Month: March 2019

Young Guns II (1990)

Young Guns II (1990)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On Cable TV, March 2019) You don’t have to be a genius Hollywood executive to figure out why Young Guns II exists—the first film was a smash hit, most of the good-looking actors were available for a sequel and what’s a little retroactive modification of the first film’s happy ending if it can lead to a new story? Not that this sequel can be accused of being overly precious with its returning characters—by the end of the film, it’s clear that a hypothetical Young Guns III would have required outright resurrections in order to work. A bit of effort is put into the framing device and narration, adding just a bit more interest to the results. Pop music enthusiasts will also note that the film spawned two hit singles that many people can still hum today: Jon Bon Jovi’s “Wanted: Dead or Alive” and especially “Blaze of Glory.” As with the first film, the focus here isn’t as much on the story than the actors being glossily photographed—it’s a great showcase for actors who would go on to have decent careers, such as Emilio Estevez, Kiefer Sutherland, Lou Diamond Phillips and Christian Slater. An equal-opportunity fan-service machine, the film may feature mostly male actors, but it doesn’t miss an occasion to show mild female nudity either. In between the actors, pop music and numerous sequences featuring heroics, one-liners, explosions and guns, it’s an action western for young and excitable audiences that wouldn’t be caught watching an authentic 1950s western. It’s quite a bit of fun even despite the downer ending.

Ladyhawke (1985)

Ladyhawke (1985)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On Cable TV, March 2019) While Ladyhawke is certainly part of the 1980s fantasy film boom, it does have a few distinguishing elements to help it stand out from the crowd … good and bad. Let’s mention the bad one first: a music score of pop synthesizers, completely incongruous to the kind of orchestral score that fantasy films usually get. If you can get past that (not an easy feat considering that it wallpapers the film), the rest of the film is not too bad. There’s a very pleasant tactile feel to the physical effects, in ways that newer fantasy films so reliant on CGI can’t quite match. Michelle Pfeiffer has an interesting role as a short-haired heroine. Matthew Broderick is almost a walk-on extra in his own movie, helping two bigger heroes. There’s some romanticism to the star-crossed lovers fantasy premise, fated never to meet due to them being transformed in animals whether it’s day or night. It’s all directed with some competence by Richard Donner, no stranger to SFX spectacles in the analog era. Ultimately, it’s the narrow scope of Ladyhawke’s fantastic premise that makes it work—it’s not too ambitious relative to its ability to show the story on-screen, and that makes it work better than many fantasy films of the time.

10 (1979)

10 (1979)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(In French, On TV, March 2019) If you’re looking for where that picture of Bo Derek in cornrows and bikini comes from—it comes from 10. If you’re looking for the origins of Maurice Ravel’s Boléro reputation as a naughty piece—it also comes from 10. If you’re wondering about movies in which an older man obsessively stalks a significantly younger woman—yeah, OK, 10 didn’t come up with that, but it’s certainly blatant about it. What worked in 1979, however, isn’t necessarily so warmly greeted decades later—the shtick of having a middle-aged man instantly fall for the bride of another man, to the point of following them on their honeymoon doesn’t get many laughs nowadays. In fact, 10 feels like an obnoxious film about a middle-aged white man going through a midlife crisis by lusting after a teenager. It’s very much a sex comedy from comedy veteran Blake Edwards, except that the laughs now feel forced. Pratfalls and goofs from a character can be endearing or annoying depending on our attachment to the character but here, despite Dudley Moore’s natural charm, he just comes across as a lout. I don’t think such a film as 10 would be acceptable today, and that’s welcome progress.

Rob Roy (1995)

Rob Roy (1995)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On Cable TV, March 2019) Is Rob Roy the underrated Scottish epic drama of the mid-1990s? Yes. All the attention goes to Braveheart, but (dare I say it?) I preferred Rob Roy. In the subgenre of non-Englishmen being persecuted by Englishmen, it also spends a lot of time doing Scottish mythmaking, but feels more honest about it. The landscapes of Scotland are beautifully photographed, and while Michael Caton-Jones may not a particularly flamboyant director, he gets it right when it counts. His touch helps ensure that the film’s execution trumps its standard material. One element that helps Rob Roy a lot is Liam Neeson’s extraordinary performance—a role only he could play in combining his imposing physical presence with his exceptional dramatic skills. The straightforward revenge plot isn’t surprising, but it’s sufficient for the purpose of myth-making, and it all leads to a very impressive climax. The final sword-fight is a high point of action filmmaking, especially when compared to most other instances of showy sword-fighting in films—this isn’t flynning as much as it’s a credible, painfully physical sequence that still stands as an anthology piece. It’s not the entire reason to see Rob Roy, but it certainly helps cap off a well-made film that withstands comparisons with its Oscar-winning counterpart.

The Accidental Tourist (1988)

The Accidental Tourist (1988)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(In French, On TV, March 2019) From its multiple award nominations, it’s clear that a lot of people liked The Accidental Tourist when it came out. Decades later, it still holds up … as long as you’ve got some tolerance for grieving dramas that hinge on the middle-aged male protagonist being rescued by an eccentric woman. It’s focused on the life of a travel guide writer going through a very rough patch following the death of his son. His wife leaves, his dog bites and he breaks a leg. One more verse away from being in a country song, forced into the care of his sister, he connects with a dog trainer who takes a strong interest in him. Despite many questionable decisions taken by the protagonist, coincidences are there to help him in the end. What saves The Accidental Tourist, in general, from becoming an undistinguishable mainstream drama is its quirkiness—a protagonist who job it is to write about travel advice, an unimaginably over-the-top trauma that propels the entire plot, an off-the-wall romantic interest, a protagonist going crazy with grief in very interesting ways—this is both a standard kind of drama with oversized details. It’s a messy journey, but ultimately a satisfying one. William Hurt and Geena Davis make for an interesting couple of actors, especially given the richness of the material that the story provides them. It all amounts to something more palatable than it may seem at first glance—even if there’s something a bit off-putting about so much attention placed on a middle-aged man being comforted out of his issues by a free-spirited woman.

Revenge (1990)

Revenge (1990)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(In French, On TV, March 2019) At first, I was amazed that there was a suspense film from director Tony Scott that I didn’t know about, especially considering that it features not less than Kevin Costner and Madeline Stowe (and Anthony Quinn, and John Leguizamo, and Miguel Ferrer). Then I watched Revenge and understood why the film hasn’t endured—it’s an average, melodramatic romantic thriller, somewhat saved by impeccable cinematography (Scott’s strongest point) but never escaping a plot that hinges on the dumbest of dumb decisions. To wit: it begins in Top Gun land (brother Ridley Scott actually helped with this sequence) as our protagonist is a freshly retired fighter jet pilot who heads over to Mexico to reside at a friend’s estate. That friend (Quinn) turns out to be a drug lord with a temper and a lovely younger wife (Stowe). Showing the kind of bad judgment unique to puffed-up actors doing a vanity project, our protagonist soon begins a relationship with the young woman and everything goes well until the ending where they live happily ever after. No, wait—that was another movie. In this one, the affair goes badly, precipitating a back half entirely devoted to revenge even if, let’s face it, both of them ignored decades of film noir warnings and really asked for it. If I’m not impressed, it’s for a reason: the inevitable attraction, seduction, revelation and punishment, leading to the titular revenge are intensely predictable—even if the melodramatic ending goes beyond what we’d find over-the-top. Some of the film is buoyed slightly by Costner and Stowe’s charm and Scott’s stylistic approach, but it’s otherwise stuck in common elements and lack of distinction. No wonder few people ever mention it today—even in Scott’s filmography, it’s sandwiched between Beverly Hills Cop II and Days of Thunder and the contrast couldn’t be more to Revenge’s disadvantage.

Agnes of God (1985)

Agnes of God (1985)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On Cable TV, March 2019) There are films that you hear about, forget and rediscover later. The title “Agnes of God” did remind me of something, but didn’t know what exactly. I still recorded it without knowing why. It’s while watching it that I realized that I had completely forgotten the film’s strong Montréal connections: helmed by Canadian-born directing chameleon Norman Jewison, the film is not only set in Montréal with recognizable French-Canadian accents everywhere in the background, but it’s clearly, visibly shot in Montréal with its mid-1980s city logos and cars and slushy winters. Meg Tilly is quite good here in the title role, especially considering that we never see anything but her face and hands. Elsewhere in the cast, both Anne Bancroft (as a mother superior) and Jane Fonda (as a hard-driven psychiatrist) get great roles. All the Anglophone actors can be easily spotted by the fact that their French is phonetically pronounced mush. Narratively, the ambiguous ending is a forgone conclusion the moment the film sets up its characters—we know it’s going to end up with a could-it-be-rational-or-could-it-be-not, in order to make everyone happy (it’s the default conclusion of any religious-or-reality movie). Still, the journey is interesting, and it’s worth noting that the three lead performances in the film are all from women—the men are supporting characters at best. Despite a muddy yet predictable conclusion and a somewhat esoteric and difficult subject matter, Agnes of God is frequently interesting—for the acting, for the setting, sometimes for the drama itself. I’m not sure I’m going to forget it again.

UFO (2018)

UFO (2018)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On Cable TV, March 2019) I’m not a sympathetic viewer for undigested ufology, but UFO’s main strength lies somewhere else, somewhere I’m more than willing to follow: A scientific procedural thriller, in which an incredibly bright mathematics university student pulls at the thinnest threads in order to figure out a scientific mystery. Writer-director Ryan Eslinger turns in quite a cerebral film, with no action and arguably no antagonist either. But it’s a clever suspense movie in which the question is whether the protagonist will figure out the mystery, with equations and conceptual breakthroughs being what he needs to get there. Alex Sharp turns in a Miles-Tellerish lead performance (that’s a compliment) as the obsessed student, with some assistance by Gillian Anderson and David Strathairn. The low budget of the film is used effectively by a script that knows that its strength lies elsewhere than big-budget spectacle filmmaking. I quite enjoyed it despite my misgivings about presenting this as a true-ish story—it’s best to ignore the weak woo-woo attempts to link it to “real” events and enjoy it as a purely fictional thriller. In that light, it reminded me not only of my own computer science university days, but of the pleasure I got then from reading hard-SF short stories tackling first contact from a mathematical-as-universal-language perspective. I really can’t claim that I completely followed all of UFO’s heady concepts, but I knew enough to follow along and to appreciate that the film doesn’t treat its audience as idiots. There’s some noticeable but clever foreshadowing throughout, and I enjoyed it quite a bit more than the more ambitious but also more pretentious wave of low-budget Science Fiction that we’ve seen lately. Hard-SF readers should get quite a kick out of it.

Badlands (1973)

Badlands (1973)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On Cable TV, March 2019) There were a surprising number of high-profile “romantic criminal couple on the run” movies during the New Hollywood period, with seemingly everyone (including Spielberg!) taking a shot at it. Badlands is Terrence Malick’s debut feature and it fully embraces the subgenre, while being perhaps a bit more entertaining for Malick completists than the impression left by his later features would suggest. A summary of the story sounds like genre material: a girl meets a guy who ends up killing his dad and then go on the run together, killing more people along the way. From Gun Crazy to Bonnie and Clyde to Natural Born Killer (and others!), this is an American archetype. But Malick makes everything sophisticated rather than trashy by using voiceovers and a kind of languid pacing that never abandons the small-town atmosphere even as the bodies pile up. Badlands spends a lot of time in rural America in ways rarely seen in other movies, adding credible 1950s details in ways that stick in mind, whether it’s recording physical records at coin-operated machines or filling up a car from leaking gas stations. Sissy Spacek and Martin Sheen both star, with Sheen looking uncannily like his sons would two decades later. I really expected to dislike the film, based on my reactions to later Malick films, overall lack of appreciation for New Hollywood and familiarity with the subgenre… but I didn’t. It eventually won me over slightly, thanks to the period detail and flourishes such as a climactic car chase. It certainly helps that Badlands isn’t as bleak as other films of the subgenre, most of which can’t be bothered to be more imaginative than to have their leading couple go down in a hail of bullets. Malick is definitely after something else here, and the film thrives on that intention.

Rachel, Rachel (1968)

Rachel, Rachel (1968)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On Cable TV, March 2019) Oof: It’s not because films are nominated for an Academy Award that they’re worth a look. Case in point: The grating, annoying, irritating Rachel, Rachel—a story of a small-town mid-1930s spinster rediscovering herself that ends up being more boring than anything else. Sadly directed by Paul Newman, with his wife Joanne Woodward in the lead role and their daughter playing the heroine at a younger age. I’m not necessarily claiming nepotism here—Woodward was hailed for tackling a difficult role, won a Golden Globe and was nominated for an Academy Award. But keep in mind that Rachel, Rachel is a product of the late 1960s, a time more concerned with gleefully pushing the limits left unguarded by the end of the Production Code and audiences thirsting for neorealism. While it worked at the time, it hasn’t necessarily aged well. It’s not a bad film, but it feels slow, long and dull. The herky-jerky flashbacks anticipate more modern non-chronological technique and grammar, but feel like unpleasant experiments to twenty-first century audiences—the added padding on a small story feels more grating than enlightening, with an inexplicable slowness to everything. But Rachel, Rachel remains in the pantheon of Academy Award-nominated movies, so there’s that.

The Year of Living Dangerously (1982)

The Year of Living Dangerously (1982)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On Cable TV, March 2019) There are a few movies that make more sense when measured against an entire corpus, and while I’m not calling The Year of Living Dangerously an incomplete movie by itself, it does get much of its power when you oppose it to a corpus of adventure films in which a westerner performs heroics in a foreign country, either saving others or having an impact on the events. Here, we get a very young Mel Gibson as an Australian journalist assigned to Indonesia in the months leading to the 1965 attempted coup, learning about the dangerous country, befriending an eccentric character, falling for an English embassy worker, and trying to do his job during a volatile situation. Gibson is fine, Sigourney Weaver is quite good as the British woman but it’s Linda Hunt who steals the movie (and won an Academy Award) as an Asian male—an impressive transformation that adds much to the character. The Year of Living Dangerously may sound like a dull foreign drama, but it works wonders in immediately capturing viewers in its opening moments, thanks to an enigmatic character narrating and taking harsh notes on the protagonist. The atmosphere carries much of the film’s midsection despite a few lulls, with director Peter Weir doing well at showing how much our protagonist is still a neophyte at his job, how far out of his element he is and how he ends up paying for his mistakes. That starkly comes into play during the film’s last act, as the white saviour stereotype is completely defeated in the Graham Greene tradition. Our lead spends much of the film’s climactic events completely unable to do anything, unable to report on the biggest story of his career and having to abandon everything in order to make it out alive. It’s a measure of the film’s success that the film isn’t all that depressing despite the downbeat material, but your mileage may vary—you may have to be exasperated with an entirely different kind of film in order to get the most out of The Year of Living Dangerously.

Auntie Mame (1958)

Auntie Mame (1958)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On Cable TV, March 2019) Late-1950s comedy Auntie Mame is a bit of an odd duck to me. Its helter-skelter structure and narrative certainly reflect its eventful origins—first a novel in 1955, then a play in 1956, followed by this film (and then later as a Broadway musical in 1966 that led to another movie in 1974—whew!) The key of Auntie Mame isn’t the plot, though: it’s an eccentric character study featuring Rosalind Russell in a powerhouse late-career performance. Compared to her, it’s fine if the rest of the film pales a bit. Still, the weirdness is often conscious and sometimes not. It feels harmlessly eccentric at first, with a young boy being taken in by a socialite aunt whose main talent appears to be giving lavish parties in her large apartment. But then it goes on to become darker (all the way to tackling prejudices), only to win viewers back by the time the finale rolls by. There’s a new thing every ten minutes which sounds exciting but often lends a disconnected feeling to the proceedings. In many ways, Auntie Mamie often feels like a different kind of film than it is—the multi-decade plot is more akin to serious family epic dramas, whereas the bright Cinerama cinematography and overall tone seem to belong to a musical even if it never bursts in song and dance—and then there’s the theatrical scene transitions. Fortunately, Russell is formidable as a formidable character (with Peggy Cass also having a short but likable turn), which helps to ground everything on a central focus. Eventually, her performance coheres to go beyond the “quirky character” to demonstrate the kindness and determination of the woman behind the eccentricities. But it does occur to me that Auntie Mame is the kind of film that may appreciate considerably on a second viewing, once you know what to expect.

New Wave: Dare to be Different (2017)

New Wave: Dare to be Different (2017)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On Cable TV, March 2019) Hey, how about a documentary focusing on telling us the story of a … radio station? Well, yes: before almost all of the radio market got swallowed in innocuous and predefined mass-market segments, there was a place for distinctive voices on-air. So it is that New Wave: Dare to be Different is the story of former Long Island radio station WLIR, which enjoyed a few years of popularity and respectability in the early 1980s by playing New Wave British music for the New York City market well before other American stations. It’s a film with many, many dozens of talking heads combined with blurry eighties-era footage, all telling the story of a rebellious radio station flouting the rules of the industry and introducing a new era of music for an influential NYC audience. In discussing the operations and influences of a long-closed radio station, New Wave is liable to make you nostalgic for an era that you never experienced first-hand (…or almost: my own experience with high-school radio was roughly congruent with the end of WLIR. But I’ve said too much already.)  WLIR had its zenith in the heyday of radio, playing music, launching careers and having foreign rock bands (including U2!) over for visits and performances.   Going bigger than WLIR, the documentary becomes an excuse for talking about New Wave music’s influence in America. As you can expect, the music is nothing less than terrific and its performers also contribute to the story of WLIR, with a few rousing interventions from Billy Idol. Director Ellen Goldfarb touches upon cultural, social, technological changes and their associated scenes (including fashions) linked to New Wave. It’s a documentary at its best when it delves into the fun of the station at its heyday, with DJs, fans and musicians fondly reminiscing about the time. Pair a viewing of New Wave with the fictional Pirate Radio for an evening of rebel rock radio.

Blue Steel (1990)

Blue Steel (1990)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(In French, On Cable TV, March 2019) Try as I might, I can’t really find any truly compelling reason to recommend Blue Steel despite some half-promising elements. Probably the best reason remains that it’s a police thriller directed by a woman (the legendary Kathryn Bigelow) at a time when there weren’t that many of them, and seeing the better-than-average stylistic sheen she can give to the result. On the other hand, well, there’s everything else. An over-the-top criminal thriller in which a rookie police agent (Jamie Lee Curtis, not stepping too far away from her then-Scream Queen persona) discovers she’s dating a serial killer, the film unapologetically goes from thriller to slasher horror. It sits at an awkward point in late-1980s tropes and execution (intrusive score, slap-dash motivations, use of genre conventions trumping realism or even elementary logic) that magnify the issues inherent in the result. Some elements are lazily developed—the antagonist doesn’t appear to have any deeper motivations than just being crazy and while the cast features some names that would become famous (Richard Jenkins, Elizabeth Peña, Tom Sizemore), they don’t really have anything interesting to do. There may be some ironic material in the film’s obsession with guns and gender-role reversal, but it’s not developed particularly well. For Bigelow herself, the film is eclipsed by her later titles, not leaving much in Blue Steel for cinephiles to investigate unless they’re completionists.

Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971)

Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On Cable TV, March 2019) It’s not rare for the imitations to be left in the dust of history even as the groundbreaking work they’re copying endures for generations. That should be a lesson for Hollywood studios, but … yeah, never mind. A good case in point, however, is Bedknobs and Broomsticks—a mildly forgotten Walt Disney live-action picture that seems to be taking most of its selling points from the example set by Mary Poppins: A whimsical kid’s movie, adapted from books written by a British author; integrating songs and mixed live-action/animated numbers… The comparisons aren’t accidental: Bedknobs and Broomsticks was the backup plan throughout Mary Poppins’ early production history in case their first choice didn’t pan out, and the work invested in that early project was eventually resurrected for this later take. The story is a bit messy on several levels—conceptually, it’s a blend of two different books, so it stands to reason that the film itself can feel disconnected as it goes from one big special-effects showcase to another, leaving more traditional aspects (such as acting) relegated to a supporting element. The high production values certain shows—not only was the film nominated for five technical/music Academy Awards back then (winning the Special Effects category) but it can still be watched with a certain interest. Director Robert Stevenson handles an appreciable volume of special effects, and some of the set-piece sequences (Knights fighting Nazis?) still work rather well. Bedknobs and Broomsticks definitely labours in the shadow of Mary Poppins even fifty years later, but it does have one advantage of the underdog: you’re far less likely to have already seen it.