Month: September 2019

Trois couleurs: rouge [Three colours: Red] (1994)

Trois couleurs: rouge [Three colours: Red] (1994)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On DVD, September 2019) Third entry in Krzysztof Kieślowski’s “Three colours” trilogy, Rouge is almost certainly the most complex and least describable of them. It’s about a woman, yes, and an eavesdropping judge, sure, and yet so much more that you can’t really slot it into one of the archetypical movie plots. It’s almost easier to talk about its themes than its plot elements: it’s about coincidence and philosophy and interconnectedness and privacy and happenstance and many other things as well. As red-tinged as its title, it eventually pulls together characters from previous films in the trilogy in short appearances. Carefully crafted, it’s enigmatic and sustains scrutiny, although you may be forgiven for not thinking that it’s all that much fun—this isn’t about entertainment at much as cinema-as-art, yet not quite so inaccessible as many other movies with similar objectives. Rouge is a good cap to a highly rated trilogy, and absorbing viewing as long as you’re willing to give it enough time and undivided attention.

Hitchcock/Truffaut (2015)

Hitchcock/Truffaut (2015)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On TV, September 2019) After watching Hitchcock/Truffaut and seeing a few of François Truffaut’s best-known movies, I think I’ve got a new name for the old “what celebrities, dead or alive, would you like to have over for a dinner party?”: I really would have liked to talk filmmaking with Truffaut. One fascinating footnote in his biography is the way he idolized Hitchcock as a young man, all the way to interviewing the English director at length in order to write a book about him. The book was published in 1966, but Hitchcock/Truffaut describes the five days Truffaut spent with Hitchcock in order to tell us how those interviews came to be, and how they influenced both filmmakers. The meeting between the two (indeed, their friendship that would last until Hitchcock’s death) is the stuff that is almost too true for cinephiles, and this documentary really illustrates it well. Using photos, movie clips, interview footage, highlighted documents and audio recordings of the interviews, the film explains how the two filmmakers met, the insights that Truffaut got from Hitchcock about his films and the growing rapport between the two. I don’t expect most audiences to make much of the film, especially if they’re not already fans of either one of the directors. There’s some awkward sound editing in the final product—silences and cuts probably reflecting the original, but feeling disruptive to the flow of the film. It naturally spends more time on some of Hitchcock’s best-known films, specifically Vertigo (which I should re-watch at some point) and Psycho. Still, the appeal here is seeing two titans of cinema (even though Truffaut was still a rookie director at the time) have the kind of high-level chat only possible between two people fluent in cinematic language. It’s quite inspiring, oddly likable and makes Truffaut looking incredibly likable as a star-struck fanboy until the interview begins and he’s back in his film-critic persona with unlimited access to a major director.

Death Race: Beyond Anarchy (2018)

Death Race: Beyond Anarchy (2018)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On TV, September 2019) If you’re keeping score at home, Death Race: Beyond Anarchy is the sixth Death Race movie, and the fourth in the modern rebooted series. But even missing a few instalments isn’t that much of a problem in approaching Beyond Anarchy, so loosely does it not care about overall continuity. The rebooted series is only about one thing, after all: a series of movies in which cars race and do battle with one another. The convoluted nature of the rebooted series means that this is the first sequel to the 2008 reboot (the other ones were prequels), but this matters far less than you’d think—it’s still the same thing, except that this one cranks up the nudity. Although, comparing what I’ve seen to what’s being cited as evidence for the film’s rating, I’m sure that what I saw on TV was edited down to something between PG-13 and R. Even in its edited version, however, Beyond Anarchy is not uplifting cinema. Taking place deep in dystopia, it features excessive violence, swearing so pervasive that it attains meaninglessness, women treated as objects and an overall nihilism that nullifies the film’s stakes. If you’re looking for name actors, there’s Danny Trejo doing the strict minimum (which is still more enjoyable than the rest of the other actors combined), and Danny Glover slumming it up. But the film’s greatest sin is that even the action itself isn’t anything special—the ending sequence is a bit better than the rest, but that’s not a lot to save the film from pointlessness. At this stage, you know that they’re going to make more sequels until the premise has been wrung dry … but how will anyone tell?

Overboard (1987)

Overboard (1987)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(In French, On TV, September 2019) You don’t have to go back all that far in time to find movies with premises that seem unacceptable by today’s standards. With Overboard, for instance, we have a man taking revenge over a rich woman by making her believe that she’s his wife after she suffers a comprehensive case of amnesia. There are complications, and the film tries its best to not make it extra-creepy, but that’s still a film based on an extended series of lies passing itself off as a comedy. (Significantly enough, when the film was remade in 2018, the genders were swapped, and several other details were added to make less creepy.)  You can either take the premise as-is, or have a hard time with the film. If you’re the forgiving suspension-of-reality type, you’ll find that the result is a middle-of-the-road 1980s comedy, albeit once with the great good sense of having husband-and-wife Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell in the lead roles, leading to quite a bit more chemistry than usual. Considering the average nature of the film and its humour, it’s a good thing that at least the lead performances are watchable. The belligerent romantic tension works within the premise of the film, although there’s a layer of discomfort that’s also built into it. Overboard is not exactly an essential, not exactly a dud, just a film that gives its actors just enough slack to pull the film on their own shoulders.

Sabotage (1936)

Sabotage (1936)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On Cable TV, September 2019) You can make a good case that Sabotage was the film in which Hitchcock’s talent as a filmmaker came into focus. While he had, at the time, more than a decade’s experience in directing, this is the film that encapsulates a lot of what his later movies would be about. Yes, The 39 Steps and The Man Who Knew Too Much both precede it, but Sabotage has one of the first of Hitchcock’s classic illustrations of how to create suspense, with a boy unwittingly carrying a bomb onto a bus and the audience knowing that it’s about to explode. The overall story is a sordid tale of a deep-cover foreign agent creating deadly chaos in London, reinforced by the drama of his English wife suddenly discovering who he truly is. Several touches show Hitchcock perfecting the various aspects of his direction that would soon see him recruited by Hollywood—the oddball details, the touches of dark humour, the domestic concerns crashing into criminal ones. Hitchcock may not have been all that good at titles (Sabotage was accompanied by Saboteur a few years later), but he already knew how to put together a well-crafted movie back then. While it’s going to be of most interest to Hitchcock completists, Sabotage holds up better than many of its contemporaries.

Willow (1988)

Willow (1988)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On Blu Ray, September 2019) I’m aware that Willow has its fans—if you were a fantasy fan of the right age in 1988, Willow was supposed to be a genre-defining event, a bit of hype that was helped along with having George Lucas as the film’s screenwriter. The intent was to deliver a fantasy equivalent to Star Wars (you can recognize themes running through both), working from an archetypical plot executed through state-of-the-art technology. The result, well, isn’t quite as successful. Drawn-out, dull, repetitive, predictable, it’s somewhat balanced with a great lead performance by Warwick Davis, some oddly likable bits of worldbuilding, Val Kilmer in a breakout role, and some digital special effects that, in retrospect, demonstrate the road to even more sophisticated CGI. Watching the film as a middle-aged man, I can’t quite say that it has aged well—the film’s young target audience is obvious, and part of the point of fantasy stories is the immersion that the sometimes-dicey special effects break. For every good thing that makes us like Willow, there’s at least one other bad thing pulling us farther away. Clearly, I’m far too old to watch it as intended.

Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970)

Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(Second Viewing, Hoopla Steaming, September 2019) I have vivid memories of watching this film as a kid, and being unsettled by the idea of a supercomputer taking over humanity. If anything, re-watching the film as an adult is not necessarily any less disquieting—The Forbin Project takes an almost gleeful amount of time and details to explain how this new supercomputer is invulnerable, impossible to stop and impossible to starve. There is an effective plot beat early in the movie (“There is another system”) that should prepare you for the nightmare ahead, as the film runs through the steps required for the computer to complete its enslavement of humanity, with our heroes being unable to stop it. The paranoia here is top-notch, and the matter-of-fact direction from Joseph Sargent barely represses the growing hysteria of the situation as any human countermoves are detected and deactivated. The now-primitive technology from 1970 paradoxically makes the film more interesting these days, as it creates a near-allegorical atmosphere that would be surely punctured by any modern remake. There is some interesting material for contemplation in having the computer’s motives being somewhat benevolent despite its harsh methods. I’m not entirely happy by the ending, not as much for its downbeat nature (which follows where the film has been heading all the time) but for its lack of final conflict, or strong coda—especially for techno-horror, where you can have a gut-punch denouement. Still, I quite like the result: Colossus: The Forbin Project is a gloriously nasty nightmare of a film, and one that still manages to unsettle even fifty years and several fundamental technological advances later.

The Black Hole (1979)

The Black Hole (1979)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(Second Viewing, On Cable TV, September 2019) I distinctly remember seeing trailers for The Black Hole on TV—it’s hard to forget the spectacular “meteorite heading for the heroes” shot that capped it off. Viewing the film as an adult is something else—It’s a film with a strong split personality, both aimed at kids with cute robots and terrible logic, but also a dark and nightmarish Science Fiction drama that almost literally ends in hell. (“Event Horizon for kids” strikes far too close to the truth to be a joke description.) As a result, The Black Hole can feel like a schizophrenic experience: a special effects showcase (they aged better than you’d expect), a summer blockbuster clearly taking aim at Star Wars’s success, a horror-lite story with easily guessable “twists,” and a good old-fashioned space adventure. In the middle of so much stuff, the cast doesn’t get enough attention, what with names such as Maximillian Schell, Robert Forster, Anthony Perkins, Yvette Mimieux and Ernest Borgnine—what kind of movie was this? There is stuff in there that is so clearly of the 1970s that watching them today feels alien—I mean: a robot shooting gallery, ESP with robots, a quote-spewing robot? If you haven’t seen The Black Hole in a while, have another look at it. If you haven’t seen it yet, do it now, and strap yourself in for a wild mixture of elements that you wouldn’t necessarily put in the same movie.

Dune (1984)

Dune (1984)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(Second or Third Viewing, On Blu Ray, September 2019) At least two generations of Science Fiction fans have now commented at length on David Lynch’s Dune, and it’s easy to take cheap shots at the result. As an adaptation to one of the most widely read, widely known best-selling SF novels of all time, this is a film that sets itself up for failure: There’s no way a mere two-hours-and-seventeen-minute film could do justice to a densely packed 500-page novel that launched a mythology that barely fits on a single shelf. That holds even true considering how inwardly focused the novel can be, with complex conspiracies, duelling factions, sweeping galactic events and subtleties on top of subtleties. In fact, considering the nature of the source material, I’d say that Lynch’s version does quite well with what it brings to the screen. The special effects are not particularly good by today’s standards (and there are a lot of them), but the set design and costumes remain effective, and the sheer ambition of the film does create some amount of sympathy. Of course, I’m not exactly looking at Dune without a healthy dose of nostalgic wonder—I watched the film once or twice as a teenager and I credit it with what was necessary to read the novel. (It’s a great novel, one of my favourites, but it’s not a bad idea to have pictures in your mind to understand who’s who and what’s what.)  If the film seems a bit crazy and over-the-top as a middle-aged adult, it’s a good kind of crazy and over-the-top. Even when it doesn’t quite succeed, when it looks silly, when it clearly bites off more than it can chew, it’s still wonderfully ambitious. The cast is an amazing mixture of generations of actors (I mean: super-young Virginia Madsen alongside super-old José Ferrer, with various pop-culture icons such as Sting, Patrick Stewart, Sean Young, Kyle MacLachlan and Linda Hunt? That’s wild.) That remains interesting even when the film gets caught up in the mechanics of the plot and gadgets it shows on-screen. Dune escapes the question of whether it’s good or bad—it’s a good thing that it exists, flaws and all.

Heaven Can Wait (1943)

Heaven Can Wait (1943)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On DVD, September 2019) I started watching Heaven Can Wait reluctantly, convinced that it was going to be the original that led to the 1978’s Heaven Can Wait remake (which I really don’t like). But the Heaven can Wait original is called Here Comes Mr. Jordan and this is a completely different film. It ends up being a comedy by none other than Ernst Lubitsch, featuring Don Ameche recounting his life to the Devil in order to be admitted in Hell. As with most of Lubitsch’s films, it features a rather good script (adapted from a theatrical play, hence the strong dialogue) filled with clever touches, and an unobtrusive directing style that makes it absorbing viewing. Gene Tierney holds the female lead, with ample chemistry with Ameche when it counts. It’s a film made by people aware that there’s a jaded audience on the other side of the screen, eager to be seduced by a film but having been disappointed before. As a result, it feels as if Heaven Can Wait is constantly nodding at its audience, comforting them when it wants to and surprising them in other ways. It’s quite a likable movie, and it’s one of many that affirms Lubitsch’s strong touch on the material he directed.

Two Lovers and a Bear (2016)

Two Lovers and a Bear (2016)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On Cable TV, September 2019) After seeing Kim Nguyen’s poetic Le Marais and then his techno-thriller-ish The Hummingbird Project, I was curious as to how a filmmaker could go from one to the other. It turns out that Two Lovers and a Bear holds part of the answer—or, at least, mixes a harsh reality with suspense mechanisms with an oneiric sensibility that occasionally turns the film into something quite different. There is some built-in interest in the premise, which follows two young people madly in love with each other in Canada’s deep, deep north—the kind of arctic-circle north that scares even Canadians that live in the kind of climate that scares Americans. Humans are not meant to live that far north without considerable assistance, and nearly everything there is measured against the imperatives of temperature and distance to the south where it’s not always frozen. Our two titular lovers are played by Dane DeHaan and Tatiana Maslany—it goes without saying that Maslany acts circles around DeHaan, but the climate suits him: he’s not nearly as annoying nor emotionally distant here than in many other movies. As for the bear, well, the bear is an imaginary companion that only speaks to him, not her. When they are convinced that a stalker is threatening her, they strike out southward, getting stuck in a blizzard and eventually discovering an abandoned military base that can act as shelter. But the stalker is as imaginary as the bear—and if it’s not clear enough from the get-go that these are not emotionally healthy characters, they then burn their sole shelter to make a point. The rest of the film barrels toward its tragic but romantic conclusion, with intrusions of the fantastic into reality that, to me, act as a bridge between Nguyen’s earlier work and the somewhat more realistic nature of his latest film. I can’t say that I really enjoyed Two Lovers and a Bear: I didn’t like the characters, the ending, the undisciplined blend of genres. But it did hold my attention, and there were a few moments that were particularly successful. Suddenly, I’m far more interested in Nguyen’s filmography: I can gather a sense of direction from it, and I hope that his next project will keep going even further in that direction.

Smultronstället [Wild Strawberries] (1957)

Smultronstället [Wild Strawberries] (1957)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(Criterion Streaming, September 2019) While I’ve managed to remain interested in some of Ingmar Bergman’s movies, my default assessment toward them remains that of the prototypical European art-house film: long, dull, definitely not aimed at me. Wild Strawberries doesn’t escape that assessment—it’s the story of an older man on a road trip, using the time on the road and stops on the way to reflect on his life and loves. Running on nostalgia for the character’s past, it’s a series of episodes as secondary characters board the car, they make a few stops, and everything he experiences lead him to reflect even more intently on his past. I don’t dislike the results (the film does score more than a few good moments), but I’m not exactly amazed either—it’s a fine film, but one that will speak louder to others. I strongly suspect that I like it more now than I would had I seen it twenty years ago, and will like it even more in twenty years. But for now, Wild Strawberries feels like middle-of-the-road Bergman to me, reusing familiar tools to deliver something that appeals to his own sensibilities. A success by that metric, but not necessarily a guaranteed good time for audiences.

La Dolce Vita [The Good Life] (1960)

La Dolce Vita [The Good Life] (1960)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On DVD, September 2019) At nearly three hours of a nearly plotless movie about a nearly unlikable protagonist, writer-director Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita can be a trying viewing experience. It’s a collage of scenes with minimal narrative connective tissue, a lot of supporting characters that come and go without resolution, a decidedly depressing outlook on the search for meaning and enough ambiguity and loose ends to frustrate anyone who thinks that cinema is a primarily story-driven art form. That used to describe me almost perfectly a few years ago, but I’ve grown far more relaxed in my outlook for a while, striving to find pleasure even in movies that would have exasperated me not too long ago. La Dolce Vita does manage to remain interesting despite having been made into cliché—much of what it did to shock audiences back in 1960 (it was banned in a few countries) has been remade, redone, and re-examined (often far more interestingly, sometimes even by Fellini himself). We’re not exactly shocked anymore by a protagonist going from woman to woman, adventure to adventure, excess after excess in search of existential fulfillment. We’re not so shocked by backless dresses, form-fitting bras or prudish stripteases filmed to avoid showing nudity. There are scores of meandering films chronicling a few days in the life of an erring protagonist. But La Dolce Vita remains the ur-example of the form for a reason—it’s at its best when it jumps the bounds of strict Italian neorealism to spend some time in Fellini’s expressionist imagination. It features an impressive number of striking women: Anita Ekberg certainly makes an impression as a movie star in the film’s most purely enjoyable moment. But above all, La Dolce Vita features Marcello Mastroianni, world-class-cool despite playing a borderline reprehensible character. We can coast a long time on Mastrantonio’s charm and the odd visuals that the film throws at us in the middle of the protagonist’s search for meaning. It doesn’t really lead anywhere but a melancholic sense of missed opportunities, but it’s an interesting trip. This being said: I’ve seen the film, all 174 minutes of it. I don’t need to do so again anytime soon.

Majo no takkyûbin [Kiki’s Delivery Service] (1989)

Majo no takkyûbin [Kiki’s Delivery Service] (1989)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On DVD, September 2019) Oh, what a lovely film. Kiki’s Delivery Service’s comforting, joyful tone starts early on as a thirteen-year-old girl, witch from birth, decides that now is the time to leave for her year away from home in learning how to become an adult. The departure is curiously drama-free (it’s clearly a film made for kids in that the occasion is portrayed as an adventure rather than an anxious white-knuckle event for her parents) and that sets the tone of a film without antagonists other that the protagonist’s own self-doubts. The pleasantness extends to the film’s redefinition of what it is to be a witch, keeping the flying broom and the black cat (hilariously snarky), but completely erasing any of the negative connotations of the term by western standards. Much of Kiki’s Delivery Service is a simple slice-of-life adventure in which nothing terrible happens, our protagonist discovering a few life lessons along the way and events reaching a spectacular conclusion when a gentle disaster threatens her new city. Hiroko Miyazaki’s touch has seldom been gentler than here—the character design of companion Jiji is particularly cute, even for an animal as overrepresented in fiction as a black cat. It’s a very different viewing experience, and a truly enjoyable one. Nearly everybody in the film is quite nice and it all feels like one big friendly hug.

Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex * But Were Afraid to Ask (1972)

Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex * But Were Afraid to Ask (1972)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On DVD, September 2019) Time advances and leaves some things behind—watching writer-director Woody Allen’s Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex * But Were Afraid to Ask feels like a relic of an earlier era. Very loosely adapted from a then-bestselling sex advice book (the only material kept being the questions, answered by comic sketches penned by Allen), it’s an anthology film with the typical strengths and weaknesses of the form. Much of the subject matter has gone from shocking to boring in half a century flat, leaving only such things as humour and acting to keep the thing afloat. Fans of Allen’s nebbish persona will get a few treats along the way—the opening segment has him anachronistically riffing as a court jester with designs on the queen, while a later quite amusing segment has him face off against a mad sex research scientist and then a gigantic disembodied breast. Easily at its best when it’s at its most absurd, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex * But Were Afraid to Ask hits a comic highlight in a sequence describing the inner workings of a male body during a one-night stand (featuring Burt Reynolds in what’s possibly his weirdest cameo), or when it lets Gene Wilder work through a bestiality premise to its dumbest conclusion. Much of the rest of the film, alas, is just dull. A sketch about a TV show based on fetishism must have felt old even back in 1972, while another about exhibitionism feels like a single joke extended over several long minutes. There’s a cross-dressing sequence that fails to get a single smile—the conflation between cross-dressing and homosexuality has aged poorly. Despite those misfires, this is one of Allen’s “earlier, funnier movies,” and it does give a glimpse at Allen’s glib genius, his madcap imagination (long since abandoned) and his most likable screen persona. This being said, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex * But Were Afraid to Ask does remain more vulnerable than most of Allen’s early films to our changing perception of Allen as a highly problematic figure when it comes to sexual relationships—even if the age difference between him and his other co-stars such as Lynn Redgrave here is a “mere” eight years or so. Some things do age poorly … like Allen himself.