but based on Mainichi Shimbun. The series touches on Japanese acceptance of authority, always publishing the “official” police version of every crime.

“There are no murders in Japan” may sound Orwellian, but that’s the way stabbings, shootings and such are reported. Not until the cops call it a “murder” is it so identified. So that slashed up fellow with the knife sticking out of his last and terminal wound will have to wait.

Japanese sexism, racism, xenophobia and mania for boy bands (It’s peak Backstreet Boys era Tokyo.) is touched on.

Just getting a job at the newspaper, which has “never hired a gaijin” (foreigner) requires taking an exhaustive test with maybe a hundred other aspirants.

Everybody smokes, and the new kid is informed that’s something he’ll be taking up soon enough, if he ever learns to hack it as a hack at a 12 million reader newspaper.

And everywhere, there are the teeming masses — from the huge, orderly, deferential and ever-so-polite “scrum” at every police press conference, to the streets and lurid, plush designer nightclubs where the hostesses ply their trade.

The story is told from five points of view. Jake Adelstein (Elgort) — the series is based on his memoir — is the “gaijin” who came to teach English and understand the culture, but whose background pushes him into work where learning about Japanese policing, its underworld and night life culture is crucial to the job. This world is “explained” to him and the viewer — but not OVER-explained — as he experiences it.

Samantha (Rachel Keller) is the “hostess” “bottle girl” playing her own angles, scrambling to make some cash, keeping her own secrets. Tokyo Police detective/family man Katagiri (Watanabe) is a veteran cop straining at the “just keeping the peace/just close-the-case” police work that rarely digs deep enough to get at real criminals or the true “Why?” of crimes. Emi (Rinko Kichuchi of “Pacific Rim” and “Babel” is Jake’s editor, the one who keeps his racist and seemingly anti-Semitic section editor from firing this “half Jew/half-ape” on general principles, if not just cause.

The American, a University of Missouri product (home to a prestigious journalism school), isn’t quick to pick up on the “rules” for news coverage and the strict formula such stories stick to is this gigantic newspaper.

And Sato (Shô Kasamatsu) is a young yakuza, tested, teased and tormented by his mob, a guy whose life intersects with Jake’s and Samantha’s in ways both menacing and potentially helpful.

Everyone has personal tests and slippery ethics about what is the truth. Everyone has secrets they’d like to keep, that they’re afraid of or running away from.

Elgort has made the most of his years being cast as “callow youth,” and this mop-topped fish-out-of-water is a good fit — arrogant, happy to surprise the various Japanese he meets by knowing their language (not that any of them take this revelation well), but sloppy and easily misled by a would-be mentor or yakuza or cop who needs a favor.

Watanabe, a mainstay of Japanese, Asian and Hollywood cinema since the ’80s classic “Tampopo,” classes up the series and lends it gravitas and toughness. And he’s just the headliner among a supporting cast of faces long familiar in Japanese cinema.

The high-stakes intrigues here are fascinating, if somewhat back-burnered. Such series are built on cliff-hangers, which keep us coming back for the next installment. The cliffhangers here aren’t dazzlers.

But the milieu will be lure enough to anyone curious about this Westernized but still exotic culture, its cuisine, tattooed gangsters, accommodating cops and seemingly meek, don’t-rock-the-boat press.

Rating: TV-MA, bloody violence, sex, nudity, smoking, profanity

Cast: Ansel Elgort, Ken Watanabe, Rachel Keller, Shô Kasamatsu, Ella Rumph and Rinko Kikuchi.

Credits: Created by J.T. Rogers, based on Jake Edelstein’s memoir. An HBO Max release.

Running time: 10 episodes @ :58 minutes each.

The review embargo for this HBO Max series about an American reporter covering the Japanese mob for a Japanese newspaper is Monday afternoon.

But before one writes the review of Ansel Elgort’s series set in the Japanese underworld, one must immerse oneself in it. Half a dozen episodes, each an hour long.

I don’t review a lot of series, as they’re time consuming, and reviews of series have an extremely limited shelf life, as in nobody reads them a month after they’ve been published.

But I love mob movies, love Japanese films, love Japanese mob movies.

So Sunday is “Tokyo Vice” day. Michael Mann directed the series premiere, and here we go.

A Cold War drama set in a Czechoslovakian seminary just after the Russo-Warsaw Pact invasion of the country is today’s DVD dropoff.

“Servants” is, of course, a good one, a winner from our friends at Film Movement

MovieNation, spreading fine cinema, like Roger Appleseed, to public libraries far and wide.

Happy viewing, South Boston, Va. I dare some patrons here in the rural South needed to be reminded why the Russians are our ancient ideological enemies. Lot of Faux News cultists here in the Bosom of the Lord and the Heart of Tobaccoland. I know. I grew up here.

Try to forget Neil Maskell’s turn as a young Winston Churchill on TV’s “Peaky Blinders.” Put Winston out of your mind.

As “Bull,” every time the hulking Maskell enters a room people look alarmed. Shocked even. And nobody’s ever glad to see him.

‘Allo, Cheryl,” he says to his ex in the film’s opening scene. She’s crying, slack-jawed, at the sight of her current husband, duct-taped from head to foot in his easy chair. She barely has time to process this and dodge Bull’s query about someone else’s whereabouts, when he pitilessly and purposefully pokes that taped-face husband in the gut with a knife.

Because there is just one name Bull is dropping other names to track down, and that’s of the son “they” took from him.

“AIDAN!” he bellows at every single victim. They remain a victim only long enough for a flashback to tell us something awful happened years before, a travel trailer fire, a hasty burial in an open field.

These aren’t “victims” Bull is having his way with. They’re co-conspirators. His mission is nailing down what happened to his little boy, and butchering every single SOB who did him wrong, which only partly explains what they’re all so shocked and awed at seeing him.

Writer-director Paul Thomas Williams (the choral dramedy “Unfinished Song” was his) has produced an instant gem of the “vengeance picture” genre, with Maskell a sort of insensate brute bulling through the china shop that once was his life in the underworld.

The story is as jarringly violent as it is overly familiar. He starts on this spree. He’s working his way up to the “boss” (venerable character actor David Hayman). And as he passes through the way-stations of his past, embodied in former colleagues, relatives and acquaintances who are about to become bodies, flashbacks tell us what happened to Bull and show us the lad (Henri Charles) he lost, a loss he’s about to collect on, with interest.

Bull is a magnificently malevolent creation, on the page and in the flesh. He’s got no qualms about getting the drop on this villain or that one, even the one taking his kids to school. Kids are curious, and Bull is just as sweet at describing himself as you’d expect, given the slaughter we’ve already witnessed.

“Ooo’re you,” the children want to know?

“Aye’m the big bad WOLF!”

Williams gives us just enough of this suburban underworld, just a single corrupt cop, the merest hint of the “stuff” this Cockney mob and its branches are into. British underworld pictures are a bracing break from North American ones, largely because the violence is more personal. Fewer guns. We get a hint of why Bull doesn’t use them from the one time he has to acquire a pistol. It’s not at easy as in the U.S.

The best vengeance pictures never experience mission creep. Everybody confronted by this guy is shaking in his or her boots for reasons too obvious at the moment, and more obvious in an unnecessarily twisty finale.

“If you don’t tell me what happened to Aidan, I’m gonna make you EAT that little knife yer’oldin’, mate!”

I wasn’t nuts about the coda here. But even that can’t be faulted as it makes sense, dramatically.

Hayman makes a perfectly logical, absolutely sociopathic crime lord, a man as quick with a sawed-off as Bull is with a fist or blade.

Everybody else? They’re just china, here for Bull to smash through on his way to his ultimate destination — vengeance or death, or both.

Rating: R for strong violence, language throughout and some drug material

Cast: Neil Maskell, Lois Brabin-Blatt, Elizabeth Counsell, Jason Milligan and David Hayman

Credits: Scripted and directed by Paul Andrew Williams. A Saban Films release.

Running time: 1:28

Sometimes, you keep adding photos to top of a review just to avoid having to write it.

Because I’ve been a fan of Judd Apatow, and I just knew his turn towards indulgent, overlong, nepotism-laced “comedies” in recent years wasn’t going to be helped by giving him Netflix money, casting control and final cut.

“The Bubble” is a bad movie about making a bad franchise movie in the middle of the COVID pandemic. Cast and a skeletal crew assemble in a British hotel and assorted green screen soundstages to quarantine, go stir crazy and film “Cliff Beast 6.”

Two hours and six minutes is a lot of screen time to fill with tired Hollywood “types,” off-camera sexcapades or pandemic protocol capade-blocking, dance and lip-sync interludes and a showcase for yet another limited-ceiling Apatow daughter he’d love to turn into a starlet.

No, it doesn’t come off. The entire enterprise feels under-developed and hamstrung, and not just by whatever level of “lockdown” conditions this was filmed under.

The cast — actors played by Keegan-Michael Key, Leslie Mann, Pedro Pascal, David Duchovny, Guz Khan, a new Tik Tok “influencer” (an Apatow daughter) and Karen Gillan, playing a semi-humbled and resented member of the ensemble who left the franchise, briefly — reassemble for another green-screen and special effects extravaganza involving dinosaurs “feeding” on the scorched, climate-changed lower reaches of Mount Everest.

They’ll be tended to by a purring taskmaster producer (Peter Serafinowicz), Mr. “I won Sundance!” indie-now-in-over-his-head director (Fred Armisen), production assistants, a “wellness team” (Samson Kayo and Harry Trevaldwyn) and a tiny hotel staff (Maria Bakalova and Vir Das).

A busted Hollywood marriage (Mann and Duchovny’s characters) is archly, absurdly renewed. He’s a heel who considers himself “the guardian of the franchise,” and is determined to rewrite the script. She’s a ditz who insisted they adopt some 16 year-old who hates them, and whom they left behind in La La Land. One actor’s (Key) trying to start his own “Lifestyle Brand/Motivational System” (religion). One “Oscar winner” (Pascal, a hoot) deftly slings a Latin accent on camera, and does every drug under the sun while off camera, propositioning every “socially distanced” woman in sight.

“Would you like to have sex with me?”

The newcomer tries to keep her social media followers engaged with lip-synced song and dance numbers (“Boss Bitch” by Doja Cat) involving the whole cast. Cute.

It’s a film of broad caricatures of movie “types,” Hollywood “types” and Hollywood parenting. Bakalova, of the last “Borat” movie, plays an Eastern European desk clerk determined to virginally seduce Dieter the Oscar winner (Pascal) as a “pure angel.”

Accidents, “security” issues, walk-offs and fresh quarantines dog this slow-motion disaster-in-the-making, presided over the by rich and tone-deaf ( bouncing from 1 percent resort to resort) studio head, played by Kate McKinnon, whose big screen track record remains unblemished — all dogs.

Back in their “Knocked-Up” days, Apatow and his Ap-Pack invented “best line on the set wins” comedy, but without the contributions of an ensemble of hilarious comics-turned-actors, his films play like a balloon the air’s sputtering out of.

Ideas that somebody like Christopher Guest could have gotten a droll, amusing film out of (the hapless “behind the scenes” videographer) wither on the vine, and even the ironic “Actors are some of the toughest people we know” nonsense explaining how these coddled “cattle” “power through” a troubled shoot with actors getting sick or injured all along the way has no place to go.

But the montages of “stir crazy” quarantine, in which the director gets cast members to use some special skill to dress up mundane moments of isolation, pays off. Gillan’s twerking/pole-dancing lessons pay off, and Mann — Mrs. Apatow — rollerblades her way around the remote resort hotel like the star of an ’80s Dire Straits video.

Mann, a dazzling comic talent who is Madeline Kahn reborn, is always the MVP of the movies she makes with her husband. But that shouldn’t encourage him to keep casting his kids in these comedies. That’s a move that’s fraught with risk, because growing up in the movies and being competent in a part doesn’t translate to charismatic. And some of us are going to call him on this BS.

If you don’t realize at first that he’s cast another of his children here, you might wonder “OK, this character ‘type’ has promise. Why didn’t they get somebody with some spark to play her?”

Netflix quickly developed a reputation for giving blank checks and free rein to filmmakers, some of whom made “Buster Scruggs,” “Roma,” “The Irishman” and “Don’t Look Up” with that money and control. Every one of those films had indulgent flaws that undercut them. Apatow isn’t the first to serve up something that needed outside input, voices of experience and reason pushing back against his indulgences.

Maybe alter those blank check contracts, Netflix. Offer “consulting on final cut” guarantees, so that you can get a slightly-less-awful 90 minute movie out of a flaccid farce like this one. And perhaps a “no nepotism” rider is in order, just to protect filmmakers from their blind spots.

Apatow isn’t doing his films or his kids any favors with that.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, drug abuse, sex, profanity

Cast: Keegan-Michael Key, Leslie Mann, Karen Gillan, Pedro Pascal, David Duchovny, Guz Khan, Fred Armisen, Samson Kayo, Kate McKinnon, Vir Das, Maria Bakalova, Peter Serafinowicz, Maria Bamford, John Cena, Beck and some Apatow daughter or other.

Credits: Directed by Judd Apatow, scripted by Judd Apatow and Pam Brady. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:06

You never think of how integral doors are to a “door-slamming farce” until you run into a screen comedy that leaves them out.

“French Touch,” aka “An Artist with the Ladies” and titled “Coiffeur pour Dames” in its native France, is a screen comedy adapted from a stage play that could have been tailor-made for its star.

The French vaudeville singer and comic Fernandel plays a lowly sheep-shearer who clips his way to hair styling stardom in post-war Paris by giving scalp “massages” that are catnip to the ladies. That points him and us towards a marriage-threatening, client-clinging, teen daughter seducing finale that screams out for something bawdier than the mild-mannered 1950s would allow.

But more importantly, as our anti-hero Mario juggles the wife (Blanchette Brunoy), the many upper class clients and the somewhat smitten 18 year-old daughter of a client (Françoise Soulié) he has massaged his way into, dodging husbands and fathers as he bounces from office to salon to apartment along the way, you miss the doors he should be slamming behind him or getting slammed in his face.

Marius the sheep shearer (Fernandel) has a gift, something the ladies of his village pick up on straight away.

“You’ll go far with those hands!”

Whatever leering accompanied that on the stage, it’s largely brushed past in this not-particularly-bawdy comedy. Because in a few too-quick scenes, we watch Marius work his way from sheep and dressing up horse tails for contests at county fairs, to dog grooming and hair-styling for plastic dolls in Marseilles, where he meets Aline (Brunoy) and talks her into marrying him and following him to Paris as he pursues his dream.

Even in a tiny salon working for somebody else, “Mario” as he now calls himself, becomes famous for “fingers that speak.” To clients, “each hair is a violin string” (in French with English subtitles) for this “virtuoso” of the scissors, shampoo and hair dryer.

He seems destined for glory, and not just for mastering the basics. The hairdresser is “everyone’s confidante and father confessor.” The ladies want his coiffeur adorning their heads and his fingers working their scalps into relaxing release.

“Your profession’s so gay,” one client swoons, in a pre-Stonewall use of the word. Mario is simply irresistible.

The first client to truly cross the line is kept woman Edmonde (Arlette Poirier). She demands that he come to her apartment to prep her for an evening at the theater with her married lover, and they get so carried away that the next thing you know, they’re in bed together.

How he knew to keep a pair of pajamas with him at all times is why he is French and you and I are not.

But it isn’t until Mario clips 20 years off the wife of the kept woman’s paramour that his world changes. He saves Mme Brochard’s (Renée Devillers) marriage, and she sets him up in his own salon. Soon, every posh Parisienne is at his fingertips. Literally.

Naturally, our Icarus flies too close to the sun…or daughter, in this case, Mme. Brochard’s hip teen daughter (Françoise Soulié).

Yes, modern viewers are allowed to say “Ewww” here. Even accounting for the difference in eras, that wasn’t Miss Austen’s Empire waistline England and 18 paired with a stout, grinning hair-dyed fop of his late 40s isn’t played for the big laughs it might have delivered. Not that young Denise seems over the moon about the hairdresser who pines for her.

That goes for much of this Jean Boyer film. Whatever his earlier reputation, this outing seems muted and muzzled, watered down even for its era. He is best-known for his pre-war films, although he worked steadily up until his death in 1965. “Un mauvais garçon,” “Virginie” and “We Go to Monte Carlo” might be his most famous credits, although as a writer and composer, he had a tune on the “Chocolat” soundtrack decades after his passing.

Still, Fernandel is in fine form and the framework of this follicle-friendly farce holds it all together. It’s not a great French sex comedy, even of its era, but it’s well worth checking out, if for nothing else than considering how it might be remade, even today.

A bawdier version where they don’t forget to slam a few doors could still play.

Rating: approved

Cast: Fernandel, Renée Devillers, Françoise Soulié, Blanchette Brunoy and Arlette Poirier 

Credits: Jean Boyer, scripted by Jean Boyer and Serge Weber, adapted from the Paul Armont play. A Times Films release on Tubi, Mubi, Amazon etc.

Running time: 1:27

Some of the best vampire “transitioning” effects ever are wasted on “Morbius,” perhaps the least interesting and certainly the least consequential action picture ever to wear the Marvel badge.

Jared Leto isn’t awful in the title role. But aside from the effects, everything and everyone around him is indifferent and dull and he proves himself once again as more suited to chewy supporting roles than a lead.

Michael Morbius and the rich kid Lucien, whom re-names “Milo,” met in a Greek sanitarium for children of wealth and the rarest of the rare blood diseases, one that requires a transfusion or two every day to keep them alive. Morbius, plainly a genius, is sent away to school where he vows to “find the cure” for them both.

But while we catch up with the adult Michael as he’s refusing his Nobel Prize, probably for inventing artificial blood, he hasn’t yet figured out how to correct the faulty DNA that keeps him and Milo (the least interesting recent “Doctor Who,” Matt Smith) weak and on crutches.

“Bats” might be the answer, and no, he didn’t get that idea from Bruce Wayne. Vampire bats from the Jurassic Park corner of Costa Rica provide the serum that Morbius takes as the first “human trial” on an offshore Panamanian-flagged freighter. That turns out to be bad news for the hired goons/minions on board.

And this is where “Morbius” pretty much goes off the rails.

It’s bad enough that the good doctor’s scientist/colleague (Adria Arjona) doesn’t know how to pronounce “NoBEL” (Director Daniel Espinosa didn’t get another take?), but for evil henchmen, these mercenary minions seem awfully eager to pull the trigger on their supposed meal ticket.

It’s to no avail. Morbius, transformed to something just this side of “sleeping in coffins,” slaughters them and makes his way back to New York, cursed and yet ethical enough to see that nobody else should try this stuff as he enlists Dr. Bancroft (Argjona) to elude the mustachioed FBI agents (Tyrese Gibson, Al Madrigal) on the case.

“These puncture marks, they look like fangs to you?”

And Morbius must also fend off the rich financier of his experiments — “Milo” — hellbent on availing himself of this hellish “cure” he’s paid for.

A hallmark of many of the less enduring or endurable comic book adaptations is their humorlessness, and “Morbius” is a case in point. The best gag (perhaps from the comic book) is the name of the Panamanian freighter, “Murnau,” the director of the first important vampire movie, “Nosferatu,” F.W. Murnau.

Letolocks is not just about the dreamy eyes and Reagan/Elvis dye jobs. He’s has made it his business to build on the “Method” legend of DeNiro and make his body over for roles. Here, he’s hollow-eyed and emaciated as pre-“transformation” Morbius, chiseled and “cut” afterwards. That’s not why this movie sat on a shelf for so long, waiting for him to beef up or starve himself down. It’s a Marvel picture and there was a pandemic going on so there was no sense leaving money on the table by releasing it to empty cinemas.

But I can’t remember a Marvel movie that went to less trouble giving us an “origin story,” that put more effort into tying the tale into this corner of the Marvel “universe,” and that had less going for it.

Sony makes the best arguments “for” the continued existence of endless iterations of Marvel adaptations, and the best arguments “against” them.

Rating: PG-13 for intense sequences of violence, some frightening images, and brief strong language

Cast: Jared Leto, Adria Arjona, Matt Smith, Tyrese Gibson, Al Madrigal and Jared Harris

Credits: Directed by Daniel Espinosa, scripted by Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless, based on the Marvel comic. A Sony/Columbia release.

Running time: 1:44

He single-handedly turned America into an Olympic swimming powerhouse, competing in four Olympiads. And while touring with that Olympic fame, he brought Hawaiian surfing to the world.

There are statues to Duke Kahanamoku in countries where he first dipped a board in the waters of this or that section of coast, and surfers to this day speak in awed reverence about “the father” of “our sport” and lifestyle.

Beach lifeguarding? He pretty much invented that too, on one fateful day in 1925, swimming out into ferocious, trawler-sinking surf in the most publicized beach rescue ever, pulling survivors out of the water onto his board and ferrying them ashore, a “superhuman” feat in 25 foot waves that wasn’t the first of his many rescues, nor the last.

To Hawaiians, he was “the living embodiment of ‘aloha,'” and the island chain’s global ambassador to the world for half a century.

A brown man in the Golden Age of White Supremacy, Duke Kahanamoku integrated sports and cultures, Hollywood and even the racist institutions of his home islands with an all-embracing grace that become another piece of his legacy.

“Waterman” is a grand feel-good remembrance of an epic life, a documentary that could make even non-surfers and “haoles” (non-Hawaiians) swell with tearful pride that the human race ever produced this “bronze god” who walked among us and changed the world.

Isaac Halasima’s film has interviews with descendants, historians and researchers, as well as surfers and surfing historians recalling the Duke’s exploits and influence on everything from Hawaiian tourism to the invention of “extreme sports.” There are recreations of several of these events as well.

The film is framed within a 1950s episode of the famous “This is Your Life” TV biography series, and has radio and TV interviews with Duke dating back to the early 1950s. We see newsreel footage and still shots from Olympics, from his landmark visits to Australia and New Zealand. There’s a generous sampling of his Hollywood film work, where they never let him become a leading man, only to turn his friend, the swimming champion who finally surpassed him in the Olympics, Johnny Weissmuller, into Tarzan, a screen icon of the 1930s and ’40s.

The film begins with a montage of Hawaiian history set to animation, and ends a funeral that brought all of the islands to a halt in mourning. All along the way, we see a new surfboard “shaped,” the old, traditional hand-carved way, from raw lumber to work of art.

And it has Aquaman himself, Hawaiian hunk Jason Momoa, narrating the story of this extraordinary yet humbly-lived life.

A contemporary of Native American Olympian Jim Thorpe, Kahanamoku inspired a “Chariots of Fire” moment of Olympic sportsmanship, and provided more red letter dates for his respective sports than anyone you can name.

Although the film is quite sloppy with dates in its intertitles, it makes a fine introduction to a larger than life figure’s extraordinary public career and is the best argument yet for giving the “the “Big Kahuna” and icon a big screen biography.

Rating: unrated, PG

Cast: Duke Kahanamoku, Johnny Weissmuller, Kelly Slater, Kelia Moniz, Carissa Moore, Laird Hamilton and Ha’a Keaulana, narrated by Jason Momoa.

Credits: Directed by Isaac Halasima, based on the book “Water: The Life and Times of Duke Kahanamoku,” by David Davis.

Running time: 1:32