The Second Annual Havasu Film Festival, Part Two

For Part One of this post, please click here.

 So the sister-in-law has gone off home to Colorado, and the wife has gone off to play soccer in the Huntsman Games in Utah, leaving me alone to watch the movies I checked out of the Mohave County Library for this part of the festival. Since it's just me (Carly's here too, but she doesn't care for watching movies) I pick the film more or less at random. This year, it's films from the "C" shelf and films from the "N" shelf.

 Since I just pick the movies for this part of the festival at random, I expect them to be worse movies. I do this both because I don't want to take the time to look them up while at the library, and because I prefer bad movies for this write-up. It lets me channel Alexander Woollcott more effectively. So having now watched these films, I'm more than a little disappointed that they are on balance pretty good entertainment. Tant pis.

Congo

Science fiction is such a wonderfully flexible genre. It runs the gamut from entirely plausible variations on real life, like a disease run rampant around the world, to the most outlandish plots that rely entirely on the existence of evil, plus coincidental natural disasters; and then bleeds off into the realm of fantasy.

Congo is a movie that relies to some extent on evil as a motivation. Not in the central characters, mind you, but in Humankind in general. No, the main characters are motivated by greed, or by love, or by a sense of duty or honour. But evil, it turns out, is implicitly the characteristic of mankind that perverted the natural course of the world and hence produced the threat that causes mayhem in the movie. As that mayhem comes to its climax, natural catastrophe joins in, implying the will of the gods. Except that, as we’re talking about King Solomon’s mines, it must be the will of the one true God. But that is an uncomfortable thought for the film’s makers, so it goes unsaid.

At the beginning of this film we meet Dr Karen Ross, played by Laura Linney with a minimum of scenery-chewing despite some of the lines she’s given. The company she works for has a problem that requires a discreet rescue mission to central Africa, played by Costa Rica. We also meet Professor Peter Elliot and his protegé, a gorilla named Amy, played by two women taking turns in an ape suit. Professor Elliot and his team have developed a machine that can translate sign language into audible speech. They decide to return Amy to the wild with the vaguely expressed idea that she can teach all the other apes to understand sign language, essentially becoming a universal translator between humans and gorillas. Their trip hits a snag when the mysterious financial backer, played by Tim Curry with an eastern European accent and a generous coating of sleaze to provoke suspicion of his motives, admits to financial embarrassment. Fortunately for Professor Elliot, Dr Ross’s company has very deep pockets and will foot the bill. They hop on a plane and fly off to Tanzania, where they meet their guide, played by Ernie Hudson, who delivers the best performance in the film as the man with a plan. He smoothes over all difficulties by knowing the score in the perennial revolutionary chaos of that part of the world.

Remarkably, Amy’s home — and thus the destination for Professor Elliot — just happens to be in the same place where Dr Ross expects to conduct her search for survivors and other things. Who’d have ever have thunk it? It’s a small world, it turns out. The group stumbles upon signs of the people to be rescued in that vast tropical jungle, then discover that King Solomon’s mines, the objective of the eastern European financial backer, are just right there too. Wow! It’s an amazing coincidence! But yeah, it could happen, sure. And in discovering the mines, the group also discovers (a) what happened to the people Dr Ross came to rescue; (b) the treasure of King Solomon is still there; and (c) the treasure is guarded by vicious apes selected for viciousness by King Solomon’s mine-managers twenty-five hundred years ago, and they’ve apparently been waiting for 25 centuries for Dr Ross’s group to wander in. The apes are not vanquished, but modern human technology is enough to allow Dr Ross and a few of her friends to survive (though of course Professor Elliot’s survival is only assured by the intervention of Amy, whose lunch break ended just in time for her to order the bad gorillas to leave him alone). At this point the gods (or the one true God) express some displeasure with the whole thing by having a volcano that has been dormant for all those centuries and more spew its lava upon the ground, and collapse the mines, and raise great chunks of ground into the air where unfortunates can cling to the sides before falling into the bowels of the earth, and open great rifts in the earth to swallow people who don’t get star billing. It’s truly remarkable timing for a catastrophe of biblical proportions.

And yet the movie works. Of course there’s a happy ending for Amy, and of course Dr Ross demonstrates her own strong moral values, and of course the sleazy eastern European backer dies horribly off screen. Of course it’s all fantastically implausible from start to finish, but it’s a fun little idiotic movie done well enough to entertain. It was only after I’d watched, and was thinking about the guys in the ape suits, that I remembered all the jokes about Penny’s gorilla movie on The Big Bang Theory. I was satisfied.

No Clue

The best indicator I know of that I will enjoy a movie is that Rotten Tomatoes’ critical rating is at least fairly good, and that the audience’s rating is higher. There are reasons for this, but they don’t matter. This movie’s critical rating on RT isn’t good, but the audience’s rating is a bit higher, so it would have been a toss-up if I’d checked RT before selecting the movie from the library shelf. I don’t do that, though, because it’s too time-consuming, typing on a smartphone’s little screen, so I just take my chances from what's on the DVD case.

As it happens, I did like No Clue. Not a lot, but enough.

It stars Brent Butt, who apparently has had some success on Canadian television in programs not available to me. Too bad: he has an animated series called Corner Gas that sounds like a fun Canadian version of Family Guy, but with a unicorn and a sasquatch instead of a giant chicken.

In No Clue, which Butt also wrote and co-produced, he plays Leo, a small-time salesman of specialty advertising products who offices in a slightly run-down building across the hall from a private investigator. In walks Kyra, played by Amy Smart, who has been in a number of movies that probably never played in the proudly lame cultural backwater that is my home town. Kyra tells Leo her brother has disappeared and hires Leo to find him. Leo takes the job on, despite his clear stupidity, because, as he tells his idiot friend, “I’m a two and she’s a ten.” Comedy of mostly a low sort ensues, and in the end Leo almost gets it right. (Apropos of nothing, I notice that the video case cover has the same picture as the one above, except the guy who plays Leo's idiot friend is also pictured on it. Probably means nothing.)
I think this is the only movie I’ve ever seen that describes itself as “Canadian.” That alone lends it a very slight aura of the exotic, but let’s face it, Vancouver, Canada, where the movie takes place, is not that different from, say, Seattle or, I assume, Portland. And I don’t think anybody in this movie ends a sentence in “eh?” except in irony.

Norman

Norman Long, played by Dan Byrd, is your typical high-school senior: wracked by self-doubt, shy, often depressed, occasionally suicidal, he feels no one understands him, much less loves him. His mother was killed in a car wreck some years before the movie starts; his father, played by Richard Jenkins, is dying of cancer, is in constant pain and has pretty much given up on life. He’s waiting to die. I get that.

Norman’s English teacher volunteers him as the senior class’s speaker. His best friend nags him into auditioning for some kind of competitive dramatics team. Norman resists both, but in both cases gives in to pressure. And following the audition, Norman gets noticed by Emily vanCamp, a pretty blonde girl played by Emily Harris delivering the best performance of the film. She finds him quirkily interesting, and shows him a friendly warmth he’s not experienced before.

Meanwhile, Norman gets in a heated argument with his best friend (I can’t tell from the IMDb page who played him; probably Billy Lush, but that’s just a guess from the order of the credits) about next to nothing, and Norman, who has kept his father’s illness a secret from his friends, but conveniently has taken his father’s recent MRI scan results from the house that morning, claims to have cancer himself, just to win a silly argument. The friend is aghast and, as you’d expect, apologetic. Emily overhears the two talking about Norman's cancer and offers her sympathy.

By the end of the day the whole school has heard the story. Norman resists it at first, but gives up denying it because, well, that’s what he does. The rest of this dark coming-of-age comedy is about Norman’s journey from cancer victim to honest man. It’s a surprisingly interesting journey, as portrayed by a well-written script and accompanied by a distinctive but unobtrusive soundtrack. I assume it was all written for the film, because Spotify couldn’t identify the songs I tried it on, and I’m damned if I’m going to sit through all those closing credits for that. 

 

Not Suitable for Children

If I was still fifteen years old I probably would have thought Not Suitable For Children was a good movie, funny and cool. Cool because it’s Australian and has a lot of music in, I assume, the style that was popular in Australia in 2012, and raves and lots of drinking and drugs and some nudity and steamy scenes, and it’s about sex. At 15, I would have been as ignorant of reality as the lead character, Jonah, whose doctor told him he had testicular cancer but also (incorrectly) told him that he would be infertile after treatment. That sends Jonah on a quest to father a child in the few weeks remaining to him before surgery to remove the affected testicle. Jonah is a moron, with or without the doctor’s misleading advice, so the rest of the movie follows him in his quest. Naturally, every female he propositions turns him down, and sometimes it’s funny, but mostly it’s just stupid.

One of his roommates, a girl named Stevie, who seemed until the midpoint of the film to be the adult in the room, decides that, gee whiz, she’d like to have a baby herself, and so she makes an elaborate agreement with Jonah — sort of like Sheldon Cooper’s Roommate Agreement on The Big Bang Theory, full of qualifications and limitations — and they go to the drugstore for a syringe for the application of Jonah’s upcoming deposit. They break the syringe, and by then the drugstore is closed so they decide to do things the normal way. Thus the sex scenes and nudity. Oddly, after four days of rutting like rabbits on speed, they fall in love. Then they suddenly grow up and come to their senses.

I don’t believe I laughed even once. I’m not fifteen anymore. 

The Courier

I got lucky at least once when I was browsing through the shelves at the Mohave County Library: I selected a 2021 film called The Courier, mostly because it starred Benedict Cumberbatch, who is widely regarded as a great actor. (I share that opinion to some degree.) This movie had the misfortune to come out right at the start of the Covid pandemic, when nobody dared go to a theater, and it lost a fortune upon its release. But unlike most of the other movies I checked out for this year’s Havasu Film Festival, it really is a high-quality film.

In it, Cumberbatch plays Greville Wayne, who was a real person. In the early 1960s, at the height of the Cold War, Wayne was a salesman in the UK who often dealt in Eastern Bloc countries. He is known slightly by a spymaster at MI6, the British spy agency, who enlists Wayne as a courier to contact Oleg Penkovsky, a highly placed Russian official who has managed to convey to the Western spy agencies the desire to spy for them. (Merab Ninidze portrays Penkovsky, who also was a real person.) Against his better judgment, Wayne agrees, and ends up forming a friendship with Penkovsky. This leads him to try to get Penkovsky out of Russia, despite the insistence of both MI6 and the CIA that it can’t be done.

The film presents a stark contrast of sorts between the West, represented here by the United Kingdom, and the Russian-dominated East. While neither man lives in anything approaching luxury (not too surprising for a British salesman approaching middle age, but kind of surprising for a highly-placed Soviet apparatchik — or maybe my idea of “luxury” doesn’t take sufficient account of the widespread deprivation in both countries at the time; I, after all, am a child of the American 1960s, when we had plenty of just about everything), at least Wayne is free to think, say and do what he likes. Penkovsky is not.

The movie is tense, well-made and thoroughly engrossing, If I had to quibble with anything (and of course I do, or I wouldn’t be me) it’d be with Wayne’s wife, who jumps to the conclusion that Wayne is cheating on her when the pressure of his position makes him increasingly testy. Her reasoning is that (a) he’s cheated once before, and (b) he’s not a good liar. I can understand her arriving at her suspicion, but I resent her acting upon it by throwing him out of their apartment without any real evidence. 

No Man's Land

No Man’s Land is something of a vanity project for one Jake Allyn: he wrote it, produced it (along with four other people, two of whom are named Allyn … I suspect they’re related to him), and stars in it. One of those four co-producers, another Allyn, directed it. Somehow this family venture attracted two well-known performers to participate: Andie McDowell as the main guy’s mom — not a big part, but much more than a cameo — and George Lopez, first famous for stand-up comedy, then television comedy, now appearing in a dramatic role as an honest Texas Ranger. (Of course there are!)

Allyn stars as Jackson, second son of a ranching family barely hanging on along the Rio Grande, between the river and the border fence. (The title, according to the film’s intro, references that strip of land where the fence is at some distance to the river, but really it’s more a metaphor than that.)  Jackson has a shot at a contract with the New York Yankees coming up — everything’s arranged but the signing of contracts — but he’s really more interested in staying home on his beloved ranch with his beloved family. The family’s ranch fronts on the river, and so is a through-route for illegal immigrants (no matter what sensitive term you use for them). These nightly visitors cut fences, thereby occasioning potentially serious financial losses for the ranch family, and of course disturb the dogs, which in turn disturbs the ranchers.

Meanwhile, across the river somewhere in Mexico, there are a couple of people who guide immigrants across into the United States. One, called el pastor (the shepherd) is set up to be a good guy. The other, who may or may not have a name, is a younger thuggish-looking skinny guy with blond-dyed hair and all kinds of tattoos and piercings to make clear that he’s a Bad Guy. He is also a former customer of el pastor, but the guidance taken on board was only of the physical kind. No one is sad when he dies at the end. He is an insult to actual coyotes.

So as the story begins, el pastor leads a small group across the family ranch in the night. The group includes his own son. Dogs bark, the paterfamilias rushes out to deal with it, along with weapons and his older son Luke; Jackson, the baseball star-to-be, is told not to go. Of course he disobeys, blundering into a tense confrontation that results in him accidentally shooting el pastor’s teenaged son. The law, in the shape of the Texas Ranger, shows up; daddy takes the blame. Luke is also wounded and is taken to hospital, while the immigrants are left to go back to Mexico, or whatever.

The Ranger figures out easily that Jackson is the one who actually pulled the particular trigger that cost the boy his life. I’m not clear on how he figures this out, but frankly I couldn’t tell who did what in the confrontation in the night in the first place. Anyway, the Ranger goes to collect Jackson in his pickup truck. Jackson has been out looking over the site of the confrontation and has found the dead boy’s wallet, with some kind of identification in it. When the Ranger arrives, Jackson, who is on horseback, rides away, and we have another low-speed chase featuring a white (and brown) bronco. This time the horse gets to the river. The Ranger stops his truck and waits for Jackson to admit defeat, but Jackson has the brilliant idea to ride through the river into Mexico, like that was going to accomplish something.

The rest of the film follows Jackson on his adventure in Mexico. He first encounters the Bad Guy, but gets away, then gets picked up by some local ranchers who hire him as a laborer. He makes himself their hero by breaking a horse that had otherwise resisted all efforts in that direction. Then he encounters the Bad Guy again and runs off to Guanajuato, where the dead boy was from, having formed a plan of returning the boy’s wallet. Meanwhile, el pastor is seeking revenge and has teamed up with the Bad Guy. They pursue the hero onto a bus to Guanajuato, then chase him through the woods, where they lose him. But they learn from another passenger that Guanajuato was his destination. Ignoring the fact that Guanajuato is a sizeable city, they head down there. (El pastor is from Guanajuato anyway, and has a funeral to attend to besides, so it could be his reason for going is less about revenge; but the Bad Guy has no other real reason to go, unless perhaps he’s a fan of the city’s unrivaled old-world charm, like me. But I find that unlikely.)

By now the Ranger has figured out that Jackson is still in Mexico, and manages to trace his progress to Guanajuato, where he gets the local policias to arrest the hero. Things don’t go smoothly, and he ends up pursuing Jackson through the streets of the city, until the ultimate confrontation when everything is neatly resolved.

Here’s my main complaint about a movie that is actually quite entertaining: the entire story depends on the unbelievable ignorance of the ranch family. How anyone can live that close to the international border with Mexico for long enough to raise two adult sons without learning any useful amount of Spanish beyond “gracias” is logically impossible unless these ranchers are the stupidest four people not in elected office. If they’d had any useful knowledge of the language that probably 80 to 90 percent of the people around them are speaking, there would have been a relatively calm confrontation that night on the ranch, with the migrants either being turned back or turned over to the Ranger, who is conveniently sitting in his truck not far off, listening to Spanish language instructional recordings. (The character claims not to speak Spanish, yet he uses it well enough when he pursues Jackson through Mexico.) (For that matter, when the need arises, Jackson has no problem using Spanish to eloquently insult someone, in order to start a diversionary fight that allows him to escape the Ranger. Maybe he’s not as ignorant as he claims to be, either.)

Jackson is changed by his sojourn in Mexico, and develops a deeper understanding of that country’s land and people than he ever had before. The young man, like his whole family, apparently was entirely lacking in curiosity prior to this trauma. No other minds are likely to be changed by this film, but I’m just happy that it was actually filmed in the city of Guanajuato (and San Miguel de Allende), but mostly in parts that I’m not familiar with. Still, you can bet I paid close attention to the scenery, hoping to recognise something in it. I did not.

The Constant Gardener

In watching The Constant Gardener, a 2005 “gripping suspense-thriller” starring Ralph Feinnes and Rachel Weisz, and based upon a book by famous spy novelist John leCarré, I was prompted, eventually, to define for myself the difference between “dull” and “slow.” This movie is slow, but it manages to not be dull. I’m not sure I can articulate the distinction, except to say that, even when nothing is happening in this movie, something is going on.

Feinnes plays Justin Quayle, a mid-level British diplomat posted to Nairobi, Kenya in some capacity. Weisz plays Tessa, a social activist who is not limited to any one cause. In a flashback to the pair’s meeting, where Quayle is reading a very dull lecture written by someone who was unable to attend the event, Tessa launches into a series of challenges to Quayle that runs so long and gets so rude that all the other attendees get up and leave. When it’s just the two of them left in the room, hormones take over -- like in a scene from Frasier, whose title character famously loves, shall we say, a challenge -- and the two go for a drink and one thing leads to another and there’s a bit of one of those sex scenes where the camera is so close and the cuts come so quickly that you can’t tell really what you’re looking at, but you know it's human bodies writhing. The sounds tell you if you don’t already have it figured out.

In the next scene, an indeterminate time later, they’re married and in Kenya and Tessa is dead. Justin, who spends all his time tending to his plants, whether in the yard or in the house or in the office, is being told by a colleague, Sandy, that two bodies have been found; one seems to be Tessa, but the other is some unknown black guy (horrors!), but not the colleague she had gone off with.

The powers that be, whether Kenyan or British, seem uninterested in investigating the matter. They put it down to banditry, always a good excuse for not doing their jobs. Justin, unconvinced, begins to investigate himself, and the plot is underway like Margerie Glacier. It features post-imperial imperialism, corporate murder, greed, abuse of the poor people of Africa, the impotence of authorities (Kenyan and UN — the British are only impotent when it suits them) and a love story centered on intentional deception. It’s all very well done, with fascinating scenery (including the slums of Nairobi and other places) and well-drawn characters, and it’ll keep you guessing until the last two scenes: one in which the bad guy gets his comeuppance, and one that explains just how that came about. This film is slow, but it’s not dull.

Norman, the Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer

In the last film of this year’s Havasu Film Festival, Richard Gere plays Norman Oppenheimer in the 2016 movie Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer. His character is a pathetic liar who tries to parlay slight acquaintances into major deals, hoping to collect finder's fees and other cuts of big payoffs At the start of the movie we know nothing about him; by its end, we know only that he has a serious peanut allergy and a desperate longing for a Big Score.

Norman is persistent to a point well beyond irritating, and he is so full of lies he makes Donald Trump seem indifferent honest. “My wife used to babysit him. We’re very close.” "I've got a guy, he's willing to match your donations up to seven million." He mischaracterizes things to make himself seem connected, and important; after being thrown out of a private dinner party at a heavy hitter’s home, he tells someone “I just came from [his] house, there was a dinner party.” Names are dropped as though Norman knows all the players. It’s an irony that his one completely true statement in the film causes his downfall, when he tells a woman he meets on a train how he met the man who is now Israel’s prime minister: “I bought him some shoes.” That leads to an investigation of corruption, which leads Norman to the brink, where he finally achieves a Big Score.

I found it hard to sit through this movie. The film’s first release was in September 2016, when it looked like The Donald couldn't get elected dogcatcher. Maybe the film was meant to be an amusing look at the sleaze he inhabited, but it just felt like I was watching two hours of back-to-back Trump rallies, half of them in Hebrew. I got the feeling I’m supposed to feel sorry for the harmless, inconsequential Norman, with his apocryphal wife and daughter and his has-been airs, but I don’t. Despite Gere's fine performance I felt nothing beyond a sad sense that Norman made his own bed, and some relief when he at last laid down in it.

The Second Annual Havasu Film Festival, Part One

Having returned to Lake Havasu City for the umpteenth time, and being once again required to spend many consecutive days with little of interest to do, I found myself a bit of distraction last year by watching DVDs of old movies borrowed from the local branch of the Mohave County Public Library. This year, we started with a number of films watched with my family members (my wife and her sister); once they were gone I had five days on my own in the desert (a description that is both physically and culturally apt). The films watched with other people are Part One of this post; the films I watched alone are Part Two. The difference between the two groups of films is that my wife and her sister are choosy about which films to check out; they look for things they have enjoyed in the past, or think they will enjoy on first viewing. I tend to be more random in my selections: I go to a portion of the shelving in the library and just take whatever looks at all interesting for any reason, based solely on the covers’ content. As a result the films reviewed in Part One are probably better than the ones in Part Two.

I should mention that there are a few films that I didn’t watch. We had Puss in Boots: the Last Wish, an animated sequel that, almost inevitably, wasn’t as good as the first film. I’d seen it before and knew that going in, but still intended to watch it all the way through, if only so I could include it in this blog post. But I was too tired — I don’t know why, as, other than having gone for a short walk in the morning around Carly’s Island, at the edge of the lake, and doing a little geocaching during the afternoon, and cooking dinner (pickleburgers and cabbage with tomato, not a particularly challenging menu) I’d done nothing in the way of exertion all day. So I went to bed early. I don’t feel like I missed anything.

The other one that I didn’t make it through was Les Miserables, starring Hugh Jackman, Russell Crowe and Anne Hathaway. I’d read the book many, many years ago in the last century, so I knew the story and knew it was a great piece of fiction. I also know that it’s a much-lauded stageplay that ran for ages on Broadway. So I was looking forward to the film with high expectation. It started off with a musical number sung by prisoners dragging a computer-generated warship into a drydock, and clearly little expense had been spared on special visual effects; but it didn’t take long for me to realize that this was not, as I’d been led to believe, a musical, but a fucking opera. Much as I respect tradition, and despite the hundreds of years of tradition that opera as a medium brings to culture, I won’t sit through it. The songs themselves are okay, but the actors’ lapsing into sung dialogue in fitful and monotonous bits of tune is an affectation up with which I will not put. I was fooled once into sitting through a stage production of Porgy and Bess, having thought that was a musical when I bought the tickets, and I hated it. I won’t suffer such an imposition again. (Plus, in this case, it was obvious that at least one of the major characters was clearly chosen for the name rather than the talent; I haven’t heard so much off-key singing since the last time I attended karaoke.)

Part I: Family Film Fest

The film festival started off with an entry of known quality: The Greatest Showman, starring Hugh Jackman (who can sing, and well) a musical -- a real musical -- that I’d already seen all the way through at least twice, and one that I enjoy enough that, if I find it playing on television, I’ll always stop surfing channels to watch it. It may not be the best movie of all time, and will probably never make the list of 100 Best Anything, but it’s a good romantic story, with good performances and very good singing by literally every member of the cast. And the music is great; I like it enough to have bought the soundtrack album and incorporated some of the songs into the mix that I play in my cars, especially a moving piece called Never Enough. I don’t know how closely the plot hews to fact about the historical character P.T. Barnum, but who cares? This is an excellent show, even the third time through.

There are a few actors that I will always watch: Jennifer Aniston and Julia Roberts are top of that list, but there are quite a few others on it as well. One is Jodie Foster. She stars in Stealing Home, a somewhat predictable drama also starring Mark Harmon. I can’t watch him without seeing Leroy Jethro Gibbs, his character on NCIS for more than two decades, even though I was a third of the way through this film before I realized it was him. Stealing Home is a sweet little movie, set among well-to-do Philadelphia suburbanites, partly in the early 1960s and partly in the 1980s, in which Gibbs’s character — sorry, Harmon’s character — has to deal with the ashes of his dear friend, Jodie Foster’s character, who has committed suicide. Most of the movie is flashbacks illuminating her character, and to a lesser extent Harmon’s. I can summarize his in a sentence: he’s a good boy growing up to be a man troubled, for unexplained reasons, by the death of his father. I suppose some people just lose their focus when a tragedy like that happens, but his character didn’t seem the type to be so strongly affected for so long. I consider it insufficient motivation, one of the weaknesses of this movie.(The half-hearted attempt to make baseball a meaningful metaphor in the film is another.) On the other hand, the development of the relationship between the characters played by Foster and Harmon is completely believable, and if we don’t really know how far it extended, we are satisfied that it was, in every way, plausible and honourable. And, of course, the cars from the ‘50s and ‘60s are way cool, except for one ugly red station wagon.

Another actor I’ll always want to watch is Antonio Banderas (who voices the title character in Puss in Boots, by the way). He stars with Salma Hayek in Desperado, one of the sequels to Robert Rodriguez’s 1992 film El Mariachi. Rodriguez is from my home town and went to college at my alma mater, so I suppose I should feel some slight kinship with him for that; but I don’t. I don’t know him or anybody who does, so other than the pride I feel whenever San’tonio gets a mention in the press, there’s nothing. (Wikipedia says he’s a close friend of Quentin Tarantino, so if we’re playing Kevin Bacon, that puts me 4 degrees away from Rodriguez, and more importantly, 5 away from Banderas. And Hayek, which is equally titillating in a different way. (And I bet Tarantino, who has a small part in Desperado, knows both Banderas and Hayek. That would put me only 4 degrees away from both of them. Ooh! Now I’m excited.)

Anyway, Banderas plays a nameless former mariachi musician who has embarked on a hobby of murdering drug dealers in Mexico. At the start of this film, he arrives in a stereotypical town in northern Mexico to track down “the last one.” The film follows him for the few days he’s there. There’s some humour, mostly provided by the over-the-top violence and the cluelessness of some of the minor characters, but some of it is written into the script, apparently on purpose. The climax of the movie comes when the mariachi finally confronts the “last” drug lord. All in all, an enjoyable movie to watch; kind of like one of those Marvel Comics movies, but with a sex scene for the grown-ups in the audience.

Morgan Freeman may not be one of those actors I will always watch, but he is one that always delivers in his signature style. He stars with Monica Potter, who is unknown to me, in Along Came a Spider, a police-procedural of sorts from 2001. My only complaint about this movie is that it really should be maybe 20 minutes longer, because the film seems to rush through some complicated twists near the end. I get the feeling that they kept it to 103 minutes so that there was room to stuff in lots of commercials when it gets a 2-hour slot on cable. I feel cheated, like in that episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation called “The Game,” where everything is resolved suddenly and without warning when (spoiler alert) Data comes in with a light. It kind of ruins all the tension built up gradually over the course of the film, when Freeman’s character, Dr Cross, almost miraculously figures out what character X and character Y are up to, deception-wise, and acts without taking us along. He does what cops do, and then just explains it to us as he’s doing it. I think if the director (Lee Tamahori) had taken as much care with the last quarter of the movie’s plot as he did with the first three quarters, it would have been a much better movie.

He probably blames the studio, and he’s probably right. But still, it’s his name on the film.

Midnight Run rarely makes it onto lists of Robert deNiro’s best films, but that’s probably because he’s been in so many great ones. In this 1988 buddy film, he plays a former policeman, Jack Walsh, who had to leave his home in Chicago because he wouldn’t be bent, and took up bounty hunting for a living. He gets hired to bring in a Robin-Hood embezzler, “the Duke,” played by Charles Grodin, and the movie deals with the pair’s adventures in crossing the country, pursued by the FBI, a crime boss and a rival bounty hunter, from New York to Los Angeles*, where Walsh means to turn the Duke over to the bondsman who hired him. Despite the geographically challenged location shooting (what’s that mountain in the background in “Amarillo, Texas”? And why does the downtown area of a city of a hundred and sixty thousand people not rise higher than two stories?) the resulting film is a thoroughly enjoyable piece of work. If I had to say, I’d allocate most of the credit for that to Grodin. DeNiro’s character is exactly what we’d expect from him and from a hard-boiled cop; Grodin’s character is nothing like what we’d expect of an embezzling accountant. 

*Why is it always New York and Los Angeles? How come nobody in the movies ever crosses the country from Brownsville to Duluth? Or even from Seattle to Miama? 

Begin Again, from 2013, was a slight surprise. While Keira Knightly makes my list of favourite actors, Mark Ruffalo does not. And since both their names were covered over by the library’s label, I didn’t know they were in the movie until the opening credits came up. More significantly, Ruffalo did a creditable job of portraying Dan, an almost-washed-up music-biz guy who happens to be in the bar when Gretta, Knightly’s singer/songwriter character, is badgered into performing one of her songs. The plot is predictable from there on, including Dan’s renewed relationship with his ex-wife and teenage daughter (thanks to Gretta’s sensible influence) and Gretta’s relationship with her rock-star boyfriend Dave (played by Adam Levine, who actually is more a rock star than an actor). It’s saved from provoking complete ennui by the interesting telling of the opening of the story, before the two characters meet. The music is, to my aging ear, somewhat insipid but I very much enjoyed the outdoor recording sessions, as much for the scenery as for the performances. The slight surprise of the movie came from the fact that Knightly actually can sing, and learned to play some guitar. (She sounds a lot like Dido.) I didn’t understand exactly what happened at the very end of the film, but I don’t care. (And, on the plus side, Ruffalo’s character Dan drives what looks to me like a mid-60s vintage Jaguar Mk X saloon. Très cool.)

Another surprise was a little movie from last year called Emily the Criminal, starring nobody I’d ever heard of (although Gina Gershon has one scene late-on in the film; I’ve heard of her but know nothing about her beyond her name). It involves a young woman, Emily, played by Aubrey Plaza (who’s been in a lot of TV shows that I never watched and a lot of movies I’ve never heard of), who falls in with some credit-card scammers, and thereafter leads a life of crime because of society’s stupid rules: she can’t get a real job because (1) she lies about her record in a job interview and they know they can’t trust her with the sensitive information the job deals with, and (2) she’s unwilling to take an unpaid internship her idiot friend arranged for her. That second one, I thought, was a good reason, and such internships should be paid. That job interview is one of the highlights of the film. Emily is a pragmatic, decisive young woman, and despite her moral weaknesses (ones that the movie would have us believe are forced on her) I found myself feeling that (1) everyone got what they deserved, and (2) Emily’s kind of stupid. I say that, not because of the character’s irritating Noo Joisey accent, which does make people sound kind of stupid, but because, when her mentor sets her on her way to criminal success, he gives her several “rules” born of his experience, and she ignores them, each time leading her to the next pothole in her road of life. In the end her pragmatism sees her through and she achieves her dream.

Next up was a movie that all of us had heard of and two of us had seen, You’ve Got Mail, starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, a box-office hit from the end of the last century. I thought I’d seen it too, but apparently I was thinking of some other Hanks/Ryan rom-com from the late ‘90s. This one is a remake of a Jimmy Stewart-Margaret Sullivan movie from 1940, which in turn is based on a Hungarian play from the 1930s. The playwright, Myklos Laszlo, is a pretty big name; the director of the Stewart-Sullivan film (The Shop Around the Corner) was Ernst Lubitsch, also a big name. Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks are still big names, and the co-writer (along with her sister Delia) and director of this movie, Nora Ephron, was a big name right to the end of her life as well. The movie has great bones, and a timeless story.

In this incarnation, Hanks plays the scion of a big-box-bookstore family à la Barnes & Noble, while Ryan is the daughter and successor of a woman who opened a children’s bookstore in the 1950s. Hanks’ family is opening a bookstore around the corner from Ryan’s shop and drives her out of business. The two hate each other IRL; at the same time they are corresponding anonymously in an AOL chatroom and falling in love. (In the Jimmy Stewart version, they write letters, so the pace of the story in You’ve Got Mail is much faster.) When the anonymous correspondents arrange to meet, Hanks realizes Ryan is his correspondent, while Ryan is not privy to similar knowledge about Hanks. Hanks, having identified his feelings for Ryan, manipulates her into falling in love with him before he reveals himself to be her chat-room correspondent. (In the ‘90s, this sort of manipulation between the sexes was acceptable, at least to Ryan’s character. Today it's only acceptable if it's successful, otherwise it's a lawsuit or online harassment.)

Anyway, the movie is a good story well told, with a script that is as sophisticated and witty as anything Nora Ephron ever did, I think. Ryan and Hanks both turn in top performances, as do other well-known members of the cast (Maureen Stapleton, Dave Chappelle, Greg Kinnear and Dabney Coleman). And it doesn’t seem at all dated, 25 years down the line, except for the price of coffee at Starbucks, and the dial-up modem.

The ‘90s sophistication of You’ve Got Mail gave way to the ‘50s sophistication of Carol, a lesbian love story made in 2015 but set in 1952-53, the time frame of the underlying novel, The Price of Salt by then-well-known writer Patricia Highsmith. I resisted seeing this film, as I’m pretty tired of the modern artistic obsession with alternative lifestyles; but I’m glad I did. Despite the subdued, almost somnolent tone of the film, the two stars, Cate Blanchett (“Carol”) and Rooney Mara (“Therese”) give excellent performances, and the 1950s setting gives the film a layer of interest I enjoy: the clothes, the music, the big-city ambience, and especially (of course) the gigantic cars. Carol drives a Packard, and I could almost feel the squishy suspension, weak brakes, loose steering and fuzzy seat covering as the two women take a road trip west. In any case, the film seems to me to be not so much about the developing lesbian relationship as about the social attitudes toward such things, as a counterpoint to our own much more (generally) accepting outlook. In the 1950s world of this movie, homosexuality was a psychological aberration that could be dealt with by psychotherapy. Most of us can laugh at that now, but we can also recognise that, then as now, most people just didn’t really give a shit about how other people ordered their private lives.

The next film we watched was an action movie from 15 years ago, a very complex tale about a terrorist attack in Spain. The action in the movie takes place over the course of about twenty minutes, but is told and re-told from various points of view until, at the end, the audience understands what happened, who did it, and how. The acting in Vantage Point is second-rate, despite being the work of some fairly heavy Hollywood hitters: Dennis Quaid as the damaged-goods Secret Service guy who triumphs in the end; Forest Whitaker as a tourist with a camera; Sigourney Weaver as a hard-boiled news director; and William Hurt as the world-weary target of the operation. All of their roles could have been filled as capably by unknown actors, with no loss of storytelling quality.

Vantage Point succeeds as entertainment not because of the acting -- or lack thereof -- but because of the film’s technique. Almost nothing that happens in the early part of the movie makes sense, but in the end it all makes sense. The way the story is told is, to my way of thinking, a remarkably clever narrative tour de force.

Consider Ambrose Bierce: he was, for his entire professional life, the second-best writer in America’s literary pantheon, behind Samuel Clemens. He probably knew that. He was a much more cerebral writer than Clemens, experimenting with fiction’s structure and form, which made his work a more rewarding academic subject than Clemens’s, but less popular. Both wrote with a sense of humour, but where Clemens was straightforward, Bierce was darker and more cynical. At the end of his life, (Clemens having already died) Bierce went off to Mexico to lose himself quite literally in that country’s revolution: he disappeared, having last been seen in the state of Chihuahua, and no trace of him has ever been found.

That event, that mystery, is not at the heart of Old Gringo; it’s just the setting for the story, which revolves around the relationship between a naïve American woman and a general in Pancho Villa’s revolutionary army. The American woman, played by Jane Fonda, is Harriet Winslow, a spinster who has been living, with her mother, on the pension provided to dependents of soldiers who died in the Spanish-American war. Her father isn’t actually dead, though; he just met a woman in Cuba and decided to stay there, but his “widow” and daughter continue drawing the pension and visiting an empty grave to sell the ruse. Harriet has a moment of self-actualization, however, and decides to take hold of her life and step outside her comfort zone. She takes a job as governess to a wealthy Mexican family, and soon finds herself in the city of Chihuahua. Ambrose Bierce, played by Gregory Peck, just happens to be at the same hotel, and is on his way to the same hacienda. Arriving at the same time is the revolutionary army, led by General Tomás Arroyo, played by Jimmy Smits. The family Harriet was supposed to work for has already fled, and she gets caught up in the battle for the hacienda. After that, there are two story lines: one involves Harriet’s romantic relationship with General Arroyo, and the other involves Bierce’s quest for "a pretty good way to depart this life." There is enough violence and sex in the film to keep it from being a total eye-roller, but it’s essentially a confused diatribe about truth and justice and the relative merits of the American and Mexican cultures. There’s only one automobile in the movie, so that doesn’t add anything.

You would think that with Jane Fonda and Gregory Peck in the cast, there’d be some good acting. Sadly, no: Fonda was fit enough at 50 to not seem an odd pairing for the 30-ish Smits, but her undeniable acting skills got left behind when she went off to film. Gregory Peck, one of the greatest actors in the post-war history of American film, seems oddly uninterested in portraying his famous character as anything other than an older Atticus Finch. That leaves Smits to carry the film. He seems capable of doing that, but unfortunately for him (and us) the script puts only fills his mouth with clichéed revolutionary speeches, and his character is too much defined by his origin story.

The penultimate film of this first part of the Second Annual Havasu Film Festival is the 1989 movie Valmont, starring Colin Firth and Annette Benning. Set in pre-revolutionary France, this is an adaptation of sorts of the 1782 epistolary novel Les liaisons dangereuses, and imagines the lurid manipulations of two hedonistic rivals, the Count of Valmont and the Marquise of Mertreuil. Let me save you the trouble of watching this dull period piece: he wins their bet, she won’t pay up, he dies. There, now, you have no reason to bother with this utterly disappointing and slow-moving drivel, unless you’re just obsessed with Hollywood's take on fashions of the Ancien Régime. Like this brief description of the film, it assumes you already know who these people are and what they’re about. You haven’t missed a thing, and there are no cars in the movie at all, it being the 1700s.

And finally, there is the third installment of Robert Rodriguez’s Mexican trilogy: Once Upon a Time in Mexico, in which Antonio Banderas and Salma Hayek star again as El Mariachi and his girlfriend. Hayek has very little to do in the film, and really only appears at the beginning and the end; the rest of it consists of more satirical violence, as El Mariachi gets caught up in a ludicrous assassination plot. It’s amusing in a blood-soaked way, but if there’s a story worthy of a trilogy of feature films is there, it seems to have ended in the second movie, Desperado (see above); this one seems only to have been made because Johnny Depp wanted to play a CIA agent who gets his eyes ripped out but still never misses when he shoots, and because there was a buck to be made.