The Second Annual Havasu Film Festival, Part One

Having returned to Lake Havasu City for the umpteenth time, and being once again required to spend many consecutive days with little of interest to do, I found myself a bit of distraction last year by watching DVDs of old movies borrowed from the local branch of the Mohave County Public Library. This year, we started with a number of films watched with my family members (my wife and her sister); once they were gone I had five days on my own in the desert (a description that is both physically and culturally apt). The films watched with other people are Part One of this post; the films I watched alone are Part Two. The difference between the two groups of films is that my wife and her sister are choosy about which films to check out; they look for things they have enjoyed in the past, or think they will enjoy on first viewing. I tend to be more random in my selections: I go to a portion of the shelving in the library and just take whatever looks at all interesting for any reason, based solely on the covers’ content. As a result the films reviewed in Part One are probably better than the ones in Part Two.

I should mention that there are a few films that I didn’t watch. We had Puss in Boots: the Last Wish, an animated sequel that, almost inevitably, wasn’t as good as the first film. I’d seen it before and knew that going in, but still intended to watch it all the way through, if only so I could include it in this blog post. But I was too tired — I don’t know why, as, other than having gone for a short walk in the morning around Carly’s Island, at the edge of the lake, and doing a little geocaching during the afternoon, and cooking dinner (pickleburgers and cabbage with tomato, not a particularly challenging menu) I’d done nothing in the way of exertion all day. So I went to bed early. I don’t feel like I missed anything.

The other one that I didn’t make it through was Les Miserables, starring Hugh Jackman, Russell Crowe and Anne Hathaway. I’d read the book many, many years ago in the last century, so I knew the story and knew it was a great piece of fiction. I also know that it’s a much-lauded stageplay that ran for ages on Broadway. So I was looking forward to the film with high expectation. It started off with a musical number sung by prisoners dragging a computer-generated warship into a drydock, and clearly little expense had been spared on special visual effects; but it didn’t take long for me to realize that this was not, as I’d been led to believe, a musical, but a fucking opera. Much as I respect tradition, and despite the hundreds of years of tradition that opera as a medium brings to culture, I won’t sit through it. The songs themselves are okay, but the actors’ lapsing into sung dialogue in fitful and monotonous bits of tune is an affectation up with which I will not put. I was fooled once into sitting through a stage production of Porgy and Bess, having thought that was a musical when I bought the tickets, and I hated it. I won’t suffer such an imposition again. (Plus, in this case, it was obvious that at least one of the major characters was clearly chosen for the name rather than the talent; I haven’t heard so much off-key singing since the last time I attended karaoke.)

Part I: Family Film Fest

The film festival started off with an entry of known quality: The Greatest Showman, starring Hugh Jackman (who can sing, and well) a musical -- a real musical -- that I’d already seen all the way through at least twice, and one that I enjoy enough that, if I find it playing on television, I’ll always stop surfing channels to watch it. It may not be the best movie of all time, and will probably never make the list of 100 Best Anything, but it’s a good romantic story, with good performances and very good singing by literally every member of the cast. And the music is great; I like it enough to have bought the soundtrack album and incorporated some of the songs into the mix that I play in my cars, especially a moving piece called Never Enough. I don’t know how closely the plot hews to fact about the historical character P.T. Barnum, but who cares? This is an excellent show, even the third time through.

There are a few actors that I will always watch: Jennifer Aniston and Julia Roberts are top of that list, but there are quite a few others on it as well. One is Jodie Foster. She stars in Stealing Home, a somewhat predictable drama also starring Mark Harmon. I can’t watch him without seeing Leroy Jethro Gibbs, his character on NCIS for more than two decades, even though I was a third of the way through this film before I realized it was him. Stealing Home is a sweet little movie, set among well-to-do Philadelphia suburbanites, partly in the early 1960s and partly in the 1980s, in which Gibbs’s character — sorry, Harmon’s character — has to deal with the ashes of his dear friend, Jodie Foster’s character, who has committed suicide. Most of the movie is flashbacks illuminating her character, and to a lesser extent Harmon’s. I can summarize his in a sentence: he’s a good boy growing up to be a man troubled, for unexplained reasons, by the death of his father. I suppose some people just lose their focus when a tragedy like that happens, but his character didn’t seem the type to be so strongly affected for so long. I consider it insufficient motivation, one of the weaknesses of this movie.(The half-hearted attempt to make baseball a meaningful metaphor in the film is another.) On the other hand, the development of the relationship between the characters played by Foster and Harmon is completely believable, and if we don’t really know how far it extended, we are satisfied that it was, in every way, plausible and honourable. And, of course, the cars from the ‘50s and ‘60s are way cool, except for one ugly red station wagon.

Another actor I’ll always want to watch is Antonio Banderas (who voices the title character in Puss in Boots, by the way). He stars with Salma Hayek in Desperado, one of the sequels to Robert Rodriguez’s 1992 film El Mariachi. Rodriguez is from my home town and went to college at my alma mater, so I suppose I should feel some slight kinship with him for that; but I don’t. I don’t know him or anybody who does, so other than the pride I feel whenever San’tonio gets a mention in the press, there’s nothing. (Wikipedia says he’s a close friend of Quentin Tarantino, so if we’re playing Kevin Bacon, that puts me 4 degrees away from Rodriguez, and more importantly, 5 away from Banderas. And Hayek, which is equally titillating in a different way. (And I bet Tarantino, who has a small part in Desperado, knows both Banderas and Hayek. That would put me only 4 degrees away from both of them. Ooh! Now I’m excited.)

Anyway, Banderas plays a nameless former mariachi musician who has embarked on a hobby of murdering drug dealers in Mexico. At the start of this film, he arrives in a stereotypical town in northern Mexico to track down “the last one.” The film follows him for the few days he’s there. There’s some humour, mostly provided by the over-the-top violence and the cluelessness of some of the minor characters, but some of it is written into the script, apparently on purpose. The climax of the movie comes when the mariachi finally confronts the “last” drug lord. All in all, an enjoyable movie to watch; kind of like one of those Marvel Comics movies, but with a sex scene for the grown-ups in the audience.

Morgan Freeman may not be one of those actors I will always watch, but he is one that always delivers in his signature style. He stars with Monica Potter, who is unknown to me, in Along Came a Spider, a police-procedural of sorts from 2001. My only complaint about this movie is that it really should be maybe 20 minutes longer, because the film seems to rush through some complicated twists near the end. I get the feeling that they kept it to 103 minutes so that there was room to stuff in lots of commercials when it gets a 2-hour slot on cable. I feel cheated, like in that episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation called “The Game,” where everything is resolved suddenly and without warning when (spoiler alert) Data comes in with a light. It kind of ruins all the tension built up gradually over the course of the film, when Freeman’s character, Dr Cross, almost miraculously figures out what character X and character Y are up to, deception-wise, and acts without taking us along. He does what cops do, and then just explains it to us as he’s doing it. I think if the director (Lee Tamahori) had taken as much care with the last quarter of the movie’s plot as he did with the first three quarters, it would have been a much better movie.

He probably blames the studio, and he’s probably right. But still, it’s his name on the film.

Midnight Run rarely makes it onto lists of Robert deNiro’s best films, but that’s probably because he’s been in so many great ones. In this 1988 buddy film, he plays a former policeman, Jack Walsh, who had to leave his home in Chicago because he wouldn’t be bent, and took up bounty hunting for a living. He gets hired to bring in a Robin-Hood embezzler, “the Duke,” played by Charles Grodin, and the movie deals with the pair’s adventures in crossing the country, pursued by the FBI, a crime boss and a rival bounty hunter, from New York to Los Angeles*, where Walsh means to turn the Duke over to the bondsman who hired him. Despite the geographically challenged location shooting (what’s that mountain in the background in “Amarillo, Texas”? And why does the downtown area of a city of a hundred and sixty thousand people not rise higher than two stories?) the resulting film is a thoroughly enjoyable piece of work. If I had to say, I’d allocate most of the credit for that to Grodin. DeNiro’s character is exactly what we’d expect from him and from a hard-boiled cop; Grodin’s character is nothing like what we’d expect of an embezzling accountant. 

*Why is it always New York and Los Angeles? How come nobody in the movies ever crosses the country from Brownsville to Duluth? Or even from Seattle to Miama? 

Begin Again, from 2013, was a slight surprise. While Keira Knightly makes my list of favourite actors, Mark Ruffalo does not. And since both their names were covered over by the library’s label, I didn’t know they were in the movie until the opening credits came up. More significantly, Ruffalo did a creditable job of portraying Dan, an almost-washed-up music-biz guy who happens to be in the bar when Gretta, Knightly’s singer/songwriter character, is badgered into performing one of her songs. The plot is predictable from there on, including Dan’s renewed relationship with his ex-wife and teenage daughter (thanks to Gretta’s sensible influence) and Gretta’s relationship with her rock-star boyfriend Dave (played by Adam Levine, who actually is more a rock star than an actor). It’s saved from provoking complete ennui by the interesting telling of the opening of the story, before the two characters meet. The music is, to my aging ear, somewhat insipid but I very much enjoyed the outdoor recording sessions, as much for the scenery as for the performances. The slight surprise of the movie came from the fact that Knightly actually can sing, and learned to play some guitar. (She sounds a lot like Dido.) I didn’t understand exactly what happened at the very end of the film, but I don’t care. (And, on the plus side, Ruffalo’s character Dan drives what looks to me like a mid-60s vintage Jaguar Mk X saloon. Très cool.)

Another surprise was a little movie from last year called Emily the Criminal, starring nobody I’d ever heard of (although Gina Gershon has one scene late-on in the film; I’ve heard of her but know nothing about her beyond her name). It involves a young woman, Emily, played by Aubrey Plaza (who’s been in a lot of TV shows that I never watched and a lot of movies I’ve never heard of), who falls in with some credit-card scammers, and thereafter leads a life of crime because of society’s stupid rules: she can’t get a real job because (1) she lies about her record in a job interview and they know they can’t trust her with the sensitive information the job deals with, and (2) she’s unwilling to take an unpaid internship her idiot friend arranged for her. That second one, I thought, was a good reason, and such internships should be paid. That job interview is one of the highlights of the film. Emily is a pragmatic, decisive young woman, and despite her moral weaknesses (ones that the movie would have us believe are forced on her) I found myself feeling that (1) everyone got what they deserved, and (2) Emily’s kind of stupid. I say that, not because of the character’s irritating Noo Joisey accent, which does make people sound kind of stupid, but because, when her mentor sets her on her way to criminal success, he gives her several “rules” born of his experience, and she ignores them, each time leading her to the next pothole in her road of life. In the end her pragmatism sees her through and she achieves her dream.

Next up was a movie that all of us had heard of and two of us had seen, You’ve Got Mail, starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, a box-office hit from the end of the last century. I thought I’d seen it too, but apparently I was thinking of some other Hanks/Ryan rom-com from the late ‘90s. This one is a remake of a Jimmy Stewart-Margaret Sullivan movie from 1940, which in turn is based on a Hungarian play from the 1930s. The playwright, Myklos Laszlo, is a pretty big name; the director of the Stewart-Sullivan film (The Shop Around the Corner) was Ernst Lubitsch, also a big name. Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks are still big names, and the co-writer (along with her sister Delia) and director of this movie, Nora Ephron, was a big name right to the end of her life as well. The movie has great bones, and a timeless story.

In this incarnation, Hanks plays the scion of a big-box-bookstore family à la Barnes & Noble, while Ryan is the daughter and successor of a woman who opened a children’s bookstore in the 1950s. Hanks’ family is opening a bookstore around the corner from Ryan’s shop and drives her out of business. The two hate each other IRL; at the same time they are corresponding anonymously in an AOL chatroom and falling in love. (In the Jimmy Stewart version, they write letters, so the pace of the story in You’ve Got Mail is much faster.) When the anonymous correspondents arrange to meet, Hanks realizes Ryan is his correspondent, while Ryan is not privy to similar knowledge about Hanks. Hanks, having identified his feelings for Ryan, manipulates her into falling in love with him before he reveals himself to be her chat-room correspondent. (In the ‘90s, this sort of manipulation between the sexes was acceptable, at least to Ryan’s character. Today it's only acceptable if it's successful, otherwise it's a lawsuit or online harassment.)

Anyway, the movie is a good story well told, with a script that is as sophisticated and witty as anything Nora Ephron ever did, I think. Ryan and Hanks both turn in top performances, as do other well-known members of the cast (Maureen Stapleton, Dave Chappelle, Greg Kinnear and Dabney Coleman). And it doesn’t seem at all dated, 25 years down the line, except for the price of coffee at Starbucks, and the dial-up modem.

The ‘90s sophistication of You’ve Got Mail gave way to the ‘50s sophistication of Carol, a lesbian love story made in 2015 but set in 1952-53, the time frame of the underlying novel, The Price of Salt by then-well-known writer Patricia Highsmith. I resisted seeing this film, as I’m pretty tired of the modern artistic obsession with alternative lifestyles; but I’m glad I did. Despite the subdued, almost somnolent tone of the film, the two stars, Cate Blanchett (“Carol”) and Rooney Mara (“Therese”) give excellent performances, and the 1950s setting gives the film a layer of interest I enjoy: the clothes, the music, the big-city ambience, and especially (of course) the gigantic cars. Carol drives a Packard, and I could almost feel the squishy suspension, weak brakes, loose steering and fuzzy seat covering as the two women take a road trip west. In any case, the film seems to me to be not so much about the developing lesbian relationship as about the social attitudes toward such things, as a counterpoint to our own much more (generally) accepting outlook. In the 1950s world of this movie, homosexuality was a psychological aberration that could be dealt with by psychotherapy. Most of us can laugh at that now, but we can also recognise that, then as now, most people just didn’t really give a shit about how other people ordered their private lives.

The next film we watched was an action movie from 15 years ago, a very complex tale about a terrorist attack in Spain. The action in the movie takes place over the course of about twenty minutes, but is told and re-told from various points of view until, at the end, the audience understands what happened, who did it, and how. The acting in Vantage Point is second-rate, despite being the work of some fairly heavy Hollywood hitters: Dennis Quaid as the damaged-goods Secret Service guy who triumphs in the end; Forest Whitaker as a tourist with a camera; Sigourney Weaver as a hard-boiled news director; and William Hurt as the world-weary target of the operation. All of their roles could have been filled as capably by unknown actors, with no loss of storytelling quality.

Vantage Point succeeds as entertainment not because of the acting -- or lack thereof -- but because of the film’s technique. Almost nothing that happens in the early part of the movie makes sense, but in the end it all makes sense. The way the story is told is, to my way of thinking, a remarkably clever narrative tour de force.

Consider Ambrose Bierce: he was, for his entire professional life, the second-best writer in America’s literary pantheon, behind Samuel Clemens. He probably knew that. He was a much more cerebral writer than Clemens, experimenting with fiction’s structure and form, which made his work a more rewarding academic subject than Clemens’s, but less popular. Both wrote with a sense of humour, but where Clemens was straightforward, Bierce was darker and more cynical. At the end of his life, (Clemens having already died) Bierce went off to Mexico to lose himself quite literally in that country’s revolution: he disappeared, having last been seen in the state of Chihuahua, and no trace of him has ever been found.

That event, that mystery, is not at the heart of Old Gringo; it’s just the setting for the story, which revolves around the relationship between a naïve American woman and a general in Pancho Villa’s revolutionary army. The American woman, played by Jane Fonda, is Harriet Winslow, a spinster who has been living, with her mother, on the pension provided to dependents of soldiers who died in the Spanish-American war. Her father isn’t actually dead, though; he just met a woman in Cuba and decided to stay there, but his “widow” and daughter continue drawing the pension and visiting an empty grave to sell the ruse. Harriet has a moment of self-actualization, however, and decides to take hold of her life and step outside her comfort zone. She takes a job as governess to a wealthy Mexican family, and soon finds herself in the city of Chihuahua. Ambrose Bierce, played by Gregory Peck, just happens to be at the same hotel, and is on his way to the same hacienda. Arriving at the same time is the revolutionary army, led by General Tomás Arroyo, played by Jimmy Smits. The family Harriet was supposed to work for has already fled, and she gets caught up in the battle for the hacienda. After that, there are two story lines: one involves Harriet’s romantic relationship with General Arroyo, and the other involves Bierce’s quest for "a pretty good way to depart this life." There is enough violence and sex in the film to keep it from being a total eye-roller, but it’s essentially a confused diatribe about truth and justice and the relative merits of the American and Mexican cultures. There’s only one automobile in the movie, so that doesn’t add anything.

You would think that with Jane Fonda and Gregory Peck in the cast, there’d be some good acting. Sadly, no: Fonda was fit enough at 50 to not seem an odd pairing for the 30-ish Smits, but her undeniable acting skills got left behind when she went off to film. Gregory Peck, one of the greatest actors in the post-war history of American film, seems oddly uninterested in portraying his famous character as anything other than an older Atticus Finch. That leaves Smits to carry the film. He seems capable of doing that, but unfortunately for him (and us) the script puts only fills his mouth with clichéed revolutionary speeches, and his character is too much defined by his origin story.

The penultimate film of this first part of the Second Annual Havasu Film Festival is the 1989 movie Valmont, starring Colin Firth and Annette Benning. Set in pre-revolutionary France, this is an adaptation of sorts of the 1782 epistolary novel Les liaisons dangereuses, and imagines the lurid manipulations of two hedonistic rivals, the Count of Valmont and the Marquise of Mertreuil. Let me save you the trouble of watching this dull period piece: he wins their bet, she won’t pay up, he dies. There, now, you have no reason to bother with this utterly disappointing and slow-moving drivel, unless you’re just obsessed with Hollywood's take on fashions of the Ancien Régime. Like this brief description of the film, it assumes you already know who these people are and what they’re about. You haven’t missed a thing, and there are no cars in the movie at all, it being the 1700s.

And finally, there is the third installment of Robert Rodriguez’s Mexican trilogy: Once Upon a Time in Mexico, in which Antonio Banderas and Salma Hayek star again as El Mariachi and his girlfriend. Hayek has very little to do in the film, and really only appears at the beginning and the end; the rest of it consists of more satirical violence, as El Mariachi gets caught up in a ludicrous assassination plot. It’s amusing in a blood-soaked way, but if there’s a story worthy of a trilogy of feature films is there, it seems to have ended in the second movie, Desperado (see above); this one seems only to have been made because Johnny Depp wanted to play a CIA agent who gets his eyes ripped out but still never misses when he shoots, and because there was a buck to be made.