Month: August 2020

  • Jojo Rabbit (2019)

    Jojo Rabbit (2019)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, August 2020) The premise of Jojo Rabbit is strikingly unappealing (a young German boy, in WW2 Germany, has Hitler as an imaginary friend and befriends a Jewish girl hidden in his attic, as the Nazis close in a start purging non-patriotic Germans) but if there’s any filmmaker who could make it work, that would be Taika Waititi, whose off-beat sense of humour has led to a string of films far better than their premise would suggest. So it is that from its first moments, Jojo Rabbit plays on a knife’s edge of discomfort, applying an ironic comedy filter on events that, in other hands, would have been yet another tragic-but-dull WW2 drama. This is really and constantly not a film to be watched at a surface level, as it plays for laughs while camouflaging some terrible things. Yet it still manages to earn its dramatic moments later on. There’s an interesting mastery of craft here, as Waititi hits his off-beat beats along the way. I don’t exactly love the results, but I’m impressed enough with them.

  • Bande à part [Band of Outsiders] (1964)

    Bande à part [Band of Outsiders] (1964)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Youtube Streaming, August 2020) When I think French Nouvelle Vague, I picture a vague mix of black-and-white cinematography, characters in a romantic triangle, the streets of Paris, references to Hollywood, and seemingly improvised philosophical discussions sometimes interrupted by the elements of a criminal subplot. In other words, I’m just about ready to designate Bande à part as the most new-wavish of the French New Wave movies. In writer-director Jean-Luc Godard’s hands, it features one woman and two men plotting a robbery in-between dancing at Parisian cafés, running through the Louvre and discussing Hollywood. It may feature budding criminals, but Bande à part qualifies as a genre-heavy crime film only by the loosest of definitions—it’s far more interested in the relationships and rambling discussions between the trio than the crime they’re planning to commit. As befit such an archetypical film, it has spawned numerous imitators from Tarantino (who practically worships the film and features a striking homage to its dance sequence in Pulp Fiction) to Bertolucci’s The Dreamers. For a cinephile, it’s interesting to see an influential film after its imitators and feel the mental click of puzzle pieces fitting together—it does help that Bande à part fully plays into nearly all of the clichés of its specific era of filmmaking: it’s an archetypical film, and perhaps best of all it’s curiously enjoyable as such—but then again most of Godard’s early movies are a charm to listen to once the characters get talking about such any subject. In the end, I’m not that overly enthusiastic about Bande à part… but I can see what the fuss is about.

  • The Peanut Butter Falcon (2019)

    The Peanut Butter Falcon (2019)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, August 2020) On paper, there is nothing about The Peanut Butter Falcon that would make me like the film. It’s about a protagonist with Down’s syndrome who escapes from a Southern US placement home in order to go to a wrestling training school. Barely functional in society, he meets a small-time crook on the run, and they soon start to rely on each other, as both social workers and vengeful hoodlums are looking for them. Add to that the naturalistic gritty filmmaking style and it not only sounds like anything I’d enjoy, but it should be fit to send me running for the exits. And yet, even from its first few uncomfortable scenes, The Peanut Butter Falcon does manage to be more interesting than expected. There’s a genuine rawness to Zack Gottsagen’s performance, and a solid leading role for Shia Leboeuf, as well as a good supporting turn for Thomas Haden Church. The sense of place of the Southern US is astonishing, and the story does often allude to Huckleberry Finn in its travels down the river. The film does earn its emotional beats later in the third act, and the result is surprisingly likable, especially as it reinforces its themes of reconstituted family. I’m often more impressed by directors that can make watchable material from unappealing premises than those who do well with surefire starting points, and on that metric, writers-directors Tyler Nilson and Michael Schwartz have done quite well here.