Month: April 2012

You Again (2010)

You Again (2010)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On-demand Video, April 2012) It feels churlish to criticize a film that’s not meant to be much more than a lighthearted comedy with a female-centric cast, and perhaps even ungrateful to do so when it does deliver a few laughs, but You Again simply isn’t as good as it could be.  While the idea of a decade-deferred vengeance between bully and bullied is interesting and definitely can be mined for comedy, this script seems confused between slapstick, retribution and reconciliation.  The first act is annoying in how it presents a relatively innocuous situation where an easy way out is dismissed through sheer dramatic inevitability: the main conflict of the film exists because the characters are self-destructive, and the ending doesn’t do much to send an anti-bullying or even anti-revenge message.  But, OK, fine: this is not a “message” movie, even though it shoots itself in the foot comedy-wise by trying to reach for a heartfelt moment or two late in the game.  It’s perhaps best to focus on Kirsten Bell’s physical comedy in the lead role, or the casting of Jamie Lee Curtis and Sigourney Weaver as dueling rivals, or the always-hilarious Betty White and Kristin Chenoweth in small supporting roles.  (There are also a few cute cameos.)  Meanwhile, the male performers all wisely take a step back in order to let the actresses shine.  It adds up to a film that’s not too difficult to watch, but goes through a number of fuzzy plot choices that do nothing to bring You Again out of average mediocrity.  Good casting; flat script: could have been much better.

Hot Coffee (2011)

Hot Coffee (2011)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On-demand Video, April 2012) A lot of people know about Liebeck vs McDonalds, a legal case in which a woman sued McDonalds for burns from a coffee, and received $2.7 million in damages.  Naturally, “a lot of people” don’t really understand the case, and still think it was an example of a frivolous lawsuit run amok. Hot Coffee starts by establishing the damning facts (showing gory burn pictures), and they make it that this certainly wasn’t a frivolous lawsuit: McDonalds had received over 800 complaints about burns caused by their coffee and Liebeck suffered third-degree burns that required extensive surgery.  But this is only the start of Hot Coffee‘s true agenda, which is to expose the ways in which the US civil judicial system has been systematically undermined by powerful corporate interests.  The goal is simple (make sure that business interests aren’t threatened by the judiciary branch) and the methods are many: PR campaigns to discredit civil suits and promote a hollow “tort reform”; lobbying to impose caps on damages; financing an organized effort to elect pro-business judges and discredit those who can’t be bought; and the practice of linking contracts to “mandatory arbitrage”, bypassing the judicial system in favour of conflict-resolution processes stacked in favour of the corporate client.  It’s all damning, and the examples used to illustrate the four pillars of writer/director Susan Saladoff are well-chosen.  Hot Coffee goes well beyond Liebeck vs McDonalds to uncover yet another piece of the vast anti-citizen effort that has noticeably curtailed civil rights in the US over the past few decades, and as such earns a place alongside some of the better-known activist documentaries of the past ten years.  Hot Coffee may not, stylistically speaking, be anything more than a series of talking heads blended with poignant personal stories, but it’s a fascinating piece of non-fiction… which may make you go to bed an angrier, more despondent moviegoer.

Repeaters (2010)

Repeaters (2010)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On Cable TV, April 2012) The proverbial “low-budget but well-scripted SF movie” is hard to find, but it exists, and if Repeaters isn’t quite a complete success, it’s quite a bit better than the disaster-film swill that often passes for low-budget SF nowadays.  The central idea borrows liberally from Groundhog Day in sticking characters inside a day-long time loop.  The twists are that three characters rather than one are stuck, and that the treatment is much closer to criminal horror than to romantic comedy.  As three teenagers stuck in rehab understand their predicament and the darker implications of days repeated without consequences, the tension goes up, and the three characters end up having to fight each other day after day.  Repeaters doesn’t run all the way with the idea, nor can it escape a certain pat sentimentalism in deciding how characters escape their time-loop, but once the premise is firmly hooked, it’s easy to keep watching the film just to see what will happen next.  The limits of the budget don’t show in the rather good script as much as in the murky cinematography and intrusive handheld camera.  The film’s Canadian origins are more amusingly demonstrated by the fact that a big plot twist hinges on the fact that it’s snowing when it shouldn’t.  There is a lot of trash to be found in the wee hours of cable-TV, but Repeaters isn’t even close to badness –think of it as a nice little surprise.  (And don’t stop watching after the first few credits; there’s a nice little sting buried a few seconds later.)

Conan the Barbarian (2011)

Conan the Barbarian (2011)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On Cable TV, April 2012) The problem with boring movies is that they make everything seem worse.  Lame jokes in an otherwise solid film are minor blemishes, but they become almost offensive in dull movies.  Gore is, at best, a necessarily evil in good films; in bad ones, it feels immature and forced. This remake of Conan the Barbarian is, in a few words, useless and charisma-free.  The problem start early on, with a gory prologue leading to a lengthy young-Conan sequence that leads, years later, to a third introduction to the Conan character now fully-grown.  But even with three starts, this film seems to sputter out of energy early on: A return to the kind of dull epic fantasy film we thought we’d left behind with The Scorpion King, Conan the Barbarian struggles in keeping the audience’s attention throughout its entire duration.  It doesn’t succeed, to the point that the film seems to erase itself from memory as soon as the credits roll.  Jason Momoa isn’t too bad as the title character; sadly, it’s the rest of the production that seems to fall around him.  As far a sword-and-sorcery fantasy films go, this is routine stuff, made a bit more repellent with the gratuitous meanness and gore.  Some sequences are a bit better than others (including a fight over a wooden wheel), but the initial disappointment of the film never goes away, and the end result just isn’t all that impressive.  Fantasy fans will at least get the impression that the budget was spent on-screen: There are a few good images here and there.  For everyone else, through, this remake compares unfavourably to the original Conan the Barbarian.  Good or bad doesn’t matter when the film is just this dull.

The Andromeda Strain (1971)

The Andromeda Strain (1971)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(Second viewing, On Cable TV, April 2012) I hadn’t seen this film in about two decades, but seeing it today was almost like seeing it for the first time: Much of the film’s impact is to be found not in the basic plot (in which scientists investigate a new and lethal threat from space in a top-secret secure laboratory) but in the ways this plot is presented on-screen.  For viewers deeply steeped in the current storytelling aesthetics of the techno-thriller genre, The Andromeda Strain is a seminal film.  It laboriously presents devices that would be used as shorthand for more than a generation of latter filmmakers.  Much of the film’s first hour is spent laboriously describing details (mysterious deaths, characters being gathered, their gradual introduction to the intricately-protected facility) that would be condensed to the simplest shorthand by latter movies such as Resident Evil.  The pace may be considerably slower than modern films, but some of the techniques remain captivating: The split-screen cinematography, the thick jargon, the post-action framing device, the quasi-documentary appeal to authority, the unflinching dedication to procedural details… it’s a generally-faithful adaptation of Michael Crichton’s novel that ended up influencing an entire sub-genre.  The film has certainly struck a nerve in popular culture: I gasped audibly when I recognized the original line of dialogue (“Let’s go back to the rock… and see it at four-forty”) sampled in Apollo 440’s “Ain’t Talking About Dub”.  Some of the changes from the Crichton novel are better than others: The character gender switch that brought Kate Reid in the film have also led to a memorable character, even though the film itself is a bit weaker in explaining the “Scoop” premise of the plot.  Douglas Trumbull’s special effects are impressive for the time, but sometimes fail to accurately represent what’s happening on-screen.  Plot-wise, the film is just as notable as the novel in presenting a non-event; The Andromeda Strain has characters struggling to understand and eventually try to stop a mistake, but (taking its cues from War of the Worlds) doesn’t give them a whole lot to do in stopping the threat that brings them together.  It’s still a fascinating piece of work, though, especially for what it doesn’t do well from a perspective forty years distant.

Groundhog Day (1993)

Groundhog Day (1993)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On Cable TV, April 2012) Curiously enough, I’d never seen Groundhog Day until now, nearly twenty years after its release.  It’s one of those films quoted/referenced so frequently that it’s easy to feel as if you don’t need to see the actual footage to know about it.  But that’s wrong in predictable ways: This film hasn’t become a minor enduring classic for no reason: Past its high-concept, Groundhog Day is a solid, well-made movie with an appealing lead character perfectly played by Bill Murray, many small pleasures, terrific scene-to-scene narrative momentum, an eye-catching Andie McDowell, and a deeply satisfying thematic subtext.  Spiritual, funny, thought-provoking and unpretentious at once, it’s a film that clicks on nearly every level.  Its annoyances and contrivances are easily swept under the rug, and what remains is a terrific film even after two decades.  The spiritual growth of the lead character is inspiring, and is enough to make anyone think about how they’d act in similar situations. As a fantasy, it may not be particularly rigorous, but thematically it’s completely satisfying.  Don’t miss it, even if you think it’s way too late to see it. 

Colombiana (2011)

Colombiana (2011)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On Cable TV, April 2012) If anyone in the world has earned the right to write yet another female assassin movie, it’s probably Luc Besson.  Besson’s not a particularly gifted screenwriter, but as a director he did help popularize the female-assassin stereotype in movies such as Nikita. Colombiana is another riff on a familiar concept: As a young girl’s parents are murdered by a drug lord, she vows revenge and dedicates her life to becoming a killing machine.  The story picks up years later as she nears her vengeance.  The rest is simply a series of kill-sequences noisily arranged by director Olivier Megaton, from a script by Besson and Robert Mark Kamen.  While some of their previous collaborations such as Transporter 3 were terrible even by B-movie standards, Colombiana is closer to Taken in understanding the mechanics of the action-thriller genre and delivering the formula in an energetic fashion.  It helps that Zoe Saldana has the lithe physique and feral intensity required by the role: Colombiana wouldn’t be as good without her intensely physical performance.  The cinematography, at least, is a bit more ambitious than usual and the result is a slick action movie.  It may not avoid a bit of stupidity around the edges, but it’s put together with some competence and doesn’t overstay its welcome once the overlong prologue is done.   Big guns, big explosions, original executions all point a little bit too much as set-piece-driven carnography, but fans of B-grade action movies will understand the game being played here.  The result is potable.

The Bodyguard (1992)

The Bodyguard (1992)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On Cable TV, April 2012) The Bodyguard may not have earned unanimously favourable reviews when it came out, but it has stood the test of time relatively well, even though the fates of its two lead actors may now lend it an unwarranted gravitas.  Whitney Houston is now dead, of course, victim of internal conflicts that seem so much more complicated than being stalked by insane fans and professional killers.  Kevin Costner, meanwhile, has retreated into a quasi-parody of his humorless character, reaping scorns from his Waterworld-esque hubris and seldom allowing himself to portray weakness.  The Bodyguard came at the peak of the period where he was a major A-list actor, and it’s not hard to see how it was a star vehicle for his stoic infallible personae.  As a piece of entertainment, though, the film still clicks: The mixture of thrills and romance is carefully dosed for maximal impact (even when the contrivances pile up), Houston is immensely appealing and Costner act as a capable foil for her.  The suspense sequences are cleverly shot, and it’s easy to get caught up in the story despite its familiarity.  The early-nineties period is just beginning to date (the cars are the most obvious tell-tale), but there’s no need to remake The Bodyguard: It’s just as effective now that when it came out, and the number of memorable songs from the soundtrack is impressive… even for those who have never seen the film.

Winnie the Pooh (2011)

Winnie the Pooh (2011)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On Cable TV, April 2012) There’s a common rhetorical defense against unfavorable reviews of bad children’s movies that goes approximately like “But it’s for kids!” as if the young ones deserved swill and as if adults weren’t somehow involved in the process of creating and viewing these films.  Of course, the truth is that kids deserve the best just as their parents do, and that parents will end up watching the same films as their young ones.  Why settle for less?  Such it is that a well-made kid’s film like Winnie the Pooh can charm adult audiences while still appealing to its core audiences.  Whimsical, good-natured and rarely dull to watch, this newest Disney-branded adaptation of A. A. Milne’s stories is a complete success.  The 2D animation (with a bit of CGI help and a subtle live-action framing) seamlessly transfers Pooh’s iconography to the screen, while the voice talent (including John Cleese as the narrator) strikes all the right notes.  The story itself is a charming framework in which the character’s personalities are given a chance to shine.  Adults will be especially amused by the meta-textual interludes in which the film plays with storytelling conventions and the transition from page to screen, but the entire family will enjoy the film.  Winnie the Pooh runs a bit short at a mere 63 minutes, but it’s a complete success reflected by its gentle self-assurance.

Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008)

Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On Cable TV, April 2012) If you believe in the idea of Hollywood as one big giant conversation during which the same group of people build upon each others’ ideas in order to make genres “evolve” (acknowledging that evolution isn’t always progress), then Forgetting Sarah Marshall now seems like an essential piece of 2000s American comedy.  It’s from well-known comedy producer Judd Apatow; it features early feature-film appearances by a number of performers who would earn further notoriety in other films; and it fits in the revival of the raunchy R-rated romantic-comedy-for-boys sub-genre that stretches from The 40-Year-Old Virgin to counter-exemplar Bridesmaids (so far).  In short, Forgetting Sarah Marshall has become an essential piece of the conversation about the comedy genre over the past ten years, and I had to see it after missing out on its inauspicious release four years ago.  Fortunately, it lives up to the hype: It’s biggest enduring legacy is bound to be writer/actor Jason Segel’s break-out performance as a relatively more charming man-boy character than the Will Ferrell type.  Forgetting Sarah Marshall also remains noteworthy for bringing Russell Brand to the movies; something that would lead directly to Bring Him to the Greek.  Otherwise, there are good performances here by Mila Kunis, Kristen Bell and Jonah Hill, all of whom would go on to star in other high-profile comedies.  The film itself is decently funny, if sometimes over-long and almost repetitive at times.  The ending clearly shows the way to 2011’s The Muppets, as a further piece of evidence of Forgetting Sarah Marshall‘s crucial link in the Hollywood comedy conversation.  You don’t have to see it for what it set in motion: the film is successful enough by itself.  But it’s far more interesting as part of a genre than as a film completely disconnected from its context.

Our Idiot Brother (2011)

Our Idiot Brother (2011)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On cable TV, April 2012) There’s something almost archetypical in the holy fool that Paul Rudd plays so loosely in Our Idiot Brother: a childish man with no perceptive filters and an almost-infinite good faith in his fellow humans, the titular brother becomes a catalyst for dramatic change when he’s forced to spend time with his three sisters and their families.  The specific of the plot becomes secondary to the character work and the conflagration when too much unfiltered truth exposes everyone’s illusions.  The trailer makes the film look like a laugh-a-minute, but the actual film is more measured and demands to be taken more slowly.  In the roles of the three sisters, Elizabeth Banks, Zooey Deschanel, and Emily Mortimer do fine work, but it’s really Rudd who holds the film on his shoulders.  With all the self-deluded characters, painful confrontations and elaborate rationalizations, Our Idiot Brother becomes a profoundly humanistic film.  As a result, and with the help of a conclusion in which everything predictably goes well, it’s a charming, likable and self-assured film.  It may be a bit too gentle and slow-paced to please those looking for laugh-a-minute hilarity, but when a film has so much charisma, it doesn’t really matter.

Ali G Indahouse (2002)

Ali G Indahouse (2002)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On cable TV, April 2012) Sasha Baron Cohen became quite a bit better-known in 2006 after Borat‘s runaway success, lending retroactive interest to his earlier feature film.  His debut Ali G Indahouse features Cohen’s dim wannabee rap-gangster alter-ego as he improbably gets elected to Britain’s parliament and uses his passion for sex, drugs and rap music to make the world a better place.  Unlike Cohen’s subsequent Borat and Brüno, this one seems entirely scripted.  It definitely has a few funny moments, but the entire film runs a bit thin. Not only is Ali G’s character a one-note annoyance, unfit to sustain a feature-length film, but the script depends on idiot-plotting writ large: even allowing for the unreality of silly comedies, this one requires a lot of disbelief.  But there are compensations: the soundtrack is an impressive greatest-hits blend, Cohen fully commits himself to the material, Borat makes a cameo appearance and there are a few good jokes here and there.  As a borderline stoner-comedy, it works more often than it doesn’t; even the annoyances don’t suck all the joy out of it.

The Way Back (2010)

The Way Back (2010)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On Cable TV, April 2012) The Way Back is inspired by a story that may or may not be true (check Wikipedia for the controversy), but the premise is the stuff of epic adventure as a few prisoners escape from a Russian Gulag and make their way, on foot, to India –crossing Siberian forests, enormous caverns, the shores of Lake Baikal, vast plains, the Gobi Desert and the Himalayas along the way.  By the time the film ends, it feels like an odyssey, and not solely in the best sense: This is a long, sometimes tedious film.  The characters suffer, the attempted realism of the presentation offers very little levity, and the script doesn’t trouble itself with compelling dialogue.  As a result, The Way Back feels longer than it should, and ends up shortchanging viewers on the “viewing pleasure” aspect.  Still, there’s a lot to like and admire: The scenery is often breathtaking, the actors (including Ed Harris, Colin Farrell and Saoirse Ronan) do a fine job in rough circumstances, the story kills off a number of characters you wouldn’t expect, and the feeling of a difficult odyssey certainly comes across on-screen.  A bit of plot-tightening, more compelling character work (enough so that we can distinguish between the minor players) and some punched-up dialogue may have helped The Way Back rise above the good and become great.

Mr. Nobody (2009)

Mr. Nobody (2009)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On-demand video, March 2012) I like to think that I’ve got a pretty good knowledge of the past few years in science-fiction movies, but some things can still slip through the cracks. Missing out on a big-budget experimental SF movie shot in Montréal with tons of special effects, and featuring at least four name actors, is a pretty big oversight. Granted, Mr. Nobody is a very unusual kind of Science-Fiction film: It’s about a 118-year-old man reminiscing, circa 2092, about all the lives he’s led. Most of those occur between 1980 and 2010, meaning that most of the film takes place in contemporary times. Still, there’s little that’s ordinary about this 140-minutes meditation on fate, choices, happenstance and a rewinding universe. Mr. Nobody hints at a multiplicity of lives by showing the protagonist in three different marriages and about as many other fates. The first few minutes show a far future psychiatry station, a spaceship breaking apart, as well as the protagonist getting shot, and drowning in at least two different ways. Don’t hope for a tight movie, though, because in-between the SF framework, Mr. Nobody sometimes takes a lot of time to make its dramatic points: The first fifteen minutes are a fast-paced montage of marvels and the last ten wrap up everything very well, but in-between the film can dawdle for a while.  Still, the result is often pure cinematic joy.  Jared Leto makes the most out of a complex role(s) and the cast of character around him include names such as Diane Kruger, Sarah Polley and Rhys Ifans. Director Jaco Van Dormael has an ambitious agenda with this film, but he seems equally at ease with big ideas and small character moments –the film is packed with inspired moments even when they don’t quite sustain critical scrutiny.  (Many SF-related details look good but are wrong, and let’s not even get into the role of coincidence in the story.)  What is perhaps most impressive from the film, from a critical SF perspective, is how the SF devices are used in support of what the story is trying to tell about the human condition –that’s a textbook-perfect definition of what Science Fiction does in the best of circumstances.  For a film that got nearly no attention in North America, Mr. Nobody really isn’t too bad: I hope more people get to see it, even as flawed as it is because its strengths are considerable.  Few films are good and meaningful enough to make one viewer happy about life, but this is one of them.

How do You Know (2010)

How do You Know (2010)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On cable TV, April 2012) Watching well-made romantic comedies is so effortless that making them seems easy… and then you find one that doesn’t quite work as well as it could. On the surface, How Do You Know isn’t a hard movie to like: It has four good actors in the lead (Paul Rudd is charming as the co-protagonist and Owen Wilson is almost hilarious as a clueless baseball player but the film’s highlight is that Reese Witherspoon is aging really well –I can’t recall her looking any better), appealing characters, quirky details, a few big laughs and a somewhat witty script. Shot to glossy perfection in the streets of Washington DC, it’s the kind of film fully steeped in movie-magic, fit to send audiences in a feel-good trance. And yet… it never quite clicks. The dialogues, even from the first few scenes, seem willfully scattered. The scenes go on for longer than they should, and no amount of character charm nor scene-setting can excuse the tepid rhythm. While How Do You Know earns a few credits for avoiding the more obvious clichés of romantic comedies, it doesn’t quite replace those clichés with anything remarkably compelling. The look at the struggles of an aging female athlete seems eclipsed by the look at the idiocy of an aging male athlete, while the corporate malfeasance plot doesn’t quite boil at any point in the story. It all amount to nothing much; at best, a pleasantly eccentric but forgettable romance. But then, looking up the film’s production information, you find out that it cost $120 million, almost half of which was spent on five key salaries… and the film goes from unobjectionable to incomprehensible.  Really, writer/director James L. Brooks? Did you really need Jack Nicholson to play his same shtick for that amount of money? How Do You Know feels like the kind of low-budget romance given to hungry up-and-coming directors for a quick release a modest box-office… not blockbuster budgets and massive audiences: there’s nothing here to warrant more attention. No amount of “Eh, it was all right” can recoup those losses.