Movie Nation

You can be a fan of Minot, North Dakota’s own Josh Duhamel, and want to see his directing debut.

Fond memories of guy’s guy/car-guy funnyman of Dax Shepard? Yup.

And Olivia Munn as the gorgeous tough broad in a sea of testosterone? That always pays dividends.

But it’s the presence of Nick Swardson that’s the most important casting choice and the dead give-away for “Buddy Games,” a bro comedy about pals who bond over their annual contest of strength, skill, guts and stomach capacity. Nothing says “low, lower lowest brow” like Swardson. The star of “Bucky Larson: Born to be a Star” and “He’ll do anything for a laugh” mascot of Adam Sandler’s posse is a veritable brand name for juvenile gross-out. To me, his name in the credits is a guaranteed “pass,” especially since Sandler moved his aged act to Netflix.

“Buddy Games” is practically built around Swardson, leaning on him for the stomach-churning “comedy,” to sell assorted bodily-function/bodily fluids gags that others in the cast — Kevin Dillon included — would blanche from trying.

The script is slapdash and daft, and not in a good way. And you almost feel sorry for Swardson being forced to carry it and set the “teabagging” tone. But the viewer is the victim here.

Duhamel, Dillon, Shepard, Swardson, James Roday Rodriguez (“Psyche”) and Dan Bakkedahl (“Veep,” “The Goldbergs”) are friends who’ve been competing in this elaborate multi-discipline “Buddy Games” thing in the forests around a family cabin Bob’s family owns in the hills.

Whatever else has been going on in their lives — marriages, business ventures, dreams — they revert to their place in the pack whenever the “Games” roll around. Bob (Duhamel) becomes “The Bobfather,” planner of their various “tests.”

We meet them at the “last” Buddy Games. That’s where dominating jerk Shelly (Bakedahl) got carried away with the bullying, and got injured. Five years later, Shelly’s in assisted living, shattered and in need of a boost.

Doc ( Dillon) may be a successful chiropractor, Bob a man of means who lives with the temptress Tiffany (Munn) and gymrat Zane (Rodriguez) a tanning salon (mini) tycoon. But Durfy (Shepard), who gave up running a backhoe to pursue a Hollywood career, has only worked his way up to Neal McDonough’s stand-in. Perpetual loser Bender (Swardson) has run through his inheritance.

Shelly has lost the will to live. And he blames Bender for it.

Let’s get the gang back together, play a high-stakes version of those Buddy Games, and bond anew, mending old rifts, acting like 40something juvenile delinquents for one more weekend.

The events of this decathlon for douches include kayak races and dirt bike/ATV sprints, busting a watermelon with only your bare hands or head, a corn dog eating contest, chugging duels and strapping steaks to themselves to see which of them will let a wild animal eat it off his forehead. There’s also a bar pick-up competition, obstacle courses and a bow hunt pursuing “the most dangerous game.”

The winner gets a big cash prize, and most of them could really use that right about now.

I laughed twice, and one of those two moments came in the finale. No, the outtakes over the end credits don’t have so much as a grin in them.

The other laugh came from Swardson’s Bender, desperate to raise cash, selling vodka shots in competition with the neighborhood eight-year-olds, who’re running a lemonade stand. For once, Swardson’s go-to vulgarity amounts to mirth.

“You’re gonna be STRIPPERS when you grow up! Really BAD ones that NO one pays to see!”

Sex jokes, semen zingers, flatulence, gay gags and the aforementioned “teabagging” are the rule here. It’s like every idea and not-funny-enough profanity edited out of a Judd Apatow movie was cut and pasted into a script designed to mimic “Tag,” after a fashion.

It’s just terrible. With Nick Swardson in it, we should have known.

MPA Rating: R for strong crude sexual content and language throughout, some graphic nudity, drug use and brief violence

Cast: Josh Duhamel, Olivia Munn, Dax Shepard, Nick Swardson, Kevin Dillon, James Roday Rodriguez and Dan Bakkedahl

Credits: Directed by Josh Duhamel, script by Jude Weng, Bob Schwartz and Josh Duhamel. A Saban Films release.

Running time: 1:36

Meeting “the family” for the holidays can be messy.

Even without a pandemic and the possibility that you’ll end up hosting a “super spreader” event. Even if, say, you’re in a long-term single-sex relationship, you’ve never “come out” to your parents, Dad’s running for mayor and you make your girlfriend hide who she is “just for five days.”

Say the trite “joke” you just know someone will trot out with me — “How long can it be?”

That’s the premise of “Happiest Season,” a Kristen Stewart/Mackenzie Davis gay holiday romance making its debut on Hulu. And “messy” is its one-word review.

The leads make a cute couple, Dan Levy is here because even a same sex rom-com needs a snarky “gay best friend.” And little flashes of warmth and wit intrude on this sentimental, uneven, somewhat brittle holiday “message” with a movie sloppily wrapped around it.

It’s got Levy (“Schitt’s Creek”) cracking gay and Stewart taking a pratfall. Aubrey Plaza shows up as SOMEbody’s “ex,” and Mary Steenbergen amuses with even the lamest lines as the wound-tight mother who doesn’t know her daughter Harper (Davis) is gay, or that Abby (Stewart), the “roommate” she’s brought home for the holidays, is her loving life partner.

“Abby! What are you doing in the closet?”

Actress turned writer-director Clea Duvall (“The Intervention”) and comic actress turned first-time co-writer Mary Holland made something of a holiday hash of it, a movie with good moments buried under clumsy ones, with plenty of pandering layered on top of sentiment.

Abby is a Phd candidate and Pittsburgh dog-walker who loves local journalist Harper. But Abby, whose parents died some years before, isn’t into Christmas. Harper impulsively invites her home to meet the family. And we get the idea she regrets that pretty much the same moment she does.

Harper never told her parents. Dad (Victor Garber) has political ambitions, Mom (Steenbergen) is the queen of Keeping Up Appearances. Now “wouldn’t be a good time.”

So much for that ring Abby picked out, over the objections of Very Gay John (Levy). Abby is “trapping (Harper) in a box of heteronormality” with this Big Gesture.

Abby doesn’t find out about Harper’s secret until they’re almost “home,” so she’s trapped herself — the “roommate,” odd woman out in the “perfect” family’s very political over-scheduled holiday traditions and parties.

The running gag of Abby being “a poor orphan with no place else to go” gets old, to her and us. There’s also Mom’s shameless effort to throw Harper into the arms of her high school beau (Jake McDorman) and Harper’s endless efforts to please her parents, tolerate her daffy younger sister (co-writer Holland) and win the endless competition that characterizes her relationship with married-with-two-kids sister Sloane (Alison Brie).

It doesn’t matter that Sloane and her husband quit their law firm to “raise the kids” and that they’re “selling gift baskets” as a fallback career.

“We create curated gift experiences inside of handmade reclaimed wood vessels!”

The only people Abby has to talk to are John, who keeps calling her to shame her “back out of that closet,” and Riley, Harper’s “real” high school ex. She’s underplayed by Plaza as a dry, above-it-all sounding board with nothing funny to say or do.

That makes “Happiest Season” a holiday rom-com with two “firsts,” a K-Stew pratfall (Comedy isn’t her forte.) and Aubrey Plaza playing the comic “straight man.”

Duvall can’t make Abby and Harper “sneaking around” to be together in a house where they’ve been separated funny, can’t find a rhythm that allows the story to flow from laughs to romance to sentiment and heartache.

It staggers toward an ending that you just KNOW they won’t have the guts to get right.

The comic highlights are Levy’s over-the-top turn as John, Brie’s biting sibling rival sister and a WAY over the top shoplifting “interrogation” by mall cops.

The emphasis is thrown at the melodrama in the weary “late coming out” story, and that’s handled so gracelessly that Davis, equally at home in comedy and drama, is hung out to dry.

Stewart? A holiday movie isn’t the place to learn that pretending you’re in love with a teen vampire is easy, comedy is hard.

MPA Rating: PG-13 for some language

Cast: Kristen Stewart, Mackenzie Davis, Dan Levy, Mary Steenbergen, Aubrey Plaza, Alison Brie, Mary Holland, Victor Garber, Jake McDorman, Clea Duvall and Mary Holland.

Credits: Directed by Clea Duvall, script by Clea Duvall and Mary Holland. A Sony/eOne film on Hulu.

Running time: 1:42

There is nothing, simply nothing, to make you feel that you’ve led a sexually-sheltered life, that your understanding of the modern fluid, on-the-spectrum nature of sexuality is superficial at best, than “Queer Japan.”

One might have guessed that the culture that pretty much invented pornography, that perfected fetishes from schoolgirl uniforms to tentacles, where pornographic comic books have achieved the level of high art, would snap your head back and make your mouth drop when catching a glimpse of the gay life in the Land of the Rising Sun.

But damn.

Manga and drag fashion shows where the rubber literally meets the road, (“It’s my second skin,” one aficionado explains.), a popular lesbian “Gold Finger” party (wait for it), debates by the lesbian club owner who runs such parties about allowing “men who used to be women” admission, elaborate stage shows where an inflatable pig gives “birth” to rubber-clad “piglets,” kinky cosplayers creating sexy “pet” costumes — topped with a dog or cat head “mask” because they want to be “coddled,” fondled and adored like pets, Japan has it all. Or has at least tried it out.

Queer cinema auteur Graham Kolbeins (“Th House of Gay Art,” “Rad Queers”) takes a tour of “Queer Japan” and delivers a lurid, over-saturated blast of neon-colored eye candy, a film shot like a fashion video, capturing this oppressed but out-there minority in a country where “conformity” has always counted, even if they’ve always acknowledged their cultural kinkiness.

Kolbeins, grabbing more than 100 interviews for the film, samples a wide cross-section of Japanese LGBT culture, a wide span of ages, sexual preferences and sexualities, with manga artists, transgender activists, sex workers and people old enough to connect this to open-minded cultural traditions of The Edo Dynasty, which ended when America “opened” Japan in 1853 and the country became at least somewhat “Christianized.”

The film teaches us Japanese words — slurs and otherwise — for “gay.” “Hen” means “strange, queer,” “hentai” means “abnormal sexuality.” So when a big annual party, show and gala is thrown as “Dept. H.,” you know what you’re signing up for.

“We enjoy ambiguity,” one interviewee declares. Even if “we’re behind the times, compared to the rest of the world,” another offers.

Disparagement and discrimination lingers, even though Shinto and Buddhism, dominant religions, have “no problem” with “alternative” sexualities.

We see a Japanese version of Anita Bryant, testy about adding gay awareness to school curricula, jokingly dismissive of this “unproductive” (in a propagate the species sense) but increasingly visible minority.

People like her fret over the collapse of the national birth rate (Japan is aging and dying out, thanks to generations not having babies.), but literally laugh on TV at the news that gay teens commit suicide at six times the national average for that age group.

It’s little wonder that as in other countries, queer Japan has made allies with other discriminated-against “outsiders,” marching with the Zainichi (Korean immigrants and their descendants) in protest of right wing harassment.

Red light districts to clubs, runway shows to Youtube channels, an aesthetically daring “reversible identity” apartment complex, “pride” marches or stepping out into politics, “Queer Japan” as portrayed here comes off as a not-quite-hidden culture in a rush to make up for lost time, like Spain after Franco or New York after Stonewall.

It’s hard to keep track who everyone is and how they fit into all this, a bit overwhelming, as if Kolbeins and co-writer Anne Ishii edited down a TV or online series of shows into a single film (Did they?). But if you’re up for a little Total Immersion in another culture’s non-conformists, it’d be hard to top “Queer Japan.”

MPA Rating: Unrated, and “out there” in a sexual sense.

Cast: Nogi Sumiko, Saeborg, Gengoroh Tagame, Vivienne Sato, Akira the Hustler, Leslie Kee, Atsushi Matsuda, many other

Credits: Directed by Graham Kolbeins, script by Anne Ishii, Graham Kolbeins. An Altered Innocence release on Apple TV, Prime Video, etc. on Dec. 11.

Running time: 1:39

One bit of bookkeeping seems to have evaded the Hollywood devouring Mouse when it swallowed 20th Century Fox.

There were these Fox franchises Disney took over the rights to. Those franchises, two of them any way, had led to books — novelizations of “Star Wars” and “Alien” installments. Those books still sell. And Disney has refused to pay royalties to sci fi writer Alan Dean Foster, who wrote many of those novels.

Writers in this genre guard their rights, authorship credits and royalties with the ferocity of the late Harlan Ellison. Foster and the sci fi writers guild are outing the Mouse for ripping him off. Lawyers are involved.

This has been Disney”s brand for decades. The biggest studio, one of the world’s largest and most viable corporations, and they always cheap out on talent. Always.

They’ve gotten Congress to give them exceptions to copyright laws so that they can “protect” Mickey and other “properties” “to infinity and beyond.” But others are denied those protections whenever the Mouse deems it to be in their best interest.

Being big, they’re a lawsuit magnet. You think they’d know better than this. The optics are awful. But every now and then they go as far as flat out ripping somebody off and we read about it when lawyers get involved.

Read on.

#DisneyMustPay Alan Dean Foster

Filmmaker Eric Power turns the digital version of that cut-out construction paper style of animation that “South Park” made famous loose on a town-attacked-by-demons thriller, “Attack of the Demons.”

It’s more interesting as DIY animation than as a movie, with inexpressive faces and flat-voiced actors and not nearly enough scripted wit to carry it. Sure, a cute melting skin/peeling-the-skin-off effect and the odd demon beheading can be amusing. But “Demons” is like a blandly-written and drawn horror comic, as lifeless as construction paper.

Barrington is home to a popular Halloween Festival, complete with horror movies at The Tower (theater) and battles of the “horror punk” bands at assorted venues.

Kevin, voiced by Thomas Peterson, is into film and living with his grandmother. Jeff (Andreas Peterson, who also wrote the script) is into “Rodent Rumble” and assorted other video games.

And Natalie (Katie Maguire) is returning to her hometown with her jerky music critic boyfriend Chet and his snide pal Brandon to review a show. They review the small city as well.

“I feel like these waffles are giving me cholera!”

Natalie runs into Kevin and Jeff, people who graduated together but don’t really know each other. Then she heads off to see her favorite band, Teak (“This one’s called ‘Sleeping Trees,’ off our new EP.”). Jeff goes back into the arcade. Kevin?

“Music isn’t your thing? What’s that even MEAN?”

They’re each off on their own when a demon takes to the main music stage, kills and creates recruits (like zombies) and takes over the town. There’s nothing for it but to flee to the mountain, and the old haunted mine, fighting/ducking demons every step of the way.

The immobile nature of the faces takes us back to the early “South Park,” before digitization allowed more malleable mouth-eye-nose reactions. Here, the dull amateurish line readings don’t help.

The friends-making-a-movie vibe that permeates this — Power did the animation himself, guessing the Petersons are siblings — is the most charming thing about “Attack of the Demons.” A wittier script might have allowed that friends DIYing a horror cartoon vibe to translate into something more fun on the screen.

Cast: The voices of Katie Maguire, Andreas Peterson, Thomas Peterson and Eric Power.

Credits: Directed by Eric Power, script by Andreas Peterson. A self-distributed release on Youtube, Vudu and Amazon Prime.

Running time: 1:15

No, it’s NOT based on the anime series from about a decade ago.

Dec. 18, IFC Midnight unleashes the hounds. Or wolf.

“Getting to Know You” is “Up in the Air” without the air — or airline travel. Or “backpack” speeches.

This light, wistful Canadian romantic comedy clings to its longing and amuses in its awkwardness. Well-cast, well-acted, a touch melancholy and a tad overlong, it’s one of those movies that would have passed me, you and everybody else by if a pandemic hadn’t derailed the global movie-consuming model.

British actress Natasha Little (“The Night Manager”) is Abby, who has flown from London to northern Ontario for a funeral. Rupert Penry Jones (“Black Sails”) is Luke, a Canadian “big city” guy “home” for his high school reunion.

They “meet cute,” late at night, at the “best” hotel in town. The “cute” and memorable part is he’s standing there, wearing a lei, and she’s trying to check in, both of them overhearing two staff members going at it in the office behind the front desk.

“I don’t think it’ll be long now.”

Ahem.

“How long should we give them?”

“About a whole cigarette.”

The terrible service at the Bay Front will be a running gag, rude rude staff members who are more tied up in their own dalliances and melodramatic intrigues than they are in their work. Another running gag? How loud, boorish and indiscreet small-town Canadians are, to a one, in this corner of Ontario.

Abby and Luke? They’re thrown together by this incompetence, two lonely strangers who bond, talk of regrets and find themselves all mixed up in each other’s business.

Because as crushed as Luke was to learn his high school sweetheart married “the paper boy” and brushed off his heartfelt confession of unending love, he’s completely put-out when Kayla (Rachel Blanchard, brash and funny) shows up, drunk, throwing herself at him in his room.

“I haven’t had an orgasm since” is merely the beginning of Kayla’s coital full-court press. She’ll leave her husband and children and run off to New York with her first love!

Only Abby can save him. I mean, “I sympathize, but what can I do?”

That’s where this “Brief Encounter” turns daft. She’ll scare Kayla off, pretending to be Luke’s wife. Only Kayla is too drunk and desperate to scare.

“He loves me more than he loves you, bitch!”

And as pushy and obnoxious as she is, she’s not the worst “old friend” Luke collides with over the next day.

Penry-Jones and Little have a genteel, reserved (they’re both British) chemistry. The laughs come from their collision with assorted Luke classmates, the testier and testier staff at the Bay Front and the preacher/classmate (Duane Murray) who presides at Abby’s late-brother’s funeral.

“It was either this or real-estate — and I was never good on commission!”

Writer-director Joan Carr-Wiggin, who’s been around since “Sleeping with Strangers” (1994), has a sure hand with this material, save for finding a graceful way to exit it. A melancholy sets in when Abby and Luke, two strangers, are left without loopy locals to bounce off of, lie about their “marriage” to on the fly, etc.

But if you’re looking for a little grown-up romance, adults with adult issues and complications that interfere with their chemistry, “Getting to Know You” more than fills the bill.

MPA Rating: unrated, with sexual situations, alcohol abuse and profanity

Cast: Natasha Little, Rupert Penry-Jones, Rachel Blanchard, Duane Murray

Credits: Scripted and directed by Joan Carr-Wiggin. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:43

Robert Towne couldn’t structure a script worth a damn, and he kept the fact that he used a collaborator and co-writer a secret from Hollywood.

So his “greatest screenplay ever” or “best script of the ’70s” reputation, based on a screenwriting textbook’s effusive praise for it at the time, is a fraud.

Roman Polanski solicited underage girls for years before Anjelica Huston caught him with the one he was charged with drugging, raping and sodomizing (at Jack Nicholson’s house) in the mid-’70s.

Pretty boy/studio chief/producer wunderkind Robert Evans “wasn’t a reader,” but he was a decent judge of talent (save for Ali McGraw), and held screenings with friends at his palatial hilltop mansion “Woodlands,” took their opinions and molded them into his own. Such a screening was where he scrapped the dissonant score Roman Polanski wanted for “Chinatown” and brought in composer Jerry Goldsmith.

Evans liked to say he “saved” pictures like “The Godfather,” but Coppola never thanked Evans in his many acceptance speeches. And Jerry Goldsmith “saved” “Chinatown” in just a couple of inspired days. Damn.

Once Jack Nicholson got his Oscar for “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” right after “Chinatown,” he stopped choosing challenging material and made it all about “The doe-re-me, doll.” But we knew that.

Sam Wasson’s “The Big Goodbye: ‘Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood” is an evocative, detailed account of the milieu “Chinatown” was created in, just after The Manson Family mass murders, just as cocaine was about to take over Tinseltown.

Think of “The Big Goodbye” as “Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood,” with nothing but facts.

It’s a somewhat purple mini-biography of Nicholson’s Jack Pack, the friends he made when he came to Hollywood whom he stayed loyal to for decades, adding “the little Polack” (Polanski) to their ranks when they made what might be the best film of one of cinema’s best decades.

Towne and his lifelong sounding board/collaborator Edward Taylor, “the big mystery reader” (and Raymond Chandler fan) of the two, spent years building the untitled “Chinatown” out of memories of the LA that had mostly disappeared by 1970, but which both remembered from their youth. Towne wrote it for his longtime pal and muse Jack Nicholson, just reaching stardom after “Easy Rider.”

And then Polanski, still devastated by the Manson family murder of his wife, Sharon Tate, was lured back to a city that haunted him by Evans, whose studio made a mint off “Rosemary’s Baby.” Polanski stripped the bloated script down to its private eye basics, “made it make sense” and made damned sure “the girl dies at the end.”

“The girl” was Faye Dunaway, a diva hated on the set, bullied by Polanski, but understood by some of the other actors in the picture. She kept everybody waiting.

Jack? He had to be done by the time the Lakers were on TV. As always.

“The Big Goodbye” is a breezy, quick read — purple passages about “the eucalyptus” and everybody involved’s childhood/parent “issues” aside. Longtime Variety chief Peter Bart, Evans’ Paramount colleague/co-conspirator (the who one read and had taste) is here, very young Anjelica’s infatuation with Jack, Jack’s adoration of her dad, director and “Chinatown” co-star John Huston, all covered as Warren Beatty, Hal Ashby, Harry Dean Stanton and others drift around the edges.

Anecdotes abound, furious on-set fights, Dunaway shrieking when Polanski impatiently yanked out strands of her hair to make a prettier shot, Nicholson and Polanski squaring off over a Lakers’ game that went into overtime. But the many ways Anjelica Huston could be humiliated by her drunken dad whenever she visited the set stands out.

“So…” her father boomed across the (lunch) table to Nicholson. “I hear you’re sleeping with my daughter…Mr. Gitts!”

Wasson is astute in picking out the dates and ways Hollywood “ended” around this time, from “Billy Jack” turning the business into wide releases/make all the money the first weekend, to “Jaws” launching the blockbuster era to Jack’s selling out to play “The Joker,” which drove him, the broken outcast Evans and coke-addled Towne to finally get around to “The Two Jakes” sequel over a decade later.

The overarching theme, a loss of American innocence, connecting the “water theft” scandal of LA history from the movie to the Manson murders and Watergate, fits like a glove.

If you loved “Once Upon a Time,” here’s one of the better books about its context, built around one of the defining films of the era.

The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood. By Sam Wasson. 334 pages, $28.95, Flatiron Books.

This Canadian indie ooks odd, and promising.

Dec. 8 it streams, VODs and DVDs.

In the last decade of the Soviet Empire, George Soros sent copying machines to Eastern Europe.

People like Václav Havel of Czechoslovakia, Lech Wałęsa of Poland and other dissidents behind the Iron Curtain got them. In that pre-Internet age, photocopying fliers, Western newspaper stories and calls to action was a cost-effective way to spread messages of dissent across totalitarian states.

In violent, racist and fascist 1979 South Africa, Soros underwrote a vast academic scholarship program for Black schoolchildren, reasoning that if anything there was ever going to improve, “educating the Blacks” would be behind it.

When the Bosnian Civil War broke out and with it the Serbian genocide against Muslims in the formerly multi-ethnic states of the former Yugoslavia, Soros charities shipped vegetable seeds and newsprint to the besieged minorities, sponsored concerts and the like, an effort to “let them hang on” until the international community finally took action against the aggressors.

And when the Serbian mass murderers were finally brought to justice, it was an in International War Crimes court backed by charities supported by George Soros.

Lucky and rare is the American who doesn’t have some Fox-addicted relative or high school classmate forwarding a chain letter literally demonizing — pictures with little Devil’s horns drawn on — or just blurting out the name “George SOROS” in the middle of a debate that they’ve realized they can’t win on the merits of their arguments.

He is the far right’s Bond Villain, financially responsible for everything they hate, from “Black Lives Matter” and the mythic “antifa” to COVID19 shutdowns and the pumpkin spice flavoring epidemic.

A quick and cringe-worthy montage of Fox News, Russia Today, Rush Limbaugh, Lyndon Larouche, Anne Coulter and Glenn Beck clips, of Britain’s Brexit backer Nigel Farage and Hungarian strongman Viktor Orban cursing his name open “Soros,” a documentary profile of the Hungarian expat, hedge-fund billionaire and global philanthropist. Such hate-mongering montages also show up later in the film, directed by comedy director Jesse Dylan (“American Wedding,” “Kicking and Screaming”). It’s an ongoing caricaturization.

Then Soros himself appears, a very old man in a plain shirt, telling his story. He re-directs Dylan’s off-camera question about the beginning of his “political philanthropy” (the South African scholarships) and tells his life story — growing up in Hungary during the Holocaust, the ways his father kept the family alive, even if he couldn’t keep the Russians from raping his mother after the Germans were finally driven out.

Academics, journalists, non-profit NGO (non-government charitable) organization chiefs, and no less than THREE Nobel laureates then weigh in on Soros the man, his seemingly sincere motivations and his global impact on pushing the world’s repressive regimes towards more “open societies.”

And any sober-minded person who isn’t brainwashed can only wonder, “What on Earth are those people (Fox addicts) upset about?”

Dylan’s film’s interviews are mostly with people who know Soros, including his children and those in charge of the Open Society Foundation, which he backs, although others are here to take a more detached view of his philanthropy and impact on the world.

Fox’s Tucker Carlson lays out why people mistrust Soros, without accepting responsibility for Rupert Murdoch’s media empire’s anti-Soros mania. Oh no, the death threats and bomb sent to Soros’ house have nothing to do with O’Reilly, Beck and Carlson’s ceaseless “dog whistle” attacks on the Hungarian Jew.

Soros is seen in decades of interviews sampled here, typically promoting books that he wrote as he started spending the billions he’d earned as a high roller, betting on or against banks, businesses and governments heading into or emerging from each financial crisis that he had the foresight to anticipate. He talks of the big influences on his thinking, and what’s shaped his philanthropic philosophy.

He sticks up for minorities, like the one he belongs to that so many right wing critics are so very quick to bring up. And when he donates to support free speech, education, equal rights or what have you in Africa, Myanmar, Hungary or the Middle East, he wants to lead by example.

Soros understands the value of “not simply helping people like you.”

The film doesn’t significantly alter the picture of Soros that has emerged from a “60 Minutes” profile here or a CNN interview there. But those aren’t the media organizations lying about his background, exaggerating his influence or twisting his motives. They aren’t the ones drawing Satan’s horns on his head.

Then again, Nobel laureates, American Civil Liberties Union, Human Rights Watch and NAACP spokespeople aren’t nearly as credible as Anne Coulter, Rosanne Barr and loony Lyndon Larouche to the hopelessly venal and ill-informed.

As America starts the long process of recovering from the racist-nationalist ignorance of the last four years, an intellectual, moral and financial collapse that even Soros didn’t see coming, “Soros” could be a useful film to buy and send to relatives this holiday season.

The Fox-driven hatred of Soros comes off as many of Donald Trump’s tantrums do — “projection.” Fox oligarch Rupert Murdoch is the one not-so-secretly attacking free speech and disrupting free societies for personal gain. But blame George Soros.

Let the people you won’t be able to see thanks to an incompetently managed pandemic and the political ugliness that Donald Trump’s reign unleashed get a light dose of “fact” in place of the ignorance and hatred they’ve been spreading, one ignorant, Anti-Semitic chain letter at a time.

MPA Rating: unrated

Cast: George Soros, Leymah Gbowee, Kofi Annan, Jeri Laber, Leon Botstein, Joseph Stiglitz, Tucker Carlson, many others

Credits: Directed by Jesse Dylan. An Abramorama release.

Running time: 1:25