Prologue
And so it begins, the annual recrudescence. The mountain folk have returned to their high-altitude homes; my raison d'être has gone off to play in her Huntsman Senior Games tournament; and I am left here in the desert wastes with a dog and a plastic bag full of DVDs. Thank God this house is air-conditioned.
Who would ever have thought I could keep anything up for five whole years? Certainly not me, but if I say so myself, reading back through the previous years' reviews -- something I do for entertainment from time to time -- makes me think that some of my most evocative channelling of Alexander Woollcott can be found in those chatty descriptions and digressions provoked by the best or (more usually) the worst of the filmmaker's craft.
This year, I make two promises. First, I will endeavour to avoid the phrase "little movie." In preparing for this foray into criticism (a word used intentionally and in its literary sense), I found that phrase all too common in previous reviews. Never mind that it was in each case accurate. I just got tired of reading it. So take it as a given: the movies I look at this week will almost certainly be low- or moderate-budget productions, usually with one not-entirely-unknown name brought in for major bucks just to lend some celebrity cachet to the undertaking. It must work, because movie producers keep doing it. Second, this year's post will be shorter than in previous years, as this year I have less time for film-watching to contend with. That, I'm sure, will be a relief to those who slogged through reviews of 27 movies in six separate posts last year, and of 38 movies in seven posts (including a re-cap) the year before. Even though every review was a gem, it can be a lot to take in. I had a lot more time available in both of those years. This year I have only five days to watch and review the random selections from among the offerings of the Mohave County Library Lake Havasu City branch. And the United States Women's National Team match against Spain on Saturday will take a chunk of time and attention away from that already-reduced allotment. There may also be a couple of Premier League matches that will claim my attention.
These two promises should make the coming posts a little less painful for you, Dear Reader.
And before I forget, here are links to the previous Havasu Film Festival posts:
And now: On with the shows!
I realized this was a movie produced for television when the second fade-to-black-for-a-commercial-break came. While television movies can be good, and well-made, and interesting, and even thought-provoking, they usually aren't. They're more likely to be just-good-enough productions, with only as much quality as is needed to keep the viewers in place for the real purpose of the production, to get those advertisements in front of a passable number of eyeballs. Beyond that, it's seldom considered to be in the producers' interest to work a little harder on the story, the script, the cinematography, and all the other technical factors involved in making anything approaching art. So it is here.
Mac, played by Jerry O'Connell, is a young man from Missoula who spends his summers working for the nascent Forest Service in the mountains of western Montana, portrayed here by the mountains of British Columbia. (This is an example of why the Pampered Cheese Puff likes tariffs on Canadian products.) Over the course of the film, he gets to do a little growin' up. It's an easy enough story to follow, but if there's a deeper truth to all this it's lying on the cutting room floor, along with explication of "that big fire up near Cœur d'Alene" and whatever "a Hole in the Sky" refers to in the title (and the narrator's last line). Mac is helped along in his episodic maturation by Bill Bell, played by Sam Elliot with all the effective economy of speech and gesture that has made him a truly well-respected actor. Sadly, he only wears his trademark mustache on the cover of the DVD, another clue that much has been cut from the film.
There's also a lot of backstory involving Bill Bell and a less-than-pure group of gambling folk down in the town two mountain ranges over. We know this because passing mention is made of it; that's how we know everything in this movie that's not shown on the screen. Bill Bell plans to get his revenge, and that involves bringing in a ringer for the big poker game at the climax of the movie. The ringer, played by Ricky Jay, makes his living (when he's not cooking for the ranger's crew up in the mountains during the summer) as a card sharp, and Bill Bell plans to back him in the game, along with his entire crew.
The story, including the parts only guessed at as you watch, is interesting enough to hold you for an hour and forty minutes of your life. Good thing we have tropes to fall back on. The acting is good enough to make you think you missed something. The scenery is as gorgeous as the Rocky Mountains, but even there you're left thinking it could be prettier if more thought had been invested in the cinematography. And I, for one, am convinced that the original script for this film was much closer to being a work of art than what was left of it after the producers' machetes were finished with it.
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| Drew Struzan |
Having never been much of a Stallone fan, I passed on seeing most of the Rocky movies. I think I saw one on television once, but I'm not sure. All I know about them is that his signature line is, "Yo, Adrienne," or something like that, and it cemented his reputation as an actor who plays men of action rather than words. Sitting through this movie, the first in what would become the "Rambo" series, you can see that reputation is deserved. In a little over an hour and a half, during which he is on screen most of the time, he might say three sentences of more than two words. But at the end, he proves that he is, in fact, capable of delivering a full-on soliloquoy with all the emotion the situation calls for. It took me by surprise.
Stallone plays John Rambo, a former Green Beret and winner of the Congressional Medal of Honor. We never learn what the character did to earn that ultimate award, but it doesn't matter: what matters is that we know (or should, anyway) that anyone who has one has done something admirable, beyond question.
Rambo, back from Vietnam, has just learned that the last member of his unit died of cancer. This knowledge, gleaned from a family member of the deceased, seems to cut Rambo loose from whatever frail bonds maintain him in civil society. When he is picked up and given a ride out of town by the sheriff of Hope, Washington, he seems determined to provoke the confrontations that come, and escalate, until he has pretty much destroyed all Hope. The sheriff (Dennehy), for his part, seems intent on assuring Rambo's provocations by his self-righteous arrogance and, indirectly, through the heavy-handed and arrogant sadism of his poorly-trained underlings, none of whom know what a Congressional Medal of Honor means. The law-enforcement contingent trying to deal with Rambo increases throughout the film, both in size and trigger-happiness, until we encounter the much-needed comic relief of a bunch of National Guardsmen with light artillery.
Later productions would build on the Rambo series' unrelenting action, and in fact the Rambo character has become iconic, so much so that other movies merely refer to people as a "Rambo" and we all know what they mean. (For example, The Retirement Plan, reviewed next.) We have been treated to more than 40 years of honourable if flawed action heroes and their flawed-and-dishonourable enemies shooting at each other with everything from arrows to rocket-propelled grenades. Explosions light up the screen, bullets fly, cars and trucks flip over almost randomly, and are launched into the air in a stunt move that really needs to be retired. It was over-used even when this movie was new. But the genre of action movie thrives, to the point where most of the videos available on my library shelf, it turns out, are action movies of one sort or another.
At the time of its release, this country was still feeling the confused after-effects of our misguided war in Vietnam, the first in a series of military exercises we should not have undertaken, or at least not undertaken in the way we did. This movie, for all its artistic flaws, at least forced the public to debate what we had done and were continuing to do to our own soldiers, now that they were home and walking among us. It's not a question, I think, that we have made much progess with: even though we have made great strides in repairing the physical injuries our servicemen and -women suffer, we don't seem to have done nearly as much for the mental injuries that result from their adherence to their duty; the sort of injuries First Blood tries to portray.
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| Darius Films |
Grandpa hasn't spoken to his daughter in ten years. He's living the dream in a small house on the beach in the Cayman Islands, because he likes to fish.
His daughter Ashley, played by Ashley Greene Khoury, has married a small-time crook who's working his way up in organized crime, and believes he's found himself a quicker path to advancement. This, of course, gets him into some trouble with his boss, and forces his wife to take their daughter and get away. The only place Ashley can go to get away is Grandpa's house. But there's only one seat available on the last flight of the day, so she sends her daughter and books a seat for the next day.
Grandpa is Nicholas Cage. His name might be Matt, or it might be Jim. Whoever he is, it turns out he's a man of special ability. He's a Rambo, and his skills have not atrophied at all in the years of his (forced, he says) retirement from wet-work with an unspecified US government agency. Now that the bad guys are coming after his daughter and the grand-daughter he never knew he had, he has to revive all those skills and re-establish some old agency contacts to protect them.
It's all nicely tongue-in-cheek. The bad guys are cardboard cutouts with mostly Noo Yawk accents who don't know what they're up against. They can't shoot straight and are always being taken by surprise. The head bad guy is a woman who just loves seeing people suffer. If we were in a live theater the audience would know they're supposed to boo her every time she makes an appearance.
As a movie, it's slap-dash perfunctory artistic and technical work, but as entertainment it holds together well enough to do the job. Its one of those movies that's just good enough that, when you encounter it unexpectedly in your channel-surfing, you'll stop to watch at least until the next commercial, and maybe you'll come back to it after that's over.
This is unexpected.
I selected this video from the shelf just because of the name of the star. I would not have called myself a fan of Jason Statham, but having now seen this movie, I would have to say that I am one. I knew the man's work first from his supporting role in Spy, the funny espionage vehicle for Melissa McCarthy, done in 2015. I've watched it several times and it's still hilarious. Then I came across Statham's movie Wild Card, also from 2015, a film which made it into the Third Annual Havasu Film Festival a couple of years ago. I very much enjoyed that film, finding the style of action on a par with the very best of the genre, and Statham fills the white-hat role well.
Then last year I viewed another Jason Statham vehicle, A Working Man, wherein he played yet another former military man with the purest of hearts. That, it turns out, was actually a new movie at the time I included it in the Fourth Annual Havasu Film Festival Remote Edition. (It also, incidentally, was co-written by Sylvester Stallone.) It was "pure entertainment of a particularly violent kind. I view it the way I used to view the unending struggles between Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd: pure meaningless fun that satisfies my sense of justice. All the bad guys deserve what they get; who could complain?"
Well, as you might expect, I can. Because in this movie, from 2012, Statham shows himself capable of playing a more complex and complete character than the ones portrayed in the later films (including Spy). If I had seen these films in order, I believe I would have wondered what's happened to Jason Statham, that his characters have gotten so much less intriguing than the promise shown in Redemption?
The answer, I feel, is that scripts have gotten less intriguing as more and more action gets packed into the limited run time of movies. It's increasingly difficult to justify taking the few on-screen seconds needed to fill out a character and signal his complexity and growth when you have to use that time for yet another violent confrontation with the bad guys. Character doesn't sell commercials, fights do.
This isn't to say that the script of this movie is a high-quality product. It's not. The central premise of the film is that Statham's character Joseph Smith (or Joey Jones) is going to avenge the death of a young woman he knew while dealing with his own demons. The set-up for the climactic confrontation is generously paced, but simplistic. After a long introduction to the character and hints about what brought him to the low place where we meet him, he settles on his course of action: he must find the man with the scar above his eye. It has the potential makings of a tense, tight pursuit. Sadly for the film, though, it turns out to require only a few questions asked in the right quarters, and a degrading quid-pro-quo. The identity of the villain being known, Joey has no trouble locating him and dealing with him in a dramatic and public way. And what happens to Joey, after he's dispensed illusory justice all around? You don't want to know.
Despite the movie's failure to live up to its potential, it remains an entertaining example of the action genre, with enough light moments to keep it from being overwhelmingly dark, and enough quality in the production, both technically and artistically, to give hints that it could have been much more than commercial limitations allow.
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| A24 Films LLC |
This "darkly funny" film is two hours and ten minutes long. That's about two hours too long, as we know everything we need to know in the first ten minutes. Mikey Davies (Rex) is a liar and nothing is ever his fault. All his decisions are bad, and he's the smartest person he knows. He left Texas City nearly 20 years before to make porn movies in California, and now has come back. He talks his way into his ex's house, can't find a job, takes to selling dope, seduces a teenaged girl and makes plans to take her to California and get her into the porn industry, with himself as her manager. His plans get derailed in the end because, at the end, he decided to behave with just a smidgen of honour: he tells his ex that he's leaving in the morning, instead of just waving goodbye as he walks out the door. That gives her and her mother enough time to orchestrate his undoing.
There are no laughs in this supposed comedy. There are a few amusing situations, but don't hold your breath waiting for them. They are infrequent, and brief. (And as a Texas taxpayer, I do hope the Texas Film Commission didn't sink a whole lot into this mediocre film. That may be too much to ask.)
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| Columbia Pictures |
At nearly two and a quarter hours, this is another too-long movie. In this case the wasted time is given over to long pauses while the starts stare meaningfully into each other's eyes or off into the distance. (It's not helped, either, by the maudlin musical score or the insistence of both stars to speak in near-whispers.)
Here's the plot: Ford plays a DC Internal Affairs sergeant called Dutch. He loves his wife. Scott Thomas plays Kay, the daughter of a New Hampshire politician who is now running for Congress after her father's death. She has a good life with her lawyer-husband and teenaged daughter. Her husband and Dutch's wife are both killed in a plane crash. It turns out they were having an affair and were on their way to a romantic weekend together in Miami. Dutch, who takes his wife's cheating personally -- it's all about him -- can't let the matter go, and insists on improperly using his police authority to investigate the relationship between the two deceased adulterers. (Give this guy access to Flock cameras.) This brings him into conflict with Kay, who doesn't see the point in dredging up all the dirty secrets in dead people's lives. She follows Dutch to Miami to get him to see things from her perspective. "If they find out about your wife, that's gossip. If they find out about my husband, that's in the newspapers." A good point, but one that Dutch can't grasp.
Upon their return from Miami, Kay offers to drive Dutch to his home. When they get in the car we endure one of those ludicrous scenes where anger turns suddenly to lust. It was funny when Frazier did it on TV; it doesn't work at all here. But next thing you know they're hooking up at a cabin in the woods. Romance is in the air. Dutch then ruins it by returning to his obsession with his wife's affair. As a result of his questioning Kay, she learns that her husband not only had a love-nest apartment in DC but that he had also had an affair with her best friend Wendy (played by Bonnie Hunt). She, unlike Dutch, behaves as you would expect a person to.
Sidney Pollack has given us at least a dozen of the best films of my lifetime. This is clearly not one of them.
The FIFTH Annual Havasu Film Festival! will continue in a separate post, 'cuz I know y'all need a stopping place about now.
