Movie Nation

Netflix dips its toes into that most Japanese of film forms, anime, with “A Whisker Away,” a charming, whimsical fantasy that you’d never guess came from the country that gave us “Hello Kitty.”

It’s a body-switch tale about a manic teenage girl who obsesses over a boy, and is lured into getting close to him by taking the guise of a cat.

Miyo (voiced by Mirai Shida in Japanese, with English subtitles) is impulsive and given to acting out. Her mother left her father, and dad’s new live-in girlfriend is a bit young and green to be stepping into mothering.

Miyo crushes on classmate Hinode (Natsuki Hanae). Hard. As in hip-check in hockey or hoops hard. “Sunrise attack!” she shrieks, tumbling into him each morning at school. She can’t tell how embarrassed he is by this.

Maybe the nickname everybody else in school has given her should be her clue. “MUGE, Miss Ultra Gaga Enigmatic.”

Her 14-15 year old problems get the best of her, and she confesses “I hate this stupid world. I wish it would end soon.”

But this Buddha-sized cat she runs into sells cat masks. All she has to do is lend him her “human face mask” and she can see the world through cat’s eyes — literally.

As “Taro” she can get close to Hinode and see his life. She can also leap off roofs into trees, something she takes to doing as Miyo, putting the mask on mid-flight.

Of course, there’s a catch to becoming a cute cat. Several catches, beginning with “I need to wipe my butt” issues and carrying on through to the REAL cost of this “exchange.”

Studio Clorido (a “Pokeman” anime, and “Penguin Highway”) did the animation here, and while it isn’t as rich as the best Studio Ghibli outings, the detail and effects are better than your average TV anime.

Mari Okada’s script is a winner, offering up the usual slices-of-Japanese-life (“festivals,” meals, cats and school life). I wasn’t nuts about the finale, but the Fat Cat with the Masks is a grand creation, and the fanciful alternate world of cats, complete with a “Human Car Bar,” is wonderfully imaginative.

Cats have little more trouble slipping into human guises than humans becoming cats.

The movie may be mostly about teen love, but there are all these subtexts — adored pets and adoring pets who crave sharing their shorter lives with their one human, pet mortality.

The West may have long regarded the East as “inscrutable.” In Japan, they save that word for felines, who come off here as reserved, loyal, observant and aloof. On the money, to anybody who’s ever shared a life with a cat.

Money well spent, Netflix. Let’s see what else you’ve got.

MPAA Rating: TV-PG, fear, violence, smoking.

Cast: The voices of Mirai Shida, Natsuki Hanae, Susumu Chiba.

Credits: Directed by Jun’ichi Satô, Tomotaka Shibayama, script by Mari Okada. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:44

The Kansas City chain ignored movie going demographics and common sense in deciding to make its theaters COVID and MAGA friendly.

“AMC Theater CEO Adam Aron says their cinemas won’t require masks upon reopening because they didn’t “want to be drawn into a political controversy.”

https://t.co/zNjy9wzGMK https://twitter.com/Variety/status/1273763757592735746?s=20

Needless to say, Twitter is lighting this wingnut up. But as Regal and Cinemark have also said they won’t be requiring masks, it’s not wholly unexpected.

Cinemas, like most businesses, don’t want to scare off any potential customer. Younger people tend to be moviegoers, and more careless about COVID in general. The more rural you get, the fewer masks you see in stores and public places

But big city theaters are going to be dead empty on reopening because of this. AMC is broke as it is. This will hasten their demise, I dare say.

A staged Chinese stunt? A cover-up?

This one has me intrigued.

This July release gave birth to a trailer that is kind of diffuse and all over the place.

Stress? We know. A lot of chefs drink and have bad tempers? We know.

Love life issues? Check.

Might be good, can’t really tell. Can you? I don’t recognize anybody in “Nose to Tail.” TV actors I haven’t seen?

It stars Precious Chong, so of course it’s a dark comedy. That runs in the family.

“Runner” is the life story of Olympic marathoner Guor Maker (Marial), a South Sudanese refugee who raced in two Olympics, once without a country.

In Maker’s tale, first-time documentary director Bill Gallagher finds a story of privation and perseverance, personal pain, of tragedies and triumphs. It’s a running saga reminder that life and sport only rarely dole out ” Hollywood ending.” But the struggle is its own reward and is inspiring in its own right.

We hear Guor, who went by his uncle’s name (Marial) for part of his competing career, having lost touch with his parents in civil war-torn Sudan, narrate his story to animated visuals of the trauma of attacks in the Sudan/South Sudan border county of Pariang.

“I was born into a war life,” he says. With child-soldier kidnappings a way of life in the conflict between the Islamic north of Sudan and the African south, his parents urged him to flee. He was captured and escaped, imprisoned by a soldier using him as his slave only to escape again.

Maker and the filmmaker gloss over the process it took for him to be sent to America in his early teens. But he wound up in Concord, New Hampshire. And that’s where coaches saw his raw potential.

“‘Are you ready to run?'” one asks him. “He didn’t know what ‘track’ was, didn’t even know it was a sport.”

“Run where?”

Thus began his life-changing odyssey, from track team to stand-out cross-country runner, to Iowa State University and then his quest to make it to the Olympics, with or without a country.

Gallagher’s film recounts the Concordians who pitched in to help Guor, media members who related his story and created notoriety that the International Olympic Committee could not ignore, even if South Sudan was separating from Sudan, and had no Olympic team in time for the 2012 London Olympics.

Gallagher spends much of the film on the qualifying races Guor had to run, wringing drama out of the qualifying time he had to beat, lots of footage of Guor running, “the weight of his country on him,” manically checking his watch to see if he was on pace to be under two hours and nineteen minutes, the Olympic benchmark.

Sudanese refugees cheer him on from the race course, but back home, do his folks even know he’s alive? 

Gallagher’s years-in-the-making doc hits several emotional peaks, and its hero remains a compelling figure, win or lose. It’s the cinematic embodiment of that worn old Olympic ideal, expressed by founder Pierre de Coubertin over 125 years ago.

“The most important thing in the Olympic Games is not winning but taking part; the essential thing in life is not conquering but fighting well.”

Cast: Guor Maker

Credits. Directed by Bill Gallagher. A This is It Films release.

Running time: 1:28

Airline disaster movies often follow the same narrow formula, no matter what their country of origin.

We meet the cross-section-of-society passengers, pick up on their soap operatic/melodramatic lives, meet the flight crew and get a hint or two or three about what’s about to go wrong.

The Nigerian “Nollywood” production “Last Flight to Abuja” applies that formula to one of a string of real-life accidents that hit the country in 2006.

It’s fictionalized and formulaic, from the passenger (Omotola Jalade-Ekeinde) who has just “surprised” her fiance at home, only to catch him in bed with another woman, to the womanizing account executive (Hakeem Kae-Kazim) flying, on a company retreat to the planned city capital of Abuja, with the worry that his skimming off company contracts and other crimes are about to become public knowledge.

The pilot (Anthony Monjaro) just switched flights with a colleague. The boss who organized the retreat and another colleague miss the plane.

They grow corn in Nigeria. Do they have an equivalent for the expression, “corn ball?”

But director Obi Emelonye gets a gripping third act out of this modestly-budgeted thriller. Flashbacks, a blur of images summarizing what every passenger went through to make this ill-fated commuter jet (“30 souls on board”) flight, the discovery of smoke in the toilet, all are shot and cut together punching up the suspense.

Fictionalized or not, the “Living in Nigeria” touches are nicely-incorporated — traffic jams, snatch-and-grab cell-phone thefts in those traffic jams, middle class worries, touches of affluence.

And then there’s the frank exposure of Third World air travel — safety shortcuts being taken, a lone air traffic controller who brings his kid to work (!?) and gripes about how he should’ve taken the day off to avoid “this palaver,” flight maintenance logs kept on a ringed notebook you pick up at a Nigerian Dollar General.

The acting is uneven, ranging from solid to cringe-worthy. The dialogue is heavy on the romantic banter, from the ladies’ man passenger joking about “bracing positions” (for a crash landing) innuendo, to the love-life chatter in the cockpit.

But the finale (including cheesy fake animation) almost pulls this Flamingo Flight 212 out of its formulaic tailspin. Almost.

MPAA Rating: TV-14, adult situations

Cast: Omotola Jalade-Ekeinde, Hakeem Kae-Kazim, Jim Iyke, Jennifer Oguzie, Anthony Monjaro and Celine Loader

Credits: Directed by Obi Emelonye , script by Obi Emelonye, Tunde Babalola and Amaka Obi-Emelonye. A Nollywood Film Factory/Netflix release.

Running time: 1:15

“Queen of the Capital” is a softer, cuddlier version of the landmark drag queen documentary, “Paris is Burning.”

It’s a new film about the drag queen scene in Washington, D.C.

Where the 1990 film revealed New York’s drag queens as organizing themselves into “houses,” like high fashion “couture” labels, in Washington the men who dressed as women were, for decades, in The Academy or in “families.”

The queens in New York were generally young, mouthy and outspoken. In D.C., they’re mostly older, outlandishly dressed but mild of speech.

“Paris” had egos run amuck, hilarity and edge. Thirty years later the Washington scene has evolved into a sort of conservative cotillion, a community service organization almost.

“We’re the gay man’s Renaissance Faire,” one offers. No, he’s corrected. “We’re the gay Shriners…without the little cars!”

And that is both this film’s charm, and its chief shortcoming.

It’s informative, a gay drag history of Washington, a painstaking breakdown of the popularity contest that crowns the King and Queen of D.C. drag (at the Czar’s Ball, held in Richmond, Va.), an ad for the charities that this “court” raises money for and a portrait of one queen in particular, Daniel, aka Muffy Blake Stephyns.

It’s warm, sweet here and there. But this soft approach makes it a fairly joyless enterprise. Perhaps it was music rights that kept the filmmaker, veteran TV videographer/journalist Josh Davidsburg, from showing more performances, more audience interaction. You barely get an idea of the universal truth of drag that is kind of the point of it all.

Gay or straight, RuPaul or Monty Python, drag is fun.

So there’s a hint of Muffy’s drag “mother,” the drawling Shelby Jewel Stephyns, vamping “God Bless the U.S.A.” to the fans, and that’s pretty much it.

“I am a ‘Steel Magnolia’ woman in a “‘Designing Woman World!'”

The point here is the tradition being passed on, how drag “depends on the older generation instructing and passing along” the regimen, styles, beauty tips and mores “to the young.”

And that’s kind of “TV news segment” myopic. I didn’t realize Davidsburg was a TV journalist until the closing credits. But the film — with its heroine, Muffy — leans heavily into TV “feature story” elements such as the epilepsy Muffy battles and the service nature of the “court,” with snippets of performers talking about “not wanting to BE a woman, I just like to dress up like them” (echoing Eddie Izzard), or being in the military or growing up in a small town.

Muffy relates the Cub Scout/not-into sports childhood he experienced in Marceline, Missouri, and everything that mutes the impact and muzzles the entertainment value of “Queen of the Capital” is made clear right there.

Muffy doesn’t mention that Marceline was where Walt Disney grew up, the slice of Americana he was trying to recreate in his theme parks. Muffy doesn’t mention it and Davidsburg doesn’t appear to realize it.

There’s the theme for his movie. Drag has become mainstream “Americana” in the few decades since “Paris is Burning.”

And if you can’t find something fun in connecting conservative Walt to a guy who grew up wanting the biggest wigs in drag, or drag queens thriving in an age when every June, Walt Disney World becomes not just “the happiest place on Earth,” but thanks to Pride Month, the gayest, you’re going to miss everything else that’s fun about it as well.

MPAA Rating: Unrated

Cast: Muffy Blake Stephyns, Natasha Dennis Carrington, Ophelia Bottoms, Shelby Jewel Stephyns

Credits: Directed by Josh Davidsburg. A Lot 1 release.

Running time: 1:20

Having judged student films at many a film festival, I figured I knew one when I saw one.

The good ones show a certain polish — craftsmanship — an attention to things significantly less important than script, casting or performances.

That’s “Elodie.”

A sophomoric freshman feature, a film noir built on young, unfinished (Still in school?) actors and a script that feels about nine drafts away from “Let’s shoot this,” I sat through it saying “student film, student film. Why was this pitched to me and why is this being offered on Amazon streaming?”

And 75 words into writing this review, I decide to google the releasing production company, Black Box Films.

Yup.

A story about an actress and would-be playwright (Faith Decker) who lets her “character take you where it wants to go,” and is sucked into her play in a black and white nightmare after a debacle of an opening night, there isn’t one character, performance, scene or situation sufficiently intriguing to draw one in.

A playwright who taps away at “The Tungsten Dagger” (Wait, what? Not exactly a “precious metal.”), her tepid “one act” stage thriller. One act, with intermission, apparently./

It’s a kidnap-for-jewels caper. And yes, the play within the movie is worse than the film script. Much worse.

Writing the “villain” is holding her up. And casting the lead. She stares into her mirror so long you hope the theme of “self-regard, self-criticism” will be explored. Not really. You know she’s going to take the title role for herself.

But for all the encouragement of her about-to-move-away best-friend (Britney Watson), opening night goes even more pear-shaped  than you’d expect when her beau-leading man (Ian Holt) decides to end their romance, right before curtain.

Hey, he’s memorized the play. He’s seen the range of the leading lady. His character, at least, has understandable motivation.

Later that night is when Sabrina awakens, disturbed by the model she’d wished she could cast as Elodie (Taylor McGlone). Elodie wants Sabrina to alter the course of the play, change its outcome.  But Sabrina’s reaction to being in her nightgown, chasing a femme fatale down the black and white streets (of Phoenix, I think)?

“You’re real,” acted with all the conviction of somebody noting the spaghetti water is almost boiling.

It doesn’t get better, it gets worse. But as I say, “student film” is not just a moniker for the works of aspiring filmmakers still in college. Daniel Ziegler’s “debut feature” wouldn’t stand out on many film school campuses as anything more than a project with chutzpah, and not much else.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Faith Decker, Taylor McGlone, Ian Holt, Brittney Watson, Taylor Dahl, Brandon Caraco

Credits: Written and directed by Daniel Ziegler.  A Blackbox Films release.

Running time: 1:35