Month: November 2017

  • Äkta människor, Season 1 [Real Humans] (2012)

    Äkta människor, Season 1 [Real Humans] (2012)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On DVD, November 2017) I’m five years late in watching Swedish TV series Real Humans, and yet taking a look at it today, after 2014’s rush of AI-themed movies and 2016’s similarly themed Westworld, reveals a ten-hour story that still works as a complement to what’s been done since then. Typically Swedish down to the IKEA furniture in the protagonists’ living room, Real Humans takes a refreshingly domestic approach to the perennial issues facing the introduction of humanoids in society. There’s a real sympathy for the robots here, especially as human characters fail to come to grip to their own imperfections in comparison to always-optimal machines. Interestingly enough, this season does spend a lot of time in its first half in making us care for its androids, whereas the second half of the season offers a far more nuanced portrait of everyone involved. Some characters have the luxury of changing their minds a few times, becoming more complex along the way. The domestic approach (in which a substantial portion of important conversations take place around the proverbial dining room table) helps the show remain grounded in its more fanciful second half. Still, this being a Swedish show, don’t mistake “domestic” with “boring”: the series has its share of violent deaths (especially in the last-episode bloodbath), copious nudity and mature themes featuring robosexual characters. While none of the ideas developed here are startlingly original for seasoned SF fans, they are executed well enough, and following characters for ten hours does allow for an impressive amount of character development that may be missing from shorter movies. While there is quite a bit of narrative sleight-of-hand required to keep so many things happening to such a small number of characters, Real Humans does work well, and justifies its running time thanks to deeper engagement with its characters and ongoing ideas. Despite a second series and a two-season English remake, there’s a fair chance that the series will have flown under the radar of most north-American SF fans—get the DVD box sets and rectify this whenever possible!

  • Kate & Leopold (2001)

    Kate & Leopold (2001)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, November 2017) I’m usually a good audience for romantic comedies and science-fiction movies, but Kate & Leopold falls flat in ways that have to do with an incompetent blending of genres. Even as a time-travel romance (a surprisingly robust category), it falls short. It really doesn’t help that Hugh Jackman signed up to play an essentially perfect character, plucked from history to serve as a romantic partner for an incredibly bland heroine played by Meg Ryan back when Meg Ryan was the it-girl for any romantic comedy. While I can understand Jackman’s enthusiasm for a role in which he is flawless, it doesn’t make for good cinema. Kate & Leopold’s romantic aspect seems rote and featureless, while the time-travel elements scarcely make sense. Not only does it have to do with falling through temporal anomalies by jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge (!), there is something deeply dumb about elevators not running properly because their inventor has travelled to the present. By the time hero and heroine travel back in time for good, we can barely muster up enough energy to formulate a perfunctory “I give them six months … or really I give her a year before she’s dead.”  To be fair, little of the film’s flaws have to do with its lead actors: Jackman is charming no matter the situation, while Liev Schreiber gets an oddball role as a nerd matchmaker far removed from the tough-guy persona he has since developed. (Amusingly enough, look closely and you’ll see Kristen Schaal, Viola Davis and Natasha Lyonne in very small roles.) While it’s worth remembering that romantic comedies aren’t really watched for plotting or even logical consistency, Kate & Leopold does very little in more crucial matters of characters, dialogue, comedy or struggles to outweigh its serious narrative issues. As a result, it feels both flat and insubstantial—with very little to make it worthwhile except for Jackman coasting with a flawless character performance.

  • The Manchurian Candidate (1962)

    The Manchurian Candidate (1962)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Second viewing, On Cable TV, November 2017) I thought I remembered The Manchurian Candidate from seeing it (on TV, in French) more than two decades ago, but it turns out that I had forgotten quite a bit in the meantime. Which is a good thing, given that I got to re-experience it all over again. A product of the paranoid early sixties (it was famously released shortly before the Cuba Crisis), The Manchurian Candidate delves into far-reaching Russian plots to destabilize the United States through intervention in its politics—but stop me if this is too familiar circa 2017. What I really did not remember from my first viewing is how early we know of the Russian brainwashing, and the delightfully crazy way in which this is explained, through a dream sequence that switches between real and imagined environments. After that, it’s up to Frank Sinatra as the protagonist to get Laurence Harvey (as the tragic anti-hero) to reject his condition. There are complications. While The Manchurian Candidate remains a clear product of its time, director John Frankenheimer keeps things moving, and the fascinating glimpse at early-sixties contemporary reality is now fascinating and proof that the film has aged well. It even takes potshots at McCarthyism. Sinatra is quite good in a relatively straightforward role, while Angela Lansbury is surprisingly evil as a scheming mother. Better yet, the film itself is a crackling good thriller with interweaving subplots and good character performances. While much of The Manchurian Candidate will feel stiff by today’s standard (and occasionally silly or misleading, such as Sinatra’s character love interest), it remains compelling today and well worth another look.

  • Haute Tension [High Tension aka Switchblade Romance] (2003)

    Haute Tension [High Tension aka Switchblade Romance] (2003)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, November 2017) Curiosity may or may not kill the cat, but it certainly leads movie reviewers to questionable choices, such as watching Haute Tension despite not liking extreme horror and knowing all about the film’s certifiably insane Big Twist. A core movie in the “New French Extremity” curriculum of extremely violent and intentionally transgressive horror movies, Haute Tension is also an early calling card for writer/director Alexandre Aja, who has since gone on to a Hollywood career. Since I don’t really like gory horror, I put Haute Tension on as background noise while I was doing something else and dared the movie to catch my attention. It only did so in small moments: there is a lot of screaming and crying in the film as it seems to show a woman trying to rescue her friend from a psycho killer. Québec-based French-language horror movie channel “FrissonTV” doesn’t provide closed captioning yet, but that doesn’t matter much given that most of the film’s soundtrack is composed of crying, screaming or disquieting musical cues in-between bouncy pop songs used ironically. Perhaps the most surprising thing about Haute Tension is that it does provide a lot of foreshadowing for the Big Twist (starting with one of the film’s first lines, “I dreamt I was chasing myself”) but also more grist for calling it completely bonkers. Even shrugging off the film as having an unreliable narrator really doesn’t explain much of the film’s first half (including an entire truck). Is it important, though? The point of Haute Tension isn’t the plot or the heroine-as-psycho-killer twist: it’s about the various violent deaths graphically portrayed, the relentless tension of the film and the writer/director impressing horror-loving audiences with whatever horror-loving audiences love to see. I’m not part of that audience, so even noting that the film’s big twist makes partial sense and pointing out that the tension is often effective doesn’t really mean that I liked the result. But I was curious about Haute Tension and now I’m not curious any more, which means that I can scratch the film from my to-see list and move on to something else.