Movie Nation

A Japanese manga about a mythic ancient Chinese civil war becomes a live-action Japanese feature film in “Kingdom.”

It’s, in essence, a samurai sword fight film with Chinese touches and that “unified China” messaging that many a Chinese combat period piece preaches, as decreed by Beijing.

Do the “Cultural Appropriation Police” know about this?

Even if they do, perhaps the best word for “Kingdom” is in keeping with its slangy, profanity-peppered trash talk — badass.

Grand fight choreography, complete with dazzling swordplay and gravity-defying wirework, imposing production design roughly on a par with the great Chinese-made epics such as “House of Flying Daggers”  and “Hero,” it’s a “Lord of the Rings” without the rings.

Slaveboys fated to meet in youth and inspire each other in adulthood, feuding royal siblings, a secret tunnel defended by an ogre, archers, blowguns and a warrior princess.

Actually, she’s a queen, and she too is pretty badass.

So many MANY names. The sub-titlers spell them a couple of different ways, so how is a mere critic to keep all the generals, assassins, court counselors, sidekicks, etc. straight?

And that dialogue, all “bull” this and “ass” that, with the swaggering young hero, played by Kento Yamazaki, bellowing, bludgeoning, stabbing and slicing, or just slack-jawed in awe — manga/anime style. Every so often he bites off some smack talk (in Japanese with English subtitles) that is vintage Hollywood action hero fodder.

“You wanna piece’a me!?” “I’ll decide whether to kill you after I take care of them!”

In 255, BCE, Qin State, on the western edge of the Middle Kingdom, we meet two slave boys, Xin and Piao, thrown together on the farm of a taskmaster who gives them little hope for a future.

“There’s no climbing out of the slave class.”

Swords, which they cannot afford, are their only way out. So they learn with sticks in the sylvan forests near their village, figuring that “10,000 bouts like our lives depend on it” and they’ll be in a position to become great generals.

That dream ends when Piao is spied by a great general and singled out to serve the king. Xin (Yamazaki) fumes and practices on his own until that night, some time later, when Piao (Ryô Yoshizawa) shows up, mortally wounded.

He has a mission for Xin, and a map to help him fulfill it. Go, serve the young king that Piao was hired to defend and be a body-double for. Xin figures “Avenge Piao” is part of that mission, too.

Xin fights his way to that newly-deposed young king (Yoshizawa), bringing along this “boy” guide who wears an owl costume in disguise who can help.  He Liao Diao (Kanna Hashimoto) fools everybody but the viewing audience about her gender. She looks like she stepped off the cover of a Japanese pop pixie magazine.

They’ll need help, as is the way of such epics, an alliance with “The Mountain Tribes,” primitive brutes nobody can understand because they wear animal war-masks all the time. It isn’t until she removes hers that Yang Duan He (Masami Nagasawa), their leader, is revealed to be a two-fisted, two-swords-slinging warrior queen.

The fights are drawn-out and the story is formulaic silliness, and also plodding. But damn this is fun.

Director Shinsuke Sato did “Bleach,” also based on a manga, and brings dashes of style to the proceedings. He handles the “training montage” briskly and punctuates it with a striking backlit/moonlight duel.

A characteristic of Chinese films of this era and genre is the sea of bodies thrown at the camera, and Sato and Sony/Toho Studio (Funimation is distributing) spent the money it took to manage that in Japan.

Vast cavalries of mounted, pennant waving lancers are worthy of the Japanese master Kurosawa, and the set-piece fights are brawls straight out of (Chinese) martial arts classics, the epics of Zhang Yimou (“House of Flying Daggers”), John Woo (“Red Cliff”) and Chen Kaige (“The Emperor and the Assassin”).

The action and spectacle don’t leave one much time to ponder the performances, which isn’t really what this is about.

Yoshizawa presents a regal stoicism, Yamazaki is all antic energy and “down and not out but on the verge of despair” when the need arises.

Nagasawa gets the real flourishes in the fight choreography, a veritable Japanese Wonder Woman not shy about slicing and dicing, especially the sneaky SOBs who dare come at her from behind.

Bad. Ass.

This isn’t quite the spectacle that the signature films of the genre are, but lacking the seriousness of those isn’t exactly a shortcoming. Those films were long in order to impose stateliness via pacing. This one plays as drawn-out because, well, because we know girlfriend’s got a blowgun that could end this mismatched fight in a flash, or because we’re wondering why the heroes don’t tackle the giant ogre, the Vermilion Assassin or anybody else as a group.

Or maybe the filmmakers couldn’t bear to edit all this into something even more energetic and brisk — a 100 minute movie stuffed into a 134 minute one.

MPAA Rating: R, bloody martial arts violence, swordplay, profanity

Cast:  Kento Yamazaki, Ryô Yoshizawa, Masami Nagasawa, Kanna Hashimoto, Kanata Hongô, Masahiro Takashima,Takao Ohsawa

Credits: Directed by Shinsuke Sato, script by Tsutomu Kuroiwa and Shinsuke Sata, based on the manga (comic book) by Yasuhisa Hara. A Sony/Toho/Funimation release.

Running time: 2:12

“Gwen” has the tenor of a spooky folk Welsh folk legend and the grasping, gasping punch of an Industrial Revolution parable.

Dark, helpless, grim and bleak? It’s all a part of the windswept and gray setting of this period-perfect period piece from writer-director William McGregor.

Eleanor Worthington-Cox of “Maleficent” and “Action Point” is the title character, a Welsh teen struggling under the thumb of her mother (Maxine Peake of “Peterloo,” TV’s “Little Dorrit”) and the conditions of the day.

It’s the early 19th century. Father is “away in the fighting” and their corner of Wales is transitioning from farms to “quarries,” open-pit coal mines to fuel the steam engines that have come to rule Britannia.

Gwen keeps their sheep, tends their vegetables and dreams of the day, with her doted-on little sister (Jodie Innes) when their beloved father returns.

But Mother being a stern taskmaster isn’t enough. Strange, lethal goings-on around them soon visit their farm as well. Gwen hears sounds on the farm in the night.

Mother’s reassurance, “I’m sure there’s nothing to worry about,” isn’t reassuring at all.

As their livestock die and the woes pile up, Mother starts having seizures and Gwen tries to pick up the slack even as the helplessness of it all falls entirely on her shoulders.

McGregor is a TV director who cut his teeth on “Poldark,” “The Missing” and “One of Us/Retribution.” He’s most concerned with mood, here — foggy, gloomy hillsides, lowering skies, a girl in her nightgown wandering into the dank dark with a lamp, pleading “Who’s there?”

Britain’s eternal class wars flicker in the subtle threats and intimidation the family faces. There’s not a lot of mystery about what they’re up against — not when a sheep’s heart is found nailed to their door after the local coal baron (Mark Lewis Jones) leans on Mother to sell out, after church service.

McGregor fleshes in period detail, the ivory pin used to prick one’s finger so that blood can add a little blush to one’s cheeks, the simple, candle-lit meals, the mud, muck, life-and-death nature of farmwork and the feeble hopes that the local mine’s doctor (Kobna Holdbrook-Smith) can offer Mother some relief from what ails her.

Worthington-Cox has the pluck to pull off Gwen, and McGregor’s handling of the admittedly thin material is expert and artful — flashbacks showing that things there were always thus, but at least the family laughed and loved before Father went off to fight some rich man’s war for empire and markets.

Narrow in focus it may be, and it could certainly use a few more spooky touches to animate the “mystery” part of all this — Mother scattering sheep bones to ward off, what? Screeching animals in the night suggest The Cat of the Baskervilles might be on the prowl.

But “Gwen” is still a fascinating, immersive period piece that captures the helplessness of the working poor and the callousness of those who aren’t as aptly as, well, “Peterloo,” without getting the militia involved.

MPAA Rating: unrated, graphic violence

Cast: Eleanor Worthington-Cox, Maxine Peake, Jodie Innes, Kobna Holdbrook-Smith, Mark Lewis Jones

Credits: Written and directed by William McGregor. An RLJE release.

Running time: 1:24

Short answer? No. Milo Ventimiglia a is a bland, if pretty, non-presence in the film.

Nobody went to see it, and anybody looking for star power and charisma won’t see any sign of it from him in the movie.

Whatever he gets across in the TV show, he was a huge hole in the center of this movie built around him and a dog voiced by Kevin Costner.

The very premise of this LA Times piece is laughable. Did the reporter see the movie?

“Milo Ventimiglia, after a decades-long successful career in television, is trying his hand at leading man status in the film “The Art of Racing in the Rain.” https://t.co/gA48E53MPJ https://twitter.com/latimes/status/1160747760817229824?s=17

Every cable operator, all the dish services, losing subscribers to the tune of a million and a half last quarter alone.

They are the newspapers of video content, profitable but dying. Quickly.

Dead media walking.

https://deadline.com/2019/08/u-s-pay-tv-subscriber-losses-more-than-triple-to-1-5m-in-q2-report-1202666232/

A rain-soaked forest and mountain top, kids being kids, until the guns come out, the kidnapping happens and the helicopters come looking for them.

This striking Alejandro Landes feature opens Sept. 13 from Neon (of course)

It’s another version of “Most Dangerous Game” (humans as “game”), and I’m not sure it is so politically touchy that it needed to be pulled.

Trump wanted it yanked, and it was.

https://t.co/F3KuM5x3hc?amp=1

Love this.

https://www.thewrap.com/jason-momoa-says-he-cant-shoot-aquaman-2-because-he-got-run-over-by-a-bulldozer/

Good performances and a healthy dose of earnest righteousness go a long way in atoning for the choppy structure and shortchanged characters that mar the telling of the inspiring true story of a life interrupted by a crime that never happened.

“Brian Banks” is about an All American high school football player racing towards a potentially glorious and lucrative future, but who lost years of his life to a laughably unjust accusation, trial and arm-twisted “plea deal” that was no “deal” at all.

That story is interesting enough, in a “Dateline: NBC” sense. But what this Tom Shadyac film is really about is discovering inner peace and resolve in prison, finding a mentor who helps you “get over” and forgiving those whose grievous sins against Banks have the audience muttering for blood, but not the hero.

Emerging star Aldis Hodge of “Straight Outta Compton,” “Hidden Figures” and TV’s “City on a Hill” plays Banks in high school, when the alleged rape at the center of this story occurred, then in prison, and ten years later when he’s trying to clear his name so that he can fully restart his life.

But we get to know him just as it’s all unraveling — again. Just after getting out, he’s playing college football at a smaller school than U.S.C., which recruited him, pre-prison. A change in the law takes even that away from him. Registered sex offenders lose more and more rights, over time, as every “get tough” measure under the sun makes its way through states and localities.

He needs the help of the California Innocence Project, whose founder, Justin Brooks (Mr. Tears, Greg Kinnear) just doesn’t see this case — Banks is out on parole, and he took an awful plea deal rather than go to trial, thus limiting his options — as a winner.

Brooks, his team and his law school students in San Diego must find something “extraordinary” — new evidence, new testimony — that will persuade the prosecutor’s office and judge who railroaded the 16 year-old Banks into prison to take it all back.

Good luck with that.

The movie here is what happened to Banks in prison, something the screenwriter and director seem to have missed. Prison is where the big, strong kid is tested and embittered, only to be redeemed by a prison teacher who counsels “All you can control in your life is how you respond to it” and “The path to happiness begins and ends in the mind” and “Given the right perspective, prison can set you free.”

The filmmakers seem to think that casting Morgan Freeman in the part and giving him those lines (and virtually no others) to intone was enough. It isn’t. This is a redemption tale, a broken hero’s internal journey to the light. The hero and his mentor need more screen time together.

Ex-con Banks dating an art major/personal trainer (Melanie Liburd) who is thrown by his startling personal history, is of little consequence. His never-losing faith-mother (Sherri Shepherd) is a given.

At least the many life-interruptions engineered by the hardass probation officer (Dorian Missick is amazing and hateful in the part) give this story the sort of twist — how “paying your debt to society” is never done when “a broken system” keeps renewing that debt — that the movie’s formulaic story craves.

Even those who aren’t football fans know where this story is headed, at least in the courtroom. What’s interesting is that interior life-change that Hodges gets across, but that could use a lot more setting up via scenes with Freeman’s character.

And for a movie that decries a “broken system,” “Brian Banks” lets a plea-bargain-busting judge, bums-rush DA and inept defense lawyer off too easily.

The villain played up here is a veritable stereotype, a caricature of a young African American woman, cleverly and hatefully made flesh and blood by Xosha Roquemore.

All of which makes “Brian Banks” much more of a mixed bag of a movie than you’d hope. A “broken system” isn’t going to be driven to change by pulled punches like this one.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for thematic content and related images, and for language

Cast: Aldis Hodge, Greg Kinnear, Morgan Freeman, Sherri Shepherd, Xosha Roquemore

Directed by Tom Shadyac, script by Doug Atchison. A Bleecker St. release.

Running time: 1:39

You will tear up a little at the animated short film “Hair Love” that Matthew A. Cherry, Everett Downing Jr. and Bruce W. Smith whipped up, via Kickstarter, and Sony attached as the opener to “The Angry Birds Movie 2.”

It’s a mostly silent tale of a hapless African American father doing battle with his little girl’s violently mussed hair, with instruction assistance from an online video.

He’s got to manage this because Mom’s not there. And as much as you’d think a man who has to attend to the care and feeding of his own dreadlocks would have to know about taming an unruly Afro, he’s out of his depth.

It is adorable, poignant and about something — African America’s love-hate relationship with hair. It is everything that the generic, laugh-starved sausage factory production that Sony Pictures Animation slapped on AFTER it is not.

“Angry Birds 2” has hints of empowerment, of “work together” and “don’t steal credit from smart women” to fend off a female supervillain.

All that in a comedy with barely a chuckle in it. The script is so thin that the best lines lean HARD on speech impediments to work.

“Oh Kwap!” “Awe you fweakin’ kiddin’ me?”

It starts out weak and is coughing up blood by the third act.

“Birds” is a Chatty Cathy of a cartoon comedy, relying on three screenwriters to provide lines that virtually never deliver, a plot that is generic “add a new villain to the sequel” piffle and a voice cast that can’t compensate for those shortcomings.

Jason Sudeikis returns as the non-heroic “hero” bird with the “angry” eyebrows, again forced to deal with a threat to Bird Island from abroad.

The Pig Islanders, plump and green and mischievous, in or out of thongs and tankinis, call for a truce when they recognize a new common threat, a third island, is hurling volcanic snowballs onto their respective paradise islands.

Quick, call in “Squeal Team Six!”

Red and the head pig Leonard (Bill Hader) must “assemble the team,” including a porcine gadget guru (Sterling K. Brown), and the smart ladybird (Rachel Bloom) who wrote off Red (or vice versa) in a bird colony round of speed-dating just the day before.

The early promise of the movie is in their testy exchanges, her rattling off a list of his shortcomings and “issues,” professional jerk Sudeikis — as Red — responding in kind.

“Talks to herself…Doesn’t answer her own questions. Left-handed, probably a witch.”

But those sparks disappear as the picture slacks off into a couple of other settings — hatchlings trying to rescue the eggs they have endangered (“Oh Kwap” comes here.) and the villain’s lair, where we discover how little humor Leslie Jones can wring out of a villain with no funny lines, and how Tiffany Haddish maybe needs a better agent (playing the villain’s daughter).

Scores of pop tunes, courtesy of everyone from Sarah McLachlan and Paula Cole to Lionel, Bowie, Buffett and, wait for it — Europe — are slapped on as comic kickers to many scenes. They do not help.

I won’t say it’s excruciating, but viewers of every age will be keenly aware of the passage of time and this colossal waste of it.

MPAA Rating: PG for rude humor and action

Voice Cast: Jason Sudeikis, Leslie Jones, Tiffany Haddish, Awkwafina, Josh Gad, Bill Hader, Peter Dinklage, Danny McBride and Eugenio Derbez

Credits: Directed by Thurop Van Orman and John Rice, script by Peter Ackerman Eyal Podell, Jonathon E. Stewart. A Sony Pictures Animation release.

Running time: 1:36

You never hear horror stories about random fan encounters gone wrong involving John Travolta. Never.

The face he shows the public doesn’t have room for bad days or bad moods, even though everybody has them. And that’s by design.

“I make it a point of getting myself in the right frame of mind, prepared, whenever I know I’m going out somewhere I might be seen,” he says. He gets himself into a good mood, and makes sure he stays that way. At least as far as the public is concerned.

You joke that maybe he’s just learned what Vincent Vega, his famous “Pulp Fiction” character, was taught by Jules (Samuel L. Jackson) in the film — “Get your ‘game face’ on,” and Travolta laughs and points “Bingo.” But he’s known this pretty much from the start.

He remembers, he says, what it was like to meet his idols when he first came to Hollywood. James Cagney, Paul Newman, Paul McCartney, “all just as kind and generous as could be.” That’s the “game face” he wanted to present.

So even if the roles aren’t as juicy at 65, the hits fewer and farther in between, his general fan likability is still off the charts. The rare bad press he got back at his peak was generally over his love of perks while on location, great roles he turned down when he didn’t get them. Even Scientology, which hasn’t been the kindest label for the likes of Tom Cruise, is shrugged off when it comes to Travolta.

Travolta is talking about this whole fan relationship to the famous thing a lot. His new movie, co-written and directed by Limp Bizkit rocker Fred Durst, has him playing the ultimate “fanboy” — obsessive, annoying and “on the spectrum.”

For a guy whose famous villainous line in “Face/Off,” “Ain’t it Cool?” became the name of the first major fanboy website, “Ain’t It Cool News,” it’s a daring turn — and not just because of the hairstyle and choice of wardrobe. Taking fanboydom over the top can have consequences.

“Oh, those guys, they’ll know it’s just exaggerated, just a movie,” he says, laughing. “But Fred actually knew a guy like this, named ‘Moose.’ So there’s a that bit of reality we’re starting from, even if this guy is way over the top, but harmless until he’s humiliated and threatened and treated badly.”

Every entertainment journalist has her or his favorite story of catching a celebrity on a bad day, a Pierce Brosnan hissy fit here, a Spike Lee or Julia Roberts silent-treatment and glare there.

“The Fanatic” has Moose, a childishly obsessed LA fan and film buff, rebuffed when he catches his favorite action hero on a bad day. As Moose has just bought a costume vest Hunter Dunbar (Devon Sawa) wore in a vampire picture some years back, and NEEDs it autographed in the very worst way, he persists — finding his way to Dunbar’s home, and getting the tongue-lashing he deserves for “stalking” him this way.

That’s when things turn violent, with an accident here and a few twists there. “The Fanatic” opens Aug. 30.

Travolta could sympathize Moose from the other side of that interaction, because he once interrupted a star’s dinner before he himself was famous, and got put off. He liked the idea of showing the childlike appreciation the most “fanatical” fans get swept up in, liked dramatizing how important how they’re treated — even at their most intrusive. And he liked the idea of working with Durst, a filmmaker bringing his rock world sensibility to the picture.

“We’d been talking about doing something together for 15 years, and this looked ‘out there.’ Kind of risky. And I like working on these smaller projects. We did stuff on this shoot (in Birmingham, doubling for Hollywood and environs) you could never get away with on a big studio picture. Just to get it done.”

That’s where Travolta’s career is, mostly, these days. A lower tier stock car racing drama here (“Trading Paint,” with Shania Twain), a notorious underworld tale in New York (“Gotti”) or Miami (“Speed Kills”) there.

With the paradigm shifting in distribution, and streaming platforms taking some of the wind out of theatrical studios’ sails, Travolta can get these movies made and in front of audiences more easily than ever. He figures others may follow this path as their careers change direction past leading lady/leading man peaks.

“You’ve got to establish yourself in Hollywood or New York, first,” he says. “But once you’ve done that, you’ve got to have somebody (representation) who can show producers, ‘My guy can bring this much attention and (paying customers), so he’s good for a picture with this much budget.’ That way, you don’t have to live in Hollywood, deal with everything that goes on out there that wears you out.”

He’s lived in Florida, off and on, since the late ’80s, full-time since the early 2000s. “I just love it here. Always have.” There’s been room for him to indulge in his other passion — flying, most famously his own personal jets (a 707 among them, at one point). And he’s continued to make movies past his peak earning years — “Basic” and “The Poison Rose” — “My daughter got to act with me in that one!”– and “Speed Kills” all filmed in Florida.

I’ve interviewed him maybe half a dozen times over the years, watched him shoot a couple of those films, seen him interact with fans. He is all charm in public and in interviews. Even smiles through the question he habitually dodges.

The paydays aren’t as big, but “the freedom, the characters you get to play” make up for it, he says.

“I get an idea, ‘Always wanted to play a race car driver. I tell a writer, ‘Why don’t you write me something that’s a little bit ‘A Man and a Woman,’ with ‘Grand Prix’ in it. You know, those ’60s movies.”

Add Shania Twain, Michael Madsen, Toby Sebastian, Barry Corbin and Kevin Dunn, and “Trading Paint” is up and running.

“If you love diving into characters like I do, you want to keep doing it,” Travolta says. “I’ve always considered myself a character actor, even when I was a leading man. This feels like” a natural progression.

You just have to keep in mind what superfan Moose tells Hunter Dunbar in “The Fanatic — “Without people like me, you’re nothing.”

Travolta lights up a smile making that point.

“Never ever ever forget that!”