Month: December 2018

  • A Star is Born (1937)

    A Star is Born (1937)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2018) I’m consciously watching all twentieth-century versions of A Star is Born back-to-back-to-back, and the first stop has to be the original 1937 film that codified it all. (Yes, I’m aware of What Price Hollywood? No, I don’t have it on hand.) The first shock is in the first frame—This A Star is Born is in colour, at a time when only a handful of Hollywood weren’t in black-and-white. Then comes the clichés: The young girl with a dream, going to Hollywood to strike it big. Even knowing a lot about 1930s films, it’s not clear to me what’s a cliché and what’s a then-witty attempt at openly poking fun as the Hollywood dream machine: Certainly, seeing a bus, a train and a plane arrive to “The City of Los Angeles” one after another suggests that the screenwriters were clearly aware, even in those early decades, about the satirical potential of their story. Still, it is a rough prototype of later version, sometimes delivering good scenes and at other times prototyping a basic idea to be developed in later remakes. I really liked the “switchboard” scene, which to my knowledge is unique to this version of the story (as is the strictly non-musical focus of the star’s skills). This first version of A Star is Born is a fascinating film in its own way, if only for the time-travel aspect of it. Alas, my viewing experience was marred by a muddy low-resolution picture from a TV channel largely indifferent to good presentation. This may have been a problem.(Second viewing, On Cable TV, June 2019) I decided to give this version of A Star is Born another shot when I was able to watch it in as good a high-definition version as possible on TCM rather than from a standard-definition channel of dubious fidelity to the original. The good news are that the picture and sound are quite a bit better without being spectacular—this is one of the earliest mass-market colour movies, and it’s not surprising if the image is rough (even TCM has a version scanned from a print that played in theatres—scratches, pops, discoloured spots, cigarette burns and all) and the colours are washed out. Still, this is far better than my first viewing and it helped a lot in staying immersed in the experience. Going back to the 1930s quasi-original (I’ve got What Price Hollywood? lined up next) after watching the 1950s, 1950s and 2010s version is interesting in that you can see some of the roots of the later versions. A lot more of the 2010s version is in the 1930s film than you’d think, for instance—including the “I just wanted to see you again” sequence in a slightly different format. This 1937 version has a lot more humour than you’d think considering the dramatic ending of all versions of the story—some of the dialogue is particularly snarky, which I’m tempted to attribute to Dorothy Parker as one of the credited screenwriters. Janet Gaynor and Fredric March are fine as the leads, but my attention this time around was more interested in Lionel Stander’s darkly hilarious turn as an exasperated publicist symbolizing early Hollywood’s hunger for celebrity spin. (A version of his character would pop up again in the 2018 version.) Speaking of which—the more I learn about classic Hollywood, the most interesting this sometimes-satire becomes. Still, it’s the scene-by-scene execution that remains the film’s biggest draw: it’s far more fun to watch than you’d imagine for a film more than eighty years old, and the fact that it’s in colour keeps it more accessible than many of its contemporaries.

  • Larry Gaye: Renegade Male Flight Attendant (2015)

    Larry Gaye: Renegade Male Flight Attendant (2015)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2018) I mourn certain movie subgenres, and one of those nearest to my cinephile’s heart is the kind of rapid-fire spoof comedy that Zucker-Abrams-Zucker used to do so well in the 1980s. I’m not mourning the degenerate form of the subgenre that plagued the 2000s, but sometime I miss their sheer frantic pacing, aiming for a joke every ten seconds or so. Larry Gaye: Renegade Male Flight Attendant is far from being an ideal comedy, but it certainly has the right intentions. It attempts a joke every fifteen seconds—alas, only one in ten will land. That still gives viewers a laugh every few minutes, which is not that bad. Not spoofing any movie in particular, Larry Gaye focuses on the eponymous flight attendant and how he reacts when his airline announces plans to replace human attendants with robot ones. Of course, plot is merely pretext here for stringing along one silly gag after another. Most of them are unsuccessful, and the script is to blame: from the get-go, even the Larry Gaye character is ill-defined hovering between oblivious obnoxiousness and ultra-competence. For someone supposed to be the best flight attendant in the world, Gaye doesn’t achieve his full comic potential. It’s not lead actor Mark Feuerstein’s fault, though, as he does his best to wring every laugh out of the raw material. Speaking of casting, Larry Gaye features one a surprisingly good cast: In between various walk-on roles, we get Stanley Tucci, Taye Diggs, Danny Pudi, Henry Winkler, Rebecca Romijn and others. While the overall result is definitely more miss than hit, there’s an attempt in Larry Gaye at a silly comedy the likes of which we rarely get to see any more.

  • Total Frat Movie (2016)

    Total Frat Movie (2016)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2018) I thought they didn’t make movies like this anymore. Feeling like the 1980s sent a time capsule to the 2010s, Total Frat Movie is a college sex comedy along the lines of, well, the 1980s college sex comedies featuring fraternities, copious female nudity and dubiously gross humour. The loose outlines of the plot have something about a frat going through the process of getting its charter reinstated three years after excessive partying. I’m told that the film comes from a web site of some sort, but don’t quote me on that—I’m so out of the loop on college fraternities (which generally don’t exist in any significant capacity in Canada) that I’m not even sure where the loop is. Total Frat Movie never has any illusion about its audience: it’s clearly made for white college-age boys who enjoy the party lifestyle. If you’re looking for questioning the idea of fraternities, racial diversity, sexual equality or any kind of progressive value beyond binge drinking, this is not the movie for you. Even by the notoriously Caucasian standards of mainstream American cinema, the film features a remarkable lack of diversity in its casting. It also has some seriously reprehensible moments in glossing over male rape. And it’s really not clever, witty or even all that funny. Still, there are a few upsides: There’s some basic filmmaking competency to the effort despite the visibly low budget—director Warren P. Sonoda handles the party sequences quite well. Tom Green is actually quite funny in hamming it up as the college dean. And I have to confess that I will never, ever really complain about wall-to-wall gratuitous coed nudity. Despite being in almost constant and acute disagreement with just about everything the film intends to do, I must have laughed a few times along the way. The evidence piles up: I probably have to consider Total Frat Movie as a guilty pleasure of some sort. (Surprisingly enough, the film doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page as of this writing. Maybe I’ll add one eventually.)

  • Blockers (2018)

    Blockers (2018)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2018) In the pantheon of comedy characters, the icon of a parent trying to stop their daughters from getting in trouble (for euphemistic values of “trouble”) ranks highly enough that Blockers not only based its entire premise on it, but multiplies the parent/daughter pairing by three for good measure. The film’s success starts with a decent script, but is fully realized by great casting with none other than Ike Barinholtz, Leslie Mann and the ever-dependable John Cena as the parents, as well as newcomers Kathryn Newton, Geraldine Viswanathan and Gideon Adlon are the daughters. (Viswanathan, in particular, makes an impression.) The plot itself goes back to the good old prom day premise, as the daughters plan on losing their virginities and the parents vow not to let that happen. The rest is one comic episode after another, punctuated by such things as a spectacular car crash, wild parties, and bonding between the parents chasing their daughters. It all ends on a surprisingly mature note (especially by notoriously juvenile sex comedy standards), reflecting contemporary morality rather than questionable old-fashioned standards. The fast pace helps, as does a script that seeks to go beyond the easiest answers. Expectations may count for much here, as the film is significantly better than expected. Still, a good movie is a good movie, and Blockers does have the advantage of feeling like a 2018 movie, and not a 1980s one dressed-up with cell phones and new car models.

  • FANatic (2017)

    FANatic (2017)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2018) Anyone who seriously claims that the latest multiplex movie is the worst thing they’ve seen all year either makes the claim on the first week of January or should spend more time looking at what’s being offered on Cable TV channels. Horrible movies, movies made for minuscule budgets, movies without discernible talent either in front or behind the camera. Terrible, terrible movies, and we Canadians often get it twice as hard given CanCon requirements for cable channel licences. That’s right: we get extra special servings of terrible movies as long as they’re made in Canada. This is important in setting expectations for FANatic, a made-for-Cable Lifetime TV movie that by all rights should have been terrible. Surprisingly enough, it merely turns out to be not very good. The distinction is important—some of those straight-to-Cable films are bad enough that you can’t even make it to the end. FANatic, on the other hand, has enough juice to last until the end, even though it doesn’t rise up to any decent standard. I suppose that I have a built-in fondness for its premise, in which the strange subculture of media SF fandom is mined for the usual Lifetime stalker plot template. Here we have Betsy Brandt as the lead actress in a Science Fiction TV show—she’s got enough problem with the silliness and sexism of the job, but it’s all about to get worse once her trusty assistant turns out to be not so trusty … and even homicidal. Hell hath no fury like a scorned fan, and seeing obsessive fandom portrayed in Lifetime fashion is good for a few giggles. Jean-François Rivard’s workmanlike direction is a bit better than usual for those kinds of films, but once again we’re grading on a curve. Katy Breier is cute when she’s not playing pure psycho. I’m not going to actually recommend FANatic—life’s too short to give two hours of it to a Lifetime movie—, but I will vaguely allude to a half-hearted recognition that it’s not as bad as it could have been, and through its sci-fi hook will appeal to viewers who normally would not even be watching a Lifetime movie.

  • Cuban Fury (2014)

    Cuban Fury (2014)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2018) Let’s be clear: There’s nothing in Cuban Fury that’s all that original, but it’s still a nicely handled romantic comedy with a substantial dancing component. Nick Frost stars in a role that’ generally less comic and more romantic than many in his filmography, and it generally works. Rashida Jones is fine as the object of his affection (with a deliciously slimy Chris O’Dowd completing the triangle), although Ian McShane and Kayvan Novak are highlights as (respectively) a cranky dance instructor and a flamboyantly gay dancer. The plot is as by-the-number as they come, what with past trauma, romantic interest, training montages and to-thine-self-be-true message complete with a triumphant ending. Still, the protagonist is endearing, the entire film is fun and it fits squarely in the kind of gentle British comedy that we’ve grown accustomed to. Cuban Fury may not be challenging, innovative or meaningful, but it doesn’t have to be.

  • Guarding Tess (1994)

    Guarding Tess (1994)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, December 2018) There’s a whole slew of apolitical politics-adjacent American movies out there, and Guarding Tess has one of the strangest hooks of them all—Nicolas Cage as a Secret Service agent assigned to an exasperating detail as he’s in charge of protecting a widowed First Lady living in a small town. She (played by Shirley MacLaine) often considers her security detail undistinguishable from her serving staff. You can imagine the rest, including a third-act thriller that runs at odds with the generally comic tone of the film up to that point. Of course the secret agent and former first lady will make up and learn lessons about each other—that’s not the point of the film. What Guarding Tess has in abundance is Cage playing off MacLaine, pokes at the reality of a Secret Service team assigned to what they consider to be a dead-end posting, and the minutia of such an arrangement. There’s a real genre twist thirty minutes before the end of the movie as the former first lady is kidnapped, buried underground and then Nicolas Cage has to shoot a toe off a suspect for him to confess the crime. Somehow this ended up in a comedy, but it feels a bit more natural in the movie than described like this. (After all, what would be the point of a security detail if there wasn’t a threat to their client at some point?) I still liked it, but Guarding Tess is almost the very definition of a movie that you shouldn’t watch if there’s anything more pressing to do.

  • Love, Simon (2018)

    Love, Simon (2018)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2018) As much as I hate to admit it, I live in a comfortable bubble and movies are one of the ways in which I can understand that. A teenage romantic comedy whose Big Idea was to feature a gay protagonist coming out at first struck me as, well, unnecessary — but given that I live in Canada (and the progressive, French-speaking part of Canada at that), work in an environment that embraces diversity and carry my cis straight white male privilege around, I clearly didn’t fully appreciate what it meant to others. On its own, I quite liked Love, Simon: despite an annoying tendency to portray its characters at the edge of hipness with the perfect musical choices and coolest pop-culture references, it’s a warm, engaging, funny and dynamic teenage romantic comedy. It’s also inclusive in the sense that by the big triumphant romantic finish, I was aaaw-ing for the protagonist just as I would have for a straight protagonist (in fact, perhaps more so, because Love, Simon is a superior example of the form that leaves many blander hetero rom-coms behind). The dialogue is filled with good moments, the cast is performing up to the demands of the script and the atmosphere created by director Greg Berlanti approaches some of the earlier teenage movie classics. Comparisons with John Hughes films may have to sit a while, but don’t seem unwarranted at a first glance: I’m seriously considering it for my own year-end Top-10. Nick Robinson is quite good in the lead role, but the entire cast is fantastic — I particularly liked Alexandra Shipp, Natasha Rothwell and Clark Moore even in short supporting roles. Small funny script details about — I was particularly amused by the notion of a high-school performance of Cabaret, but sobered up when I realized that this was actually A Thing. And it’s in that vein that I’m willing to cut a lot of slack to Love, Simon — It’s a great movie, and it’s a great movie not necessarily designed for someone like me. There’s a wide difference of experience between this middle-aged movie reviewer and its target audience, and the notion of a gay teenage romantic comedy is important to its target audience — it’s not overdone, not obvious, not unnecessary. We all need to tell our own stories, and we will find unity in what they have in common.

  • Beginners (2010)

    Beginners (2010)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, December 2018) I’m not sure what I expected from Beginners, but I got a lot more than I thought. The story of a man dealing with the death of his father as he’s trying to decide whether to pursue a romantic relationship of his own, Beginners is considerably funnier than you’d think considering the subject matter. As our protagonist pieces together his life, the life of his father, and what happened since his father came out as a gay man, the film is remarkably free-form and entertaining in taking us inside the character’s head. This is not a big film, but director Mike Mills’s execution is almost maximalist at times—non-chronological, expressionistic, surprisingly humorous and able to wrap up this slice-of-life narrative with a satisfying finish. Mélanie Laurent is quirky and cute as a free-spirited love interest but this is not her film: Ewan McGregor gets a strong dramatic role here, although he’s sometimes overshadowed by Christopher Plummer’s sheer presence. Beginners wraps up nicely as a film that sits between genres—not a comedy, not a drama, but something that clearly understands what it’s trying to do.

  • Hearts and Minds (1974)

    Hearts and Minds (1974)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2018) I probably wouldn’t have seen Hearts and Minds if it hadn’t been for its 2018 inclusion in the American Film Registry and consequent broadcast on Turner Classic Movies. I ended up giving it a shot out of curiosity, and was surprised at its blistering quasi-contemporary criticism of the Vietnam War. It really holds nothing back in its indictment of the American war effort over there, using nearly all available tools at its disposal to make its points. (There is a clear acknowledged line from Hearts and Minds’s director Peter Davis to Michael Moore’s work.) Scenes of intense Vietnamese grief are accompanied by a coolly analytical voiceover from a high American official explaining in racist terms how Vietnamese doesn’t care as much about human life—the hypocrisy and detachment is staggering. Much of the film runs along those lines, giving voice to Vietnam opponents and unearthing some amazing footage of people trying to defend it with shocking admissions. It has aged amazingly well at a time where American interventionism is still an ongoing concern—Hearts and Minds was made close enough to the events it describes to be raw about it, but with enough accumulated evidence to back up its claims that the war was a mistake. It really isn’t aiming for cool analysis, and it’s this obvious anger that makes the documentary feel so relevant today.

  • Monterey Pop (1968)

    Monterey Pop (1968)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2018) I wasn’t really planning on watching Monterey Pop all the way through. TCM was having a special 8-hour broadcast of movies selected for the 2018 American Film Registry, and it was easier to record the entire block to get all of the short films and commentary than to try to pick the movies I really wanted to see. The idea of a Sixties concert film wasn’t high on my list of essentials, but I let the movie play while I was doing something else … and the music ended up imposing itself. Featuring an A-list of late-1960s performers, Monterey Pop is often hailed as a pivotal concert film, one that captured the energy of the Monterey festival, and led to more concert movies and more concerts as well. Director D. A. Pennebaker’s style does feel surprisingly modern, and yet evokes the Sixties without much of the false overblown nostalgia that creeps into more contemporary looks at the time period. In between The Mamas and the Papas, Simon & Garfunkel, Jefferson Airplane, The Who, Jimi Hendrix and many others, there’s a lot of great music in a single film, and Monterey Pop is likely to keep you listening from beginning to end.

  • The Informer (1935)

    The Informer (1935)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2018) An early Oscar favourite, The Informer is director John Ford’s look at 1922 Dublin, gripped in the fractious Irish War of Independence. Our protagonist is a flawed character who sees, in informing about a friend, a way to get tickets to America for him and his girlfriend. Things don’t turn out as planned. As befits such a sombre tale, the atmosphere of the film is fog-shrouded, bridging the transition between German expressionism and American film noir. Victor McLaglen plays our flawed hero, someone whose imperfections prevent him from doing the right or the best thing—he was given an Academy Award for the role. While some of the material feels overly blunt, there is still something very confident in the use of split-screen optical effect for storytelling purposes, giving us a glimpse in the characters’ inner thoughts. You can seek The Informer because it’s a John Ford movie, or because it’s an Academy Award Best Picture nominee, but it’s surprisingly engaging at time, and a counterpoint to the belief that early Hollywood played nicely with its characters and film endings.

  • Tomb Raider (2018)

    Tomb Raider (2018)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2018) In rebooting the Tomb Raider film franchise, the 2018 version of the film sets itself against two perhaps overwhelming references—not only the series of adventure videogames that made such a splash over the past two decades, but also the Angelina Jolie double-feature that, for many and for all of their faults, defined the way it should be approached on-screen. But everything reboots, even videogame heroines, and so the recent Tomb Raider games have featured a younger, untested heroine, and that’s the approach also taken with the 2018 film featuring Alicia Vikander. The result is not especially impressive. Petite Vikander isn’t much of a presence even as the not-yet-formidable Croft, and director Roar Uthaugturnins merely manages to deliver serviceable sequences along the way to yet another dull origin story. (Seriously, the decision to “re-introduce” Lara Croft is dumbfounding: here we have one of the few videogame household names, and you’re going to waste everyone’s time reintroducing a beginner’s version of her? Why bother?) Much of the film is boring digital mayhem, not shot with any wit or expertise—the lone exception being a sequence featuring an old aircraft fuselage and a cliffside waterfall. It’s all not quite terrible, but it’s definitely laborious—there’s a sense that this is the film we have to struggle through so that they can be bothered to make a real Lara Croft movie. The film chuckles to itself as it ends with a reveal of Croft dual-wielding guns, but it’s only the final nail in the exasperation felt by the movie not delivering what it should. I’m solidly whelmed by the perfunctory adventure movie that is this wholly useless Tomb Raider. Now let’s hurry up to the inevitable sequel to see whether they’ll manage to make something out of this redundant throat clearing.

  • The Mechanic (1972)

    The Mechanic (1972)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On TV, December 2018) It’s a tale as old as Hollywood: The remake comes out and everybody bemoans that it’s not the original. When the Jason Statham-headlined The Mechanic remake came out in 2011, I made a mental note to check the original. It took me a while, but I finally got it done years later as one French-Canadian channel had itself a nice little Charles Bronson marathon. Having seen the result, I don’t think I wasted all of these years not knowing. The Mechanic is very obviously a product of the early 1970s, with a whiff of drug-fuelled existentialism making a fairly simple action thriller get weirder than it should have been. It follows and deconstructs the lifestyle of a renowned assassin as he goes through his contracts and slowly seduces a younger man into his own way of seeing things. By necessity, our protagonist (played by Bronson) is an absolute loner—paying for call girls and quietly appreciating the expensive entertainment that his job pays for. His life gets more complicated when he’s asked to take on a younger partner, and both men’s styles clash. It’s not headed to a happy ending, but then again neither does the film have a happy middle or a happy beginning. Typically dark, grimy and off-putting for a film of its era, The Mechanic seems content to offer a counter-programming alternative to the better-known action movies of the era. Any hint of a homosexual relationship between the two lead characters is not accidental: the original script reportedly had it explicitly detailed and we can only regret the adulteration of that choice—it would have made the movie quite a bit more interesting than the one that made it to screen. In the end, what we have is a dourer Bronson vehicle that fails to impress except, perhaps, for its accidental period patina. Even though the remake wasn’t particularly remarkable, it still feels like an improvement over the original.

  • No Way Out (1987)

    No Way Out (1987)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, December 2018) I saw the very end of No Way Out two decades ago, and you would be forgiven for thinking that remembering only the final revelatory scene of a thriller would have been a problem in seeing it again. But there’s a lot more to a movie that its narrative conclusion, and I was remarkably pleased to find out that it’s a solid thriller from start to finish, and that what could have been a twist is half-telegraphed much earlier in the film—and that much of the film’s dramatic tension works equally well knowing about it. As a man investigating himself, Kevin Costner gets a great occasion to play off his stoic persona, and director Roger Donaldson cranks up the tension through a few remarkable scenes. The labyrinthine complexities of 1980s official Washington, D.C. can be fascinating at times, including the limited computing capabilities that fuel one of the film’s best sequences set deep within the Pentagon. There’s even a dash of (much parodied) eroticism to make things even spicier, as if Soviet spying, underhanded government secrets, plotting between organizations and a ticking-clock plot weren’t enough. It doesn’t really matter if the plotting is outlandish, or if the characters are well beyond unbelievable—sometimes, a thriller works because it’s ludicrous and this is one such case. I had a surprisingly good time watching No Way Out, and it still works largely because it doesn’t even attempt to be realistic.