Movie Nation

“High Ground” is a violent, vengeance-driven Western set at the end of the Frontier era in northern Australia. More intimate than epic, but gorgeous, stately and tense, it captures a last burst of tit-for-tat reprisals in a country starting to face its genocidal past and racist present.

This can’t-do things-that-way-any-more epiphany only comes as the country slides into the Great Depression and an uprising starts in remote Arnhem Land, one sparked by a massacre a dozen years before. Yes, this was going on as recently as that.

The film takes great pains to show Aboriginal life and the point of view of the continent’s native people as it tells its story from the point of view of a survivor of that massacre, a little boy (Guruwuk Mununggurr) whose life is shattered in mere moments when virtually his entire family/clan is wiped out.

Simon Baker plays a World War I sharpshooter turned law enforcement officer. In any potential confrontation, Travis always seeks the high ground, a vantage point where his accuracy can end a fight in a hurry. That’s where he is when a posse closes in on an Edenic watering hole in some of the most stunning Australian scenery ever put on film.

Little Gutjuk is too young to have absorbed all of the wilderness skills and folkways of his family. As the police-led posse shows up to question the family about stolen cattle, the kid picks the worst possible moment to panic over a snake. In a flash, the slaughter begins and ends.

Travis, appalled, sees all this play out through the scope of his Mauser. When he finally climbs down into it, he stops the murdering of witnesses with his gun and without hesitation.

And he’s the one who takes Gutjuk to the nearby Alligator River mission, where he leaves him with the pastor’s sister (Caren Pistorius of “Unhinged”) and the Aboriginal congregation there.

The bad blood between Travis and his colleague, formerly his wartime spotter/partner Eddy (Callan Mulvey) will fester for years, even if there are no legal consequences for this latest slaughter of the disenfranchised natives.

When an uncle starts an uprising, burning settlement “stations” and killing a white woman, adult Gutjuk, renamed Tommy (Jacob Junior Nayinggul) is ordered to lead police to his uncle (Sean Mungunggurr) to “bring him in” by Royal commissioner (Jack Thompson) in charge.

Tommy wants to know if Travis is there to “kill my uncle,” and Travis wants to know if this is yet another “punitive expedition” against the Aborigines. He’s the only white man in all of this who wonders “Why? There’s always a why?”

Uncle Baywarra is getting revenge for that massacre a dozen years earlier.

“High Ground” is the second feature and second film with an Aboriginal story (“Yolngu Boy”) of director Stephen Johnson, who works mostly in Australian TV. Much of the tale unfolds through the lens of a rifle scope, as Travis — a second father figure for Gutjuk — teaches him how to shoot, and to seek “the high ground,” where he can dictate the terms of a confrontation.

Johnson takes pains to show the unspoiled beauty of a land visited by all this violence, and screenwriter Chris Anastassiades (who wrote “Yolngu Boy”) has the testy, racist Eddy state the obvious about the root cause of this conflict.

“Two people can’t share a country.”

We’re shown the debates and rationalizations of the natives, speaking Jawoyn (with English subtitles) as some seek revenge and others look for a parlay, a negotiated way out.

Johnson’s devotion to shots of birds — in flocks and solo, screeching their various calls — suggests a nod to their symbolism in Aboriginal culture that won’t be obvious to most viewers.

Character motivations aren’t the clearest, and loyalties can seem to turn on a half penny. But the stand-offs are suspenseful, brutal and skillfully staged.

And the performances — from Baker’s resigned stoicism and Mulvey’s hotheadedness to Thompson’s cynical pragmatism — are first-rate, with newcomer Nayinggul holding his own with the veteran cast.

It’s not “The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith,” but Johnson has crafted a striking look at Aboriginal life tucked into a most engrossing tale of racism that manifests itself in violence, violence which has consequences whose blowback can comes years and years later.

MPA rating: unrated, bloody violence, nudity, profanity

Cast: Simon Baker, Jacob Junior Nayinggul, Callan Mulvey, Sean Mununggurr, Caren
Pistorius, Witiyana Marika and Jack Thompson

Credits Stephen Johnson, script by Chris Anastassiades. A Samuel Goldwyn release.

Running time: 1:44

It’s been a very long time since I’ve seen Preston Sturges’ masterpiece, “Sullivan’s Travels.” Watching it again on Mother’s Day weekend (my mother had never seen it) reminded me of the fickle nature of memory, when it comes to movies.

That image of Joel McCrae watching a cartoon with his fellow inmates is what sticks with you from this film. Playing a filmmaker who has to be busted and dumped onto a chain gang before he figures out that his “light entertainments” are what the public craves — and not movies of Big Social Import because life’s hard enough — this is the “money shot,” the image meant to stick with you from the 1941 film.

For the life of me, I couldn’t recall the madcap opening act of the movie, the many abortive starts our self-important star director, John L. Sullivan, has to make before he actually hobos his way out of Hollywood. He’s hellbent on making a picture that matters, one that speaks to the human condition, one he’s titling “O Brother Where Art Thou.”

Nothing is sacred to those Coen Brothers. Nothing.

I didn’t remember the spirited teen in the “whippet tank” hot rod of his own creation outrunning the studio-provided “land yacht” that is to shadow our college-educated, privileged Hollywood icon as he slums on the bum.

“I’m going out on the road to find out what it’s like to be poor and needy and then I’m going to make a picture about it.”

But I vaguely remember the lecture his English butler and valet (Robert Greig, Eric Blore) give Sullivan about his patronizing “caricaturing” of “the poor and needy” and the very idea of faking homelessness, joblessness, hopelessness and abject poverty.

And I had forgotten the situation that allows Sullivan his epiphany, sitting with an audience of “just folks” as they roar with laughter at a Disney cartoon starring Pluto, the dog.

Whatever you take away from the film, the most moving scenes are “Grapes of Wrath” accurate depictions of homelessness and the African-American church the prison inmates are ushered into, the sheet dropping from the rafters as a screen, and a preacher calling for sympathy for “those less fortunate” as they’re led in, in chains, to watch the movie with his congregation.

Jess Lee Brooks was the uncredited actor who gives the film’s lesson in compassion. The fact that Sturges and Paramount left his name off is a stain that should sting, eighty years after it came out. All that attention for 19-year-old newcomer Veronica Lake, and Veronica Lake’s hair, and they leave a good contract player who acts and sings and just breaks your heart, off the credits because of racism.

The nattering studio execs and publicity folk characters don’t really stand out, although William Demarest as a crusty publicity chief, makes an impression.

McCrae, who embodied a lighter version of that innate decency that Gregory Peck projected on and off screen, is terrific. And Lake, unpolished as she is — Bacall was MUCH better and just about as young in her screen debut — manages a winsome way with a line to go with her luminescent shimmer.

“You know, the nice thing about buying food for a man is that you don’t have to listen to his jokes.”

Al Bridge, playing the archetypal chain gang “Mister,” is spitting, whipping perfection.

But Brooks is the one who makes the message work, the one who should have been credited and the supporting player who makes “Sullivan’s Travels” worth the journey. He’s the difference between a good film of the Depression Era, and a classic.

MPA Rating: Approved, violence

Cast: Joel McCrea, Veronica Lake, William Demarest, Jess Lee Brooks, Franklin Pangborn, Porter Hall, Robert Warwick, Eric Blore, Robert Greig and Al Bridge

Credits: Scripted and directed by Preston Sturges. A Paramount release.

Running time: 1:30

John Frankenheimer made his leap from “Golden Age of Television” TV director to big screen Big Name director permanent with “The Young Savages,” a flinty, gritty courtroom drama dressed up as a street gang murder thriller.

He’d just turned 30 when he dove into this Burt Lancaster star vehicle back in 1960-61. And he never looked back, pounding through “All Fall Down,” “Seven Days in May,” “The Manchurian Candidate,” “The Train,” “The Fixer,” “Seconds,” the epic “Grand Prix,” “The Gypsy Moths” and the bomb “The Extraordinary Seaman” before the ’60s ended.

He went on to direct “The French Connection II,” “Black Sunday” and a genuine modern action “classic” — “Ronin” — before he was done.

“Savages,” a non-musical companion piece to “West Side Story,” has Lancaster as a one-time Italian street punk turned assistant DA, grabbing a political hot potato of a case — the broad-daylight/witnesses everywhere killing of a Puerto Rican kid, right in front of his sister on the stoop of his tenement.

ADA Bell has to fight his politically-ambitious boss (Edward Andrews), his “bleeding heart” wife (Dina Merrill), the court-appointed psychiatrist (Milton Selzer) and the rival gangs — the Thunderbirds and the Horsemen — to get at the truth.

His past is thrown in his face in the form of the mother (Shelley Winters) of the youngest of the three accused killers. She’s the fiance he outgrew as he worked and married his way out of the Lower East Side.

The mistrust and New York cynicism comes at Hank Bell from all sides.

The shrink — “I understand they’re building a kid-sized electric chair upstate!”

The wife — “Why don’t you just tell her you’re going to burn her son, for old time’s sake?”

The uncooperative cop (Stanley Holloway, briefly seen and unbilled) on the other end of the radio — “In which order do you want these requests turned down?”

Telly Savalas makes a ferociously dogged New York cop more than a decade before he took up the “Kojak” lollipop, Luis Arroyo becomes a Hispanic gang-banger archetype as Zorro, the smart, smooth and ruthless leader of the Horsemen.

And John Davis Chandler turned his leering, blond and clammy looks to a career of heavies as the ring leader of the Thunderbirds hit squad, striking the victim “in self defense. He had a knife!”

“He must’ve been better with a knife than anybody in the wooooorld,” Bell smiles, in that Lancasterian purr. “Roberto Escalante was BLIND!”

Frankenheimer stages the violence with an in-your-face verve, tilting and turning the camera in fights and foot-chases, hurling us into a brawl on a crowded subway car at one point.

He can’t do but so much with the courtroom portion of this saga, so his solution is to cut that to the bone. It feels truncated and half-abandoned for a reason.

There’s an unfiltered quality to the racial slurs slung about here. In 1961, you could make the case that Italian and even Irish slurs had something near-parity with Hispanic and African-American ones. Not any more.

The story is more melodrama than anything else, with the whole “used to be a couple” business with Winters, the tipsy wife’s liberal politics embarrassing the “job-to-do” ADA and infuriating the man’s all-powerful boss and the many wrinkles in the murder victim and his family’s “complicated” relationship to the gang warfare and vices of the day.

But “Young Savages” is more than just “West Side Story” without the singing. It took another Lancaster movie or two for the rest of Hollywood to catch on, but this kid Frankenheimer? He had style to burn and an eye for big, brawny material that only the big screen could do justice to.

MPA Rating: unrated, violence, smoking, drinking, racial slurs

Cast: Burt Lancaster, Dina Merrill, Telly Savalas, John Davis Chandler, Luis Arroyo, Pilar Seurat, Stanley Kristien, Neil Byrstyn, and Shelley Winters

Credits: Directed by John Frankenheimer, script by Edward Anhalt and J.P. Miller, based on an Evan Hunter novel. A United Artists release.

Running time: 1:43

I interviewed Romero once or twice, interviews that always turned toward why he wasn’t able to get his films financed.

As indie and DIY as the “Night of the Living Dead” icon was, little he managed to get in front of audiences came easily.

“The Amusement Park” was one he got made but couldn’t turn into a release back in the early ’70s. Frankly, the trailer makes it look like distributors would have laughed him out of the room. Even drive-in theaters had some standards, after all.

Still, curious to see it.

Shudder has this, streaming it on June 8.

On a gloomy, fog-enshrouded night a decaying mansion is glimpsed in the darkness. It is where Nurse Cherry’s new assignment is. She will take care of the very old, quite-catatonic master of the house.

Little does she suspect, as servant/chauffeur Dwayne takes her bag out of the ancient British limo, that this place, this job and this “arrangement” is going to bring back the demons of her orphaned childhood along with hints of the dark Halliwell family history haunting these halls.

But we suspect. Because we can’t miss that opening scene where Cherry had “weirdo” scrawled on her forehead by the cruelest orphans there. Because the cadaverous old man (Germán Naranjo) looks like the Living Dead, or the Undead.

Because we’ve seen his imperious daughter (Fiona Horsey) show us the whites of her eyes — and only the whites.

It takes a very VERY long time for anything to “happen” in Colombian writer-director David Bohorquez’s “The Devils Child.” Somebody is yanked out of the frame at roughly the one-hour mark.

Apparently, Bohorquez needed the hour that precedes that almost-scary moment to bore us to death.

Still, it’s an oddly-disorienting horror tale. The accents are distractingly hard to place. Cherry’s is plainly Spanish, Dwayne (Marvens Passioano) is explained away as “island” (Caribbean).

Miss Naomi, the owner’s daughter, has a reasonably-convincing North American accent, as do Cherry’s friends-since-orphanhood. I found myself lost in trying to set this story in some sort of geographic reality — Louisiana without the drawl? That’s a pointless exercise, but the film is so dull that’s where the mind wanders.

Cherry takes the job, accepts the order to keep “the curtains drawn” and the lamps down low in the old man’s room. She explores, and stumbles into visions of children wandering the halls.

She dances with Dwayne and imagines she’s tripping the light fantastic with patriarch Philip in his platinum-blond youth. And she has nightmares. None of which produces anything remotely frightening.

“It’s not real, it’s all in your HEAD” she chants in the manner of 4,321 horror heroines before her.

The accents are worth fixating on because the actors labor through their line readings like they’ve been sentenced to “Hooked on Phonics.” It makes a couple of the players come off as rank amateurs. But if you want your movie, titled “Diavlo” in Colombia, to earn a North American release, this is a price you pay.

Plot elements are introduced — Philip was once “a highly-respected psychic.” — and forgotten. Characters go missing or go mad.

And nothing resolves itself in a way that makes the least bit of sense. Nothing.

MPA Rating: unrated, horror violence, drug use

Cast: Maria Camila Perez, Marvens Passiano, Fiona Horsey, Francisca Tevez and Germán Naranjo.

Scripted and directed by David Bohorquez. A Vertical release.

Running time: 1:28

Here’s an oddity on the resume of the wonderful Hollywood character actor Claude Rains — a Technicolor star vehicle, shot partly on location in Amsterdam and Paris in the early ’50s when Rains was in his 60s.

“The Man Who Watched Trains Go By,” released as “The Paris Express” in the US, was adapted and directed by the esteemed British stage director Harold French, who made 20 or so films, none of them particularly distinguished or highly-regarded today.

The performances are interesting, and it’s especially novel to see the 60something Rains on a bicycle, clambering out of windows and bolting under railcars. Sixty back then was the “new” 75.

The plot is the “quiet little old man falls for a femme fatale and steals” trope of Edward G. Robinson’s “The Woman in the Window” and other pictures of the day. There’s a curiously dated and sentimental sympathy for him that isn’t properly set up, leaving the whole entirely too haphazard to be the compact, dark noirish morality tale it’s meant to be.

Kees Popinga is a conservative, servile man of habits. He’s worked for De Koster & Son, a small firm where he’s chief clerk (bookkeeper) for 18 years. He puts in his days with quiet efficiency, and comes home to his wife, teen daughter, tween son and cigar every night.

He’s fond of the local chess club, even though he’s not very good. And he’s downright meek around his imperious boss (Herbert Lom) and utterly unable to convince the man to take on an old acquaintance whose firm went bankrupt, through no fault of his own.

His firm has “a reputation for honesty and integrity,” de Koster, who inherited the three hundred year old enterprise from his father, huffs. And, as an afterthought, he adds “and morality.”

His clerk “knows more about my firm than I do myself,” but what de Koster doesn’t see is the quiet desperation in Popinga’s thrift and routine. He knows every passing train’s destination, its ETA and whether its late arriving in their small city of Groningen. It’s implied, but only later overtly introduced, that he longs to get on such trains and travel.

The arrival of a Paris detective (Marius Goring) who wants to see their books is the first sign of trouble. Then there’s young woman (Märta Torén) Popinga spies his boss kissing and putting on the Paris train. When he stumbles across de Koster burning ledger books, the game’s up. The fool’s embezzled his company into ruin over the woman and there’s nothing for it but “death before dishonor.”

It’s only when his briefcase pops open that Popinga realizes his employer, who has stolen from him personally (he’s an investor), has looted the safe and is fleeing town, planning on faking his death as he does.

Popinga’s rage means the death by drowning in a canal might not be faked after all. And that briefcase means Popinga can realize his unspoken and barely implied dream and escape his life in Groningen. He’s off to Paris, but is he cunning enough to get away with it?

I can’t speak to the qualities of Georges Simenon’s novel, but the film adaptation has a lot of plot problems that pretty much leap off the screen. The first we learn of Popinga’s discontent is when he shoves his boss into that canal. All that longing to “escape” and “travel” is seriously under-motivated.

Kees Popinga is naive enough to approach a hooker (Anouk Aimée) for help finding a “no passports required” hotel in Paris, and Dutch cheap when it comes to “rewarding” her (indirectly leading to his downfall).

While it’s established that the man is no chess master and can be quite gullible, that doesn’t explain his decision to look up the boss’s mistress when he gets to Paris, to fall into her clutches, hiding out in a dumpy auto repair garage apartment with her sinister “real” boyfriend (Ferdy Mayne).

Rains, so wonderful in chewy supporting roles from “Casablanca” and “Notorious” to “Lawrence of Arabia,” has a bit more trouble hiding his Edwardian theater melodramatic excesses in this performance. Popinga’s character journey seems abrupt and over-the-top, from meek and subservient to wild-eyed with…jealousy, greed, fear of discovery?

And then there’s the kid gloves treatment of the detective, warning and tracking Popinga at the same time, trying to keep him from “crossing a line” we’ve already seen him cross. Or are we supposed to have forgotten that, no matter how much he “has it coming,” Kees killed his boss?

Still, the post-war locations, mixed with British soundstages, are striking and captured in all their glory. And “The Man Who Watched Trains Go By” remains a Technicolor novelty in showing us a favorite supporting player from Hollywood’s Golden Age given a rare leading role, even if he isn’t quite up to carrying the picture with the same panache and cynicism he wore that French policemen’s cap with in “Casablanca.”

MPA Rating: Approved, smoking, violence

Cast: Claude Rains, Märta Torén, Herbert Lom, Marius Goring and Anouk Aimée

Credits: Scripted and directed by Harold French, based on a novel by Georges Simenon. An Eros Films release, streaming on Amazon, Tubi and other platforms.

Running time: 1:22

The people who represent the stars who agree to show up to the HFPA’s assorted events, including the Golden Globes, say the band aid NBC endorsed that the HFPA introduced yesterday does not go far enough.

With #TimesUp and others pushing the HFPA to turn less racially monochromatic, less corrupt and more “transparent” — the latest effort to make this connected, grandfathered in membership and its operation more professional — this is yet another warning shot over the bow. Will they go back to the drawing board, and will NBC get behind that pressure? Or they just riding this ok it and expecting Short Attention Span Nation to forget all about it?

This year’s miniscule viewership has a whiff of “headed to streaming only,” and NBC should be withholding cash and the promise of a Globes broadcast to make this happen. Will they?

Scott Feinberg’s THR story is below.

https://twitter.com/ScottFeinberg/status/1390767339625275393?s=09

“Knots: A Forced Marriage Story” is a documentary that, on its surface, sounds like something from a more primitive place and time.

More than one woman appearing in Kate Ryan Brewer’s film — legislator, activist or victim — marvels at the idea that “forced child marriages” are not something relegated to the less developed corners of the world, but that it’s happening “right here” and right now, with some 27 U.S. states still not having a minimum age requirement for girls getting married on the books.

And here the “leader of the civilized world” is, a global punchline to a crude joke about Appalachia or Utah or the ultra Orthodox corners of Borough Park, Crown Heights or Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

Archaic laws that allow parents to deliver their children to a “mate” of their or their subculture’s choice, or even ordain that their statutory rape victim child be forced to marry their rapist, are on the books or allow such things to happen, thousands of times a year, via loopholes in those laws.

The stories told are damning, deflating and compelling, the statistics alarming and the villains as obvious as your nearest “fundamentalist” this or “ultra-conservative” that.

Brewer’s film touches on many variations of this “inhuman” practice — a girl “handcuffed” to force her to marry her rapist, “grooming” that goes on, in and out of religious practices, religions distorted into cultish sects that add this extra element of “control” to their hold on women.

But the film focuses on three stories, women from patriarchal fundamentalist religious groups who talk of their lives, the terror, despair and isolation of their plight, the desperation that led them to find a way to escape and the outrage and sympathy that turned them into activists to stop the practice and seal those loopholes.

Nina is a Michigander whose parents turned increasingly “conservative” religiously, and started “grooming” her for the day when her father would find her a mate and order her to marry him.

It hits her, when this arranged union takes place, that “my body’s not my own any longer. It belongs to him.”

Sara is a Californian whose Muslim father fell in with a sect that eventually caused her mother to flee. But when Sara found her first boyfriend ever, in her mid teens, Mom sent her off to stay with her father, who secretly married her off to a 28 year-old. She was 15, and when the actual “civil” union took place — legally — no one brought up the fact that she was pregnant via statutory rape in Nevada, where her father and his co-religionists took her.

And Fraidy is a Jewish Brooklynite who describes the ultra Orthodox “brainwashing” that went on in her world, almost from birth — with Halloween treated as a night when “the Goyim” put on masks and “came to get us.”

Her loveless arranged marriage arrived abruptly and without her consent.

“I wasn’t a party to my marriage to my husband. I was ‘given’ to him.”

It’s all kind of revolting, learning that these cruel vestiges of the ancient patriarchy exist in a time when we think of women as emancipated people of agency able to choose their own destinies, priorities and lives.

“Education” is a worry of all these sects, “control” is their end game. To a one, these women got out and started speaking out, with Fraidy Reiss becoming a well-known advocate for rescuing girls crying for help and all of them active in changing laws to end this nonsense.

We see what Virginia had to go through to address this problem, the nakedly Neanderthal counter-arguments offered on the floor of the General Assembly by a Republican fighting the bill that allowed teens “emancipation”

We see similar legislation vetoed by then-Governor Chris Christie in New Jersey.

Brewer’s film — decorated with metaphorical images of a young dancer entwined in a knottier and knottier web of red twine — hints at the “whys,” and suggests the “hows” of getting rid of this practice.

But we can read between the lines. Not even things as fundamental to human rights as this are easy in these Divided States. And until every law is changed or Federal mandates supersede them, men will be dragging their daughters or would-be mates to places where yet another “choice” is still only left in their hands, and not women’s.

MPA Rating: unrated, adult subject matter

Cast: Nina Van Harn, Sara Tasneem, Fraidy Reiss

Credits: Scripted and directed by Kate Ryan Brewer. A Global Digital release.

Running time: 1:16

Well, isn’t this just adorable?

“The Paper Tigers” is a martial arts action comedy filled with punch-ups, knock-outs, insults and one-liners. Well-acted, with actors who know how to throw a kick and land a punch — and a punchline — stuntman and editor turned writer-director Quoc Bao Tran has made a debut feature that tells a tired “avenge our master’s death” tale with real comic flair.

In the “Karate Kid” ’80s, the three star students of Sifu Cheung (Roger Yuan) dominated their corner of American martial arts. Danny “Eight Hands,” Hing and Jim — seen in vintage videos — mixed it up, won tourneys and were constantly beating down white boy challenger Carter.

They were “The Three Tigers,” not mere students but “disciples” destined to take over Cheung’s dojo. But when the old man is killed by an unseen master, those days are decades past. Even Danny “Eight Hands,” whose fists were so furious they blurred and looked like he had extra appendages, has mellowed into a post-divorce minivan.

Danny (Alain Uy of “The Passage” and “True Detective”) has snow on the roof and little in the way of muscle mass. He’s all about “walking away” from trouble, something he imparts to his son, who stays with him on weekends. A confrontation in a parking lot opens him up to an Asian slur.

“Can’t you PARK?”

“Can’t park. Can’t drive. Can’t help it.”

But when his fellow “Tiger” Hing (Ron Yuan of “Mulan” and “Marco Polo”) shows up, he’s shamed into joining him for the funeral. Running into the their old nemesis Carter (Matthew Page of “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot” and TV’s “Enter the Dojo”) sets the tone for “Paper Tigers.”

To Danny — “You look skinny. You sick?”

To Hing — “You look like a fat, Asian Mister Rogers!”

The two “Tigers” are wheezing and limping and out of shape. But the hint that their Sifu might have been killed and not died of a heart attack forces them to track down their estranged third Tiger Jim (Mykel Shannon Jenkins of TV’s “The Rich and the Ruthless”). He runs his own school, has branched out into Brazilian jiu-jitsu, so at least he’s in shape.

As they slowly (pace and “urgency” are a real problem with the movie) get on with hunting for answers about what “really happened” to their beloved teacher, at least Jim won’t let down the side as they get into “knock-out” contests with assorted “punks” and rivals as a way of discovering the truth.

Damned convenient, these pauses for brawls.

The fights have a grand cotillion formality to them — bows and flexes as every fighter takes his position.

The jokes are of a “Kung Fu Panda” vs. “Kung Fu Sanford” thing.

Tran has the most fun with Yuan’s character — whose toupee makes for quite the martial arts dust-up sight gag — and with Page’s “more Chinese than you” cultural appropriating doofus.

“If you asked me…” “Which I DIDN’T.” “If I were YOU…” “Which you are NOT.“

Carter is forever trotting out “As the Chinese say,” and then offering some bit of sage advice that might have come from a fortune cookie — and delivering it in CHINESE.

The humor moves the picture along, which truthfully starts VERY slowly thanks to an overlong “Tigers in the ’80s” prologue. But Tran’s screenplay problem-solving is first rate, foreshadowing via a trip to the gym how they might find out how killed their Sifu.

“Find the one that hits the hardest.” That won’t be a visual clue. “Listen” for how the blows sound when they land.

Clever.

The same goes for the movie itself. These “Paper Tigers” cover mostly familiar ground, but do it with rusty moans and groans of pain, and with laughs — some of them damned adorable.

MPA Rating: PG-13 for some strong language, offensive slurs, and violence

Cast: Alan Uy, Mykel Shannon Jenkins, Ron Yuan, Roger Yuan, Raymond Ma, Andy Le and Matthew Page

Credits: Scripted and directed by Quoc Bao Tran. A Well Go USA release.

Running time: 1:48

Good piece from The Hollywood Reporter how online directed group buying is propping up AMC’s stock price, keeping it an attractive investment and a company worth loaning money so that it will survive the pandemic.

It’s kind of a GameStop scenario, where fans of the game store brought them back from the dead by buying and boosting their stock price, and clobbered a lot of Wall Street types who gambled that they’d go under.

Who is shorting AMC? They have looked doomed for the past year, do it wouldn’t be the dumbest bet. SOMEbody has to be losing, with a few million Reddit “Wall Street Bets” investors buying up the stock.

Adam Arons, the CEO, is on board with this fan takeover. The users of the company’s theaters own it? Win win, I say. As there’s a Diane Fossey “Gorillas in the Mist” charity that also benefits from this investor activism, it’s got a righteous side, totally beyond the “save the theaters” and “Screw the short sellers.”

Still not my favorite film chain, but they keep a lot of smaller older theaters going and thus help prop up the movie going habit.

They were the first major theater chain to pull its newspaper advertising, further crippling newspapers and killing the movie reviewing profession (and eroding the movie going habit in the public’s mind further as well). When I called them on it, they sent a form letter snidely suggesting that newspapers continue publishing their showtimes, for free, “as a public service.”

So I won’t shed any tears if they go down. But here’s the link to the THR report.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/amc-reddit-wallstreetbets-gorilla-fund-1234949784/amp/?__twitter_impression=true