Movie Nation

The Colorado cut-ups wade into the whole NBA/Winnie the Pooh censorship controversy in China, and take the hit for it from the One Party “Republic.”

Tonight at 10, we’ll see what frightens the Winnie the Pooh overlord so very much.

https://variety.com/2019/film/news/south-park-nba-controversies-point-up-challenges-of-doing-business-with-china-1203364704/

“Furie” is a female Vietnamese “Taken” predicated on the simple premise that you “Never take on a tigress who is defending her cub.”

It’s a showcase for Vietnamese actress, model and pretty-convincing martial artist Veronica Ngo (Ngo Van Tranh), who takes takes beating after beating, and delivers beating after beating, as she brawls her way through the child-trafficking trade of Indochina.

Hai Phuong  (Ngo) is a debt collector in Tra Vinh, feared by some, hated by most. She isn’t shy about busting deadbeats in the mouth, and often finds herself chased off by machete-wielding debtors who underestimate her lithe frame and capacity for violence. Some even dare to come to her house and make threats.

Her little girl (Mai Cát Vi) is bullied for being a fatherless child, and for how Mommy provides for them. She can’t be more than 10, but already she’s got a business plan — fish farming — that she hopes can fix all this.

That goes by the boards the day Mai is kidnapped, right in front of her mother at the market. Hai Phuong takes a beating, but so do a LOT of henchmen. The market is busted up, and as the bad guys spirit the child away in a boat, Hai Phuong steals a moped and the cross-country chase is on.

Naturally, the trail leads to Saigon/Ho Chi Minh City. A desperate visit to the police station misses connecting her with the detective (Thanh Nhien Phan) on the kidnapping beat. But Hai Phuong steals a rap sheet leading into this underworld where children and others are grabbed for all manner of criminal activities, including organ harvesting.

The machete fights of the rural districts turn into a screwdriver/hammer brawl, a hatchet fight, fire-extinguisher-as-weapon on a train, and of course, a cat fight.

Tranh Hoa has a Michelle Rodriguez in “Girlfight” and “Fast and Furious” look and vibe, the two-fisted Dragon Lady/mastermind of this enterprise, or at least the top dog Hai Phuong right in front of her. Their throwdown is epic.

Guns? They’re saved for the finale.

The story is as plain as they get, with a ticking clock driving Tigress Mom’s dogged pursuit and Ngo’s ability to handle intricate fight choreography with anybody. Slo-mo and sound effects do a decent job of covering up the blows-that-aren’t-blows, the simple throw-weight that make the fights laughable from a “How’d she recover from THAT?”  perspective.

Ngo, Tranh Hoa and Thanh Nhien Phan have mastered the badass glower and cooly cruel sneer action heroes wear when the brawls are about to start, or their characters are getting their second wind in mid-fight.

But it is Ngo who must carry picture across its (anti-climactic) finish, keep us involved when it lapses into third act lulls. And she does. It’s no wonder Hollywood has finally discovered her (at 40) and is casting her in action films by Spike Lee and Gina Prince-Bythewood. Even without a “cub” to protect, she’s a tigress.

MPAA Rating: unrated, graphic violence, some of it involving children and child abduction

Cast: Veronica Ngo, Mai Cát Vi, Thanh Nhien Phan, Tranh Hoa

Credits: Written and directec by Le-Van Kiet.  A Well Go/Netflix release.

Running time: 1:37

When the child has to become the adult because of a parent lost in addiction, you get the painful, guilt and rage that such an unnatural reversal brings with it.

This film festival favorite is headed into theatrical/VOS release.

Keep an eye out for Annabelle Anastasio’s domestic melodrama “Mickey and the Bear” Nov. 13.

If only they hadn’t given away most of the movie in the trailers.

If only Ang Lee hadn’t tried to conjure up an action film out of close-ups of indifferent actors — two of them Will Smith.

If only the digitally-augmented action beats weren’t so obvious — digital de-aging, physics-defying, unnatural, unsurvivable fights and chases, a parkour practitioner straight out of video game graphics.

If only the screenplay didn’t provide the perfect, pithy single sentence review of “Gemini Man.”

“It’s like The Hindenburg crashed into The Titanic!”

It’s a thriller about a hitman who hugs — everybody — a picture that skips from Belgium to Buttermilk Sound, Cartagena to Budapest. And it’s something of a digitally-augmented debacle.

Smith plays Henry Brogan, a supernaturally gifted government assassin who can hit a passenger in a hurtling bullet train from two kilometers away.

He’s just done his “one last job,” and shared a toast.

“To the next war, which is NO war.”

But that last job wasn’t what it seemed, and the people who run him send assassins after him. Brogan barely has time to grab his “blown bag” (bugout bag), fetch the fetching marina manager/agent “minder” (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) and summon his pilot pal (Benedict Wong), who whisks them off to Cartagena.

The bad guys can find them there, because the baddest bad guy, a former boss (Clive Owen) has this mercenary operation, “Gemini,” that can get to anybody.

And his ace agent looks just like Brogan, only 28 years younger.

The digital process of taking that many years off Will Smith is good enough to pass muster, but makes for a more wooden performance. It’s the plainly animated running, fighting and racing a motorcycle that take you out of the picture.

Three credited credits screenwriters — two of whom have “Breach,” “Captain Phillips,” “Game of Thrones” and “The 25th Hour” in their credits — and all they could come up with was that “Titanic/Hindenburg” crash line, and a lot more generic junk like this.

“I need you to get to get me to Budapest!”

“What’s in Budapest?”

Apparently, the two acclaimed writers deferred to the dude with “Turbo” on his resume for most of the dialogue.

Lee, director of “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” and “Brokeback Mountain,” sees the picture in nurturing, protecting, parenting tones, which is why he went with so many closeups. The players have their strengths, but can’t find anything in their skillset to give this script that feel.

That adds up to a movie with a whole lot of running around, zero pathos, no romance — one of the many holes in Will Smith’s movie acting game — and a central conceit that’s given away in the trailers.

And that “crash?” Well, it’s something to see man.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for violence and action throughout, and brief strong language.

Cast: Will Smith, Clive Owen, Mary Elizabeth Winstead

Credits: Directed by Ang Lee, script by David Benioff, Darren Lemke and Billy Ray. A Paramount release.

Running time: 1:57

So Will Smith starred in the second film based on Richard Matheson’s “I Am Legend,” the version that actually used that title.

The one starring Chuck Heston? “The Omega Man.”

Now Will’s got another trip to the sci-fi well, “Gemini Man,” about an assassin cloned by Big Brother (Clive Owen is Big Brother’s cousin, twice removed) and forced to face the younger version of himself.

Early word on this has been bad, but Smith’s overcome “bad” or at least “listless” (“Aladdin”) before.

“Gemini Man” opens Friday and may be hard-pressed to chase “Joker” off the top of the box office mountain. Because “Joker” just set another Oct. record — best Monday in Oct. EVER.

Documentary filmmaker Louis Schwartzeberg, of DisneyNature’s “Wings of Life,” didn’t need to add “The Magic Beneath Us” to the title of his “Fantastic Fungi.”

We were already thinking, “Oh, it’s a magic mushroom movie.” He might as well have titled it “Shrooms,” am I right?

And yes, this documentary about the many beautiful and often utilitarian types of mushrooms on Planet Earth gets around to the “mind/consciousness expanding” corner of the story. Not every expert here counts that as the source of their fandom.

But in the latter third of this eye-opening and sometimes eye-popping film, we do hear from our fair share of long-bearded prophets from the ’60s and ’70s, extolling the virtues and even the biochemistry of that part of fungal world of edibles, inedibles, decay-inducing, pollution-eating lifeforms of the Basidiomycota and Agaricomycetes divisions.

They exist “somewhere between plants and animals,” one of the legion of professional and amateur mycologists (mushroom experts) weighing in here declare. And they have uses all across the spectrum, from basic biodiversity to culinary treats to the darned thing growing out of that rotten log that could cure cancer and treat Alzheimer’s.

TED talkers (Paul Stamet) and foodies (Eugenia Bone, Michael Pollan) sing the song of ‘shrooms — no, they do NOT like them so labeled, connotations you see — and immerse us in the world these fungi made, and how humanity might have been shaped by our primate ancestors ingesting mushrooms that promoted Big Thinking.

There we are, back to the ‘shrooms thing.

Stamet is the central interview subject here, an amateur mycologist who has turned himself into one of the world’s leading experts in the field. His TED talk was “Six Ways Mushrooms Can Save the World,” and he makes a great case.

And yeah, some of his initial interest might have come from the psychedelic side of things. The film’s overall “heightened consciousness” of “profound experiences” bent spins out of that.

But this movie is fascinating on a lot of levels, not just what the Mayans and Native Americans of North America knew about fungi with mind-expanding properties.

Schwartzberg points his time-lapse camera at fungi growing, devouring rotting flora and (a dead rat) fauna, at stunning bioluminescent mushrooms and this “icicle-like” mushroom, Hericium erinaceus, “Lion’s mane,” whose nerve-growth stimulating properties could hold a meaningful treatment for Alzheimer’s.

We’re told that research and breakthroughs in the study of mushrooms make preserving old growth forests a matter of human survival, and we’re soberly reminded that every mass extinction event on Earth has had one certain survivor. The damned mushrooms will be here long after we’re gone.

There’s a poetic, credulous narration read by Oscar winner Brie Larson that summons up “the pulse of eternal knowledge” that grows out of the rot and hurls spores into the air, and makes a fantastic pizza topping along the way.

The viewer can bring his or her own skepticism to the “cured my stuttering” and “cured my mom’s cancer” claims of Stamets, while still hoping the hard research into applying these “natural” cures to what ails us proceeds with all haste, with as little involvement by Big Pharma as possible.

If you can grow something to treat your anxiety in your compost heap, who needs Bayer, Merck, GlaxoSmith this or CVS that?

The answers to what ails us might be right there on the forest floor — mushrooms, not just for Pizza Hut and Timothy Leary disciples any more.

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast: Paul Stamets, Mary P. Cosimano, Andrew Weil, Suzanne Simard, Michael Pollan, many others — narrated by Brie Larson

Credits: Directed by Louie Schwartzberg, script by Mark Monroe. A Moving Art release.

Running time: 1:21

In “Entangled,” we can size up Marin, played by Ana Girardot, by what we see and hear. Or we can let “what happened to me” make up our minds for us.

What happened to her was a miscarriage.

“It hurts,” she says, in a French-accented voice-over that plays like a long letter or email she is sending to her boyfriend of many years Mark (Peter Mark Kendall). She hates that he wants to “act like nothing happened.”

But she doesn’t want to talk about it. She keeps him at a distance, living on her own in a posh Manhattan apartment.

She hates when he and others ask “if I feel better.”

And she gets really mad when one of Mark’s friends’ wives offers the feeble comfort of “I am so sooo sorry.”

Confronting Mark later, it’s “Who do you think you are telling them about MY miscarriage?”

Her therapist has to hear that Mark “doesn’t get what it is like for me,” even though the shrink knows things Marin won’t say to Mark, her “secrets.”

“I’m tired of being in my head. When I look at myself, I see negative space.”

We begin to, as well.

“I want to see myself through someone else’s eyes.”

Way ahead of you there, dear.

We’ve seen just enough of Mark in the office, chatting with friends about Marin, how she “needs space/needs time,” to wonder if he’s cheating on her. With say, his stunning assistant or somebody else his less ethical married pal invites to their table in whatever bar they’re “working late” at this night.

Marin? “I just want to touch someone new.”

First-time writer-director Milena Lurie seems to want “Entangled” to be a portrait of the emptiness Marin feels in recovering from this most solitary of traumas. What she’s managed is something far less flattering and indulgent.

As we hear Girardot’s plaintive, flat-voiced narration — “Escobar: Paradise Lost” is her most famous credit in North America — we’re treated to Marin showering and pondering, Marin taking a soak and musing, Marin getting dressed in her too-sexy underwear, Marin hanging out at a fashion shoot with friends and peers.

A model? Maybe. Something or someone pays for that penthouse.’

She summons a pal (Lucy Walters) with a simple “Can you come over?”

She shares an erotic dance with another model-beautiful woman at a bar-party.

She reconnects with a French ex (Grégory Fitoussi) who finds an excuse to “be in New York.” And when he’s late, she lets herself be picked up by a charming, rich bar prowler (Jonathan Cake).

And at some point, for me it was distressingly early, you check out of Marin’s plight, her fragile emotional state, and pick out everything beyond her great looks that just…grates.

As pretty as everything and everyone are in this vapid film, there’s nothing to disentangle here, no empathetic performance to cling no matter what sympathies we bring to someone going through this.

MPAA Rating: unrated, nudity, sexual situations, smoking, alcohol, profanity

Cast: Ana Girardot, Peter Mark Kendall, Lucy Walters, Grégory Fitoussi and Jonathan Cake.

Credits:Written and directed by Milena Lurie. A Samuel L. Goldwyn release.

Running time: 1:32

You may think you know Lupita Nyong’o, Oscar-winning star of “Twelve Years a Slave” and “Us.” But you haven’t seen her at her funniest, fiestiest and sweetest until you’ve plunged into the comic horrors of “Little Monsters.”

As kindergarten teacher Miss Caroline, she protects her tiny flock like a mother hen, brooking no nonsense from these five year-old Aussies.

“One two three, eyes on ME!” she commands, and their response is always “One, two, eyes on YOU.”

They adore her, are charmed by her ukulele playing and utterly beguiled by her singing. You haven’t heard Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Up” til you’ve heard Miss Caroline’s ukulele sing-along version.

They have a connection, which is especially important when she’s trying to keep her dozen charges alive during a zombie outbreak while on a field trip, and convince them it’s all a game, and that they’re winning.

That blood all over her lovely yellow dress?

“I got caught in the middle of a jam fight!”

“YAAAaaaaaaaayyyy!”

Writer-director Abe Forsythe’s break-out zombie romp may be structured around Dave (Alexander England), a lazy, loutish 30something guitar player who’s never given up his Flying Vee, never given up his metal band, God’s Sledgehammer, never held a real job.

The scene-stealer might be the world famous kiddie entertainer Teddy McGiggle (Josh Gad, a hoot), an insipid singer and hyperactive bundle of fun who is filming on location at the petting zoo Miss Caroline’s kids, including Dave’s nephew (Diesel La Torraca, I kid you not) are visiting for a field trip.

“I learned Meisner from Pacino! AL!”

But once the “virus” escapes from the neaby U.S. test facility, once the dead are biting the living and making more living dead, the movie belongs to Miss Caroline.

It’s a zombie comedy, so the laughs come in mostly very familiar places, with cracks about “Children of the Corn” and “Meals on Wheels” from the American entertainer, and American GIs asking their commanding officer the most important question in any zombie apocalypse.

“Fast zombies or slow zombies, SIR?”

Forsythe sets us up for something even more conventional before that, a mismatched rom-com in which Dave is kicked out of his girlfriend’s life and becomes the most inappropriate role model for his single mom sister’s (Kat Stewart) bullied, allegeric boy Felix (La Torraca). F-bombs, violent VR video games, dragging the kid into his struggle to reclaim his lost love Sara (Nadia Townsend).

A strident but amusing opening credits sequence has summed up that dead-end relationship as an endless argument and Dave as a loser with no prospects.

The first big laugh comes as Dave sorts one “bully” problem with a classroom door.

But Miss Caroline makes everyone want to do better. And when the dead feast on the living, it’s no heavy metal buffoon or diva of kids’ TV who must take charge and save little bodies as she’s shaping little minds.

She is adorable, and she makes “Little Monsters” the most adorable midnight movie/cult comedy/zombie farce you’ll see this year.

MPAA Rating: R for bloody zombie violence, crude sexual content, language throughout and brief drug use.

Cast: Lupita Nyong’o, Josh Gad, Alexander England, Kat Stewart and Diesel La Torraca.

Credits: Written and directed by Abe Forsythe. A Neon release.

Running time: 1:33

“Lady-Like” is the kind of cute-coeds-act-coarse comedy that calls for us to revive a word that isn’t used enough these days.

“Blowsy.” That’s the best six-letter description of anti-heroine Allie (Stephanie Simbari of “Coldwater”). Park her character somewhere below “trollop,” somewhat above “floozy” or as the kids say these days, “skank.”

“Blowsy” Allie isn’t a comment on her fixation with oral sex, or talking about it with BSSF (best sorority sister etc.)  Kort, blandly-played by Allie Gallerani of “Professor Marston and the Wonder Wome.”

Allie is brash, brazen, too young to be a hussy but collegiate enough to refer to her “sloppy sophomore sandwich” as something she’s “not going to judge” herself for.

She oversleeps, slacks off, texts and giggles about texting in class, spends Daddy’s money and counts the days until she and Kort take their summer break trip to Europe. “No boyfriend” until she gets back, she vows. She needs to knuckle down if she’s going to het that Mrs. Degree, the house in Chevy Chase, the husband in the State Dept. in D.C.

And frankly she’s a little shocked when Kort suggests SHE could apply herself and get all that on her own. She’s even more shocked that Kort didn’t take her overbearing declaration as an edict for them both.

Kort meets a handsome lacrosse player at their DC area college (filmed at Princeton and in and around Washington). And she dares to fall in love.

“Lady-Like” is about Allie’s abandonment spiral after Kort finds her some “Nantucket nector,” Daniel (Zak Steiner).

That’s not a helluva lot to hang a college rom-com on, but writer-director Brent Craft loses himself in this male wish fulfillment fantasy about what college girls are REALLY like and Simbari, a firecracker who plays this kid like the 30ish, confident woman she was when she was cast, makes the best of it.

The film has the tinge of “The Male Gaze” about it, although the raunch is almost entirely verbal. Craft’s foul-mouthed farce has some winning lines, girl-talk interrupted by sorority sisters’ demanding “Are you guys gonna ‘scissor’ all night, or are we gonna PARTY?”

Have a drink. “I call this the Ben Affleck. Because you drink this, you’re gonna be GONE girl!”

The fluffiest scenes are the ones where Kort and Allie bond over trying on date dresses at a tony Georgetown “Forever 21” clone. “We’ve gotta have more Beyoncé, less Bea Arthur!”

The promiscuous sorority atmosphere is fleshed out with Olivia Luccardi and Corinne Mestemacher, finding just enough funny stuff in the script to say to make an impression.

“Is that a hickey? Who DID it?”

“No idea.”

“Lady-Like” feels oddly subdued for an R-rated comedy these days. That’s because it’s ten minutes shorter than its festival release cut. The dirtest scene was apparently omitted.

Probably wouldn’t have helped.

But Simbari, however the boys’ fantasy girls screenplay lets her down, makes the most of a starring role, a little Alia Shawcat bravado and vamp, a hint of Jillian Bell hurt. Find this woman better roles than this! Or a sitcom!

MPAA Rating: R for crude sexual material and language throughout, and brief graphic nudity

Cast:Stephanie Simbari, Olivia Luccardi, Corinne Mestemacher, Zak Steiner and Beverly D’Angelo

Credits: Written and directed by Brent Craft.  A Craftsmen Media/Netflix release.

Running time: 1:22

Marin Ireland’s been a busy bee in the 15 years since she broke into film — “Hell or High Water” and “Sneaky Pete” are a couple of highlights on her resume.

Interesting that Jim Gaffigan’s agent is landing him all these no-budget dramas.

“Light from Light” seems to be a mildly spooky tale where you feel the weight of grief in the trailer.

“Light from Light” opens in limited release Nov. 1.