Movie Nation

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

The setting is unfamiliar, the language spoken is Arabic, the violence unexpected and the plot — “Who is framing me for the famous man they had shot in my rideshare?” well-worn.

The slick, confusing and yet somehow familiar Egyptian thriller “30. March” forces the Western viewer to engage it in one’s own film comfort zone — genre. It’s a “clear my name” or “Could I really have done this?” thriller with a disorienting lack of sure-footing.

Is the “hero” really a “villain?” What on Earth could he do for a living that allowed him to become reclusive, with a nice apartment, an ex and a child, a shrink, a hot-to-trot neighbor warm for his form and a lawyer-protector pal?

Because this rideshare thing he does at night (driving while wearing sunglasses) wouldn’t cover his expenses. But that’s how the well-known virologist/TV pundit (!?) Naeyr happens to be in Ali’s back seat when the motorcycle assassins ride up and pop him.

Ali (Hameed Al Madani) voice-over narrates “my life as a dream,” giving us and his distracted psychotherapist (Injy Al Moqaddem) a cursory overview of his problems (“You need to go back into rehab.”) up to the point where he has to go on the lam.

Because that murdered guy in his back seat? He was famous. Ali’s a little too experienced at dumping the body to be wholly innocent. And he’s a bit too hazy on his command of reality to be sure he didn’t do it.

Oh, and that body? It won’t stay “dumped.” It turns up in his apartment after Ali’s slept the previous night off. Between that and the murder weapon, the fact that the cops were tipped and he’s immediately arrested, only to violently make his getaway from a hospital, suggests Ali was an easy patsy to pin this on, and is known as a man of violence.

That doesn’t keep sexy neighbor Hanan (Dina El Sherbiny) from lustily, eagerly and ditzily trying to help him, or lawyer-friend Abel (Hamad Almutaani) from hiding him.

As Ali acquires shiny pistols, digs for clues and meets shadier and shadier figures, Ali wonders just how he got mixed up in something so big and so dangerous with so very many people out to get him.

Hard living?

There’s a slick, soapy sheen to director Ahmed Khaled’s film of this not-quite-exhausting script. Mysteries commonly use the voice-over interior monologue crutch, but rarely as cryptic-to-the-point-of-obtusely as screenwriter Hameed Al Madani does.

“We ran to our fates” to “an enemy I didn’t know” may be poetic. But it doesn’t advance the plot or give the viewer nearly enough to go on just to keep up.

The conventions of the genre may be familiar — tracking the dead man’s contacts, rebuilding the hero’s last night via cell phone clues, impromptu interrogations and a torn up ID card. But the directions taken and tips picked-up are confusing.

As is Ali himself. Introspective, brooding, smart and seeing a psychotherapist, he hurts people, holds others hostage (a little girl at knifepoint) and has no compunction about resorting to threats and violence. He seems pitiless.

Who is this guy, a better-looking Tony Soprano?

“30. March” — yes, the date has a significance to the plot — no doubt makes more sense to Egyptian audiences and Arabic speakers (subtitles often miss nuances). I found myself lost early on, only occasionally getting firm footing and only then on genre conventions that are sometimes clumsily used, misused or abused here.

This “Around the World with Netflix” outing doesn’t even give us a firm enough sense of place to ground us with the allure of the exotic. If it weren’t for the provocatively dressed women and soap operatic sexiness of it all, you’d never guess this plainly-Arab-world-set mystery was taking place in Egypt.

It could take place anywhere the drinks are strong, the women beautiful, the guns easily acquired and the shrinks sit at their desk and roll-their-own while you’re pouring your deepest insecurities out to them at the psychiatrist’s going rate.

Rating: TV-MA, violence

Cast:
Hameed Al Madani, Dina El Sherbiny, Hamad Almutaani, Nada Musa, Asma Abul-Yaziz

Credits: Directed by Ahmed Khaled, scripted by Hameed Al Madani. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:39

The viewing event of the spring isn’t some streaming series on Hulu, Amazon, Disney or Netflix. It’s a an eye-popping motion picture event that demands to be seen in a cinema, preferably IMAX, to get the full overwhelming and immersive effect.

It doesn’t bear a Marvel or DC brand. The heroes don’t wear capes, Spandex, Spanx or bustierres. This cerebral science fiction keeps the effects mostly analog — stunt performers, wirework, frenetic action editing. No CGI superheroes and supervillains brawling in colorful, incoherent digital blurs.

“Everything Everywhere All at Once” is the truth-in-advertising title, a trippy science-and-the-supernatural tale told in eye-candy strokes by the filmmakers who brought us “The Swiss Army Man.” A MOVIE movie with a genuine “beginning, middle and end” in the Age of open-ended, cliff-hangered “Content,” it’s something to see, I tell you what.

Kafkaesque, a “Matrix” adrift in the “Spiderverse,” a hint of “Brazil” at its most “Buckeroo Banzai,” with the whimsy of “Being John Malkovich” and the some of the pathos of “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” “Everything” is a self-mocking/self-aware dive into the “multiverses.” That’s the scientific sidebar that has enraptured comic books writers and fans and science fiction on the page and on the screen for decades.

And if its a jumble at times, a deluge of images and exposition blending science and pseudoscience, at least it’ll shut up those Tweeters and Instabraggers tempted to slap “Living my best life” on whatever indulgences they share with the social mediascape.

Because as this movie asks — “Seriously, how can you know?”

“Crouching Tiger” star, Bond film veteran and “Crazy Rich Asian” alumna Michelle Yeoh stars as Evelyn Wang, a Chinese expat joylessly overwhelmed by her joyless life, married to relentlessly upbeat but plainly unhappy Waymond (former “Goonies/Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” child star Ke Huy Quan).

She can’t help but notice he has a divorce decree in hand.

Even the “Joy” in her life, the daughter bearing that name, is miserable and a source of her mother’s misery. She is aimless and gay, something Mom can’t bear to explain to her father (legendary character player James Hong), who has just moved in with them.

Their Simi Valley (California) laundromat is cluttered, dumpy and broke. And this heartless IRS auditor (Jamie Lee Curtis) is on their case. No use playing the language barrier “confused” card, immigrants. Pay up, clean up the possible fraud on your return or they’ll seize the laundry.

As unfriendly and bitter as Evelyn is, she considers their regular customers “friends” if not family, and tries to get the woman she only knows (in Mandarin, with English subtitles) as “Big Nose” (Jenny Slate) and others to join them for a Chinese New Year party. No, that karaoke machine they bought isn’t now deductible.

Buried under all this disorganized paperwork, getting her head bitten off by the IRS harridan and her father’s “No English” meddling is a helluva time for her might-be-ex-soon spouse to say “I’m not your husband,” to tell her she’s not the only “Evelyn,” and inform her that, multiversally speaking, “You’re living your worst life.”

Oh, and there’s this multiverse villain hunting for her the way this “version” of her husband is. He hopes she’s a fighter and can fulfill that “our last hope” promise. The evil Jobu Tobacke looks like daughter Joy. That’s by design. Jobu wants Evelyn dispatched.

Evelyn must pop in green bluetooth buds (instead of “Matrix” shades), master “verse jumping,” with one particular version of her husband as her guide. And she must fight Jobu Tobacke and her minions with everything she’s got, and every skill she picks up from her verse-jumping into Evelyn as Japanese steakhouse chef, Evelyn as maid to a BDSM aficionado, Evelyn as a famous martial arts star, etc.

The action beats are epic brawls, all the more amazing when you consider that basically all of these take place within the low-rise/high-rise where the Simi Valley IRS offices are located.

The filmmakers’ self-awareness comes from Easter Eggs and overt homages to “2001,” “Ratatouille” and “Guardians of the Galaxy” and the like. Co-writer/directors Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert give themselves the license to set their tale in a stereotypical “Chinese laundry” whose co-owner makes “Big Nose” cracks about a Jewish customer.

All this “chaos” can be confusing, even for those taking notes. But “chaos” is the very point of it all.

“This is CRAZY.” “You’re starting to GET it!”

And for all its attempts at delivering a heartfelt message, the finale is more something that unravels than resolves.

But “Everything Everywhere All at Once” is still something to see, something that demands to be seen in a cinema, mouth agape at the wonders playing out on the huge wall — the bigger the IMAX the better — in front of you.

Rating: R for some violence, sexual material and language

Cast: Michelle Yeoh, Stephanie Hsu, Ke Huy Quan, Jamie Lee Curtis, Jenny Slate and James Hong.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert. An A24 release.

Running time: 2:12

Documentaries are a great way of getting a quick summary of the history of this or that corner of the culture, subcultures we know little about.

“Girls Can’t Surf” has that going for it, and if we’re not careful, we might learn something come April 19 when this movie streams and goes on sale on DVD.