AINBO: SPIRIT OF THE AMAZON

Featuring: Lola Raie, Naomi Serrano, Dino Andrade, Joe Hernandez, Thom Hoffman, Rene Mujica, Yeni Alvarez, Bernardo De Paula, Alejandro Golas and Susanna Ballesteros.
Writers: Richard Claus, Brian Cleveland and Jason Cleveland.
Directors: Richard Claus and Jose Zelada.

Rating: ★ ★ ★

A Peruvian/Dutch co-production, AINBO boasts a strong-willed, Indigenous heroine, self-assured and sturdy of character, with one determined eye cocked towards her personal goals, the other watching over her people and their traditions. This stirring, culturally-layered adventure deserves to do for the Amazon jungle what Moana did for Hawaii and Frozen did for snow. 

Our titular heroine (energetically voiced by actress Lola Raie), is at a junction in her growth, both as a young woman and as a member of her tribal community. The village lies deep in Candamo rainforest, an uncharted pocket of jungle that legend has it exists on the back of an almighty beast named Turtle Motelo Mama (Susana Ballesteros). 

Increasingly alienated from her best friend and new village leader Princess Zumi (Naomi Serrano), Ainbo is befriended by her ‘spirit guides’ - an armadillo named Dillo (Dino Andrade), and a tapir named Vaca (Joe Hernandez), playing the ‘Timon and Pumba’ sidekick roles. Together, the trio discover their land is threatened by encroaching tree-crunching steel giants. Guided by Turtle Mama and the spirit of her ancestors, Ainbo sets about fighting Yacuruna, the evil jungle spirit, who manifests in the form of a linen-suit wearing corporate scumbag, Cornell DeWitt (Thom Hoffman).

Directors José Zelada and Richard Claus utilise the template established by the Mouse House in films like Moana, Frozen, Brave and Tangled and craft a familiar story of empowerment and family and friendship. A point of difference emerges in the use of centuries-old Amazonian customs and lore to tell this contemporary tale, as well as its addressing of the issue of deforestation and land clearing of traditionally-owned land in the  Basin.

It is the indigenous-themed elements that work best in Ainbo; an over-reliance on goofy humour, the kind that assumes kids need a pratfall or an eyeroll to stay engaged, are less impactful. The best moments recall Kirby Atkins’ 2019 pic Mosley, which embraced heritage and legacy with an equally engaging connection to its characters and setting. The CGI character animation lacks Pixar fluidity, although thankfully avoids mimicking the cliched, ‘doe-eyed’ facial designs of so much studio output; the landscapes are beautifully rendered, capturing the breathtaking Amazon greens and blues with true artistry.

VAL

Featuring: Val Kilmer, Jack Kilmer, Mercedes Kilmer and Joanne Whalley. 
Directors: Ting Poo, Leo Scott

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ½

Val Kilmer has forever existed in a weird Hollywood limbo, a professional realm between brilliant, talented character actor and A-list heartthrob star. His darkest period professionally was also his biggest box office success - Batman Forever. His career has fluctuated between films that didn't find an audience (The Doors, The Ghost & The Darkness, Wonderland); for which he seemed awkwardly ill-suited (Willow, The Real McCoy, Red Planet); or, benefitted from his vivid support work (Tombstone,True Romance, Heat, Top Gun).

In the documentary Val, he provides a first-person account of his life - the work he’s known for, the loves he has had, the man he is now. All the footage is taken from a personal archive of material shot either by him or of him (collated by directors Ting Poo and Leo Scott), from his earliest high-school plays through to the contemplative but ebullient cancer survivor he is today. His personal journal provides the narrative, read in voice-over provided by his son Jack.

Just as the man is a unique film industry figure, so is Val that rarest of beasts - a star profile that eschews, even undermines, the subject’s celebrity to provide not an actor’s portrait, but an everyman journey of a complex individual. Industry milestones, like working with his idol Marlon Brando on the infamous Queensland shoot of The Island of Dr Moreau, ultimately seem like existential asides compared the lifelong grief of losing his teenage brother Ben, wooing then divorcing his wife Joanne Whaley, raising their children and coming to terms with the legacy of his father. 

The darkness of his past is balanced by a mature-age man’s boundless playfulness. At one point he collapses in front of the camera, only to rise from the floor giggling at his son’s panicked reaction. He can be a bit of an arsehole, as some of his directors and co-stars can attest, and which he acknowledges and attempts to put into perspective in the doco.

His late-career, last pre-cancer project Citizen Twain, in which he dons heavy make-up for his self-penned one-man show that explores the life of America’s great humorist, embodies not only the immense talent but also the rare empathy that Val Kilmer brought to his most invested characters. Those elements are what shine through in Val.

THE GREEN INFERNO

Stars: Lorenza Izzo, Ariel Levy, Aaron Burns, Kirby Bliss Blanton, Magda Apanowicz, Daryl Sabara, Ignacia Allamand, Nicholas Martinez, Sky Ferreira and Antonieta Pari.
Writers: Eli Roth and Nicolas Lopez.
Director: Eli Roth.

Rating: 1.5/5

The grand-scale cannibal epic that sly marketeers have been hinting at is nowhere to be found in Eli Roth’s low-rent, low-IQ disappointment, The Green Inferno. Touted as a loving homage to Italian grindhouse hero Ruggerio Deodata’s 1980 cult shocker Cannibal Holocaust, Roth’s limp, one-note adventure plays more like a half-baked piss-take than the work of someone with any knowledge of, let alone respect for, the anthropophagus genre.

Providing the film’s only inherent worth is Lorenza Izzo as Justine, a restless freshman sharing a dorm room with her gormless bff, Kaycee (Sky Ferreira). Disgusted by a classroom presentation on female genital mutilation (surely a course requirement, though everyone acts like the images were just sprung on them), Justine is in the frame of mind to be convinced by smitten, schlubby do-gooder Jonah (Aaron Burns) to attend a campus activist group session led by the charismatic douche-bag, Alejandro (Ariel Levy).

A bat of his eyelids later and Justine is bound for South America, part of a naïve but energised group of protesters determined to highlight the region’s deforestation. A dozen nobodies padlocked to trucks and trees to spread the word about the already well-documented practices of indigenous habitat destruction seems a tad pointless, so some techno-babble about uploading the real-time confrontation for the whole world to see is inserted. In what proves to be just one of the film’s shortcomings, The Green Inferno is peopled almost entirely by imbeciles, burdened with execrable dialogue. These twenty-somethings are smart enough to be accepted into college but too dumb to research their logging industry targets before jetting off into the Amazonian jungles. “You mean, they’ll have guns?” says one wide-eyed moron, just before they board a boat to head upstream.

Long overdue action in the form of a well-staged plane crash finally spins the film on the narrative axis the target audience has been waiting for– the bloody deaths of non-essential support players and the insertion of our protagonists into unfriendly jungle. Thankfully, Roth finds some mojo and moves his players swiftly; in a whirlwind sequencing of post-crash carnage and poison darts, Justine and her surviving activists (which now include ‘Spy Kids’ alumni Daryl Sabara and pretty blonde screamer Kirby Bliss Blanton) are soon in the clutches of a red-skinned native tribe and the festivities begin.

Gorehounds will be happy that the film finally gets down to some bloodletting; by the half way mark, tongues, eyes, limbs and torsos have featured. Those new to either cannibal film lore or Roth’s gleeful depiction of acts of dismemberment will squirm, but the tone of The Green Inferno doesn’t allow for any sort of serious investment on the audiences’ part. Just as no character earns our empathy, nor do any of the acts of cannibalism prove truly shocking. It is one of several misjudgements on the productions part that creates such a chasm between it and Deodata’s film; the Italian’s camera cast an almost objective eye over the horrors, while Roth’s all but screams “Wow, look what I’m doing!”

Devolving into pointless padding (Justine’s plunge into the Amazon is entirely unwarranted) and episodic fight-or-flight diversions, The Green Inferno’s most diabolical liability is tone. Is Roth’s work a satire on spoilt rich kids and the privilege they blindly yield? Why are there passages of wacky black comedy in my cannibal movie (the ‘bag of pot’ sequence is plain stupid; it’s ‘overseas’, remember, so we gotta get a diarrhoea joke in there…)? There is meant to be humour in the notion that the traditional tribal practices the protesters are trying to save proves to be their undoing, right? So why is it barely referenced? And does the tribe (whose ‘remote outpost’ looks like a quiet corner of Central Park) exist only to prepare and eat human flesh? Little else seems to be going on for the whole time the captives are there.

Of greater interest than anything in the film would be to consider The Green Inferno as part of Roth’s broader filmography. To date, his films present the ‘uncivilised world’ as a dangerous threat to those who are privileged, collegiate, good time go-getters. His heroes aren’t always the brightest of bulbs, but they are America’s future; so far, they have been threatened by the swampy backwaters of their own homeland (Cabin Fever), the horrors of Eastern Europe (the Hostel films) and, in his latest work, the ‘savages’ of South America. In each case, powerful forces not aligned to the vision of the upwardly mobile represent pure evil (here, personified by the majestically demonic Antonieta Pari as ‘The Elder’); myopic villains driven to exploit those that represent the best the US can and will offer. There is a forceful horror at work in The Green Inferno, but perhaps it is not the flesh-eaters of the rainforest.