Movie Nation

I’ll bet they remember an episode of “Community” done with stop-motion animation, or the unfulfilled dream of Jerry Seinfeld, to do a stop-motion episode of his series way back when.

Ted Lasso in plasticine? Here it is.

Did they pitch the script to MBJ knowing he’d be curious, seeing as how his father figure is writing a booklet to his unborn child, to be named Jordan?

Or did they change the name once he signed on?

Just kidding. Denzel directed this one, based on a memoir (true story) by Dana Canedy.

A weeper for the holidays.

If you’ve watched any movie with even a trace of Japan about it, you’ve probably stumbled across the work of actor and sometime director “Beat” Takeshi Kitano. He was in the “Battle Royale” movies, “Johnny Mnemonic,” did a definitive version of “Zatoichi: The Blind Swordsman.”

He’s been pretty much the elder statesman of Japanese show business since the passing of Toshiro Mifune, which makes the “How he got his start” story one worth telling — at least in Japan.

“Asakusa Kid” is a slow, sentimental walk through Kitano’s origin story. It only truly comes to life in a finale that includes a long, reminiscing tracking shot through the venue where the man learned everything he needed to get his start in show business. Too much of what comes before that is static, with a hint of not-that-funny comedy set against a funereal elegy for a lost era of show business.

This Around the World With Netflix tale takes us to early ’70s Tokyo, to the music hall where “Take,” as his friends called him, learned to be an entertainer at the feet of “the master,” and from the strippers who performed in the France-za, a dying, mostly-empty burlesque palace run by Senzaburo Fukami (Yô Ôizumi).

Yûya Yagira plays the gawky 20something cleaning the place, fixing stuff he had no idea how to repair and running the lights, an aspiring “entertainer” with just a crooked smile and a little ambition to work with.

He sees the MC and owner tap dance, do stand-up and comic sketches between strippers and scantily clad chorus liners, a master of “manzai,” Japanese “double act” comedy. His killer bit? That would be the samurai “scene” that he and his co-star act out, with Fukami interrupting his own “performance” to critique and berate his co-star, much to the amusement of the guys-there-to-see-strippers.

Television has killed their bottom line, but this is where Take hopes to learn something that will put him on film and TV.

“Any skills? You can’t be a performer without any skills.”

Take has none. But his first lesson is “Get some” and the second one is essentially “always-be-on,” be prepared to do something entertaining, and dress well to ensure you get noticed and people believe you’re doing well because you’re good at what you do — entertaining.

Tap-dancing is something the kid can practice on his own. Constantly. Flirting with the stripper Chihura (Mugi Kadowaki) is instructive…for her dance steps. She’d love to be a singer, but nobody comes there to see women sing. And no, she won’t sleep with him.

There’s a whole backstage world that keeps this place going — aspiring writers who also clean or serve customers, dancers, costumers.

Fukami is generous with all, but especially the no-talent with the crooked smile he takes under his wing. His passes on the lessons that will serve Beat Takeshi his entire life, something the film’s flashback structure makes clear.

Before coming onstage or stepping into a scene, Take learns to tapdance away the jitters, standing in the wings, just like Fukami.

“Don’t get laughed at. Make them laugh with you.” “Don’t suck up to the audience,” he’s told (in dubbed English, or Japanese with subtitles). “You tell them what’s funny.”

The tapping is what gets his “hold the audience” abilities out there. Fukima breaks him in on stage, making him the stooge in sketches. And eventually, Takeshi and a writer-pal form a double act of their own, eventually taking on the names “Two Beats.” That’s why he’s called “Beat” Takeshi to this day.

The Franze-za scenes are wholly about relationships and attachments that form in the theater, with “Beat” being born on the road, abruptly pushing their act closer to “edgy” by drawing inspiration from American Lennie Bruce and American jazz. Some jokes are set to four beats, some to eight.

“Two Beats” is born. Edgy?

“My grandma buys tampons just to show off!”

A fundamental flaw of this Gekidan Hitori bio-pic is that moment. It is explained to us, but not really shown. We see a comic learning timing, “quickness” and “entertaining” from Fukami. We aren’t shown him studying his real influences, or much beyond the venue in terms of outside life, touring and the like.

That makes the film stagebound and all but locked in place.

Takeshi is a beloved figure, and seeing his formative years is informative even if this film is somewhat subdued, almost in reverence to the man.

But at some point this movie needed to make that extra effort to “entertain,” just like our learning-permit comic. It rarely does.

Rating: TV-MA, profanity, near nudity

Cast: Yûya Yagira, Yô Ôizumi, Mugi Kadowaki

Credits: Scripted and directed by Gekidan Hitori, based on the memoirs of Takeshi Kitano. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:03

The screenwriter who gave us “Whiplash” makes her splashy (sorry) directing debut with “The Novice,” a movie about an insanely competitive college coed who takes up competitive rowing, where the competition takes over her.

Because if there are two things that Lauren Hadaway knows, it’s youthful obsession and anything that you practice until your hands bleed.

Her film defies easy categorization, a sports movie that immerses us in the sport without really being “about” the sport, with a freshman year same sex romance that isn’t romantic and a heroine who is anything but.

So no “‘Personal Best’ in Boats” headlines, here. This tense tale doesn’t invite us to root for Alex Dall (Isabelle Fuhrman, “Orphan,””The Last Thing Mary Saw,” TV’s “Masters of Sex”) or fear for her health and wellbeing. And that’s kind of the way she wants it.

We meet the twitchy nail-biter as she’s finishing up a test. “You finished first,” her teaching assistant (model turned actress Dilone) complains. “Why’d you take it twice?”

Alex sprints across campus to the “novice rowing” class at Wellington U. She just took a physics class test twice “because it’s my worst subject,” even though it’s her major. She knows nothing of boats, oars and rowing crew. Something else she’s not good at? Welcome to her new obsession.

After hearing how very hard it is for “novices” looking to learn and get some exercise “to move up to varsity,” the die is cast. Alex will be the first at practice and the last to leave. She will skip college breaks. She will row, either on the water or on the rowing machines, until her fingers and hands bleed, until she collapses, once even wetting her pants in front of her teammates from exhaustion.

Coach Pete (Jonathan Cherry) notices, and is disturbed. “Relax” and “have fun” and “shouldn’t you be stuffed in a library (during exam week) fall on deaf ears.

Because Alex has been told of the long odds. Because there’s been a little hazing from the varsity scholarship rowers. Because a high school jock (Amy Forsyth, a supporting player in “CODA”) is also a novice here, determined to make varsity and score a needed scholarship.

Writer-director Hadaway and her stars create marvelously contrasting characters, the confident, swaggering athlete and the chronic over-achiever determined to do what she always does — outhustle the competition.

Because Alex is all about competition. And as we learn in this quite-clever screenplay, “competition” is just the first sign that Alex’s obsessions go beyond scholarship, physics and applying physics to rowing. She and a fellow student, a friend since high school (Jeni Ross), show up at a fraternity mixer.

“I just wanted to get the drunk college one-night stand out of the way,” Alex confesses.

That teaching assistant Dani? She’s like another “experience” to check off a life list as Miss OCD tallies up all she’s up to her eyeballs in this freshman year.

Hadaway, who also edited “Novice,” serves up montages aplenty — Alex’s notetaking, coach-stalking and “out-working” everybody, this “seat race” (competing for a spot on a varsity boat) or that racing regatta.

Fuhrman’s polished intensity draws us in, even if we’re repelled a bit by this young woman who will not give herself “a break,” at anything.

And Hadaway, as she did with college jazz band drumming in “Whiplash,” immerses us in the jargon, banter and brittle women-being-women-among-other-women dynamic of this collegiate combat among coeds.

It’s enough to make you glad you took up sailing instead.

Rating: R for language, some sexuality and brief disturbing material

Cast: Isabelle Fuhrman, Amy Forsythe, Dilone, Jonathan Cherry, Kate Drummand and Charlotte Ubben

Credits: Scripted and directed by Lauren Hadaway. An IFC release.

Running time: 1:37

This Jan 28 “high school reunion afterparty where the shallow, influencer host gets murdered” has no “true crime podcast hook, thank heavens. But Tiffany Haddish is the cop looking over a whole lot of suspects.

Zoe Chao, Sam Richardson, Ike Barinholtz, Ben Schwartz, Ilana Glazer and many others might have been the murderer of Xavier, aka Dave Franco.

Hard to tell if this will click. More characters means less character development.

This Michelle Yeoh star vehicle about an immigrant who is “the only hope” opens in March. Pretty dazzling trailer. Jamie Leigh Curtis and James Hong star in this A24 release.

I can’t recall ever dumping on a “Spider-Man” movie, and I see no reason to start now.

Yes, they’re as repetitive and formulaic as the other franchises in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. But they never fail to find the cute or deliver a little warmth and laughs amidst all the increasingly impressive effects and fan service.

“Spider-Man: No Way Home” takes its inspiration from the blockbuster success of the animated “Into the Spider-Verse,” which toyed with the physics concept, sampled on “Star Trek” and embraced like the Holy Grail in comic books, that there are infinite universes, infinite versions of life on Earth and in the cosmos and infinite Spider-Men.

In modern memory, there have been three Peter Parkers, so the gimmick here is to create a worst-kept-“secret” situation that puts all three — Tobey Maguire, Andrew Garfield and the fellow who succeeded them, Tom Holland — on the screen at the same time, joining forces to fight some fresh threat to the order of things.

And when you go down that multi-verse rabbit hole — or worm hole — you can toy with the possibilities of villains of the past. A little digital-de-aging, and Alfred Molina, Willem DaFoe, Thomas Haden Church and Jamie Foxx can collect a fresh check for bringing us “Spider-Man’s Greatest Hits.”

The fact that “No Way Home” hits during the holidays points to another inspiration. It’s like a “Doctor Who Christmas Special,” a reunion of many of the actors who’ve played a character over the decades — and it has indeed been nearly 20 years since Maguire and director Sam Raimi made Marvel the dominating Doc Ock of cinema and video culture, jamming its metal tentacles in everything.

These gimmicks don’t electro-shock the moribund storytelling, the not-quite-witty dialogue, don’t create chemistry between our romantic leads Holland and the latest MJ, Zendaya. But the effects are off-the-chart dazzling, and it nothing else, the picture jumps out of the gate and sprints until one and all get good and winded entirely too quickly.

Mysterio (Jake Gyllenhaal) lashed out and “outed” Peter Parker as he met his doom in the last “Spider-Man,” “Far from Home.” Yes, even the title-writers are out of new ideas these days.

The opening of Holland’s third outing in the spider suit has him coping with the awful blowback over that confrontation, that “murder,” and that exposure as the formerly unknown masked do-gooder vigilante.

Oscar winner J.K. Simmons brings Limbaugh, Alex Jones and Hannity-style hype and fake vitriol to the devolving newspaper editor J.J. Jameson, now fulminating furiously about this “murderer” and “menace” on The Daily Bugle’s web channel show, The Daily Fix.

Peter is stalked, baited and mobbed.

With handheld cameras, extreme close-ups and next-gen web-slinging, skyline-hopping effects, director Jon Watts, who did all three films of this trilogy, puts this action IN YOUR FACE, and how. See this in IMAX and you’ll be utterly bowled-over by how far the CGI assistance puts Spidey and MJ on the Roosevelt Island tram towers, hunted by the paparazzi and TV news helicopters.

The new “exposure” and negative publicity makes Peter controversial and leaves him imprisoned in his own apartment. And it isn’t just Aunt May (Oscar-winner Marisa Tomei) and her just-ended love affair with Tony Starke’s man Happy (Jon Favreau) that suffers. MJ and Peter’s pal Ned (Jacob Batalon) all see consequences when it comes to where they can all go to college together. The trio is basically black-listed.

That makes Peter wonder if there’s a way to undo his “outing,” maybe make the world “forget” who he really is so that they can go back to the way things were and maybe get into a decent Boston school.

And that’s why he visits his friendly, neighborhood wizard, Doctor Stranger (Benedict Cumberbatch), looking for another Marvel “reset,” like the one that brought the world and the Avengers back to status quo ante.

That spell is where all the multiverses colliding comes from.

One sweet touch to the script is the way each “Spidey,” when they all come together, plays around with the “strengths” and peculiarities of their version of the character — Maguire’s wide-eyed earnestness, Garfield’s Peter’s lack of confidence, Holland’s much more manic take.

A few laughs are to be found in each’s ignorance of the other’s story and “universe.”

“I was in the Avengers!”

“Cool. Are they like a band or something?”

The villains remind us why Marvel is always best served when it cares enough to send for the very best. Dafoe’s scientist/Green Goblin Jekyll & Hyde thing is a winner, Molina’s Doc Ock in a fine lather, Thomas Haden Church’s working class Sandman eager to please and help out, until he senses he’s chosen the wrong side. And Oscar-winner Foxx’s Electro gives new meaning to the phrase “power mad.”

The multiverse rift means that even the dead villains are brought back for another round here. Apparently though, there is no spell for uncanceling James Franco and his Son of Green Goblin.

There are renewed efforts to get back to the Big Statement of the Tobey Maguire Spider-Man pictures, the consequences of violence and revenge.

But the message to this movie, the line repeated by MJ time and again to tamp down her own expectations from life, is “If you expect disappointment, you can never be disappointed.”

That applies to colleges you want to get into, and Spider-Man movies. The breathless hype surrounding this one only applies to the augmented cast and some first-act chase sequences. It’s a perfectly ordinary arachnid installment starring your “friendly neighborhood” you-know-who, with a little wit (not a lot) and a nice dollop of pathos, good effects, limp dialogue and a great big gimmick.

It ends one trilogy with an almost-bang, and opens the door to more movies without the traditional Spider-Man reset and change of actors. Could Tom Holland become the Sony/Marvel James Bond, serving for a decade or more, barring a belated growth spurt?

That’s the ultimate “fan service.”

Cast: Tom Holland, Zendaya, Benedict Cumberbacth, Tobey Maguire, Andrew Garfield, J. K. Simmons, Willem Dafoe, Alfred Molina, Benedict Wong, Jon Favreau, Jamie Foxx and Marisa Tomei.

Credits: Directed by Jon Watts, scripted by Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers. A Sony release.

Running time: 2:30

It’s animated and out in April.

How well do you figure the “National Treasure” movies played, how easily understandable were they to international audiences with even less knowledge of the arcana of American history than the average U.S. Joe?

That’s something I pondered while watching a Chinese mash-up of “National Treasure” and oh, “Antiques Roadshow,” with a smidgen of “Raiders of the Lost Ark.”

“Schemes in Antiques” is a history-hunting adventure about a missing jade head from a Buddha statue, a work of legend long lost after it was lopped off, then rediscovered and then abruptly sold to the hated Japanese when a member of one of the “Plum Blossom Five,” the esteemed and ancient first families of Chinese antiques dealing, made a deal.

That family fell into shame, “pariahs” for that sale, and are “Plum Blossoms” in name only in the film’s present day, 1992.

But when the Japanese heir to the fellow who bought this Tang Dynasty temple’s jade Buddha head says she wants to return it to China, her ancestor’s will decreed that a member of the family of the “traitor” who sold it be the one to receive it, thus clearing a stain from two nations and two family’s names.

That “heir” proves to be hard to find, having changed his name and what not. But he’s found, and his quick take on the diplomatically-handed-over head isn’t positive. The head she wants to hand off is a fake. T

hat sends that hapless, hustling alcoholic heir Xu yuan (Lei Jiayin) on a mad pursuit of clues left behind by his late father, while pursued by assorted gangs and the more respectable heir Yao Buran (Alan Aruna) to the other family whose ancestor helped recover the head, but wasn’t in on the secret sale to a Japanese collector long ago.

That’s a complicated set-up, so it’s no wonder that tedious voice-over narration by hustler Xu yuan (Lei) has to load down the first seven minutes with literally nothing but exposition, and the first half hour plays as prologue as our two heirs are matched in a snappy ancient Chinese artifacts and antiques authenticate-off.

That’s how they’ll decide “who” the head is handed off to. How…original.

“Schemes in Antiques” is a film, based on a poplar Chinese novel, that bogs the viewer down in dozens of dynasties, vast numbers of vases and arcane bits of Chinese historical lore wherein lie the clues as to where the “real” head is hidden. This mountain of detail isn’t really what the movie is about, and may not be an issue if you’re Chinese and viewing this. But after a brisk beginning, where our drunken anti-hero spectacularly hustles his local “fake” antiquities market, the film staggers to a near crawl.

And the light tone promised by “Drunken (Antiques) Master” sobers up and dulls down.

Xu yuan can’t fight worth a damn, which would be handy as thugs beset him. The “chairman’s” granddaughter, Yanyan (Xin Zhilei), turns out to be the classic “SHE is the martial artist in this team” switch as she assigns herself to be his sidekick.

Except the fights are few and far between.

The story stumbles from one “suspect” or “underworld figure with the next clue” to another. One is an ex partner of Xu’s dad (Ge Yu), a con artist in his own right. Another is the elusive underworld figure Lao Zhaofeng, and then there’s Lord Zheng, a shot caller and dealer of long-standing ill repute, a “Lord” who turns out to be a woman (Mei Yong).

And every so often, a clue or antique is confronted, examined in detail by each expert, with their intense gaze bringing ceramic painted dragons and the like to life, at least in their minds, as they mention the details that separate “authentic” from “fake.”

Xu, once he sobers up, has the edge in this regard thanks to his apparently-perfect recall of conversations or encounters he remembers — even from the edge of consciousness — and his apparent eidetic memory.

Unfortunately, once Xu sobers up, the movie loses most of its pop, pizazz and light touch. Without more chases, more fights and more fumbling and stumbling across “the truth,” “Schemes” outsmarts itself and simply talks and “dynasties” itself to death.

I had higher expectations for this, seeing as how history and artifacts and clue-by-clue mysteries are hard to pass up. But “Schemes” schemes itself out of ever being interesting enough to hold my attention.

Lei Jiayin’s performance loses its appeal and edge as the character dries out and cleans up. There’s no “love interest,” just more and more characters added on and endless explorations of what might be inside this bronze mirror or that cave or contained within a clockwork puzzle game of “Go.”

The stakes in this can have a deadly edge. And the elements of a better “quest” movie are present.

But without the pace or giddiness of its Hollywood antecedents, I have to say this promising Chi-Kin Kwok (“Journey to the West,” ugh) project turns more “Roadshow” than “Raiders,” and that’s just a bore.

Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Lei Jiayin, Xin Zhilei, Alan Aruna, Mei Yong, Qin Yan and Ge Yu

Credits: Directed by Chi-Kin Kwok, scripted by Hai Huang, Chi-Kin Kwok, Fan Wenwen and Kuan Zhu, based on a novel by Marberionius (Ma Boyong). A Well Go Entertainment release.

Running time: 2:03

This send up of Cage’s rep, image and last dozen years of career choices, not all of them “Pig,” could go either way…great or not so much.

What do you think, based on this first teaser?