Movie Nation

The departure of a beloved giant panda, sent home from Koreo to China to propogate this endangered species, becomes a most touching farewell as we mourn her leaving with the two zookeepers who cared for her in “My Dearest Fu Bao.”

Pandas are among nature’s most adorable creatures, and this documentary by Shim Hyeong-jun and Thomas Ko encourages the viewer to overdose on cute. But it’s also about loss, solitude, intimate grief and very public group grieving and the connection humans feel with animals, which those animals often acknowledge.

Fu Bao was born in Korea, and as she reaches four years of age, she’s to go home to her natural breeding place, where the bamboo is sweeter and the gene pool is larger, ensuring the survival of this rarest of bears.

Her leaving hit the staff of the Everland Zoo — which is all but built around housing and letting the public see pandas — hard. They still have Fu Bao’s parents, and her two adorable baby sisters, as a draw. But the years of care, attention and interaction with Fu Bao makes this loss lead to grieving, especially to her chief caregivers, Kang Cheol-won and Song Young-kwan.

The two men have tended gardens raising food for the zoo, improved her playground, cleaned her night time enclosure, and catered to Fu Bao’s every need. Learning that she was leaving, Kang even arranged for a heavy duty hammock to be sewn and he himself installs it in a tree in her compound. She and her mother played and napped in one when she was a toddler, he explains.

Both men acknowledge openly-expressed male grief and even male hugging aren’t the social norm in Korea. But this departure hits Kang so hard he weeps and it makes Song recall an earlier on-the-job loss that he only just got over, thanks to the lovable Fu Bao, who let him “love again.”

Surrounded by a park emblazoned with slogans playing up the countdown to Fu Bao’s departure the two — Kang especially — struggle to cope, and to comfort the mobs that pour in to see her before she leaves. People endure 400 minute wait times, and wait outside the panda enclosure for Kang or Song to reassure them and comfort them, a sort of “Elvis has left the building” gesture that plays as incredibly sweet.

The two men have tended gardens raising food for the zoo, and catered to Fu Bao’s every need. Learning that she was leaving, Kang even arranged for a heavy duty hammock to sewn and he himself installs it in a tree in her playground compound. She and her mother played and napped in one when she was a toddler, her explains.

Both men acknowledge publicly expressed male grief and even male hugging aren’t the social norm in Korea. But this departure hits Kang so hard he openly weeps and it makes Song recall an earlier on-the-job loss that he only just got over, thanks to the lovable Fu Bao, who let him “love again” (in Korean with English subtitles).

Surrounded by a park emblazoned with slogans playing up the countdown to Fu Bao’s departure —
“You’ll always be our baby panda!” — the two, Kang especially, struggle to cope, and to comfort the mobs that pour in to see her before she leaves. People endure 400 minute wait times, and wait outside the panda enclosure for Kang or Song to reassure them and comfort them, a sort of “Elvis has left the building” gesture that plays as incredibly sweet.

One is tempted to ask what psychologists and sociologists might have to say about this public grief and human connections with affectionate and adorable animals. But when the departure comes and goes, and Kang travels to visit Fu Bao in her Chinese home some while later, we have our answers. And you’d have to be made of stone to not be moved.

Rating: unrated, G-worthy

Cast: Kang Cheol-won, Song Young-kwan and Fu Bao.

Credits: Directed by Shim Hyeong-jun and Thomas Ko. A Well Go USA release.

Running time: 1:36

A lone combat vet squares off against bloody-minded veterans-turned-contractors on a bridge in Boston in “Aftermath,” a sometimes satisfying action pic undone by lapses in logic, talk-you-to-death villains and murky, uneasy politics.

Dylan Sprouse, who got his big breaks as Adam Sandler’s kid in “Big Daddy” and on TV’s “The Suite Life of Zack and Cody,” plays an ex-Army Ranger whose drive to the movies with his kid sister (Megan Stott of “Little Fires Everywhere” and “Yes Day”) is interrupted by a terrorist attack.

The assault on Boston’s Tobin Bridge is carried out with military precision and uncertain aims. A gang of commandos given “Kilo, Foxtrot, Tango, Sierra, Yankee, Echo” code-names by their leader, “Romeo” (nepo baby Mason Gooding of “Scream”) block traffic and blow two spans of the bridge out.

Their goal? Get to a convict (Dichen Lochman of “Severance”) being transported to a trial.

With a number of people already killed and some 70 or so ziptied to their car steering wheels as hostages, the ex-military/now-“contractors” terrorists have demands, and a live stream platform on which to broadcast them to the world.

Only Eric and his “particular skills” stands in their way. Well, there’s always an older truck-driving vet (Will Lyman) who can be relied on in a pinch. Everybody else is just cowardly “collateral damage.”

And then there’s Eric’s PTSD flashbacks to something that happened in Afghanistan that have to be dealt with.

The set-up is “Die Hard” meets “The Rock,” a plot that’s bloody-minded with military men and women who have gone fascist driving the action.

Eric will pick off the masked murderers, one by one. He’ll drop the occasional one-liner about how he’s acquired a bad guy’s semi-automatic weapon.

“I didn’t get this by playing rock, paper scissors!”

Gooding chews up the scenery as a Man with a Mission, the pill-and-eye-popping commander they used to call “Captain Chaos” starting “the greatest revolution since 1776,” spitting with rage, hectoring the cops and only really challenged by his combat-vet quarry and the convict who remembers him, who betrayed him, the woman they nicknamed “Doc” Brown (Lochman).

Cute.

The picture wanders off the straight and narrow when it pauses to pontificate. The combat situation problem solving is interesting enough, even when far more logical moves make themselves known.

But whatever the effects and convincing (faked) Tobin Bridge setting, the object of the Nathan Graham Davis screenplay is to keep the hero and the villain alive and maybe a wild card character and a sidekick around for a big finale. Director Patrick Lussier — “Drive Angry” was his high-water mark — never forgets that, and more’s the pity.

Rating: unrated, very violent

Cast: Dylan Sprouse, Mason Gooding, Dichen Lochman and Megan Stott.

Credits: Directed by Patrick Lussier, scripted by Nathan Graham Davis. A Voltage release on Netflix.

Running time: 1:37

I won’t refer to my not-a-professional carpenter, not remotely Amish efforts as “cinematic.” But let’s just say that putting down the rasp, the hammer, assorted screwdrivers, the jigsaw and the ancient power drill, I’ve never felt more “Keatonesque.

That’s the drill every March 17, isn’t it?

Listen to a spot of this.

Watch an Irish film or two. “The Late Rite,” I’d suggest. Or Roddy Doyle’s “The Snapper,” “The Van” or “The Commitments,” maybe Gabriel Byrne’s “Into the West,” or perhaps “Circle of Friends” or the more obscure early efforts of Liam Neeson.

Relish the grand Irish actor, Ciaran Hinds, who so aptly defined this music and the Irish cinema he and Colm Meaney and Cillian Murphy and Saorise Ronan prop up every chance they get.

And plan your own trip to the cinematic Ireland, the homey, music-filled pubs, the lush green countryside, the seaside cliffs and the quaint villages where movies like “The Quiet Man” were filmed.

I’ve visited a few locations used by “Braveheart,” “The Quiet Man” and lesser and greater films around Dublin, Trim, Galway, Cong, Athenry etc. Lovely place to take in during the fall or spring, although I can’t imagine it ever looking grim, even in the dank and chilly winter.