Movie Nation

“Wild Men” is a deliciously deadpan Scandinavian farce about the crisis in masculinity, skewering poseurs, shortcut-taking criminals and lazy, incompetent cops in a slow-walking pursuit thriller that really isn’t about the thrills.

Every decision a man makes in it seems idiotic, stupid or not wholly-thought-out and wrong. That’s what it’s about.

Danish filmmaker Thomas Daneskov wraps a goofy spoof of delusional Men’s Movement ideas in a tale of smugglers and cops colliding with a primitive, off-the-grid Viking lifestyle. Sometimes dark and often hilarious, it’s a comedy well worth the subtitles.

A burly, fur-covered mountain man (Rasmus Bjerg) stalks a mountain goat with his bow but fails to kill it. So he stalks a frog instead, feasting by the fire and paying the abdominal price for it later. It’s only when this Neolithic Nordic hunter stumbles across the empty candy wrapper that the game is up.

He’s off to the Shell convenience store to load up on groceries, smokes, maybe some beer.

“I forgot my wallet,” he whines, which tells the clerk he’s Danish and us that the movie’s set in Norway. “We need to work something out.”

No cash? No Spam and potato chips, chief. That’s the rule. Our Great Hunter can’t be blamed for the scuffle that breaks out, or how it ends. He’s hungry, loads up a basket and flees into the mountains.

That’s when we see his modern tent, his iPhone and the way he cooks beans in the can over the fire. And that’s where the injured smuggler with the backpack (Zaki Youssef) stumbles into him, a guy with a bloody gash that Martin, as our homeless “for about ten days now” hunter is called, offers to “stitch up.”

Musa was traveling with two mistrustful companions when they ran into an elk. He left them for dead and staggered into the woods, and he too notices Martin’s Danishness, that he’s adeptly sewing his leg up but with the filthiest hands Musa’s ever seen.

“Let’s hope it doesn’t get infected,” the jovial Dane reassures him.

The gas station robbery draws the interest of the seriously unmotivated local police. Old Øyvind (Bjørn Sundquist) seems more interested in scoring a free “French hotdog” than taking the clerk’s statement. And talking his two subordinates into tracking this “Viking” into the woods is a hard-sell.

“I have to pick up the kids. My wife’s made a roast. Can’t this wait until tomorrow? There’s more to life than WORK!”

“Protect and serve” is just as much of a myth in Norway as anywhere else.

Meanwhile, Martin’s dodging calls from his wife, who thinks he’s on a “team building retreat,” and unloading his reasons for abandoning his family and society to Musa. “I never need to open a mailbox or computer again.”

And a quarreling couple, whose pregnant wife is chewing out her husband’s lack of “altruism” stops to pick up hitchhikers — at the husband’s “Here’s your altruism” insistence — only to be carjacked by the survivors of Musa’s crash.

Director and co-writer Daneskov (“The Elites”) follows three, sometimes four threads and points-of-view in this slow and patient comedy. Everything and everyone points towards a coastal village where Musa and his mistrusting mates need to catch a ferry and Martin just might find his “tribe.” There’s an encampment of Viking reenactors living as “off the grid” as Martin, or so Musa promises him, if he’ll just get them there.

The Danish director knew that if he was mocking Norwegian cops and poking at anti “immigrant” prejudice he’d best make the biggest idiot here a Dane.

Bjerg’s Martin is beautifully befuddled and insecure. He’s pompously pure in his mid-life crisis “natural man” dream, incompetently delusional about that and downright judgmental when he discovers that the Guddalen Viking village takes Visa or American Express.

Youssef’s Musa is the audience’s surrogate here, puzzled at why anybody would want to live a primitive life as hard as that and impatient with the plainly racist (they pay him no mind) Norwegian cosplayers, led by Viking poster-boy character actor Rune Temte (“Captain Marvel,” “The Last Kingdom”).

Sundquist, Wotan on Netflix’s “Ragnarok” TV series, brings a lovely world-weariness to his tiny town police chief performance. Øyvind’s every deflection and change-the-subject distraction can be taken as a funny Danish dig at Norwegians. He’s literally “too old for this s—” and barely lets himself get put-out over his subordinates’ unwillingness to do their jobs, and their ineptitude when they finally do get around to the hard and sometimes dangerous work.

Sofie Gråbøl plays Martin’s understanding but increasingly frazzled wife, dragging their two kids and their pet rabbit up to Norway to find the father and husband who’s “lost his mind” as he got lost in the mountains.

“Wild Men” is a comedy of slack-jawed chuckles and slow-burn laughs, a movie that immerses us in that “O’Horten,” “A Man Called Ove” Norwegian style of deadpan, here married to a story that isn’t afraid to go “In Order of Disappearance” dark.

It’s “toxic masculinity” made light enough for mockery. And it tickled me, first scene to last.

Rating: unrated, violence, smoking, profanity

Cast: Rasmus Bjerg, Zaki Youssef, Bjørn Sundquist, Sofie Gråbøl, Håkon T. Nielsen, Tommy Karlsen and Rune Temte.

Credits: Directed by Thomas Daneskov, scripted by Thomas Daneskov and Morten Pape. A Samuel Goldwyn release.

Running time:1:44

Jackie Moore has the title role, and this bad girl is on VOD now.

Hostages forced to tunnel into a demolition job, this one looks promising. Emile Hirsch with a drawl?

Sept. 23.

In the words of Simon Pegg‘s mother tongue and mother accent, what manner of “jobby-flavored fart lozenge” is this?

Two Oscar winners in the cast, plus Pegg and Pixar’s good luck charm John Ratzenberger, and “Luck” turns out to have none.

It’s an almost utterly-joyless animated exercise in tedium, a botched “Inside/Out,” “Arthur Christmas” or “Monsters, Inc.” “on the factory floor” treatment of the concept of “luck,” how it is manufactured, what prevents bad luck and the like.

A sweet but blander-than-bland lead teen character, Pegg voicing a black cat — “In SCOTLAND, black cats are considered very lucky!” — barely a sight gag in 105 minutes and nary a joke, you’d think Apple had apps that could concoct a better script. Better get on that, and donate it to Skydance Animation.

The three credited writers set out to teach kids what a movie that’s all exposition is like. The cat accidentally leads clumsy “unlucky” orphan Sam (Eva Noblezada) into “The Land of Luck,” where she visits the Research and Development Dept. “where real luck is created” — “Happy Accidents,” “Right Place, Right Time,” “Lucky at Love,” etc.

Luck is manufactured with the aid of a “randomizer,” thanks to “good luck stones” and “bad luck stones.”

Pegg’s cat character, “Bob,” is better as a sight gag. Otherwise, he’s stuck limply reciting expositional drivel such as “GRAVITY shift! Luck’s gravity is the opposite of ours!”

Baszinga!

Sam follows this black cat into the luck netherworld in search of a lucky penny to give her fellow orphan — a little girl who still has the hope of finding a “forever family.” You know the drill. So does your kid.

“Find a penny, pick it up. All day long, you’ll have good luck.”

Sam? She just aged out of the orphanage, never adopted, and she wants to make sure little Hazel doesn’t suffer the same fate.

The cat’s part of a sort of Luck, Inc., and that’s where the lucky pennies are made, kept and polished. Unlucky Sam had one and lost it. Thus, she follows the cat.

Whoopie Goldberg voices the boss, a leprechaun. Jane Fonda plays the dragon overlord of it all.

The animation is…adequate — inexpressive faces, for starters.

There’s no real conflict, no heart and not much point to a movie that aims to remind us that luck doesn’t exist, or at least doesn’t matter.

“It wasn’t all fun, but I wouldn’t change a single thing.”

Oh sure. Me, too. Except for this movie. I’d change the rhymes-with-white out of this dafty bowfin of a film, ye’bampots.

Rating: G, ever so inoffensive

Cast: The voices of Eva Noblezada, Simon Pegg, John Ratzenberger, Lil Rel Howery, Whoopie Goldberg and Jane Fonda

Credits: Directed by Peggy Holmes, scripted by Kiel Murray, Jonathan Aibel and Glenn Berger. A Skydance Animation release on Apple TV

Running time: 1:45

It’s considered one of the most righteous acts on Earth, the simple planting of a tree. But can it be an act of destruction as well?

The Canadian playwright and screenwriter (“After the Ball”) Jason Sherman ponders that question in “My Tree,” his new documentary about charitable tree-planting in the Middle East.

Sherman says it all started when he wondered where a tree that was planted in his name after his 1970s Bar Mitzvah might be. That tree was to be planted in Israel.

“My Tree” became his documentary quest to figure out who talked his parents into buying him that gift, what sort of tree was planted, where it was and why it was placed in that particular spot.

As his film makes clear, there’s been pretty extensive media coverage in Canada over the years about the trees of Israel’s Canada Park — a place that the Jewish National Fund (Keren Kayemet L’Yisrael) designated as a fund-raising magnet for their decades long “Greening of Israel” campaign. Sherman’s film would be about the nature of that campaign and its agenda, an “innocent” asking innocent questions of folks who run a long-established charity familiar all over the Jewish diaspora.

But getting someone involved in it to talk about it proves shockingly difficult.

“Why was it so hard to talk about trees?” may be his rhetorical question. But we can guess he knew the answer before ever starting “My Tree.”

We can take Sherman at his word about this documentary’s origin story, or assume he’s being disingenuous for the camera, that he knew enough going in to ensure he’d have a compelling film on his hands. Considering the earlier reporting on the subject which explains seriously suspicious behavior by the JNF here, whose officials dodge interviews with him, guiltily drive up on him in the various Israeli planted-forests he visits and even shoo him away from their big Israeli tree nursery — which he’d arranged, with them, to visit — I have a feeling the latter is more likely.

They’ve been up to something a lot less righteous and more unsavory than is commonly known, and they know it. And he knew it going in.

“My Tree” is a damning reminder of the true nature of this “make the desert bloom” operation, which has a “facts on the ground” purpose, covering up — with parks, a “Martyr’s Forest,” groves of trees — forcibly-evacuated Palestinian villages like Yula or Imwas. The JNF has worked hand-in-glove with government and the IDF (Israeli Defense Forces), which knock down houses and chased out families that had lived there for hundreds of years. The planted trees are literally erasing Palestinian history in an effort to burnish Israel’s 1948 founding myth, the later “Six Day War” “miracle” and the decades upon decades of state-sponsored “settlements” being established on seized Arab land.

Speaking to a gardener/arborist, historians, investigative journalists, his Israeli relatives, Jewish activists in Israel and Canada, a Canadian rabbi and just a couple of actual Palestinians with a stake in the contested lands, Sherman’s film paints a picture of a greening-over “cover-up.” Words like “war crime,” “ethnic cleansing” and “apartheid” turn up in discussing these “no democracy does this” practices.

Starting with a brief history of Israel and the Zionist movement, Sherman works in home movies and the search for that Bar Mitzvah “certificate” promising the tree had been planted as he unravels what was really being sold — a cash donation and piece of paper that forged a connection between the Jewish diaspora around the world, and the “idea of the State of Israel.”

His Israeli relatives decry the ongoing “planting” and its connection to the country’s decades-long slide towards authoritarianism that followed the Rabin assassination. A Palestinian-American remembers returning to the village he was forced out of as a child and Sherman interviews the one retired JNF official who will talk to him, pressing him on his sunny “official version” of history and how Canada Park and other “parks” came to be, coming back again and again to that one central question that defines “My Tree.”

“What was here before a forest?”

“My Tree” makes for an eye-opening documentary about propaganda’s role in the founding of Israel and continual efforts to immunize the controversial Jewish State from criticism, partly by having donors plant 240 million trees there. And it adds another voice to the choir of people protesting the ignorance of what’s actually going on, with “trees” roles in the Apartheid necessary to carve a monocultural “Jewish” state out Palestine.

Rating: unrated, profanity

Cast: Jason Sherman, many others

Credits: Scripted and directed by Jason Sherman. A Level 33 Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:42

Two unutterably gorgeous Mexican actresses dressed in assorted sexy dresses are about all there is to recommend the perky but drab romantic comedy “Don’t Blame Karma!”

Aislinn Derbez and Renata Notni play siblings, Sara and Lucy. A harmless “incident” in childhood has convinced Sara (Derbez) that she’s “cursed,” that all the luck in the family went to her sister.

Seeing as how Sara’s a T-shirt shop owner in sleepy Mérida and Lucy is a world famous runway model, maybe she has a point.

But only in the movies is anyone who looks like the stunning Derbez (“A la Mala,” “Miss Bala”) presented as a shrinking violet, the not-quite-as-pretty older sister to The Face of Fashion.

The reason Sara has believed this all her life is that her “first love” in high school, the one she tried out her light-sensitive dye clothing designs on, brushed her off way back when. And now Aaron (Gil Cerezo) is “Aaron Starr,” a global pop idol.

This all comes back to her as Lucy stops by the house Sara inherited from their grandmother to announce her engagement…to Aaron.

The “romance” here is Sara pining for Aaron, Aaron secretly treating her as his muse and Lucy wondering if this famous-model/famous pop star match is “the one.” I mean, even an influencer wants there to be fireworks.

The “comedy” comes from their parents, who might be splitting up thanks to Mom’s passion for an “open marriage,” and from Sara’s own romance with Roberto (Giuseppe Gamba), who is better at phone sex than the real thing.

The “purge my bad karma” plot is strictly a non-starter, with this Elisa Miller (“The Pleasure is Mine”) film foundering as it searches for something else compelling to hang this story on.

It’s a timid TV-MA outing, so the sex farce possibilities are left mostly unexplored. The “fashion” and “influencer” elements are undeveloped, and the whole “pop star” idea is a bust, as are the tunes that our Aaron is supposed to make the ladies swoon over.

Scene after scene lacks spark or fire or heart. I’d quote a great line from it (either in Spanish, or dubbed into English), but there are none, only this one which may explain everything.

“In Mérida, time doesn’t matter.”

Indeed. Time stands still for the 85 minutes it takes “Don’t Blame Karma!” to play out.

Rating: TV-MA, sex, profanity

Cast: Aislinn Derbez, Renata Notni, Gil Cerezo

Credits: Directed by Elisa Miller, scripted by Fernanda Eguiarte and Marcelo Tobar. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:25

“Prey,” the reincarnation of the “Predator” franchise in prequel form, is a straight-up old-fashioned B-movie, a Western dressed up with spaceship, cloaking device and alien hunter effects.

A Native American take on the tale, it’s better than the worst of the “Predator” pictures, which makes its move directly to Hulu and Disney+ a puzzle. But we aren’t Disney accountants, are we? The “Predator” franchise feels played-out. And as I said, this one’s never more than a “B-movie.”

In Western terms that means the film puts the Texas and Southern Plains Comanche tribe in the woodlands of the north, dealing with the first incursions by French fur-trappers in the late 18th or very early 19th century. Buffalo and grizzly bears and elk and wolves and mountain lions co-exist in the same corner of North America.

That’s B-movie “history” and “geography” for you.

Amber Midthunder plays Naru, a 20ish huntress in a patriarchal tribe that isn’t that keen on her chosen path in life. She’s good with a bow, handy with a hatchet. And with her very smart dog by her side, there isn’t much in the forest she can’t handle.

She wants to become one of the hunters and make her spirit quest against something formidable. She’s seen the legendary “thunder bird,” which made the sky boil as its engines brought it to Earth. Her people are familiar with the passengers on that craft, so it would seem. She wants her “test” to be against a Predator.

“You want to hunt something that hunts you,” her brother Taabe (Dakota Beavers) wonders? Be careful what you wish for.

And as we see our towering, stealthy (invisible) and advanced-tech-armed “hunter” battle a bear, and then start slaughtering his way through tribal hunting parties, we get Taabe’s point. Naru faces fight-or-flight choices, and we understand the way she flinches when faced with the chance to kill something she might not be able to finish off and we’re downright impressed with her decision to flee on first sight.

She’s not stupid.

Director Dan Trachtenberg (“10 Cloverfield Lane” and TV’s “The Boys”) makes great use of locations (Alberta, Canada) and the film’s set-piece fights. Screenwriter Patrick Aison sticks to the “Predator” basics for the alien hunter, and creates some wonderfully visceral scenes that try to reason out how bow and arrow, hatchet and woodlore skills might be used against a super-sized/super-powered foe.

Mainly, though, this picture is about the ways the over-sized, over-equipped villain slaughters Comanches and has his way with some enterprising French trappers as well.

The leads are compelling with Midthunder pretty and plucky and very fit, and Beavers is primed for Matinee Idol status.

Lapses in logic, infuriating hesitations on the part of our heroine and trite talk-to-the-dog dialogue are familiar tropes of Native-oriented Westerns and B-movies of every stripe. And what self-respecting B-picture would be complete without that hoariest of action film cliches of Old Hollywood — quicksand?

This is still a perfectly passable creature feature-meets-First-Americans entertainment, and I dare say any multiplex in North America would have loved to shown it.

Rating: R for strong bloody violence.

Cast: Amber Midthunder, Dakota Beavers, Stefany Mathias, Mike Paterson and Michelle Thrush

Credits: Directed by Dan Trachtenberg, scripted by Patrick Aison, based on the “Predator” movies. A 20th Century Film on Hulu and Disney+.

Running time: 1:39

“The Andy Baker Tape” is a film school textbook example of how much movie you can get out of virtually no money.

It’s a “found footage” thriller knocked together by its writer/director-co-stars, Breta Lada and Dustin Fontaine, a tale of two long-lost brothers reunited by a DNA test and a Youtube finger-food and travel show of the “”Triple D” variety.

Well-executed, reasonably well-acted and brisk — it’s just 70 minutes long — it turns from sibling reunion and sibling revelry to deadly sibling rivalry in a New York, or in this case, New Jersey minute.

Jeff Blake (Lada) is a one-man Youtube foodie channel whose specialty is Guy FierriLand — “Diners, Dives and Drive-ins” and the sumptuous finger foods one can find by American roadside eateries, served in crumpled aluminum foil.

“What I’m smelling right now’s what Mark Antony smelled when walked into ancient Egypt and smelled Cleopatra.”

That’s the shtick that landed Jeff a Food Network pilot. All he has to do is gather together his best video, and some new stuff, and impress them and the deal is done.

That makes this the perfect time to add a little drama to his life and the show. He gets an online DNA test that tells him he has a brother his father sired out of wedlock. Let’s go meet him, on video! Let’s take mechanic Andy Baker (Fontaine) out of his rural New Jersey digs and on the road to New Jersey’s finest fun-on-a-bun pork sandwiches.

The film is heavy on Jeff’s “process,” running different version of his lines, cleaning up his language (for “the network”), showing just how much he tapes to edit into each show, and how he now includes his newly-found brother — who doesn’t share his outgoing personality or palate — in this episode.

A road trip with a close-in-age relative you’ve just met and have little in common with? What could go wrong?

It’s far too easy to guess that, and just as little effort is required to spot the moments where we wonder “Why are they recording this?” or “Who exactly is recording that?” “Baker Tape” still manages to avoid most found footage pitfalls.

What works against this short, sinister and to-the-point thriller are its limited horizons. Simply put, it’s a story of no consequence, a movie that leaves you with an overwhelming sense of “Yeah, and?”

The acting is adequate when it needs to be bigger. The characters aren’t compelling enough to invest in, and the paranoia, fear and fury acted-out here just aren’t over-the-top enough to hold one’s interest.

We’ve seen so many versions of this sort of story that you’ve got to have more on the page before shooting starts than a “Food Network” gimmick and a few yummy sandwiches to unwrap, describe and taste.

Rating: unrated, violence, profanity

Cast: Bret Lada and Dustin Fontaine.

Credits: Directed by Bret Lada, scripted by Dustin Fontaine and Bret Lada. A Terror Films release.

Running time: 1:09

Kind of a big deal, and while it wasn’t supposed to be a big screen blockbuster, you don’t eat $90 million+ and not even show it on HBO Max if it’s great.

What would Disney have done? Put it out streaming and moved on to the next iteration. Was the lead subpar? The story a dud? Considering that they put “Super Pets” in theaters, this makes even less sense.

“Devalues the brand” I dare say, and not just for the reasons speculated on.

https://variety.com/2022/film/news/batgirl-not-released-warner-bros-hbo-max-1235331897/

Hulu has this Friday.