The Havasu Film Festival

 One of the ways I've entertained myself, having been left to my own devices in this family-oriented desert getaway spot, is by taking advantage of my newly-acquired borrowing privileges from the Mohave County Library to take out DVDs to watch. As there were no other people's tastes and preferences to consider, I could get whatever I wanted. As it's a public library, there was no porn available. Fortunately I have internet of a sort, through a hot-spot device that is nearly as slow as my cellphone, and no particular need or desire for porn. So, there being only one vote in the electorate, controlled by me, I was limited only by the fact that I have no idea what most of the movies available are about, and I didn't want to spend the time that would have been needed to look each title up on Rotten Tomatoes. I played my hunches, confident that if I ended up with crap, I didn't have to watch it all the way through, and could go back to the library every day except Sunday for another try.

 At this point, I've played nine of the ten DVDs. The last I was saving to watch tonight with my wife when she got back from St George; but she's decided to stay over an extra day to do some hiking with her teammates. So I guess I'll be watching it alone. But first, I will indulge my own desire to pontificate on matters of taste and art, and slake your undoubted need, dear Reader, to know my humble opinions, given as they always are as if from On High.

 The absolute worst of the nine films is Reindeer Games, starring Ben Affleck. This is the story of a felon released from prison who impersonates his suddenly-dead cellmate so that he can sleep with that guy's pen-pal girlfriend. He doesn't realize that she and her gang of ill-bred friends have hatched a plot to use the dead cellmate's insider knowledge of a casino to rob the place. He gets beat up but good and goes along with the plan to keep from joining his cellmate in the Great Beyond. This film was so dull that I only watched about thirty minutes of it before deciding that life was too short to sit through so bad a movie. On a scale of 1 to 5 jalapeños, this film gets none.

 Next lowest on the entertainment scale is a meritless farce called Super Troopers. This waste of a grown-up's time was put together by a deservedly not-well-known comedy troupe called Broke Lizard: five guys, none of whom, it seems, has matured much past puberty, though they have enough schooling to be able to churn out a script of sorts. (It appears, though, that there are enough pubescent boys* buying DVDs to justify the creation of a Super Troopers 2 video, which I will not be looking for on my library shelves any time soon.) Suffice it to say the movie consists of fart jokes and childish pranks draped around a loosely-conceived plot made mostly of holes, so that the semi-tractors at the center of the low-jinks can be driven through them. I laughed once, more from surprise than amusement. There's a pretty girl, the one character with a measurable quantity of brains, to give the film enough of a hint of sexuality to draw in the masturbation-centered crowd that is this film's intended audience; and a shot of a fat guy in full-frontal nudity to turn them all off. If I had half a jalapeńo to award this film I'd be reluctant to do so.

*And not just pubescent boys, it turns out.

 Continuing from bottom to top of the entertainment scale, I come to Scarface, a film that illustrates director Brian De Palma's well-known obsession with screen violence. This is one of the few films in this festival that I had actually heard of, though I'd always thought it was about Al Capone. It's not. It's a remake of a 1932 film based on a 1929 novel that was loosely based on Capone, but this blood-soaked three-hour jaunt is about Tony Montana, a Cuban immigrant who comes over on the Mariel Boat Lift during the Carter administration, and makes his way to the top of Miami's burgeoning drug-dealing trade. Al Pacino is not at his best as the murderous coke-addled Montana, and Michelle Pfeiffer must have had nothing much going on in her life when she accepted the role of Elvira, the bored housewife of the drug dealer who gives Montana his first criminal job after he comes to the US. There isn't much to the Elvira character, and Pfeiffer delivers what there is and nothing more. On the other hand, Elvira does at least survive the end of the film, which literally no one else can say. I'll give it two jalapeños, mostly for the cars. At least De Palma had the decency not to shoot up the 60s-vintage white Rolls, which is the only other star to survive to the closing credits.

 Next are two mediocre films, one a disappointment, the other a pleasant surprise. The disappointment was Running With Scissors, a memoir about a teenaged boy coming of age in a truly warped household. His mother, a delusional poet played by Annette Bening, gives him away to her psychologist, who believes that thirteen-year-olds are mature enough to be considered adults. (This, it seems, was a real person. The character's name is changed but the real person actually believed that, and practiced in New England until being stripped of his licensure.) The boy's father, played by Alec Baldwin, has finally had enough of her irrational behaviour and left; he gives not a shit about the kid. Since the boy is already well along the mother's path by the time of the divorce, I can't really blame him. Naturally, the kid goes through hell and comes out looking like a 21st-Century New York version of normal; it helps that the script is taken from that character's In-Real-Life memory. For some reason -- could I have put faith in the blurbs on the DVD case? -- I expected more of this film. I didn't get it, so will grudgingly give it only three jalapeños; and some of that is just because it's so much shorter than Scarface.

 The other mediocre film was the pleasant surprise, Puerto Ricans in Paris. It stars Luís Guzman and Edgar García as a couple of New York police detectives with some success at sniffing out fashion fraud. The movie begins with an entertaining sequence that ends in the arrest of some guys selling knock-off Louis Vuitton bags. They get hired for a private job on the side, in Paris. They use their vacation time to go to the City of Light and stumble their way through the beau monde of fashion, failing to find their criminal until the last minute, when Garcia's character makes a mental leap (foreshadowed by the film's opening scenes) and saves the day. I expected mindless fluff; I got that, plus some well-designed cinematography, a few funny lines and even a smattering of character development; and Rosie Perez, playing the wife of García's character, is less irritating than usual. This film meets expectations where it was not expected to. Three jalapeños, and maybe a little bit more.

 Getting up there on the overall-quality scale is Rumor Has It, a 2005 rom-com starring Jennifer Aniston and ... I don't know; was there anybody else in that movie? There must have been.... (Aniston has that effect on me: if I had one of those lists that got Ross in so much trouble when he met Isabella Rossellini at Central Perk, it would just list Jennifer Aniston four times, plus Sandra Bullock, because she's kind of local. She lives in Austin, so I could actually meet her, theoretically.) Oh, yeah: Mark Ruffalo, back when he was playing romantic leads with all the nuance of a supermarket birthday cake, and Shirley Maclaine, who, having forgotten more than most actors ever know, still knows more than most of them about how to deliver a performance. Kevin Costner is in it, too. The movie takes the premise that The Graduate was based on real people in Pasadena, and those real people are the family of Aniston's character, who for some reason sets out to find out about it. The premise isn't entirely ludicrous; for all I know it may even be true (or, as they say in Hollywood, based on real events.) The characters aren't all made of cardboard, and the love-story aspect of the script isn't entirely slapped up. Plus there's just the one shot of Jennifer Aniston's side boob (or her double's; don't tell me if it is, I need to believe it's actually Jennifer Aniston) that reminds me of what it's like to be young. All in all it's a fun little movie, and I'll give it three and a half jalapeños, even without the side boob.

Next up is The Sum of All Fears. Yes, it's a stock Tom Clancy-type story of spies and military derring-do and heroism and Apple Pie and all, but it's a good story and a well-made movie, with a reasonably tight script that kept me guessing, good performances from the principals (Morgan Freeman and Ben Affleck) as well as the rest of the cast, and just a whole lot of action. The movie holds interest from beginning to end, and I was intrigued enough by it to even watch those gushing interviews about how the special effects were done. (You know: how the boss had such vision and the peons who did the actual work had such talent and the entire crew was just so imaginative. These interviews always sound like Donald Trump introducing his next victim to the country, only more sincere-sounding.) I give it four jalapeños.

I checked out A Simple Favor, mostly because I like Anna Kendrick and the title seemed vaguely familiar. In this black comedy, Kendrick's character, an oh-so-happy homemaker and mother who finds purpose in giving helpful hints in a chirpy vlog, gets wrapped up in the lives of her neighbours, a crazy woman and her husband. It's a fun story, with enough twists in the plot to keep you entertained, even if you can see them coming. She's dead, or is she? Will the good guys win? Who, exactly, are the good guys? It also stars Blake Lively, who I thought was a man but who very clearly isn't. This movie also gets four jalapeños from me.

 

 Finally, the best of the lot. No surprise: it's A River Runs Through It, with Brad Pitt, Craig Sheffer, and Tom Skerritt. I checked out this film because we had been talking about it a few days before, and all I could remember about it was that it involved fishing and Robert Redford. (He directed it.) It's a gorgeous movie, visually. The story is tragic but not unexpected, and the acting is believable, even if the script gets a little too on the nose at times. Even the child actors deliver quality performances (and one of them went on to be kind of famous, as did that Pitt guy). Nobody dies on screen in this period piece, which is more a human drama than any of the exciting action pictures I usually see in theaters (because movie choices there always involve at least two voters). Think The Waltons, but out West. The film isn't as overwhelmingly beautiful as I remembered it being from when it was new in theaters, but it's still a sumptuously told tale of real life in America at any point in our history. I give it four and a half jalapeños.