Movie Nation

An exasperated Monaco developer wants to teach his lazy, insufferable “Spoiled Brats” a lesson by pretending they’ve lost it all in what turns out to be a tepid remake of the Mexican comedy “We Are the Nobles.”

It’s a plot the predates the screwball Hollywood comedies of the ’30s, the idea of the rich being brought low and figuring out they’re not any better than the rest of us by becoming “the rest of us.” Despite scoring a few laughs at the expense of the louche, lazy louts of the Batek clan, the lesson to be taught is watered town, the “teachable moments” a mere string of pulled punches. It feels as if several of the story’s necessary steps have been skipped.

In gambling terms, in trying to switch up this “classic” formula, writer-director Nicholas Cuche left a lot of laughs at the table.

Gérard Jugnot stars as patriarch Francis, one of Monaco’s wealthiest builders. There’s a hint he’s largely self-made, a Polish emigrant who worked his way to riches. But his kids had no such struggle. Aside from losing their mother young, the vain clothes-horse Stella (Camille Lou), free-spending, free-eating Philippe (Artus) and hippy womanizer Alexandre (Louka Meliava) wanted for nothing.

To a one they’re rude, selfish and naive to the way the world works and where the money always comes from.

Dad’s heart-attack scare — over Stella’s shallow pursuit of an Argentine playboy (Tom Leeb), Philippe’s idiotic idea for an app/company that has employees wear and break-in your pricy shoes for you and Alexandre’s bedding of not just the wife of his latest university president, but the man’s daughter as well, and in Francis’s mountainside mansion — should be a wake up call.

Two months later, his scheme goes into motion. Their accounts are locked, the house is raided, the Ferraris and Lambos impounded and the kids whisked away by their father, who admits the “fraud squad” is on his tail.

He takes them to a long-abandoned family villa, tosses their cell phones and says they must lay low until he can straighten all this out. But as none of them have any money and he’d be recognized, even in Marseilles, they’ll have to go out and find jobs.

After a tirade of insults –“Fat ISN’T an insult! “No? Neither is MORON!” — they are sent out into the world, babes in the marketplace, selling their idle lives as “qualifications” for jobs they and no one else feels they deserve.

Portly Philippe winds up pedaling a pedicab. Stella — waited on hand and food her entire life — is taken on as a waitress at a restaurant where side-hustle servant Matthias (Joffrey Verbruggen).

Alexandre?

Well, he sleeps in, declares ” I refuse to let myself be exploited!” (all of this is in French with English subtitles) and tries to live off the land, “to take what nature (freely) gives.” Right.

Dad will stay in and fix up the old house, suggesting “I’ve fed you your entire lives. Now it’s your turn!” Alexandre will eventually join Dad in his re-plastering, re-plumbing and painting project.

Each will learn what it’s like to be on the other end of that indulged master-servant lifestyle to which they’re grown accustomed.

Only they don’t. Not really.

Cuche’s script shortchanges each character, so that Stella’s lesson, the most complete, is barely work an “incomplete” grade. There’s a tiny bit of learning and virtually no struggle.

The “obvious” directions this could have gone — Phillipe pedaling himself into shape, Alexandre contributing to society rather than leeching off it, Stella getting down off her high horse and seeing through her gold-digging fiance, are either discarded as ideas or soft-sold.

There’s precious little that’s funny in any of it as the story takes its big “Let’s do things REALLY different” turn in the third act.

Lou (of several French TV series and the movie “Play”) has the most screen time and most promising character arc. The script lets her down.

The single-named Artus has a few funny moments and the most interesting “his real talent” revelation in Phillippe. But so much of that is skipped over we can’t figure out how exactly he’s managing his “transition.”

It’s all gaudy and glitzy enough, with lovely Monaco scenery — Lamborghinis for all! — as its backdrop.

But our filmmaker seems to have been seduced by all that and forgotten his point, if he ever had one. What fun is taking away the rich’s money if they don’t “learn” from the experience?

Rating: TV-14, sex without nudity

Cast: Gérard Jugnot, Camille Lou, Artus, Louka Meliava, Tom Leeb and François Morel

Credits: Scripted and directed by Nicolas Cuche, based on the Mexican comedy “We Are the Nobles,” director and story by Gary Alazaraki. by A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:35

Generations before Colin Kaepernick took a knee, not all that long after Jackie Robinson retired, and shortly after Althea Gibson broke the color barrier in tennis, Arthur Ashe took to the world’s most famous tennis tourneys, brought his game to Apartheid South Africa and had a hand in inventing what it means to be an Activist Athlete.

The new documentary “Citizen Ashe” reminds us not only in his role in shaping the racial debate in America, but of his own journey, from reserved, private and non-confrontational champion to a quiet, compelling and forceful activist for social justice and well-spoken/outspoken critic of injustice.

Filmmakers Rex Miller and Sam Pollard track that journey through Ashe’s career, when he was repeatedly profiled in the media as “one of the greatest we have ever produced,” as CBS reporter Charles Kuralt put it, a lone Black face in the “white country club, white suited white guys” world of tennis.

The fact that grew up in the Richmond, Virginia and later St. Louis of the 1950s and ’60s, and other Black athletes were speaking out and acting out — at the 1968 Olympics, in the NBA — and Ashe wasn’t got him labeled “an Uncle Tom” by the likes of Kareem Abdul Jabbar. It’s a little shocking to remember the Elder Statesman of American Sport, as Jabbar now is, calling his contemporary “Arthur Ass” for not speaking out in the ’60s and early ’70s.

But as his playing career wound down and opportunities presented themselves to take high profile stands, Ashe collected his thoughts, picked his spots and became everything his critics never expected him to be and more.

Jabbar, one of the most widely-quoted m sports figures on the subject of race and racism in America, is conspicuously absent from “Citizen Ashe.” That points to the film’s narrow focus (not a lot of interview subjects), the privacy of Ashe and lingering grudges (or in Jabbar’s case, embarrassment) held by his contemporaries.

Where “Citizen Ashe” excels is in getting at the essence and the origins of the man’s character. Growing up, as he put it, in “Civil War-obsessed Richmond,” the son of a playground caretaker with the city’s public works department, he learned the game on the now-famous public courts of Virginia’s capital.

He was mentored by Althea Gibson’s coach, Robert Walter Johnson, and attended Johnson’s summer tennis camps in Lynchburg, Va. all through his childhood.

He got his game from Johnson and his discipline from his father, who held a public works job in a segregated city that openly celebrated its role as the Capital of the Confederacy.

Once he got good and started playing tournaments, Ashe faced racism as a teen, both in Richmond and elsewhere as the family relocated to St. Louis to improve his prospects. A lifetime of “first Black man” to do this or that in tennis began as he starred at UCLA, won the first ever U.S. Open (as an amateur), and later titles at the Australian Open and Wimbledon, and became not just the first Black man to play on the U.S. Davis Cup team, he became its first Black team captain, riding John McEnroe’s racket to glory in the ’80s.

He was president of the Association of Tennis Professionals, his sport’s union, in the ’70s, maybe the first hint that “Uncle Tom” wasn’t a fair label.

“Citizen Ashe” is more interested in the Ashe’s activism as his tennis career wound down. But we get a great taste of his game and assessment of his skills from the likes of Donald Dell (his agent), Billie Jean King and others. There’s plenty of interview footage of Ashe explaining the way he rethought his serve and volley style to beat hated rival Jimmy Connors at Wimbledon in 1975, his last burst of tennis glory, an “old man” beating the “punk” on his sport’s grandest stage.

Ashe said of his reluctance to speak out and act out, “That’s not my way.” He was kept clear of the Vietnam War and any compulsion to speak out on that by not being drafted, something his brother Johnnie (seen in the film) attributes to Johnnie’s service, and signing up for a second tour to keep his sibling from being drafted out of the same family.

Ashe’s entre to activism came through South Africa, openly supporting the widening boycotts that pressured the Apartheid regime, agreeing to go there but only on his integrated terms.

He only spoke out about AIDS years after he contracted the disease, and only when the intensely private man was about to be “outed” as having it (he apparently contracted it from a blood transfusion) by a news report. It became another cause, one he worked on until he died, in 1993.

Although “Citizen Ashe” covers the highlights of a life and career that has drifted from the public consciousness in the nearly 30 years since his death, it doesn’t get all that close to its subject. We meet and hear from his wife and brother, a Civil Rights activist friend here, and childhood friend there.

There’s a lot more in-depth information on his Wikipedia page, frankly. Most CNN Films docs have a surface-skimming quality to them.

But the timeliness of the film and the need to remember him seems obvious in “Citizen Ashe.” His statue now stands on Richmond’s famous “Monument Avenue,” which formerly honored a lot of the Old Dominion’s “heroes” of the Confederacy.

The Colin Kaepernicks don’t emerge in a vacuum. They’re a part of a continuum, thanks to the issues they speak out about (or in Kaepernick’s case, release a “statement” or Tweet about) never going completely away thanks to the glacial pace of “progress” in America.

Rating: unrated

Cast: Arthur Ashe, Donald Dell, Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe, Johnnie Ashe, Harry Edwards, Billie Jean King, and John McEnroe

Credits: Directed by Rex Miller and Sam Pollard. A Magnolia/CNN Films release.

Running time: 1:34

It’s more familiar to film buffs than it is to the generation that still watches old TV Westerns on assorted cable, streaming and Grit TV channels. And to us, it’s attained cult status, a “Prisoner” or “Black Adder” but beloved because it gave a career to the filmmaker who’d eventually make “Ride the High Country,” “The Wild Bunch” and “The Getaway.”

“The Westerner” was Sam Peckinpah’s graduation from writing an episode, here and there, for TV series created by and run by others — a “Rifleman” here, several “Gunsmokes” there.

And SOMEbody over at Roku must be a fan. Seems like every month there’s an obscure early Sam Peckinpah film or now, this formative series which put him not just on the screenplay page, but behind the camera, working out the brawny, simple style he’d film with and the violence he’d explore as a theme, a flinty element of the American “Western” character.

The show was rare, even in its day, a half-hour Western drama. Peckinpah learned to pack a lot of information in every shot and use as few set-ups as possible until he got to the generally violent payoffs.

He built the show around an actor he befriended, Brian Keith, and paired the man with a dog damn near as big as he was — Brown. And he populated the supporting cast with grizzled veterans of Western movies and TV — Dub Taylor and Arthur Hunnicutt, Karl Swenson, R.G. Armstrong and John Dehner and John Anderson. Hell, even the dog, “Spike,” was famous. He’d played “Old Yeller.”

The series made Keith better known and gave big boosts to future stars (Robert Culp) and Peckinpah mainstays like Warren Oates (he’s in the series pilot, “Jeff”) and Slim Pickens.

Right from that opening episode, we see Peckinpah pack as much “story” as possible in a long establishing shot, a camera panning over the lowlifes of a remote saloon where Jeff (Diana Millay), a barmaid and singer, is under the thumb of some Brit ex-boxer (Geoffrey Toone).

As the first shot of the series has Dave Blassingame (Keith) fussing at Brown to keep up as he has some “killing” to do, we know what’s coming.

If you want to know where America’s fetishing of firearms comes from, the best place to start is the TV Westerns of the late ’50s and early ’60s — Blassingame’s “inherited” Winchester with a scope stood out even from Chuck Conners’ Wincehster on “The Rifleman” and the shortened “Mare’s Leg” Winchester Steve McQueen’s Josh Randall wore like a pistol on “Wanted: Dead or Alive.”

Before the pilot episode is over, Blassingame’s soft, sentimental side will be laid out as he tries to talk Jeff into leaving with him, his toughness will come to the fore as the boxer beats the daylights out of him before he gets the upper hand on him and a Native American bartender will be killed in a shootout, and pretty much forgotten as Blassingame takes stock of what Jeff has put him and others through by the closing credits.

Every episode is minimalist, archetypal and derivative. Dave tries to “save” a “fallen woman” (“Stagecoach”). Dave comes close to a mob hanging for a murder he didn’t commit (shades of “The Ox-Bow Incident”), Dave is “tested” by the temptation of a prospector’s “Treasure” (reminiscent of “Treasure of the Sierra Madre”) and so on.

Dave is a Western “type” who defies type, a man of uncertain “moral compass” and a lot less predictable. Even the dog sets us up for “Lassie” heroics, leaping through a glass window to “save” Dave, only to be more interested in devouring the villains’ victuals than untying Dave’s hands.

The dog is so big it’s nothing for him to put paws on a table and sample Dave’s drink for him. And he’s so big Dave and others are not all that interested in stopping him.

The violence is plentiful and artfully-staged and filmed, but no more explicit than the standards of the day would allow.

It’s a pity there was only one season of the show. But if it hadn’t ended, Peckinpah wouldn’t have quickly graduated to directing features. He and Keith went off to do Peckinpah’s film directing debut, “The Deadly Companions,” with Maureen O’Hara, the spring after this show was canceled.

As it was, the 13 episodes now on Roku (or Amazon, or other streamers you may prefer) stand like the early short films of Chaplin or Keaton, the formative and instructive (to fans) works of a future master, learning his craft, one three or four-day shoot at a time.

Rating: unrated, pretty violent for a 1960 TV series

Cast: Brian Keith, Warren Oates, Diana Millay, Dub Taylor, Katy Jurado, John Dehner, R.G. Armstrong, John Anderson, Karl Swenson, Slim Pickens.

Credits: Created and mostly-written by Sam Peckinpah, often directed by Sam Peckinpah. Now on Roku TV.

Running time: 13 @:25 minutes each.

The “inciting incident” in the Latvian drama “The Pit (Bedre)” is so chilling that we judge the kid committing it instantly and in the harshest terms. There’s a younger child, a little girl, literally in a pit, and he’s doing a Latvian “eenie, meenie minie moe” about whether he’ll help her get out.

Markus, played by Damir Onackis, is a dead-eyed, soulless monster. He doesn’t speak up when the child’s frantic mother (Inese Kucinska-Lauksteine) bursts in on his grandmother Solveiga’s (Dace Eversa) community choir practice, looking for her missing child.

When he and Grandma are confronted later, after little Emily’s been saved, he doesn’t give away any emotion. And Solveiga seems quick to take offense at the accusation, and quicker to chew out the kid because “I have to LIVE here,” (in Latvian or “Lettish,” with English subtitles).

His whole family is so hands-off in their dealings with him we have just a moment to wonder if he’s some eastern branch of the Children of the Damned. He talks back, screams “I HATE it here” and sees no real repercussions. But he’s living with Grandma for a reason. His artist-father has died. His mother isn’t in the picture, and the 10 year-old from Riga is stuck in a village where everybody knows everybody else’s business.

His family has secrets, and perhaps even a reputation.

Even Markus’s one passion, drawing, gets him labeled. His pictures are “violent” and suggest “a warped mind.”

But fleeing the little girl’s bullying brother one day, he stumbles into an elderly recluse living on the edge of town. Grandma sometimes sends things to “Sailor” (Indra Burkovska) and has Markus deliver them. Once the fear and mutual mistrust abate, the kid sees the stained glass Sailor used to create, and sailor figures out the child is gifted enough to draw faces that could be transformed into windows.

Markus has a secret mentor who teaches him how to cut glass and thread the “lead veins” that hold it together. But the incident in “The Pit” hangs over him and threatens to cut off this one outlet, the one normal thing in his seriously disrupted life.

Director and co-writer Dace Puce (“Manny”) beautifully depicts small town provincialism and the ways families with “history” can be trapped by it, hemmed in by judgmental neighbors, unable to bury the past because they know their neighbors know, and haven’t forgotten.

Markus is portrayed as both a troubled loner and an observer. Whatever the Latvian equivalent of “Little pitchers have big ears” is, that’s him. He knows what others say about him, hears the scheming of little Emily’s mother and feels the blows of Grandma and others’ efforts to shed him.

He catches hints of the abusive, drunken fights mechanic Uncle Roberts (Egons Dombrovskis) has with the cowering wife (Agata Buzek) he wants to have a baby with. The kid wonders what his great Uncle Alberts (Aigars Vilims) is sneaking around behind his son’s back for.

The script serves up many puzzles, including the original inciting incident. It’s a film not so much intent on solving every one, but on showing what all these secrets and all this “history” and psychological baggage does to the sensitive boy, and the myopic ways small towns deal with square pegs, especially those who might be a danger.

The “misunderstood artist” may be a big fat metaphor at the heart of it all, but it is an apt and moving one.

Puce finds fear and a disheartening, misdirected fury in all this, and pathos in its resolution. And she does it in a subtle but provocative drama that may not make the Best International Feature Oscar field, but is still one of the best pictures of 2021.

Cast: Damir Onackis, Indra Burkovska, Dace Eversa, Inese Kucinska-Lauksteine, Agata Buzek and Egons Dombrovskis

Credits: Directed by Dace Puce, scripted by Jana Egle, Monta Gagane, Peteris Rozitis and Dace Puce. A Film Movement+ release (Dec. 17)

Running time: 1:47

Boy, you think you know all the “madcap” Hollywood farces, and then something like 1951’s “Behave Yourself!” pops up, begging to differ.

It’s got Farley Granger (“Strangers on a Train,” “Rope”), cast against type, Shelley Winters playing comedy and every mug in Hollywood in a supporting cast for the ages.

Hans Conreid playing an assassin? William Demarest as a police chief named O’Ryan who calls everybody — not just his fellow Irish cops — “O” this or that?

Sure, Sheldon Leonard, Elisha Cook Jr. and Lon Chaney Jr. were already old hands at playing heavies. But here’s a picture that captures 1950s-70s film and TV’s quintessential nebbish, Marvin Kaplan, as a gangster — a bespectacled bad guy who calls women “goyulls.”

An earlier generation of critic described Granger’s turn, as a hapless fellow mixed-up with mobsters and the cops over a “trained” dog and a mob handover that goes awry, as “a poor-man’s Cary Grant.” Fair enough.

But we can’t call writer-director George Beck “a poor man’s Howard Hawks.” Because Beck only directed one movie, for starters. The direction here shows little flare for doing anything with the camera — the odd funny closeup. The man was making his first feature, working with a lean RKO budget and filming a movie dependent on a trained dog, so cut him some slack.

Beck was a screenwriter for film and later TV, specializing in “story” credits. Movies like Bob Hope’s “Boy, did I Get a Wrong Number!” and the 1930s gangster comedy “Everybody’s Doing It” got their plots from Beck. And while Frank Tarloff got the story credit here, the complexity of a farce with this many moving parts had to have Beck’s input.

This mug (Leonard, the mean barkeep in “It’s a Wonderful Life”) drops off a doggie cage at the Union Station luggage counter. He leaves a note. The dog is “trained.” Walk him on Wilshire Blvd. “and he’ll lead you to your contact.” Cook, in almost every film noir worth seeing (“Maltese Falcon,” etc.) picks the “luggage” up.

But before he and his gang have a chance to figure out how this is supposed to work, the dog takes a liking to the pushover in the next phone booth over. That’s mild-mannered Bill (Granger). The dog follows Bill home.

As it happens to be his anniversary and the voluptuous wife (Winters) and her shrewish mother (Margalo Gillmore) won’t “ever let me forget” forgetting it, Bill lets wife Kate think the adorable Welsh terrier, Archie, is her gift.

Yes, “Archie” is Cary Grant’s real first name. “Coincidence?” No such thing in a screenplay.

Bill finds the dog an irritant and a real Kate-blocker. This is upsetting, as she’s bought a new nighty and “the neckline might be kinda low.”

“You got the furniture for it!” he reassures her. “She’s got the shape the WORLD should be in,” he tells somebody else. The “hubba hubba” is always implied.

Bill looks for a missing dog ad, finds one and tries to figure out a way to give the dog back to the rightful (mob) owner, who insists “My little goyull’s been crying her eyes out.” How can he hand over the dog without losing face and catching hell from the women back home?

He stops by the listed address to try and explain. But one mug has already been knifed by another. As Bill leaves his business card with every person he meets, that’s how he gets hauled off by the cops, led by Demarest’s O’Ryan, who keeps calling him “O’Denny.”

The mistakes and the lies start to pile up as Bill tries to hide his tracks from “my mother-in-law.” This, at least, the cops believe.

“Yeah, I had a coupla those myself.”

The mobsters go to the trouble of getting him a look-alike dog that’ll fool his wife.

“Sex” Conreid’s “Gillie the Knife” asks his boss, Fat Freddy (Francis L. Sullivan)?

“Sex?” the rotund Brit sighs. “Ah, the fires of YOUTH.” Gillie was just asking if they got the right gender for their replacement Archie, pal.

Gillie the Knife, Fat Freddy, Pinky, Shortwave Bert, Pete the Pusher and Max the Umbrella — they just don’t name movie mugs the way they used to.

Granger is in a role that has him manhandled by cops and gangsters, getting upstaged by a dog, fainting at near death experiences and sputtering like a madman to LA’s finest, because Bill’s figured out that dog is “the kiss of death” and that all these bodies turning up where he goes have to be connected to that canine. This is way out of Granger’s comfort zone.

Winters is shrill and manic and in fine, um, “form,” something the leering script and characters repeatedly point out.

And any picture that has Conreid as a comical Cockney killer is going to get my attention, especially one that has him catering to the blustering, bloated Sullivan (“Great Expectations,” “Oliver Twist”) in a bubble bath.

Clocking in at 81 minutes, there’s no time for anything to go seriously awry in this script. Funny character actors saying funny lines at a pretty funny clip is a can’t-miss formula. Beck doesn’t so much direct his players doing his lines as stay out of their way.

And that’s enough. It’s a shame he never got the chance to direct again, because “Behave Yourself!” suggests he’d have developed more than just a knack for it. He had a gift.

Rating: “approved,” TV-PG today

Cast: Farley Grainger, Shelley Winters, William Demarest, Sheldon Leonard, Elisha Cook, Jr., Francis L. Sullivan, Marvin Kaplan and Hans Conreid

Credits: Scripted and directed by George Beck. An RKO release, now streaming on Tubi, Amazon, elsewhere

Running time: 1:21

At last Netflix releases a family holiday movie worth watching this year. I was beginning to lose hope.

“A Boy Called Christmas” continues the streamer’s run of good luck with tales that reset the Christmas myth, finding new origin stories for Santa. Like the animated “Klaus” this British (Studio Canal) production finds whimsy and delight in making up new ways give the world St. Nick, ways that have nothing to do with a real-life saint, Clement Clarke Moore or Coca-Cola ads.

A director with the animated delight “Monster House” in his credits (Gil Kenan), and “Best Exotic Marigold Hotel” and “Mamma Mia!” screenwriter Ol Parker attracted an A-list cast that includes Oscar winners Maggie Smith, Jim Broadbent and Sally Hawkins, with Kristen Wiig and Toby Jones to ice the cake. That team and this cast and top drawer production design make “Boy” a “can’t-miss” kid-friendly favorite that doesn’t miss.

It’s a “Princess Bride” inspired retelling of That First Santa that features no less than Dame Maggie, as a “tactless” and “very very old” aunt relating a story to three sad, motherless kids who aren’t shy about interrupting to make sure the tale’s various dark turns don’t “trigger” them into thinking about their recently-deceased mother.

“There’s no WAY to get to a ‘happy ending’ from here,” one moppet complains, at one point. That’s OK, Auntie assures them. Not all endings are happy, and “nothing ever ends.”

She tells of a Finland before from a time before the world knew about or celebrated Christmas. Nikolas (Henry Lawfull) is a fresh-faced lad, son of a poor woodcutter, who saves a mouse from Dad’s (Michiel Huisman) angry axe so that he can teach the critter to talk.

“Moms always told me, ‘If you believe in something, you’re halfway there.”

Eventually, the mouse does pipe up, with the comically querulous voice of Stephen Merchant.

“Why would you teach me to talk if you’re never going to listen?”

This is after the kid’s aunt (Kristen Wiig, a GREAT villainess) comes to look after him while Dad’s off on a quest for the comically-overwigged King (Broadbent). Aunt Carlotta kicks the kid and the mouse out of the house, so there’s nothing for it but to trek through the snow towards “The Far North,” in search of what the father and his quest crew are looking for — proof of Elfhelm, a fabled town of elves.

Their journey gets easier when the kid removes an arrow from a reindeer who obligingly provides transport. Let’s call him…Blitzen. But the quest grows more complicated when they run across actual elves, including the downcast Father Topo (Toby Jones). The elf-queen (Sally Hawkins) is in a mood.

This movie had me from the moment Dame Maggie trots down the snowy, decorated street to her duties baby sitting. Seeing a National Treasure cover ground that fast, at 86, is impressive. And the production design — by “Paddington” veteran Gary Williamson — is just exquisite, start to finish.

Pythonesque touches pop up as the gloom-and-doom “We’re all miserable” king finds his rhetorical question about what they can do about it answered by not-quite-compliant peasants.

“A health care system?” “A living wage?”

Little kids who’ve lost their parents aren’t the only ones who might be “triggered” here.

Merchant brings an offhanded wit to his mutterings as the mouse, and Hawkins (“The Shape of Water”) is gloriously cast against type as a heavy, and shockingly scary in the part.

But she’d have a ways to go to be as wickedly fun as Wiig, who is at her very best in a tiny part, the “wicked aunt” who serves the boy Nikolas some seriously dubious soup.

“What’s it made with,” he wants to know? Aunt Carlotta’s scary eyes glitter at her punch line.

“Love!”

“Boy Called Christmas” peaks a bit early and sticks around too long after that climax. The movie doesn’t exactly “stick the landing.”

But in a winter of dull holiday romances and seriously unimaginative seasonal slop, this one tickles and delights and is at least good enough to put off that “Christmas Story” rerun you know you’re getting around to, because that after-all is a tradition.

Rating: PG, violence, some disturbing images

Cast: Maggie Smith, Henry Lawfull, Jim Broadbent, Kristen Wiig, Joel Fry, Michiel Huisman, Toby Jones and Sally Hawkins.

Directed by Gil Kenan, scripted by Ol Parker and Gil Kenan, based on the Matt Haig book. A Studio Canal film on Netflix.

Running time: 1:46

We tend to lump all of the musicals of Hollywood’s Golden Age into one warm memory. But of course there were lesser lights — forgotten gems — and big budget blunders, like “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.”

A Technicolor musical built around a Mark Twain classic and the reliable crooner Bing Crosby, with songs by Jimmy Van Heusen and Johnny Burke, who wrote the lyrics for the Crosby standard “Swinging on a Star,” which won the best original song Oscar for “Going My Way?” This should have been a laid back easy layup for Paramount.

But while it was by no means a bomb when it came out, it’s neither aged well nor connected with the collective memory of the the great, the good or even the adequate musicals of the day. “Yankee” is colorless despite being colorful, flatly-directed, soundstage-bound for the most part and so lacking in comic bits that work that we’re reminded that there’s never been a version of this Twain novel that truly came off. The Will Rogers take on it in 1931 at least has a laugh or three.

Maybe putting Tay Garnett, the director of one of the definitive noirs, “The Postman Always Rings Twice” and several notable WWII pictures, behind the camera wasn’t the smartest move.

The half dozen songs have a generic, disposable feel, with one even cut from the film after its 1949 premiere.

Crosby, so funny in the bantering Bob Hope “Road” comedies, hasn’t got much that’s funny to say or do here. It’s as if the laid-back “Der Bingle” is too laid back even for a role that admittedly is more of a “reactor” than “antagonist” in nature. The pacing is slow, the comic timing even slower.

William Bendix and Cedric Hardwicke are Crosby’s sole comic foils. They’re usually funnier than this. The movie should have taken the tone of Twain’s 1889 novel, flippant and tart. It’ain’t.

Crosby stars as Hank Martin, an American tourist who drops in on present day Pendragon Castle just to reminisce about the place and contradict the nonplussed tour guide. No, that’s not a crossbow-bolt hole in that (period incorrect) suit of armor. Twas a bullet, my good man. I was there, Hank implies.

Meeting the cute old lord of the castle (Hardwicke), Hank tells the story of his first visit to the place, in the sixth century, when Arthur (Hardwicke again) was an aged grump under the thumb of the wizard Merlin (Murvyn Vye) and his sister Morgan Le Fay (Virginia Field).

Hank, then an early 20th century Connecticut blacksmith trying to adapt to an increasingly automotive America, took a fall off a horse and woke up way back when, with the hapless Sir Saggamore (Bendix) who takes him prisoner and marches him hither.

“That can’t be Bridgeport!” “It’s CAMELOT!”

Hank finds himself labeled “a monster,” under-reacting to anyone in an “iron union suit” (armor), smitten with the fair Lady Alisande (Rhonda Fleming) and having to escape the executioner (Alan Napier, butler Alfred to TV’s “Batman”) by relying on his Yankee wit.

Castle intrigues, jousting and songs follow. But fun? Not so much.

“If there were aught I could say, aught I could do to save thee…”

“Well, ain’t there aught?”

“Naught.”

One thing common to every version of this comic fantasy I’ve ever seen is a reliance on Twain’s long-out-of-date misreading of Dark Ages Arthur and Medieval “courtly love” chivalry, with its much more elaborate armor, jousting and what not. Not that anybody expects “period detail” to be a concern in this story.

It’s children’s entertainment, not nearly as droll as “The Innocents Abroad,” which it resembles more than Twain’s “Tom Sawyer/Huckleberry Finn” masterpieces.

But that’s no excuse for not finding more funny lines than this, for not making even slam dunk “magic” sight gags (Hank uses his pocket watch crystal as fire-starting wizardry to effect his first “escape”) work.

Hardwicke is more than game, and makes a wry Arthur. Bendix, trapped in that squeaking “iron union suit” (long underwear jokes were the rage in the ’40s), seems puzzled at being here, and unable to find the funny in the film’s most comical character.

Crosby and Fleming are in fine voice, but there’s little chemistry in their shared scenes.

The villains are drab, the story limps along, and every so often there’s a song, a seriously forgettable song from one of the great song-writing teams of the era.

Lump this one among the lesser musical lights of The Studio Era, and move on.

Rating: approved

Cast: Bing Crosby, Rhonda Fleming, Cedric Hardwicke, Virginia Field, Alan Napier, Murvyn Vye and William Bendix.

Credits: Directed by Tay Garnett, scripted by Edmund Beloin, based on the novel by Mark Twain. A Paramount release, on Amazon, Tubi, other streamers

Running time: 1:46

A pull-out-all-the-cliches and throw in a few on-the-nose new ones script leaves Halle Berry’s directing debut, “Bruised,” a split decision.

As a showcase for the fittest 55 year-old in the cinema, one who masters fight choreography and is (mostly) convincing in the clinches, it’s a winner. But every time we just about lose ourselves in this solid genre picture, some theft from “The Champ,” “Requiem for a Heavyweight” or — this is new — “Personal Best” pops up and reminds us that it’s not the first-time director who’s making this one bleed out, it’s the first-time screenwriter.

Berry plays Jackie Justice, a UFC MMA contender we meet at her darkest hour. Losing an important fight in which she’s taking a beating, she tries to flee the octagon. Simply not done. But she is. Done, I mean.

Four years later, Jackie’s crawled in a bottle — so many bottles that as a housekeeper who drinks on the job, she’s taken to slipping her booze into spray bottles so that she’s never far away from a shot.

“You used to be thick and famous” the punks on the Newark Light Rail tease. But no more.

Her boyfriend/manager (Adan Canto, all testosterone and contempt) resents that his meal ticket refuses to fight any more. But the animalistic sex makes up for it, I guess.

Lured to an “unsanctioned” basement brawl, Jackie is goaded into mixing it up with a Russian behemoth she isn’t even sure is a woman. That’s where we see her secret weapon — rage.

In the octagon, Jackie is either fight of flight. There’s nothing in between.

A new promoter/manager (Shamier Anderson) sees some fight in the old broad and sends her to his favorite trainer, Buddhakan. And the former British fighter (Sheila Atim was in TV’s “Underground Railroad”) is a reluctant convert. She sees a quitter. She sees somebody who’s “old.”

If you’re walking the tightrope of scripting a Halle Berry movie, you’d best avoid using that word “old” with “woman.” So Buddhakan shows her contempt with “You’re DONE, Betty White!”

If she’s not “done,” Jackie’s got more distractions than she ever bargained for. Her drunken brute of a lover isn’t happy to not be managing her. And he really flips out when Jackie mother (Adriane Lenox, hatefully good) rolls up on her and drops off a little boy of six (Danny Boyd Jr.), reminds her that he’s her son and says the kid’s dad is out of the picture. Oh, and he’s silent. Manny doesn’t talk.

“This ain’t my mess, it’s YOUR mess! For once in your life, HANDLE your business!”

With promoter Immaculate imagining a title fight and live-in-lover Desi getting “physical,” with a kid who won’t speak needing to be enrolled in school and an aging body that needs to be training-montaged into condition, what IS Jackie Justice to do?

Read the character descriptions above and guess. No, not all of them behave according to ancient, tried-and-true screenplay tropes. But the surprises are as obvious as a roundhouse punch in “Bruised.”

Berry has always relished chances to dress down. Her breakout Spike Lee film had one of the cinema’s great beauties transformed into a haggard junky. She won the Oscar for “Monster’s Ball.” She isn’t bad as Jackie Justice. She’s just obvious, like the character’s cornball name.

Atim has a striking, imposing screen presence and is the most impressive member of the supporting cast. But stage and screen veteran Stephen McKinley (“Fences”) makes his mark as everybody’s fight-picture favorite, the “cornerman.”

The short fights are brutal, the final brawl never-quite as epic as we’re meant to think. Are we supposed to see the fighters throwing air punches out of fatigue, or is the punch choreography that far down the “protect the star’s good looks at all costs” rabbit hole?

Not to pick on Berry’s reputation, but you have to think a supporting player who boxes and draws blood, by accident, would pay an awful price if the blooded one was La Berry. She could make a bit player disappear faster than a Chinese tennis star.

In a season of over-long movies, “Bruised” plays long largely because of all the added wrinkles screenwriter Michelle Rosenfarb throws in. The fact that to a one, they’re all non-starters points us at the real shortcoming of “Bruised.” It’s on the printed page.

Rating: R, pervasive language, some sexual content/nudity and violence.

Cast: Halle Berry, Sheila Atim, Adan Canto, Shamier Anderson, Adriane Lenox and Stephen McKinley

Credits: Directed by Halle Berry, scripted by Michelle Rosenfarb. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:09

The end, when it comes, is never pretty. But can it be a thing of beauty?

That’s an unspoken premise of “So Late So Soon,” a portrait of two kind of cute/kind of quarrelsome Chicago artists as they close in on 80 and the big Final Act decisions that face everyone lucky enough to reach that age.

Jackie and Don Seiden were, for decades, mainstays of Chicago’s art scene, if never exactly household names. A couple of 1980s TV interviews capture them at their creative peaks — her, a roller-dancing mixed-media artist specializing in “decaying media,” him a welder and papier mache sculptor and sketch artist.

What they’re most famous for is teaching; at local schools, at the Art Institute of Chicago, in art therapy classes. But what “So Late So Soon” captures is lives lived artistically and a fifty year-plus marriage tested by the trials of old age.

Filmmaker Daniel Hymanson visits them in in their worn, dated and somewhat cluttered apartment, where the highly-strung chatterbox Jackie shrieks at this or that, and celebrates a mouse “turd” she finds in their cabinetry. Nothing for it but to set traps, and shriek as she sets them off by accident.

Don reacts to most every Jackie outburst. Just not right away. He might walk into the kitchen and see her stringing up dental floss between cabinets, suspending toy animals (a plastic cow) as she does, cursing mildly when she runs out of floss and needs Don to hold things in place until she returns from the bathroom.

She kvetches as she services their ancient toilet. “We’re gonna have to MOVE.” That seems like a conclusion she might be coming to.

“Being old, being elderly, is like a dirty trick,” she complains — 78 and still dancing as if no one is watching.

“I’m not making any more furniture or painting any more walls,” he gripes. So nertz to your idea of “moving,” missy.

We hear her aches and pains, witness his panic attack and find him in a hospital doing physical therapy.

In tiny dollops, we hear about their past, how their sisters were best friends from childhood, how they “got along” and were sort of thrown together, how he choked when questioned by the justice of the peace who married them, and how she never let him forget that.

Yes, we see them fight, with Jackie donning ear muffs to shut him out, Don pleading “How can we fix this?” and the viewer never doubting for a second that they will, nor that they’ll decide that being together is more important than living on “some place where we’re not together.”

In just 70 minutes, Hymanson has shown us what “soul mates” look like, and leveled with us about the best possible outcome for our final years, months and days. Not bad.

Rating: unrated, mild profanity

Cast: Jackie Seiden, Don Seiden

Credits: Directed by Daniel Hymanson. An Oscilloscope Labs release.

Running time: 1:12

“Hobbit” filmmaker Peter Jackson invites his fellow “kids” into the candy store of Beatles archives for “The Beatles: Get Back,” a film compiled from the mountains of documentary footage shot as the band scrambled to make an album in London in January of 1969.

Over the seven-almost-eight hours of this three part streaming series, a project that was pitched as a single theatrical film pre-pandemic, Jackson shows us just what a fanatical fan would be up against, trying to edit 57 hours of often-candid film footage and 150 hours of audio into a project that says something new about The Beatles.

“Kid in the candy store” indeed. It’s as if Jackson couldn’t bear to leave this, that or the other out of his film appreciation of The Fab Four. That makes for an exhaustively-detailed but often repetitive and redundant illumination of their creative process, even as it is a telling documentation of the forces that broke them up. That happened shortly after this project climaxed with their iconic “rooftop concert” from their new and crowded Apple townhouse office and studio.

The album was to be called “Get Back.” It was to be accompanied by a couple of live shows — which they hadn’t performed in three years — and include another Beatles TV special.

They were attempting a deadline-pressing recreation of their earliest recording days — writing, re-writing, working out arrangements and solos, rehearsing and re-rehearsing on a soundstage, and then in a studio, and finally performing live-on-tape (no overdubs) for an album that might have been called “Get Back,” but ended up as “Let It Be.”

And that rooftop show, “taking over London” for a no-permit “free concert” that was busted up by the bobbies after a few tunes, turned out to be their last live performance as a quartet.

Jackson, working with film shot by a vast crew led by then-director Michael Lindsay-Hogg, shows us enough footage to rewrite or at least renew their legend. But watching a film this long, with this much banter, this many versions of “Get Back” and “Two of Us,” becomes the visual equivalent of panning for gold. Still, by the time that last take of “Let It Be” decays on the soundtrack, I think he’s turned up some shiny flecks in that panning.

Lindsay-Hogg, already by 1969 a veteran of music videos for the Beatles and Rolling Stones (he’d go on to film “Frankie Starlight” and “The Object of Beauty”), is very much a character in this project, explaining what he’s doing, clarifying with John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr the direction things are going in the film he’s making, which seems to be “going to pieces” much like the band, at times.

Ringo had a movie production start date, “The Magic Christian,” pressing down on their plans. They begin rehearsing and filming on a soundstage at Twickenham Studios, where the movie would largely be shot (co-star Peter Sellers drops in to say “Hi.”).

Those early days, on a cavernous stage with a cyclorama backdrop, come off as a lot of goofing around, getting back in the groove, going in circles if they’re “going” at all. Stress fractures are glimpsed in that setting

Jackson shows us the countdown pages on the calendar bearing down on them. They had to have the songs composed and the album and the live filmed performances in the can before month’s end.

There’s no overt hostility to the presence of John’s new flame, Yoko Ono, who has injected herself into these proceedings, often literally sitting between John and Paul. Linda Eastman, soon to be Linda McCartney, also shows up and takes photos and her daughter Heather bounces around the studio, entertaining and then being entertained by each Beatle in turn.

When Paul jokes about “fifty years from now” the story that “The Beatles broke up because Yoko sat on an amplifier,” he seems prophetic. The worst you could say about Ono was that she was underfoot, mostly-silent but distracted and a little distracting, shoehorning her way into an intimate circle that formerly was just four.

There’s a little visible tension in Harrison, lacking confidence that he can do this or that to always-upbeat task-master McCartney’s satisfaction, unhappy at the backlog of songs he’s written or partially composed that he will never get on a Beatles LP. George, remember, walked out of the band at one point in these sessions.

Then they move to their more intimate, yet-unused (the gear installation was botched by a Beatles hanger-on) new Apple studios. Ray-of-light keyboardist Billy Preston starts sitting in and George comes back.

In one quietly magical moment, we and George watch as Ringo plays a bit of this lark he’s working out on the piano, “Octopus’s Garden.” George comes over to compliment what’s there and suggest what’s needed to turn that — lyrically and musically — into a pop single.

A Beatles fan might shed a tear over that. It’s a little fleck of gold, one of many Jackson found in all that footage. We hear the first rough idea of what “Get Back,” the song, will be, catching a literal “moment of creation.” Paul pounds away at it like the craftsman he is, getting a melody and a chorus by force of will. He envisions it as a protest tune for an LP that might have a little edge to it, commenting on the anti-immigrant backlash sweeping Europe…in 1969.

Paul gets into their “nervousness” about performing live and mentions that ultimate fear of the Fabs — repeating themselves. Gathered together, they’re “talking about the past like old age pensioners.” But as the series’ prologue reminds us, they’d been together for a dozen years, most of them. Liverpool to Hamburg to the Cavern Club to EMI and George Martin (always in the scene here, with producer Glyn Johns), to glory and superstardom and fame so overwhelming it became a trap and a cliche.

Yes, there’s footage of their trek to India, and George has a spiritual advisor/guru in studio with him at times.

But what Lindsay-Hogg preserved on celluloid and what Jackson wants us to see, throwing all this never-before (or seldom) seen footage at us, is their bonhomie, their good humor and musicianship and mutual support, even at what became “the end.”

George has this new tune, “Something in the way she moves me,” but can’t work out what comes next. “Just sing anything that comes to mind,” John coaches, something we’ve seen all of them do time and again as they work out songs like “Let It Be” in these sessions. “‘Attracts me like a cauliflower‘ — until you get the right words.”

“Attracts me like a pomegranate,” George offers.

Split screens and overlapping audio break up the straightforward “documentary” style. There are secretly-recorded conversations about the state of the band in the Apple commissary, endless cigarettes and tea and toast. “Let It Be,” “Long and Winding Road, “Something,” and others come together a little, then are dropped as the band backslides into their vast repertoire of Hamburg eight-hours-of-sets-a-night days, rock and pop classics from the late ’50s and early ’60s, just to break up the grind.

It’s all entirely too much, of course. Jackson copped out on cutting this into a tighter, more coherent “history.” Ninety minutes per show would have sufficed. But in this form, he really is asking “Well, what would YOU leave out?”

A Beatles buff won’t need any salesmanship to know Disney+ is the place to be this weekend. And even a more casual fan might want to drop in on “Get Back,” just to get a peek at what all the fuss was about and why they still seem relevant over fifty years later. Because “where they once belonged” is where they’ve always been.

Rating: smoking, profanity

Cast: Paul McCartney, John Lennon, George Harrison, Ringo Starr, Yoko Ono, Linda Eastman McCartney, George Martin, Billy Preston, Glyn Johns, Mal Evans, Michael Lindsay-Hogg

Credits: Directed by Peter Jackson and Michael Lindsay-Hogg. A Disney+ release.

Running time: 3 episodes, 2-3 hours each, 468 minutes (7 hours, 48 minutes) total