The Third Annual Havasu Film Festival, part four

  This is a continuation of the previous post. I recommend you read them all in order. Here's a link to the first part.

 

 

 You may notice that my second raid on the library was centered on the "G" shelf.

 

22. Goon

Starring Sean William Scott

Directed by Michael Dowse

Released: 2011

 After watching more than twenty movies in this third annual film festival, I was beginning to despair of my ability to pick really crappy titles from the library shelf. Everything we've seen has been mediocre or better, and one or two have even been excellent. Until now.

 Goon is a really, really bad movie. It's billed as a comedy, but it's not even as funny as the conspicuously un-funny television series Bear. I remember being told once long ago, when I was a student, that tragedy to the Ancient Greeks was when somebody died, and comedy was everything else. By that standard, Goon is a comedy. (So, by the way, is Bear, not that it matters here. Or anywhere.) 

 

 At one point I thought that I had zoned out for a few seconds, and had to run the movie back. Turns out I'd missed probably ten minutes of the thing. In an ordinary movie, where there's a story to tell, ten minutes would make a difference. It made none here. Nothing that happened in that ten minutes near the beginning was necessary for comprehending the stupefying jumble that was to come.

 There are no laughs in this pathetic film, unless you get a kick out of seeing blood dribble onto the ice. The premise -- Doug, a guy who can't ice skate, becomes a minor-league hockey star because he can beat up other players -- is a farce, while the farce intended in the fight scenes is so haplessly done that it falls by the way unnoticed. The budding relationship between the inept Doug (Sean William Scott) and his crush Eva (played with some competence by Alison Pill) wallows in the who-cares zone, and when she throws off her often-absent boyfriend in favour of Doug, his reaction is a meaningless masochistic visit to the ex. His relationship with his family consists of two scenes that depend almost entirely on Jewish character tropes rather than skill, talent or insight. (Eugene Levy played Doug's father and is probably embarrassed to have done so. But this was three years before the debut of Schitt's Creek, so at least he did something useful with the money.) And Doug's relationship with his teammates seems to be on a timer, switching on and off for no reason beyond the time of day.

 

 Doug's best friend (played by Jay Baruchel) is apparently meant to provide comic relief (have to wonder why that would be thought necessary, in a comedy) but his only tools to accomplish that are scatological and vulgar. (Baruchel is also credited as a producer and screenwriter, so clearly the breadth of his lack of talent is in keeping with his poor judgment in hiring himself to play the best friend.)

 If the writers, producers and directors of this movie had focused on any one of those relationships, and carried through an exposition of how that one relationship matters, and changes, or changes Doug, then there would have been the bare bones of a film worth watching. They would still need someone who could write five- and six-letter words, and if they insisted on having a comedy maybe they could hire somebody to write some jokes into it. But they tried to do everything, and so did nothing. Less than nothing.

23. The Good House

Starring Sigourney Weaver and Kevin Kline

Directed by Maya Forbes and Wally Wolodarsky

Released: 2021

 In the earliest scenes of this film I was dreading having to sit through it. Hildy Good (Sigourney Weaver) talks to the camera in slow, clipped tones that sound like she's trying to communicate complex ideas to a third-grader. But eventually she gets over it and speaks more or less normally, and I'm grateful that, although her family has been in Massachusetts since the 1600s, Hildy has no discernible local accent. She speaks with a Mid-Atlantic accent, like Sigourney Weaver. She sounds normal and odd pronunciations don't distract from the content of her speech. She can pronounce an "R". (There's actually only one character in the film that has that peculiar New England sound, and she has mercifully few lines.)

 The story is this: Hildy Good has been successful in real estate, a top agent in the state. But things have gone a little bit wrong lately. Her husband left her for another man. (That happens so often in the movies these days.) Her family and friends staged an intervention because of her drinking. (She denies it's a problem, but went to rehab just to shut them all up.) Her employee Wendy Heatherton quit and stole all her clients, and Hildy is now in competition with that smug, odious bitch (well-played by Kathryn Erbe). Hildy is on a downward slide, and it's subtly related to her manner of speaking. 

 Suddenly, though, things are looking up. Business takes a turn for the better, then another success follows on success. It looks like everything's coming up roses for her, and she even renews an old romantic relationship with Frank Getchell (Kevin Kline), a local entrepreneur and -- she says, though it's hard to credit -- the richest man in town. And at the moment of her greatest success everything falls apart.

 I only knew Sigourney Weaver's work from the science-fiction send-up Galaxy Quest, and to be honest I sometimes confuse her with Andie McDowell. Kevin Kline I knew only from A Fish Called Wanda, which I barely remember, and a movie poster in a friend's guest bathroom. (I know I saw the movie it advertises, In & Out, but don't recall it either.) To me these people were just names. I may not remember Kline's performance as Frank from this film, but I'm pretty sure that I will remember Weaver's portrayal of Hildy. Having briefly looked over the list of Best Actress nominees for the year, I'm honestly surprised not to find her included there. I'll put it down to studio politics involving the production companies behind this film.

24. The Good Catholic

Starrig Zachary Spicer, Wrenn Schmidt, John C. McGinley and Danny Glover

Directed by Paul Shoulberg

Released: 2017

 The male stars of this film are priests at a Catholic church in a medium-sized midwestern town. The bishop has decided the church will be open on Friday nights until the wee hours, the better to reach an underserved demographic, You can probably imagine how well that works. Father Daniel (Spicer) is in the confessional, saying his rosary and fighting off sleep, when he finally gets a visitor: an odd-seeming young woman named Jane (played by Schmidt), who says she's dying and wants to talk to him about her own funeral arrangements. She leaves in something of a huff when Father Daniel can't answer her questions about pallbearers or something. But she's back the following Friday night, and we learn that she's a singer in a coffee shop. She invites Father Daniel to come to her show, and when he does it forms the basis for a budding friendship between the handsome young priest-with-doubts and the eccentric and cock-sure young woman. You can assume the outlines of the conflict, but only to a point. Watching their relationship develop or fail is the interesting part of this movie. The performances are good, especially John McGinley's portrayal of the Franciscan priest Father Ollie, who can amuse and irk at the same time. Spicer's portrayal of Father Daniel is well-measured, though the script requires a barely-plausible resolution of his self-reflection.

 But as a reasonably astute (lapsed) Catholic I feel insulted by this movie. First by Jane's casually snide disrespect for a priest's training and position (I can barely stomach his willingness to go along with her role-playing during her second "confession"). And second, by the words Paul Shoulberg, as screenwriter as well as director, put in Father Victor's mouth during a climactic scene over dinner in the rectory. I won't go into the details here, to avoid spoiling the movie for anyone who might later watch it. Suffice it to say that words can have more than one distinct meaning, and it is insulting to the audience, the character and the accomplished actor to conflate those meanings to make a specious point. If anything brings this film down below the level of mediocrity it is this fatuously glib and facile speech by Glover's character. (There's also a point at which Father Victor tells Father Daniel that priests don't have a special line to God. Why, then, do we need priests at all? Might as well make do with ministers and preachers.)

25. Goodbye Christopher Robin

Starring Domnhall Gleeson, Margot Robbie, Will Tillston, Kelly McDonald and Alex Lawther

Directed by Simon Curtis

Released: 2017

 I don't know how much of the story told in this biographical film is true. It is the story of the first child to be exploited by his parents for wealth and fame, the first to have his life ruined by them for their own sakes. If the tale told is true, Christopher Robin's father, A.A. Milne, was oblivious to what he was doing to his boy, while the mother, Daphne Milne, was happy to do it and would have kept on. I had always heard that the real Christopher Milne wanted nothing to do with the Winnie-the-Pooh stories, and this film certainly explains why that might be so.

 A.A. Milne (Domnhall Gleeson) was a playwright, successfully, before World War I. He returned from the war traumatized by the experience, and moved his family to the country in hope of finding peace of mind. Daphne (Margot Robbie) was a selfish airhead -- today she would be an influencer -- who yearned for the fashionable life. She is made to say more crude, crass, insensitive things than seem possible for real life. I've said such things myself, but at least I recognize, usually immediately, that they are boorish; she has no such awareness, and her husband's quiet futile attempts to shut her up seem not to register in her consciousness. 

 

 Left alone in the country for a time, Milne and his son begin to explore the woods around their home, and we see the basis for the famous stories begin to form. When the tales are published, everybody wants a piece of little Christopher Robin, and his parents are happy to oblige for the right price. It's only when the nanny (Kelly McDonald) quits after a particularly vicious interview with the boy's parents that Milne and his wife become aware of just how much they were requiring of their little boy. By then, it's too late for the child, and his life thereafter is a particularly British version of Hell.

  

26. Selma

Starring David Oyelowo, Tom Wilkinson, and Carmen Ejogo

Directed by Ava DuVernay

Released: 2014

 For those of us who were alive and watching television in the 1960s, there are few voices as recognizable as that of Dr Martin Luther King, jr. Indeed, I would imagine that even younger Americans have heard portions of his "I Have a Dream" speech, given at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, played with some frequency during their lives; it is that famous, and that important to our national story. 

 David Oyelowo doesn't do an imitation of Dr King's voice. What he does instead is to use the same cadence of speaking, the identifiable Black-Preacher intonations and rhythms, and the same elegance of word and thought, to become Dr King. The skill required to do that has ready comparisons in this film, as the actors portraying President Johnson and Alabama Governor Wallace make do with thick Southern accents to inhabit their characters. But Tom Wilkinson neither looks nor sounds like LBJ, who had a Texas accent, not a Southern one. Tim Roth as Governor Wallace gets a little closer as the governor, but he has the advantage of playing a less-familiar actual person with a more easily recognized accent.

 This film covers a short portion of the Civil Rights Movement. The March on Washington is in the past; the immediate goal of the movement is voting rights: federal legislation to stop states like Alabama from all the underhanded chicanery and overt injustices practices against black people for a hundred years to keep them from the rights of citizenship: the poll taxes, the tests, the circular restrictions on voting. The Johnson administration is sympathetic to the cause but has other priorities, and urges Dr King to drop his push for voting rights for a time. Dr King has other ideas, and in the end public outrage at the treatment of protestors in Selma force the President's hand. 

 As with any two-hour movie, the reality it depicts is trimmed and edited to fit in the time allowed. Still, if my own understanding of that time in history is accurate (and who's to say it is or isn't?), this movie presents a fair synopsis of the debates of the era, not just between the Movement and the Administration but also within the Movement. And even if it's not accurate, or fair, it's still a good story well told, and it's something every American of the 21st Century should have some understanding of. 

27. Next Goal Wins

Starring Michael Fassbender, Oscar Kightley and Kaimana

Directed by Taika Waititi

Released: 2023

 

 I expected a round-ball version of the famous Cool Runnings, a film about athletes who succeed where no one believed they could. That's pretty much what I got.

 

 The national soccer team of American Samoa went from humiliation to humiliation for years, including the worst World Cup Qualifying match loss in history, in 2001. Eventually the territory's Football Federation hired a somewhat well-known coach, Thomas Rongen, who had been fired as head coach of the United States' team and didn't want to be without a job. He came in just a few weeks before qualifying for the 2014 World Cup and tried to whip the raw American Samoa team into some kind of shape. This film chronicles the results of those few weeks.

 Soccer fans will recognize what Rongen was up against. Human beings will recognize the importance to the players, the team, and the nation of the results of his work. Movie fans will get some catharsis and at least a few laughs out of this delightful little film.

The Third Annual Havasu Film Festival, part three

 This is a continuation of the previous post. I recommend you read them all in order. Here's a link to the first part.

 

Wednesday came and we had to return most of our videos, seen and unseen, to the library, but we walked away with three more big piles of DVDs. The Festival continues.

 

14. The Artist

Starring Jean duJardin and Bérénice Bejo

Directed by Michel Hazanavicius

Released: 2011

 This is a remarkable film. Jean duJardin plays silent film star George Valentin, a sort of Douglas Fairbanks type. When talkies come along he scoffs at the notion that they will ever be popular.

 Meanwhile, he runs into wanna-be starlet Peppy Miller, played by Bérénice Bujo, literally by accident, and he literally leaves his mark on her. It apparently is just what she needs to get ahead in Hollywood, and her star rises as his sets. When Valentin is hospitalized after a fire in his home, Miller takes him in and does all she can for him. His pride becomes an issue, an obstacle to be overcome.

 The story in this film is more about friendship than romance, and it's refreshing to see a Hollywood tale that doesn't depend on backstabbing and betrayal to be told. (You should know that the film is entirely in black-and-white, and is almost completely silent other than two brief scenes, and the almost relentless music. Do yourself a favour and watch it without closed captions.)

15. Yesterday

Starring Himesh Patel and Lily James

Directed by Danny Boyle

Released: 2019

 On a warm evening before the Pandemic, something happened. All the power in the world went off for about twelve seconds. It was right about the time that failed singer/songwriter Jack Malik (Himesh Patel) was hit by a bus and lost two teeth. Everyone else in the world lost certain memories.

 Once Jack recovers, his friends celebrate with a little get-together, at which they give him a new guitar, to replace the one destroyed in the crash. He uses it to play Yesterday, the beautiful ballad written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney. Except that none of his friends know the song. Turns out they have never heard of The Beatles. In fact, no one in the world seems to have ever heard of them. Only Jack. (He's also the only person who's ever heard of Coca Cola, but that doesn't figure in the story.) 

 

 When I was a kid I wanted to be John Lennon and Paul McCartney. Not one or the other, but both of them, because I found McCartney's songs too skippy-bubbly happy and Lennon's too dreary and (as we would now call it) woke; but together they worked magic, writing songs that are as fresh now as when they were new. I will hardly ever listen to Instant Karma or Silly Love Songs all the way through, but if Got to Get You Into My Life comes on the radio, I'm tuned to that station for the duration. Jack Malik got to live my dream some fifty years later.

 Jack suddenly becomes the world's most famous musician, on the strength of such songs as She Loves You, I Wanna Hold Your Hand, and Let It Be. He meets real celebrities, particularly Ed Sheeran (played by himself), and gets an agent and a record deal before realizing what the cost is. Wealth and fame turn out to be a double-edged sword, and Jack has to decide how he is going to deal with it. 

 I saw this film in the theater when it was new, and was frustrated by the little snippets of great music it dropped in throughout the two hours of film. But such earworms! The only complete rendition of any Beatles song in the film is over the closing credits, when we get to hear the entire (real) version of Hey, Jude. It's worth the wait if not the teasing.

16. The Good German

Starring George Clooney, Cate Blanchett and Tobey McGuire

Directed by Steven Soderbergh

Released: 2006

 

 Nineteen-forty-five: war rages on in the Pacific, but Germany has surrendered in Europe. The allies have divvied up the capital city for occupation and are preparing to hold the Potsdam Conference to see who gets what. George Clooney plays Jake Geismer, a war correspondent posted to Berlin to cover the conference. There he runs into his old girlfriend Lena, who is now the girlfriend of Corporal Patrick Tully, the soldier assigned to be Jake's driver. It's not a coincidence.

 Things in Berlin are a mess, made messier when Corporal Tully washes up dead in Potsdam with big bucks on his body. Jake wants to investigate it but is waved away by the US Military Governor. He gets involved anyway, and it rapidly gets complicated. Too complicated for me, in fact: while I eventually figured out what was going on and why people did what they did, I don't feel like I was helped at all by the storytelling in this downbeat black-and-white film. Instead, I get the feeling that too much of real interest was left on the cutting room floor. Aspects of character are introduced that look like they're important, or are going to figure in the resolution, but they just lie there like so many gefilte fish. It's as though they started off to make a film comment on one facet of society, but then swerved to a commentary on something else, and forgot to update all the roadsigns. 

 

 By the end I didn't much care anyway. That may be the worst thing you can say about a suspense film: the audience doesn't care. Besides, I've never been much of a fan of film noir: its movie-industry practitioners seem too willing to sacrifice content for mood. This gritty movie does nothing to disabuse me of that prejudice.

17. Going the Distance

Starring Drew Barrymore, Justin Long, Charlie Day, Jason Sudeikis and Christina Applegate

Directed by Nanette Burstein

Released: 2010

 This is what I want in a rom-com: a reasonably realistic relationship portrayed with reasonably realistic characters and reasonably realistic dialogue, one that actually makes me laugh out loud more than once while my heartstrings are tugged. Barrymore and Long deliver the first part; Day, Sudeikis and Applegate deliver the second and third, and everybody, including supporting actor Jim Gaffigan, contribute to the last part. This is, as a result, a fun little movie; not great art, but fun. And don't miss the deleted scenes if you're renting the DVD. I have a feeling they were ad-libs and they are funny.

 The premise is simple: she is an intern at a New York newspaper; he works in the music business. They meet shortly before she returns to school on the west coast, and fall in love. The rest of the movie chronicles their efforts to keep the relationship, which is important to both of them, going despite the distance. I had a long-distance relationship myself once, and this story rings true to me, though mine was less intense and nobody followed either of us around with a film crew. I also didn't have such an enjoyable cadre of supporters as these two people have. I need better writers in my life, I guess, though my own personal sequel did much better than the original.

18. The World's Fastest Indian

Starring Anthony Hopkins

Directed by Roger Donaldson

Released: 2005

 Anthony Hopkins, one of the world's great actors, plays an eccentric old Kiwi Burt Munro, who for years has dreamed of taking his ancient Indian motorcycle to the Bonneville salt flats and setting a world speed record. The film is based on a real person, who actually sort-of did the motorcycle-related things shown in the film, though a number of details, according to Wikipedia, are fabricated or altered, including the outcome of his trip to Bonneville.

 The World's Fastest Indian is essentially a one-man road movie. Scenes set at Munro's house in New Zealand establish his idiosyncracies, including his skill in manufacturing parts for his bike and his capacity for aggravating his neighbours, who nonetheless remain friendly toward him. (That may be the difference between "eccentric" and "crazy".) He then loads the bike onto a ship and sails to Los Angeles, where he encounters a sometimes-confusing American culture. He buys an old car, builds a trailer, and drives his motorcycle across the desert to Bonneville, leaving a trail of well-wishers in his wake. It's a heart-warming tale, even if it's not strictly true in detail. 

 On another note ... I was intrigued by the cover quote on the library's copy of this movie: "One of the year's best films," said by Jeffrey Lyons, a respectable film critic. I thought that was a stretch too far; it was a nice movie, a pleasant movie, but one of the year's best? I didn't think that could be true outside of MAGA-land; but this film came out long before there were Jewish space lasers "they" use to control the weather and make hurricanes. So I looked online to see what great movies came out in 2005 (when this film was released in New Zealand) and 2006 (when it opened in the United States). 

 

 Turns out Lyons' opinion is arguably true. There were no really good movies released in either year. It was a time dominated by franchise films like Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith; Batman Begins; and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Just about the only film of those years that I've seen and could call "great" is Joe Wright's film Pride and Prejudice with Keira Knightly ... and I'm biassed by being a huge fan of both Jane Austen and Keira Knightly. So anyway, Lyons' tribute quote is arguably true by default. Good on him.

19. Gosford Park

Starring too many big names to list

Directed by Robert Altman

Released: 2001

 Downton Abbey meets Clue. The cover of the DVD (and the movie poster shown) lists sixteen names as stars in this film; having watched it, I think a lot of people got left out of the list 

 If you can't bring yourself to let this silly story just wash over you as you admire the words spoken and the pictures shown -- if you need some drama with your comedy -- you will likely be disappointed by this movie. You're not watching a period murder mystery, you're watching a vaudeville revue. None of the characters develop in any way, though certain things are revealed about some of the understairs staff.  

 

 A mean old tightwad invites an uncurated group of selfish people to his country house during the Great Depression. He gets murdered eventually, and the police are called in. Don't get too hung up on the plot: it's just a coat hanger for the many amusing performances in this loose talent show. (My favourite is Stephen Fry as the most clueless police inspector in film.) By the end of the movie we know who done it and why, and we've gotten some laughs and we've admired the gaudy late-Edwardian décor and hair and clothing, and we've studied the glimpses of several nice old cars (particularly the 1924 Rolls Royce that drives Maggie Smith away at the end). Let that be enough, and just be glad you only borrowed or rented the DVD, or bought it out of the bargain bin at Wal-Mart. It's worth that.

20. The Good Shepherd

Starring Matt Damon, Angelina Jolie and Robert DeNiro

Directed by Robert DeNiro

Released: 2006

 

 There was a time when this great nation left organized spying to our friends in Britain and their European frenemies. About the time the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, we had cottoned onto the need for spies of our own, and after a few jolly ploys in imitation of Brit ways, we got our act together and set up a group of self-righteous snobs to keep tabs on our Cold-War opponents and allies. We told ourselves they were all honourable men (see Julius Caesar III.2) and left them to do their dirty work in our collective name.

 This film traces the career of one particular honourable man, played by a completely mirthless Matt Damon as he goes from Yale schoolboy to CIA bigwig. It is a study in the contrast between his success as a spy and his failure as a husband and father. The story is convoluted and complex, and centers on the Bay of Pigs Invasion in the early 1960s, historically a sort of turning-point in that it marked the end (hopefully) of the uncontrolled Wild West Cowboy style of spycraft that had prevailed since the start of World War II, in favour of a more cerebral and technologically sophisticated spying that (we hope) serves us better as a nation in a complex world full of suspect friends and smiling enemies. Sort of like the student body at Yale.

 It's a good movie, full of good performances, and not too much of it was shot in the dark, so you can actually see what's going on most of the time. Angelina Jolie's character is, to my mind, unstable, but maybe it's meant to be that way. Seems to me, though, that she was unhinged from the start and just looking for someone to blame. The relationship between her and Damon's character -- wife and husband -- plays such an episodic part in the story that it seems like most of that aspect of the tale got cut out after the fact, leaving it a little confusing. If the point of it was to explicate the final resolution of the film, involving their son (played by Eddie Redmayne), it kind of misses. Still, a good movie. 

21. The Young Victoria

Starring Emily Blunt and Rupert Friend

Directed by Jean-Marc Vallée

Released: 2009

 Everybody wants to know: what was Julian Fellowes doing with himself before Downton Abbey? Turns out he was writing luxuriant period pieces about titled rich people who live in big, fancy houses. Things like this film, the story of King George III's great-niece, last of the Hanovers, first of the house of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, ancestor of the Windsors. 

 Victoria had the good fortune to reign for a long time while her nation was at its political and economic peak. Everything in the world is named for her, and as a result people think she is important in the great scheme of things. Well, certainly she was more important outside her own circle than I am outside of mine, but that's not saying much. Whether she was more important than my ancestors is a closer question, and I come down on the side of my ancestors, without whom I would be in no position to argue about anything. 

 But I digress.

 In the 21st Century we like to see Victoria as an expression of feminist virtues, whatever they may be. Like every other set of virtues, they fluctuate with the sensibilities of the viewer. In this film, she is a very rich young woman in love with a less-rich but equally well-connected young man, and the two of them are making their way, either without guidance or with too much guidance, toward a balance between her public position, his public position, and their respective private wants and needs. We know from history that they largely succeeded. The world went on around them, and because of their public positions, especially hers, their lives are extraordinarily well documented, so anybody wishing to make a point about anything that comes after Victoria can point to something she did, or something he did, or something one of them didn't do. Truth is in the eye of the beholder.

 Either way, it's a beautifully made movie, and you get a frisson of pleasure at seeing her gradually assert herself in the face of pressure from politicians and, especially, family. One wonders that the Germans are so much more attuned to things than the English.