MOVIES: Our Academy Award hopeful, a bit of a puzzle, three other films are loud and clear

The others are about cops, racism, gentrification and a space-shot accident

I guess the most notable movie news this week was the death of James Earl Jones. His voice we'll always remember whether as Darth Vader or the Lion King or even the CNN on-air logo. But look back at his filmography and see how many other films of his you've seen and how many were important. From Dr. Strangelove to Field of Dreams to The Great White Hope and to lesser but hit films like The Hunt for Red October and Conan the Barbarian. And don't forget that little gem about boys and baseball, The Sandlot. 

A smaller bit of news this week, but very welcome, is that Netflix has picked up a small Canadian documentary called Yintah which shows the fight that went on in Northern British Columbia against a pipeline project. When I reviewed it back in June I gave it four stars and called it the strongest of the recent films by and about Indigenous people in Canada. There's fiery, determined rhetoric in this one and now (starting Oct. 18) it'll be available wide, here in Canada and in the U.S. and the U.K. 

Totally coincidentally I have praise for two other Netflix films which I review today. But I start with our Oscars hopeful.

Universal Language: 3 stars

Happy Campers: 3 ½ 

Apollo 13: Survival: 4

Rebel Ridge: 3 ½ 

UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE: The film Canada is submitting to the next Academy Awards shows good intentions but by trying to be so clever will probably leave many people perplexed. We are all connected is the theme. Good. How that's expressed is rather oddball. It's in two languages: French and Farsi. Imagine the welcome to Winnipeg sign out on the highway written in Farsi. Or the Tim Horton's sign in the same language, which is Persian, by the way. Writer/director Matthew Rankin, who is from Winnipeg and is a fan of Iranian cinema, has created a comical hybrid that dabbles with the absurd. There are people clearly not connected, like the Quebec bureaucrat who talks of Alberta as if it's Manitoba. Another character describes the value of connection with an analogy: two rivers that come together and flow into a lake. That speech is the heart of the film. The rest meanders.

There are three stories. Two young women spot money frozen into the ice and go on a quest to find a tool to get at it. They want to buy a friend a new pair of glasses because a turkey stole hers. They're directed to a store run by the turkey expert of Manitoba and then a hardware store where a clerk cites rules and refuses to help. A second story has a Montreal civil servant (played by Rankin himself) return to Winnipeg to visit his ailing mother. When he phones, a man named Massoud answers. That same man also appears in a third story. He's a tour guide who leads people to key sites around the city, none of them notable at all, an abandoned mall, for instance, or a briefcase left on a park bench so long that it's covered with snow. There are more absurd elements, like a Kleenex store, and together they amount to an hallucination that's interesting to watch but so enigmatic. (Has played at TIFF, is coming to VIFF and several other festivals and later to theaters. It's already playing at the Silver City in Mission, B.C. according to its website) 3 out of 5 

HAPPY CAMPERS: This film also has good intentions and delivers on them directly and clearly. Quietly, though. It extols the idea of community; people living close to each other, enjoying each other's company and helping each other out when needed. One woman says her neighbor is letting her keep food in her refrigerator. Where does that ever happen? In this trailer park called “Inlet View” somehere in Virginia, according to this documentary by Amy Nicholson. She's from New York and is known for exploring Americana and just might be enthralled by a way of life that may be quite remote to her. 

She shows the people there visiting, chatting and laughing, playing cards, bar-b-queing, kids playing in the ocean or in a pool. One says there's no other place on earth she'd rather be. A glorious sunset underlines that. Weather as a metaphor intrudes though with thunder, lightening and rain. The good life for these working class people is going to end. The land will be redeveloped and they'll have to leave. (Reminds me of similar cases I've read about here in Canada). Luxury housing for rich people will be built, says one man, though details on that aren't given anywhere in the film. One woman says they can't do anything about it because they're “just little people.” There's no politics spoken although I can well imagine these are people that Donald Trump could be appealing to. What is captured here is community, humanity and everyday life that includes ordinary activities like catching fish, mowing the lawn, patching a roof and spending time with your neighbors. It's worth searching for. (Available at Apple TV and VOD) 3 ½ out of 5 

APOLLO 13: SURVIVAL: Ron Howard told it dramatically back in 1995. Now the British filmaker Peter Middleton tells it again as a documentary and surprise, it's just as gripping and tense. And with actual footage from the 1970 space trip that went wrong, archival and a new interviews we get all the drama plus the science. It's amazing how detailed that science and techonology explanation is here and yet how interesting it is. 

You might not know what a burn is in this context but you'll soon understand, and with the help of some animation to demonstrate, be rapt by it. For the record, it seems it's a sudden turn, maybe like a u-turn, made by a spaceship. It has to be done precisely or it'll go wrong. The ship could “slip off into space,” 

In this case three astronaut lives were at stake. They were on their way to the moon, the third such mission sent by NASA, but a loud bang (that was later found to have been an electrical explosion) disabled the craft. On earth, Walter Cronkite called it “the greatest drama yet in space.” Jim Lovell, one of the astronauts, recalls “We knew we were in deep deep trouble.” 

His wife watched the TV coverage in horror. His children heard about it from classmates. They didn't know the half of it. The ship had two days of water and power left. It was expected it would take four days to get it back to earth. The burn had to be attempted manually. It was described as a “hodge podge manoeuvre.” The whole world prayed, TV said, and one reporter called it a parable: we're on a small planet and we have nowhere to go. Lofty words, but the predicament was real. Carbon dioxide was poisoning the air in the spacecraft. On earth a tropical storm was coming into the area where it would have to splash down. The film tells us more of the science than we've known and still works as an edge of your seat thriller. (Netflix) 4 out of 5 

REBEL RIDGE: It starts with a familiar scene of a cop harassing a black man. Then it expands into a blast at police corruption in a small southern town and gives a novel explanation for it. Several current themes about law enforcement play out, though the film initially looks like just a violent genre piece. And some have compared it to First Blood. I see the fight-back angle, sure, but not so much as that. I do see a terrific confrontation between a black ex-Marine, played by Aaron Pierre, and a strutting, obviously feeling-entitled, police chief, played by Don Johnson. 

Pierre, as Terry Richmond, was riding a bike when one of Johnson's deputies pulled him over, intimidated him, found $30,000 in cash in his backpack and confiscated the money. Terry tries to explain he had sold his truck to get the money to bail his brother out of jail. No result, not then or when he tried stating his case at the police station. A young law clerk, played by AnnaSophia Robb, confides that the cops grabbing the money is part of a wider web of corruption in the town. 

Since Terry is a former combat instructor he's more than capable of fighting back. He takes on the chief (Johnson) and his men. That sounds like pure genre stuff, and it does have the fun and action you'd expect, but it's more than that. It's thoughtful, about police issues these days and about the treatment that black men get. FYI: Aaron Pierre is British, classically trained, has done Shakespeare and was recently in a Clement Virgo film playing a Caribbean immigrant in Toronto and will be the voice of the Lion King in the upcoming prequel from Disney. (Netflix) 3 ½ out of 5