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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
