Movie Nation

“A Perfect Fit” is a light, schmaltzy Indonesian romance about superstitions and shoes.

A shoe designer and a fashion blogger meet cute, but seem destined to marry wealthier, bullying partners who offer security and a lot of stress. What’s it going to take to pair these two up?

Yes, it’s cute enough to make your teeth ache. There’s no edge to it, the picture’s respectul tone means it doesn’t wring many laughs out of every time someone hands someone else a tiny palm leaf and orders her to “spin around three times, or advise that “People who had bad luck are in need of a breath that’s new.”

A “cleansing” it is!

Will these two ever get it together or find a “perfect fit?” As Saski quips in her blog, “The journey pf a thousand miles begins with a fabulous pair of shoes!”

Saski (Nadya Arina), an upbeat fashion blogger with a sickly mother (Ayu Laksmi) who is deep into Lontar, the palm scriptures of the ancients. That’s why Saski is marching towards the altar with the handsome, rich bully boy Deni (Giorgino Abraham). That’s also why she lets herself get arm-twisted into having her fortune told.

The spiritualist tells her which fabrics “repel bad energy,” and foretells “You will find a new path to travel on.” Here, take this “spell” with you, and ignore it at your own peril.

And despite Saski’s insistence that “life’s not some movie with a silly prophecy that has to be fulfilled,” she lets BFF Anda (Laura Theux) talk her into it.

That’s what puts her in the not-yet-opened shoe shop, Shoes With Love, where hunky Rio (Refal Hady) presides. He’s Mister “Those don’t suit you” about the shoes she picks out, and offers his interpretation on what she needs, what suits and what will work.

“You can tell what a person is like by their shoes,” he opines (in Indonesian with subtitles, or dubbed into English). Shoes determine “fate,” he suggests, making way too much eye contact, then telling Saski “You’re staring at me. Please don’t. You might fall in love.”

That there is Bali’s best pick-up line ever.

“As someone whose days are filled with shoes, my heart is always a step ahead.”

That should settle it. Except his mother is anxious that he link up with childhood friend and ruthless shoe out-sourceress Tiara (Anggika Bolsterli). She’s just as pushy as Kaski’s Deni, wealthy and smitten. Her bullying is all aimed at the working classes.

Amidst all the rituals, ceremonies and traditions, and talk about “Oh no, these are melinjo leaves! They’re supposed to be JACKfruit!” and fairytales and “Ladybugs are said to bring patience,” there’s a sweet, chaste romance that kind of gets lost in the mix.

The various rites and superstitions seem mockable and mocked. But it’s a light “Who believes in that stuff anyway?” ridicule, and as the whole movie is driven by Saski’s “fate” and “bad luck,” which is an endorsement.

The leads have good chemistry. But the obstacles to their being together are worn out cliches with a light frosting of “cleansing,” “readings” and Lontar and leaves.

Deni is a caricature of the “projecting” paranoid and ill-tempered boyfriend, and Tiara is the “working woman” cliche incarnate.

So “A Perfect Fit?” Not perfect. Not that close. But cute, here and there.

MPA Rating: TV-PG, violence

Cast: Nadya Arina, Refal Hady, Giorgino Abraham and Laura Theux

Credits: Directed by Hadrah Daeng Ratu, script by
Garin Nugroho and Hadrah Daeng Ratu. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:52

He started his big screen career with “The Duelists.” Now Ridley Scott returns to that subject and another French period piece.

Oct. 15 look for “The Last Duel.”

The villain is introduced in the first scene, a meticulous pest exterminator (“Ongedierteverdelger,” in Dutch) mercilessly hunting down a cyclist on a backroad in the land of windmills, wooden shoes and Dutch treats.

He gets the drop on his quarry, who begs for his life. That never works, even in the Netherlands.

“The time for apologies is behind us,” our unnamed exterminator (Willem de Wolf) officiously growls. We all know what that means, or have our sinking suspicions.

“Tailgate,” which sounds almost adorable in the original Dutch (“Bumperkleef”) is a thriller in the “Duel/Breakdown/Unhinged” mold. And its tagline — “Road Rage Has its Consequences” — suggests something most of its predecessors in this subgenre avoid. Maybe the monster tormenting motorists has a point.

We don’t know how that cyclist crossed him. But next time we see him, he’s just minding his own business, driving the speed limit in the left lane of a divided highway (“dual carriageway”). All those cars backed up behind him? They should be like him, following the rules, being polite, etc. Right?

Especially the frazzled if not-totally-fractured family piled into that Volvo XC 90, scrambling to get to Grandma’s house for what might be Grandpa’s last birthday.

The kids (Roosmarijn van der Hoek, Liz Vergeer) are noisy, quarrelsome tweens.

Wife Diana (Anniek Pheifer) has a hint of passive aggression in her disorganized procrastination. Husband Hans (Jeroen Spitzenberger)? There’s no “passive” to whatever he has going on. His mother is calling, constantly, nagging them for an ETA. The kids are griping and fighting.

And there’s this “kont gat” in the passing line, tying up traffic.

If you’ve ever been behind the wheel you know how this goes. Lights flashing and the horn won’t move him. “Tailgating” only gets you a stop-short. One rude gesture later and the die has been cast.

Diana’s “Don’t provoke people unnecessarily” falls on deaf ears for a guy seeing red. And that inevitable stop for gas is merely the second confrontation. Hans turns his back, and our exterminator is telling a gruesome story — a parable — to his kids. The family wants to leave and the tall man with sprayers and a hazmat suit tucked into his van isn’t having it.

“I’d advise you to apologize,” he purrs, in Dutch with English subtitles, or dubbed into English, “so that you can get back on the road safely.”

Writer-director Lodewijk Crijns — the teen cancer comedy “Sickos” was his — doesn’t reinvent the wheel here. But he keeps the camera tight, capturing the growing fury and then panic inside that Volvo, and keeps his extreme closeups low — bumper’s-eye-view — for the pursuit, chase, and frantic struggles and escape attempts.

All you want out of a movie like this is the ride, fraught and harrowing, a little empathy for the victims and some sense of release.

Crijns works hard to dodge the tried and true in that regard. This has “High Tension” touches that take it out of the realm of the straight-up “Duel” chase with its relentless pursuer. He finds new ways for our villain to get inside his quarry’s heads.

But sometimes avoiding the obvious leads to missteps as tension is frittered away and “logic” flies out an open car window.

I can only imagine the Dutch stereotypes Crijns is poking with his mixed messaging. The first “jerk” the family deals with is driving an Audi, sort of motoring shorthand for “kont gat” the world over. A bike-crazy culture frets over what transgression the first victim could have committed. The littering, speeding, bickering family with the blowhard, confrontational husband isn’t the easiest to root for.

And the villain? Is he or is he not owed his “apology?”

MPA Rating: unrated, violence, profanity

Cast: Jeroen Spitzenberger, Anniek Pheifer, Roosmarijn van der Hoek, Liz Vergeer and Willem de Wolf.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Lodewijk Crijns. A Film Movement (July 30 streaming) release.

Running time: 1:26

High tech horror from beyond the grave, August 20.

Stunts and pranks and injuries for laughs return October 22.

Paramount uhhhh, raises the bar?

The Police, Stevie Wonder, Elton John, Earth, Wind and Fire, The Stones, Dire Straits and Jimmy Buffett singing “I don’t know where I’m a gonna go when the Volcano blow” are among those who made music in Beatles Svengali George Martin’s Montserrat Air Studio, before the volcano blew and buried it all.

This August 17 release looks intriguing, from a rock history standpoint.

Zazie Beetz, Benedict Wong, Tony Hale, Arianna Ortiz and Bill Skarsgaard are among the stars of this provocative, atmospheric fantasy.

This one opens July 30.

The other night I was channel surfing and stumbled across a Chinese-made World War II film from 2018. “Air Strike” was a Sino-Japanese War thriller about daring Chinese aviators battling the aerial hordes of Japanese bombers that laid waste to China’s cities for a couple of years before The Flying Tigers and Pearl Harbor brought allies to China’s aid, and changed the focus of combat to the South Pacific (mostly).

It’s a terrible movie, ahistorical and unexciting, with token high-priced American talent such as Bruce Willis and Oscar winner Adrien Brody (The “New” Nicolas Cage?) in supporting roles.

The worst thing about “Air Strike” is the CGI air to air combat, animated air raids and dog fights. We first started to see this “make an aviation movie cheaper” with Scorsese’s “The Aviator,” with the cut-rate WWI Lafayette Escadrille romance “Flyboys,” and the George Lucas-produced “Red Tails.”

After “Midway,” I got the feeling that the digital animation was getting better, more convincing. Not in “Air Strike.” “Cheesy” doesn’t do cheese justice.

But such abortive efforts inevitably increase my respect for the films that used real period aircraft, or slightly-safer modernized (better engines) replicas and real stunt pilots. These reached a kind of zenith in the ’60s, when fast photo-helicopters and sophisticated filmmaking made the aviation part of war films such as “The Blue Max” and “Aces High” (WWI) and “The Battle of Britain” vivid and convincing.

The most impressive of all, in that regard, has to be the 1965 “all star cast” comedy “Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines.” It might have been the “best picture” pic of the New York Film Critics Circle back then (Judas Priest!), and considered one of the “500 best screen comedies” by some entity or another, but the “comedy” part of it seems to have faded with the intervening decades.

It’s not very funny.

But the aircraft — a couple of vintage ones, and a lot of recreated versions of aircraft actually flying in 1910 — grow more impressive by the year.

Here is a version (top left) of the Alberto Santos Dumont “Demoiselle,” the most famous monoplane of the era, here flown by the French entrant (Jean-Pierre Cassel) in the movie’s London to Paris air race.

There is the Roe IV British triplane, the vehicle the villain (Terry-Thomas, blast him, lower left) flies. There’s a Wright Flyer (Stuart Whitman‘s Arizona barn-stormer flies this) and a Bristol Boxkite and Blackburn “Type D” (Gordon Jackson‘s Scots pilot’s “kite”), and a Philips Multiplane, Passat Ornithopter, Lee-Richards Annular Biplane, Vickers 22 Monoplane, an Avro, a Dixon Nipper, and an Eardley Billing Tractor biplane (upside down with the Very German Gert Fröbe (his stunt double) dangling from it.

They spent the money to rent a couple of survivor planes and built 18 replicas, repowered with Rolls Royce engines (most of them) and actually had pilots fly the darned things. Some of those planes, authentic and replicas, still fly today.

And even though there are process shots and tricks to put stars at the stick, or crowd the screen with planes (in a couple of cases), it’s still amazing to see almost 60 years after “Those Magnificent Men” were filmed.

The plot — a jingoistic British newspaper publisher (Robert Morley) stages a race from London to Paris (with one stopover) as a stunt and a means of gathering global aviators and all the different types of aeroplanes then in the air — is perfunctory.

The characters are stock “foreign” types — the Italian (Alberto Sordi) whose wife looks like Sophia Loren (and dresses like her) and their large Italian brood, the lascivious Frenchman (Cassel, later of “The Discrete Charm of the Bourgeoisie”) who flirts with a succession of identical women from different countries, the (dubbed) Japanese pilot (Yûjirô Ishihara) who is more English than the English, the harrumphing German (Fröbe, aka “Auric Goldfinger”), the broke American “cowboy” (Whitman) and the prim, proper English officer, played by James Fox almost 20 years before he took “A Passage to India.”

Some of the slapstick still works, most of it playing around the airfield’s “sewage pond” crash zone and with those stock European “types.” But there’s little amusing in the airplane crazy publisher’s daughter (Sarah Miles) pursued by the American and her British fiance or in Benny Hill’s aerodrome firefighter.

That gap-toothed bounder Terry-Thomas remains a walking, bug-eyed sight gag all these decades later. But he has to be. There’s little funny for him to do. Just another posh toff picking on the hired help, one among many in his long career.

I gave up looking for what amused me as a kid and found myself marveling over how this sort of propeller or that style of airframe ever got off the ground. But they did, and this relic of a comedy provides magnificent proof of that, and the nerve it took to try and fly them, then or now.

It’s worth seeing today as a means of shaming any filmmaker who doesn’t ride her or his CGI animators harder to get more convincing footage, flying scenes that look like the real thing, as seen in “Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines.”

Cast: Stuart Whitman, Sarah Miles, Gert Fröbe, James Fox, Alberto Sordi, Karl Michael Vogler, Jean-Pierre Cassel, Sam Wanamaker, Benny Hill, Yûjirô Ishihara, Robert Morley and Terry-Thomas.

Credits: Directed by Ken Annakin, script by Jack Davies and Ken Annakin. A 20th Century Fox release.

Running time: 2:18

There’s probably an “overcoming every obstacle” story behind the five credited directors and six credited writers who made “Deep” in their native Thailand during the COVID pandemic.

And whatever it was — maintaining “protocols,” filming during lockdown, filmmakers getting sick and being replaced — it’s almost certainly more interesting than what they managed to get on the screen.

Glib summary — it’s a tepid Thai “Flatliners.” Good looking young medical students get wrapped up in a deadly experiment not wholly unrelated to their studies. Take a collection of “types” — a med student drowning in debt, a cute online “influencer,” a video game nerd, a grinning son secretly grieving his dead mother — and take away their sleep. That’s the premise.

“Deep” winds up a somewhat lifeless enterprise that manages a suspenseful moment or two almost in spite of itself.

Jane (Panisara Rikulsurakan) and sister June (Warisara Jitpreedasakul) are sibling rivals, living with their grandmother and behind on her mortgage. Jane is badgered about “not quitting” her studies by her closest professor (Dujdao Vadhanapakorn).

That’s how she becomes a well-paid test subject for this German researcher (Kim Waddoup) who is digging into the chemistry of what makes us sleep, and what might prevent us from staying up forever. This “Qratonin” bears looking into, extracting and maybe synthesizing.

For a lot of money, Jane agrees to have a chip implanted that will leech Qratonin out of her system. She’ll wear a monitoring watch, stay awake — something she’s used to doing — and when she hits “0 percent” of that stuff in her system, the chip will be removed.

This is how she meets others wearing the big black watch. Win (Kay Lertsittichai) is the always-smiling classmate who’s sweet on her, Cin (Supanaree Sutavijitvong) is a pageboy haircut influencer pixie, and Peach (Krit Jeerapattananuwong) is the socially-awkward gamenerd who all but stalks her.

They have the chips implanted in their necks, stark orders to not fall asleep (“Or your heart might stop.”) and starker orders to not talk about what they’re doing.

Which is exactly what they do. The compare notes, hang around and bond, “professional insomniacs” who become Team “Non Non,” a Thai-French mashup that means “No sleep.”

As they progress through the “levels” of sleep deprivation, hallucinations, paranoia and their various OCD manias, phobias and the like become major league problems.

As the movie has opened with a student standing on a balcony at Sirindara University, ready to jump to his death, we know the stakes. We stay with the film to see who will sleep and who will die.

The little bits of melodrama that play out as back story — sibling rivalry, demands on an influencer’s time and person, etc. — don’t do much to hold our interest.’

The story is as drab as the laughably simple names — June, Jane, Win, Cin and Peach? What is this, a first draft? And yes, Westerners can count the insane number of letters and syllables that make up real Thai names and exhale, “THANK you for shortening that.”

Little montages showing what the kids do with their newfound riches — bling and boob jobs are on the list — add nothing.

The fact that these are medical students could have raised the stakes beyond the personal, and beyond freaking out when dissecting cadavers. Secretive sleep-deprivation study gets patients killed because their young docs are dozing off mid-diagnosis would have been a promising line of attack.

But no, all these directors and all these screenwriters, and this is what they came up with.

“We stay up, and we stay alive!”

MPA Rating: TV-MA, violence, some profanity

Cast: Panisara Rikulsurakan, Supanaree Sutavijitvong, Kay Lertsittichai, Jeerapattananuwong, Dujdao Vadhanapakorn, Kim Waddoup and Warisara Jitpreedasakul

Credits: Directed by Sita Likitvanichkul, Jetarin Ratanaserikiat, Apirak Samudkidpisan, Thanabodee Uawithya and Adirek Wattaleela, scripted by Sita Likitvanichkul, Kittitat Nokngam, Jetarin Ratanaserikiat, Apirak Samudkidpisan, Wisit Sasanatieng and Thanabodee Uawithya . A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:41

In his wry, goofy and prescient radio series “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” — later turned into books, a TV series and a feature film — author Douglas Adams wrote of “Teasers.”

“‘Teasers’ are usually rich kids with nothing to do. They cruise around looking for planets which haven’t made interstellar contact yet and buzz them… They find some isolated spot with very few people around, then land right by some poor unsuspecting soul, who no one’s ever going to believe, and then strut up and down in front of ‘em wearing silly antennae on their head and making “beep, beep” noises. Rather childish really.”

If you take the UFO hunting documentary “On the Trail of UFOs: Dark Sky” the least bit seriously, think of it as a celebration of “teasers.” Because if there’s a corner of America that would make most people roll their eyes as a font for “the unexplained” and UFOs, it might be “wild, wonderful West Virginia.” If you’re an alien “rich kid” who wants to do flybys and landings and “visitations” in a place where few will take the eyewitnesses seriously, the Appalachian heartlands would have to be awfully attractive.

Ohio filmmaker Seth Breedlove, who’s made movies about Mothman, “The Flatwoods Monster” and a TV series with the same title, “On the Trail of UFOs” (Is this merely a re-editing of that?), and his Vegas-based hostess/star, Shannon Legro, trek all over West Virginia, “collecting stories,” cataloging the state’s colorful history with “the unexplained.”

The extremely credulous pair visit many folks who relate “episodes of high strangeness” — often from their own youth. More often they speak with other local “collectors” of stories relating this or that second or third or fourth-hand tale, some covered by local newspapers in the 1950s and ’60s.

The eyewitnesses are generally straightforward, if relying on very old memories of something they saw and didn’t understand at this or that time. The local “experts” are a more breathless lot, pondering “lights in the sky” through the lens of conspiracies — “secret military bases” and connections to coal mines or chemical plants, and the arrival of the first “documented” encounter with “Men in Black,” perhaps a chap who called himself “Indrid Cold” who might have been trying to get witnesses to keep quiet about what they claimed they saw.

A funny sidebar. Lowell Cunningham, who created the comic book “Men in Black,” is also from Appalachia — Tennessee — and told me the story of how a friend introduced this urban legend to him while he was in college in Knoxville. Black SUVs near campus? “That’s what the ‘Men in Black’ would drive,” the friend told him. Odd to think of Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones as Appalachian lore.

Funnier sidebar — Did Douglas Adams ever visit West Virginia? Is his “lying on my back in the Austrian Alps” staring at the sky “inspiration” for the radio series and all that it spawned a fib? Because a lot of what pops up in this documentary, the yarns spun by the gullible (“You wanna talk about a BOMBSHELL” to the credulous, has a familiar Adams ring to it.

“Hollow Earth,” alien visitors in “haz-mat suits” before anybody knew what they were called, military secrets, “The Grafton Monster,” “The Green Monster,” “Bashful Billy,” Point Pleasant’s “Mothman,” “The Flatwoods Monster” and its associated museum, “On the Trail of UFOs” covers a lot of ground and even points its own camera at the dark sky with some fellow enthusiasts and gets images that will convince…nobody.

The most credible material here might be the samples of 1950s “flying saucer mania” movies, connecting all this to Atomic Age zeitgeist in perhaps the most paranoid corner of a pretty paranoid country.

The most interesting interviewee is the late West Virginia folklorist, storyteller and paranormal buff Susan Sheppard, who relates the lore matter-of-factly, noting how “stories are told and retold” in that part of the world, where population density is thin, economic and educational opportunities are more limited but yarn spinning is an Irish and Scotch-Irish birthright.

With the military adding to the chorus of “There’s something out there,” documentaries like this are flying out of the editing (or re-editing) bays of anyone who has “collected” stories the way these two have. Breedlove and his star, with her sing-songy, new-to-this-practice narration and deadpan softball questioning of this or that witness, aren’t the most polished to uncap a lens on this subject. Not by a long shot.

But that’s almost an asset. If you’re saying, on camera, “I’ve finally seen something that I can’t identify,” that kind of hype, after swallowing every under-sourced story fed you for the first hour of “On the Trail of UFOs,” has its own naive charm. The poor dear.

Because these folks, in front of and behind the camera, are why “teasers” haven’t touched down at JPL, MIT or Cheyenne Mountain. Not yet, anyway.

MPA Rating: unrated, profanity

Cast: Shannon Legro, Seth Breedlove, Susan Sheppard, many others

Credits: Directed by Seth Breedlove. A 1091 release.

Running time: 1:25