Month: February 2021

  • 7 Guardians of the Tomb (2018)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, February 2021) There’s a been a dearth of adventure movies lately, but if you’re looking for more, 7 Guardians of the Tomb will not be anything more than a momentary satisfaction. Putatively an Australian/Chinese collaboration, this is a film that owes nearly everything to the way Chinese blockbusters are put together these days, from slapdash uneven narrative tone to cheap imperfect CGI to western actors being thrown in the mix in the hopes of opening up the film to western audiences. None other than Kesley Grammer (!) takes up the mantle of an adventure film here, as he plays a pharmaceutical executive who goes looking for missing employees in the newly discovered tomb of an ancient emperor. The film often becomes more of a horror than an adventure film thanks to its main critters: giant CGI spiders that explode in goopy slime whenever the heroes look harshly in their direction. Underground room after underground room (don’t bother looking for the seven guardians), the spiders bite the characters and transform them into not-zombies, leading to a dwindling head count and plenty of icky special effects. The repetitiousness of the script highlights its lack of ideas, and not even Li Binbing’s presence is enough to make the film any more than intermittently interesting. At least there’s some comedy value in seeing an actor like Grammer trying to play the heavy in a horror/adventure film. For all the flack that Hollywood gets, a decent-enough budget with professional cast and crew probably would have done better than this version of 7 Guardians of the Tomb, or at least in not being so ridiculous. It does work if you want a quick hit of Tomb Raider-inspired moviemaking, but there are plenty of better movies even if they’re not recent ones.

  • House of the Dead (2003)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, February 2021) Curiously enough, it took me almost eighteen years to watch House of the Dead — it’s certainly not an essential movie, but it felt weird having written so much about writer-director Uwe Boll without mentioning his best-known (and perhaps highest-budgeted) film. House of the Dead in infamous in movie circles as a terrible film, one that showed Boll’s limitations as a director, announced the rest of his career and established his lack of care in delivering a movie. It’s adapted from a videogame, and Boll won’t you let you forget it: the opening credits are set against distortions of footage from the original 1996 game, and scene transitions throughout the film are awkwardly spliced with more game footage — it’s as visually repellent as you can imagine. Not that this is the worst of the film’s problems, given its characters going to a rave held on an ominously-named island and somehow not freaking out when nobody is there upon their arrival. This means zombies, of course, and House of the Dead briefly becomes enjoyable once the protagonists gear up for undead-shooting action: the techno music pumps up along the number of cuts per minute, and the bullet-time camera rig gets a workout as every character gets a spinning hero action shot. (It’s a low-budget bullet-time rig, though: the one pointing up rather than the horizontal-facing one that requires a studio greenscreen and CGI to hide the other cameras.)  As overlong and in-your-face as that sequence is, it’s probably the strongest claim to cinematic style that Boll can make, and it’s ever-so-briefly enjoyable… especially for those with a nostalgic kick for early-2000s techno music. The rest of the film is not good at all: terrible dialogue that makes you doubt the sanity of the screenwriters, awkward staging, nonsensical narrative, exploitative costumes and low-budget production values all make House of the Dead a bad movie. Perhaps not as bad as many would like—there’s a difference between theatrical-bad and streaming-bad, and 2003 critics were grading against the theatrical curve—but still not good. Oh, there are a few fun things — aside from the graveyard war sequence, sharp-eyed viewers who know what to look for will spot Canadian rock singer Bif Naked as the rave DJ. But an absence of excruciating pain is not exactly a strong compliment, and so House of the Dead generally lives up to its reputation as the film that announced that Uwe Boll was up to no good. Of course, the joke would be on reviewers, since Boll then proved that he could do much, much worse than House of the Dead.

  • High Fantasy (2017)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On TV, February 2021) Messages should be part of popular entertainment. Art is self-expression, and artists who are not trying to tell others how they feel about the world are missing the point of art. But messages (especially political messages) are to be handled with a light touch: I’d rather play with ideas and viewpoint than being explicitly told who to vote for. So it is that writer-director Jenna Bass’s High Fantasy is often undone by its very reason to exist: a harsh, not especially optimistic look at race relations in late-2010s South Africa that often feels like an unfiltered, poorly-presented screed. I have to admire the high-concept at the heart of the movie: while on an outing in a rural area, four teenagers of different ethnicities somehow (it’s never explained) switch bodies, allowing them to explore being the other. By itself, it’s a lovely (if not entirely original) premise, and several writers would have been able to run for miles on this idea. The added wrinkle here is that our teenagers are from the influencer generation, meaning that the film is presented as found-footage of the trip, with the actors sharing writing and cinematography credits as they improvise and film themselves with their phones. The good news is that this means an intriguing, even provocative film on a threadbare budget. The not-so-good news is that High Fantasy often feels like a slapdash mixture of half-developed ideas, naturalistic cinematography (sometimes beautiful in taking in the natural landscape, but usually suffering from the usual indignities of amateur filmmaking), and bad dialogue. It gets even more irritating considering that for a group of friends heading out for a weekend of fun, nearly all of the shown dialogue is a political screed on racial issues and not the kind of stuff that friends would discuss among themselves. Yes, we understand the resentment between races in South Africa — yes, there are valid points to be made all around. But the unrelenting way those issues are always at the forefront quickly becomes annoying, especially since there seems to be no natural progression of ideas, simply the same topics raised in different ways. Here, I squarely suspect the improvised dialogue is to blame: there’s no building argument, logical synthesis or deliberate examination of facets here — it’s all thrown together, repeated and rehashed to the point where everyone and everything becomes irritating and juvenile. Even as a reality check on the illusions of Rainbow Nation, it’s better than nothing but still feels like a wasted opportunity. The lack of a clear climax is even more damageable — High Fantasy feels like a film without a point, which is too bad because it does have a lot to say.

  • Nine 1/2 Weeks (1986)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On TV, February 2021) I don’t think that Nine 1/2 Weeks is nearly as culturally omnipresent as it was back in the late 1980s, but I’m a man of my time, and watching the film today, I was struck by how much of it was referenced, satirized or quoted by other films of the time. (Hot Shots being a specific source of many, many jokes.)  To the extent that the film is remembered today, it’s as one of the few good movies of Mickey Rourke’s first act in Hollywood — he was young, trim and handsome at the time, and the perfect man to play the domineering lead in an erotic thriller. (So much so that he’d essentially reprise the same role in Wild Orchids three years later.) Kim Basinger makes a great foil for him as a submissive art gallery employee who gets caught up in his increasingly wild impulses. Decades before the Fifty Shades of prudish excitement, director Adrian Lyne was the foremost purveyor of titillating erotic thrillers, and Nine 1/2 Weeks remains one of his best claims to fame. Alas, it’s an incredibly dull film once you strip away the lengthy erotic sequences: The predictable plot fits on a paper napkin, and don’t ask where that napkin’s from: the point of this film is a series of music-video-like sequences in which the female lead is progressively controlled and abased by her dominant partner until it all breaks apart. (Many will point at the kinship between this and Lynne’s later Fatal Attraction or Unfaithful, but I found an even stronger connection with the way Flashdance presents its dance numbers as near-standalone sequences.)  What does help in finding Nine 1/2 Weeks boring is, as I’ve mentioned, all the jokes and parodies and references to the film that have popped up since then. It’s practically impossible to watch the film and see its pretentious eroticism punctured by the way it was laughed at. (And if your kinks don’t run along the same lines, well, all dullness is forgiven.)  In other words, I don’t think I received Nine 1/2 Weeks in the same way it was designed: I don’t think it’s meant to be a comedy interrupted by lengthy moments of boredom. I’ll at least recognize that both Rourke and Basinger are game in playing their characters the way they do — lesser actors would have held back. Still, it’s considerably duller than I was expecting, and frequently more ridiculous than alluring. I don’t see it as a tragedy if younger audiences have no idea about Nine 1/2 Weeks any more.

  • Miss Juneteenth (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2021) I’m not going to go on at length about Miss Juneteenth — I get the strong feeling that it’s not a film for me, nor should anything I have to say about it be worth more than a moment’s amusement. Still unusually enough for 2020, writer-director Channing Godfrey Peoples’s film is about black mothers and daughters, spanning generations and expectations. It’s nominally about a young black teenager being reluctantly drafted in the local “Miss Juneteenth” pageant by her mom, a past winner eager to live vicariously through her daughter after her own life took a less than triumphant turn. But it’s also about the relationship between the mom and her mom, a matriarch used to getting her way. It’s about reciting Maya Angelou, and a look at a tight-knit black community and all sorts of things that still feel fresh and unusual in today’s cinema landscape. In keeping with the past few years in Hollywood history, it’s a clear example of what happens when you trust filmmakers from different backgrounds to tell their own stories rather than the very narrow demographic of people who directed Hollywood films for decades. Miss Juneteenth has nothing specifically for me, and that’s good — I’m happy just listening in.

  • Assassination Nation (2018)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2021) I’m an optimist by nature, which puts me at a disadvantage in taking in a dark satire like Assassination Nation. Taking modern issues to a caricatural extreme, it’s a Dark Mirror episode given an expansive treatment: What if half the citizens of a small town got their phones hacked and everything they did online was uploaded for everyone to see? In the world of the film, this doesn’t mean embarrassment and saucy Internet searches: oh no, it means dark secrets and—especially—people being willing to kill in revenge. Assassination Nation is a harsh gory nightmare of American values gone awry (or, some would argue, exposed for everyone to see) and it soon turns into survival horror when its four protagonists are targeted by a rampaging mob intent on violent revenge. This is a film that doesn’t make sense on many levels, but that’s the point: it’s a nightmare of unleashed ids and it’s executed with the kind of fast-pacing meant to stop you from asking too many questions as it runs to the ending. That’s not necessarily a bad thing: like many socially conscious films of the past few years, Assassination Nation flips hard into a kind of violent moral rectitude that I find increasingly distasteful. (In another review, perhaps I’ll have a go at the way this is another example of the corroded public discourse in America.)  By the end of the film, the back-patting of the virtuous protagonists gets increasingly ludicrous, but I’ll have to admit that writer-director Sam Levinson’s go-for-broke pacing and sarcastic attitude didn’t make it feel as repulsive as more innocuous such films of the past few years. The satire helps keep in mind that this isn’t intended to be serious — and also explains why the too-earnest conclusion falls flat. I do think that there’s a great movie to be made about the ways the Internet shatters inner and outer personalities, and the consequences of excessive transparency. Assassination Nation isn’t it — but at least it’s willing to engage vigorously with current issues. I just wish the message was more artful and less self-convinced of its righteousness. Or that there would be some acknowledgement that, outside the headline-seeking extremists, humans are somewhat better behaved than we’re often willing to give them credit for. But then again, I’m an optimist.

  • The Hunter’s Prayer (2017)

    The Hunter’s Prayer (2017)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On TV, February 2021) It’s too early to call it a wrap, but Sam Worthington will eventually have an amazing story to tell about his time in Hollywood — assuming he wants to talk about it. Plucked from obscurity and poverty to star in 2009’s Avatar, his first few years as a high-profile leading man were filled with a handful of projects that any actor would kill for, usually playing superhuman characters. And then… his profile dropped along with the quality of the projects. Was he judged not ready for primetime? Did his lack of distinctive charisma do him in? Or did he not want superstardom enough? While Avatar sequels still loom in his future, by the end of the 2010s he could be found making one or two films a year, not always in leading roles. The Hunter’s Prayer is one of those films — one in which he holds the lead, but so incredibly generic that it seems to exist to become one of those good-enough thrillers fit to fill a slot for TV programming directors. The story takes us in familiar territory, as a hitman can’t bring himself to complete a job and leagues with his former target to take down his client. Efficiently directed by Jonathan Mostow (another name who once seemed destined for bigger and better things — this is his first film since 2009’s forgettable Surrogates), it’s a film that works but never reaches for anything more. It’s watchable without being memorable, and doesn’t do much to distinguish itself from genre clichés and conventional execution. In this kind of showcase, Worthington himself looks like set dressing — he’s got the appearance and the rough charisma to be credible, but doesn’t go any farther than that. I’d feel sorry, except that I have a feeling that everyone got what they expected with The Hunter’s Prayer — a paycheque, their name on the movie poster, some renewed attention and a chance to do better next time. Nobody had any illusion about it being anything more.

  • Destroyer (2018)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2021) Anyone who has seen the underseen 2015 thriller remake The Secret in their Eyes won’t be that surprised at Nicole Kidman’s drastic physical transformation in Destroyer. Taking a hint from the previous film’s mixture of dark Los Angeles police drama, deglamorized appearance, neo-noir plotting and merciless ending, Destroyer goes deeper and harder than its predecessor. Kidman turns in an arresting role as a burnt-out Los Angeles cop who gets involved in a murder case with ties to her early days as an undercover agent. The jumbled chronology deliberately obscures events taking place across three distinct periods of time, our only guide being Kidman’s transformation from an adorably round-cheeked rookie to a gaunt middle-aged woman running on borrowed time. The film’s subject matter isn’t any more cheerful, what with her character going on a rampage of personal revenge and hurting a lot of people along the way. The film feels completely at ease in its Los Angeles setting, even when it’s taking bits and pieces of heist movies and removing anything remotely exciting about them. Even the film’s centrepiece action sequence (a completely unprofessional shootout between cops and robbers inside a bank) is bleak, grim and reprehensible. It gets much worse by the end. This unrelenting griminess takes its toll — Destroyer feels far too long at 123 minutes and would have left more of a mark at a lesser length. But then again, there’s probably only so much we can take from seeing Kidman as a husk of her former self being powered solely by revenge and paying a very high price for it. Fans of dark crime fiction will best appreciate the result, as will those who are curious to see glamorous actresses making a strong bid for dramatic intensity by thoroughly giving themselves up to an unlikable character.

  • The Son of Bigfoot aka Bigfoot Junior (2017)

    The Son of Bigfoot aka Bigfoot Junior (2017)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2021) There was a spate of cryptozoology animated family films in 2017ish, and The Son of Bigfoot is probably the least known of them. This can be explained by the film’s independent European pedigree — rather than being a Laika, DreamWorks or Sony Animation Studio production, it hails from French Europe and was distributed by StudioCanal. Don’t expect a cut-rate production — the budget of the film and the well-worn production experience of nWave pictures are such that the computer animation looks great, easily up to the standards of anyone but the biggest studios in the industry. The story itself is more pedestrian, what with a young boy discovering that he’s getting hairier by the minute, and eventually that his absent father in none other but the Bigfoot himself. Throw in a plot that has to do with an evil businessman capturing the bigfoot for follicular fortune (don’t ask) and you’ve got enough to fill up the film’s 92 minutes. The Son of Bigfoot is not that good of a film: the humour is easy, the concepts only make sense in the context of a family film, and the tone underlines every emotional moment twice. But it’s more than just watchable — it’s fun and frantic and well grounded in its dramatic moments. There are far worse movies out there in the children’s section, whether we’re talking content or execution. Director Ben Stassen has come a long way since his debut feature Fly Me to the Moon, and he’s now cruising at a higher level with The Son of Bigfoot, since then followed by The Queen’s Corgi and sequel Bigfoot Family.

  • Target Number One (2020)

    Target Number One (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2021) I doubt that anyone will care, but in the interest of full disclosure, I’ll include my standard disclaimer that writer-director Daniel Roby is the only working filmmaker with whom I’ve had brief personal contact, back when I did the first version of his first film’s web site thanks to a common acquaintance. You’d expect me to be a bit softer on his work than others, so the irony here is that the thing I dislike most about Target Number One is very much the directorial decision to overuse the shakycam approach, providing so much cinema-verité that it borders on nausea. Fortunately, there’s more to the film than that: A fictional exposé of a Canadian cause célèbre in which elements of the RCMP essentially framed a small-time junkie for drug dealing in order to justify their operational budget, Target Number One presents a true story in a mild thriller-style, yet avoids most of the overdone clichés of the genre. Save for one sequence toward the end, there isn’t much gunplay or car chases — just a banal series of meetings between RCMP officers, informants, and our unlucky protagonist. In parallel, noted Canadian investigative journalist Victor Malarek sniffs a story and starts digging despite the personal costs of his quixotic quest. There’s an unmistakable Canadian stamp to the result — the young junkie at the centre of the action is French Canadian, and one of the rare pleasures of the results is a credible depiction of the Canadian linguistic duality and how it works in practice, much like Roby’s previous Funkytown. Taking on the RCMP is a big target, but the film does a credible job in showing how official corruption can find its roots in humdrum banality rather than caricatural evil. Shot with decent-enough means for a Canadian film, Target Number One goes from British Columbia to Thailand, and features no less than John Hartnett as Malarek. As a thriller, it has an unusual restraint. That does translate into a few lengths that take the film’s running time over two hours, and a climax inspired by real-life events that’s messier than any film would prefer. Still, for Roby, it’s a clear step up in a career that gets more and more interesting at every stage — and considering the number of French-Canadian directors breaking into Hollywood, I’m not just saying that to be nice.

  • Wonder Wheel (2017)

    Wonder Wheel (2017)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On TV, February 2021) While Woody Allen’s life has long been shrouded in controversy, there was a definite shift in public opinion against him during 2017’s #MeToo movement, as tolerance for his numerous personal relationships with younger women became unacceptable to a much wider audience. In that chronology, Wonder Wheel may be the last of the pre-controversy Allen movies and also the last with plausible deniability from casual fans. (Meanwhile, everyone who watched Manhattan in theatres is left thinking, “Hey, we knew there was something off with the guy back in the 1970s!”)  It’s also likely to be one of Allen’s last “normal” films — he’s 85, just wrote a controversial autobiography and is going to be scrutinized forever, so it’s unlikely that he’s going to go back to his past production rhythm that led to a very long uninterrupted streak of annual movies. For better or for worse, Wonder Wheel is unmistakably a Woody Allen film: While it starts in a nostalgic vein reminiscent of Radio Days by taking us back to 1950s Coney Island, the lighthearted autobiographical bent soon becomes a lead-in to a more dramatic tale of adultery and jealousy à la Café Society, then of criminal intention à la Irrational Man. In other words, we’re in familiar territory well beyond the Windsor typeface and jazz music. While the spectacular opening shot of Coney Island beach shows that even Allen can use CGI to draw a historical tableau, much of the film is in his usual low-key style, with a character providing a running narration to tie together the scenes without having to shoot the connective plotting material. Acting-wise, it’s a typically gifted ensemble: Justin Timberlake as the dreamy beach monitor moonlighting as an author and narrator, Kate Winslet as the tortured lead, the ever-cute Juno Temple as the object of temptation and Jim Belushi in an unusually effective dramatic role. Think the worst of Allen-the-man (I do!), but as a filmmaker he’s long been able to deliver something interesting, even on full autopilot. The story does show signs of not quite being a coherent whole, with far too many digressions before getting to a quick finale, but it’s still watchable enough. This being said, the meta-narrative surrounding the movie is more interesting: While Allen may be on the verge of being disgraced out of the industry (his two subsequent films have been haphazardly distributed following Amazon’s decision to break their five-film contract), it may be time to start looking at his body of work as near-finite. I’m still not sure how I feel about that—I’ve had trouble enjoying many of his films on their own merits, but he was a major filmmaker for a very long time and even his steady-as-it-goes output away from the high points of the 1970s–1980s has been consistently interesting as long as you go along with his specific blend of nostalgia, philosophy, crime and strong actor showcases. We may come to look at Wonder Wheel as the last of the films he made within the American film industry, and that’s something perhaps more interesting than what the film is about.

  • Play or Die (2019)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, February 2021) When some genres go bad, they truly turn rancid. Horror, alas, is one of those genres — there seems to be no limit to how low horror can go when it’s incompetently handled. I suppose that within a genre often showing the worst of what humanity has to offer, bad horror can become undistinguishable from actual psychopathy. Fortunately, Play or Die manages to avoid that last final rung on the badness scale — but that only barely excuses how a dull escape room dark mystery turns to gory torture horror to eventually end up in incompetent storytelling by the time the climax rolls by. The opening of the film does have a kernel of interest, as a computer-based mystery has an estranged couple reuniting to solve it. This holds up for a few minutes before people are captured and tortured in increasingly gory ways, clearly pandering to the horror crowd after a more restrained opening. But wait, there’s more! Because just as we’re settling for the climax, here come a few more narrative curveballs, as we discover that the protagonist and antagonist are the same (what?) and that it’s all a big sadistic plan to get back together with his girlfriend (what?) and that this is all explained by a horrifying childhood at the hands of a domineering mother that is shown at length just as the climax rolls by (what?), especially her murder at the other end of a screwdriver, which she considers to be her son’s rite of passage (what?)  In other words — the ending self-destructs in somewhat spectacular fashion, not being beholden to any specific rule for good screenwriting, like economy of character, good structure or foreshadowing. The film, co-written and directed by Jacques Kluger, is reportedly adapted from Puzzle, a novel by Frank Thilliez, so maybe the source material is to blame — although I can’t find a good plot summary of the book to judge. [June 2025: French Wikipedia provides the plot summary and while the screenwriters aren’t innocent, they’re not blameless either.] Still, no matter who screwed up, Play or Die is simply a failure — so many people should have intervened to make this a better film, but then again this is horror: the worst instincts of horror creators often operate on a very different wavelength as more casual viewers, while leaving everyone looking embarrassed when they turn bad.

  • Indiscreet (1958)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2021) There’s a freshness of approach in Indiscreet that makes it one of Cary Grant’s most satisfying late-career films. At the time, the fifty-something Grant was branching out in producing his own films, and starting to struggle with the growing age gulf between him and his on-screen love interests. What makes Indiscreet special in the middle of such films as Houseboat and Charade is that it’s a romance between two middle-aged protagonists —and an age difference of merely eleven years between Grant and co-star Ingrid Bergman, practically insignificant by Hollywood standards. (By comparison, Grant/Hepburn was fourteen years, Grant/Day was seventeen years, and Grant/Loren was twenty years —not that they all played their age.)  This meeting-of-equals of the characters (him a respected economist, her a well-known actress) gives Indiscreet a level of maturity not often seen in romantic comedies of the time, as both of them have ghosts to exorcise before committing to each other. To be fair, I found Indiscreet’s first half more classically interesting than the second — the process in which both characters cautiously choose to enter a relationship and have fun in its early days (all the way to a synchronized split-screen scene, said to be the first film to do so) is more interesting than the increasingly contrived complications keeping them apart in the second half. Grant is his usual smooth self here, with Bergman looking as radiant as she usually does. As directed by Stanley Donen, the film is a bit lighter on laughs than you’d maybe expect, but it remains mostly lighthearted throughout, as the obvious exception of the climactic sequence in which everything seems lost (but isn’t). Indiscreet remains a good example of how polished the Cary Grant persona was at that point of his career (he simply has to appear for the characters to go “wow!”), and without the lingering problematic implications of him being involved with much younger co-stars.

  • The Truth About Charlie (2002)

    The Truth About Charlie (2002)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, February 2021) I never bothered watching The Truth About Charlie at any point in the past eighteen years, discouraged by its lousy reviews and having missed it during its period of maximum hype. But having seen Charade (the 1963 film of which this is a remake) was enough to get me curious—and being reminded that Thandie Newton starred in the film didn’t hurt either—Mark Wahlberg is no Cary Grant, but I’d probably think a few seconds before choosing between Newton and Audrey Hepburn. Surprisingly enough, the remade script doesn’t mess all that much with the premise of the original: we still have a newlywed coming back to Paris to discover her husband gone and their apartment empty. We still have a mysterious stranger claiming to help despite being allied with three dangerous people. We still have the stamp thing and an American embassy official. It’s more in the directing style that The Truth About Charlie distinguishes itself from Charade — and really not in a good way. Director Jonathan Demme throws in a flurry of circa-2002 stylistic quirks, plus many more of his own (such as the staring-at-the-camera dialogue shots) and the result isn’t dynamic as much as it’s intensely irritating. While the basics of the narrative are still there, they’re made less comprehensible by the showy direction and the elided connective material. It gets worse once you realize that little of the film’s stylistic excesses really serve the thriller — a lot of them are actively distracting from the narrative, and some of them (such as Charles Aznavour showing up to sing) remain completely unexplainable — I happen to think that featuring New Wave director Agnès Varda in a small strange role is Very Significant in figuring out that there’s nothing to figure out. Tim Robbins is fine in the Walter Matthau role, Wahlberg is miscast and Newton is always a delight, but the film around them struggles to keep a coherent tone or even clearly presents its narrative. I suppose that remaking an intensely watchable suspense film as an arthouse experiment is more interesting than simply aping it verbatim, but it completely misses the point of why people loved the film so much in the first place: I’m not sure anyone ever watched the original Charade (which, to be fair, does have its moments of first-act weirdness) and thought, “You know, what this movie needs is more incomprehensible stuff.”

  • Carnival of Souls (1998)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, February 2021) Being a movie critic is all about keeping a flimsy veneer of civility over intensely fascistic opinions about how movies should be made or marketed. Crown a movie reviewer absolute despot and they’ll probably enact a humane progressive science-based policy agenda — but first, Hollywood is going to Get it in the teeth. One of my first acts as King of It All would be to discourage remakes and forbid them if they’re going to make a mockery of their original inspiration. I will even provide this 1998 remake of Carnival of Souls as evidence. I won’t try to convince anyone that the original film was a slick and polished production — In fact, it’s the opposite: a slapdash low-budget effort that, by sheer happenstance and dreamlike luck, happened to produce a compelling mixture of oneiric horror and enigmatic visuals. But the 1998 Carnival of Souls is not worthy of sharing the same title as the original — in an effort to make sense of a senseless inspiration, this remake adds a completely new (and dull) narrative about a woman chased by the spirit of a murderous clown. It ends as a dreamlike fun fair, which is roughly the extent of the films’ similarities. The strengths of this remake are a few and superficial: Having a coherent plot is nice, but not when it’s a tiresome accumulation of “Anything can happen! Boo!” moments that betray a lack of confidence in the material (a justified lack of confidence, but a lack of confidence nonetheless). Acting-wise, it’s a mixed bag: Lead actress Bobbie Phillips is very cute here, but comedian Larry Miller is misused as a murderous clown. The showy style of the film is dull, and Adam Grossman’s slapdash direction doesn’t do much to raise already struggling material. No wonder if the no-budget original continues to be respected and seen today, while this remake struggles in cultural oblivion, now only caught late at night on specialized French-Canadian cable horror channels. On second thoughts, I may not enact my anti-remake policy once I’m King of It All — but I may let the producers be exposed to public ridicule.