Movie Nation

A North Dakota rancher accused of neglecting his livestock becomes a fictional Big Conspiracy wingnut wet dream in “The Stand at Paxton County,” a nasty little piece of prairie propaganda that no film distributor would touch but Netflix has picked up for streaming.

So “true story?” Not exactly. Not even close.

It’s a film of animal rights activists conspiring with veterinarians and a corrupt sheriff’s department to seize animals and perhaps, it’s suggested, ranches themselves.

The little hints of truth — aged farmers and ranchers losing their grip on operations and animals that they aren’t able to pass down as their children are moving away — is buried under a mountain of horse manure, weekly newspaper “hit” pieces on targeted ranchers, animals seized for cash value and the fond hope that failing ranchers will just commit suicide.

Jacqueline Toboni plays Janna, a surgeon summoned from her Army field hospital in the Middle East back home to North Dakota because there’s trouble on the ranch. Her curmudgeonly dad (Michael O’Neill), was confronted with surprise inspections from the sheriff’s department and state-authorized veterinarians who have found the place in disrepair and the horses he keeps skin and bones.

Dell had a heart attack.

When Janna gets back, she wonders who ratted them out, wonders why the hunky ranch hand who was supposed to be keeping the place up didn’t do the work and wonders where that ranch hand ran off to once the inspections begin and the ranch is imperiled.

For some reason, this corner of Western North Dakota (it was filmed in California) is covered by a snooty reporter from The Fergus Falls Gazette, when Fergus Falls is hundreds of miles away, in Minnesota.

Anyway, Janna and this newer hunky ranch hand (Tyler Jacob Moore) and a local lawyer team up to fight whatever conspiracy is behind all this and save the ranch.

Christopher MacDonald (“Quiz Show”) plays the sheriff, who might be sympathetic but might just be in on it, too.

The leads are fairly low on the charisma pecking order, save for MacDonald, and the movie’s drama is tepid, even at its most worked-up.

The picture is designed to push a lot of buttons and isn’t the least bit subtle, or honest about it. Got to have a soldier so you can wrap all this up in the flag and camo, got to have “liberal elites” taken on by slow-talking cowgirls, cowboys and their kin. Even the lawyer’s wearing a ten gallon hat.

But maybe you don’t see how you’re being played.

If you’re an angry, anti-government Western conservative looking for comfort that “they’re out to get Real Americans” in this, I have a news flash for you. Big Oil anti-environmentalist Lucas Oil money backed the picture. These are the same right wing propagandists who blamed environmentalists for droughts in “Pray for Rain.”

THAT is your real conspiracy.

Any time you muck out a barn, you’re getting a gander at what the Lucas (Kochs without the clout) clan is serving up in feature film form. They’re full of it. I didn’t have to look up the production company’s real owners to smell Lucas BS, HS and whatever other S they’re serving up here.

MPA Rating: R for some violence and language 

Cast:  Jacqueline Toboni, Michael O’Neill, Tyler Jacob Moore and Christopher MacDonald.

Credits: Directed by Brett Hedlund, script by Carl Morris, David Michael O’Neill. An ESX Entertainment Netflix

Running time: 1:42

The National Archives has most of the papers and all of the tapes recorded in the FBI’s years of surveilling Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. under lock and key, hidden from public view until 2027.

So there’s nothing salacious in the new documentary about the Bureau’s investigation of King, “MLK/FBI.” What this film sets out to document, put into context and explain is something that began life as Bureau File Number 100-106670 and that came to look, with hindsight, like a vendetta against the civil rights leader and Nobel laureate.

Sam Pollard, an African American documentarian with “Eyes on the Prize” and many PBS documentaries on the African American experience on his resume, talks with academics, King confidante Andrew Young, former FBI chief James Comey and author David J. Garrow, whose book “The FBI and Martin Luther King, Jr. — From ‘Solo’ to Memphis.”

They map out this decade-long operation, code-named “Solo,” through its secret wiretaps and phone bugs to the nasty public pronouncements of longtime Bureau chief J. Edgar Hoover, who grew up in a white supremacist culture that had a lot to do with his growing obsession with King.

But it all began with “communism.”

As King’s many speeches and TV interviews, along with archival coverage of civil rights marches of the era and snippets of the many FBI-fluffing TV shows and movies popular back then play out, Pollard’s unseen (until the closing credits) interview subjects lay out how King’s connection with a Jewish New York lawyer, businessman and advisor in the mid-1950s piqued the Bureau’s interest and forever-marked the civil rights leader as a communist pawn in the eyes of the conservative white men who ran the FBI.

To Hoover and his domestic intelligence chief, William Sullivan, King’s association with longtime communist activist Stanley Levison was the only excuse they needed to go after “the most dangerous Negro in America.”

Young, who went on to become mayor of Atlanta, a Congressman and US Ambassador to the UN, recalls King’s efforts to recruit and drill into people in “the movement” folks who “come off as sane and patriotic,” which it turns out meant nothing to the FBI. 

King, told by the Kennedys to distance himself from Levison, claimed he did just that, but “MLK/FBI” suggests that they never totally ended their association.

We hear President Lyndon Johnson fretting over the phone about what he was being told about King by Hoover, wondering to an unnamed aide if there wasn’t somebody who could warn King to curb his womanizing. But those close to King who knew they’d been wiretapped tried to do just that, and King refused to believe them.

And we see, in interviews and speeches, just what about King drove Hoover so crazy. The singularly eloquent King turned every public Hoover attack around on the Bureau chief whose agency was slow-footed in tracking down racist murderers, Birmingham church bombers and the like.

The suggestion that the Bureau should have seen King’s assassin, James Earl Ray, coming explains why some still question whether the Bureau was somehow involved in the Lorraine Motel murder.

However, the film doesn’t overreach in setting the FBI director up as the villain, with authors like Beverly Gage and Donna Murch noting that Hoover wasn’t a one-man operation or disconnected from the culture.

King’s fears, once the FBI made its most direct threat at “exposing” him, that some news organization would publish evidence of his infidelities, isn’t explored at length. Did some know and yet question the motives of the government for trying to smear him? “Witnessed” and “laughed at” a rape? That allegation, true or fabricated, would have had dire consequences.

King dominates the conversation in the film as he did in life, laying out the depth of the social ills he attacked, the ingrained violence against Black people in American culture at large, telling interviewers “The only way they can grapple with their prejudices is to admit that that they have them.”

But will his status as “the moral leader” of the America of his day change in 2027? That question is bandied about but left hanging by “MLK/FBI.” We’ll have to wait until the last of the documents and the tapes come out, and for a future documentary that includes them, to know the answer. 

For now, we have this sturdy PBS-friendly documentary that summarizes the conflict without scandalizing the historical icon Hoover so fervently wanted to take down.

MPA Rating: unrated

Cast: The voices of Martin Luther King, Jr., Andrew Young, Beverly Gage, Donna Murch, James Comey, many others

Credits: Directed by Sam Pollard, script by Benjamin Hedin and Laura Tomaselli. An IFC release.

Running time: 1:44

You read enough sloppy Cary Grant biographies, you tend to give up on him as a subject and spend your Golden Age of Hollywood reading time on less controversial icons of the era.

But when Oxford University Press puts an academic on the case, and he takes the time to go through Grant’s letters, diaries, many scrapbooks and even home movies, something author Mark Glancy insists those before him never did, or at best perused, you flip open “The Making of a Hollywood Legend.”

Here’s the test of any “new” Cary Grant biography. Turn to the index and see if “Scotty Bowers” is listed. He’s the bisexual Hollywood hooker whose alleged exploits with everybody-who-was-anybody during that “Golden Age” included declaring he’d been with Grant and Grant’s most oft-named Hollywood same sex lover, cowboy B-lister Randolph Scott.

As Bowers had at least one claim buttressed by famed gossip maven Liz Smith before her death — that Katherine Hepburn was bisexual — you had to take him at least a little seriously. Maybe not a lot. Hollywood “hangers on” have always sought to give meaning to their on-the-periphery existence out there with claims of various sorts.

And Bowers isn’t in Glancy’s book. So you know going in that he’s either a British classist looking askance at a common, opportunistic prostitute, and trapped in “binary” thought about sexuality, or he’s got enough evidence that he can address those long-standing rumors (Grant even sued Chevy Chase for “outing” him in the ’70s) without ever giving the now-dead Bowers, his book or documentary more publicity.

Reading “The Making of a Hollywood Legend,” I detected a bit of both — British jingoism defending his fellow countryman, so much of it that things that should raise an eyebrow are papered-over by Glancy, and the testimony of ex-wives, girlfriends and others that Grant liked them lithe and blonde and female.

So despite his “forensic” digging into Grant’s life story, I can’t say Glancy settles that debate in the first big Grant bio to come out in the age of “Sexuality doesn’t really matter.” As it shouldn’t.

Grant was a deft comedian — his “staccato” speaking style and accent lending itself to screwball comedies, his vaudeville tumbler/acrobat background giving him the gift of physical shtick as well. He was a marvelously mysterious heavy on occasion, and handled characters that covered a lot of ground in between those extremes.

Glancy dissects the movies and the former Archibald Alec Leach’s performances in them, and building on the work of many who came before him, psychoanalyzes the oft-married/always-dating slow-to-commit adult whose mother was taken from him, thrown into an asylum by her tom-catting working class husband, with young Archie told that his mother was “dead.” He didn’t learn she wasn’t until he was rich and famous.

That’s a scar that doesn’t heal. It was only when he got into psychotherapy in his 50s (LSD was a part of his treatment) that the workaholic Grant found some peace.

More interesting to me is all the material about Grant’s insistence on doing what few other actors would put themselves through, watching his “dailies” during filming. He was analyzing his performances, figuring out what he did well, what roles suited him.

He met silent screen star Douglas Fairbanks as a teen tumbler and decided that was what a movie star looked like — tanned, toothy, perfectly-put-together, athletic, light on his feet.

His stage name was taken from a character he played on Broadway in a show with Fay Wray, carrying a crush on his co-star (who later became King Kong’s leading lady) all the way to Hollywood. She’s the one who said “Cary” he should be.

Paramount put him under contract and he made a lot of forgettable movies there. But he developed a notion of what he’d be good at and changed the rules when that contract ran out, a free-lancer who had director, script and story approval, a star who would provide his own clothes for roles, protecting his dapper, polished image…and getting a tax write-off for his wardrobe.

Co-star after co-star would note how he’d learned blocking and lighting, insisting on one profile, knowing where his key light should be, always to the most flattering effect.

He got so good so fast — “The Awful Truth” to “Bringing Up Baby” to “The Front Page” — that Hollywood overlooked him at the Oscars, taking his effortless performances at “effortless” face value.

And he became his fellow working class Brit Hitchcock’s alter ego, which ensured his longevity long past most leading men’s expiration date. Glancy takes a deep dive into Grant and Hitchcock’s masterpiece, the movie most people think of when they think “Cary Grant” — “North by Northwest.”

Yes, he was close friends — at the very least — with longtime roommate and onetime co-star Randolph Scott. Yes, there was that one day a gay studio photographer came out to stage “bachelors at home” shots for widely published magazine articles on two rising Paramount stars. And yes, Grant was quick to improv or merely throw himself into a “gay” quip on screen, and cross-dressed more than once in his comedies.

But nobody’s ever published a “smoking gun” that proves Grant was anything less than working class Bristol heterosexual. Well, aside from Glancy himself — who unearthed some unpublished thoughts by Grant’s early New York career gay roommate, who went on to become a famous costume designer (“No,” said Jack “Orry-Kelly.”). Glancy also notes the gay secretary living with Grant and Scott in Santa Monica and the real reason teen Archie Leach was kicked out of school at 14.

But since acceptance is far more the rule of the day, and nobody today begrudges a star being both a heterosexual heartthrob and a gay icon, perhaps Glancy has weighted that discussion where it should have been all along — not all that relevant.

In getting at Grant’s personal papers, decades of good, bad and indifferent reviews clipped and saved, Glancy gives us a take on Grant outside of the ex-wives, cut-and-paste researchers and professional “pathographers,” those who make a living writing scandalous things about the famous and dead. It’s a good, thorough read and may hint at a change in the winds of how we look at this famously private, famously gorgeous and underrated movie star.

“Cary Grant: The Making of a Hollywood Legend,” by Mark Glancy. Oxford University Press, 539 pages, $34.95.

Adam shows up at a “surprise” birthday party thrown in a bar thrown for him, where no one knows him other that his “best friend.”

“I’m your best friend, and I hate you.”

At least Kyle (Nore Davis) sets him up. Awkward silences, more awkward sentences later, and somehow she and Adam hit it off. “Settle up” your tab K (Olivia Luccardi) advises him. He does, but when he opens the door for her to get into his car, she’s vanished. And the look on Adam’s face gives away just a hint of shock before a wave of resignation crosses it.

It always does.

Actor turned actor/writer/director Alex Knapp‘s “Go/Don’t Go” is an obscurant cinematic journey into one man’s existential crisis, a long dark night of the single man’s soul. Because whatever happened in that bar that night, whatever followed it, his “present” is hell — a hell, we come to believe, that exists entirely in his own skull.

Adam (Knapp) is obsessed with lightbulbs, taking them out of empty houses, burying them under a cross he makes and paints on a hillside near where he lives.

Any time Adam finds a phone, he calls to leave himself messages — “Hi, it’s me. You me.” Don’t forget to hit the market when you get this message.

The market is nearly out of stock, but the messages remind him of where that last box of powdered milk is.

He takes batting practice, via pitching machine, at a steadily more overgrown ball field. He wanders a vast vacant bowling alley. And he goes to “work,” donning coveralls to take another shot at fixing a pickup truck in a garage.

Every car he sees he marks up with an “x.” Because it no longer starts? Every empty house he inspects gets another “x.” After he’s removed a light bulb.

Is this what the apocalypse will look like, “I Am Legend” at least in my own mind?

“Outer Limits” flickerhops onto his TV. And on a radio — in the shop where he works, or in a car — mournful tunes play out in between 1976 Cincinatti Reds World Series games and chat shows where a host talks about people “stuck in nostalgia.”

One song stands out. “I’ve done a bad thing,” a man sings, “and I’m paying for it right now.”

How you take “Go/Don’t Go” depends on your tolerance for minimalism, existentialism and cinema that’s almost devoid of incident. “Obscurant” means “deliberately obscure,” withholding information, teasing or challenging. That’s what’s going on here.

It’s not impossible to break the code in this Big Metaphor/Little Movie. But aside from a few arresting images — that bowling alley could have been Charlton Heston in “The Omega Man” at the movies — there’s not enough going on to demand attention or hold one’s interest.

MPA Rating: Unrated

Cast: Alex Knapp, Olivia Luccardi, Nore Davis, Zoey Wagner

Credits: Scripted and directed by Alex Knapp. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:32

At a key moment in the volcanic-theme-park-erupts thriller “Skyfire,” a young woman and her lover leave behind the Chinese SUV full of scientists and the park owner’s wife to see about the young woman’s grandfather just down the road.

Exploding pumice and ash are raining down all around them, lava isn’t far behind. The veteran volcanologist (Wang Xue-Qi) who scolds one and all for “your arrogance” warns the driver “Don’t speed — ash will make the radiator overheat.” Lover boy driver (Shawn Dou) ignores him.

Seconds later they stall out, with the senior volcanologist half-swapping an “I told the fool” look at his volcanologist daughter (Hannah Quinlivan). The driver and his girlfriend (An Bai) sprint off and find grandfather.

Here’s the movie in the nutshell. The scientists have fixed the SUV and race up to retrieve the lovebirds, with volcanologist daughter/motorcycle buff Meng Li (Quinlivan) heroically at the wheel.

And Meng Li gets OUT OF THE DRIVER’S seat as she’s yelling “GET IN,” after having saved the day, runs to the passenger’s side and turns the wheel over to the dunce who stalled it out the last time.

Where is this, Saudi Arabia?

“Skyfire” is a disaster movie from the China Film Co., a government-backed film studio there. Patriarchal, nonsensical, filled with heroism and self-sacrifice, sexism and very bad science, at least it’s got a Western villain (Jason Isaacs). But they soft peddle that, too.

Whatever else comes from The New Chinese Century, their take on popcorn movie making is seriously People’s Republic of Rubbish.

Brit Simon West (The Jolie “Lara Croft,” “When a Stranger Calls,” the Statham take on “The Mechanic”) was behind the camera, because at the China Film Co., there’s a sucker born every minute. He’s made a movie with pretty and pretty convincing effects based on a dimwitted, dull and science-blind screenplay.

Our heroine, Meng Li, was there as a child with her volcanologist Mom (Alice Reitveld) and Dad were caught totally off-guard as the volcano Tianhuo blew.

All the monitoring gear her parents’ team had on site, all the observing they were doing, and the little girl is the one who sees it coming.

“Mom! The snow is burning!”

Dad and daughter survive. Mom is resigned to her fate as she’s swallowed by the pyroclastic flow.

Twenty years later, Meng Li is the chief researcher on site for Tianhuo Island’s “Jurassic Park” styled volcano theme park, with suspension monorails and “totally safe” bubble elevator to take tourists into the cone of an active volcano.

Tourists need their thrills, after all.

Jason Isaacs is the entrepreneur who developed this attraction, leading around investors, keeping his staff on task, even when things start to go wrong.

“Give all the guests free drinks. You’re managers. MANAGE.”

Meng Li’s dad shows up to fetch her, because he can what’s about to go down — again.

The young lovers on staff slip off to a watery grotto for a little romantic swim.

“The water is PERFECT!”

But when the mountain opens up, they aren’t instantly boiled to death. As we’ve seen other volcano movies, we note the error and wonder how many more there’ll be?

The lava moves at a sprint, the pumice explodes like artillery rounds and the gas! The GAS!

There’s much shouting, starting with “I’m staying like everybody else” and ending with a lot of “No, NO, I HAVE to go BACK!”

The acting isn’t awful, but the script flatters no one.

Messages about how woman should have children and not take the wheel when a man is available, Western “short cuts” and noble Chinese employees risking their necks to stay at their posts because “They need me” are all part of the package.

Deaths have meaning, tears won’t bring anybody back and the physics-defying daring escapes make about as much sense as having the grandfather live in a wooden ocean-going junk nowhere near the shore.

With no building of suspense, little connection with a lot of the thinly-scripted characters, and no volcano movie ever having much of a story to go with its effects, “Skyfire” still falls short of “Dante’s Peak” and “Volcano,” even if it is marginally better than “Miami Magma.”

MPA Rating: unrated, natural disaster violence

Cast: Jason Isaacs, Hannah Quinlivan, Wang Xue-Qi, An Bai, Shawn Dou

Credits: Directed by Simon West, script by Wei Bu, Sidney King. A Screen Media release.

Running time: 1:33

Breeding and bloodlines are sources of whimsy and trauma in “Rams,” a winning dramedy set in Australian sheep country.

Sam Neill and Michael Caton play loners — feuding brothers Colin and Les — stuck on adjacent ranches, never speaking, bitter rivals whenever there’s a Merino sheep judging contest at a local fair. They’ve split the land handed down to them, each raising the family bloodline of sheep in their own way, and even compete for the love of one shared sheep dog — “Kip” to Colin, “Floss” to the other.

Older brother Les is a slob and sloppy farmer, fond of spiced rum and Humble Pie t-shirts and vintage R & B. But he always raises the prize-winners, always lords it over his “weak” sibling and indulges in the occasional drunken flip-out — with firearms — at his bullied younger brother.

Colin is more conventional and conscientious. And still he loses, and cowers when Les goes on a tirade.

This remake of an Icelandic dramedy of the same title and tone from a few years back fills the background with neighboring colorful cusses of the “If you’re gonna farm sheep, farm REAL sheep (“not” Merinos) variety, grown men not shy about measuring a ram’s competitive value by reaching under his hindquarters and weighing his testicles.

The new pink-haired vet (Miranda Richardson) is a “pommy,” a Brit who’s just settling in. She’s about to be tested, and not by the judging she pitches in to do at the fair.

Colin spots it first, the symptoms of the deadly and contagious “OJD,” Ovine Johne’s Disease. What had been “cute” with an edgey subtext now turns serious as government-mandated testing and “destroying the flocks” sets in.

Add to that the fact that this being Australia, it wouldn’t be Christmas (arriving in Australia’s summer) without brushfires.

Neill, a formidable actor and these days, gentleman farmer/vintner in his native New Zealand, is perfectly cast as Colin. He lends a little sparkle to the feud moments, and is terrific getting across Colin’s panic at seeing OJD symptoms and the awful trauma of a losing animals he coddles and compliments every morning.

“You’re beautiful. And YOU’RE beautiful…”

Veteran Aussie character actor Caton makes Les easy to hate, easier to pity.

And Richardson makes the most of a character of a certain age who is somehow drawn to Colin, even if we can’t quite see why that would be.

That’s a shortcoming of Jeremy Sims’ take on this material. It’s a bit all over the place, introducing characters and possible story threads that it abandons, which accounts for what feels like a somewhat bloated running time for a dramedy that’s essentially a three-hander, and that wants to be — despite dramatic moments — a comedy.

But the leads and the lovely scenery make up for some of that, and the quietly compelling “brother’s keeper” storyline — with lots of detailed farmwork and local color, make “Rams” well worth your time.

MPA Rating: PG-13 for language

Cast: Sam Neill, Miranda Richardson, Michael Caton

Credits: Directed by Jeremy Sims, script by Jules Duncan, based on the Icelandic film, “Rams.” A Samuel Goldwyn release.

Running time: 1:55

Soap operatic and silly, patriarchal and patriarchy-bashing, the Indonesian dramedy “100% Halal” plays like a commentary on living a rigidly “Islamic Law” life in 2021.

Jastis Arimba begins by sending up traditional marriage and ends with an overwrought confession of sins and an earnest quote from the Koran. The movie in between abandons one tone for another, takes us down dramatic dead ends and gives the impression of a young filmmaker going about as far as cultural and religious tradition will allow him, and then some.

But it’s a real eye-opener about a culture whose films seldom play in North America and hints at a freer, more honest dive into romantic comedy from the director of a couple of films about “The Power of Love.”

The goofy opening has eager youngsters Anisa (Anisa Rahma) and Putra (Anandito Dwis) meeting with a magistrate because they want to get married. As he’s 20 and she’s just 18, the official goes to some pains to find out why. Was this arranged? You don’t have to submit to that, depending on the conditions and criteria, he reassures the girl.

“You must not be pressured into it,” he says. You can’t be members of the same family either. And on he goes (in Indonesian with English subtitles).

“You two know each other well?”

“YES,” the groom affirms.

“No” the would-be bride confesses.

How can this BE? Well, “I follow her on Instagram!” And Anisa? “”Dad chose Putra.”

Whatever, you crazy kids. No sense pulling off one’s kufi cap in frustration. They’re lectured on the Islamic prayer couples must learn, “the prayer for…the ACT!” But they’re confused.

“What are the kids calling copulation these days,” the magistrate wants to know?

“ML” Anisa’s giggling girlfriends (Fitria Rasyidi and Arafah Rianti) blurt out, for “making love.”

Those potty-mouthed Indonesian teens.

The prayer begs Allah to “keep the Devil away from us” as they consummate the marriage, and yes, that revelation is played for a laugh.

The movie we’re set up for is light, a goof on marriage traditions and marrying young in an Islamic country, with Anisa’s best-selling author/provocateur Dad (Ariyo Wahab) basically offering his daughter at lectures as a way of testing/proving his “marry young” because “dating leads to ADULTERY” hypothesis.

His book’s title? “100% Halal.”

Putra approaches author Ilham after a seminar and asks for Anisa’s hand. I mean, he’s following her on Instagram, after all. Dad agrees. What kind of father would allow such a union, just to make a point? Aside from one whose last name is “Kinsey,” I mean? A patriarchal traditionalist with books to sell, apparently.

No, neither of the spouses is ready. Anisa’s frantic wedding night consoling of her outraged grandmother ends with a frantic bathroom Facetime call to her pals to “Help me out here. How do you…start?“

“Have you brushed your teeth?”

She has. And the next thing we know, she’s sharing her EPT stick on Instagram.

There are several laughs in this lighthearted opening act — the naivete, the sending up of quaint, dated traditions (a seriously transactional wedding ceremony mainly between husband and father-of-the-bride) and a light but under-developed mocking of those who embrace them like Anisa’s Dad. It’s a crying shame “100% Halal” doesn’t stick with that tack and tone.

Because the mystery-melodrama that follows — the marriage might not be “valid” under Islamic Law, Anisa frantically searches for her birth mother to fix it — isn’t nearly as interesting.

There’s a big “secret” we can guess almost the minute we hear Anisa is adopted, and the weeping and wringing of hands plays overwrought and as I mentioned, soap operatic.

Far more promising threads include the way the adoring daughter basically shoves her husband onto the back burner, dragging Dad to her OB-GYN appointments (AWK-ward.), the troubling dynamic set up in this “threesome,” Anisa’s need to open her eyes and Putra’s need to insert himself between father and daughter.

Every time the naive know-it-all friends show up, something funny happens. Trying to get information out of a screwball Youtube novelty song singer goes awry. Checking into a hotel with a leering “We don’t let out rooms by the hour” clerk earns a stern “Watch your MOUTH or may thunder strike you!” from Putra.

Sure enough, thunder claps follow.

But none of the melodramatic scenes that dominate the film’s last half come off, at least to this Western viewer. The acting is broad and hokey in the dramatic moments, deft and cute in the comic ones.

The shock of people from an older generation shrieking “ABORT it” about this or that baby whose provenance is less than Sharia-approved unsettles the comedy struggling to get out of “100% Halal.”

Arimba may be taking baby steps towards making that movie, given the official and religious restrictions he’s working under. Maybe someday he’ll get to make a 100% comedy that gets away with being, say, 75% Halal. One can hope.

MPA Rating: TV-14, adult themes and situations

Cast: Anisa Rahma, Anandito Dwis, Kinaryosih, Ariyo Wahab, Fitria Rasyidi and Arafah Rianti

Credits: Directed by Jastis Arimba, script by Jastis Arimba and Ali Eounia. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:44

You’ve been hearing about it for decades, the amateur musicians’ version of various sports “fantasy camps,” but for rock and roll fans.

Pay $5000 (at first, now $5499, plus extras), jam and learn from your aged classic rock or metal heroes, hang with them in a nice hotel for a few days, soak up a little of the rock’n roll lifestyle. And in this version, you don’t have to take a “fan” cruise to get up close and personal.

“Rock Camp: The Movie” is yet another informercial for manager turned promoter David Fishof, 90 minutes of assorted people with the disposable cash to live out their fantasy — an accountant singing with Paul Stanley of KISS and an impromptu band campers and experienced rockers have formed for a weekend — Jurassic Waste, Stack of Yokos or Motley Jue.

Over the past 23 years, every network morning show, every cable network, even “The Simpsons” and “Bones” and other TV programs hyped this amusing, harmless indulgence into the popular “vacation” for well-heeled adults and the children of the equally well-heeled that it is today. It’s a movie that feels like a sales pitch, a hollow glossing of a Baby Boomer indulgence that doesn’t amount to much more than glimpses of scores of famous rockers who sell-their-services to this camp — Daltrey to Meat Loaf, Nancy Wilson to Rob Halford and other members of Judas Priest, Vince Neill to Lita Ford — and quick, dull sketches of those who buy their way into one weekend of the camp.

Filmmakers Renee Barron and Douglas Blush tell the story of how David Fishof went from being a Catskills resort kid to New York sports agent for the likes of Phil Simms and Lou Pinella, to an “outside the box” rock promoter whose brainstorms were all nostalgia tours, reuniting the Monkees, the Happy Together Tour and helping create and promote Ringo’s All Starr Band.

His friends, possibly parroting something Fishof himself says, credit him with “taking the yarmulke to a new level,” a smart promoter who used those oldies acts to create a camp for the now-well-off fans who grew up loving these musicians.

No, it’s “not hip,” Fishof jokes. But helping fangirls and fanboys (mostly) live out their dreams, if only for a weekend, is just good clean wish fulfillment, if a little pricey.

But listening to the assorted rockers fluff the experience in varying degrees of sincerity, meeting a cross section of campers for a recent Las Vegas Rock Fantasy Camp — a singing-drumming real estate trust’s accountant, a guy who seems to work for a church, parents of a teen with autism who comes out of his shell with his Gibson Les Paul guitar — one never shakes the feeling that this entire enterprise is seriously tone deaf.

It’s not their fault that this comes out in the middle of a pandemic and the recession it caused. But even without that, it’s nigh on impossible for anybody in this to not come off like a total douche. And no, I don’t think I’ve ever used that word in a review before, but it’s almost unavoidable here.

The kid with autism gets off lightly, and considering the other and better “kids learn to rock” camp documentaries, that’s a given. And not all the A, B and C-list musicians ooze bottom-line insincerity. Tony Franklin, former bassist with the ’80s super group The Firm, takes a moment to remember the lifestyle and how much the partying and touring failed to fulfill him, and that stands out.

California camper Scott “Pistol” Crockett, a drummer who was a high school bandmate of Lenny Kravitz and turned to religious work (It’s not clear what exactly he does.) has to learn to hang “with the metal guys,” and master the cowbell for his camp band’s cover of “Mississippi Queen.” He does, but truthfully, none of these “ordinary fans” has a back story compelling enough to hang the movie on.

Then there’s the dominant figure here, Fishof, a guy Simmons jokingly suggests “could be a recurring character on ‘The Goldbergs'” ( A Jewish showbiz stereotype?) When Fishof refers to himself as “Jewish Santa Claus” for doing this, Fishof’s not just confirming how tone-deaf this all feels (What’s Santa’s cut from the $5,499?). He’s proclaiming himself King of the Douches.

MPA Rating: unrated, pretty darned clean

Cast: Paul Stanley, Nancy Wilson, Rob Halford, Lita Ford, Gene Simmons, Roger Daltrey, Sammy Hagar, Tony Franklin, Spike Edney and David Fishof.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Renee Barron and Douglas Blush. A Madpix release, on Amazon, etc. Jan. 15.

Running time: 1:28

That 2018 Taiwanese film about a cursed hanging rope has a sequel, “The Rope Curse 2,” and a whole lot more plot and ritual, and many many more characters, although a couple are holdovers from the original.

Do you need to see the first film to make sense of the second? I’d hate to put you through that, and this is such over-plotted nonsense that virtually nothing could render it sensible.

The new wrinkle this time — the “cursed” rope has a Thai Demon origin, a demon favored by “Thai drug dealers,” we’re told.

So “Stay off drugs, kids,” and in Taiwan, “Beware those Thai drug dealers” is implied.

That demon is contained in a gnarled, burned statuette. It’s not just the rope that strangled someone who died that could “pass on the curse” (in Mandarin with English subtitles) this time.

And it’s not just ropes that might get you. We see people strangled by necktie and seat belt, noose and whatever’s at hand.

All a drug smuggler hiding heroin in cocoanuts has to do is mutter “I have nothing to tie this up with” and “I think I saw a rope around here somewhere” and damn, the curse is passed on again.

Channel Gray Bear and the live streaming “supernatural hunters” of the first film weigh in, with their eyes on a new “hot psychic (Wilson Hsu) who is extra sensitive to ghostly presences, and afraid of most everything.

Masters of Taoism (Bor Jeng Chen returns) figure into the plot. One running gag is the notion that elected officials summon Taoist priests to “purify” a location or rope, “lift the curse” and that they pay the priests for doing it. There are all these elaborate ceremonies, face-painting rituals, masks and costumes and exorcism dances and parades.

And a prosecutor who stalks in at one point takes the audience’s side when he announces “What a scam.”

Only it isn’t. Assorted “masters” try to stop the spreading, deadly curse — a hanging spree that rips through first the drug dealers, then others in this corner of suburban Taiwan. When one master is possessed (eyes turn blood red), the next master takes on the quest.

Kang Sheng Lee plays the master Miss Teen Hot Psychic (Hey, THEY named her, not me.) turns to as she’s haunted by visions of her dead parents and struggles to save her raging, guilt-ridden and finally possessed and ready to end-it-all Aunt (Vera Chen).

“Are we going to be afraid for a lifetime,” Master Huo-ge asks the girl, Jiachen, “or face this bravely?”

Take a guess which way she’s leaning.

The acting varies between realistically chilling and over-the-top hysterical. The tone is spooky, but never more than that.

This thing is all over the place, and while the violent ends are creative, they lack logic and order after a while. “Rope Curse 2” starts out making little sense, and makes none at all by the time the credits roll.

Maybe “Rope Curse 3” will tidy that up.

MPA Rating: TV-MA, graphic violence

Cast: Wilson Hsu, Kang Sheng Lee, Bor Jeng Chen and Vera Chen

Credits: Directed by Shih-Han Liao, script by  Tzu-Ming Ma. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:44

Many movies, animated and otherwise, have been made about the events that inspired Alaska’s famed Iditarod sled dog race.

Disney’s “Togo” is far and away the most factual of all the many movies about the 1925 Nome epidemic and “The Great Mercy Run,” the dog sled relay run that saved it.

There’s plenty of Hollywood hokum, superhuman and supercanine feats, liberties with topography in the film. But “Togo” is the first version of this story that emphasizes that there were many teams, many mushers — most of them Native Inuit — involved, that the much-heralded Balto — object of a fine animated film on the story — wasn’t the only dog of note, merely the most publicized.

“Togo” has drama, heroism and pathos. And it hangs on the grand, craggy and weather-worn features of the great Willem Dafoe, one of the finest actors of his generation turned loose on a role with built-in theatricality.

There aren’t many who could launch into a Norwegian musher’s version of Shakespeare’s “St. Crispin’s Day” speech from “Henry V,” epic poetry to inspire his dogs, “we happy few,” and not seem utterly ridiculous. Dafoe makes this corny moment kind of magnificent.

Diphtheria breaks out in remote Nome in the middle of the winter of 1925. Thousands might die, with children the most vulnerable. A serum was available in Anchorage.

But there was no rail line, ice covered sounds preventing shipping and primitive airplanes would never make it to the town in 60 below snow squalls with 50 mile per hour winds. Only sled dogs would do. Only Norwegian immigrant Leonhard Seppala could guide them through 674 miles of frozen, blizzard-blocked wasteland.

And Seppala wouldn’t make the run without his aged lead dog, the “runt of the litter,” Togo.

It wasn’t until days after Seppala took off that the governor came up with the idea of a relay run, using mail carrying mushers (most of them Natives) to rush the medicine through. But Seppala was already crossing frozen Nelson Sound, braving the worst Alaska’s winters have to give with his trusty team of huskies.

He and his dogs endure frigid white hell to make the trip from way station to way station. And as they do, curmudgeonly Seppala remembers the “damned mutt” he hated, tried to give away (and considered worse) whom he’s entrusted with his and his team’s lives.

“St. Francis of Assisi would shoot this dog,” Leonhard grouses at the sickly “runt” wife Constance (Julianne Nicholson) insists on saving, treating and indulging as the little pup grows up to be healthy and seriously rambunctious.

The grace notes in Ericson Core’s film, based on a romantic Tom Flynn script, begin with the depiction of Seppala’s marriage. Nicholson lends heart and whimsy to this partnership. She and Dafoe make it a warm relationship with spark and wit.

“I’ll be back before you know it.”

“I won’t even make the bed.”

Constance keeps the faith, saves the dog and rolls her eyes at every escape he makes from the kennel, every time he comes back after Leonhard tries to give him away. And when people later question what her husband and his fellow mushers will do under these conditions, Nicholson puts a lump in your throat when Constance declares that none of them would “sit in front of a warm fire while children are dying,” and you remember the stakes involved.

Sentiment could easily overwhelm the picture, and make no mistake — you will cry over this one.

But in setting out to get it right, in not going the ridiculous “Call of the Wild” Harrison Ford with digital dogs in digital landscapes route, Disney’s made a kid-friendly/dog-loving epic that harks back to some children’s classics of the genre.

MPA Rating: PG for some peril, thematic elements and mild language 

Cast: Willem Dafoe, Julianne Nicholson, Nive Nielsen, Michael Greyeyes, Christopher Heyerdahl

Credits: Directed by Ericson Core, script by Tom Flynn. A Disney+ release.

Running time: 1:53