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.
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| copyright Sony Pictures |
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.
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| copyright Lionsgate |
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.)
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| One of these is not like the others. |
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| copyright Neon Films et al. |
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.
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| copyright Bleeker Street |
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.
