Month: July 2015

La Vénus à la fourrure [Venus in Fur] (2013)

ByChristian Sauvé 2015-07-042019-03-25 Movie Review

(On Cable TV, July 2015) There’s a remarkable purity of intention in La Vénus à la fourrure, a psychological thriller adapted from a stage play that almost entirely takes place on a darkened theater stage, featuring only two characters that spend much of their time reciting snippets of a stage play based on Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs. You really wouldn’t expect any sustained tension out of this premise, and yet the film builds upon fairly dry foundations until it becomes an unsettling display of psychosexual combat, lead actor and lead actress locked in a duel of wills and kinks. I’m going to ignore the question of whether you really want infamous fugitive director Roman Polanski to be the one to teach you about perversion, but there is some serious directorial skills on display here as the film does the most it can achieve with very limited elements. Mathieu Amalric is good as a playwright who finds himself captured by his own creation, but Emmanuelle Seigner (Polanski’s wife) is simply astonishing in the lead role –she seems to be playing five or six parts one after the other, simple changes in costume or posture bringing out entirely new sides to her character. It certainly helps that the script is so densely constructed, referring back and forth between actor, character and character-as-actor, with at least three levels of interpretation constantly feeding off each other. (A hint for bilingual francophones watching the film: turn on the English subtitles to catch more references.) I wouldn’t call La Vénus à la fourrure an enjoyable film, but it’s certainly a fascinating one that builds and builds until it seems unbearably intense.

Movie Review

Detention of the Dead (2012)

ByChristian Sauvé 2015-07-032019-03-25 Movie Review

(On Cable TV, July 2015) “The Breakfast Club for the zombie generation” is a fair way to describe Detention of the Dead, as it features half a dozen mismatched students stuck in detention, suddenly dealing with a zombie epidemic ravaging their school (and, presumably, the world). A fair warning, though: this is a very low-budget film adapted from a stage play, so don’t expect much more than adequate production values, acting or staging. Much of the zombie material is strictly standard fare, with a few odd moments that don’t necessarily contribute much to the film other than to boost its running time into feature-film territory. Of course, this isn’t a film to be taken seriously: the references to previous horror films abound, the tropes are completely familiar and it’s definitely meant to be a comedy first rather than a pure horror film. While Detention of the Dead should work based on the strength of its characters, dialogue and situations, the best it can do is a bit of amusement. The actors aren’t all strong enough to carry their roles, the staging isn’t always convincing, some of the references seem forced, the love triangle doesn’t really work, the order in which the characters die is almost entirely predictable and for all of the slight attempts at playing with the tropes of the genres it melts together, Detention of the Dead remains far too beholden to the core concepts of zombie films to bring anything new. Shaun of the Dead it isn’t. Still, comparing this film to the best examples of the sub-genre ignores the fact that at a time where terrible zombie movies rise up faster than reviewers can shoot them in the head, writer/director Alex Craig Mann has managed to craft a mildly entertaining film on a threadbare budget. It could have been far, far worse.

Movie Review

Annabelle (2014)

ByChristian Sauvé 2015-07-012017-08-30 Movie Review

(On Cable TV, July 2015) What a strikingly dull horror film. It wasn’t a good idea to spin off The Conjuring’s acclaim, but every profitable horror film inevitably ends up producing inferior sequels and so here we are. Tracking the back-story of the Annabelle doll introduced in The Conjuring, (but otherwise independent of the previous film to the point of being stronger if you haven’t seen it), Annabelle doesn’t reach too deep in the bag of usual horror movie tricks, what with its blend of babies-in-peril, catholic mythology, jump scares and demons out to suck innocent souls. It’s all very familiar, utterly by-the-numbers and it doesn’t take much to let our attention wander as the film laboriously works its way through plot point best established in other better movies. The doll has more personality that the human characters, and while the conclusion has about thirty seconds of intensity, it’s a bit too little too late to redeem the film. Created on an assembly line and put together without too much craftsmanship (which is a bit surprising, given director John R. Leonetti’s experience as a cinematographer on films such as The Conjuring), Annabelle is another in a long string of proofs that horror franchise can’t usually sustain Hollywood success: they invariably become corrupted at the slightest touch of financial greediness.

Movie Review

Ghosts of Girlfriends Past (2009)

ByChristian Sauvé 2015-07-012019-03-24 Movie Review

(On TV, July 2015) For all the flack that 2000-2010 Matthew McConaughey has received for his lengthy string of undemanding roles in romantic comedies, it’s easy enough to forget that he was really, really good at it. Ghosts of Girlfriends Past is as good a showcase for him in that mode as any of the other films in that sub-genre. Here, A Christmas Carol crashes into rom-com conventions as McConaughey plays an unrepentant womanizer taught the error of his ways via three helpful ghosts on the eve of a wedding. As with many films trying to mix familiar genre premises with high-concept premises, Ghosts of Girlfriends Past works best as its wildest (the scene where the protagonist meets his past girlfriends “in bulk” is the highlight), and worst when it’s saddled with obligatory emotional beats, or realise it actually has to deliver a romantic payoff beyond the jokes. So it is that the film is an inventive delight when McConaughey acts as a bad-boy or when the ghosts take him through a tour of his romantic life. It’s not so enjoyable when it has to go through the motions of the typical foreordained romance, or the dramatic scaffolding required to get to the triumphant ending. But the film does make an impression: Emma Stone is nothing short of hilarious in a pre-stardom role, while Michael Douglas is slick-smooth as the kind of mentor every mother warns her son about. Noureen DeWulf, Anne Archer, Lacey Chabert and Robert Forster also make good impressions in smaller roles. Still, the script is a bit hit-and-miss as its better moments are saddled with more obvious ones. In other words, Ghosts of Girlfriends Past should have been a bit better with the elements at its disposal, and occasional signs that it’s capable of much better. But even as it is, it’s an impressive showcase for the kind of persona that Matthew McConaughey enjoyed in his rom-com heyday.