Month: February 2021

  • Il postino [The Postman] (1994)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (YouTube Streaming, February 2021) As I’m slowly making my way through the list of movies nominated for the Best Picture Academy Award, I can usually understand why they were nominated —The Academy is often predictable, and watching the films is usually enough to see how they correspond to the broad categories most likely to earn a nomination. But there’s a meta-game at play as well, and watching Il Postino is a good reminder that there are often external factors to consider. On its own, it doesn’t seem like such a strong film. As a story about a poor fisherman’s son who befriends famed poet Pablo Neruda, it clearly plays on familiar themes — poor versus famous, self-discovery through art, bucolic boosterism and so on. Philippe Noiret is quite good as Neruda (even if his voice is dubbed in Italian — Noiret without his own specific voice is a disappointment), while Massimo Troisi makes for a likable protagonist as an uneducated man gathering an appreciation for art, romance and the world through bringing Neruda’s mail. But that doesn’t seem as if it’s enough: Il Postino plays with arthouse themes but doesn’t feel like the kind of film that the Academy goes nuts over. Then you look at the film’s production history and its American releasing studio and it all starts making sense. For one thing, it turns out that writer/star Troisi was gravely ill during shooting, even pushing back heart surgery in order to complete the film… and he died the day after principal shooting wrapped. Now that’s the kind of dying-for-your-art story that the Academy loves to nominate. But the final piece of the puzzle is simple: Miramax. At the time Il Postino went to the Academy Awards, Miramax was known as an unusually skilled movie awards campaigner: now-disgraced studio owner Harvey Weinstein was a legend in pushing his slate of movies “for consideration” to Academy voters, and the 1990s are littered with curious Academy Award nominations (and wins!) that all share Miramax as their American distributor. To be clear: Il Postino is not a bad movie, and I suppose that anyone stumbling upon it would be at least halfway charmed by its take on the postman and the poet. But if you come at it, as I did, with an eye on completing your list of 1990s Academy Award nominees, you may feel something missing: the meta-narrative surrounding the film at the time of the awards.

  • Ziegfeld Girl (1941)

    Ziegfeld Girl (1941)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2021) In some ways, you can see Ziegfeld Girl as the second of an informal trilogy of MGM movies about Florenz Ziegfeld Jr. —or more specifically the Ziegfeld Follies revue productions that he created for Broadway. Their appeal could be summed up in a word: Girls. 1945’s Ziegfeld Follies was MGM’s attempt to re-create his shows with lavish means and the biggest stars in the business. Before that, 1936’s Academy-Award-winning biopic The Great Ziegfeld showed us the man’s life, and produced some of the most stunning musical numbers of 1930s American cinema along the way. Some of those set-pieces are reused in 1941’s Ziegfeld Girls, which foregoes the man himself to focus on the fictional story of three girls who become part of the show. That, in itself, would be a decent-enough backstage musical, but that’s before taking a look at the cast. Not only do you have James Stewart playing a vaguely disreputable truck driver getting annoyed at his girlfriend’s greater fame (a role somewhat less sympathetic than usual for Stewart, who doesn’t sing a line), you also have the girls themselves being played by none other than Judy Garland, Hedy Lamarr and Lana Turner — a ridiculously stacked cast, if you’ll pardon the expression. Garland is at her youthful best here, not yet showing the strains of studio life — her “Minnie From Trinidad” is the film’s standout number, as long as you put aside the unfortunate cultural issue of having her perform as a darker-skinned girl. Lamarr and Turner don’t sing, but their roles as still good showcases, and the combined impact of all three is not bad — and I’m saying this a someone who’s usually indifferent to Turner and often unimpressed with Garland. Ziegfeld Girl doesn’t manage to be a great musical, but it does have enough running for it to distinguish itself from the crowded arena of Broadway backstage musicals. Reusing some of the lavish numbers from The Great Ziegfeld must have been great for MGM’s bottom line, and it does add visual impact (as well as the gravitas associated with the earlier prestige production) to Ziegfeld Girl. It’s a nice-enough film, although I suspect that some modern viewers (as I nearly did) may run the risk of thinking they’ve seen it already due to its title being very similar to the two other films in MGM’s informal trilogy.

  • Nighthawks (1981)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, February 2021) Twenty-first century reviews of Nighthawks have generally been kinder to the film than the ones it received at the time of its release, and it’s not hard to see why. In some ways, the film was ahead of its time, by maybe ten or twenty years: As a suspense story of how a cowboy Manhattan cop goes after a terrorist attacking New York landmarks, it shows many of the characteristics of late-1980s/1990s action movies as the form coalesced in the wake of New Hollywood. That it features none other than Sylvester Stallone with a fetching beard as the cop (plus Billy Dee Williams) and Rutger Hauer as the mad terrorist is a clear bonus, considering the career that both of them had later on, especially in the very kinds of movies that Nighthawks announced. The film does manage to get quite a few things right: the atmosphere of wintertime Manhattan is very well presented, and the standout sequence in the film (aside from an opening store bombing sequence that would become a staple of later action movies, such as Die Hard with a Vengeance) is a tense and still rather original sequence set aboard and around the Roosevelt Island Tramway with Stallone’s character talking with the terrorists. I wouldn’t want to oversell the film: Nighthawks may point the way forward that many more action films would follow, but it’s only semi-successful in its approach. Making a protagonist out of a cowboy cop is increasingly troublesome, the ending sequence is nonsensical and the film does feel a bit slow by contemporary standards. But it has aged better than other films at the time, and Stallone isn’t as annoying here as he is in other films. (A look at the production history of the film does reveal that he was already then showing the signs of being a troublesome star, but that’s Hollywood’s problem, not ours.)  Considering how it has faded from cultural memory, Nighthawks is now a bit of a pleasant surprise, and more interesting than expected.

  • La double vie de Véronique (1991)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Criterion Streaming, February 2021) I’m clearly in no position to properly appreciate films such as La double vie de Véronique: it’s clearly a film with a distinct sensibility that courts arthouse audiences. The story of two women (both played by Irène Jacob) who barely glimpse each other but share a number of similarities, it’s a film of subtle connections, almost itching to delve into magical realism but not quite willing to do so. It’s not exactly dull, but it doesn’t seem to build to anything in narrative terms. The two halves of the film barely connect in tangible ways, whereas the stories take a back-seat to presentation and mood. You can be charitable and call La double vie de Véronique poetry in film form — I’ll fall back on platitudes along the lines of “it’s a good thing that cinema has something for everyone” and call it a day.

  • The Old Guard (2020)

    The Old Guard (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Netflix Streaming, February 2021) As someone who spent a few years as a film critic professionally slicing apart the sometimes-subtle differences between genres, I’m really tempted to approach The Old Guard as a case study in the differences between Science Fiction and Comic Book sensibilities. Any kind of artistic genre is often best understood as the product of a community rather than a corpus in and of itself. It’s about a group of creators talking to each other, borrowing techniques and sensibilities, and aiming for a specific audience that is attuned to those very specific aspects of a genre. It’s no big revelation that the prose Science Fiction and the Superhero Comics communities have evolved according to different parameters: both were limited by the specifications of their publishing medium and have a different history. Comics tend to be more action-oriented at the expense of believability (sometimes ridiculously so, using fights as structural building blocks), while Science Fiction chose to focus on ideas and narrative more than literary sensibilities. The Old Guard is interesting in that it takes a science-fictional device (immortals living in the margins of history) and filters it through a comic book sensibility, pumping up fights every fifteen minutes and going for big broad narrative strokes rather than stopping to think about what it’s doing. The result definitely reached an audience (it’s apparently one of the most widely-streamed films of 2020, whatever that means in a weird year for movies), but it can be a frustrating film if you’re expecting it to take a more grounded approach. The undisputable highlight here has to be Charlize Theron, once more burnishing her action-movie credentials with a lean, mean performance as a burnt-out immortal (the mythical Andromache) openly questioning why she’s still living in the face of so much evil in the world. Next up are the dynamic fight sequences — not revolutionary, but good enough to keep the film moving even when the plot doesn’t make all that much sense or grace. It’s when we peek more closely at the ideas of the film that The Old Guard gets creaky. Bits and pieces of the exposition (delivered to a newly minted immortal played by Kiki Layne in a breakout performance) are graceless and depend more on rule of dramatic explanations rather than telling it straight. This problem carries through much later in the film, as another character played by Chiwetel Ejiofor takes a rabbit out of narrative hat in suggesting a greater-scope purpose that’s not supported nor foreshadowed in any way by the rest of the narrative. Worse yet is the undiluted sense (carried over from comic serials) that The Old Guard is barely the beginning of the story, so obvious are the plot threads deliberately dangled to set up a series of sequels. Blah — so much for wholly satisfying single-film narratives. There’s little doubt that Hollywood will hold itself hostage to comic book conventions for a long while: the commercial success of such films speaks for itself, and the numerous parallels between comic-book writing and screenwriting are just as obvious. I just wish that comics-inspired screenwriters would stop and think a little bit more and that they’d learn to identify and dispense with the clichés of another medium as they write for another.

  • On Moonlight Bay (1951)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2021) My well-established fondness for musicals is not unshakeable, and it clearly reached its limits with On Moonlight Bay. To be fair, this is a film that plays on chords that don’t particularly matter to me: As an affectionate look at 1910s small-town America, it played far better to older American 1950s audiences who could recognize themselves in there. (It’s worth mentioning that the film scrupulously avoids any realistic portrayal of the misery of life in the 1910s — this is a musical comedy, after all, and nothing is as important as the romantic fantasy it showcases.)  It also features Doris Day in one of her squeaky-cleanest roles as a young debutante faced with two romantic prospects: not the Day persona I like best, as she was far more interesting in satirical non-musical comic roles. But those are not the movies that On Moonlight Bay tries to be: This, based on a series of short stories, was meant to lull audiences into nostalgia enlivened by a few standard songs and familiar romantic choices. It’s not much and it feels even less interesting now than it must have been back then. The comedy is not that comic, the songs are not that striking and it’s a Technicolor Warner Brothers production— if anyone is looking at why MGM was such a powerhouse musical-making machine in the 1950s, you can do worse than studying the difference between their 1951 musicals and this one. On Moonlight Bay is far duller than I expected, although it earns a defensible place on any Doris Day filmography as an example of her early roles.

  • The Salton Sea (2002)

    The Salton Sea (2002)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2021) There’s a neo-noir sensibility to The Salton Sea that is not necessarily apparent from its first few minutes, considering that it begins with a surprisingly funny explanation of where meth comes from and the curious community that forms between junkies in a crack-house. But as the lead character tells the audience, we haven’t heard the entire story and should wait before judging. Things get kicked in second gear soon after, as a visit to a not-so-friendly neighbourhood drug dealer leads to the protagonist calling the police as an informant. There’s clearly another narrative at play, especially when our protagonist starts thinking about his past life as a jazz musician. Plot-heavy but stylishly directed, The Salton Sea proves to be an auspicious feature film debut for director D. J. Caruso, who would go on to direct an uneven but intriguing corpus of thrillers. It stars Val Kilmer in one of his last good leading roles before a lengthy eclipse (though there’s an interesting link to be made here between The Salton Sea and the following year’s Wonderland, both set in the Los Angeles underworld), and features Vincent D’Onofrio in a usually creepy turn. The plot twists and turns and twists some more with a few happenstances thrown in for good measure, but eventually settles for a satisfying conclusion. The Salton Sea probably works better now than it did upon release — its hodgepodge borrowing of other films and showy style have grown a bit less unusual, and the film no longer labours under the shadow of Tarantino. It’s not a bad watch, but it does make one yearn for the late career that Kilmer never had.

  • Vargtimmen [Hour of the Wolf] (1968)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2021) Watching Ingmar Bergman movies is often like beating my head against a wall, but I’ll note that the stereotypical satire of his movies as being hermetic and pretentious pieces of black-and-white artistic cinema is often truer in his lesser-known films than the ones he’s famous for. Persona is intriguing, The Seventh Seal is funnier than you’d expect and Wild Strawberries has its moments along the road trip. For Hour of the Wolf, however, it’s almost as if we’re watching a humourless pastiche of other Bergman films. We’re back in an isolated area with figments of the protagonist’s imagination playing an ambiguous role, stark black-and-white cinematography reinforcing the idea that this is art and not meant to be fun at all. I still like to see Max von Sydow and Liv Ullmann whatever the context, and seeing Bergman take a look at horror is its own special kind of interesting, but Hour of the Wolf seems designed to try anyone’s patience in how it meanders through its nightmares. This lack of coherence certainly explains why the film is tough to care about. There’s probably something to write about how various directors, according to their genre friendliness, will approach the literal aspect of horror, but I’m not going to do that here, as eager as I am to stop thinking about Hour of the Wolf.

  • Ernest Scared Stupid (1991)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, February 2021) Complaining that family movie Ernest Scared Stupid is not particularly intellectual is asking for trouble, especially given how it’s the third of a series never known for excessive smarts. Still, even by those standards, Ernest Scared Stupid is no high-flyer:  Combining cheap plotting with overindulgent direction at the mercy of a showboating star, the film is firmly going for the kid’s comedy angle, bringing in the latex monsters and cheap gags to keep the young ones entertained. John R. Cherry III’s direction is particularly noticeable for its refusal to show the action in medium shots, and for using fisheye lenses whenever it features lead actor Jim Varney. The impact of this combination of filmmaking choices can be borderline nightmarish: there is no escaping the rubber-faced Varney, especially not when he gets home and starts playing every member of his household. I kid, but not by much: Varney does have some innate charm as Ernest (he did play the character steadily for nearly twenty years), but Ernest Scared Stupid often overplays its hand in presuming that nothing is as interesting as Ernest. This leads to shameless mugging for the camera (indeed, one wonders what would remain from the film if the shameless mugging was removed), overlong sequences, plotting that can’t get away from its protagonist and a film that, well, is very specifically made for Ernest fans. I can sort-of-see the appeal, but the kiddie horror comedy genre is not necessarily a particularly good one if you’re just discovering Ernest. On the other hand, he’s just about the best possible lead for that kind of film — with Ernest Scared Stupid, what kid is not going to laugh despite the horror-themed material?

  • Andhadhun (2018)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Netflix Streaming, February 2021) While I have much nicer things to say about the Hollywood formula than you’d expect, there are times where I yearn for a film that escapes the obvious confines of the three-act structure, the familiar genre formulas and the usual characters that mainstream cinema loves to showcase. I’m not going to suggest that the answer is always to be found in foreign films (Hollywood can break its own rules, and others can follow them more slavishly than it does), but Andhadhun does, at times, exemplify what happens when a seasoned filmmaker sets out to entertain audiences according to their own whims. Andhadhun does place the originality bar high from its first few moments, as we meet a blind pianist who reveals himself to be not-so-blind, but faking it in order to connect more deeply to the music and practise his skills in anticipation of a competition in Europe. That’s unusual enough, but things quickly escalate as our not-so-blind blind man ends up witnessing the aftermath of a murder and has to keep playing the pretence of not seeing what’s going on. Ironies soon pile up when his attempts to extricate himself from the situation get him in deeper trouble, as suspicious characters keep testing his blindness, and as fakery becomes real even as it becomes known as fake. The collision between dark humour and criminal suspense makes Andhadhun of particular interest to anyone looking for later-day Hitchcockian efforts — it helps that writer-director Sriram Raghavan knows what he’s doing behind the camera, and that he was able to find good actors in the key roles. Ayushmann Khurrana is quite good in a difficult lead role, but Tabu arguably makes an even better impression as a ruthless murderess. While the film is a bit too long for its own good and consequently suffers from a few dips in interest throughout its 138 minutes running time, its second half is more suspenseful than the first, and builds up to an interesting fillip of a coda that makes the entire narration very suspicious. It’s quite a bit of fun, and a welcome thriller at a time when I feel a bit bored with the usual formula: this one zigs and zags through expectations, playing with savvy viewers who think they know what’s going to happen next. While there are a few strange, unlikely and even ludicrous plot developments, it’s all done with some playfulness and a thorough understanding of what a powerful tool dramatic irony can be once it gets away from conventions. Andhadhun has a much higher profile in the west than many other Indian films and it’s easy to understand why: this is a top-tier thriller by any measure.

  • Second Chorus (1940)

    Second Chorus (1940)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, February 2021) The more I dig into Fred Astaire’s filmography, the more I understand why some of his movies aren’t as popular as other ones. While Astaire himself is never less than funny and amazing, the rest of the movies can’t always claim as much. Second Chorus still gets some airplay these days, but one suspects that its status as a public domain film has much to do with the circulation of its low-quality prints. It’s also a film that curiously de-emphasizes Astaire’s skills as a dancer. Instead, the premise has us believing in Astaire (then forty-one) as a twentysomething trumpeter who voluntarily flunks his courses in order to remain with the college band. His friendly competition with another trumpeter kicks into high gear when they meet a young woman and convince her to work for them as a manager, in turn causing no less than bandleader Artie Shaw to recruit her. The rest are comic shenanigans occasionally making good use of Astaire’s skills — most notably in a duet with co-star Paulette Goddard and a climactic number in which tap-dancing is combined with orchestra conducting. More of a band movie than an Astaire movie (especially thanks to Artie Shaw’s contribution), Second Chorus is pleasant to watch but hardly in Astaire’s top half. Goddard herself is far from being the best dancer Astaire’s been paired with (although she does quite well in their sole duet, the one-shot “I Ain’t Hep to That Step but I’ll Dig It”), but she’s among the cutest. Astaire does get a few more good comic scenes — including “Kamarinskaya,” in which he dresses up as a Russian for some step-dancing — but there’s a sense that Second Chorus wastes the considerable talent he brings to it. The result is fine, but just fine: there’s little in the way of pyrotechnics that he brought even to his most average efforts. But that’s what I get for watching Astaire movies in rough descending order of popularity.

  • Blithe Spirit (1945)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2021) Surprisingly enough, the 1940s offer a substantial list of supernatural romantic comedies. Beyond the obvious picks of the Topper series, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir and I Married a Witch, here’s Blithe Spirit to show what happens when a séance brings back a man’s first wife from the dead and he has to explain her presence to his second wife. The pedigree of the film is impeccable: Directed by David Lean before he became an epic filmmaker, scripted from a play by producer Noël Coward and featuring a young Rex Harrison in the lead role, the film also showcases British filmmaking at the close of WW2 with decent colour cinematography and Academy Award-winning special effects. You can see the basic elements of an American 1930s screwball comedy filtered through wartime British sensibilities, and the combination does have its pleasant quirks. Good biting dialogue compensates for the somewhat ordinary direction, although one suspects that the requirements of the special effects may have had an impact on limiting camera movements when a ghost shows up on-screen. The film does suffer from a bit of a slow start, as it puts together its fantastical elements for an audience less used to supernatural devices, but the film becomes sharply more interesting once the undead make their appearance, and it builds to an impressively dark (but remarkably funny) ending. Those who like a specific, somewhat stereotypical strain of British comedy will appreciate the result even more — in its closing moments, Blithe Spirit anticipates the arrival of the Ealing Studios films such as The Ladykillers and Kind Hearts and Coronets in mixing dark topics and humour. It’s a fun watch even today, which is what happens when still-credible special effects are bolstered by great dialogue.

  • Arrowsmith (1931)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2021) I can see in Arrowsmith the elements that should interest me — a fictional portrait of science at work, a protagonist with self-destructive impulses, some Pre-Code candidness, and decent production values for the time. I like that the film, in an alternate universe, would be a precursor to a very different “Science Fiction” genre, one focused on illuminating the inner workings of science through contemporary fiction. But even with all of these advantages, I had a more difficult time than anticipated in staying interested in Arrowsmith. The flattening effect of 1930s filmmaking (with its limited audiovisual range and camera placements) has a bit to do with it, but perhaps the biggest problem is inherent in the story: an unlikable protagonist that keeps self-sabotaging anything outside his chosen profession, heightened melodrama that spares few supporting characters, and some ludicrous choices that feel far-fetched. I’m generally happy that I’m now more familiar with the original Sinclair Lewis story (which does have a place in SF history) and its Oscar-nominated adaptation, but that didn’t make Arrowsmith any more interesting to watch.

  • The Killer That Stalked New York (1950)

    The Killer That Stalked New York (1950)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2021) If, like me, you sometimes think of “Hollywood movies” as a vast multi-thousand-item collection of nearly every topic to have fascinated American history from 1920ish onward, it stands to reason that you can find anything and everything in those archives. So it is that even the unprecedented, history-making COVID-19 pandemic of 2020-21+ can find an unlikely precedent in… a film noir? That’s right: now that you’ve seen Contagion and Outbreak, have a look at The Killer That Stalked New York, an uneasy 1950 mixture of public health announcements and criminal thriller plot. Based on the true life but often forgotten 1947 New York City smallpox scare, it’s a film that follows the detection of smallpox in Manhattan, brought in the city from Cuba by a woman involved in a mixture of diamond thievery and lurid murder. But that film-noir plot is often shoved in the background, as director Earl McEvoy details the heroic efforts of public health officials, doctors and policemen in tracing the infection, vaccinating New Yorkers (despite ever-present skepticism) and trying to save everyone who contracted the disease. In many ways, The Killer That Stalked New York is not a particularly good film noir: The plot is thin, the two disparate parts of the whole don’t quite mesh, and the characters take a back-seat to the didactic requirements of the script. On the other hand, well, it’s completely engrossing: The fact-based depiction of how New York City reacts to the threat of a smallpox epidemic makes for a fascinating medical procedural, and the historical footage is simply wonderful. It’s an eloquent reminder that pandemics are nothing new, and that we once lulled ourselves into a false sense of security despite ample historical precedent. It’s definitely worth a watch right now, although I hope it becomes quite a bit less relevant soon enough.

  • The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970)

    The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2021) Watching older films can often be an exercise in picking apart what was new then, even if it’s not new now. The character of Sherlock Holmes, at this point in the early twenty-first century, has been endlessly remixed, examined, criticized, parodied or dismissed: There are nearly as many movies adapting Sherlock Holmes as there are faithful adaptations, no matter which kind of Holmes you prefer. In this light, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes appears to be one more entry in a crowded group. But it does have the distinction of having been the first in many ways — most notably, the first to have poked at the sexuality of the character even if the answer isn’t all that satisfying. (The film makes much about Holmes being gay or repressed, which seems less interesting than portrayals of Holmes being Adlersexual — that is, uninterested in any women other than the striking Irene Adler.)  It also takes a somewhat lighthearted tone to the character (heck, even in portraying Queen Victoria), something that must have resulted in a few dropped monocles back then, but appears painfully limited now that we’ve had feature-length man-child parodies of the character. There’s also a curiously unbalanced feeling to the script, which can be explained if you read about its tortured production history and how a much longer episodic film was chopped up in what appears on-screen. As with nearly all of writer-director Billy Wilder’s movies, even the most mediocre ones, it’s not uninteresting to watch: it’s got good scenes, good dialogue, a pleasantly loopy third act and another clever take on the character. But for all of its strengths and its impact at the time of its release, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes does pale in comparison with the later takes on the character, often going much further than this one in exploring Holmes’ quirks.