Month: May 2018

Giant (1956)

ByChristian Sauvé 2018-05-092019-03-24 Movie Review

(On Cable TV, May 2018) As a swan song for James Dean, Giant is a fitting statement. A vast family generational drama set in the vast expanses of oil-rich Texas, Giant begins as our newlywed heroine (the ever-captivating Elizabeth Taylor) moves from the East Coast to arid Texas, and befriends a ranch hand (Dean). One semi-accidental death later, the ranch hand inherits some land that proves to be soaked with oil. Over the next few decades, he develops an empire, leading to a climactic confrontation at the opening of his grand hotel where long-held feuds are detonated. Dean manages to play both a young cowboy and an aging industrialist, holding his own not only against Taylor, but also Rock Hudson as the ranch owner who ends up butting heads with his ex-employee. If Giant has a flaw, it’s that it’s a really, really long movie at three hours and twenty-one minutes. I don’t mind the multi-decade scope as much as the length of each individual scene—time and time again, the film takes forever to make a point that could have been made far more efficiently. Surprisingly enough, I don’t quite dislike Dean’s performance—he’s mopey in the film’s first half, but rural mopey rather than urban mopey or suburban mopey such as in his other two films and as such sidesteps his caricatures that have emerged since then. In the film’s last half, he effectively becomes a drunken unhappy industrialist and actually sells the role rather well despite playing decades older than he was at the time. My other issue with Giant is how it doesn’t reach a climax as much as it blows up over a lengthy period at the hotel, then moves to a roadside diner for a moral climax that actually makes the film’s conclusion feel far smaller. That’s what you get from working from a novel as source material, though—whether you have the guts to change what doesn’t make sense on the screen, or you get criticized for it. The film has endured rather well—its anti-racism streak is still surprisingly relevant, and its anti-sexism message also comes across. The film also shows with a decent amount of detail the transition from Texas’ ranching heritage to its more modern oil extraction boom. I may not like Giant all that much, but I respect it a lot, and I frankly find it disappointing that it got beaten by as frothy a spectacle as Around the World in 80 Days for the Best Picture Oscar.

Movie Review

Monkey Business (1952)

ByChristian Sauvé 2018-05-082019-03-25 Movie Review

(In French, On Cable TV, May 2018) It’s easy to see why Monkey Business is often considered to be a loose follow-up to Bringing up Baby—Howard Hawks is back with a fast-paced comedy, Cary Grant reprises his silly intellectual mode, Ginger Rogers steps in as the wilder female partner and the film is at its best when it’s just goofing around. Thanks to a high-concept premise (what if a serum gave you back your youth … or at least made you regress back in age mentally?), there are plenty of opportunities for random silliness. The film never gets better than seeing Day play at being a bratty schoolgirl, although seeing Marilyn Monroe vamp it up as a voluptuous secretary is also fun. While it’s technically a science-fiction film, Monkey Business is best seen as a farce reteaming Hawks and Grant together and just having fun along the way. (This being said, the film’s best laugh comes early on in the opening credits sequence, as the director tells Grant “not yet” and to go back behind the door before making an entrance. Alas, the film doesn’t go back to metatextual comedy.) It’s really not quite up to Bringing up Baby’s standards—the film is occasionally annoying (the monkey), occasionally dull (anything with the scientists), occasionally offensive to modern sensibilities (never mind “the secretary”; I have in mind the “Indian scalping” schoolyard playing.) It’s still not a bad time thanks to the aforementioned goofing off, but it could have been better.

Movie Review

Pet Sematary (1989)

ByChristian Sauvé 2018-05-072019-03-25 Movie Review

(On TV, May 2018) There’s something almost charming in quasi-classic Stephen King adaptation Pet Sematary. The way it doesn’t mess around in creating an atmosphere of overblown fear and suspense. The almost uncaring way the film uses familiar horror tropes. The abundance of straight-up “this is a bad idea!” reactions from the audience. The ultra-pitch-black ending. The novel is one of King’s bleakest and the film makes no effort at trying to be something else. The actors are almost forgettable (although Fred Gwynne plays his elder-advisor role with the false gravitas that the part requires) and the direction isn’t particularly polished. But then again, lack of polish is the point of this film—criticizing the characters’ incredibly dumb actions in the film is tempting but useless as we’re here for the thrills and chills. At least Pet Sematary know what it’s about and whatever artful moments it has (most notably in depicting the entirely predictable death of a child upon which the film pivots) are in the service of later shlock. As a result, it’s easy to dismiss Pet Sematary … but there’s not use denying that it works at what it sets out to do, and perhaps even more so today as a late-eighties horror movie now that the genre has evolved (well, in its best examples) toward a more artful and meaningful presentation.

Movie Review

Fiddler on the Roof (1971)

ByChristian Sauvé 2018-05-062019-03-24 Movie Review

(On Cable TV, May 2018) Oh goodness. As I make my way through musicals through the decades, it’s clear that the post-Hays-code decade was terrible for the form. Musicals are best suited for light-hearted fare, but in-between 1968 (Oliver Twist, blah) and 1973 (Cabaret, yuck), everything got darker, heavier, longer and impossible to enjoy. While I don’t dislike Fiddler on the Roof quite as much as Oliver Twist or Cabaret, it certainly reminded me of both of them in the way a story is stretched over an interminable amount of time, further deadened by musical numbers that sabotage whatever pacing the film had going for it. To be fair, there are quite a few things that I like about Fiddler on the Roof: Topol is fantastic as the protagonist, addressing the audience and God Himself throughout the film as he tries to cope with his daughters making their own matrimonial choices. “Here’s to life” is a good number, and I finally got to experience firsthand the inspiration for Gwen Stephani’s “Rich Girl.” The look at life within a shtetl (and then later on in an urban enclave) feels of quasi-anthropological quality. But as it turns out (and maybe it’s the weather), I wasn’t quite in the right frame of mind for a nearly three-hour immersion in traditional Jewish culture. The film drags on and on, especially in its second post-pogrom half as the laughs stop. Fiddler on the Roof isn’t helped by an overall visual scheme that revels in its rustic quality—the film feels as brown as it looks, and that is an endemic quality of post-Hays musicals. It’s not a bad movie—I just wasn’t ready to commit to it.

Movie Review

Avengers: Infinity War (2018)

ByChristian Sauvé 2018-05-042019-03-24 Movie Review

(In theatres, May 2018) The second most interesting thing about Infinity War is that taken on its own, it’s not that good a movie: Far too many characters having too little to do, with meaningless battle sequences and an ending that is nothing but a bit cliffhanger inviting audiences to pay again to see the real ending of the story. That’s all true, and inevitable in light of what is the most interesting thing about Infinity War: The TV serial storytelling model has finally achieved its dominance over the typical way movies are told. It is the culmination of ten years of effort from Marvel Studios to piece together a mostly coherent shared universe, and this effort is paying off here by allowing fans who have seen all 18 movies to date. It does mean that you should show up to the movie with as encyclopedic a knowledge of the series so far in your head—a lot of the finer details of Infinity War are best appreciated when already knowing about the characters involved and their relationship with each other. It also means that whatever audacious ending the film has in mind is likely to be partially dismantled in time for further instalments of the ongoing series. (I remember the end of Winter Soldier even if the series doesn’t.) But that’s almost in the implied contract when purchasing the ticket—the difficult calculation is whether fans of the series will get what they expect from a major crossover event. Here, fortunately, Infinity War does well: At a frantic pace, it does find things to do for a roster of over three dozen characters, and while some of them get short thrift, there’s an impressive virtuosity in finding multiple flavours of science fiction and fantasy co-existing together in a single story without tonal clashes. The “Marvel House Style” does help a lot in unifying characters that can be noble, silly, supernatural, materialistic, alien or young … but it’s still quite a juggling act to make everything feel at home in this cross-stitch of a story. For once, Marvel also benefits from a good credible villain—in fact, Infinity War is most satisfying when considered as a story from the villain’s point of view—all the way to a happy ending in which they get what they’ve wanted all along. Is suspect that reaction to Infinity War will change quite a bit once the next chapters in the series are seen and digested—but I can’t quite say whether this will be seen as a frenetic mishmash, an apex for Marvel Studio or an aperitif for something even better. Such is life in a serial model, though—either the series grows too big for itself (as we suspect that a number of stars will not return for further instalments of the series by dint of being too expensive), or it grows stale and abandoned (leading to an end through disinterest), or it keeps finding a middle ground with occasional spikes of interest. Marvel’s been in the serial business for decades, though, so let’s leave them to figure out what’s next. Tune in next year for the next episode.

Movie Review

Cabaret (1972)

ByChristian Sauvé 2018-05-022019-03-24 Movie Review

(On Cable TV, May 2018) I started watching Cabaret knowing only three big things about it—it stars Liza Minnelli, is popular within the gay community and has been widely hailed as a musical for people who don’t like musicals. Given that I don’t care for Minnelli, I am straight and I do like musicals, I shouldn’t have been surprised by my decidedly unimpressed reaction to the movie. Another one of those “wow, there are a lot more Nazis here than I expected” movies, director Bob Fosse’s Cabaret seems willfully dedicated to the task of deconstructing musicals. It takes places in early 1930s Germany, portraying it as a time when fascism is ascending and debauchery is reaching decadent extremes. Most of the songs are set within a nightclub (with one memorable exception), with much of its romantic plot about a three-way romance between an English writer, an American showgirl and a German aristocrat. So far so good … except that the deconstruction goes all the way. The love story crashes and burns (abortion is involved), while the rest of the film chronicles the way the world is headed toward genocide and war. Cabaret wants you to feel disgusted at its musical numbers: One of them (“The world belongs to me”) is a nightmarish descent from a Bavarian beer party to goose-stepping jingoism, while another (“If you could only see”) is a comedy routine with a vile punchline that is fit to cause nausea. It doesn’t help that despite being soaked in sexualized markers (fishnets, fishnets everywhere!), Cabaret is almost entirely unarousing—Minnelli does nothing for me, and the film goes out of its way to extinguish any sexiness. While it’s easy to respect the final result—including the gut punches of the worst musical number and the unhappy-ever-after ending, I can’t possibly imagine myself willingly seeing Cabaret again any time soon, which is not something I usually say about other musicals.

Movie Review

Pinocchio (1940)

ByChristian Sauvé 2018-05-012019-03-23 Movie Review

(On DVD, May 2018) The interesting thing about Disney’s decades-long media saturation is that it’s possible to know almost everything about one of their movies without actually having seen it. I grew up in the seventies with tons of materials (multiple books, mostly) about Disney’s Pinocchio. The events, characters, themes (don’t lie!) and visuals were deeply embedded in my brain growing up, and further material available is available now for another generation. I know everything about Pinocchio the film … but this was the first time I’ve watched in beginning to end in its original language. As it turns out… I don’t particularly like it. Oh, there are plenty of things to like about it. The theme song is iconic, Jiminy Cricket is terrific, the quality of the animation remains exceptional … but there is something I don’t quite like about Pinocchio. Part of it is the heavy-handed morality tale; another is the uncanny valley of Pinocchio as a character; another has to do with the quasi-hallucinatory quality of the episodic plotting; much has to do with heavier episodes in the story that go well into child-endangerment territory. To be fair, few early-era Disney movies (and quite a few of the 1970s ones as well) escape the shifting of what we consider to be acceptable material for kids—there’s some rough stuff in everything from Snow White to Dumbo to Bambi to The Rescuers. Still, respecting the historical context in which Pinocchio was created isn’t the same thing as saying that the film is enjoyable today: I may appreciate seeing the film on my way to Disney Animation Studios completism but I won’t necessarily push for the film to be on heavy rotation in my household. (Not that I need to—my child isn’t particularly fond of Pinocchio either.) It’s certainly worth a look for a bunch of reasons, but a purely enjoyable viewing experience isn’t one of them.