A chat show with an alien host? Disney’s “Earth to Ned”

 

The way various TV chat shows have coped with quarantine during the pandemic has been fun to watch play out, with Seth Myers and Samantha Bee thriving, Bill Maher and John Oliver barely missing the live audience and the rest basically lost in the ether, making little or no impression for weeks and months at a time.

So I was intrigued at the Disney/Jim Henson Co. pitch “Earth to Ned.” It’s a special effects and puppet-centered chat show, with a single guest each week, lots of produced bits, and is thus somewhat more scripted than spontaneous.

Unlike say, “Space Ghost: Coast to Coast” or “Mystery Science Theater 3000” or even “The Muppet Show” or “The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson (puppet-happy),” it’s aimed at kids. There’s no edge, no innuendo, just very adult guests and the occasional zinger — some off-the-cuff — that will fly over the heads of the intended audience.

Chat shows in general always take a while to hit their groove, and one where there’s a lot of technology is sure to have its human-connection hiccups.

But one truism that comes to mind watching “Animaniacs” voice actor Paul Rugg, as the titular reptilian host “Ned,” and his anteaterish alien sidekick Cornelius (Michael Oosterum) interact and hunt for laughs, is that networks put in ALL that time trying to line up the perfect host for a reason.

And they cast stand-up comics, female or male, black or white, Asian or Scottish, because being quick-on-one’s feet is JOB ONE, even when you’re sitting at a desk with a four-armed alien puppet as your avatar.

 

There are moments when Rugg is interacting with horror director Eli Roth, or “Get Out” funnyman Lil Rel Howery, or Gillian Jacobs or Andy Richter,  Rachel Bloom, where something funny comes out. Talking about music with Bloom, Ned, from a species that typically invades and takes over planets it has an interest in, laments that there is “No music, no art, no lacrosse, nothing” entertaining on the planet where he’s from.

Bloom, pretty far removed from TV’s “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” explains the 12-tone musical scale (It’s an educational show, kids!) and Ned comes back with “I’m sort of an alto, with a baritone rising.”

He tries to make jokes over the culture clash (the set is an environment “buried deep in the Earth’s crust”), or being as ill-informed as say, Zach Galifianakis in “Between Two Ferns.” Gillian Jacobs is “a woman of a thousand voices.”

“I don’t do impressions…at all.”

And they try to make a game out of her impersonating his favorite alien entities. Are there crickets in space? You’d hear them during that bit.

Asking a star “How much money do you make?” seems unrehearsed, as Jacobs bats that away as if she’s teaching the kids at home, and the childish or at least new-to-Earth host, “it’s rude” to ask that.

Richter, Conan O’Brien’s sidekick, is the first episode’s guest and advises sidekick Cornelius (there’s also a female computer voice/CGI screened “mask” face) on what’s required in the job.

“Only swing at the pitch that you think you can hit.”

Roth lists his reasons for getting into horror, his favorite scary movies, and  jokes that aspiring filmmakers in the audience need to master “the point” and “The Claw.” Those are the two gestures every director has to make the most on the set, pointing to something that needs to happen, giving notes to actors making this “claw” shape with your hands, as if you’re molding your words into the clay sculpture you want them to become.

The guests talk about “formulaic” college drama programs, how to make any name sound sinister (Hiss-whisper it, “Jesssssssssicaaaaaaa!”) and other tidbits about pop culture on Earth.

“Oh, is that sarcasm? Teach it to me!”

 

The special effects are more polished than is absolutely necessary. Cheapness and obvious fakery is always funnier. The recorded bits have the occasional Disney Channel (“High School Musical” the latest iteration) plugs, as indeed is Roth’s first “scary” movie experience (“Pinocchio”). 

But far too much of the banter is of the “Sorry, sir. I’m still getting the hang of this” variety. The educational material, teachable moments, stand out more than the comic ones. Not that there are many of those, either.

The last time I interviewed Frank Oz we talked of whether those old “Muppet Shows” would play to new, 10-and-under audiences. He didn’t think so. And the last version of “Muppets” to make it on the air, via Disney/ABC and “adult” in tone, was a bust.

“Earth to Ned” may click with kids. But are they really going to sit still for a chat show? Even if the not-that-kid-centric guests have something interesting to say? Even if there are rubbery or computer-generated aliens interacting and attempting wisecracks with them?

I doubt it. If this was a regular network and the first shows landed with the thud that these do, there’d be panic and a mad hunt to recast. Round up a list of funny stand-up comics who might be willing to work a puppet. Josh Robert Thompson (“The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson”) can’t be the only one.

Cast: Paul Rugg, with Gillian Jacobs, Eli Roth, Taye Diggs, Lil Rel Howery,

Credits: A Disney+ release.

Running time: Episodes @:23 minutes each.

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Movie Review: Cosmonaut brings home an unwanted guest in “Sputnik”

“Sputnik,” for those who’ve forgotten their Space Race history, is the Russian word for “companion.” It was cute that the Bolsheviks chose to name the Earth’s first satellite that, a tiny radio-transmitting metal ball launched into space, Earth’s first man-made “companion.”

It’s also the perfect name for a space travel creature feature. What’s the last thing a cosmonaut wants to bring back to Earth after a mission in orbit? An alien “Sputnik,” it turns out.

Director Egor Abramenko’s debut feature is a Soviet era thriller abot what happens when a couple of cosmonauts go into space in 1983, and they bring back a third passenger, probably the one that rattled them by scratching on the hatch of their capsule after they uncoupled from the Soyuz space station they’d been working in.

It’s a bloody scene a Kazakh horseman comes upon when they land on the steppe in the dark. Only one cosmonaut, Konstantin (Pyotr Fyodorov), survived. The other fellow’s head was bitten off.

Tatyana (Oksana Akinshina), a risk-taker among the Soviet state’s hidebound psychotherapists, is summoned by Col. Semiradov (Fedor Bondarchuk) to a base on-lockdown. That’s where they’ve been trying to get Konstantin to talk.

The expert on duty (Anton Vasilev) can’t get the guy to submit to hypnosis. Maybe Tatyana can get through to him.

“PTSD” is her snap judgement. She even thinks he killed his co-pilot.

Ah, but Comrade Doctor Tatyana Klimova. There is more to tell you. Slowly. OK, not so slowly. Come by again after dark. That’s when the “Hero of the Soviet Union” leans over the side of his bed and upchucks giant gekko with the multi-eyeballed head of a cobra. He lives inside our “hero” during the day, and only comes out at night.

Akinshina — you might remember her from a late Bourne movie — gets across the shock of this realization, going slack-jawed and weak-kneed. Then, training and instinct kicks in. It’s her job to get this “parasite” or “symbiote” to leave the cosmonaut for good, and do it without killing Konstantin.

Her colleague (Vasilev) may smell “Nobel Prize.” “Go back to Moscow while you still can,” he warns (in Russian with English subtitles). She wants to help people, and save Konstantin.

“Sputnik” is an intellectual exercise in its early scenes, with the doctor trying to draw out her patient, figure out what secrets he’s hiding and what he knows or doesn’t know. It shifts into shock and horror as we see the slippery thing that will kill, if it gets a chance. The third act becomes all about Soviet era intrigues — what everybody’s REAL motives are, what further horrors they could lead to.

I found the jump into the third act a stretch, not quite buying into character motivations, not believing Semiradov’s shifting attitudes and security concerns. Perhaps some of that is merely East vs. West mindset, but you’d think “The Andromeda Strain” concerns would kick in, even in the Byzantine Soviet system, where paranoia ruled and “public safety” rarely figured into considerations.

But we still get a pretty entertaining thriller out of what’s here, no matter how the finale sets up and how the picture resolves itself.

MPAA Rating: unrated, graphic, bloody violence

Cast: Oksana Akinshina, Fedor Bondarchuk, Pyotr Fyodorov and Anton Vasilev

Credits: Directed by Egor Abramenko , script by Oleg Malovichko, Andrei Zolotarev. An IFC Midnight release.

Running time: 1:53

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Netflixable? Taiwanese college kids tempt “The Bridge Curse”

He does what college kids do. He looks to Apple for help.

“Hey Siri,” he says (in Chinese with English subtitles). “Turn the screen light up to the brightest!”

But Siri can’t save him.

He calls out for flashfight function and frantically tries to text. But his iPhone can’t save him, either.

No, not when he’s forgotten that one thing, that one instruction he was given before climbing the stairs to “The Female Ghost Bridge.”

“Never turn your head on the stairs. The ghost might be right behind you!”

“The Bridge Curse” is a tepid ghost tale with some pretty good effects, a couple of decent twists in its meandering “Ways to Die on a College Campus” plot and a stylistic conceit that it abandons too quickly.

The conceit is thrown out after a nervy, almost-gripping opening. Five college kids at Tung Hu U. are live-streaming a “courage challenge” on “The Female Ghost Bridge,” a haunted lake-crossing span that a coed once threw herself from and drowned some while back. In cell-phone tight compositions, the kids tease, prank and goad one another as they act out and video this adventure.

But darned if that kid doesn’t forget the “Don’t turn around” rule. He counts the steps up, pranks his pals, and then forgets that rule, takes that 14th step on a 13-step bridge, and it’s “pick’em off, one-by-one” time — starting with him.

The kids — some of them makeup students, one an IT major and a couple from mass communications department, are tight enough that they’ve dated each other, silly enough that they keep separating in that “You wait here” way that horror movie characters do.

The screenplay sets up rules, ways this calamity plays out, and then forgets those rules. The original victim, the “ghost” who haunts this bridge, drowned. The victims are supposed to drown — in a mop bucket, in the film’s most memorable murder. But that’s abandoned.

There’s also this TV reporter (Vera Yen) and her camera guy (JC Lin) trying to find out what happened, if there’s been a coverup of other times that it happened, and just what those flickering images and that white shadow might be on the CCTV or streamed videos posted online.

An elevator whose digital numbers go wonky as it never seems to take those riding it to the correct floor, a dash down a “Vertigo” inspired never-ending stairwell, attacks by a ghost who — like most ghosts in Asian horror — has that “Ring” hairstyle, characters yanked out of the frame, dragged across the floor or lifted into the air — standard issue visual tropes of modern movie ghost stories.

The concept is solid, and the characters — hard to identify by name as the subtitled names don’t jibe with the closing credits names — generally give us believable reactions to a supernatural threat.

That would be shrieking, pants-wetting hysteria, even the girls.

But “The Bridge Curse” never jells, never comes together and rarely delivers. The whole point in putting “rules” in your screenplay is so that the audience can see the threats before the characters do, and the characters can try to reason their way out of their predicament.

Set up rules that you promptly abandon, and just following your random, rambling and generally-unidentified coeds becomes a chore. You don’t let us identify with them, step into their shoes and fear for their safety.

For direector Lester Hsi, “The Bridge Curse” becomes a bridge that fails.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, violence

Cast: JC Lin, Vera Yen, Ning Chang

Credits: Directed by Lester Hsi, script by Keng-Ming (Ken) Chang and Ps-Hsiang (Alain) Hao.

Running time: 1:27

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Documentary Review: The A-Bomb in context, “Apocalypse ’45”

Some years back, the Smithsonian got into trouble in planning an exhibit around the Enola Gay, the B-29 bomber whose crew dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, which helped end World War II. The occasion was the 50th anniversary of the end of WWII, and the controversy stemmed from America’s greatest historical museum’s decision to narrow the focus to that event alone and its morality or amorality.

You’d think a crew of America’s elite historians would see that, revisionism or not, you can’t discuss the end without providing context, the carnage of the months leading up to that fateful decision, the undeniable fanaticism of an intractable enemy and the civilian slaughter to come.

That’s not a problem with “Apocalypse ’45,” a new documentary from Abramorama that will make its way to the Discovery networks at some point. Here’s the footage of the hellish combat leading up to the A-Bombs of August, the slaughterhouses of Iwo Jima and Okinawa. Here are eyewitnesses and survivors, the last living Americans who fought in the Pacific, relating the awful things they faced, the friends and comrades they buried and the Japanese immovability even after the firebombing of Tokyo.

Yes, the United States is still the only nation to use an atomic bomb in war. Yes, there were good reasons for doing it if you dive deep enough into the context of the times.

Hearing a Marine recall a saying in the ranks after Iwo Jima, “Golden Gate in ’48, breadline in ’49,” drives it home. They knew “luck” was the only thing that was keeping them alive on these killing grounds. They had a hint that Operation Downfall, the invasion of the Japanese main islands, was to begin that November.

They had the best sense of all of just how long the war would drag on with an enemy determined to fight “until every last (Japanese) man, woman and child” was dead. They’d seen civilians, willing or at the gunpoint of the fascist Japanese Army, hurling themselves off cliffs rather than surrender.

Director Erik Nelson gives us a sobering tour of the four years of footage. He has his interview subjects summarize Pearl Harbor, young men on the homefront realizing “It screwed my whole life up from that moment on” — a draft, the trauma of combat, hardship and terror, survivor’s guilt and the remorse that came later, future plans deferred for years. And those were the lucky ones, the survivors.

Then we’re immersed in footage — much of it familiar if you’ve ever channel surfed by The History Channel — of that last year. We revisit the island assaults, the grim flame thrower and grenade attacks, napalm bombs and the kamikaze strikes. Nineteen forty-five was a year that exposed servicemen on the beaches and volcanic hills, on board ships under air attack and fighter and bomber crews taking the war to Japan, to “the reality of total war,” up-close, personal and wrenching.

“Apocalypse ’45” is a cut above the boilerplate docs whipped up for the various “World War II” channels on TV. The footage is silent, and every now and then a sound effect blunder pops up — a single-engine plane is heard taking off while we watch the biggest American bomber, a B-29, which took off with a rumble and roar all its own.

In the film proper, Nelson identifies only one witness, a Japanese Hiroshima survivor, just 15 when the bomb hit. He sings an ancient lament for the city.

But the closing credits show us everybody else who testifies, very old men in their ’90s now, a rare breed. Not many officers or “experts,” just sailors, Marines, pilots and aircrew who lived through it, some breaking into tears at the memories being revived, others lamenting the divided state they lived to see their country turn into.

MPAA Rating: unrated, graphic combat footage

Cast: Ivan Hammond, Joseph Wing, Charles Schlag, George Boutwell, George Vouros, Delbert Treichler, Abner Aust Jr., William Braddock Jr., Richard Spooner, Ittsei Nakagawa and many others.

Credits: Directed by Erik Nelson. An Abramorama release.

Running time: 1:44

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A Chadwick Boseman Statue in His Hometown, Anderson SC?

This is a no brainer. A petition to replace a Confederate statue with that of a native son who actually brought honor to Anderson? Crowdfunding means it could be the size of Stone Mountain, if SC chose to spend it all on such a monument. From Variety…

https://variety.com/2020/film/news/chadwick-boseman-petition-statue-south-carolina-1234754977/

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‘Honeyland’ Team Buys New Home for Documentary Subject

If you ever wonder if documentary filmmakers get attached to the people they make their films about, people who are often struggling to get by, the answer is yes. Sometimes they try to help. It’s called compassion.

From Indiewire

https://www.indiewire.com/2020/08/honeyland-team-buys-home-for-documentary-subject-1234583594/

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Movie Preview: “The Haunting of Bly Manor”

A ghost story, a little horror from Netflix, which hasn’t made much of mark in the genre.

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Movie Review: Leguizamo coaches Miami chess prodigies in “Critical Thinking”

“Critical Thinking” is a cluttered, cliched and ungainly story about disadvantaged kids becoming a formidable chess team under the tutelage of a teacher/coach who “won’t give up on them.”

It’s the feature directing debut of star John Leguizamo, who plays that “cool” teacher at Miami’s Jackson High, and tries with limited success to wrestle a Dito Montiel (“The Clapper”) script into a smooth flowing film. “Critical” has many characters, too many character “types,” melodrama by the bucketful and too little that breaks from the “Big Game” sports movie formula.

Punch up the class discrimination and racial inequality messaging, with the history of chess illustrative of the whitewashing of history — “How come they always paint us out?” — and you’ve got a movie with plenty of good intentions, lots of speed chess, and so many elements it can’t get out of its own way.

Thankfully, we jump right into the fray. Top dog player Sedrick (Corwin C. Tuggles) finishes off an argument with his dad (Michael Kenneth Williams) with a chess match before heading off to his favorite elective class — chess.

Mario Martinez (Leguizamo), “Mister T” to the kids, starts another semester of chess, going over the basics for “the fish” (new kids), batting down banter and personality conflicts among his stars, the four guys who comprise his team.

Sedrick is stoic and steady. Rodelay (Angel Bismark Curiel) is the cocksure braggart. Ito (Jorge Lendeborg Jr.) is the hothead and bully with a drug dealing future seemingly laid out for him. But they won’t be competitive unless Sedrick can lure white boy Gil (Will Hochman) away from the video games and back to class.

To do that, Sedrick — who once took great offense at having his new sneakers stepped on — has to find Gil and apologize.

It’s mostly a man’s world, with the girls in the class taking a timid back seat as Mister T goes into “The Philidor Defense,” “The Opera Game,” the career of Jose Raul Capablanca and finer points of “The Scandinavian Defense.”

The usual obstacles are trotted out — lack of funding from the district, an understanding but hands-tied principal (Rachel Bay Jones), the threatening lure of a gang, the guy with a girlfriend, the working class dad who flips out over the money this ISN’T bringing into the house, the dead mother, the cops watching one player in particular.

“We’ll be the guys with the mirrored shades on.”

A shocking death rattles the first act, prompting the teacher to poetry. “You guys know about Pablo Neruda?”

“You mean from ‘Family Matters?'”

The boys come together as a team, getting even better when a fresh-off-the-boat Cuban prodigy (Jeffry Batista) comes on board. Road trips, fund raising activities to pay for the tourneys, contests where sportsmanship doesn’t figure into Mister T’s teaching. Bullying and trash talk are just who they are, it is implied.

I wasn’t shocked on learning, after the fact, that Montiel scripted this. The narrative is shambolic, with blasts of violence and random “feels” tossed in with the high school (pot-seasoned cookies) hijinx and long long scenes of chess being played, with precious few shots of what’s actually going on at each board.

Filmmakers fall for the temptation of pounded game clocks, glowers and flurries of speed-chess moves in an effort to animate what can be a dramatic but rarely cinematic game. Leguizamo takes that bait, too.

The performers never transcend the archetypes they’re stuck playing, and that goes for “Johnny Legs” as Mister T, as well. He’s a magnetic performer, but this guy is a photocopy in cardboard.

I like the messaging and films of this genre have their built-in “against all odds” allure. But “Critical Thinking” needed a vigorous edit before it went before the cameras, needed to figure out who we are meant to follow and identify with and probably needed some sense of remove from the “true story.” Because giving every character almost equal screen time out of obligation, when the movie’s going to be fictionalized, no matter what, makes for a maddeningly unfocused and unsatisfying movie.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, drug trade content, profanity

Cast: John Leguizamo, Corwin C. Tuggles, Jorge Lendeborg Jr., Jeffry Batista, Angel Bismark Curiel, Will Hochman, Rachel Bay Jones and Michael Kenneth Williams.

Credits: Directed by John Leguizamo, script by Dito Montiel. A Vertical release.

Running time: 1:57

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Netflixable? “All Together Now,” break out those hankies

There are worse labels a filmmaker could pursue that “That old softie.”

That’s Brett Haley’s niche. The director of “The Hero” and “Hearts Beat Loud” serves up another slice of sentiment with “All Together Now,” a high school “It’s a Wonderful Life” without the supernatural nonsense.

It’s an uneven affair that begins with a flourish, works to develop homeless street cred, wanders into the maudlin wilderness for the middle acts and rallies for a predictable, over-the-top, break-out-your-Kleenex finale.

Disney animation singer Auli’i Cravalho (“Moana,” TV’s “Rise”) is winsome Amber Appleton, a plucky teen who teaches her English as a Second Language class with song.

She also works in a donut shop, always brings donuts when she volunteers at a local nursing home, runs the annual high school charity variety show, nurtures her pun-obsessed on-the-spectrum cousin (Anthony Jacques), dreams of getting into Carnegie Mellon University’s music conservatory and takes her chihuahua, Bobby Big Boy, with her everywhere she goes.

And where she goes at night is a school bus on the Portland School District’s maintenance lot. That’s where she lives with her widowed mom (Justina Machado). Amber is bubbly, relentlessly upbeat and keeping up appearances. But she’s poor, proud and homeless.

“I’m great. Never better.”

Following her, we see the juggling that goes on. The prepping for school she manages at her aunt’s (Judy Reyes of “Scrubs”) house, the showers she cadges off the elderly grump (Carol Burnett) she cozies up to at the nursing home.

“One of these days I will make you laugh.”

“Not if I make you cry, first!”

Amber is always thinking of others, vowing to make this year’s variety show a fund-raiser to replace the school marching band’s stolen tuba.

“SOUSAPHONE.”

“All Together Now” is about when all those balls Amber juggles in the air tumble to the ground.

Mom’s an alcoholic with an abusive boyfriend. Auditioning at Carnegie Mellon (Disney or not, she seems a little thin-voiced for a conservatory) means she has to fly cross country, which costs money. Everything she owns is in her backpack. And her little dog isn’t the youngest chihuahua we’ve ever seen.

“Uneven” works for “All Together Now” because of the relentless, “How much more can she take?” parade of calamities that visit our heroine, whose poker face in a tear-jerker suggests limited range, not stiff-upper-lip stoicism. It’s not just the singing voice that comes off “thin” here.

“It’s under control!”

Fred Armisen has a role as a cool teacher of…something. He’s barely in this thing, but he’ll be in the talent show, for sure. On the drums? Not saying.

The “romance” with the rich boy Ty (Rhenzy Feliz) doesn’t spark, a promising circle of friends is cast by the wayside and for all the “reality” of homelessness, this plays like a Disney Channel gloss on the experience.

Still, Haley knows how to wring a tear or three out of a finale, and he manages that here, other shortcomings notwithstanding. You wish it was better, even as it isn’t. But at least “All Together Now” manages to make one feel, even if you feel manipulated as you do.

MPAA Rating: PG for thematic content, some language and brief suggestive comments

Cast: Auli’i Cravalho, Rhenzy Feliz, Judy Reyes, Justina Machado, Fred Armisen and Carol Burnett.

Credits: Directed by Brett Haley, script by Brett Haley, Marc Basch and Matthew Quick, based on the novel “Sorta Like a Rock Star” by Matthew Quick. A Netlix release.

Running time: 1:33

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Movie Review: “Mambo Man” tries to surf the hustles of modern Cuba

The old showbiz maxim “Always leave’em begging for more” is pushed beyond its limits in “Mambo Man,” a perfectly charming and utterly predictable Cuban dramedy that is over entirely too soon.

It’s about a Cuban entrepreneur, a pig and tomato farmer and concert promoter, beloved and thriving in his corner of Eastern Cuba, but a man who is out of his depth in the dog-eat-dog New Capitalism sweeping over his island.

JC (Héctor Noas) may gripe about the weather, the government, “The Soviets,” the Chinese and “the gringo trade embargo” (in Spanish with English subtitles). But the 50ish Michael Eisner look-alike is doing OK.

He’s got a nice farm in Bayona, and a very nice house on it where he can keep his wife Rita (Yudexi De La Torre Mesa) and spoil their little girl. He teaches her about “freedom” by buying her a bird a the street market, lecturing her through her tears as he lets the bird go.

JC knows that many with any sort of ambition have already fled the island. But he hosts tourists who visit the farm, does well with his pigs and does well by the many musicians who rely on him for bookings, recording sessions and exposure. The film’s composer, co-writer/director Mo Fini is one of them, appearing as himself, declaring his loyalty.

JC built a life of friends and business relationships built on handshake deals and grew up in a Cuba where you always pick up hitch-hikers, where an engine problem in his ancient Chevy could be solved by that one mechanic in whatever village he and driver David (Alejandro Palomino) often without charge.

Then this “old friend,” Roberto (David Pérez Pérez) with this secret “deal” he wants JC in on. Damned if the hustler isn’t out beating the bushes for cash, from a bank, old friends who owe him a favor — everybody.

His wife weeps. David says “There’s something fishy about it.” And anybody who’s ever seen a movie about a hustler trying to hustle up a big score will tense up, fretting over JC’s trusting ways.

The novelty of “Mambo Man” is the vivid portrait of street life in a changing Cuba. The 50somethings like JC may all seem to know each other — the engineer of the local freight train with his knowing wave, the mechanic who can “fix anything” who eyeballs a busted irrigation pump (jerry rigged with a car motor piston) and says, “It won’t be perfect, but we can get it figured out.”

The magic of “Mambo Man,” performances in clubs and restaurants, concerts and cookouts. Real musicians from the “Buena Vista Social Club” generation sing JC’s praises from the stage.

Rum, cigars, “sugar cane water — natural Viagra” and all this food — mouth watering its way right off the screen — adds to the texture.

Noas (“Sergio & Sergei”), as JC, floats through this world, irked when he’s late but not blowing a fuse, trusting this or that employee or business associate like “my brother,” trading on his good name for the New God of Cuba — cash.

“The Bible says love of money will send us straight to Hell,” he muses. Not that he’s taking the Bible’s advice. Not in today’s Cuba. It’s just that he’s one of the last playing by the old rules.

The parable is simple to the point of simplistic, but Noas makes a most engaging tour guide on this slide down the slippery slope. And the people, places, music and food of Cuba make one long for the day when “the gringo embargo” and travel ban are gone and we can all sample its charms.

Let’s hope the gringos, and the Cubans who emulate them, don’t eat guys like JC for lunch

MPAA Rating: unrated, a little drinking, a little smoking

Cast: Héctor Noas, Yudexi De La Torre Mesa, Alejandro Palomino, David Pérez Pérez and Mo Fini

Credits: Directed by Edesio Alejandro and Mo Fini, script by Mo Fini and Paul Morris. A Corinth Films release.

Running time: 1:23

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