Movie Nation

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.

The thing that sticks in the memory is that jaunty Elmer Bernstein (with lyrics by Erskine Caldwell?) title tune.

“Diggin’ in the moonlight, diggin’ in the sun,….Diggin’ in the ground till the diggin’ was done — Come over to God’s Little Acre, Come over to God’s Little Acre.”

It seems to promise something a lot lighter than any adaptation of Erskine Caldwell’s scandalous, salacious “Cracker Gothic” novel “God’s Little Acre,” could possibly be. Maybe that’s why it stuck with me, even if I never watched the rest of the movie, which first turned up on TV back in the ’70s.

It opens like “Lil’ Abner,” but crawls right into a hole of sex, sin, obsession, madness and murder. And I was plainly too young to “get it” way back when.

What Tennessee Williams was to the theater, Erskine Caldwell was to literature — a droll, drawling observer and savvy satirizer who leaned into Southern stereotypes entirely too much for my taste.

Williams was too genteel and courtly to really wallow in what I call “Cracker Gothic” — quaint, backward Southerness as a slur — although “The Fugitive Kind,” adapted from “Orpheus Descending,” “Baby Doll” and “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” certainly have a whiff of ridicule about them.

The Georgian Caldwell, most famous for “Tobacco Road” and “God’s Little Acre,” may have dabbled in religious superstition, class prejudice, labor oppression and racism as explanations for “backwardness” in his fiction. But whatever his intent, “mockery” is something that always slipped through on the screen.

Anthony Mann, best-known for his Westerns (“Winchester ’73”) and action pics (“The Heroes of Telemark”), dabbled in every film genre over the course of his career, with epics like “El Cid” and “The Fall of the Roman Empire” a hallmark of his later years. Here, he guides a stellar cast that hurls itself into accents, melodramatics and stereotypes in a story of fake piety and pointless poverty, sex, lust and sin in 1950s Georgia.

The plot, which plainly inspired Louis Sachar’s YA novel “Holes,” concerns a patriarch obsessed with treasure his grandaddy told him was buried on the family farm.

Robert Ryan is one of those Hollywood stalwarts who never gave a bad performance, and he brings a gusto and physicality to Ty Ty Walden, a would-be farmer too busy driving himself and two sons — played by Vic Morrow and Jack Lord –– to exhaustion and mania, digging deep holes all over their property, looking for the loot.

The handsome Buck (Lord, who went on to fame in “Hawaii 5-0”) is openly bitter about these circumstances, and given to unfiltered lashings of his beautiful young wife Griselda (Tina Louise, headed to “Gilligan’s Island”). Younger sibling Shaw (Morrow, soon to star in “Combat!” on TV) does what Daddy says and parrots whatever Buck blurts.

Griselda likes her dresses diaphanous and her sexual cards always on the table. Buck’s furious jealousy doesn’t phase her. She keeps her temptation in the family. Factory worker brother-in-law Will (Aldo Ray) has her attention, and Buck knows it.

Will is unhappily married to Walden daughter Rosamund (Helen Westcott), and out of work. And one of the many ways Hollywood watered-down the novel — sex, suggestions of incest, etc. — is playing down the fact that he’s a labor leader, an organizer of the strike that led the owners to close the local cotton (textile) mill. Will figures people “look up to him,” and when he’s drinking, he fumes about “turning the lights back on” in that just-closed mill, as if that alone will bring it and the “bankrupt” town back to life.

To Buck, Will’s just a “lousy lint-head.”

Ty Ty, who has Black hired hands (Rex Ingram and Davis Roberts) working the parts of the farm actually producing something, is sure that salvation will come from this buried treasure. He maintains a pious pose whose only real evidence of “faith” is the acre that he keeps a cross on, “God’s Little Acre,” land that he’s promised the Lord will be tithed to a church if anything of value comes out of that soil.

Ty Ty moves that “acre” cross marker any time he gets a notion that the treasure might actually be buried on God’s Little Acre. Piety and faith are flexible on this stretch of the Georgia/South Carolina state line, apparently.

Buddy Hackett plays a rotund oaf, Pluto, running for sheriff and desperate to marry the other sexpot under Ty Ty’s roof, his teasing, taunting daughter Darlin’ Jill (Fay Spain). Pluto rides around the county, allegedly canvassing votes in his white linen suit. But he’ll lay down on the dirt pile to jaw with digging Ty Ty when it comes to talking about Darlin’ Jill. His one suggestion? Find an albino, because they have “magical powers” when it comes to divining things hidden under the ground.

That’s how the patriarch and the boys come to kidnapping Dave (a pre-stardom Michael Landon) to help them with their search.

Whenever Ty Ty runs low on cash — there’s not much money in digging pointless holes all day — he and the others fantasize about hitting up the one son (Lance Fuller) who left the farm, moved to Augusta and made his way to a comfortable life as a cotton broker.

There’s little that’s subtle going on here, although Ryan, Louise, Lord and Landon deliver performances that pop.

Hackett is cartoonishly grating and Ray is brought in to give the picture a primitive blast of animal testosterone.

Strips of fly-paper dangle into the frame on shots around the table where water melon is discussed and savored. A bar is seen, from outside. The inhabitants of a New Orleans style brothel inject themselves into the proceedings.

Characters don’t so much argue as bray at one another. Because pretty much everybody hits their accents hard in that ancient Hollywood way of turning Southern speech into Elizabethan English. Ty Ty’s colloquialisms may be cute, but they’re as thick as molasses.

“Well dawg my cat!” “What in the pluperfect Hell!”

One and all never give a care into filtering their innermost thoughts of outermost lust.

“Darlin’ Jill, you in here. Stand up. Let me look at you in the light. Well, well, baby’s a full grown woman. Plump as a peach on a branch, ripe and ready to pluck!”

Watching this 60+ year old film of an almost 90 year-old novel, I wondered if anyone still reads Caldwell or visits the little museum dedicated to him in the sleepy Georgia hamlet where he was born. You never hear him mentioned in the same breath as Faulkner, Harper Lee, Capote, Zora, Flannery, James Dickey, Cormac McCarthy or Pat Conroy.

The subtexts Caldwell wrote about — Southern “indentured servitude,” the reluctance to challenge the patriarchy via labor organizing, the constant Protestant religious lip service and superstition that public education is never allowed to fix (the REAL “critical race theory” is what rich white folks don’t want working class white folks to learn about) — are in the movie and still in Southern life, if you’d care to see them. The film almost buries Big Ideas under its Original Sin fixation, because sex sells.

Whatever the literary merits of “God’s Little Acre,” the film (a Blacklisted screenwriter had a hand in it) pulls too many punches and lacks the dramatic subtext of Tennessee Williams’ works. It feels quaint, dated and cartoonish, so much so that seeing just how much Robert Ryan could commit to a part and how terribly confining a hit sitcom was to the gifted Tina Louise isn’t reason enough to sit through it.

And the fact that for all its sex and sordid goings on, no streamer or cable channel has seen fit to remake it under “uncensored” conditions is further damning, a book whose time passed and a movie that had no prayer of having its moment, much less outlasting it.

Rating: General audiences, pretty racy for its time

Cast: Robert Ryan, Tina Louise, Aldo Ray, Jack Lord, Vic Morrow, Fay Spain, Buddy Hackett, Rex Ingram, Helen Westcott, Lance Fuller and Michael Landon.

Credits: Directed by Anthony Mann, scripted by Philip Yordan and Ben Maddow, based on the novel by Erskine Caldwell. A United Artists release on Tubi, Amazon and other streaming platforms.

Running time: 1:58

I get through a lot of Spanish language cinema in pursuit of something out of the ordinary in my “Around the World With Netflix” browsing. And as I do, one opening credit always gets my attention and raises my hopes.

A flag appears, and “Produced with help from the Argentine Ministry of Culture” pops up in Spanish. Not everything with that label is a dazzler. But what Korea is to supernatural thrillers, zombie and monster movies, Argentina is to mysteries, murder tales and the like.

From “The Secret in Their Eyes” and “Furtive” to “Rock, Paper, Scissors,” “Black Snow,” “The Son” and even “Beer, Pizza and Smokes,” Argentine filmmakers often produce movies that keep us guessing or surprise us with their deadly twists.

The bizarre, particularly gruesome death that “Blood Will Tell” circles around and the clever way it is hidden and then revealed make this latest film from the husband-and-wife team of Miguel and Ana Cohan (“No Return”) stand out, and provides a great hook for a tale of deaths and debt in an old Argentine Jewish family.

“Blood,” titled “La misma sangre” (“The Same Blood”) in Spanish, opens with one death and recollections of another. An old rancher, working on a well’s water pump on the farm, calls his son (Oscar Martínez) to complain about it, and rant about how “useless” his other “city” son is in matters about the family cattle ranch.

The old man isn’t ranting to Yako, the ranch-savvy son, about the son who plainly isn’t his favorite, Elias. “Yako died thirty years ago,” Elias testily explains (in Spanish with English subtitles) for the umpteenth time. We don’t see his reaction to the windmill climbing accident that kills his dotty dad after he hangs up the phone. But we can’t imagine many tears.

Seven years later, Elias is patriarch, the don of the family and the ranch. He’s converted their stock to buffalo, getting ahead of the curve on a new healthier meat trend that just might hit red-meat-mad South America. And then, after a family celebration, his wife (Paulina García) dies in a bizarre accident.

His daughters weep, but don’t question how it happened. But son-in-law Santiago (Diego Velázquez), a doctor, notices “strange” things about Elias’s behavior, a chill to his mourning. After snooping around just a bit, he starts sharing his unease with his wife, Carla (Dolores Fonzi), who isn’t having it.

We’ve seen a couple of clues that Santiago stumbled over. We’ve seen Elias lock eyes with him over them. We know that Elias knows that Santiago knows, and that Santiago knows that Elias knows he knows. “Blood Will Tell” is about letting us in on the details, the back-story and the further “blood” that might have been spilled and that will be spilled because of what happened.

The Cohans — Miguel directs from scripts he and wife Ana write — fold this story in on itself, revealing pieces of “that night” and the chilling manner of death. Everything, piece by piece, that plays into motive and points to consequences, will come out.

They don’t lean on Santiago as “sleuth” to tell this story, which comes from a more neutral, omniscient narrator’s point of view. They put together a puzzle for us, and let us speculate on mysteries left hanging that could just as easily expand that puzzle.

Through it all, Martínez (“The Distinguished Citizen”) suggests a man struggling to keep his burdens from his family, hellbent on proving his dismissive dead Dad wrong and juggling — investors, government bureaucrats, his wife (pre-death, in flashbacks) — all in an effort to not have his and their world crash down around his ears.

“Blood Will Tell” isn’t so much about what drives Elias to do something as it is about a man in over his head, and determined never to admit it. He is in a quiet fury over his predicament and his inability to remedy it on his own. Even discovering what he’s capable of suggests a passivity that is no credit to whatever machismo one might attach to his actions.

His subsumed fury spills over to others as they start to pick up on what Santiago figured out that moment, way back in the first act, when he and his father-in-law “had a moment,” one so disquieting that it drives this narrative and locks the viewer into this generally riveting story as it does.

Rating: TV-MA, graphic violence, profanity

Cast: Oscar Martínez, Dolores Fonzi, Paulina García and Diego Velázquez

Credits: Directed by Miguel Cohan, scripted by Ana Cohan and Miguel Cohan. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:53

The loveable old coot screen image that Walter Brennan took to his grave tended to gloss-over his wonderfully villainous turns over the years.

A prototype for what Hollywood would come to revere as “a character actor,” he won three Oscars, with the most memorable of those performances coming in “The Westerner,” where he played the mercurial, mean and corrupt Judge Roy Bean opposite Gary Cooper.

Long before “The Real McCoys” or “Darby O’Gill and the Little People,” Brennan wasn’t shy about playing cold-blooded patriarchs (“My Darling Clementine”) along with his usual amusing “sidekicks” (“Meet John Doe,” “To Have and Have Not,” “Red River”).

He brings a bitter, self-destructive edge to “The Green Promise,” a trouble-on-the-farm film intended to preach the virtues of the teach-teens-to-farm-better organization, 4-H. Brennan and little Natalie Wood give the stand-out performances in this indifferent melodrama with a message from director William D. Russell (“Bride for Sale,” “Best of the Badmen”).

The first hint that farmer Matthews isn’t just the chipper, upbeat salt-of-the-Earth he appears to be come in the first scene. He’s a widower with three daughters and a son and all their possessions piled into their truck, “Grapes of Wrath” fashion, come to California to buy another farm.

His banter with the realtor and the local agricultural agent (Robert Paige) tells them that his last farm “blowed away,” but it’s over a decade past The Dust Bowl. He’s not sentimental about leaving it behind, grouses about not missing the neighbors, and intimates that the only reason they have cash to buy another was that insurance his late wife “insisted” they take out.

Oldest daughter Deborah (Marguerite Chapman) tries to interrupt his version of their recent history and his impulse to buy the first farm that the real estate man (Irving Bacon) shows him. “Papa” shuts that down.

But there’s the appearance of “democracy” in this family. He makes a big show of “holding a vote,” with most of the kids (Connie Marshall, Ted Donaldson and little Natalie Wood) easily bullied into “voting” his way.

Practical Debbie frets over his rash decisions, careless debts and prioritizing buying tractor and a pig when they need a milk cow, with three younger children under their roof.

And there’s an arrogant “I know best” streak that keeps him from listening to the agricultural agent’s advice on crops, what land to keep fallow and the perils of cutting a timber stand on the fragile watershed overlooking their fields.

The foreshadowing couldn’t be more obvious.

But that ag agent is persistent, because he’s sweet on Debbie. The preacher (Milburn Stone, later “Doc” on TV’s “Gunsmoke”) might as well be calling Matthews out by name when he talks about man’s flaws and the “green promise” the Almighty makes with the farmer. And the kids just might have a chance of breaking this “ruin another farm” cycle thanks to this club the other farm children in their valley belong to — 4-H.

The “head, hearts, hands and health” ethos of smart farm investments, hard work and good farm practices sparks something in all the kids, but especially in the youngest, Susan (Wood). She’s determined to buy some lambs and raise them for wool and resale profit.

Heedless Papa won’t hear of it, but events conspire to bring this doomed dictatorship into a full fledged family confrontation.

The Monte Collins script lacks much in the way of subtlety, and is so ham-fisted that we’re never sure if what we’re seeing — Agent Barkley’s gruff chewing out of Debbie as a “coward,” for instance — is some reflection of “the way things were back then” (like a child dressing up as a blackfaced “Mammy” for a costume party), or just scriptural clumsiness.

What’s striking about this film decades later is its frank treatment of farmers as flawed folk. The Dust Bowl, partly a product of poor farm practices, wasn’t the distant memory it is now. Film and media treatment of farming as a righteous profession practiced righteously by the righteous these days rarely acknowledges farm debt, land-use issues, ag consolidation, tyrannical Monsanto seed-patenting or anything else as being the least bit the fault of the folks doing the farming. Back then, Hollywood wasn’t shy about showing the flaws of folks set in their ways, looking for shortcuts (DDT) and still losing new generations who wanted easier lives off the land.

Brennan brings a devilish glee to Matthews, a man so hell-bent on doing things his way that he lashes out, self-destructively, just to spite Debbie and the other children.

But “The Green Promise” is chiefly valued today for reminding us of what a remarkable child star young Natasha Zacharenko (Wood) was. “Miracle on 34th Street” was no fluke. She pops off the screen in this film, even today, more “natural” in some scenes than others, but never less than magnetic, sympathetic and real.

Wood became a big star ten years later, after “Rebel Without a Cause” and then “West Side Story.” But she never lived long enough to become the formidable character actress her later years might have turned her into.

Brennan, who experienced a comeback on TV with “McCoys” and “The Guns of Will Sonnet,” and who made his mark in Disney films and sending up his most famous villains in “Support Your Local Sheriff” in his last years, had the career that generations of actors who followed him envied. He excelled in every character part, was always employed, always distinct and honored for that work back then and by film buffs even now, a half century after his death.

Rating: approved, peril

Cast: Walter Brennan, Marguerite Chapman, Robert Paige, Connie Marshall, Ted Donaldson, Robert Ellis, Milburn Stone, Will Wright and Natalie Wood.

Credits: Directed by William D. Russell, scripted by Monte Collins. An RKO release on Tubi, Amazon, other streaming platforms.

Running time: 1:33

Simon Rex? Sorry mate, that sounds like a porn star’s name. Not that this can’t be put to good use,.

Rex, who first gained notice on TV’s “Felicity” back in the last millennium, plays an aging not-exactly-a-household name porn actor named Mikey Sabers, clever enough to hustle up a career out of “the one thing I love,” not clever enough to know how to spell “Sabre” as his “swordsman” stage name.

Mikey is a “user,” first scene to last, a guy who can talk himself into and out of a lot of things, but somebody who quickly outstays his welcome with almost everyone –rather like the movie Sean Baker (“The Florida Project”) wrote about Mikey.

“Red Rocket” is a sordid dive into down-market down-and-outers in the hellscape of Texas City, Texas — home to oil refineries, oil workers and people slow in figuring out it’s where dreams go to die. It makes its points, takes the intensely-unlikable guy where he was always headed, and then sticks around a full half hour after the climax, another 15 minutes past the anti-climax.

No porn director would ever make that mistake.

Rex plays the fit but well-over-40 Mikey as a childish satyr, a man always on the make and often on the run. That’s how we meet him, battered and bruised and fresh off a Greyhound, fast-walking through the time capsule of Texas City with just the battered tank top on his back, his worn and stained jeans covering the rest.

He beats on the door of a battered frame house, gets past the elderly Miss Lil (Brenda Deiss) and pleads his case to Lexi (Bree Elrod of “Sometimes I Think About Dying”). She has the same question her mother does.

“Why are you HERE?”

Mikey wants something. He and Lexi have history. They were married. “We’re STILL married.” Something happened. He was in Los Angeles. She came home to live with Mama.

Over the course of “Red Rocket,” we pick up on what happened. Pornography was involved. That’s not the sort of thing Mikey can put on a resume when he’s trying for work waiting tables.

Because at some point, his “You need a man around the house” pleas won them over. Can he get a job, pay a share of the rent, make their lives better? Perhaps atone for whatever he did in the past?

Maybe. If, for instance, Leondria (Judy Hill) lets him start “moving” weed for her again. That means getting past her butch and seriously disapproving daughter June (Brittney Rodriguez).

A little help from the neighbor kid (Ethan Darbone) who grew up to driving age while Mikey was gone might help. Mikey needs rides to places Lexi’s old yellow bike won’t take him — the mall, strip clubs.

But dang it all, then he has to go and take Lil and Lexi to “celebrate” at the local donut shop. The borderline underage sales clerk, a redhead nicknamed “Strawberry” (singer and actress Suzanna Son), seems awfully receptive to Mikey’s over-age come-ons. Scheming, “I’m going to be straight with you” Mikey is dreaming up a comeback, and not one wholly dependent on the little blue pills he pops to meet Lexi’s needs, either.

It’s 2016, and Mikey’s efforts to get back on his feet, get back “in the business” and back to LA are set against the bizarre presidential election, party conventions, the works, unfolding on TV around him.

Can he keep all the balls he’s juggling in the air? Is it in the cards for Mikey to triumph? Or did he show up with just the tank-top on his back, battered and bruised, for a reason?

Rex’s bubbly, almost manic take on Mikey make the character come off as an oversexed, amoral version of “Extreme Makeover’s” Ty Pennington — chattering away, optimistic, flattering but making a sale and never letting us or anybody listening to his patter see him as anything but a toxic narcissist.

Perhaps that’s what writer-director Sean Baker (“Tangerine,” “The Florida Project”) was going for in his Texas City project. Follow this delusional, self-absorbed bottom-of-the-ladder bottom-feeder through a few weeks of the life that parked him as his ex’s front door with just the clothes on his back. Is he meant to be a repeat offender and serial failure like the unlikely con artist who got into the White House?

But Baker loses himself and his movie in this latest dalliance in down and out. We see plenty of visuals of another of America’s “s—hole towns,” follow another aspirational, deluded loser (“Tangerine”), this time one who had a taste of something resembling “fame” (“2000” screen appearances, boasts the no-longer-popular Pornhub participant).

Rex’s Mikey can be fascinating to watch as he uses everybody around him, with varying degrees of success. He talks cocky, confident and tough but lets us see he’s none of those. He has a youthful exuberance without the youth, a “plan” that is nothing of the sort but a charisma that makes people do what he wants.

We fear for the teenager who falls into his thrall, at least partly because we don’t buy it. We see Baker leaning pretty heavily on this picture’s gimmick, Rex’s full frontal nudity, a little too hard. And we wonder why Baker is having so much trouble figuring out how to wrap all this up.

It’s still safe to say that nobody makes indie films like Baker, and few filmmakers of any stripe are seeing the subcultures that he not only sees but wants to explore. But as “Red Rocket” fizzles and stumbles towards a finale that’s both melodramatic in the extreme and unavoidably inevitable, there’s no getting around that this coarse and callous comedy is quite the comedown from the acclaimed and Oscar-feted “Florida Project.” “Red Rocket” makes noise and shows moments of (sexual) flash, but never achieves lift-off.

Rating: R for strong sexual content, graphic nudity, drug use and pervasive language.

Cast: Simon Rex, Bree Elrod, Suzanna Son, Brenda Deiss, Judy Hill, Brittney Rodriguez and Ethan Darbone.

Credits: Directed by Sean Baker, scripted by Sean Baker and Chris Bergoch. An A24 release.

Running time: 2:08

“Star Wars” fans should have figured out long ago that Disney wasn’t going to shut down the assembly line for “new content” in this timeworn “galaxy far far away.” Not until someone — ANYone — said, “All right, that’s enough” or “That’s going too far.”

The problem with series and movies designed as undemanding, predigested comfort food is that “going too far” never enters into it.

Thus we come to more mining of the corners, back-stories and “further adventures of” this surprisingly confining universe with “The Book of Boba Fett.” If there was gold to be dug up from the race of bounty hunters with the sci-fi Western “The Mandalorian,” surely there’s at least a little silver in exploring the further adventures of Boba Fett, the peripheral character/”way cool” cult figure from the original “Star Wars” trilogy who was our first look at a Mandalorian.

So creator/writer Jon Favreau and a favorite “Mandalorian” episode director, Robert Rodriguez, signed on to give the fans more of what they want, a pandering tale of indifferent performances and worn story tropes, with just enough “mystery” to keep those who can’t get enough of this stuff coming back for more.

It’s another “All Galactic Roads Lead to Tatooine” tale — crime lords and ruffians, Sand People and Jawas and skullduggery and schemes set on the desert planet that Obi Wan Kenobi hid out on, that Luke Skywalker could not wait to escape.

Here’s a fellow who looks like Greedo, the Rodian bounty hunter who thought he’d get the drop of Han Solo way back in “A New Hope.” There are two of the giant green tusked trolls called “Gamorreans,” who used to guard Jabba and the Hutts and now are hired by the new Daimyo, “crime lord,” of the crater-city of Mos Espa. That would be Boba.

“Stranger in a Strange Land,” the pilot episode meant to sell the viewer on this new series, fills us in on Boba’s recent history through flashbacks obtained via a sort of isolation tank, where he remembers an “Alien” like escape from an underworld, an emergence through the sand to be robbed by Jawas and imprisoned by Sand People and the escape he affected that must have somehow made him the Bounty Hunter turned Crime Lord we know today.

It’s fun seeing Temuera Morrison in the part, introduced in the bounty hunter helmet and suit in “The Empire Strikes Back,” re-introduced in “The Mandalorian,” and finally getting to act and perform lines with his helmet off as he does.

But what lines!

“Jabba ruled with fear. I intend to rule with respect.”

Wait, what? Isn’t that off-brand for a heartless, pitiless “race” of bounty hunters?

Morrison, who became famous thanks to the gritty Maori drama of alcoholism and abuse, “Once Were Warriors,” would seem to have nowhere to go with this character. If he’s an old softy in the opening, what are they going to do? Make him revert to pitiless form later in later episodes?

Lord Boba Fett’s got an aide de camp (Ming-Na Wen) who has funnier lines and a few more fight stunts to shine in. An insolent majordomo (David Pasquesi) shows up to collect tribute FROM He who collects tribute, Lord Boba.

“Want me to kill him?” Permission isn’t instantly granted. “Is that a ‘no‘?”

Almost everything about this pilot is perfunctory — a slow-footed ambush by parkour-trained space ninjas, assorted brawls with the club-wielding Sand People. That’s a lot of boredom crammed into 38 minutes.

Will Jennifer Beals (a “paradise” club owner who pays protection money) have a bigger role to play?

A pilot doesn’t necessary foretell an entire series, but it does represent proof of concept and the “putting your best foot forward” so that the audience will tune in again rule applies.

All I got out of it was George Lucas’s old-fashioned “this race is good at playing in cantina bands (a Flamenco-flavored version of the original John Williams tune), that one is only good as body guards, those guys make great bounty hunters and Greedo-looking critters are um, greedy” has yet to be abandoned, or recognized as racism with kid-friendly training wheels on it.

It may get better as it goes along, but “Book of Boba” is starting out so stale and puerile it’s hard to see daylight and/or originality peeking through even eventually. If you’re not tired of seeing these “Star Wars” beans fried, refried, refrigerated and refried again, this must seem like a Golden Age to you. The rest of us know the only “golden” thing here is what’s spilling off the screen.

Rating: TV-14, violence

Cast: Temuera Morrison, Ming-Na, Jennifer Beals, David Pasquesi

Credits: Pilot directed by Robert Rodriguez, scripted by Jon Favreau, created by Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni. A Disney+ release.

Running time: Seven episodes @ 30-40 minutes each.

R. Patts and Zoe K., with Andy Serkis playing a different sort of Alfred.

Love the mayhem of it all. The comic book noir “Bat” stuff is pretty played, but not played-out.

Peter Sarsgaard, Colin Farrell, Paul Dano and the Return of Jeffrey Wright as Commissioner Gordon are the stand-out promises made this Matt Reeves film.

The new Nolan? We shall find out March 4.

There are a few elements of writer-director Philip Yuryev’s “The Whaler Boy” that are off-putting enough to warrant addressing them straight off.

It opens with a luridly-detailed behind-the-scenes look at an online sex-chat brothel, a scene that goes on longer than anybody other than the prurient would think necessary. We only figure out its relationship to the native lads of a Bering Straight village when we see them gathered around a laptop, lapping up the poses of HollySweet999.

This boys’ coming-of-age/obsession-with-sex-chat-hostess drama all but erases women from their world. It’s not enough that the unsophisticated local teens get lost in porn. They aren’t given the chance, in this story, to relate to real women — mothers, peers, etc. — in their midst.

If there’s a morality tale in the dangers of falling into objectified, fantasy women who exist only on a screen, it’s told without the young men confronted by the reality of their lives, their prospects and how members of the opposite sex fit into their world.

Then there’s the subsistence killing that the menfolk here do to keep one and all alive — hunting whales in motorized skiffs. That’s also detailed and bloody and won’t be to every taste.

Yuryev’s debut feature introduces us to Leshka and Kolyan, two young fellows from Chukotka (far Eastern Siberia) who pitch in on the whale hunts, have learned how to break down the carcass and are the ones designated to deliver meat to various neighbors too old to hunt or make the trek down to the beach to share in the catch.

Lyoshka or “Leshka” (Vladimir Onokhov) lives with someone like that, his elderly grandfather (Nikolay Tatato), a whimsical sort who is always warning the kid (in Russian, with English subtitles) “I’m dying soon, maybe this summer.” He’s serious.

There’s not much to do in their Arctic summer — just whale hunting, whale filleting and aimless rides on their shared motorbike with Kolyan (Vladimir Lyubimtsev). But the menfolk there have discovered sex sites on the Internet, and one American site and American “hostess” (Kristina Asmus) leaves the two teens lost in lust.

Kolyan affects a more worldly air — based on having seen this sort of content before. But poor Leshka is just gone. He sneaks off to borrow the community laptop, cranks up the family generator and tunes in. He talks to the screen, not realizing she can’t hear him. Not that she talks. She just poses and pouts and fields comments and slips off for “private chats” for paying customers.

Leshka goes down this rabbit hole so deep he’s sure Kolyan is “cheating” with her, creating a rift that will end with blows. He’s hapless with the gorgeous blonde hooker (Maria Chuprinskaia) the locals fly into town. Yeah, that’s a little “off-putting” too.

And as he pines away, wondering how far “Detroit” is, studying phrases in English to use to chat with “HollySweet999,” he makes note of the local lore of people who fled from here across the Bering Straight to Alaska, America, with its “cities” and “big buildings,” it’s “McDonald’s” and its lusty online sex workers.

Yuryev’s film is on its firmest footing in scenes capturing village life, the routines of a whale-based diet/economy. He doesn’t go into documentary-level detail, although we see a local dance (an instrumental rock combo is flown in) and the like. There’s little social life to speak of. And I was unclear as to who exactly paid to fly in a hooker, just as the film left me unsure of exactly how the locals get by, survive and what they do for money. Totally state supported?

Yuryev is much more interested in the pubescent parts of the tale — teen titillation, masturbation, an online obsession that upsets the natural order of this world — than in the above-the-Arctic-Circle world itself.

The third act is an odd odyssey that sends Leshka in search of his fantasy girl and pushes the picture into parable territory. It’s warmer than much of what came earlier, but it’s warmth with a brittle edge.

There’s merit in this story, which takes its hero on a circular path back to what anchors him in his world. But the novelty of the setting and the characters doesn’t mean we give the storyteller, who gets lost in the sordid sexual side of life above the Arctic Circle, a pass.

There’s acknowledging this technological “change” that even the most remote parts of the world are seeing, and nothing wrong with recognizing that hormones rage even in the land of the Midnight Sun. What Yuryev does, more often than is necessary, is wallow in it. And when he does, it’s not just “The Boy Whaler” who seems lost.

Rating: unrated, nudity, sex, whale hunting, violence

Cast: Vladimir Onokhov, Vladimir Lyubimtsev, Nikolay Tatato and Kristina Asmus

Credits: Scripted and directed by Philipp Yuryev. A Film Movement+ release (Jan. 14).

Running time: 1:33

Here’s one last “Around the World with Netflix” holiday offering for 2021. Better yet, think of “1000 Miles from Christmas” as the first holiday film of 2022. Let’s get an early start — 360 days before Christmas — on the tidal wave of Christmas movies to come with a Spanish farce set in the snow, scenic Pyrenees of España’s far north.

It’s a time-honored holiday take on a formula that’s worked for much of the history of cinema, a “fish out of water” comedy in which an outsider comes in to a strange locale — often a business — and stumbles into the local way of doing things. There are hints of “The Coca-Cola Kid,” “The Efficiency Expert” and even episodic TV (an “Andy Griffith Show” episode) in this tale of an auditor who hates Christmas sent to go over the books of a candy factory in a mountain village.

The hook here is that Raúl (Tamar Novas of “The Goya Murders,” “Eye for an Eye”) builds his year-end around a Cuban holiday, a play where he can be “1000 kilometers from Christmas,” a holiday he’s long loathed. And just before that annual flight, his boss has shipped him off to a town that feeds Spain’s seasonal sweet tooth with famous fudge and marzipan. Valverde is so seriously into Christmas that the whole town is engaged in a Guinness Book of World Records attempt at creating the larging “living” Nativity scene.

You’d think there’d be more laughs in that set-up, a lovelorn loner with legitimate beefs about Christmas (we see death, divorce, betrayal and other trauma he’s associated with the holiday since childhood) forced to cope with quirky locals, the view out every window a decorated, snowy holiday card, an infectiously upbeat workforce and a cute stage manager (Andrea Ros) staging the Nativity who quickly figures out he’s “The Grinch.”

Sadly, a chuckle here and there is all this Álvaro Fernández Armero (“Blinkers,” “If I Were a Rich Man”) holiday rom-com manages.

Raúl arrives with a bang — or an accident. He crashes into Nativity sets that clog the streets. He stays at a B & B where the rooms are named Balthazar, Melchior and Gaspar, after “The Three Wise Men.”

And La Navidad, the candy factory, is practically run by elves, everybody’s so giddy about the work and the Christmas season. Bubbliest of all is the owner’s son, Mateo (Peter Vives).

Raúl and Paula have their “meet cute,” which isn’t all that cute, when he crashes into her set. He’s up against an entire town’s “infectious” love of a holiday, people who at least laugh when they call him “Grinch,” a boss with a deadline and a plane ticket that represents another.

And those “books” he’s looking at? You guessed it. There are complications.

There’s a lot of “you guessed its” here, which I won’t give away.

What matters is that there are plenty of places where easy laughs could be found and just aren’t.

A sample of the humor — an expectant couple are named María José (Mar del Hoyo) and José María (Raúl Jiménez). That’s a real knee-slapper, that is.

Novas, who has a Clive Owen vibe (maybe it’s the mustache), manages a brittle sarcasm that plays but would play better with funnier put-downs. He’d be a fan of this or that about the holiday, he insists, “but I’m not six years old.”

Those assertions usually are followed by a flashback to his assorted holiday traumas, none of which play as amusing.

The gorgeous setting and can’t-miss formula — city slicker needs to slow down, find peace and joy and love, have a little marzipan — make you root for “1000 Miles from Christmas” to close that gap. It never does.

Late arrival for this year’s holidays, or early arrival for next year’s, “1000 Miles” misses the mark by miles and miles.

Rating: TV-PG

Cast: Tamar Novas, Andreas Ros, Peter Vives, Mar del Hoyo, Raúl Jiménez

Credits: Directed by Álvaro Fernández Armero scripted by Francisco Arnal and Daniel Monedero. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:42

“Three Came Home” is a fascinating curio from a Hollywood and America on the cusp of change.

This 1951 POW drama was the first to cover ground that “A Town Like Alice,” the movie and later TV series, the series “Tenko” and the 1990s Bruce Beresford/Glenn Close film “Paradise Road” recreated — stories about the Western women, wives of European, Australian and British foreign service personnel kept prisoner by the Japanese after their invasion of most of the South Pacific at the outset of the war.

What we see in Jean Negulesco’s 1951 film is a hint of the end of the old Hollywood studio system, a mostly-sound-stage bound “on location” production, acting that dates from that same “last days before The Method” era and America’s on-screen softening of attitudes towards the hated enemy of just a few years before.

It’s a bit old-fashioned, but there’s much to recommend this Oscar-nominated production even today.

Based on a memoir by Agnes Newton Keith, already a published author (“Land Below the Wind”) when the war broke out, it briefly sketches in the British Empire bubble Keith (Claudette Colbert), an American married to British forestry manager Harry (Patric Knowles) lived in until the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and seized Hong Kong, The Philippines, Singapore, Java and their corner of North Borneo, Sandakan.

There’s the Pearl Harbor news on the wireless, which only their little boy (Mark Keunig) hears on the day it happens, the concerned “Do you really think they’ll come?” from Agnes, and Harry’s stiff-upper-lip, “It’s liable to get a little rough out here” calm and sense of duty in the face of the inevitable.

The Japanese commander put in charge of their district, Col. Suga, is played by Sessue Hayakawa, giving us the first version of the commandant he’d play in “Bridge on the River Kwai.” He’s an American-educated fan of Mrs. Keith’s writings and her seeming “understanding of Orientals.”

As husband and wife are separated and Agnes is forced to raise their sometimes sickly boy under brutal, starvation conditions, she deals with mostly lower level brutes in the Japanese chain of command. But Col. Suga wants her to autograph her book for him, is eager to share stories of his children back in Japan, and makes overt gestures of gentility (“Tea?”) in sharp contrast to the privation Keith is living under.

Their barracks, with her the lone American among crusty Brits, can be fractious. Agnes is desperate for any news of her husband, any chance to see him or meet with him via passed notes. The film captures nerve-racking efforts to rendezvous with Harry, and in a scene that begins giddy and turns starkly real, has randy Australian POWs try to woo the women through the barbed wire, getting so carried away we know the Japanese will find out and there’ll be reprisals.

Colbert’s performance has more Old Hollywood glamour about it than the stoic suffering of Keith’s situation would suggest — flawless makeup and clean costumes for the adoring close-ups. She was a leading lady who knew how to crane her neck in the clinches with her leading man, moments framed more naturally by later generations of directors.

The Romanian born Negulesco, a former painter and stage decorator, learned his craft in the 1930s but was entering his most productive period when he made “Three Came Home,” which came after “Three Strangers” and before “Three Coins in the Fountain.” It’s a film of sympathetic performances and workmanlike craft — nothing fancy.

The film has plenty of evidence of the racial attitudes of the day, and the pre-war days it depicts. The women in the camp freely mock their captors — the ones who don’t speak English, anyway. But the racial caricatures of war films shot during and immediately after WWII are mostly gone.

The Japanese soldiers are quick to anger, quick to slap or point a bayonetted rifle, but also polite enough to say “Thank you” in a sort of “This war will last ten years” effort to just get along in this situation.

I was surprised by the frank addressing of attempted assault, with the Japanese officers furiously trying to pretend their cultural practice of turning captives into “comfort woman” wasn’t happening.

And I was struck by the niche the always-dignified Hayakawa was forced to carve out for himself with this performance, a villain with an urbane, Westernized and “reasonable” side. Col. Suga becomes a screen paragon of “Well, they’re our allies in the Far East, now” American/Japanese relations. We can’t have him come off as a sadistic brute, can we?

Keith’s memoirs about her time in these camps, from privation to liberation, have been the anchor account for pretty much every factual and fictional recreation of that experience to be put on the screen. And while there was only so far this “on location” (some of it) depiction was going to go in 1950-51, Colbert and Negulesco and the cast do a decent job of remembering “life reduced to one simple, stubborn purpose — to keep alive.”

“Three Came Home” manages to be both of its time and ahead of its time in that regard, a dated Hollywood classic well worth referring back to as the seed from which many more more grimly realistic versions of that “women prisoners of war” experience would sprout.

Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Claudette Colbert, Patrick Knowles, Florence Desmond, Sylvia Andrew, Mark Keunig, Howard Chuman and Sessue Hayakawa.

Credits: Directed by Jean Negulesco, scripted by Nunnally Johnson, based on the memoir by Agnes Newton Keith. A Twentieth Century Fox release now on Tubi, Amazon, etc.

Running time: 1:46