Fourth Annual Havasu Film Festival, Remote Edition, Week Two part one

You should start at the beginning. Here's a link to it.  

And if you're viewing this in an email notification, please click on the link at the bottom and view it on the Web. It doesn't display properly in the email notification.

 

 The shelf at the San Pedro branch library of movies on DVD with titles that start with "A" is at eye level. That is, therefore, where I picked this batch of movies from. It was a short shelf, and so I had to dip into the "B" movies -- I hope that's not foreshadowing -- to get 15 of them, which I calculate is how many I can watch in a week. 

 

© Millennium Films

Angel Has Fallen

starring Gerard Butler and Morgan Freeman

directed by Ric Roman Waugh 

 This is the third film in a series: it was preceded by Olympus Has Fallen and London Has Fallen. Apparently the London iteration was a massive hit, so the people behind it got together and decided a third film was in order. That's usually not a good omen.

 But this actually turned out to be a pretty good action-adventure movie. Gerard Butler, the hero of the series, has gotten older, but the movie uses his hero-emeritus status well, giving him physical deterioration causing aches and pains that an old soldier would naturally endure after an exciting life of evil-thwarting; and, being a hero, he naturally suffers silently through the pain, as I would do, were it not such a good excuse for grousing. Pretty sure, though, that if there's another film in this series, Butler's character will be saving the world from behind a desk, until the last moment, when he comes out from there for one final heroic act of salvation.

  This time, Butler's character, Secret Service Agent Mike Banning, is in charge of the president's security detail. He's been trying to deal with his deteriorating physical condition on his own, even though he knows it's a losing battle. Meanwhile, treasonous and greedy self-serving villains choose that moment to launch a coup, with a drone attack that is meant to kill the president (Morgan Freeman) and frame Banning for the job. They plant a pile of money in an offshore account in Banning's name, and plant his DNA in places that will point the accusatory finger at him. They also arrange for him to be the only member of the security detail to survive.

 The plan seems to be working, except that the prez didn't die; he's in a coma. The bad guys think that's good enough for the moment, and continue their elaborate scheme. They are helped, initially, by an FBI agent (played by Jada Pinkett Smith) who sees only too well only what is put before her; though when she's confronted by clear facts that cannot be explained otherwise, she belatedly does a little What-If scenario in her head and light begins to dawn. (In movies where the law enforcement folks are more imaginative, there would have been a brief "This is all too easy" speech.) Banning takes a bold and unexpected step, which works out well for him and the world (it's a movie, remember), and the denouement is at hand. And a clever denouement it is, with lots of shooting and dying and a building exploding, but the best part of it is the deception practiced by the good guys on the bad guys. 

 My only quibble with this movie's plot -- and it is just a quibble -- concerns the final confrontation with the main bad guy, which takes place on a rooftop. I really would have thought that Mike Banning, if he were a real federal agent, and one banged up as much as he had been by that point in the film, would have just kept an eye on the miscreant, who after all had no way out of his situation at that point except suicide with a jump off the ten-story building; maybe taunting him about how his grand scheme was going to land him in a long, drawn-out and unwinnable prosecution, which would cost him every penny he had and shame him as  pariah among the citizenry: a fate worse than death. Then, of course, the bad guy would attack Banning and we could have had the same result, but without Banning being the instigator. Or the bad guy could be led away by a squadron of police, head hung low or held high, depending on what the producers had planned in the way of sequels.

 All the action movies I've watched so far in this installment of the Havasu Film Festival have been entertaining and well made. I'd also say that this one is a cut above the others. Those special effects shots can be expensive, and this one appears to have had the budget for it. 

 

Anonymous

starring Rhys Ifans, Vanessa Redgrave, David Thewlis, and Edward Hogg

directed by Roland Emmerich

 If you think this is historically accurate just because the characters were almost all real people, you've spent too much time surfing the Web and not enough doing any real thinking. At the start of this film, a modern-day lecturer (played by Derek Jacobi in a cameo reminiscent of Jackson Hedley, the ham actor he once portrayed on an episode in Season 8 of Frasier) throws out a couple of arguable factoids about the real William Shakespeare. He mentions, for example, the famous bequest in Shakespeare's will about his second-best bed, then wonders why there was no bequest of any of his writings. (I note that Shakespeare also failed to specify who would inherit unsold film rights.)

 That takes us into this imaginary world where all the plays, sonnets and poems attributed to the Bard of Avon were actually written by the Earl of Oxford*, who also slept with the movie version of Queen Elizabeth (Redgrave), and fathered one of her several imaginary bastard children. This version of Oxford (played by Rhys Ifans, best known to me as Hugh Grant's odd roommate in Notting Hill) imagines himself to be a rival of the priggish Puritan William Cecil, Elizabeth's closest advisor. This imaginary Oxford, though, doesn't have the political savvy needed to make that rivalry a serious claim. Instead of spinning nefarious plots, Movie-Oxford spends all his time writing. (The film's version of Cecil -- played by David Thewlis, whom I recognize from his role as a professor in at least one of the Harry Potter movies -- spends all his screen time making and peering through windows into men's souls.) 

 In the political climate of the time, with the self-righteous in the ascendancy, stage plays become dangerous things; so Oxford gets a somewhat-established playwright, Ben Jonson, to put on Oxford's plays as his own. When the audience demands to see the playwright after the first performance of The History of King Henry the Fifth, Jonson starts to reluctantly make his way to the stage, but takes too long; before he can claim his putative authorship, the actor Will Shakespeare (portrayed as an illiterate buffoon by Rafe Spall) sees an opportunity and presents himself to the audience as the playwright. 

 Meanwhile, there is intrigue concerning the succession to the throne. Cecil and his party are for giving it to the king of Scotland, a Catholic named James VI, while the Oxford party want Movie-Elizabeth's bastard son to ascend. They stage a ludicrously half-assed coup attempt, not knowing that their plans were betrayed by Jonson. 

 This film is an elegantly-costumed period piece, something the British seem to do better than anyone. There are very good performances by all, and excellent special effects that make the London of 1600 seem real. The plot's farcical aspects can be suspended while you enjoy the movie, but when it's over, you really need to come back to the real world. 

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* The real Oxford is most famous for having once farted in the Queen's presence, then taken himself away from Court for seven years. When he came back, the first thing Elizabeth said when she saw him was, "My lord, I had forgot the fart."

 

Anzio

starring Robert Mitchum and Peter Falk

directed by Edward Dmytryk 

 This movie came out in 1968, as the Vietnam War approached its height and the anti-war movement was building across the country. For most people, sides were just starting to be taken, but we hadn't as a nation reached the peak of divisiveness. That's just a little context of the time, and the ongoing debate about the issue is reflected in the film. 

 Many people at the time could remember the battle of Anzio, which had taken place 24 years previously, and was kind of a big deal; and those who didn't probably knew somebody who did. It was not the greatest moment for the Allies in the fight against Germany, though it wasn't a disaster, either.*

 This film tells a small (fictional) part of a much larger story, following a detachment of American soldiers doing a reconnaissance patrol behind German lines soon after the Allied landings at Anzio. Their number includes an omniscient war correspondent, Dick Ennis (Mitchum) and a smart-aleck corporal named Rabinoff (Falk). There's a certain amount of 1940s-style jargon that might have been considered daring in 1968, but now it just makes the film seem quaint and dated. 

 Ennis, as a reporter, refuses to carry a weapon. Attention is called to this refusal a number of times, though interestingly, no one questions it or comments on it, even though they clearly disagree with it. The general attitudes seems to be "It's your funeral." Toward the end of the movie, when the small Allied group (including the Ennis character) are pinned down by a few German snipers and reduced to just three or four survivors, Ennis must consider the decision again. One of the things that most strongly dates this movie to an era now fading from our communal consciousness is the fact that the entire subject is dealt with throughout the film without a single word being spoken. 

 Everything about this movie feels dated. The acting is kind of stilted, unrealistic; the special effects are, of necessity, a little unsophisticated; the Technicolor palette of the film looks old-fashioned; the jargon, as I said before, is quaint. But at least this movie assumes its audience can figure out what the hell is going on, without feeling the need to hash out everybody's point of view or demand any explanation for the choices they make. 

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* My understanding of the actual events was that the Allied advance up the Italian peninsula had stalled at the German defensive "Cassiano" line, and the Anzio landing was meant to attack that line from the rear. The Germans, having too much coastline to defend, had wisely prepared a sort of rapid-response defense, ready to go to any point in their rear where the Allies might attempt a flanking maneuver. The landings at Anzio, just south of Rome, were therefore unopposed. The Allies' commanding officer, interpreting his orders cautiously but arguably correctly, concentrated on building up his beachhead for several days instead of immediately attacking the German forces to the south. This delay in attack allowed the Germans time to put their rapid-response defense into motion  -- the movie makes it seem like an almost fortuitous development by the Germans instead of the carefully-planned movement of forces that it was -- and so come very close to driving the Allies out of their position at Anzio. The Allied commander was of course handicapped by not having seen this movie before the battle. He was not the moron this film makes him out to be. 

 

© Lionsgate

About My Father

starring Robert deNiro, Sebastian Maniscalco, and Leslie Bibb

directed by Laura Terruso

 Sebastian Maniscalco is a successful stand-up comedian who co-wrote this film (with Austen Earl), loosely based on his own life. In it he plays the manager of a boutique Chicago hotel who has been dating Ellie, the artist daughter of a wealthy family that operates a competing chain of hotels. He wants to propose to her, and when her parents invite them to spend a holiday in their Virginia vacation home, he decides that will likely present the "right" intimate moment for a proposal. He goes to his father (deNiro) to get his grandmother's ring, but Dad refuses to give it to him until he's had a chance to evaluate the girl's family himself, face-to-face. As a result, they invite him along for the holiday.

 Sebastian is repeatedly embarrassed by his father's ways (which notably include making a delicious meal out of a family pet), and finally snaps, telling the old man everything he's ever done to embarrass his son. Saddened, the father leaves the heirloom ring for his son with a note saying goodbye. 

 At the same time, Ellie finds out that, not only was it her parents (played by David Rasche and Kim Cattrall) who bought out all her artworks at her first solo gallery opening some time previously, but also that Sebastian knew about the deception, having recognized her work in photographs of the family's hotel lobbies, and said nothing. Incensed, she goes to her Special Place, a sort of treehouse fort she used to play in as a child. Sebastian goes there to apologise and propose, but in conversation with her, he realizes how important his father (and late mother) have been in making him into the man Ellie loves. He rushes to the airport to stop his father from leaving.

 This is a cute little movie about family relationships. Sebastian's prospective in-laws are a quirky blinkered bunch beset by all the First-World problems that the excessively rich moan about, including Ellie's brothers (played by Anders Holm and Brett Dier), the spoiled overgrown frat-boy and the New-Age hippie-wannabe. There are plenty of sight gags and word-play, some of which actually made me laugh out loud (the first time thus far in this Fourth Annual Havasu Film Festival), and I appreciated the (mild) character growth of the principals (except deNiro's character, who merely demonstrates why he is already what all the others aspire to be). 

 Of course, it may also be that I liked this movie because I got to hear a couple of Italian words that I haven't heard said out loud in, oh, sixty years, most notably mannaggia, which my mother always translated as "by damn." Gives me a warm feeling of nostalgia to hear somebody cuss that way. Good times. Good times.

  

Anyone But You

starring Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell

directed by Will Gluck

 My first clue that this was a re-telling, or perhaps a re-imagining of Much Ado About Nothing came when I noticed a second quote from Shakespeare appearing in a sort of random place, and stopped the DVD so I could look it up. (The quote was, "I will assume thy part in some disguise" written on a signboard on a dock.) Up until then I thought I was just watching a cute little rom-com; I hadn't realized it had a pedigree.

 Bea (Sweeney) and Ben (Powell) meet by accident at a coffee shop. He is plainly taken by her ditziness, and I guess she's taken by his quick-thinking white-knight performance. They spend the day and night together, obviously much enjoying each other's company; then she leaves before he wakes up. He takes greater offense at that than it warrants (insufficient motivation is the hallmark of Idiot Plot, but yet again, we overlook that because the movie is enjoyable). After a very short time she realizes leaving like that was a dumb thing to do, and goes back, just in time to overhear Ben telling a friend that "she was nothing" and other put-downs. She takes umbrage. (At this point I thought Ben was dissing her because it was all none of the friend's business, and while I thought the comments he made were a little too snarky, they were at least justified, and she had no business eavesdropping, beyond the fact that the script required that she jump to conclusions.)

 Fast-forward some unspecified amount of time, and Bea and Ben meet again, this time at a bar where they are introduced to each other by Bea's sister Halle (played by Hadley Robinson) and Halle's fiancée Claudia (Alexandra Shipp), who also -- small world! -- happens to be the sister of Ben's nosy friend. The wedding is to be in Australia, because there are significant tax breaks for filmmakers there. Bea, naturally, is invited because one of the brides is her sister; I'm not sure why Ben is invited, as he is just a friend of the brother of the other bride, and all the people in the wedding part who know Ben or Bea know, too, that they seem to hate each other. But these people are full of poor excuses for why they had to do one stupid, tactless thing after another, and we go along with it all because, well, it's kind of funny. 

 The plot, from this point on, is too complicated to describe briefly, so I'll just summarize it as "Are they or aren't they?" and refer you to the Shakespeare play, which no doubt you've all seen and remember perfectly well. (If not, you can find a synopsis of the plot on the Internet, probably on Wikipedia. Or you could just not worry about it and go with the flow.)

 There are a couple of plot points that made my eyes start to roll -- the worst being the idea that Sydney Harbour is too shallow to turn a medium-sized cabin cruiser around in to rescue those who fell overboard (even though the boat is plowing along through those waters at what looks like a pretty good clip). When that line* was delivered, my left eye (which, you'll remember, has already rolled completely out of my head once within the past week) started to quiver and jump around a little, but I managed to hold it in. For the most part, though, the quality of the storytelling overcame the few idiotic bits of plotting. And there were a few particularly nice touches -- the line that the dog was "the only member of the family that's trained," (true dat) and the entire Sydney Harbour scene other than that one clanger just mentioned; and the ending, which, I'm sorry, is just perfect.

 A couple of points: First, I didn't know who Sydney Sweeney was before seeing this, though I have heard her name a number of times all of a sudden in the past year or so. She's been in a number of big productions that I've not seen: The Handmaid's Tale and White Lotus, both of which are big on the internet-conversation meter but not of interest to me. I don't have whatever pay-to-watch service they're available on.  She was also in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, which I did see; in that, she played one of the younger Manson Family members; and having read that in her bio, I find I do actually remember her performance. In this film, though, I was fairly comprehensively nonplussed by her delivery, and her facial expressions seemed slightly forced even before her character started having to pretend everything about her relationship with Ben. So I'm not sure what the fuss is all about where she's concerned.

  Second, the closing credits. In them, the entire cast sings Unwritten, an excellent song by Natasha Bedingfield that is particularly appropriate to the Bea character, in out-takes made throughout the shooting of this movie. Great foresight, really enjoyable result. It's a shame that when this movie is eventually shown on cable television, the credits will be compressed into a tiny little box and the audio will be lost to a promo for the next broadcast. 

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* I know, the plot needed to have the people in the water rescued by others. I just think the excuse was utterly lame.  

 

© Warner Bros Entertainment

Blue Beetle

starring Xolo Maridueña, Bruna Marquezine, Belissa Escobedo and Susan Sarandon

directed by Angel Manuel Soto

 Susan Sarandon first came to my post-pubescent attention when she stood on a small stage with a boa and a bustier, put her hands to her head and was turned to stone by the evil Dr Frankenfurter. That was in the 1970s. Surprisingly, and unlike every other star of that era who's had "work done," Sarandon doesn't seem to have aged very many days. She either lives in a cryogenic chamber when not filming, or she has the world's most accomplished cosmetic surgeon. Either way ... damn!

 The special effects are well done but look cartoonish rather than realistic, emphasizing the comic-book origin of the film. That may please people who actually read the comic books, but for us grown-ups it makes the look of the film seems childish and poorly designed. Every aspect of the plot is as hackneyed as they come. People who haven't seen a decade or more of films may not realize that; it may actually seem fresh to a complete neophyte. 

 Other than Sarandon, there's not much in this movie to hold an adult's attention. Well, I suppose I should qualify that: not much to hold a mature adult's attention. I've done some doomscrolling and realize there is an entire subset of humanity that has attained the age of majority without attaining maturity, and those people might think this movie is, I don't know, cool? It has kind of a gamer-vibe to it, so it might appeal to incels and other people with gamer-quality computers who have never lived on their own: people for whom ordering delivery pizza counts as social interaction. But I really think this movie is aimed at 'tweeners and other people not legally able to drive yet. 

 That may change.* There's a scene in the middle of the closing credits clearly meant to set up a possible sequel, so there may be more of these Blue Beetle movies in our already dismal future. We shall see. If there are, they may follow the course plotted by the movies in the Marvel Universe: start with low-budget crappy films with lots of action and minimal plot complexity; don't bother developing the characters into anything with a third dimension. Just like this movie, where the characterizations are cardboard cutouts of stereotypical Mexican-Americans, with a few short conversations in Spanish and some tropes like Liberation Catholicism and revolución thrown in with ethnic music and working-class poverty. 

 Then if the film makes enough of a profit, spend more on sequels to get better writers who'll create more complex plots and more rounded characters, and make better movies for the franchise. Keep adult-appropriate themes, including romance, in a closet off-set with any nuanced layers of metaphor. You can have some cleavage on the chicks -- and keep testing that limit -- but there should be not a hint of a bulge in a male crotch; that's too suggestive. What's the phrase? "Smooth as a Ken doll." 

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* Probably not. According to Wikipedia, this movie "underperformed at the box office."   "Its box office performance was attributed to factors such as the 2023 Hollywood labor disputes, the franchise's imminent reboot with the DC Universe (DCU), and Hurricane Hilary." It seems nobody thought it might be because it's kind of a crappy movie.

 

 I think that's about as much as the modern reader can take at one sitting. Look for part two of Week Two of the Fourth Annual Havasu Film Festival, Remote Edition in a few days! 

  

Links to earlier Film Festival reviews:

2025 (the beginning of this series of posts) 

2024 (link to first of seven posts, including a recap)

2023 (link to first of two posts)

2022 (link to the one post that first year)

 

 

The Fourth Annual Havasu Film Festival, Remote Edition Week One, Part Two

I don't know why it is that printers of the paper wrappers that go around the plastic DVD cases insist on printing their descriptions of the movies they contain in purple four-point type on black. I can't read any of it, so I just have to guess at what kind of movie I'm getting from the title and the cover illustration. And based solely on that limited, highly subjective and often misleading information (probably intentionally, sometimes) I exhausted my supply of light entertainment with a couple of the films reviewed in Part One of the Fourth Annual Havasu Film Festival Remote Edition Week One. As a result, I wasn't really excited about continuing my perusal of Hollywood's dreary offerings, and have proceeded more from  duty than desire. 

 I have been rewarded, somewhat. The first two movies, which I watched today (Wednesday, as I start writing this) were actually pretty good. By some standards, anyway.

 

copyright Cadence Productions Ltd

A Working Man 

starring Jason Statham

directed by David Ayer

 I've seen this guy Jason Statham in action films before. I know he's been the leading man in a number of (to me) entertaining but forgettable action films, and I have a favourable impression of his work without actually remembering any of it, other than a more comedic version in the Melissa McCarthy vehicle Spy some ten years ago.That's really what I know him from. (I'm pretty sure I've even reviewed another of his films in a previous iteration of this Havasu Film Festival, but no way am I going to bother looking through all the previous posts on the chance of finding it. I mean, who really cares? Other than Jason Statham, who probably won't know either way.)

  In this year's release, Statham plays his own stock character: this time named Levon* No-last-name, a former Royal Marine, invincible and unfailingly righteous, now a widowed construction worker. His boss's daughter is kidnapped and he promises to bring her back home. Shades of Taken! Levon gets some material help from former associates in the military but the work is his alone. He is a Lone Wolf.

 It's not a great script, it's not great acting, there's not a subtle poignant moral lesson to be learned from this movie. It's an action film. The good guy is entirely good, and all the bad guys -- and there are lots of them -- are entirely bad. They all die (except the top guys in the Evil Brotherhood of Russian Villains, who are still alive and free to cause mayhem in future films, should they be needed).

 There is, in short, nothing great about this movie; it's just pure entertainment of a particularly violent kind. I view it the way I used to view the unending struggles between Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd: pure meaningless fun that satisfies my sense of justice. All the bad guys deserve what they get; who could complain? We all saw what they did. (That, I think, is the missing essential ingredient when people try to apply the same kind of hard logic to real-life crime and punishment.)

 As a dramatic endeavour, A Working Man is okay. As a shoot-em-up action film, it's great.  

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* Levon wears his war wound like a crown. That probably has nothing whatsoever to do with this film. 

 

copyright Sony Pictures

It Ends With Us

starring Blake Lively, Justin Baldoni and  Brandon Sklenar

directed by Justin Baldoni

 No two ways about it, this is a chick-flick. You can tell because (a) Justin Baldoni keeps taking his shirt off to reveal a six pack, and the female characters gush about him in a way that would be considered actionably sexist if men talked that way about a woman; (He directed the film, so he gets to show his body off as much as he wants.) and (b) because it's a very romantic movie with some sexually suggestive scenes but no actual nudity, not so much as a buttcrack or a nipple to abhor female viewers or deprive male viewers of their cognitive skills.

  Stereotypes aside, it's a well-done movie with a message. The plot focuses on two relationships involving Lily Bloom (Blake Lively, who I knew only as the wife of the co-owner of Wrexham AFC, in Wales; when I first heard the name, I assumed it was a man): one, seen in flashbacks, involving her first boyfriend from high school in Maine ("Atlas," portrayed as a youth by Alex Neustaedter, and as an adult by Brandon Sklenar), the other with her husband ("Ryle," played by Baldoni) in Boston. The two provide an interesting contrast, though both share the fictive trait of being unable to communicate rationally at crucial moments: the Idiot-Plot again, but again not too distracting from the story. If the two of them didn't jump to incorrect conclusions, and had an actual ten-minute conversation instead of fighting like prepubescent schoolboys, this plot would grind to a halt and the movie would end before the first hour was up, with the two of them laughing over a beer and waxing philosophical about life. 

 (I'm actually more distracted by wondering where and how these people get the money to set up their thriving businesses in the leafier parts of Boston in the 21st Century.) 

  Long before the Fourth Annual Havasu Film Festival began, I had heard about this movie in passing. A web site I sometimes visit to immerse myself in bad grammar and poor spelling would sometimes  include posts about things the contemptible class think of as News, and for a while in their estimation this included some kind of controversy between the two stars of the movie, Lively and Baldoni. I never summoned enough interest to actually read any of it, having already jumped to the conclusion that it was all either a P.R. stunt or handbags at twenty paces. Probably the latter, as the movie itself hardly got mentioned in the headlines of those posts. So I still don't know what it was all about. (I did happen to notice, when searching Wikipedia for the movie poster above, that there's actually a whole separate page devoted to the controversy. I was not moved to click on the link, and so I remain as unenlightened about this celebrity dust-up as any Neanderthal gamboling about in the German forest; and unless it somehow comes to affect Wrexham AFC, I will most likely remain so.) 

 As for the movie, I recommend it, though possibly not for a first date. Wait at least until you know enough about the person you're out with to honestly appraise their integrity, and remember that despite what you hear on TV, it works both ways. Second date stuff.

 

copyright Blumhouse Productions

Drop

starring Meghann Fahy and Brendan Sklenar

directed by Christopher Landon 

 I select the movies for the Havasu Film Festival pretty much at random. I choose a shelf at the library and select films based only on what I can learn from the box. Since I've never heard of most of the movies, and usually can't read anything of the blurb on the back, I'm really going mostly by the picture, maybe the names of the stars if they're printed large enough, and my answer to the question, "Will I be able to sit through this?" 

 So I always wonder when coincidences happen, like this: Drop is about a woman and a man on a first date in downtown Chicago. The woman, Violet (played by Fahy) was a victim of abuse (coincidence #1) by her late husband Blake (coincidence #2). She may have killed him, though flashbacks indicate otherwise; now she's out on her very first date since his death a few years before. The man she meets at an elegant restaurant in a glass skyscraper is Henry. Henry is played by Brandon Sklenar (coincidence #3). Henry in this film has all the characteristics of the Atlas character in the previous movie (coincidence #4), but without a beard. And I picked this film to view, pretty much at random, off the pile of DVDs, right after It Ends With Us. (coincidence #5) 

 No idea what to make of this. I could accept that it's just an odd series of unimportant coincidences that these two movies came out about the same time and both were, as a result, in the library's "Express Collection" at the San Pedro branch. Or I could recall similar things happening with other films, and conclude that there is a vast web of profit-driven plagiarism in Hollywood, with people stealing ideas left and right and rushing to get their movie out before the other guy's. 

 Yeah, let's go with that theory. Not that it matters to me. I just thought it was curious.

 So anyway, the screenwriting for Drop isn't nearly as elegantly done as was that of the other movie; in fact, it was pretty stilted throughout. The plot is interesting, but requires an implausibly tech-literate villain, who is also on a first date with perhaps the most patient woman in Chicago. The villain also has to be able to transport himself invisibly around the dining room of the posh restaurant to poison innocent people's drinks and intercept attempts to alert people to the victim's plight. And he has to have an unlimited supply of spy-cams posted in every nook and cranny of both the restaurant and Violet's home. Oh, and he has to be able to text with phenomenal speed without his date noticing it. At one point one of my eyes (the left, which was slightly closer to the screen) rolled completely out of my head.

 The denouement of this film, while entertaining, was so implausible that the neighbour called to ask what that snorting sound was, and was I okay. First of all, I couldn't buy that Violet, who has figured out what's going on and who's doing it, could vanquish the villain in a protracted fight, get car keys from her now-wounded date, stop to comfort an innocent bystander who tried to help and is also injured, descend thirty-something floors in an elevator to the building's multistory parking garage, find the date's car, and drive from there to her house in whatever part of Chicago* it's in, and get there in time to thwart the villain's accomplice, who has been patiently waiting inside Violet's house to kill Violet's son and sister, all in less time than it took that accomplice to act after receiving the telephonic instruction, "Kill them." It should have taken him, oh, twenty, maybe thirty seconds to kill the two innocents. What, did he have a Hot Pocket in the microwave that he needed to wait on, maybe the last one? 

 That's the most implausible point of this whole story, but by no means the only one. Runner-up would be that Skelnar's character is such a nice guy that he would persist with the world's worst first date after the horrible encounter we all witnessed. No man IRL is that desperate, and no woman IRL is that attractive. (I reserve judgment on whether any date could really be that bad. I've been on a few that might come close, but not in decades, thank God, so my memories may be exaggerated.)

 But, farcical implausibilities aside, and uninspired directing overlooked along with its concomitant unenthusiastic performances (by everyone except the implausible villian Richard, played by Reed Diamond with a wonderfully evil glint in the eye and a mouth full of excited drool), and the technobabble discounted, and some pretty on-the-nose foreshadowing excused, what are you left with? I was going to say it's an okay movie, maybe three stars out of five. Then I remembered that I very nearly abandoned this movie about twenty-five minutes in as just too dull. And that was before the two characters met up for their date. No way is this a three-star film.

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* I'm somewhat familiar with Chicago, but I have never seen its streets so empty as in this scene, especially around construction zones.

 

copyright Focus Features

The Phoenician Scheme

starring Benicio del Toro, Mia Threapleton and Michael Cera

directed by Wes Anderson

 This movie is absurd. Intentionally so. There is something of Luis Bunuel about it, but by saying that I don't mean to suggest that it's a good movie, or even an entertaining one. This is an art-house movie that seems intended to give a host of well-known popular actors a resumé line that will show they have real chops and are not just in it for the money: Benedict Cumberbatch, Tom Hanks, Bryan Cranston, Richard Ayouade, Scarlett Johansson, and others who are probably familiar to European audiences but not to me. This strikes me as odd, because none of them need that kind of validation. 

 So maybe I'm wrong; it happens. But here they all deliver ludicrous lines in service of an intentionally ludicrous plot with a flatness and lack of emotional investment that, by the end, made me wish devoutly that one of the crossbow bolts (an absurd plot point, one of many with no real purpose) had gone just a little off track and taken out somebody important behind the camera, thus derailing this production. The only acting skill anyone showed is the ability to keep a straight face.

 If you want to know what this film's story is, read the hagiographic version that appears on its Wikipedia page; I can't be bothered.

copyright Sky Cinema

Fight or Flight

starring Josh Hartnett

directed by James Madigan

 Someone in Hollywood -- I'm guessing Brooks McLaren and D.J. Cotrona, who wrote this film -- had the idea of pairing an ever-righteous hero with an equally righteous superspy type. In this case, it's Josh Hartnett playing the righteous hero. He has been in a surprising number of movies and TV shows I've never heard of, and more than a few that I have, but never, so far as I can tell, in a truly major role. Yet I recognize his name, so he must have made some kind of impression on me at some point. I just don't know when, where or why. 

 Here he plays a former Secret Service agent whose properly developed sense of right and wrong got him canned by corrupt US Government bosses, and for two years he's been living off the grid in Bangkok, drinking and keeping his honour intact. Now his ex-girlfriend Katherine Brunt (played by Katee Sackhoff) needs him to do a job for her, and as incentive offers to clear his name. He's to capture and bring in a person called the Ghost, someone whose identity is unknown, but who is apparently able to do anything wanted to disrupt the world's economy. 

 Somehow, after an unexplained bombing in Bangkok, the Ghost's travel plans show up in a coded chat post in Mandarin on the Dark Web. Brunt has no assets on the ground there, so she hitches up her britches and calls her old boyfriend to beg him to please, please, please get on a flight to San Francisco, identify and capture this Ghost person, and deliver this mysterious entity to her employers. He agrees, and the movie can proceed.

 But it turns out that this Ghost has pissed off a lot of people around the world, governments and organized criminal gangs alike. Everybody has a price on the Ghost's head, and everybody has become aware of the Ghost's travel plans. Consequently, the plane is crammed full of assassins looking to kill the Ghost, and by the way they want Hartnett's character out of the way, too, one bounty-hunter to another.  

 Now we've got a plot, and a vehicle that will deliver about two hours of good, clean, bloody fun. I won't bother describing the action; it's not quite up to Jason Bourne or Mission:Impossible standards, but it's at least as good as in, oh, the John Wick franchise, and funnier. And as for the characterizations, I found them enjoyable if a little too pious on occasion. Fortunately, there's not a lot of chit-chat beyond cracking jokes in this movie, so it's kind of like church service on Super Bowl Sunday: cogent and concise, and then move on. There's even a plot twist near the end that you just knew had to happen, but it still came as a surprise when it did. And there's a final scene that's only there to set up a possible sequel.

 I kind of hope that happens. This was a fun movie, one well-enough done in writing and filming to make me willing to see these characters again. 

 

 That's it for Week One. My first batch of nine films only lasted five days, so I'm off to the library to replenish the supply. Week Two will probably start tonight, because let's face it, I really don't have anything better to do.

 

Links to earlier Film Festival reviews:

2025 (the beginning of this series of posts) 

2024 (link to first of seven posts, including a recap)

2023 (link to first of two posts)

2022 (link to the one post that first year)

 

 

The Fourth Annual Havasu Film Festival, Remote Edition Week One, Part One

 This year the Fourth Annual Havasu Film Festival is coming to you from Paradise South, i.e., San Antonio, Texas, owing to an unfortunate coincidence of kennel cough in Texas and the pregnancy of a purse-sized show dog in Colorado. I'm sure no explanation is needed for that. 

 Luckily, the San Antonio Public Library has even more DVDs to choose from than the Lake Havasu City branch of the Mohave County Public Library ... just not all in one place. But I strongly doubt that I will need to visit more than my three local branches to get enough films to fill the upcoming three weeks of enforced Me-Time that my dog-sitting duties provide. After all, just this morning I got nine recent releases from the "Express Collection" shelf -- new releases -- at the San Pedro Park branch alone; and if I should find the supply of older films runs low, or unconscionably thin, I have the Landa branch and the Central Library close-by to draw on. 

 I should mention that I have a list, curated by my wife, of good films that we want to see; I had thought to look for those movies for this year's Festival; they're mostly movies mentioned by actors on the hilarious British program, The Graham Norton Show, between 2014 and 2017. (Those were the seasons that until this month were available to us on a free streaming service, since discontinued by Amazon, because they've figured out a way to charge for those old re-runs, I suppose.) Whenever a guest on that show would mention a film, we'd look it up on Rotten Tomatoes, and if it got decent ratings we'd add it to our list. 

 But on reflection, I decided against that plan, as not being in the true spirit of the Havasu Film Festival, which since 2022 has been dedicated to providing biased and opinionated reviews of randomly selected mostly-mediocre movies. 

 And in adherence to that fine tradition, let me channel my inner Lewis and Clark and be off on another voyage of cinematic discovery.

copyright Sony Pictures

One of Them Days

Starring Keke Palmer, SZA, and Katt Williams

Directed by Lawrence Lamont

 I could tell from one look at the DVD case that I was in no respect a part of the target audience for this film. I'm white, and pension-old, and have never intentionally spent more than a few hours in the 'Hood with the windows down or the doors unlocked. I did spend a few years living in a mostly-black area in my youth, but that was a middle-class neighbourhood that had no "ghetto" vibe to it, at least not that I was aware of. 

 This is a movie for the Hip-Hop crowd. Its stars are mostly young black actors, rappers and comedians, with a few older people in small roles and a couple of white women that I cannot help but think of as token whites, except that one of them plays a character that had to be white for the plot's sake. The film is a buddy comedy -- what do you call the female version of a bromance? -- pitting two struggling thirty-somethings against the world and having a really bad time of it. Things go from bad to worse, mainly because one of the two has really bad judgment.

 The action takes place in The Jungles, a neighbourhood of Los Angeles more formally known as Baldwin Village. It's not a ghetto; more a ghetto-wannabe. On reflection, it's more like my old neighbourhood than I would like it to be. It's sort of a declining middle-class area of apartments and small businesses, a place beset with gangsters, landlords and payday lenders. I don't have to go back to my old neighbourhood in Fort Worth to see the same thing; I can find it less than two miles south of my home, on San Pedro just north of downtown. 

  It's a familiar-enough plot, and it's well-written, in that the moronic characters act consistently moronic in believable ways, and the reasonably intelligent characters act reasonably intelligently, also in believable ways. The main characters are concisely developed, while the peripheral characters are mostly cut from cardboard. The performances breathing life into those characters, even the stereotypes, are mostly well done, so nothing distracts from the flow of the story, which progresses without much in the way of eye-rolling. 

 If you can believe that Palmer's character, the straight-woman Dreux, would be a long-term friend of SZA's character Alyssa, then every event in this movie is believable. No doubt people who are familiar with the patois of black Angelenos will enjoy this movie more than I did -- and thank God for closed captions -- but even I could appreciate the realistic absurdity of events in the story even if I couldn't find them especially funny. Let's say it was amusing, and held my interest; and I'd point out that I think this SZA woman*, pretty much the only cast member I'd ever heard of before seeing this movie, did a very good job of bringing her character to the screen without making her into an unbelievable farce. In short, the movie is better than I thought it would be.

_________

* I had only ever seen the name in print before. In the extras on the DVD, I heard it pronounced for the first time. It sounds like a posh Englishman trying to say "scissor": SIZZ-ahh. Needless to say, it's not her real name. 

copyright Lionsgate

Flight Risk

starring Mark Wahlberg, Michelle Dockery and Topher Grace

directed by Mel Gibson

 I can never keep my celebrity scandals straight. I see the name "Mel Gibson" and I think to myself, Didn't he take a golf club to some guy's windshield? But no, that was one of the Gabor sisters, wasn't it? Maybe he's the guy who got arrested for getting a blow job from a hooker in a car parked on a curb in Hollywood. No, no: that was somebody else, too, but you have to wonder about the thought process leading up to that. Maybe it was an ugly divorce? Oh, who knows. Anyway, there's a scandal attached to Gibson's name, and it'd be easy enough in this Internet age to look it up. If I cared.

 Now, the names of the three stars of this movie illustrate a phenomenon about celebrity. I recognized Mark Wahlberg's name and face immediately, even though he shaved his head in a weird way for his role here. On the other hand, Michelle Dockery's name meant nothing to me, but I knew her face right away: she had played Lady Mary in the costume drama Downton Abbey, and that put my mind on a familiar path of thinking about how well Brits do American accents, and why doesn't it work the other way 'round?

 And then there's Topher Grace. I recognized the name right off and knew he'd played one of the main characters on That Seventies Show, which my wife used to watch but I rarely saw. I was pretty sure he wasn't the cool guy, or the foreign guy, or the sexy guy, so he had to be That Other One. I mean, who could forget a name like "Topher"? But even though his face was the first thing you see in this film, I didn't recognize him, and for a good part of the opening few scenes I was wondering who the actor was. 

 The plot here is a familiar one. Topher Grace's character was a mob boss's accountant and is now on the run. Michelle Dockery plays the federal marshall aiming to bring him in. Mark Wahlberg plays the guy who shows up to fly the chartered plane taking her and her fugitive from the most remote part of Alaska to the least remote part. But somebody isn't what they seem, and Drama Ensues. It is, for the most part, believable, although one can certainly see why Dockery's US Marshall character has job-performance issues. At one point, having been specifically instructed to do things "strictly by the book," she beats the crap out of her cuffed and bound adversary while interrogating him. And while she is capable of imagining the ins and outs of a fairly complex conspiracy, it doesn't occur to her to search, even perfunctorily, the small plane's cabin for the knife that adversary used. Guess why.

 The action, once the scene is set, takes place entirely within the cabin of the small aircraft, with a number of exterior shots highlighting the rugged beauty of Alaska, though the movie was actually shot in a particularly large and elaborate sound stage in California.*

  These are all capable actors guided by a more-than-competent director. The only person to phone in their performance in this film is Leah Rimini (who literally phoned hers in; she doesn't actually appear in the film, we just hear her voice as the US Marshall's supervisor), and since the filming was actually done in the confines of an old Cessna aircraft, there were physical challenges to overcome. But that's more a consideration for the people behind the camera than the actors, who ought to be able to deliver their lines anywhere from a stage to a bathtub. 

 One of the great things about modern film technology is that special effects have become so realistic that it's often impossible for the viewer to tell how a shot was made. Was it computer-generated? Did they use a green screen (or sometimes a blue screen)? Was it a miniature? Were there matte paintings involved? Or did they actually blow up that building or run that guy over with a bus? (Probably not that, but sometimes it looks so real.) 

One of these is not like the others.

 We've come to expect a level of quality so high that the original Star Wars looks a little low-tech now. As a result, it really stands out when a special-effects shot looks like a special-effects shot. In this movie, almost all the external shots of the airplane flying, banking left or right, taking off, landing, and so on -- even a dramatic shot where the airplane miraculously survives an encounter with something other than air -- look realistic. (One wonders ... I do, anyway ... why the plane would be shown banking to the left when, at that point in the film, the pilot has just been told to "maintain that heading"; but that's just a quibble.) The one exception I can recall is a scene where we appear to be looking at a small model airplane hanging from a string. I don't know why that one shot looks so fake, but in a way it's a testament to the overall quality of the movie that it sticks out like Denzel Washington's broken finger.

__________

* I watched the little documentary on the DVD about the making of this movie. In addition to that sound-stage factoid, I learned that the director's right-hand man on the film only has one T-shirt, or else the whole making-of thing was filmed on a single day. Also, the T-shirt's design reminded me a little bit about what the Mel Gibson scandal was about. Matthew 6:5. Gibson is, reportedly, not well-liked in Hollywood, and I'm not surprised; but I'm cynical enough to think that lingering resentment, however well deserved, has more than a little effect on the reviews his movies get from film-industry-adjacent writers. I'm also enough of a cynic to think it utterly fatuous that the Pussy-grabber-in-Chief has appointed him "Special Ambassador to Hollywood."  

 

 

copyright Neon Films et al.

Anora

starring Mikey Madison, Mark Eydelshteyn, Yura Borisov, Karren Karagullian, and Vache Tovmasyan

directed by Sean Baker

 I'm having a hard time deciding about this film. The first parts of it are all about dissolution: Vanya Zakharov (Eydelshteyn) is the dissipated son of a wealthy Russian family, and we join him during a visit to New York City, where he meets Anora (Madison), a dancer in a strip club. I had enough experience of such places and such people to vouch for the authenticity of the film's gritty-realism presentment, but I couldn't help think that a more imaginative director could have gotten the points across without making the naked bodies seem so much the essential point of the film's first twenty minutes. I'm sure younger film fans still think that watching one actor pretend to hump another is philosophically meaningful; I, sadly, am now old enough to have learned otherwise. The video games that vie with casual-but-athletic sex for Vanya's attention have more meaning.

 Vanya seems to be living in the fast lane out of desperation. Soon, we're told, he will have to go back to Russia and work in his family's business, whatever that is. In the meanwhile, he seems determined to cram a lifetime of meaningless experiences into a few weeks. This detailed depiction of decay goes on slowly for long enough that I got bored with it, and paused the movie to go make lunch and check some emails. 

  Vanya offers Anora ("Ani. I go by Ani.") what seems to her a lot of money to be his "girlfriend" for a week. Then he proposes, seemingly sincerely, though after just having had one of those "I need a green card" conversations, one wonders that Ani, otherwise a pretty sharp character, could have bought it. To Vanya, that kind of love is just another game he plays until it's time to go back home. She, I assume -- how else to explain it? -- thinks they're in love. So they go to Las Vegas and get married.

 At this point, shit hits the fan and the movie becomes more entertaining. Vanya's godfather Toser (Karagullian), an Armenian Orthodox priest who's supposed to be keeping an eye on the manchild while he's in New York, learns to his horror that the rumours of Vanya's marriage are true. There's a long, entertainingly farcical scene where Toser's stooges Igor (Borisov) and Garnik (Tovmasyan) invade Vanya's home to keep Vanya and Ani there until Toser arrives with a half-baked plan to get the marriage annulled. Ani puts up a fight, giving viewers good comedic value, while Vanya escapes and disappears into the Metropolis. Toser, Igor, Garnik and Ani spend the night looking for him, with Toser hoping to have the entire situation resolved before Vanya's parents arrive. Unfortunately, Toser is not in possession of certain important facts and his plan fails. (By the way, the Igor and Garnik characters are about the best part of this movie, while Karagullian's performance of the Toser character -- easily the most complex character in the script -- was the one most deserving of recognition; but it wasn't him who won the Oscar.)

 If you're the kind of person who looks for meaning of a deep, philosophical sort in films, you might enjoy being able to say you saw this movie. Personally, I kind of gave up that quest after seeing other palme d'or winners in the '70s and '80s. This one struck me as a post-modern La dolce vita played for laughs. Having seen it, I feel a little used and a little dirty. 

 

copyright Bleeker Street

The Wedding Banquet

starring Bowen Yang, Lily Gladstone, Kelly Marie Tran and Han Gi-Chan

directed by Andrew Ahn

 After the surprisingly draining experience of watching Anora, I felt like a nice romantic comedy would be the thing for me. The Wedding Banquet, it turns out, is the only comedy remaining among the DVDs I picked for the Fourth Annual Havasu Film Festival Remote Edition Week One. And wouldn't you know it, it's premised on a fake marriage intended to get someone a green card. Is that the only reason people in Hollywood ever get married these days? 

 I don't think most Americans, myself included, were even aware there was such a thing as a Green Card before the Gerard Depardieu/Andie MacDowell movie of that name came out in 1990. Since then the idea of a green-card marriage has become a trope in film and TV; this movie is a remake of the 1993 Ang Lee film of the same name and (essentially) same plot, except the location has been moved from New York to Seattle. (I haven't seen the earlier version, but I'd expect that a lot of the gay-jokes in it wouldn't fly these days. We're so much more sophisticated now. Woke, and all.)  

  Maybe it's the Seattle setting, but this movie seemed to me like an extended episode of Frasier, the '90s sit-com which used to do family-secret cock-ups so intelligently. This film wisely doesn't try to match that level of wit; instead the family secret at the center of this plot -- that the Han character of Min is gay -- turns out to be an open secret that only has to be kept from the character's absent grandfather in Korea (who, Grandma says, doesn't have long to live anyway), and the implications are never dealt with. That's not what the film is about.

 What the film is about is relationships; not just romantic relationships but familial ones as well. There is a certain amount of Idiot-Plot going on, where people have inadequate motivation for their responses to events but those responses are needed to move the plot along the desired course; but it's never too great a distraction from the story. The film does a very good job of creating interest in the major characters' lives, as when it shows but doesn't explain a traditional Korean wedding ceremony. Suffice it to say that, if I'd written or directed this movie, a few minor things, as ever, would have been different. Oddly, they didn't ask me to do that, and it's too late now anyway. So despite my own lack of involvement at the front end, I found myself involved with the movie's people at the back. 

 

 As you can see from the list of links below, my reviews of movies in the Havasu Film Festivals have been getting longer and longer. This is partly because the Festivals themselves have been getting longer, going from nine films in 2022 to 21 in 2023 to 38 last year. And partly it's because I'm a 20th-Century-type guy who uses words instead of pictures to convey his thoughts. 

 So this seems like a good point at which to break this series of reviews, because I know how limited the attention span of 21st-Century readers can be where there are no emojis or gif memes to draw information from, however inaccurately. When further reviews are posted, there'll be a link somewhere down this page that says "Newer Post", and you can click on that to be magically transported to those additional prescient thoughts like Dorothy in a tornado. Please watch where you land. 

 

Links to earlier Film Festival reviews:

2024 (link to first of seven posts, including a recap)

2023 (link to first of two posts)

2022 (link to the one post)

 

 

Parting Is Such Sweet Sorrow

 Well, it's gone, my pretty little roller skate. Off to Ohio, where it joins the collection of the British Transportation Museum, in Dayton. I was there a few years ago, & was surprised to see they didn't have one like it in their collection already. (There was a guy, I'm told, who promised his to the museum, but then he went and died without following through. The nerve.) 

 Mine happened to arrive during the monthly board meeting, which was the best possible time. Everybody who's seriously involved with the museum got to see it right off. It was a big hit, I'm told. 

 As it should be.

Adieu, adieu...

 Most of our travel is in the Subaru anyway, because we take Carly everywhere we can, and she's really not a fan of convertibles. So not having one will mean I have one less reason to go a-wandering ... and that's an activity that is less appealing overall anyway. I have to go so far to get to a place I've never been before, it becomes burdensome: the closest new counties to my home are in Massachusetts, Montana and California (and beyond). That's a lot of miles before I get there. 

 

The 2025 Condo Week Trip, That Last Little Bit

 This is the last of a series of posts, which I think you should read in order. Read the first part here. And you can see all the pictures from this trip in the Google Photos album here.

 

Monday, September 1

 We didn't have any clear plan for this day, so after a discussion over breakfast at the hotel, we decided to go back up to Holy Hill, in Hubertus, some thirty miles northwest of the city, to see the basilica that we'd been too late to see on Friday. We thought we'd also go to the labyrinth in West Bend, which is maybe fifteen or twenty miles farther, since we'd skipped that in hopes of reaching the basilica in time.

 We did get to the basilica fairly early, and that's when we discovered there's an elevator. I took that up to the porch; Jeff did too, a little later. I don't know how Sherry and Nancy got up there; they rushed off as soon as the car was parked and disappeared, like they usually do when they're together. For all I know they had themselves beamed up.

 Sherry took the stairs up the "scenic tower". I looked at the stairs and decided there was no way I was going to climb that narrow little staircase up seven stories and come back down without assistance from emergency medical technicians, so I just looked at her pictures. Oh, for the days, now so far in the past, when I would not let a tower go unclimbed. 

 While we were there, we saw a procession of young girls with wreaths in their hair, carrying a statue of the Virgin Mary up to the porch. I wonder if they came all the way from the bottom, because they were singing as they climbed up the last flight of steps (the part of their procession that I witnessed) and none of them seemed the least bit winded. Maybe they'd come just the one flight. 

Anyway, so the inside of the basilica is, as I said somewhere earlier, very spare in its decoration. It has ribbed vault ceilings in the gothic style, with almost no iconographic decoration on the walls. There are images in the stained glass, and a few icons across the front of the sanctuary, but by Roman Catholic standards the decor seems positively protestant in is sparseness. Beautiful, but in a very different way.

 We ditched the labyrinth again, because the Art Museum downtown was open only until five today (usually it's closed on Mondays, but today is a holiday, so it's open) and this was our only chance to see it, as it would be closed all day on Tuesday and we'd be leaving on Wednesday. We got down there and found a parking place in a nearly-empty garage across the street, and the first thing we did was have lunch in the cafe on the Lake level. It was nothing special: fruit bowls and prefab wraps with captive-audience price tags. I went out on the terrace to look at the lake and ended up staying out there for two hours or so, while everybody else toured the museum. Judging from their photos of the artworks contained inside, I made the better choice. I'd had a look at the museum's map of galleries and felt just from that that I'd be dissatisfied at having paid something like twenty bucks to see a bunch of abstract and postmodern crap. There was one gallery of paintings I might have liked to see, and an exhibition in the basement on the history of photography, but the map and the pictures my peeps took tell me I made the right choice (for a change) for myself.  

North Point Lighthouse

 Next we drove up to the North Point Lighthouse, which was small and really kind of squat and dumpy (it was built in two phases; first the top portion, then the bottom part was added later on). But it's a very pretty setting, sort of at the end of a miles-long string of parklands along the lakeshore that start way down below the art museum. The lighthouse itself, though, wasn't very impressive, especially after having seen the one at Wind Point in Racine.  

On the way to our next stop in our off-the-cuff tour, we stopped to get a photo of the Water Tower, built in the 1870s. Then we just sort of cruised around the Third Ward, a gentrifying artsy-fartsy area on the southwestern corner of downtown. It's got a lot of warehouses converted to expensive flats, and trendy restaurants and boutique shops, and is centered on the Milwaukee Public Market. The whole area is a duplication of the Pearl area in San Antonio -- all the same characteristics, right down to the enclosed mall of pop-up shops -- so I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that every major city in the country has a gentrifying artsy-fartsy area just like the Third Ward, or the Pearl, and they all believe they're special because of it.

 While we were there Nancy found that there's yet another lighthouse in Milwaukee, the Pier Head Light, so we drove out to see that. The lighthouse itself is a grafitti-covered lump of metal maybe fifteen or twenty feet tall, but it does offer nice views of the skyline. Then she found a listing for something called the Schlitz Audubon center out in a suburb some ten miles north, but the website said they were open until 8pm, so we went. Got there just after five o'clock, to learn that, as of today, the first of September, their closing time is five o'clock.  Probably just as well; there were a lot of mosquitos.

 It had been a day of some disappointments, obviously, but still an enjoyable day, and I think we all kind of needed a low-key day like this. And we finished it off on a high note by going back to Oscar's Pub for dinner, where we'd had such great food on Sunday (I think it was Sunday) before the Conservatory. 

 

Tuesday, September 2

  Our last day in Milwaukee began with a morning at the Pabst Mansion. When this Flemish revival house was built, in the late 19th Century, it was one of about 60 large houses on what was then called Grand Avenue. (Now it's Wisconsin Avenue, and all the other mansions have been torn down or repurposed to economically more rewarding uses than mere dwelling spaces.) After the Pabsts died, the house was sold to the Archdiocese of Milwaukee for a bishop's palace. When, in the 1970s, it became too expensive to maintain, it was sold to a neighbouring hotelier, who planned to redevelop this space into a parking lot. This was the catalyst that resulted in a save-our-history upswell among those in town who saw more value in the property than just the money it could make for the owner. Visionary fools, always getting in the way of progress. 

 To get their way, the visionaries had to give up the carriage house; but they did save the old house, now the last one remaining on the street. As someone in the gift shop's documentary video said, "a few pieces of this history to tell a larger story." 

 There was also a small domed temporary building, originally the Pabst pavilion at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago, that had been transported from there to Milwaukee when the fair ended and attached to the east end of the house. I don't think its removal had to do with the property deal, because the temporary building has been dismantled and stored in the big house's basement, awaiting a spare twelve million dollars to reconstruct. I think it was just in bad shape and they couldn't afford to fix it up. Too bad, really, because architecturally it's prettier than the house. 

This year's HQ

 Anyway: so when we arrived I realized we had actually driven right by it when we came to see the Joan of Arc Chapel, I hadn't realized it because it is serving as this year's headquarters for the Fog & Scaffold Travel Club; I just saw the historic marker for Captain Pabst, off to the side of the front lawn, as I executed a (probably illegal) three-point turn.

 We parked around the corner, not knowing there's a lot just for the Pabst Mansion across Wisconsin Avenue. We spent the few minutes we had before the tour piddling around the gift shop. Sherry found me another sweatshirt on sale ($20, not bad, and a nice bright red colour) and I stashed my camera bag in one of their lockers. Wish I'd left the camera too, as the house turned out to be so dark inside that I couldn't get any decent photos without a flash. Fortunately, Sherry got a few good ones with her cellphone camera.

 The tour itself was excellent, largely because we had a retired history teacher to show us through the place. She didn't know everything about the house -- she's only been a docent there for a couple of years -- but what she did know, she knew well, and told in an interesting fashion, without a lot of hype or melodrama.

 We located a place for lunch close to the dock where our afternoon river-and-bay boat tour would start, a sort of dive bar called München Biergarten, where we got light lunches of wurst and a big pretzel for Nancy (and I do mean big) with beer and bad service. Nancy asked for tea, which was on their digital menu, but the bartender denied they had any. Then she asked for something else on the menu, which he also said they didn't sell. She got water; they had that.

  As enjoyable as the Pabst Mansion tour had been, the afternoon's Milwaukee River & Harbor Cruise was even better. Mostly because we could sit down the whole time. (Tourism is tiring, and hard on the feet, especially for us old folks.) We booked our places on Edelweiss, which for all I know is the only company offering boat tours. They have a warning on their web site saying they cannot delay the tour for late-arriving passengers, because of "scheduled drawbridge openings." And they didn't give refunds just because you miss the boat. So I was picturing a two-deck vessel such as I'd seen by the art museum, and was looking forrward to watching the drawbridges operate from river level. But on a Tuesday afternoon after Labor Day, there aren't enough of us tourists left in Milwaukee, so we got a single-deck vessel, sort of a wide bateau-mouche, which didn't need to have the bridges open for it. That was the only disappointment of the trip. (And I wonder: if the reason they can't wait is invalid, would they wait?)

  The cruise lasted a little over an hour, I think, going out into the bay behind the breakwater on a beautiful cool late summer's day, We had an excellent narrator, one who told amusing stories about the chequered history of Milwaukee, many of them featuring the same Mr Kilbourn for whom Wisconsin Dells was originally named; a man who knew how to run roughshod. 

 Milwaukee is an architecturally interesting city.* In the late 19th Century, when all the world was putting up gingerbread houses and Neo-Classical Revival buildings, Milwaukee was too; but they also seemed to have a thing for Flemish Revival. Besides the City Hall and the Pabst Mansion, there are a number of buildings in that uncommon style, like the Dubbel Dutch Hotel. Collectively, they give the city a slightly distinctive flavour, which, being from New Orleans and living by choice in San Antonio, I appreciate.

 Most of the new stuff, of course, is dull in a postmodern cost-saving way, but in between those, there remain some attractive structures. Like in the photo above: the brown building at the right is an event venue called the War Memorial Center. Its height is the same as the cliffs at Omaha Beach, it is set back from the water's edge by the same distance as those cliffs, and the design of the building's facades is meant to evoke the German pillboxes American soldiers faced on D-Day. 

 The pointy white building behind it, by the way, is Milwaukee's first high-rise apartment building. It is now, not surprisingly, unaffordable to most people. The old building at the far left is the local gas company, so the neon flame on top lights up in different colours to show how much money they're going to make, depending on the weather. (If it's going to be really cold, it lights up gold.) The glass-and-steel buildings in the middle, behind the beautiful art museum (seen with its vanes closed, because the museum's not open on Tuesdays) are typical uninteresting glass-and-steel buildings, with curves and lumps and bulges added in the vain hope of giving them some attribute to set them apart from other typical uninteresting glass-and-steel buildings. Didn't really work.

 We were then at that closing stage of our Condo Week Add-On, a time when we just kind of roam around, making random turns and seeing what chance brings us. We saw a mouse climbing up a pole next to a railway underpass; we saw a city park that seemed to contain a small reservoir; a shop selling "bubble pancakes" and ice cream; and then we went back to the area around the Domes so Nancy could get a picture of a building she'd seen on a previous visit, the Knitting Factory. They used to make underwear there, but now it's low-income housing of some kind.

 By this time it was getting on toward being late, and we all had to pack for the next day's departures; so we started back to the hotel. We weren't in a great hurry, so I decided to take city streets all the way back, about a dozen miles. That took us through a variety of neighbourhoods in Milwaukee and into a separate city called West Allis, where we decided it was time for something to drink. We'd had such good luck in stumbling across Oscar's Pub and Grill that when I saw Paulie's Pub, I felt a sort of hopeful kinship, so I found a parking place and we went in. They were producing a (I assume) local radio show about car racing -- there was what looked like a demolition derby car parked outside, with decal illustrations of a grille and headlights where the real things would normally have been -- and it was so loud, and crowded, that when we got our drinks and a couple of small snacks, we took them outside to the porch that ran down the side of the building. One of the snacks was called jalapeño poppers, but they were nothing like what we'd get if we ordered that back home. They were more like flautas with a cream cheese filling. We also had cheese curds, which weren't nearly as good as the ones I used to get out in western Wisconsin; but despite that, there were quickly none left.

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* Unlike Minneapolis, which contains many of the ugliest buildings I've seen, all in one central business district. 

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The Drive Home: Wednesday, September 3 through Friday, September 5

 It was basically an uneventful trip home. We left the hotel at around eight in the morning and had a few spells of light rain in the first hour or two. In northwestern Illinois, we met my former law partner Curtis, who recently moved to that area from Nevada. We used to go hiking while Sherry played soccer at the Huntsman Games in Utah every year, but I guess that won't happen anymore. And we're both at an age when travel is becoming increasingly difficult, so while this is likely not the last time he and I will see each other -- a thought too sad to contemplate -- it's surely one of the last. Unless I contrive excuses to revisit the Old Northwest, or the Upper Midwest, or whatever you like to call that part of the country.

 Sherry and I started listening to an audiobook by Danielle Arceneaux called Glory Be, a funny little murder mystery set in Lafayette, Louisiana, where I used to live. The reader happened to be the same reader as the one that read Hollywood Homocide, which we'd listened to on the drive up, across Iowa. She's a good reader, but being intimately familiar with the pronunciation of place names in Acadiana made me wince from time to time. Especially the way she would pronounce "Lafayette", like it was in Indiana. Enjoyed the book anyway, and the mystery kept us both engaged until the very end.

 We spent the first night, Wednesday, in Jefferson City, Missouri, at a so-so chain hotel. We drove downtown for dinner at a place called Ecco Lounge ("Jefferson City's oldest restaurant"), where they had good food and excellent service; then we walked down to the corner where there was a place called the Ice Cream Factory still open. One of those local places that makes all their own product, and you want to try every flavour. It's been several days now, and if I meditate on the question I could probably remember which I had, but all I remember at the moment is that we ate it outside at a cafe table, I had mine in a waffle bowl, and there was some guy who'd left his car running in the parking lot with the headlights shining in our eyes while he went inside. Anyway, it doesn't matter what flavour it was; it was good, and next time I'm in Jeff City I'll probably go back and get something completely different. 

 On Thursday we drove from Jefferson City to McKinney, a northern suburb of Dallas. Freeway as far as Joplin, but then we took the highway that goes through several of the Indian nations in eastern Oklahoma (because most of that state's freeways are toll roads, and I feel like we've already paid for them once and shouldn't have to pay again). It wasn't as bad a drive as I remember it being, maybe because we finished Glory Be and started Skin Deep, by Timothy Halloran. He wrote a series of maybe eight or ten amusing mystery novels set in Los Angeles with a "detective" -- actually, a thief -- named Junior Bender, all of which we enjoyed; this series -- Skin Deep is, I think, the third in the series -- is also set in L.A., with a detective (Simeon Grist) who's actually a detective. In this book, he gets hired by a film producer to babysit the movie star he beat up at the beginning of the story, and it goes on from there with wit and a little sophistication. I recommend both series. (Halloran, if I remember correctly, also wrote a series or two of books set in Burma, but I haven't read or heard any of those.)

 Dinner in McKinney was at an Iraqi restaurant near the hotel. Sherry ordered "tawook," which is chunks of chicken marinated and grilled and served wrapped in a pita-like bread. I had a half-order of "Iraqi kebab," which was served with a piece of soft naan-like bread as big as a pizza pan. Neither of us had ever had Iraqi food before. I honestly can't tell it from Turkish, or Lebanese, or generic "Mediterranean" cuisine. It was very good, and not particularly expensive, but the first employee we encountered seemed to be a teenaged girl who spoke (or pretended to speak) no English and had been grounded for some reason by her parents, and was working at the shop as some kind of horribly unjust punishment. She was fairly quickly sent to the kitchen and replaced by what I assume is her mother, who was much more adept at welcoming customers. She did a lot to counter the offputting feel of the first encounter.

 And on Friday morning, after getting through the rush-hour traffic in Dallas, we had a light breakfast in Waxahachie, at a local shop called Oma's Jiffy Burger, which seemed to be the place for breakfast in that town. We each had just a breakfast sandwich of egg, cheese and sausage, and coffee; it was all good, and filling, and the atmosphere was pure small-town-Texas. Couldn't be better.

 And then we were home. In plenty of time to collect our Carly from the kennel and apologize profusely to her for having left her alone for nearly three weeks, when there were thunderstorms twice a day every day &c &c. She'll never let us live that down.

You will pay.