An Early Christmas

 The very idea of going to see a Christmas movie more than a week before Thanksgiving offends me. But we went anyway, because it's not that often that my wife agrees to go see a movie absent a frustrated demand from me, and that was what she agreed to see. I blame the studio (MGM, now an Amazon creature) for the early release, and will be pissed off at them for all time and will exact some vague kind of retribution at a future date.

 The movie is Red One, a vehicle for Dwayne Johnson and also starring Lucy Liu and Chris Evans -- who I was surprised to find wasn't the new Captain Kirk (that's another Chris) but the old Captain America. I don't have a scorecard and don't really care. I know Johnson from the Jumanji movies and Liu from the Sherlock Holmes series on TV a decade ago; the rest of these people are just actors celebrated or not. One of them may be an insurance company flack. It doesn't matter. 

 It's a simple story: Santa Claus has been kidnapped right before Christmas. Johnson, his head of security, has to get him back before anyone notices. Lucy Liu represents a benificent governmental agency; Chris Evans is the malefactor whose soul will be saved in the course of saving Christmas. No one's enjoyment of this film will be spoiled when I tell you that there's a happy ending. And no one will be surprised to learn that the heavy handed messages of this movie are too on-the-nose for adults, while the language is surprisingly vulgar for a movie ostensibly suitable for children.

 I cried first. The film starts out by evoking every childhood memory of Christmas, and it does a thorough job of that. Then I laughed, many, many times. This film tugs on every heart string and strokes every funny bone. I anticipate that, once it's spent a few years streaming exclusively on Amazon Prime TV, which I will never spend money on, it'll be a holiday standard in almost every household for the next two or three decades, by which point it will have become another It's A Wonderful Life: a classic movie that everybody knows about and occasionally actually re-watches. By then the special effects that today seem so amazingly realistic will probably seem as dated as Mr Potter's wheelchair.

 Now I need to review my stock portfolio, because if any company I own an interest in makes macaroons, I need to dump those shares. (If you've seen the movie, you'll understand.)

After seeing this movie at a Tuesday evening matinee, we went for dinner to an Italian place in loopland that I've been wanting to try for a long time. Read my review of that place on The Curmudgeon-About-Town.

Third Annual Havasu Film Festival: Recap

 There were a lot of films in this year's festival, as you can tell by the fact that the reviews filled so many separate posts.  This is likely a measure of how bored I was at being in Havasu to begin with. (Note, for example, that when company came for the weekend, we only watched one movie; more than half of them I watched alone over the course of five days.) So I went back through them to rate them, best to worst, in case you take this evaluation at all seriously (you really shouldn't), or just want to see which are the real crap IMHO.

 

 

The Best: Works of Art

   All Is True
   The Artist

   Notes on a Scandal

   Selma 

   Spy Game

 

Good Enough to Watch Again

   All is Bright 

   All Quiet on the Western Front

   Along Came Polly

   Becoming Jane

   Going the Distance 

   The Good House 

   The Miracle Club

   Next Goal Wins 

   Quartet

   What If

   Wild Card

   Wild Mountain Thyme 

   Without Remorse 

   Yesterday

   The Young Victoria

 

Some Good Qualities

   The Good Shepherd

   Goodbye, Christopher Robin 

   Gosford Park

   The Song of Names

   Spontaneous

   White Fang

   Will Penny 

   The World's Fastest Indian

 

Isn't There Anything Else On?

   Allied

   The American

   American Animals

   And While We Were Here

   The Good Catholic

 

Don't Even Go There

   Fantastic Mr Fox

   The Good German

   Goon 

   Hook

   Wilson

The Third Annual Havasu Film Festival, part six!

  This is a continuation of the previous post. It hasn't quite gotten out of hand, and this, I promise, is the last instalment.  I recommend you read them all in order. Here's a link to the first part.

Walt Disney Pictures

33. White Fang

Starring Ethan Hawke and Klaus Maria Brandauer

Directed by Randal Kleiser

Released: 1991

 You could probably guess that when I was growing up in the 1960s or '70s, the Jack London adventure novel on which this movie is based would have been a favourite of mine. It was (along with Savage Sam and Call of the Wild -- all involving dogs). When this movie came out, I was too old to go see it in the theater, and had no young children around to use as an excuse for my own attendance. So I had never seen it, and jumped at the chance to include it in this year's film festival, where there are no standards.

 It's a Disney movie, both literally and metaphorically; meaning that there is no subtext that would go over the heads of young viewers. (I know, a lot of the earlier animated Disney movies -- I never saw the later ones -- have such subtext, but that's not what "it's a Disney movie" means.) The novel, as far as I recall (and it's been more than 50 years since I read it, so I could be wrong) has no subtext either, so it's not like the movie is a sanitized version of the book. As far as I can recall, the movie tracks the book pretty well. 

 In this film, Ethan Hawke, in his first leading role, plays Jack Conroy, whose father died after staking a claim in the Klondike. Jack has come to take up his inheritance. He meets his father's good friend Alex (Klaus Maria Brandauer), who gets sucked into taking the boy up to the claim in an area that is remote even by Yukon standards, then gets sucked into teaching him how to mine for gold. Along the way they encounter Mia Tuk, or White Fang, a wolf-dog hybrid who has been caught and trained by local natives who are friends of the affable and widely-respected Alex. 

 

 Though all the lines in the movie are said by people, the movie is really about White Fang. Not a great movie, maybe; some of the special effects are a little on the hokey side, as when, in a quick cut, a wolf (played by a big dog) appears to bite a log covered in fur. But a great story. You know, there's a reason why all those old novels are called "classics"; they actually tell great stories, if you can get past the sometimes dated language. (If we still used the King James Version of the Bible, we'd have no trouble reading Shakespeare.)

34. Wild Mountain Thyme

Starring: Emily Blunt, Jamie Dornan and Christopher Walken

Directed by: John Patrick Shanley

Released: 2020

 So many movie plots depend on the inability of the characters to communicate thoughts to other characters. This is one of those. Anthony Reilly (Jamie Dornan) grew up on the farm next to Rosemary Muldoon (Emily Blunt). They have loved each other since childhood but he thinks he's unworthy of her, and she thinks she needs to let him make the decisive move. Sadly, he is indecisive. 

 Their romance, or the lack thereof, is also tied up with the land. Rosemary owns a strip of land between two gates that give access to Anthony's family's farm. To tell you how that came to be would be a spoiler, so ... suffice it to say that Anthony's father Tony (Christopher Walken) sold it to Rosemary's father years before. And Tony has decided to sell the farm to his nephew in New York, because be believes Anthony will never marry and thus the farm would eventually pass out of the family, and that would be wrong. Tony is something of an idiot about this, until Rosemary's mother points out that the farm doesn't know right from wrong. You would think he could have figured that out himself.

 It's a rural story, with a rural pace and a lot of rain, but as a romance it's a great success, both beautiful and engaging. You know before hitting "play" that it will have a happy ending, but getting there keeps you watching and hoping. It also makes you glad that movie characters are so often unable to communicate thoughts to other characters.

35. Wilson

Starring Woody Harrelson and Laura Dern

Directed by Craig Johnson

Released: 2017

 Woody Harrelson plays the title character, a garrulous naïf with offbeat opinions about everything, and no filter to stop him sharing them with anyone he encounters. And he encounters a lot of people. He is the guy who will share your table at a restaurant when all the others are available. If you're the only person on a bus, he will sit next to you and force you to converse. No wonder his wife left him: just packed up and moved away without a word.

 Now, after many years, he goes to find her. I forget why, and can't be bothered to look this movie up to remind myself why. He locates his ex-wife, who seems to be doing alright, and drags her into his loony effort to be a part of their daughter's life ... the daughter they gave up for adoption 17 years before. 

 There are some amusing bits in this film, like the scene pictured on the poster art, but not nearly enough to make me ever want to sit through this again. I revolt at the thought of having to listen to this character talk, and talk, and talk. And hearing the idiotic Woody character from "Cheers" in everything Harrelson says is more irritating than I would have thought. That may not be a fair point, but there it is. 

 

 Also, the dog dies. You don't see it, but it happens.

36. Spontaneous

Starring Katherine Langford, Charlie Plummer and Hayley Law

Directed by Brian Duffield

Released: 2020

 A Tale of Two Movies: It is the best of films, it is the worst of films.

 First, the premise is hilarious. Gruesome but funny. Mara (Katherine Langford) is sitting in a boring math class and drops her pencil. When she leans over to get it, the student in front of her explodes like a popped balloon. Blood covers everything like the climax of Carrie. No one knows why it happened. The whole class is taken to the police station and interviewed, tested, interviewed again. No answers are forthcoming.

 On the bright side, as a result of this tragedy, Dylan (played by Charlie Plummer) is emboldened to approach Maya, and they begin a relationship that, over the course of the first hour of this movie, will gradually develop into a real romance. Despite the unexplained popping of additional students in the Senior class, Dylan and Maya's relationship is a nicely staged romance manifesting genuine dialogue, natural reactions, and the sort of attitudes that exemplify ordinary people that age. Despite the occasional truly wierd event (Pop!) it feels right.

 Eventually the entire senior class is quarantined, and months pass without a spontaneous irruption of a student. People relax. Then there is a sudden spate as a dozen or more students vanish in puffs of blood. There is a panic scene, as the students run aimlessly about. Dylan and Maya are separated in the crowd, and when they are reunited there's a touching scene in the back of the school building. Until Dylan explodes in Maya's face. 

 And that ends the good part of this movie. The rest of it is dark, and there is nothing fun or romantic about it. It's a high-school version of Leaving Las Vegas. If I were a teenaged boy on a date watching this movie, I would know I wasn't going to be getting lucky that night. The hope and confidence I was feeling until Dylan burst would be gone in a splatter of red dye; it's a real downer. And the ending is crap, managing to be both predictable in gross and irrelevant in detail.

37. Spy Game

Starring Robert Redford and Brad Pitt

Directed by Tony Scott

Released: 2001

 It's Nathan Muir's last day with the CIA. It begins with a phone call from a contact in Hong Kong, telling him to get to his office and read a fax if he wants to know what's going on before "they" do. Muir, played by Robert Redford, learns that a former asset of his, one Tom Bishop, has been captured by the Chinese while attempting to sneak a prisoner out of a Chinese prison. Muir then gets called in to a task force meeting concerned with the incident. The agency is planning to leave Bishop where he is, but  first they want to know all they can about Bishop, what he is likely to say before being executed as a spy. Muir keeps information in his head, so he is invited to walk the task force members through his dealings with Bishop.

 In flashbacks, we see Bishop, played by Brad Pitt, being recruited by Muir in Viet Nam, then converted to an agency asset in Germany. We see his work in Lebanon, where he develops a relationship that will have consequences later. And we see Bishop, in quick cuts, in Chinese custody. In between all this, we see Muir doing odd things around the CIA offices in Virginia, things that clearly he shouldn't be doing.

 This is a taut, tense and elaborate script and the performances of both principal actors does it justice. Redford is superb as Muir, a generation older than Pitt's Bishop, and Pitt is probably playing himself as a mentee of Redford, even this far into his acting career. (Ten years before, he had been directed by Redford in A River Runs Through It, one of his first major movie roles.) It doesn't hurt, either, that both actors have similar coloring and could be father and son, except for Pitt's chipmunk-cheek look.

 The supporting actors do excellent jobs as well, particularly Stephen Dillane as Chuck Harker, whose position in the agency makes him the bad guy that Redford's Muir has to outwit. Catherine McCormack as Bishop's Beiruit girlfriend Elizabeth Hadley is suitably enigmatic. Muir thinks she's using Bishop and causes a blow-up between them. When next Bishop knocks on Hadley's door, her expression makes the viewer wonder: Is Muir right? I'm still wondering about that. Plot-wise, it's a great smile.

 

Will Penny (Paramount)

38. Will Penny

Starring Charlton Heston, Joan Hackett and Donald Pleasance

Directed by Tom Gries

Released: 1968

 By the time this film was made in the late 1960s, the Western as a movie genre was pretty much on its way out. There were still a few television shows set in the Old West, but the Golden Age of the Western had ended, helped in its passing by the competition from "spaghetti westerns," made overseas on much smaller budgets. 

 The Westerns that came out of Hollywood featured a set of morals that, by the late 1960s, were being questioned in every aspect of popular culture. This film adheres to the "old school," both in message and style. Good guys are good in every way, bad guys are bad in every way, and the cavalry always arrives in the nick of time.

 So it is here. Will Penny, played by Charlton Heston, hires on as a line-rider for a ranching concern. When he gets up to his remote cabin, he finds it occupied by a woman, Mrs Allen (played by Joan Hackett) with a young son. They turn out to have been abandoned there by their guide to Oregon. Penny has not worked out what to do about her presence, with the winter coming on, when he is set upon by a lawless family of itinerant criminals that he had encountered once before. They beat him up, rob him and leave him for dead. He struggles back to the cabin, where he is nursed back to health by Mrs Allen.

 You can guess what happens between them, but as required by the Code of the Western (or something), it's all chaste. When the bad guys return on Christmas eve, even they give Mrs Allen two days' thought before she has to choose which of the family's sons will be allowed to rape her. She uses that time well; she and Penny concoct a plan, and as she provokes fighting between the two sons, Penny neutralizes the father, steals the wagon and rides off, intending to get help from the ranch house three days' ride away. (Not much of a plan, but it's about all they can come up with in the circumstances.) Luckily, the metaphorical cavalry is already out there in the hills close by the cabin, in the shape of Blue (Lee Majors, in his first major film role), a cowboy known to Penny. Together they take on the bad guys, manage to smoke them out of the cabin, and exact justice upon the whole family. As that event reaches its climax, the ranch's boss arrives with reinforcements, having been advised by neighbouring ranchers that something is going on up there in the mountains. 

 As to the outcome of the relationship between Mrs Allen and Penny, I'll let you check out the film yourselves. The scenery is beautiful -- it was filmed in Inyo County, California, which includes both Death Valley and the Sierra Nevada's highest peaks -- and the acting by the principals is better than competent. In fact, were it not for the dated style of acting demanded by the studios in that day and age, and the traditionalist morality demanded by the motion picture industry at the time, I think this could have been a much better film. As it is, it's just pretty good.

The Third Annual Havasu Film Festival, part five (!)

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

 My God, you're thinking, where will it all end? I don't know either. My sister in law has left for a dog show in ... I forget where. My wife is leaving tomorrow for a soccer tournament in Utah, and I'll be going back to the library for a final set of videos to get me through my period of isolation. I'll be here through the weekend, when she returns and we head home to Texas. But until then... Let's go to the movies!

 

 

28. All Quiet on the Western Front

Starring Felix Kammerer

Directed by Edward Berger

Released: 2022

 This is the third time Erich Maria Remarque's classic novel has been made into a film. This one was originally shot in German, but is so well dubbed into English that you hardly notice the occasional disconnect between lips and sounds. (It can also be played in French from the same DVD.) 

 The story is pretty straightforward. Paul Bäumer (played by Felix Kammerer) is seventeen years old and is afraid he's going to miss all the excitement of the Great War. It's already been going on for three years. He forges his father's signature so he can enlist in the German army, and ends up with his friends in an infantry unit on the western front. The film chronicles his experiences there: death, destruction, injuries and amputations, glory and barbarism. It's a long film (nearly two and a half hours) so there's plenty of time for Bäumer to be thoroughly disabused of his youthful zeal for the war.

 It's not a pretty movie. Neither is it downright gruesome. It is, as far as is possible without actually sacrificing actors, accurate in its depiction of the horrors of trench warfare, where deadly technology exceeds the capacity of generals to imagine tactical solutions. In the actual event, the two sides lost three million soldiers without significantly moving the lines. The only idea they had was the blunt frontal attack, and they sent their millions of soldiers "over the top" into machine gun fire. (Makes me wonder how the Ukrainians are doing right now in the face of unprovoked Russian aggression, which has degenerated into trench warfare across the eastern part of that country.) 

 Neither is this quite the anti-war film it's often called. It takes social-comment swipes at the luxury enjoyed by the elite, who scramble for canapés while fighting soldiers scramble about in mud and filth, and it draws attention to the unchecked madness of zealots who have too little respect for their subordinates; this is personified by the general who orders his men to attack the French half an hour before the armistice goes into effect. Many are lost in that pointless attack, instigated solely by the general's personal quest for glory. But war itself? That is not a question addressed by this film. It shows war for what it is, but that doesn't mean war isn't sometimes necessary. (Although any student of history has to wonder why this particular war was necessary.)

 The film was nominated for a bunch of Academy Awards when it came out in 2022; it won four. The only one of those four that surprises me is the one for Best Original Score, as I found the intermittent and sudden heavy-metal guitar licks anachronistic and distracting (though, to be fair, in other places the music did create a suitable mood for the action on the screen).

29. What If

Starring Daniel Radcliffe and Zoe Kazan

Directed by Michael Dowse

Released: 2013

 This movie, I learned while looking for a poster picture to download for this blog post, was originally called The F Word. The movie-ratings people wouldn't give them a PG-13 rating if they called it that, so they changed it to What If. Because little kids never see the advertising for a movie, I guess. Imagine an eye-roll emoji here.

 The F Word is a more clever title, because the movie is all about being in the friend zone, and "friend" starts with F. Get it? But it implies something else, which also has a relationship to the movie's plot. Isn't that clever?

 Oh, well.

 I found myself thoroughly engaged by this charming little romantic comedy. Wallace, played by Daniel Radcliffe -- seeing him all grown up makes me feel soooo old, but it had to happen -- dumped his girlfriend for cheating on him. It's been over a year but he's still getting over it. He goes to a party hosted by his best friend Allan (played by Adam Driver) and meets Chantry (Zoe Kazan). They hit it off, and when he walks her home, she mentions her boyfriend. What man hasn't been in a similar situation before? What does one do? Wallace chooses to inhabit the Friend Zone ... for a while, at least. Better than not being with her at all.

 Daniel Ratcliffe had years as Harry Potter to learn the craft of acting, and having now seen him in a number of different roles, I think he learned pretty well. While he'll always be the boy with the lightning scar, he manages to inhabit other characters convincingly: you don't feel like you're watching Harry say the lines. 

 

 The bigger surprise in this film is how fully I was interested in Zoe Kazan's portrayal of Chantry. Maybe hers was simply written to be the more interesting character, but I felt drawn more into her dilemma than I did Wallace's. Each has a moronic and lame advisor in the film: Chantry has her airhead sister Dalia, played by Megan Park; Wallace has Allan. Wallace seems to buy into the idiotic advice Allan gives, while Chantry seems appropriately and politely dismissive of her sister's pontificating. Chantry seems to have a better grasp of reality, as though she's actually thought about things. The actress, Kazan, has been in about two dozen films, none of which I've seen all the way through, so this is the first time I've noticed her. And from what I see here, I'll look forward to her future work.

IMPAwards

30. Without Remorse

Starring Michael B. Jordan, Jamie Bell and Jodie Turner-Smith

Directed by Stefano Sollima

Released: 2021

 

 Every film that came out in 2020 and 2021, and most that came after that, have a built-in excuse for box office failure, because of the Covid pandemic. This is the type of film that, had that pandemic not happened, my best friend Roland would have dragged me to the theater to see. Well, maybe "dragged" is a little too strong, but we would have seen it, because there's a lot of shooting, and lots of people get killed. But honestly I'd have gone willingly, because the main character, John Clark (played by Michael B. Jordan) is the creation of the late Tom Clancy, and that's as good a guarantor of excitement and tight plots as you're likely to get in a story.

 Well, in this case maybe the plot gets a little loose. This movie is based on a book of the same name that I read maybe thirty years ago and don't remember at all, but as with all of Clancy's works, there's a complex story behind the action. He, as an author, never had to limit himself to 250 pages, but trying to tell that same story with a movie's time limitations means that lots of stuff gets cut. That tends to leave some holes. At least they're not too glaring in this case. 

 The story starts with a raid in a Middle-Eastern war zone to recapture a hostage. Things go a little sideways and the villain, we'll all agree, is the slimy CIA agent Ritter (Jamie Bell). Of course we know that any identifiably evil character at the beginning of an action movie will turn out to not be the problem. But every time we see Ritter, and listen to his oily speech, we think it must actually be him. His despicable character is nicely drawn in the film. At the other end of the honor spectrum -- the higher end -- is Lt Cmdr Greer (Jodie Turner-Smith), Clark's CO.

 Long after the opening raid is done, the members of the squad are being killed at their homes in the US. This leads to a retaliatory attack against the instigators, who are in Murmansk, Russia. Greer takes her hand-picked squad there to conduct its operation, and overcomes betrayal and geopolitical posturing to accomplish her mission. It's a happy ending, but not too happy.

 I did see, after watching the film, that it gets poor ratings from both critics and the audience on Rotten Tomatoes. This is why I don't put too much faith in those ratings. I'd give it a good rating, not so much for the film's acting or cinematography or writing or any particular thing; really just as entertainment. If you like action-adventure films, this one will keep your interest to the end.

 

Jason Statham/ Simon West/ Lionsgate/ William Goldman

31. Wild Card

Starring Jason Statham

Directed by Simon West

Released: 2015

 I didn't know the name "Jason Statham" when I selected this movie from the library shelf; I was mainly curious about the names on the jacket that I did recognize: Anne Heche, Sofia Vergara, Jason Alexander and Stanley Tucci. Now that I've seen it, I can say that I think I recognized Sofia Vergara in her one scene near the beginning; I definitely recognized Jason Alexander in his one scene shortly after that; I definitely did not recognize Stanley Tucci, with a full head of hair, in his scenes near the end; and I have no idea which of the many waitresses, dealers and bartenders might have been played by Anne Heche. 

 On the other hand, I found out that I did recognize Jason Statham: he played the "rogue" English spy in the Melissa McCarthy romp, Spy, one of my and my wife's favourite action-adventure send-ups. 

 In this movie, he's Nick Wild, a martial-arts expert whose background is never defined. Wild goes around Las Vegas, slaying dragons, rescuing damsels in distress and earning a grudging living generally by putting small pieces of the world right. Sort of a Jack Reacher type, but without the hitchhiking. The tone of the film is serious, but not too serious. The story is episodic, in that it is two separate stories that kind of overlap at the end.

 In one story, Wild helps a friend of his get revenge against a mafioso; in the other, a golden-child tech nerd hires him as a bodyguard. Don't worry too much about the stories, though. They're reasonably coherent and cogent, but they're really just vehicles for the elaborate fight scenes that pop up throughout this film; like songs in a musical, except instead of interrupting the flow of the story, they are the story.

 Ever since Matt Damon's first portrayal of the superspy character Jason Bourne in 2002, movies have focussed on the action hero who is able to instantly see potential weapons in everything around him. Bourne was followed by Tom Cruise as Jack Reacher and Keanu Reeves as John Wick. I think the ability of movies to portray such fight scenes, which tend to move from place to place as the combatants flee and stand, is likely down to a development in camera technology, but no matter. The point here is that, starting with Bourne, action heros were able to beat the crap out of villains with a rolled up magazine and a piece of pastrami. Punching and kicking still happen a lot, but they're kind of livened up by the clever use of props.

 

 Statham's Nick Wild character follows in that vein, and it's as enjoyable a spectacle in this little movie as it is in a big-budget movie. I guess after more than 20 years of this kind of fight scene being produced, the skill in staging it has spread, and director Simon West's staging in this film is, I'd say, a complete success, particularly the fight in the casino (I think it's the next-to-last fight scene in the movie) where Wild vanquishes a number of bad guys as he makes his way from a restaurant counter through the blackjack tables to the roulette wheel before security shows up to put an end to the melee. I couldn't care less about the relationships between Wild and anyone else in the film; neither, it seems, does he. It's not about relationships, really.

 (And BTW, Wild drives a 1969 Ford Torino in this movie; an oddly distinctive car for a character who probably has a lot of people looking for him. Cool, though.)

32. And While We Were Here

Starring Kate Bosworth, Jamie Blackley and Iddo Goldberg

Directed by Kat Coiro

Released: 2012

 

 Leonard, played by Iddo Goldberg, is a viola player. His wife Jane (Kate Bosworth) miscarried a baby and can no longer have children. She seems to define herself by that fact. Leonard takes a temporary position with an orchestra in Naples and brings his wife with him. The movie doesn't say so, but I suspect he thought a change of scenery might do her some good, as she's totally self-absorbed and cold. As they arrive, she has her wallet stolen as they leave the train station. This scene seems to have no particular point except to show that she is ill-equipped to play the tourist in Naples, while Leonard goes about dealing with the tedium of cancelling credit cards and ordering replacements in an anal-retentive businesslike manner.

 Leonard, of course, is there to work. He's very serious about his work, and it's not going especially well, so he's tired and distracted in the evenings as he tries to get it right. Not for nothing is he something of a stick in the mud, and quite reasonably so. If this were real life, he'd have more time for fun stuff after he's learned the music thoroughly and gotten accustomed to the conductor. She, on the other hand, alternates between wanting to tell him all about her aunt's boring stories of living through World War II (she's got hours of audiotapes of these stories, and claims to be working on a book about it) and wanting to tell him next to nothing about her daytime escapades in Italy while Leonard's at work.

 On her first day, she goes sightseeing and meets Caleb (Jamie Blackley), a 19-year-old American who's clearly trying to seduce her from the start. He follows after her like a puppy dog, telling stories of questionable veracity and jokes of the roll-your-eyes variety, all of them involving viola players. She seems pleased by the attention and probably knows why he's doing what he's doing, and doesn't mind. He shows her a little adventure. Maybe she's looking for a fling?

 The next day she and Leonard encounter Caleb, playing International Man of Mystery, while at lunch. Suddenly Jane is doing little things that surprise or even shock her husband. Smoking (presumably a cigarette, but does it matter?), for example. "I smoke sometimes back home. At parties," she says. Leonard seems not to have noticed her doing this. She tells a viola joke, showing derision for her husband in the presence of this young stranger. Leonard chooses not to make a scene over it. When he goes back to work, Jane goes off by herself, and surprise, surprise! Caleb shows up again. He confesses that he couldn't sleep the night before for thinking about her. They start to make out in an alley, but she breaks it off. Having moral qualms, or playing hard to get?

 The next day she feels differently, and tracks Caleb down for a roll in the hay. Caleb is planning to go off to Tibet with some people he just met, and asks Jane to go with. She never says, one way or the other, but a day or so after that, she tells her husband she's leaving him, because he doesn't see her. Leonard, frustrated by her vague accusatory insinuations and admission of infidelity, gives her her return train ticket to London and says Go do what you have to do and meet at the station when it's time to go home. Instead, when he's waiting for their train, she catches one going the opposite direction.

 

 I chose this movie from the shelf because it promised the beauty of the Amalfi coast. The film moves at the pace of the tides in that place. And the scenery, while occasionally beautiful, is rarely seen.

 There are, I'm sure, a lot of women who have difficulties dealing with the problems life hands them. Not all of them blame their husbands, and not all of them insist on the kind of mindreading necessary to discern whether they expect help or hands-off. Leonard is better off, I'm sure, with her in Tibet. I'd have been better off if I'd picked a different movie.

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.