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.

The Third Annual Havasu Film Festival, part two

This is a continuation of the previous post. I recommend you read them all in order.

7. The American

Starring George Clooney

Directed by Anton Corbijn

released: 2010

 Our Celebrity Guest Viewer was here for the showing of this movie, but consensus was no less attainable for that: we all agreed with Sherry's assessment that the movie spent a great deal of money on eyedrops, because the performers did so much staring: either at each other, or off into space. The film is an hour and forty-five minutes, consisting of a few shootings and one chase through a charming Italian hillside town, plus about seventeen minutes of dialogue. The rest of the time, the camera watches somebody stare.

 That is, of course, an exaggeration, but it does capture the mood of the film, which may be described as pensive or suspenseful but is really just slow. Very slow. 

 It begins promisingly with "Jack" (George Clooney) and a pretty girl relaxing in post-coital bliss in a remote Swedish cabin. They go for a walk and discover tracks in the snow. Jack pulls out a gun and starts hunting snipers. ("You have a gun?" says the girl.) Jack shoots a guy, then tells the girl to go call the police. When she, dazed and confused, finally turns to go, Jack shoots her in the back of the head. Why? It's never explained, and the four of us came up with three unsatisfactory explanations. Then Jack hunts down another shooter before disappearing into the crowds of Paris, where his employer or whatever tells him to lie low in Italy. The rest of the movie is concerned with Jack's growing ambivalence about his career choices. We watch him mull things.

 The American is very nicely photographed and edited, and the performances are for the most part capably done, with a special shout-out to Paolo Bonacelli as the town's priest. He deserved better lines. When Jack grabs a scooter and chases down another would-be assassin, we feel hope that things will pick up; they don't. When Jack meets a gun-buying customer in a restaurant, we think there'll be some action now, boy! There isn't. And when Jack proves that brain beats brawn in the penultimate shooting of the film, we are surprised, but then we knew it'd happen like that, because, you know, Jack is the Good Guy here and it has to. And then comes the final shootout of the movie, between the Good Guy and the Bad Guy. Nobody wins.

 

 I feel like I should say more, but there's really nothing else to say.

8. Becoming Jane

Starring Anne Hathaway and James McAvoy

Directed by Julian Jarrold

Released: 2007

 I suspect this film was chosen for the Third Annual Havasu Film Festival because it includes a small-ish though vital performance by Maggie Smith as the crusty Lady Gresham, who believes herself entitled to order a preacher's daughter to marry her heir. She has maybe three scenes in the film; it is possible to watch this beautiful movie from start to finish, admiring the glorious countryside (it was shot in Ireland, re-labeled as England), the elegant costumes and props and manners, the clever dialogue and the magnificent script, and remember only Maggie Smith's bitchy character informing Reverend Austen that she will not be attending church that day. 

 Maggie Smith is undeniably that good, but the film is about the relationship between the two main characters. Anne Hathaway (an American! Horrors!) and James McAvoy (a Scot playing an Irishman ... well, that's okay, apparently. He is known for his skill with accents.) portray Jane Austen and Tom leFroy, both real people. She's becoming the world-famous author, he's becoming a successful lawyer. They meet and fall in love. (History does not record most details of Jane Austen's private life, so this stuff is all made up. Go with it.) You really don't need to be told more than that. One of the nice things about our factual ignorance of what went on in Jane Austen's life when scholars weren't looking is that we can make her anything we want to. The makers of this film wanted to make her a hero for 21st-Century romantics, and they have succeeded. As a romantic myself (though really more of a 20th-Century version), I recommend this movie.

 

9. Notes on a Scandal

Starring Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett

Directed by Richard Eyre

Released: 2007

 

 Which is worse: an attractive thirty-something teacher who cheats on her older husband with a fifteen-year-old student, or the wizened old crone who blackmails her about it? The woman who is driven to madness, or the madwoman who pushes her down that road?

 In this case, the wizened old crone is Barbara, played by Judi Dench, a grumpy history teacher at an English school who has lost patience with newfangled methods and soft post-modern jargon. She has not a kind word to say about anyone or anything, and leaves no thought unexpressed, even if it's only expressed in her diary. She starts off criticizing, in voice-over, Sheba, the new arts teacher, played by Cate Blanchett. At first she seems only judgmental, a kind of crochety grandmother who, one suspects, has a lining of silver in the storm cloud of her thoughts. But after Sheba demonstrates a willingness to be friendly, Barbara latches onto her and attempts to supplant the younger woman's own family in her affections. She becomes the increasingly demanding friend who won't go away. 

 

 But once the old woman witnesses the arts teacher's indiscretion with a student, she realizes the hold she has over the younger woman. Her view of their relationship takes on an increasingly creepy cast, and we begin to feel a relative sympathy for Sheba, despite the culture of moral outrage that we feel bound to apply to her actions. Is Barbara jealous, and if so, is she jealous of Sheba's attractiveness or of her happiness? Does she want Sheba as a friend, a companion, or a lover? In the end, the two women destroy each other and I doubt that anyone would admit to feeling either's destruction is undeserved. We are voyeurs of the process; it's thrilling to watch through their windows and see how it's done.

 

 

 10. American Animals

Starring Evan Peters, Barry Keoghan, Blake Jenner and Jared Abrahamson
Directed by Bart Layton

released 2018

 The most remarkable thing about this "true-crime thriller" is that all four of the people who actually attempted the real-world heist came on camera to talk aboout their view of the scheme. They don't agree on the details, but the film handles the disagreements with shrewd juxtapositions, leaving the viewer to decide (a) if the variances matter, and (b) who's probably telling the truth. 

 The heist involves the theft of millions of dollars' worth of rare books from a Kentucky university library. We watch the conspiracy progress from wild idea to careful scheme, then watch it disintegrate into a briefly-successful farce. I felt no sympathy for any of the bone-headed conspirators: not the art student who let himself get sucked into a harebrained scheme; not the stoner student athlete who is the driver of the scheme; not the fastidious young man who is willing to help as long as he doesn't have to actually do anything; not the straight-laced young man who is recruited as a getaway driver. 

 As one of the real-world thieves puts it, "I was torn between the desire to keep the adventure going and waiting for the insurmountable obstacle that would stop everything in its tracks and return things to normal." But the obstacle never arrives: each difficulty is dealt with by these halfwits in what seems to them a logical way. The scheme comes together, and in the end they believe they can actually accomplish their heist. The movie chronicles the development of their plan and their ludicrous attempt to execute it. The result is a kind of testosterone-fuelled farce, entertaining on one level, laughable on another.

 

11. All is Bright

Starring Paul Giamatti and Paul Rudd

Directed by Phil Morrison

Released: 2013

 Dennis has just been paroled from prison in Canada after four years. He arrives home to learn that his wife told their daughter he was dead. "I just couldn't take it anymore," she explains. She expects to marry René as soon as he gets a divorce. 

 In this black comedy, Dennis (Paul Giamatti) and René (Paul Rudd) go off to make their fortune, such as it is, legally by selling a truckload of Christmas trees in New York City. Unlikely colleagues, they endure adversity -- often of their own making -- and find a sort of resolution in a most unlikely way. 

 I enjoy movies where characters show real growth; this is one such film. Interesting, even amusing at times, but not funny. And even though Giamatti tends to get on my nerves as an actor -- I don't know why, he just does; it's something to do with the shape of his face -- and I find René's reactions not really credible all the time, I would recommend this movie as a nice little Christmas film if you don't really want a Miracle on 34th Street kind of vibe.

12. Allied

Starring Brad Pitt and Marion Cotillard

Directed by Robert Zemeckis

Released: 2017

 A love story set in Britain in World War II. Pitt plays Max Vaten, a Canadian officer who speaks French, albeit with a Quebecois accent. Sent to Casablanca as a spy after the fall of France, he is assigned to play the husband of Marianne Beauséjour, a Resistance agent there (Marion Cotillard). They fall in love while accomplishing their assignment (try not to think about the likelihood of such an arrangement in real life), and Max succeeds in getting Marianne back to London, where they marry and start a family in north London. 

 Difficulties arise. Information has been received indicating that the real Beauséjour was killed some time before in France, and a substitute put in her place. Max is called in to be informed, and instructed about how to behave while the authorities execute a plan to make a definitive determination. The scene where these instructions are delivered seems raw and out of place, as though Pitt never got to rehearse it; as though it was written, or re-written, just before being filmed. In any case, starting with that scene, Max demonstrates phenomenally bad judgment at every opportunity, gets one courier killed, royally fucks up another courier drop for his own purposes, endangers a number of French operatives in the process (and implicitly kills a number of unseen French girls as well), and tries to steal a British airplane. Just before that, we learn that his wife's judgment is every bit as bad as his own. 

 This movie is just over two hours long. There is plenty of action throughout, and I enjoyed the portrayal of that era, as always. I also enjoyed the twists of the plot to some extent, but I have to admit that the set-up phase of the story took way longer than necessary. It seems to me it could have been done in ten or twelve minutes, but was given 46: long enough for me to start noticing the flaws in the story. It would, I think, have been better to devote most of that time to building the characters, including supporting characters, in the part of the story that takes place in London. Or they could have devoted more time to the two tasteful sex scenes. I spent the first one wondering how anyone could have accomplished that in the tiny little coupe they were driving. The second was less distracting and all too brief.

13. Hook

Starring Robin Williams, Dustin Hoffman, Julia Roberts and Bob Hoskins

Directed by Steven Spielberg

Released:1991

 When Maggie Smith died, most of the tributes I found on the web site Imgur.com referenced her role in this film, so it's no wonder I was surprised to discover that it's a small part, bookends really: a couple of scenes near the start, then one at the end. She does it very well, of course, made up to look much older than her actual age at the time, but considering the breadth of her career, this was hardly a major performance by her. 

 And more surprising to me, it wasn't a great performance by Robin Williams. He is at his best when he goes off the leash, ad-libbing and extemporizing while others stand around and admire the talent. He didn't do that at all in this movie, and the result is a kind of flat, whine-y performance as Peter Banning, né Pan, rediscovering his heritage.

 Dustin Hoffman is much more the consummate performer as Hook. His kiddie-film villain is right on the mark. Is he scary to little kids? If he is, he can't be too scary. He's a fun villian.

 The real surprise is that Spielberg could produce such a sadly dated movie. I suspect that people who came of age in the 90s -- people who post on Imgur.com, I guess -- look on this bit of fluff as a seminal influence in their development, much as I see the British Invasion or The Graduate. (I've tried to think of some kiddie film from the mid-to-late 60s for comparison, but nothing comes to mind; I must not have had a childhood.) Hook is full of giant cellphones and skateboards, and Never-Neverland is done in those awful primary-color palettes. How was this movie nominated for Best Visual Effects? It must've been just on the strength of the names associated with it, because the reality was unimpressive so long after Star Wars Episode Four.

The Third Annual Havasu Film Festival

 The Mojave County Library now allows borrowers to take out fourteen videos at a time, but still only for a week. I'm here for about three weeks all told: first with my wife and her sister, then by myself; and we'll have a special guest juror for a small part of the time, as my former law partner Curtis is scheduled for a brief visit or two over the weekend(s). Naturally, as the sole author of this blog, I'm also the sole arbiter of film quality as reflected in the following reviews. I welcome the others' opinions, but don't promise to be swayed by them. You, dear reader, deserve the full righteousness of my own views on each film.

 I doubt that we will get through all the videos that we've checked out this first week. I got ten myself, using my tried-and-true method of picking a shelf at random and taking the first ten movies that sounded interesting from the blurbs on the jackets. I had heard of (and, in fact, seen) one of them before. My wife took five or six, but hers include at least two television series videos, which are ineligible for inclusion in the film festival report. Nancy got seven or eight. Our choices for actual viewing are sort of random, and the reviews reflect that random order, rather than any kind of merit.

1. The Song of Names

Starring Tim Roth and Clive Owen

Directed by François Girard

released: 2020

 

 This movie takes place in two times: 1951 and 1986. David Rapoport is a violin prodigy brought to London from Warsaw just before World War II begins; his father leaves him in the care of the Simmons family, who promise to do their best to develop Rapoport's musical skills. The father goes back to the rest of his family in Poland, and they disappear during the war. 

 Meanwhile, true to his word, Mr Simmons has done all he could for young David, including keeping the boy true to Jewish culture despite not being Jewish himself. Simmons' son, whom David calls Mottl, has become David's best friend.

 At the start of the film, Simmons has arranged a grand concert for David on the strength of a well-received recording of the young man's playing. Simmons, unwisely, has not insured the concert ("I didn't think I need to.") and when David fails to show up for the event, Simmons loses everything. Two months later he is dead. His son Mottl ends up being a music instructor in Newcastle. Thirty-five years later, by chance, he witnesses an idiosyncrasy of David's being performed by another music student. This starts him along the path of tracking down David, to find out what happened to keep him from appearing at his big concert.

 The drama of the story is wrapped up in the Holocaust and the sense of Jewish identity. David is an arrogant prick, and acts like it. Mottl tracks him down through 1980s London, Warsaw and New York to find out what happened, then sets up another concert for David as some kind of compensation to make everything better. 

 It's kind of hard, considering current political events, to keep from letting my view of this film be coloured, now that the State of Israel has lost all claim to any kind of moral high ground. (I'm not going to get into any arguments about whether it really ever had any such claims; suffice it to say that, growing up, I believed it did.) But by focusing on the Jews of London in 1951, I can appreciate the horrors they survived and the efforts they made to rebuild their society and culture. In that way, I can understand David's journey from the Simmons household to the final scene of the film. It is, in some respects, a sad journey, and his resolution is valid. But he's still an arrogant prick, and he still acts like it. He didn't deserve Mottl's friendship, and he doesn't really deserve our sympathy or respect as film viewers. 

2. Fantastic Mr. Fox

Animated; starring the voices of George Clooney, Meryl Streep, Jason Schwartzman, Bill Murray and Owen Wilson

Directed by Wes Anderson

released: 2010

 

 My wife had this puppet show on some list she keeps of films that pique her interest. Having now seen it, she is unable to speculate on why it ever made it onto that list. Maybe it was because it's based on a book by Roald Dahl, about whom people tend to say nice things. At least she and I both got short naps during the film, which is intentionally so low-key as to be thoroughly boring.

3. All is True

Starring Kenneth Branagh and Judi Dench

Directed by Kenneth Branagh

released: 2019

 This was the one film that I had seen before, when it was in first run. I remembered it as an elegant film with a moving story. That's pretty much all I remembered about it.

 I was right about that, though it wasn't the tour de force that I recalled from five years ago. The cinematography is glorious, and the performances are superb, as one would expect from two of the English-speaking world's greatest actors (not to mention Ian McKellen, who plays the Earl of Southampton in one outstanding scene, wherein his character manages to lift Shakespeare up and put him down at the same time). 

 The story concerns the final three years of Shakespeare's life, after his theater has burned down in a performance of what would be his last play. He goes home to Stratford Upon Avon to take up the frayed threads of his family life, learning what lies he has been allowed to believe in his absence. The events recounted in the film are fictional (not much is known about what really happened, despite four hundred years of intense academic speculation) but they make for a coherent tale in Ben Elton's script. The references to truth -- "All is true"; "Nothing is true" -- come fairly thick in the film, keeping that theme front and center in the viewer's mind, but in the end you can believe either that nothing is true, or that all is, in fact, true. And the gentle pacing of the film (which I would not call "slow") gives you time to consider the idea as you watch it unfold.

 The single most enjoyable moment in the film is when Shakespeare turns on the local self-important snob and puts him down in a truly Shakespearean speech.

4. Along Came Polly

Starring Ben Stiller and Jennifer Aniston

Directed by John Hamburg

released: 2004

 The movie stars a ferret. That should be enough said. 

 Well, not really. Of course I picked this movie because it has Jennifer Aniston in it, so I was bound to like at least something about it. And I did. And not just her.

 The plot is entirely predictable, the jokes are somewhat tired, and what little character development there is goes exactly the way you would expect it to. Yet overall the movie is a modestly entertaining little romantic comedy. Ben Stiller plays Reuben, a tightass risk-assessment analyst who gets married to Lisa, played by Debra Messing. She betrays him on their honeymoon, whereupon he returns alone to New York to hang out with his moronic best friend Stan, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman. They go to a party, where Reuben meets Polly, his polar opposite, played by Jennifer Aniston. 

 Opposites attract, I hear. Boy meets girl; boy wins girl; boy loses girl; boy wins girl back and they live happily ever after. Is it really possible to spoil the ending of a movie like this? Short answer: No. None of the big-name stars (who include Alec Baldwin, Hank Azaria, Michelle Lee and Kevin Hart in small roles) is doing, or even attempting, their best work in this fluffy little film full of fart jokes, but it works on the level of a second date. It's good enough. And you get to see Jennifer Aniston salsa dancing. Did I mention she was in this?

 Oh, and by the way, the ferret is named Rodolfo and this is his first film role. He nails it.

5. The Miracle Club

Starring Laura Linney, Kathy Bates and Maggie Smith

Directed by Thaddeus O'Sullivan

released: 2023

 

 Maggie Smith died last week; her final film was this quiet little movie about three women who travel to Lourdes from Ireland in the 1960s. None of them is looking for a miracle in the physical sense, but they find one in the guise of reconciliation. They have an unpleasant history with each other that gets worked out -- rather easily, if you ask me -- by saying the things they perhaps should have said to each other forty years before, when Linney's character was involved with Smith's character's son, who died young. Bates's character seems to have been, at least in part, the catalyst for the group's falling out.

 Having never been to Lourdes myself, and having apparently never even seen pictures of the basilica there, I was a little surprised at how beautiful a place it was. But it's a distraction, really, from what I see as the real meaning of the film, which is encapsulated literally and metaphorically by a single word unexpectedly spoken in a whisper near the end of the movie. I won't spoil the ending by telling you what the word is or who says it, but will just say that all three starring actors, and several others, gave performances that make this slightly-too-cute film an enjoyable way to pass a couple of quiet hours at home.

6. Quartet

Starring Tom Courtenay, Billy Connolly, Pauline Collins and Maggie Smith

Directed by Dustin Hoffman

released: 2013

 

 Every now and then one comes to a film or tv show that seems to have as its main purpose the employment of old-time actors who have fallen out of favour. I'm thinking Murder, She Wrote; Matlock; and Diagnosis: Murder and any number of small movies aimed at the older generations. Younger people who stumble across these shows will ask "Who's that?", and their parents will be shocked by their children's ignorance of such huge stars and accomplished performers. It is the way of things. (It works the same in reverse, of course, which is why old folks tend to cancel their subscriptions to People. I can't tell you how long it was before I figured out that Lady Gaga is not a country-and-western group; and I'm still not sure what a Dua Lipa is.)

 

 This is one of those movies; and since it is thoroughly British, there's another layer of obscurity to factor in. I know who Maggie Smith is, of course, and I'm sure I've seen the rest of this film's stars in something or other over my lifetime, even if I wouldn't call them Big Names. (Well, except for Michael Gambon, who plays the pompous retired director; he did something in the Harry Potter series before he died, and so is almost as big a name as Ms Smith.) They've probably all been in Midsomer Murders or something like that.

 Anyway, all these people play retired musicians -- opera folk, mostly, but with a sprinkling of less highbrow backgrounds thrown in -- living in a fancy retirement home in the English countryside. Money for the retirement home's operations is running short, so the residents are putting on a fundraising show. (Mickey Rooney died before this film was made, and anyway he's not a musician. Or British. Although he could sing....) Into the bubbling cauldron of jealousy, rivalry and friendship a new personality is injected, as the retirement home welcomes a Great Star whose identity has been kept secret pending arrival. 

 

 Let me be honest: like in The Miracle Club, above, the great tragic consequences of a lifetime of snubs and betrayals get resolved rather too easily in Quartet, but that doesn't mean the film's not enjoyable, even moving in its storytelling. And because these are all huge stars and accomplished performers (presumably) they play off each other, inspiring each other to give the film their best. It is, on a human level, quite a good movie. And while we got the DVD to see Maggie Smith, I have to say that Pauline Collins as Cissy gave what I think is the best performance in the movie.

The Third Annual Havasu Film Festival will continue in the next post. I don't want it to get too long for 21st-Century readers.