The Second Annual Havasu Film Festival, Part Two

For Part One of this post, please click here.

 So the sister-in-law has gone off home to Colorado, and the wife has gone off to play soccer in the Huntsman Games in Utah, leaving me alone to watch the movies I checked out of the Mohave County Library for this part of the festival. Since it's just me (Carly's here too, but she doesn't care for watching movies) I pick the film more or less at random. This year, it's films from the "C" shelf and films from the "N" shelf.

 Since I just pick the movies for this part of the festival at random, I expect them to be worse movies. I do this both because I don't want to take the time to look them up while at the library, and because I prefer bad movies for this write-up. It lets me channel Alexander Woollcott more effectively. So having now watched these films, I'm more than a little disappointed that they are on balance pretty good entertainment. Tant pis.

Congo

Science fiction is such a wonderfully flexible genre. It runs the gamut from entirely plausible variations on real life, like a disease run rampant around the world, to the most outlandish plots that rely entirely on the existence of evil, plus coincidental natural disasters; and then bleeds off into the realm of fantasy.

Congo is a movie that relies to some extent on evil as a motivation. Not in the central characters, mind you, but in Humankind in general. No, the main characters are motivated by greed, or by love, or by a sense of duty or honour. But evil, it turns out, is implicitly the characteristic of mankind that perverted the natural course of the world and hence produced the threat that causes mayhem in the movie. As that mayhem comes to its climax, natural catastrophe joins in, implying the will of the gods. Except that, as we’re talking about King Solomon’s mines, it must be the will of the one true God. But that is an uncomfortable thought for the film’s makers, so it goes unsaid.

At the beginning of this film we meet Dr Karen Ross, played by Laura Linney with a minimum of scenery-chewing despite some of the lines she’s given. The company she works for has a problem that requires a discreet rescue mission to central Africa, played by Costa Rica. We also meet Professor Peter Elliot and his protegé, a gorilla named Amy, played by two women taking turns in an ape suit. Professor Elliot and his team have developed a machine that can translate sign language into audible speech. They decide to return Amy to the wild with the vaguely expressed idea that she can teach all the other apes to understand sign language, essentially becoming a universal translator between humans and gorillas. Their trip hits a snag when the mysterious financial backer, played by Tim Curry with an eastern European accent and a generous coating of sleaze to provoke suspicion of his motives, admits to financial embarrassment. Fortunately for Professor Elliot, Dr Ross’s company has very deep pockets and will foot the bill. They hop on a plane and fly off to Tanzania, where they meet their guide, played by Ernie Hudson, who delivers the best performance in the film as the man with a plan. He smoothes over all difficulties by knowing the score in the perennial revolutionary chaos of that part of the world.

Remarkably, Amy’s home — and thus the destination for Professor Elliot — just happens to be in the same place where Dr Ross expects to conduct her search for survivors and other things. Who’d have ever have thunk it? It’s a small world, it turns out. The group stumbles upon signs of the people to be rescued in that vast tropical jungle, then discover that King Solomon’s mines, the objective of the eastern European financial backer, are just right there too. Wow! It’s an amazing coincidence! But yeah, it could happen, sure. And in discovering the mines, the group also discovers (a) what happened to the people Dr Ross came to rescue; (b) the treasure of King Solomon is still there; and (c) the treasure is guarded by vicious apes selected for viciousness by King Solomon’s mine-managers twenty-five hundred years ago, and they’ve apparently been waiting for 25 centuries for Dr Ross’s group to wander in. The apes are not vanquished, but modern human technology is enough to allow Dr Ross and a few of her friends to survive (though of course Professor Elliot’s survival is only assured by the intervention of Amy, whose lunch break ended just in time for her to order the bad gorillas to leave him alone). At this point the gods (or the one true God) express some displeasure with the whole thing by having a volcano that has been dormant for all those centuries and more spew its lava upon the ground, and collapse the mines, and raise great chunks of ground into the air where unfortunates can cling to the sides before falling into the bowels of the earth, and open great rifts in the earth to swallow people who don’t get star billing. It’s truly remarkable timing for a catastrophe of biblical proportions.

And yet the movie works. Of course there’s a happy ending for Amy, and of course Dr Ross demonstrates her own strong moral values, and of course the sleazy eastern European backer dies horribly off screen. Of course it’s all fantastically implausible from start to finish, but it’s a fun little idiotic movie done well enough to entertain. It was only after I’d watched, and was thinking about the guys in the ape suits, that I remembered all the jokes about Penny’s gorilla movie on The Big Bang Theory. I was satisfied.

No Clue

The best indicator I know of that I will enjoy a movie is that Rotten Tomatoes’ critical rating is at least fairly good, and that the audience’s rating is higher. There are reasons for this, but they don’t matter. This movie’s critical rating on RT isn’t good, but the audience’s rating is a bit higher, so it would have been a toss-up if I’d checked RT before selecting the movie from the library shelf. I don’t do that, though, because it’s too time-consuming, typing on a smartphone’s little screen, so I just take my chances from what's on the DVD case.

As it happens, I did like No Clue. Not a lot, but enough.

It stars Brent Butt, who apparently has had some success on Canadian television in programs not available to me. Too bad: he has an animated series called Corner Gas that sounds like a fun Canadian version of Family Guy, but with a unicorn and a sasquatch instead of a giant chicken.

In No Clue, which Butt also wrote and co-produced, he plays Leo, a small-time salesman of specialty advertising products who offices in a slightly run-down building across the hall from a private investigator. In walks Kyra, played by Amy Smart, who has been in a number of movies that probably never played in the proudly lame cultural backwater that is my home town. Kyra tells Leo her brother has disappeared and hires Leo to find him. Leo takes the job on, despite his clear stupidity, because, as he tells his idiot friend, “I’m a two and she’s a ten.” Comedy of mostly a low sort ensues, and in the end Leo almost gets it right. (Apropos of nothing, I notice that the video case cover has the same picture as the one above, except the guy who plays Leo's idiot friend is also pictured on it. Probably means nothing.)
I think this is the only movie I’ve ever seen that describes itself as “Canadian.” That alone lends it a very slight aura of the exotic, but let’s face it, Vancouver, Canada, where the movie takes place, is not that different from, say, Seattle or, I assume, Portland. And I don’t think anybody in this movie ends a sentence in “eh?” except in irony.

Norman

Norman Long, played by Dan Byrd, is your typical high-school senior: wracked by self-doubt, shy, often depressed, occasionally suicidal, he feels no one understands him, much less loves him. His mother was killed in a car wreck some years before the movie starts; his father, played by Richard Jenkins, is dying of cancer, is in constant pain and has pretty much given up on life. He’s waiting to die. I get that.

Norman’s English teacher volunteers him as the senior class’s speaker. His best friend nags him into auditioning for some kind of competitive dramatics team. Norman resists both, but in both cases gives in to pressure. And following the audition, Norman gets noticed by Emily vanCamp, a pretty blonde girl played by Emily Harris delivering the best performance of the film. She finds him quirkily interesting, and shows him a friendly warmth he’s not experienced before.

Meanwhile, Norman gets in a heated argument with his best friend (I can’t tell from the IMDb page who played him; probably Billy Lush, but that’s just a guess from the order of the credits) about next to nothing, and Norman, who has kept his father’s illness a secret from his friends, but conveniently has taken his father’s recent MRI scan results from the house that morning, claims to have cancer himself, just to win a silly argument. The friend is aghast and, as you’d expect, apologetic. Emily overhears the two talking about Norman's cancer and offers her sympathy.

By the end of the day the whole school has heard the story. Norman resists it at first, but gives up denying it because, well, that’s what he does. The rest of this dark coming-of-age comedy is about Norman’s journey from cancer victim to honest man. It’s a surprisingly interesting journey, as portrayed by a well-written script and accompanied by a distinctive but unobtrusive soundtrack. I assume it was all written for the film, because Spotify couldn’t identify the songs I tried it on, and I’m damned if I’m going to sit through all those closing credits for that. 

 

Not Suitable for Children

If I was still fifteen years old I probably would have thought Not Suitable For Children was a good movie, funny and cool. Cool because it’s Australian and has a lot of music in, I assume, the style that was popular in Australia in 2012, and raves and lots of drinking and drugs and some nudity and steamy scenes, and it’s about sex. At 15, I would have been as ignorant of reality as the lead character, Jonah, whose doctor told him he had testicular cancer but also (incorrectly) told him that he would be infertile after treatment. That sends Jonah on a quest to father a child in the few weeks remaining to him before surgery to remove the affected testicle. Jonah is a moron, with or without the doctor’s misleading advice, so the rest of the movie follows him in his quest. Naturally, every female he propositions turns him down, and sometimes it’s funny, but mostly it’s just stupid.

One of his roommates, a girl named Stevie, who seemed until the midpoint of the film to be the adult in the room, decides that, gee whiz, she’d like to have a baby herself, and so she makes an elaborate agreement with Jonah — sort of like Sheldon Cooper’s Roommate Agreement on The Big Bang Theory, full of qualifications and limitations — and they go to the drugstore for a syringe for the application of Jonah’s upcoming deposit. They break the syringe, and by then the drugstore is closed so they decide to do things the normal way. Thus the sex scenes and nudity. Oddly, after four days of rutting like rabbits on speed, they fall in love. Then they suddenly grow up and come to their senses.

I don’t believe I laughed even once. I’m not fifteen anymore. 

The Courier

I got lucky at least once when I was browsing through the shelves at the Mohave County Library: I selected a 2021 film called The Courier, mostly because it starred Benedict Cumberbatch, who is widely regarded as a great actor. (I share that opinion to some degree.) This movie had the misfortune to come out right at the start of the Covid pandemic, when nobody dared go to a theater, and it lost a fortune upon its release. But unlike most of the other movies I checked out for this year’s Havasu Film Festival, it really is a high-quality film.

In it, Cumberbatch plays Greville Wayne, who was a real person. In the early 1960s, at the height of the Cold War, Wayne was a salesman in the UK who often dealt in Eastern Bloc countries. He is known slightly by a spymaster at MI6, the British spy agency, who enlists Wayne as a courier to contact Oleg Penkovsky, a highly placed Russian official who has managed to convey to the Western spy agencies the desire to spy for them. (Merab Ninidze portrays Penkovsky, who also was a real person.) Against his better judgment, Wayne agrees, and ends up forming a friendship with Penkovsky. This leads him to try to get Penkovsky out of Russia, despite the insistence of both MI6 and the CIA that it can’t be done.

The film presents a stark contrast of sorts between the West, represented here by the United Kingdom, and the Russian-dominated East. While neither man lives in anything approaching luxury (not too surprising for a British salesman approaching middle age, but kind of surprising for a highly-placed Soviet apparatchik — or maybe my idea of “luxury” doesn’t take sufficient account of the widespread deprivation in both countries at the time; I, after all, am a child of the American 1960s, when we had plenty of just about everything), at least Wayne is free to think, say and do what he likes. Penkovsky is not.

The movie is tense, well-made and thoroughly engrossing, If I had to quibble with anything (and of course I do, or I wouldn’t be me) it’d be with Wayne’s wife, who jumps to the conclusion that Wayne is cheating on her when the pressure of his position makes him increasingly testy. Her reasoning is that (a) he’s cheated once before, and (b) he’s not a good liar. I can understand her arriving at her suspicion, but I resent her acting upon it by throwing him out of their apartment without any real evidence. 

No Man's Land

No Man’s Land is something of a vanity project for one Jake Allyn: he wrote it, produced it (along with four other people, two of whom are named Allyn … I suspect they’re related to him), and stars in it. One of those four co-producers, another Allyn, directed it. Somehow this family venture attracted two well-known performers to participate: Andie McDowell as the main guy’s mom — not a big part, but much more than a cameo — and George Lopez, first famous for stand-up comedy, then television comedy, now appearing in a dramatic role as an honest Texas Ranger. (Of course there are!)

Allyn stars as Jackson, second son of a ranching family barely hanging on along the Rio Grande, between the river and the border fence. (The title, according to the film’s intro, references that strip of land where the fence is at some distance to the river, but really it’s more a metaphor than that.)  Jackson has a shot at a contract with the New York Yankees coming up — everything’s arranged but the signing of contracts — but he’s really more interested in staying home on his beloved ranch with his beloved family. The family’s ranch fronts on the river, and so is a through-route for illegal immigrants (no matter what sensitive term you use for them). These nightly visitors cut fences, thereby occasioning potentially serious financial losses for the ranch family, and of course disturb the dogs, which in turn disturbs the ranchers.

Meanwhile, across the river somewhere in Mexico, there are a couple of people who guide immigrants across into the United States. One, called el pastor (the shepherd) is set up to be a good guy. The other, who may or may not have a name, is a younger thuggish-looking skinny guy with blond-dyed hair and all kinds of tattoos and piercings to make clear that he’s a Bad Guy. He is also a former customer of el pastor, but the guidance taken on board was only of the physical kind. No one is sad when he dies at the end. He is an insult to actual coyotes.

So as the story begins, el pastor leads a small group across the family ranch in the night. The group includes his own son. Dogs bark, the paterfamilias rushes out to deal with it, along with weapons and his older son Luke; Jackson, the baseball star-to-be, is told not to go. Of course he disobeys, blundering into a tense confrontation that results in him accidentally shooting el pastor’s teenaged son. The law, in the shape of the Texas Ranger, shows up; daddy takes the blame. Luke is also wounded and is taken to hospital, while the immigrants are left to go back to Mexico, or whatever.

The Ranger figures out easily that Jackson is the one who actually pulled the particular trigger that cost the boy his life. I’m not clear on how he figures this out, but frankly I couldn’t tell who did what in the confrontation in the night in the first place. Anyway, the Ranger goes to collect Jackson in his pickup truck. Jackson has been out looking over the site of the confrontation and has found the dead boy’s wallet, with some kind of identification in it. When the Ranger arrives, Jackson, who is on horseback, rides away, and we have another low-speed chase featuring a white (and brown) bronco. This time the horse gets to the river. The Ranger stops his truck and waits for Jackson to admit defeat, but Jackson has the brilliant idea to ride through the river into Mexico, like that was going to accomplish something.

The rest of the film follows Jackson on his adventure in Mexico. He first encounters the Bad Guy, but gets away, then gets picked up by some local ranchers who hire him as a laborer. He makes himself their hero by breaking a horse that had otherwise resisted all efforts in that direction. Then he encounters the Bad Guy again and runs off to Guanajuato, where the dead boy was from, having formed a plan of returning the boy’s wallet. Meanwhile, el pastor is seeking revenge and has teamed up with the Bad Guy. They pursue the hero onto a bus to Guanajuato, then chase him through the woods, where they lose him. But they learn from another passenger that Guanajuato was his destination. Ignoring the fact that Guanajuato is a sizeable city, they head down there. (El pastor is from Guanajuato anyway, and has a funeral to attend to besides, so it could be his reason for going is less about revenge; but the Bad Guy has no other real reason to go, unless perhaps he’s a fan of the city’s unrivaled old-world charm, like me. But I find that unlikely.)

By now the Ranger has figured out that Jackson is still in Mexico, and manages to trace his progress to Guanajuato, where he gets the local policias to arrest the hero. Things don’t go smoothly, and he ends up pursuing Jackson through the streets of the city, until the ultimate confrontation when everything is neatly resolved.

Here’s my main complaint about a movie that is actually quite entertaining: the entire story depends on the unbelievable ignorance of the ranch family. How anyone can live that close to the international border with Mexico for long enough to raise two adult sons without learning any useful amount of Spanish beyond “gracias” is logically impossible unless these ranchers are the stupidest four people not in elected office. If they’d had any useful knowledge of the language that probably 80 to 90 percent of the people around them are speaking, there would have been a relatively calm confrontation that night on the ranch, with the migrants either being turned back or turned over to the Ranger, who is conveniently sitting in his truck not far off, listening to Spanish language instructional recordings. (The character claims not to speak Spanish, yet he uses it well enough when he pursues Jackson through Mexico.) (For that matter, when the need arises, Jackson has no problem using Spanish to eloquently insult someone, in order to start a diversionary fight that allows him to escape the Ranger. Maybe he’s not as ignorant as he claims to be, either.)

Jackson is changed by his sojourn in Mexico, and develops a deeper understanding of that country’s land and people than he ever had before. The young man, like his whole family, apparently was entirely lacking in curiosity prior to this trauma. No other minds are likely to be changed by this film, but I’m just happy that it was actually filmed in the city of Guanajuato (and San Miguel de Allende), but mostly in parts that I’m not familiar with. Still, you can bet I paid close attention to the scenery, hoping to recognise something in it. I did not.

The Constant Gardener

In watching The Constant Gardener, a 2005 “gripping suspense-thriller” starring Ralph Feinnes and Rachel Weisz, and based upon a book by famous spy novelist John leCarré, I was prompted, eventually, to define for myself the difference between “dull” and “slow.” This movie is slow, but it manages to not be dull. I’m not sure I can articulate the distinction, except to say that, even when nothing is happening in this movie, something is going on.

Feinnes plays Justin Quayle, a mid-level British diplomat posted to Nairobi, Kenya in some capacity. Weisz plays Tessa, a social activist who is not limited to any one cause. In a flashback to the pair’s meeting, where Quayle is reading a very dull lecture written by someone who was unable to attend the event, Tessa launches into a series of challenges to Quayle that runs so long and gets so rude that all the other attendees get up and leave. When it’s just the two of them left in the room, hormones take over -- like in a scene from Frasier, whose title character famously loves, shall we say, a challenge -- and the two go for a drink and one thing leads to another and there’s a bit of one of those sex scenes where the camera is so close and the cuts come so quickly that you can’t tell really what you’re looking at, but you know it's human bodies writhing. The sounds tell you if you don’t already have it figured out.

In the next scene, an indeterminate time later, they’re married and in Kenya and Tessa is dead. Justin, who spends all his time tending to his plants, whether in the yard or in the house or in the office, is being told by a colleague, Sandy, that two bodies have been found; one seems to be Tessa, but the other is some unknown black guy (horrors!), but not the colleague she had gone off with.

The powers that be, whether Kenyan or British, seem uninterested in investigating the matter. They put it down to banditry, always a good excuse for not doing their jobs. Justin, unconvinced, begins to investigate himself, and the plot is underway like Margerie Glacier. It features post-imperial imperialism, corporate murder, greed, abuse of the poor people of Africa, the impotence of authorities (Kenyan and UN — the British are only impotent when it suits them) and a love story centered on intentional deception. It’s all very well done, with fascinating scenery (including the slums of Nairobi and other places) and well-drawn characters, and it’ll keep you guessing until the last two scenes: one in which the bad guy gets his comeuppance, and one that explains just how that came about. This film is slow, but it’s not dull.

Norman, the Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer

In the last film of this year’s Havasu Film Festival, Richard Gere plays Norman Oppenheimer in the 2016 movie Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer. His character is a pathetic liar who tries to parlay slight acquaintances into major deals, hoping to collect finder's fees and other cuts of big payoffs At the start of the movie we know nothing about him; by its end, we know only that he has a serious peanut allergy and a desperate longing for a Big Score.

Norman is persistent to a point well beyond irritating, and he is so full of lies he makes Donald Trump seem indifferent honest. “My wife used to babysit him. We’re very close.” "I've got a guy, he's willing to match your donations up to seven million." He mischaracterizes things to make himself seem connected, and important; after being thrown out of a private dinner party at a heavy hitter’s home, he tells someone “I just came from [his] house, there was a dinner party.” Names are dropped as though Norman knows all the players. It’s an irony that his one completely true statement in the film causes his downfall, when he tells a woman he meets on a train how he met the man who is now Israel’s prime minister: “I bought him some shoes.” That leads to an investigation of corruption, which leads Norman to the brink, where he finally achieves a Big Score.

I found it hard to sit through this movie. The film’s first release was in September 2016, when it looked like The Donald couldn't get elected dogcatcher. Maybe the film was meant to be an amusing look at the sleaze he inhabited, but it just felt like I was watching two hours of back-to-back Trump rallies, half of them in Hebrew. I got the feeling I’m supposed to feel sorry for the harmless, inconsequential Norman, with his apocryphal wife and daughter and his has-been airs, but I don’t. Despite Gere's fine performance I felt nothing beyond a sad sense that Norman made his own bed, and some relief when he at last laid down in it.