This is the second in a glimmering series. You ought to read 'em in order. Here's a link to the first.
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| United Artists |
I'm trying to remember what life was like when this movie came out, in 1987. Reagan was still president; the Republican Party was rallying behind Oliver North and starting to exhibit the careless self-serving corruption that has led it to its present sad state; the inflation of the Carter years had ended and the economy brought largely back into control, for the benefit of the wealthy as productivity and prosperity began to go in different directions. Our health-care system ended its run as the envy of the world. The Iron Curtain was teetering, though we didn't know it yet, and Russians could still meaningfully be the Bad Guys in this bit of fluff filmmaking.
This is a movie for teenaged boys. Maybe girls, too; I don't know. Not entirely sure what motivates them, so if you have daughters in that age range, maybe it'll get a laugh. But definitely not something to entertain grown-ups.
In it, James Belushi plays a CIA super-agent. (This was back when the CIA was arguably considered a white-hat agency.) John Ritter plays an ordinary Casper Milquetoast type picked off the street. He apparently looks like somebody else; I wasn't clear on that part, as the explanation was brief and devoid of context. "The computer picked him out," the agency boss says, and that's pretty much it. Belushi's assignment is to get Ritter's character ("Bob") from California to DC by Friday evening. Yeah, you can see the set-up in your head now, can't you? Road trip! Buddy film! Action comedy! Some immature jokes about big tits and smoking after sex, to keep the kiddies interested between ludicrous fight scenes. Think Larry and Curly, but no Moe. If you want character development, there's just the faintest whiff of that, but if that's your interest you probably won't be able to maintain enough interest, or indeed consciousness, to notice it when it happens in the silliest way possible.
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| Lions Gate Entertainment |
Back in the day, before films were easily obtainable on DVDs from the library, I used to wish that films like this would be shown in my particular cultural backwater. I live in one of the biggest cities in the US, and there are, I'm guessing, two dozen cineplexes within driving distance, each with at least half a dozen screens; the one I most often go to has about twenty screens. That's a lot of potential exposure for the cinematic arts.
But alas, almost all these movie houses are owned by two or three companies; and it would appear that their interests are somewhat in conflict with mine. They show, almost exclusively, the sort of mass-market big-budget pablum that gets the big advertising: formulaic movies involving already-known characters doing super-human things the American way, available on fifty screens each. In my home town, those movies leave no light or air for the sort of films where art survives.
But I know good movies are out there; or, lowering the bar substantially, interesting and artistic movies are out there. I know this (a) because I occasionally go to Austin or Dallas or Los Angeles, and I see them playing in those cities; and (b) because I find them on the shelves at the library a year or so after the fact. I might also see them on a streaming service, but that's unlikely, as streaming services are unbearably tedious to navigate; so unless I've already heard of a movie I might want to see, I'm probably not going to find it on a streaming service, unless by serendipity.
This story is constructed around the creation of a "perfect" violin by a fictional violin maker in Cremona in 1681. His wife has just died in childbirth, and the child is stillborn. He completes this last instrument and ceases working. The film then follows the violin from one owner to another: a monastery high in the Austrian alps; a group of Romany; an eccentric English performer; a Communist Party official in Shanghai, during the Cultural Revolution; and finally an auction house in Montreal. The episodes of this violin's travels are tied together by scenes from Cremona in the 17th Century.
Some of the people in this movie are interesting characters, the kind you might like to know things about. Bussotti, the instrument's creator, played by Carlo Cecchi, for example; music teacher Georges Poussin (Jean-Luc Bideau), for another, and his little protègé Kaspar Weiss (Christoph Koncz). But as interesting as these people and others may be, they are somewhat peripheral to the story being told, that of the violin, and so they appear on the screen, tell their bit of the tale, and are gone, sometimes in ways that make us curious to know more.
At the other end of the scale is Charles Morritz, the violin expert hired by the Montreal auction house. He is played by Samuel L. Jackson. I don't know why. I mean, I know he's in this movie because his name on the marquis is worth something. I can guess that somebody -- maybe the producers or the distributor (see Prologue on the first post of this series) -- insisted on a big name. I just don't know why the job came Jackson's way. He seems an odd casting choice for this particular role, and I have to say it's like watching the credit-card pitchman at work. He always strikes me as an actor who hit his peak in Pulp Fiction (1994) and then reprised the role in all his work thereafter.
There's a gratuitous plot twist at the end, one bringing discredit to Jackson's character's morality for no particular cinematic reason that I can fathom. I can invent scenarios in my head to explain it, but none of them do anybody any credit, so I will leave them there, to be forgotten.
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| Universal Pictures |
I almost rejected this video at the library shelf, because it looked like one of those Christian-Nationalist propaganda films that find their way from some right-wing group to the mainstream by donation. I used to see a lot of audiobooks of that sort, back when I was borrowing actual audiobooks to listen to on long drives. (Now, it's all virtual borrowings.)
But I took it out in the end just because I thought it'd at least be a change from the plethora of shoot-'em-up action films and jejeune comedies otherwise available on the "R" shelf; and I thought that if it was any good at all as a love story, it would be something I could sit through.
I put it in the machine fairly late last night because the video package said the run time was an hour and forty minutes. That's not true: it's well over two hours long. But I stuck with it because, to my surprise, it was almost a good movie.
First, the religious aspect: it is a story promoting the Judeo-Christian philosophy by a re-telling of an Old-Testament story translated to the California gold rush era. California is played by South Africa. Angel (Abigail Cowen) is a young Boston girl sold into prostitution upon the death of her mother. In a tale told by flashbacks, she runs away and gets herself to California, where she again goes to work as a prostitute, under the illusion that her boss, "Duchess" (Famke Janssen), is holding her savings against the day she decides she is ready to go out on her own. When that day arrives she is violently disabused of her fantasy.
Meanwhile, an honest and devoutly Christian farmer, Michael (Tom Lewis), has spotted Angel on one of her occasional walks through the streets of the mining town where he sells his produce. She is, he believes, the sign God has given him in answer to his (literal) prayers, and so he visits her in the brothel, hoping to convince her to marry him. She thinks it's a joke, then the delusion of a simple mind, and his repeated visits have no effect on her until, beaten and broken by Duchess's henchman, she agrees to what seems to her the lesser of two evils. Michael takes her to wife and then to his farm, where their life together remains chaste, as he slowly convinces her that he is not like every other man she's ever met in her life.
She leaves him repeatedly. The first time he brings her supplies she'll need to get the twenty miles to town, and tells it's her choice whether she will walk that way. "This way," he says pointing back the way she came, "is home. One mile, all down hill. It's your choice." He rides away, and she has a moment of good judgment, and returns. The last time, a neighbour urges him to go after her; but he replies to the neighbour, "She has free will." The film paces Angel's change of heart well, and by the end you believe the movie is well-named. It is, after all, a genuine romantic love story.
There are problems with the story, of course. Michael's character is distractingly pure, and I think I would have been better able to believe him as a man if they had just left his backstory blank. And his success in rescuing Angel, when she has run back to the mining town and set herself up in the whoring business, is too easy to be readily believable, but as a plot device it funtions, barely, as long as you don't focus too much on how it came to pass. The "how," after all, isn't really the point.
It is a beautifully filmed movie, the performances are competent and the story moves along without the sort of inadequate justifications that I've taken to calling the Idiot Plot device (as in, for example, Anyone But You, in last year's film festival). And the religious message is in favour of the sort of love-thy-neighbour Christianity that I grew up with, not the hate-based God-loves-only-us fundamentalism that allows people to honour the orange anti-Christ while calling themselves Christians. Also, it's not over-done. If you don't believe in the power of God to affect your life, you can just put it down to the simple-minded superstitions of an earlier, more innocent day, and the film works just as well. The characters, Michael and, in the end, Angel believe it, but that doesn't mean you have to.
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| Magnolia Pictures |
I didn't recognise the name "Cobie Smulders." Actually, I didn't see the name until the closing credits -- it was covered up on the DVD package by a library sticker, and I don't know if I was looking at the screen during the opening credits. It probably wouldn't have rung any bells anyway, as it's been a long time since I used to watch How I Met Your Mother on TV. She played Robin, who may or may not have been the "mother" of the show's title. I don't know; I didn't make it to the end of the series before losing interest.
But it was definitely that same actor, and I realized that about the same time I decided that I didn't really like this irritating bitch ("Kay") she plays in this comedy movie. Let's just say she has issues that include anger and a lack of self-awareness, and that show themselves in a failure to respect the people around her. She sees what she wants to see, and hears what she wants to hear.
The people around her include Trevor (played by Guy Pearce) and Danny (played by Kevin Corrigan). Trevor has built a business as a professional trainer with a philosophical underpinning that he genuinely believes. Kay works for him, but thinks the philosophy is just marketing bullshit. Danny got divorced in New York one day, and the next day he inherited millions of bucks from his estranged mother in Texas. He moves to Austin and decides to "get in shape," and so goes to Trevor's gym. Sensitive about looking ridiculous while exercising, he opts for private sessions at the mansion he's renting. Kay becomes his trainer but quickly allows the relationship to veer away from professionalism until she's sticking her tongue down Danny's throat. The next day she dumps him as a client without honestly explaining to Trevor what happened. Trevor, who needs the business but also wants to do the right thing by his employee (whose story he sort of believes), goes to Danny's house to offer him another trainer or beat him up, we're not really sure which. Maybe both; it's a comedy, after all. As a result of this almost-funny confrontation, Danny ends up in business with Trevor, ready to bankroll his gym's expansion.
Danny, almost unbelievably, is the only one of the three who sees things clearly. He uses his wealth and his appropriate lack of concern with money to force Trevor and Kay to acknowledge their feelings, and though you just want to give Kay a good hard slap, and maybe kick Trevor one time, it has the desired effect: a sort of happy ending for Kay and Trevor, though I'm not sure about Danny. He might end up happy, but it's unlikely. He followed one of Kay's suggestions.
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| Anchor Bay Entertainment |
Closed captions have gotten so much better over the past decade or so.... They've made a wide range of accented English accessible to us Americans, who have mostly grown up never hearing anything more exotic than a Tidewater accent; or maybe the clear pronunciation of characters in the Lord of the Rings or the Harry Potter movies. But now I can watch Britbox Mysteries or Acorn and get almost every word (though I sometimes have to search for slang terms on the internet). Closed captions really come in handy with dialects from the north of England, and Scotland, and Ireland, and the Antipodes.
This movie is from Australia. The DVD doesn't offer closed captions. I managed to get through the entire movie without them, but for one moment when someone on the screen said a name and I couldn't understand what the name was. I thought it was Jane, which was the name of the main character's detective-partner. Then it seemed they were talking as though it had been a man's name, so I thought maybe it was James. But there's no "James" in the movie, and it was too damned late in the film to be introducing an important new character.
Turns out they said "Jason," which was the name of a cop, whose death in the first scene of the movie got the story going. It would have helped to be able to make out that name right away.
Jason, played by Luke Hemsworth -- less-famous brother of Chris and Liam -- is a friend of detective Robbie Green (LaPaglia). He's driving down a major thoroughfare in an Australian city (I'm guessing Perth, just because at one point there's a car with a Western Australia license plate, and that's the only place I know in Western Australia; I could be wrong) at night, when two shots light up the cabin of his SUV. Next morning, his good friend Detective Green is called to the scene. Green finds an evidence bag containing a single memory card in Jason's pocket.
The card contains footage shot by a girl and her boyfriend. The girl (Mangan-Lawrence) was reported missing two days before by her mother. Detective Green and his partner Jane (Lambert, played by Viva Bianca) begin investigating Jason's death by following the footage from place to place and dead body to dead body. Clearly the missing girl and her boyfriend (Williams) are engaging in some kind of Biblically-inspired retribution for the death a year earlier of the girl's sister in a hit-and-run accident. The footage being played back at the police station shows an interview with someone; the cops figure out where the interview took place and who was being spoken to, and Green and Lambert go there and find dead people as they piece together what is going on.
The story is well-done, in the sense that we don't realise the full meaning of events until the very end, after we've suspected literally every character in the movie of being behind the whole thing, and aspects of the denouement came as a near-total surprise to me. Yet the ending was oddly unsatisfying. I really felt the need for a sort of summation before the closing credits rolled.
That, and closed captions would have made me happier with this film.
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| IFC Films |
Let me start off by saying I've never been a fan of J.D. Salinger. I read Catcher in the Rye when I was younger than Holden Caulfield, and again a couple of years ago, but didn't think much of it. The themes of youthful disaffection and depression -- sadness, really -- struck me as overblown responses to what I think of as just growing up; and the use of the slang of the era when it was written makes it sound dated and cheesy. If the book had been written in the language of a 1990s surfer boy, it would not have sounded any more wilfully quaint in my head. (And maybe it wouldn't already require a glossary, to translate slang terms of 1950 into English that fluent speakers understand. Totally, dude.)
That being said, it may be true that Catcher in the Rye did for literature what Marlon Brando did for acting around the same time: cut it loose from archaic patterns and practices that had solidified into restraints on expression. I don't know. Brando certainly made film characters suddenly seem like real people (think of the phoniness of all those mid-Atlantic accents of the 1930s; think of the canned jargon of just about every World War II movie, and then tell me anybody spoke that way in the real world, except in imitation). If Holden Caulfield sounded like a real youth of 1950 at the time, well, that's fine, but by the time I read the book more than 20 years on from that, he sounded no more genuine and relatable than those beach kids in the Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello movies. The sound of Caulfield in my head is more like the "rock and roll" played on the Andy Griffith Show when Opie has a boy-girl party. A pathetic imitation of real life.
This movie, on the other hand, seems much more genuine than the book. J.D. Salinger (portrayed here by Nicholas Hoult) is mostly famous for having written one book, and then gone off to hide in the woods without ever talking to anybody. This movie tries to explain that peculiarity of his psyche. It follows him through his more-or-less normal middle-class upbringing in New York City, into a creative writing class at Columbia University, and on into the army as it makes its way from Normandy into Germany. It recounts the conflicts between the artistic temperament and the editorial authority. (I don't know the history of Salinger's dealings with editors, so I'll just take it as given that events related in the book are more or less genuine. "Based on a true story," as they say in Hollywood.) Once the book is out, and wildly successful, the movie shows Salinger's difficulty in dealing with fans and acclaim, and it follows him into his rural retreat in New Hampshire, where he spent the rest of his life.
However accurate or otherwise this explanation of the man is, it's coherent. Even if it's completely misguided and fabricated, it's a convincing story. Maybe it's even true. Doesn't matter. As a movie it's a good story, nicely told, with very good actors working off a very good script and shepherded by a very good director.
That's it for the FIFTH Annual Havasu Film Festival! I still have two DVDs, which will go un-watched, as my remaining time in the desert will be taken up by preparations to leave for home in the morning. I hope you enjoyed reading these reviews and that you'll be inspired to visit your own local library and check out movies you otherwise would never see. There are worse ways to spend your time.
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