Movie Nation

The South African CGI animation house Triggerfish (“Zambezia”) makes its Netflix debut with “Seal Team,” an animated action comedy about seals taught to fight back against “ravenous seal-eating sharks” by a grizzled HMMF (Hydro-Marine-Military-Force) trained walrus

We see seals not as human Naval commandos, but as…seals — complete with acronyms (RSI, “really stupid idea”), seal jargon and gadgets — “puffer mines,””shrimp pistols,” a bara-zooka,” and “electric eel volts” — as well as sometimes amusing birds, scary-funny (ish) sharks and a “Baby Shark” joke.

It’s more a time-killer than anything anybody, young or old, needs to see. But the animation’s quite good.

Jessie T. Usher voices Quinn, a guilt-ridden seal whose carelessness gets a friend of his eaten. They’d run across these dog tags on the sea bottom, tags that used to belong to a walrus/seal/dolphin team led by Taggart, a walrus voiced by J.K. Simmons. Quinn stumbles into Taggart, who dismisses him because he’ll need help, others who are “brave, stupid or crazy enough” to take on that sort of combat.

So Quinn lands crazy Beth (Kristen Schaal) and preening “brave” blowhard Geraldo (Patrick Warburton) and they talk/blackmail Taggart into training them. What should this “ensemble,” “club” or “flipper patrol” call themselves?

Yes, the jokes are like that.

The sharks (Matthew Rhys voices the scariest) are serious trash talkers, of the “Get INTO my FACE hole” and “This is what happens when you go up against the FOOD chain!” school.

The seals are mainly fed up with sharks, and fed up with the limited diet they endure with sharks seriously cramping their fish-hunting style.

Barnacles? Ick. “They taste like sand…and disappointment.”

With this voice cast and a “Shark Tale” setting, there’s no reason “Seal Team” couldn’t have been funnier.

The movie’s more militarized than most parents like their kiddy entertainment to be, but that’s not what lets down “Seal Team.” The action beats are borrowed from “Finding Nemo/Finding Dory” and “Shark Tale,” pretty much, and nothing to tempt tiny tots to sit still for 100 minutes.

Co-director Greig Cameron is the sole credited screenwriter. He should have shared the credit and put out a call for writers of better one-liners than “Kiss my tail fin!”

The singer “Seal” plays a singer seal named Seal, singing that “Quinn is never gonna survive.” There’s a funny basking shark reminiscent of characters from “Finding Nemo,” and a really good Australian “shark cage” tour boat send up.

But that’s pretty much every comic highlight of “Seal Team.”

Rating: TV-Y7, violence

Cast: The voices of J.K. Simmons, Kristen Schaal, Jessie T. Usher, Kate Micucci, Sharlto Copley, Patrick Warburton, and Seal.

Credits: Directed by Greig Cameron and Kane Croudace, scripted by Greig Cameron. A Triggerfish Animation film for Netflix.

Running time: 1:38

You’d think we’d have all picked up on this by now.

But maybe the annual showings, the “tradition” of watching Frank Capra’s masterful Jimmy Stewart/Donna Reed tear-jerker, has drained it of its meaning.

We watch a sentimental black and white melodrama from the postwar exhaustion of 1946 and we miss the film’s core, the quintessence of the Americanism that Italian/Sicilian immigrant Capra preached in such films as this one and “Meet John Doe.”

The meaning of the movie first hit me when “Back to the Future Part II (1989)” dabbled in Capra’s idea of what unscrupulous, greedy, crypto-fascist capitalism’s end game would look like. A divided America, kept poor, drunken, gambling-addicted and beaten-down by the one percent whose interests that served.

Former Labor Secretary, economist and now pundit Robert Reich says he’s made the connection, too.

“As America has moved closer to being an oligarchy — with staggering inequalities of income, wealth, and power not seen in over a century — and closer to Trumpian neofascism (the two moves are connected), “It’s a Wonderful Life” speaks to what’s gone wrong and what must be done to make it right.”

The messages of the film, which premiered over Christmas 75 years ago, are a black and white embodiment of “The American Dream.” That dream is financial security represented at its simplest in home ownership. That dream, as the movie makes clear, isn’t shared by people who don’t want to “share.”

So it comes down to a “broken down old Building and Loan” and a member of a generation that knew group action was the only thing that could make that happen. George Bailey, taking over the family credit union whose members were its security, people who shared that dream and could be made to understand that they shared it — that “united we stand” and get a house and a good life, “divided we fall” and pay rent to the shrinking minority of super rich who thereby “control” us — becomes the Poster Boy for “The Greatest Generation.”

This Financial Times piece points to the tests that formed that “Wonderful Life” generation — a global depression brought on by unregulated stock/securities “gambling” that causes pretty much every global financial meltdown, the rise of fascism thanks to hobbled underclasses being susceptible to “revenge” on whatever “other” fascist leaders con them into blaming — never the rich, entitled and democracy-killers who “break” government and then insist they’re the only ones who can “fix” it.

And here we are again, a violent, intolerant and willfully ignorant minority swelling up its chest to do the bidding the of Mr. Potters/Biffs/Gov. DeSantis/Abbotts/Trumps of this world. Because we can’t remember the last time we were tested this way and have forgotten or never learned the lessons of “It’s a Wonderful Life.”

This echoes with the memory and spirit if not the voice of the late Chadwick Boseman, and teases around the edges of the Nov. 22 release — pomp, circumstance, gravitas, a new villain and a car.

“Black Panther” was his legend-cementing hit, but far from the best of the high-minded Boseman’s best performances.

If Marvel makes this character replaceable, that’s totally on brand, “just business.”

Let’s hope they got an interesting movie out of their efforts.

Don’t know how I missed catching “The Colditz Story” on this or that cable channel over the years. I saw many of its 1950s Brit-film WWII classics — “The Dam Busters,””Dunkirk,” “Bridge on the River Kwai” — but never the best British example of the POW dramedy, a genre most famous for “Stalag 17” and “The Great Escape.”

Perhaps after seeing PBS and History Channel documentaries on the “escape proof” German camp at Colditz Castle, I never felt the need.

Like WWII movies about the Pacific conflict from the same period, one can feel a certain softening of attitudes towards the Hated “Hun” and the murderous “Jap” in films made after the two former adversaries morphed into Cold War allies. The evolution of the prison escape/POW film is an exemplar of that.

Starting with “Stalag 17” (1953) and climaxing with “The Great Escape” (1963), the movies about this deathly serious business of breaking out of machine-gun-guarded prison of war camps became somewhat, well, campy. There are traitors and shootings and cold and privation. But the films also feature a “Jolly good sport, wot?” jauntiness.

There was even a hint of that in the brutally serious “Bridge on the River Kwai,” although David Lean’s 1957 masterpiece reflects Europe and America’s testier, racially-charged attitude towards the (even more racist) Asian adversary.

The music of “The Great Escape” is a bouncy little martial ditty fit for a film about kids playing hide and seek…with guns. It’s no wonder that epic, a “true story” and a bloody but often lighthearted blockbuster, inspired the indefensible Nazi-normalizing cartoon “Hogan’s Heroes” on TV.

By contrast, the Francis Chagrin score of “Colditz” is alarming, its opening bars promising a dire thriller that the movie only rarely is.

“Escape” had the jauntier tune and a more blunt depiction of violence. “Colditz” had a strident score and a jocular, sporting tone with actual comedy included in the account, provided by “Carry On” comics Ian Carmichael and Richard Wattis, playing the “stars” of the camp revue at Olfag IV-C.

That was the official name (Oflag is a shortening of Offizierslager “officer’s camp”) of Colditz. It was set aside for officers of the British, Polish, Dutch and French armed forces who repeatedly attempted escapes at their other camps.

That’s how Pat Reid (John Mills), Harry Tyler (Lionel Jeffries) and others under the command of Colonel Richmond (Eric Portman) ended up there.

Although they, the Poles who preceded them there (Guido Lorraine plays one), the Dutch (the great character actor Theodore Bikel is most prominent) and French (Eugene Deckers) are told “Zere IZZ no ESCAPE” from Colditz by the Kommandant (Frederick Valk) and warned of what awaits them if and when they’re caught, they crack on with it.

“Let me repeat this once more. The sole reward for attempting to escape from Colditz will be death!“

The initial problems seem to be a senior officer, Col. Richmond, indifferent to the escape mania and seemingly passive, taking the German’s words at face value. And then there’s the lack of organization. The four groups of prisoners are forever screwing up each other’s attempts with their own. Nobody trusts or respects anybody else.

“This blasted Frenchman makes Colditz look about as dangerous as a child’s playground,” Reid complains.

That’s a complaint that suits the film a tad too much, as well. The Germans’ lax security means clever escapers will try hiding under shrubbery in the outside-the-walls soccer pitch reserved for prisoners’ use, gymnastically leap-frogging over a fence, hammering out all manner of woodwork in a workshop where they build sets for their next “Theatre Colditz” show to build tunnels and fake German uniforms to trick apparently near-sighted guards at every turn.

It’s all a bit much, but aside from the occasional shooting, future Bond director Guy Hamilton keeps it light and fun.

The light tone doesn’t so much disrespect the dire straits those imprisoned there struggled through as discount the difficulty of what they accomplished. Time and again, a funny fake mustache (sported by Richmond), a feigned Nazi salute to a guard while in a quite-convincing Wehrmacht uniform or an ingenious tunnel or rope ladder seems on the verge of success.

And when it isn’t, often as not, there’s a “Now now you naughty boys” reprimand from the Kommandant or his second (vulpine veteran character player Anton Diffring).”Solitary” is nothing of the sort, and it’s even where one semi-successful attempt is carried out.

That lowers the stakes in a movie that has fine moments of suspense somewhat undercut by the idea of “Oh well, better luck next time” for most of the failures.

“Colditz,” which became a British TV series in the ’70s, also feels feels incomplete, the ending truncated — cut-off — at the 94 minute mark. If you’ve read or seen anything about this gathering of escape artists, it’s that their getaways got to insanely elaborate levels. One even built a glider.

Much of that is left out, here.

But the players are all on top of their game, with fuming Mills, stoic Portman (of “The 49th Parallel”), Bikel and the comics Carmichael and Wattis standing out.

Hamilton (“Goldfinger,” “Live and Let Die”) and director of photography Gordon Dines (“The Third Key”) make great use of the actual castle and present a stark story with silly touches in silky black and white.

The best way to approach it is as a proof-of-concept picture for the later, bigger budget, all-star cast “Great Escape.” Movies like “Colditz” and “Stalag 17” proved that audiences, after hating and fearing and mourning loved ones lost to their recent WWII adversaries, were finally open to see the ridiculous, as well as the sad and horrific.

Rating: approved, violence

Cast: John Mills, Eric Portman, Lionel Jeffries, Anton Diffring, Ian Carmichael, Richard Wattis, Frederick Valk and Theodore Bikel.

Credits: Directed by Guy Hamilton, scripted by Ivan Foxwell and Guy Hamilton, based on the book by P.R. Reid. A Film Movement release, also on Tubi, Amazon, etc.

Running time: 1:34

The gold mine that George Lucas first tunneled keeps paying benefits to the House of Mouse that bought it, which has found leftover value in the whole bounty hunter supporting character thing with “The Mandalorian” and “The Book of Boba Fett,” in addition to animated takes on clones and the further adventures of heroes that Lucas created a long time ago in a Hollywood far, far way.

Which makes one wonder who else Disney and Jon Favreau will turn into streaming series sure to please the fans and become another hit on the pipe Lucas first lit way back when?

A few ideas…

“Jawa Jive” –– The runty, dangerous but adorable desert scavengers let their cowls down for an Inside the Crawler series on scrapping and scrappiness. Think “Minions” meets “Sanford & Son!” Think of the TOY sales!

“Lando the Rising Son: The Calrissian Chronicles” — We learn about earlier hijinks and seductions of the smooth and suave hustler, fighter and lover of a “galaxy far, far away.”

“Young Leia: An Alderaan Quincenera” — See the Princess before she earned her buns!

“Cantina Band on the Run” — Follow the plucky musicians of the “Star Wars” universe as they scramble from Mos Eisley to Mos Epsos and every Mos in between, playing their One Hit Wonder hit, bitching with their slippery, unsympathetic manager, preferably played by Mos Def.

“The Reeducation of Jar Jar Binks” — A “misunderstood” hero, an unfairly criticized racist caricature, Jar Jar starts over slinging drinks in a swampy Dagobah saloon, the watering hole where Yoda knocked back Singapore Slings, laying low, waiting for his final student to make an untimely appearance.

“Greedo’s First Move” — A Bob Odenkirk “Nobody” take on the hapless “also-ran” of Bounty Hunters, an under-estimated Inspector Clouseau that is actually a pretty dangerous dude when he’s cornered and actually gets to take the first shot.

“Call Me Mister Hutt!” — The slimy formative years of a Tatooine kingpin, back when Jabba was svelte and Tony Soprano-hungry, a gangster on the make.

Yes, you read’em all here first. Have at it, Brother Favreau.

“Spider-Man: No Way Home” added another $52.7 million this New Year’s weekend, clearing the $600 million mark domestically, more than doubling that worldwide.

It has changed the box office in a pandemic year in a huge, lifesaving way, even if it is is too soon to say it’ll save the big screen exhibition side of the business, single-handedly.

“Sing 2” belted out a robust $19.6 million on its second weekend. Nice.

“The King’s Man’s” second weekend was a slight (under 25%) falloff, mainly based on the fact that the prequel nobody asked for didn’t earn that much when it opened. It added another $4.5.

“American Underdog” added another $4 million and loose change.

That’s still better than the nosediving “Matrix Resurrections.” It earned $3.82 million, taking the “Tyler Perry Plunge” (movies that drop over 65% on their second weekend), a nearly 70% falloff.

“West Side Story” is sinking without a trace, domestically and abroad. No “Christmas Bounce” for the remake nobody but Steven Spielberg asked for. Another $2.1 million means it may hold onto screens with no new releases overwhelming it for the moment. A little over $30 million, all in. Bomb’s away.

“A Journal for Jordan” didn’t cost much, didn’t have a big name cast (Michael B. Jordan can’t open a movie…yet), and didn’t make much money at all on its second weekend –$1.17, per Box Office Pro.

“Ghostbusters: Afterlife” added another $1.42, “Licorice Pizza,” finally in wide release, a bit over $1.24, “Encanto” another $1.05.

An outstanding cast and an artificially upbeat ending had some Sundancers soiling their Underoos over “Fast Color” in snowy Utah some four winters back. And that finale had just enough wriggle room to tempt Amazon into putting a series based on the film into pre-production.

One suspects that it wasn’t just a pandemic, but saner heads prevailing, that stalled that Amazon adaptation. It’s not that a female African-American superheroine tale couldn’t work, or that the wondrous Gugu Mbatha-Raw or “Belle,” TV’s “Loki,” and “The Morning Show” couldn’t carry it. It’s that perhaps no one could get this dead weight across the finish line.

Director and co-writer Julia Hart of “Miss Stevens,” “I’m Your Woman” and Disney TV’s “Star Girl” serves up a fine dystopia and three generations of supernatural women “trying to get by” as End Times take civilization down the drain. But Hart is so sparing with her action beats and so staid and self-serious in her supernatural touches that the picture never sparks to life.

This version of the climate crisis endgame captures a rural America desultorily going through the motions as years and years pass without rain. Drinkable liquid is dearly bought and highly-priced.

Ruth (Mbatha-Raw) is on the lam, a somewhat tortured soul making her way from cash-only motel to not-yet-dry bar, haunted and hunted.

A “seizure” she feels coming on explains half of that. Something in her makes her cause earthquakes. And that “friendly” stranger (Christopher Denham) at the diner where she finishes the lone fried egg she can afford might not be so friendly.

“Where you headed?” “Oh, I’m just going.” “What does THAT mean?”

Even his “rescue” when Johnny Law shows up looking for her has strings attached.

“I’m a government scientist…We just want to run some...tests.“

Elsewhere, a little girl (Saniyya Sidney) tinkers with electronics and fixing a pickup truck, listening to the stories and guidance of her grandmother ( Lorraine Toussaint of “The Equalizer” and “Orange is the New Black”) Bo.

There’s something mysterious about these two, their shared “powers.” Seeing the “colors” is a sign that they’re able to atomize objects as they see fit, even though putting things back together again is an iffier proposition.

“If something’s broken, it stays broken,” Bo intones, laying our big societal/environmental metaphor out for all to see.

Ruth of course is the little girl’s mother, Bo’s daughter. And her homecoming is fraught, with those “scientists” and assorted cops looking for her, cops including a sheriff (David Strathairn) whose pleas for “some semblance of order” seem as despairing as everything else about this desertified landscape.

After a promising start, “Fast Color” comes to a dead stop in its ponderous, exposition-packed middle acts. Toussaint and Mbatha-Raw bring plenty of gravitas to their explanations of their gift, its coming and going nature and their fractured family history, all provided more for the benefit of the child than the viewer.

Hart never gives her film a sense of urgency, which may suit the funereal “We’ve all given up” tone, but it sucks away what little life there is to “Fast Color” the moment Ruth finds her way “home.” A good rule for screenwriters, “the quest narrative is your friend. Abandon it (‘get there’ too soon) at your peril.”

Denham is only modestly effective as the villain of the piece. The effects are equally modest, a tad underwhelming.

As is every one of the later scenes leading up to the unearned Big Finish, which the only thing that really explains this picture’s “Sundance Moment.” As for the series to be based on it? That faint “whooshing” in the background is the air going out of that balloon.

Rating: PG-13 for a scene of violence and brief strong language

Cast: Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Lorraine Toussaint, Saniyya Sidney, Christopher Denham and David Strathairn

Credits: Directed by Julia Hart, scripted by Julia Hart and Jordan Horowitz. A Lionsgate release on Netflix, Youtube, Hulu, Amazon etc.

Running time: 1:40

“To What Remains” is a film about the work of Project Recover, an organization devoted to finding and identifying the remains of American airmen lost in the South Pacific, primarily in and around the island of Palau, during World War II.

Dr. Pat Scannon’s non-profit research organization, formerly called the Bent Propellor Project, digs through National Archives materials such as combat “action reports,” looks for surviving eye-witnesses to add to what they know and sets out in search of MIA Navy, Marine and Army Air Force airmen from the more than 200 bombers, fighters and fighter bombers lost in the waters around The Republic of Palau, specifically the island Peleliu. the site of bloody island-hopping battles the U.S. and its allies fought on Japanese-held territory on their push toward Japan.

Christopher Woods’ film follows Scannon, an MD and PhD and amateur archeologist, and his team of veterans, enthusiasts and experts from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography on their quest, diving the “blue corners” and “blue holes” and coral heads of some of the most beautiful islands on Earth, piecing together the puzzle of where a lost airman and his plane might be. Woods uses silent combat footage from the actual battle, with sound effects, to take the viewer back to 1944, showing us many air crashes as they do. And Woods tags along as descendants of the missing in action learn that their long lost loved-ones have been found, or in some cases, why they haven’t.

It’s a somber movie, with an emotional musical score to match, that traffics in ceremony, sentiment and that combat veteran’s “leave no man behind” code. Descendants and members of the search team, like former Navy SEAL Marcus Luttrell, talk about sacrifice, the futures lost when this or that service member died saving democracy from fascism.

The film meanders a bit, taking some understandable detours that amount to “mission creep” as Project Recover excavates a “killing field” where the Japanese executed captured aircrew and Navy UDT (pre-SEALS Underwater Demolition Team members).

Those distractions highlight the oddly-narrow focus of Project Recover — air crew. Scannon talks of developing his “obsession” with the subject after hunting for and finding a Japanese trawler future president and WWII Grumman Avenger (bomber) pilot George. H.W. Bush sank in battle. Scannon’s ongoing obsession is finding a missing pilot friend of Bush’s, a former Naval air division mate and roommate who parachuted out of his downed plane, and disappeared.

That gives this sentimental (literal, at times) flag-waver an unintended, seriously elitist bent — skydivers/skindivers taking donations to finance searches in a Pacific Paradise for officer-pilots, most of them college men. Woods including infantry and combat-footage and speaking to veterans from that side of the battle comes off as a way of giving balance to the film in ways that Project Recover might lack.

“To What Remains” can’t help but find poignance in the sacrifice of the “Greatest Generation,” with reminders of the grim nature of the combat in the Pacific and the Japanese tendency to murder prisoners of war, and then try to cover those murders up.

But there’s just enough screen time devoted to the changing technology of MIA hunts, especially those requiring underwater searches, to make one wish the “science” side of the story was played up more.

The 75 years that have passed mean that showing touching reunions with anyone who remembers those lost has become a near mathematical impossibility. The film’s focus on people a couple of generations removed from those lost, some of whom were inspired to take up the Project Recover mantle, has a watered-down “Finding Your Roots” feel, and can even play as self-serving.

It’s still an intriguing History Channel-ready look into a hobby/obsession and the ways technology makes uncovering even the simple personal tragedies and individual sacrifices in a vast conflict possible and worthwhile.

Rating: unrated

Cast: Dr. Pat Scannon, Mark Moline, Marcus Luttrell, Jo Schumacher

Credits: Directed by Christopher Woods, scripted by Mark Monroe. An Abramorama release.

Running time: 1:21

Violent and profane, with a Deadpool-ish sense of self-mockery, here’s the John Cena superhero vehicle that John Cena’s been waiting for.

Jan. 13, laugh along with the mayhem, “inappropriate” vulgarity and general goofiness of the tone-deaf American Fanboy Id as it sees itself — “Peacemaker.”

It’s always a good sign when there’s a laugh or two in the trailer.

The last of the three incredibly funny women who made “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” legendarily hilarious has died.

The only woman who could have stolen Ryan Reynolds away from Sandra Bullock is gone.

A brassy broad who transitioned into her dotage with “The Golden Girls,” and went on to have the Greatest Fourth Act in American acting history, facing down a giant crocodile in “Lake Placid,” lifting “Hot in Cleveland” and half a dozen other series out of the doldrums in the past twenty years, hitting her marks and landing her zingers well past the point most grannies have their car keys taken away, we’ll never see another like Betty White.

Ninety nine years old, dying days short of her 100th, Emmy winner, a legend who made her mark over eight decades in show biz, funny and saucy to the very end.

RIP, Queen Betty. What a resume, what a career. And below, please find a story I wrote from an interview related to “The Proposal,” where that whole Ryan Reynolds meets his first TRUE love thing began. “The Proposal” and Reynolds played huge roles in White’s cool late life cachet, which in turn led to her attaining icon status.

By Roger Moore/McClatchy-Tribune News Service

Betty White has been stealing scenes for more years than most people can remember. In the new Sandra Bullock- Ryan Reynolds comedy, The Proposal, she stole a puppy.

“Oh, that little Samoyed was so adorable I just walked in for a rehearsal and just automatically, without even thinking about it, took the dog away from Ryan,” White says with a chortle. “I thought, ‘They’re never going to let me get away with that.’ But nobody said anything so that’s the way we shot it.”

There’s something so natural about seeing Hollywood’s most famous animal lover with a puppy, almost as natural as hearing something outrageous come out of that sweet, grandmotherly face. White, 87, has been in show business for over half a century and may very well be the busiest she’s ever been. She was just in Love’N Dancing, just this week signed to co-star with Kristen Bell and Jamie Lee Curtis in You Again, and lent a voice to the animated Ponyo due out in August.

“My life is divided absolutely in half — half is my animal work and half is show business. I have to stay in show business to pay for my animal charity work.”The Proposal has White as the too-helpful Alaskan grandmother of Reynolds’ character, a man who has been cornered into marrying his boss (Bullock) so that she can get a green card. They don’t make the work easier just because you’re 80something.

“I had to learn a song in Eskimo. And that ain’t easy, honey. There are no syllables that you can relate to. Learning the song was hard, and by the time we got to filming that dance scene it was 3:30 in the morning. It started to rain. Singing and dancing in the rain is fine for Gene Kelly, but it doesn’t work at 3:30 A.M. in the woods.”

The sassy act has stood White in good stead since the role that defined her, as snarky, man-crazy “Happy Homemaker” Sue Ann Nivens on The Mary Tyler Moore Show. When she filmed Love’N Dancing in New Mexico, “even the Teamsters had their cameras out to get a picture with Betty,” says Sylvia Caminer, a Central Florida-based producer on the film. “She turned grown men into giggling schoolboys!”

But White’s charitable side is just as evident. Her commitment to the animal healthcare Morris Animal Foundation goes back more than 40 years, as do her ties to the Los Angeles Zoo.

“Everybody who ever said ‘I belong in a zoo,” I agree!”

Caminer witnessed that when she drove White to the Albuquerque Zoo on a day off during Love N’ Dancing.

“Word reached the zoo before we even arrived, and she was greeted like a rock star by man and beast alike,” Caminer marvels.