Month: May 2021

  • The Devil’s Brigade (1968)

    The Devil’s Brigade (1968)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2021) As a lesser-known counterpart to The Dirty Dozen, The Devil’s Brigade takes the same general formula, but gives it a somewhat more classic Hollywood approach — toned-down violence, amped-up adventure for a film that reflects more the war-is-an-adventure 1950s than the war-is-hell 1970s. The added wrinkle for Canadian viewers is that the premise of the film (based on a true story) matches the worst of the American Army with the best of the Canadian Army in what is, at least initially, a rather fun clash of sensibilities in which the Canadians don’t come out too badly. William Holden plays a senior office tasked with whipping up a crew of misfits and miscreants into a fighting force, and much of The Devil’s Brigade’s first half is spent describing training deep in the American hinterland, trying to polish the sharp edges of the bad boys brought together by narrative fiat. The Canadians are nominally better than their American counterparts, but the friction between the two is a highlight. (It also acknowledges, even if fleetingly and inaccurately, the French factor in having Canadians around.)  Following a familiar narrative path, the second half of the film takes us in far more familiar territory, as the newly unified commando group (nothing like a good bar fight with locals to shape a fighting force) takes on the Nazis in the battle of Monte la Difensa. Very loosely based on a true story, The Devil’s Brigade is instantly recognizable as pure Hollywood entertainment. But if it’s not quite as striking as The Dirty Dozen (against which it had the misfortune of competing at the yearly box-office), it’s a lot more fun to take in — the violence is minimized in favour of the character-building vignettes and adventures. Then there’s the Canadian aspect for us cinephiles north of the border.

  • Zombie Undead (2010)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, May 2021) Sometimes, individual movies get the brunt of some pent-up frustration about an entire genre, and so it’s British effort Zombie Undead’s unfortunate burden to get the brunt of my exasperation with no-budget zombie movies. Thing is — it’s just good enough to be considered a movie, which may not feel like a high bar but does make it better than many other no-budget do-it-yourself efforts. With the rise in digital production means, it’s become easier than ever to make your own film with friends and family. That should be an unqualified good… if it wasn’t for the sheer laziness of most such efforts. Zombie Undead is better than many of them: it’s competently put together by director Rhys Davies, from elementary cinematography to understandable editing. The acting isn’t intolerable, and the plotting isn’t completely ludicrous. On the other hand, it’s not worth praising the result more than strictly necessary: The handheld camera gets tiresome, the dialogue is pedestrian, the plotting is so unoriginal as to be instantly forgettable and the gore effects are essentially limited to red dye. This is no-budget zombie filmmaking at its most basic, and that leads us to a more fundamental question: why bother making a movie if you’re going to make the exact same movie made much better by others? I’m enthusiastic about the democratization of filmmaking, but I prefer when they reflect perspectives, ideas or characters seldom seen elsewhere. Here, though, we’ve got the blandest actors incarnating the dullest characters stuck in the most generic zombie apocalypse possible, with threadbare ideas implemented in a most perfunctory fashion. Why bother? Why be so damnably lazy when no-budget offers you so many opportunities to be creative? Play buzzword bingo! I’ll take a black transsexual communist lactose-intolerant zombie movie over yet another bland white Anglo-Saxon trash. I want a zombie film that could only have been made by the no-budget filmmakers. I want something that the mainstream won’t dare show me. I don’t want the same zombie template used for the hundredth time. It’s not helping me in the slightest that I’m in the middle of a zombie movie marathon all feeling like the same thing but you know what — Zombeavers had zombie beavers; Dance of the Dead had a focus on a prom night marred by the undead; Rise of the Zombie had past-their-prime TV actors going through the standard Asylum formula. Zombie Undead (a terrible redundant title by itself) has… nothing. It dissolves into meaninglessness even as it unspools. Life’s too short for that lazy nonsense — an overdose of zombie movies is a fast-track to cinematic nihilism.

  • Dance of the Dead (2008)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, May 2021) You don’t understand, screams the anguished teenager, To hell with the zombie apocalypse — there’s the prom to think about. Or at least that’s the impression I keep from director Gregg Bishop’s Dance of the Dead, a somewhat cheap zombie film that, at least, presents a clear setting and focus for its gory shenanigans. The big joke here has to do with its outcast dateless high schoolers (members of the Sci-Fi club!) being in a position to contain the zombie infestation striking their more popular colleagues attending the prom. Unlike other no-budget zombie films, Dance of the Dead does have mildly compelling narrative material to go along with the red dye and repurposed entrails — there’s some perfunctory character development, mildly amusing dialogue and a high-school setting that helps distinguish it from other similar efforts. (I’m currently bingeing on zombie films thanks to a horror-channel marathon, and they get really repetitive really quickly.)  While I’m not going to be Dance of the Dead’s biggest fan, it’s comparatively better than most films of its sub-genre, and not a bad watch if you’re already looking for undead films.

  • No Time for Sergeants (1958)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2021) I’m normally a good audience for military comedies, but there’s something in No Time for Sergeants that simply (and repeatedly) fails to work. I was left bored and unmoved throughout much of the film, but I think I know why. First up would be a lack of familiarity and liking for the leads of the film — featuring Andy Griffith in the lead role (one of his first) may be a boon to everyone familiar with The Andy Griffith show, but it’s not a step up over his powerhouse dramatic performance in A Face in the Crowd. Many of the supporting players (including Don Knotts) are similarly unfamiliar, so there isn’t much of an attachment. The other big factor, I suspect, is that the film was conceived as a military comedy at a time when the vast majority of the male American audience for the film had some military service due to the draft — as a result, the film often feels like one big inside joke aimed at those who were familiar with the basics of the situation. Or, you know, it just may be that the film hasn’t aged very well. To its credit, No Time for Sergeants (adapted from a Broadway play, possibly another issue) does get a bit funnier toward the end, as our protagonists are believed dead in a nuclear test explosion and make their way back to life. But it’s a bit too little too late, and doesn’t do much to make the film much better in its entirety.

  • Rise of the Zombies (2012)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, May 2021) Infamous mockbusters maker The Asylum takes on the zombie genre with Rise of the Zombies, a frequently inept effort that nonetheless has a few things going for it. First up, it’s explicitly set in picturesque San Francisco, focusing some of its plotting on survivors of the zombie apocalypse regrouping in Alcatraz as a defensible position. Casting-wise, it seems more ambitious than most with Danny Trejo, LeVar Burton, Mariel Hemingway and French Stewart in various (sometimes very short) roles. The plotting has one degree of cleverness more than the usual film of this type, and the ending is actually rather optimistic, which is something I want to see more often in a wasteland of gratuitously downbeat zombie films. Some of the action sequences are almost potent, and the actors seem to be attuned to the spirit of the enterprise. But none of this actually brings Rise of the Zombie to a level where I’d be comfortable recommending it — at best, it doesn’t want you to stop the film immediately, and that’s an improvement over most Asylum productions. I have issues with the way the story is structured (from the prison going outward, rather than the reverse) and the somewhat low-budget production values constantly grind against what should be much more entertaining viewing. But Rise of the Zombie is still better than its closest equivalents.

  • The Climb (2019)

    The Climb (2019)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2021) I’m not a big fan of humiliation comedy — alas, that’s a prerequisite for enjoying The Climb, the story of a friendship between two men that stretches out over many years, heartbreak and personal milestones. There are several distinct chapters, many of them overusing lengthy continuous shots. Writer-director-producer-star Michael Angelo Covino clearly has a specific intention in mind here, as he sketches key moments in the lives of his two protagonists, and if you happen to be on the same wavelength — great. Otherwise, you’re going to find that the film feels as if it lasts much longer than its 95 minutes. I found The Climb unpleasant, barely amusing, self-satisfied in its cleverness and not particularly insightful considering its constant resort to wild melodrama in lieu of plotting… but that’s just me.

  • The Personal History of David Copperfield (2019)

    The Personal History of David Copperfield (2019)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2021) Writer-director Armando Iannucci seldom does the expected, and so his take on Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield is very much its own thing. Race-shifting the lead role to be played by the always entertaining Dev Patel, Iannucci goes for a very expressive, stylish presentation of the material distilled to a feel-good essence. There’s a framing device of sorts in having the narrator of the story address a theatrical audience and flashing back to the tale being told; there are interludes that break with conventional representation; and a silent fast-forward sequence. But such stylistic flourishes seem appropriate in a film when colours and actors such as Peter Capaldi, Tilda Swinton, Hugh Laurie, Benedict Wong and others seem intent on upstaging each other. (To the benefit of the film, of course.)  It’s all fun to watch, utterly divorced from the intention of delivering a strictly historical take on the story. Despite not being all that familiar with the source material, I appreciated the big happy ending (the biggest surprise of the film being Iannucci being happy with happiness) and the playfulness through which it approached a literary classic. Yes, we could use a few more movies like The Personal History of David Copperfield. But not exactly like it.

  • Zombeavers (2014)

    Zombeavers (2014)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, May 2021) With a title like Zombeavers, we can be sure of two things: It’s not going to be high art, and the end product will never live up to its title. You can guess the plot: college-age partiers heading for an isolated cabin in the woods, suddenly attacked by zombie beavers. It’s really not meant to be anything more than that. But while the film clearly wants to (and should) be a horror/comedy blend, I wasn’t completely happy with a blend placing far too much emphasis on gory horror rather than self-aware comedy. (Also: too many gory sex “jokes.”) This intention keeps going until the rather dispiriting ending, so anyone expecting lighter fare à la Black Sheep may want to temper their expectations, because that’s not where writer-director Jordan Rubin is going. This being said, while Zombeavers comfortably misses greatness and goodness alike, it’s not a horrible film. At 78 minutes, it buys itself some indulgence — especially for viewers with low expectations settling in for some late-evening fun. It’s meant to be laughed at, and while it doesn’t quite reach all of its targets, it’s certainly not unwatchable.

  • Step Lively (1944)

    Step Lively (1944)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2021) As a remake to the Marx-Brothers 1938 comedy Room Service, the 1944 Frank Sinatra vehicle Step Lively was not necessarily doomed to failure. Absent the Marxes, it’s clear that the remake will not be the same kind of comedy — and Sinatra’s ability to do verbal humour isn’t the same as Groucho Marx. (Ironically, those two would later co-star in Double Dynamite seven years later.)  Fortunately, the script was heavily retooled, largely reverting to its Broadway theatrical roots, absent the specific Marx flourishes. And it works rather well — the base story is something that can more effectively be told as a low-octane charming comedy rather than an out-and-out vaudeville special, and it’s in that vein that Step Lively can best exploit the talents of pre-icon Sinatra. There is a bit of a mismatch between young Sinatra and the world-weary fast-talking role he’s meant to play, but this is tempered by modern viewers’ knowledge that Sinatra would eventually become (as “Chairman of the Board”), the kind of character he was portraying here. Some of the supporting players (notably George Murphy, Wally Brown and Alan Carney) are meant to be funnier and usually are, leaving the straight man reacting and the straightforward singing to the lead. While Step Lively won’t rock anyone’s world (well, other than Sinatra fans), it’s a pleasant enough watch and an interesting point of comparison with the zaniness of Marx-style Room Service.

  • Brasília: Life After Design (2017)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, May 2021) Like the city itself, Brasília: Life After Design seems to have begun with the best intentions, only to end up with something far less remarkable. Keep in mind that Brasília is a product of the Brazilian optimism of the 1960s — an entirely new city built according to an overarching plan, creating a capital out of the deserted middle of the country, with mega-construction projects and lofty goals of egalitarianism. Half a century later, documentarian Bart Simpson goes on the ground to listen to the locals as they describe how it is to live in a deliberately designed city. Alas, the execution is more laborious and muddled than you’d expect. Other than a few occasional subtitles, the entire documentary eschews context. Aside from some historical footage, much of the footage is of ordinary Brazilians going about their business. There’s a frustrating lack of contextualization, narration or overarching perspective — I have seldom so missed expert talking heads than when I was trying to extract meaning from the footage. It does not help that Life After Design presents such pedestrian material— there’s far less critical commentary about the state of Brasília half a century after its construction, and more useless minutiae than I liked. It’s simply absurd that a quick look at the Brasília Wikipedia page is more interesting than an interminable 88-minute documentary on the topic. Even watching the film itself, we’re left with more questions than answers. The film’s log-line, asking, “What is it like to live in someone else’s idea?” is remarkably banal considering that nearly all of us are living in someone else’s idea of a city, a neighbourhood or a house. There’s very little here to highlight the remarkable achievements of Brasília as a synthetic city (perhaps only matched by Canberra, arguably even my Ottawa hometown) — at best, the film seems to shrug at the utter ordinary nature of its subjects’ lives. This seems to be a prodigious waste of potential. On most metrics, Brasília-the-city is a success — in half a century, it went from a desert to the third most populous city in Brazil. It’s adding new neighbourhoods like crazy, has a remarkably good Human Development Index and presents a fascinating case study in comparing planned to organic urban growth. There is, in other words, an incredible amount of potential in a documentary about Brasília, and Life After Design barely scratches at the surface. The best thing I got out of it was an irresistible impulsion to go and learn more about the city itself.

  • Desperate Search (1952)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2021) As someone with a specific interest in Hollywood movies set in Canada, I couldn’t pass up Desperate Search, especially as the log-line promised an expedition to rescue two kids lost in the wilds of the Canadian Rockies after a plane crash. Years of experience watching Classic Hollywood movies had taught me to keep my expectations in check regarding authentic on-location footage, and I was right: a look at the film’s projection history shows that the film was entirely shot on Hollywood back-lot sets, with a good chunk of stock footage and dialogue suggesting where the film was taking place. This approach was consistent with the drive within MGM at the time to produce straightforward low-budget films to supplement their typically high-gloss productions. The result, at least in Desperate Search, is a trim 71 minutes of uncomplicated thrills, featuring familiar narrative strands and unsurprising characters working their way through a few thrills of which the best is a hungry cougar. The kid actors portraying peril are not that annoying, while Howard Keel, Jane Greer and Patricia Medina make up for the adult triangle at the heart of the rescue. It’s not a movie particularly worth remembering: at best, it delivers what it sets out to do. But it does make for a telling addition to “see how Hollywood dealt with Canada” in a modern adaptation of a typical Northern story.

  • Stage Struck (1958)

    Stage Struck (1958)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2021) It took me about ten minutes too long to figure out that Stage Struck was a remake of the 1933 Katharine Hepburn vehicle Morning Glory, but that’s the least of the film’s problems. No, the problem with the film is one you rarely expect — an overacting, over-articulating, falsely cheerful, badly cast (or directed) lead actress: Susan Strasberg. I get that the film is the story of an overeager girl from the sticks heading to the big city and finding out that reality doesn’t measure up to her dreams. In that context, it makes perfect sense for the character to be exuberant, annoyingly upbeat and pretentiously mannered… at least at first. Similarly, you don’t need to point out that Hepburn was doing even more overacting back in 1933: that was the acting style at the time, and she made it work for herself. The problem with Strasberg is that she stays at eleven out of ten on the theatricality scale during the entire film, well after reality should have brought her down to earth. What a wasted opportunity, and an inexplicable lack of directorial judgment from Sidney Lumet, who would go on to direct several much-lauded films. It’s all the more regrettable, given how the rest of the film (filmed in colour on location) offers a rather wonderful look at Broadway circa 1958 in its grittiness and vitality. Henry Fonda is on hand as an older producer who, inevitably, falls in love with the half-as-young woman; other notables include Christopher Plummer as a writer (his first film) and Joan Greenwood as an acting rival. Stage Struck itself would be fine if it wasn’t for the way Strasberg uses highly stylized theatrical acting in an otherwise normal film — she stands out in a bad way and actively harms the rest of the film.

  • Le sens de l’humour [A Sense of Humour] (2011)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2021) One of the defining characteristics of French-Canadian society is its fondness for comedians — stand-up comedians, stage comedians, TV comedians or movie comedians, with a considerable amount of crossover between the four. The prototypical French-Canadian blockbuster often features one or two familiar comedians, plus a premise riffing off suspense tropes with a comic attitude. Le sens de l’humour is clearly in that vein, as it stars comic superstars Louis José Houde, Michel Côté and Benoit Brière in a film where a strong thriller premise is played for laughs. Here, two touring stage comedians (House and Côté) make fun of someone they shouldn’t during a show… and find themselves kidnapped by a serial killer eager for comedy lessons. Quite a bit of the film’s middle act delves into a meta-deconstruction of humour itself, as the stand-ups try to teach likability and humour principles to someone strikingly inept at it. There’s more, of course — the third act is all about absolving the “serial killer,” introducing a bigger threat and somehow defusing it while not having the rest of the film teetering into a more serious vein. Parts of it certainly work — the three leads have rapport, and the smaller-scale set-pieces can be funny. What doesn’t work quite as well is the conclusion, which has trouble resolving all of the impossible subplots it has created for itself. But those issues scarcely mattered at the film’s release: Le sens de l’humour was the second highest-grossing French-Canadian film of 2011, coming very closely behind Starbucks (which was remade in Hollywood as Delivery Man) — another lighthearted film featuring a well-known comedian.

  • Teenagers from Outer Space (1959)

    Teenagers from Outer Space (1959)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2021) It’s almost mandatory to make fun of Teenagers from Outer Space. After all, laughter is a response to trauma, and this is a truly wretched film from a technical point of view: bad special effects, worse actors, nonsensical screenplay and shoddy production values are only some of the highlights of this attempt to create an alien-invasion film out of a woefully inadequate budget and jack-of-all-trade involvement of multi-multi-multi-hyphenate filmmaker Tom Graeff. And the result is rather endearing in its ineptness — there’s something about how over-the-top clumsy the film is that’s almost disarming. Many others agree—the film was a featured viewing for MST3K, and its passage in the public domain led it to be propagated everywhere—including within the Destroy all Humans videogame, where it was appropriately displayed as a drive-in movie. It may not be a glorious legacy, but it is a legacy — what other 1959 film produced for a five-figure budget do you remember as of 2021?

  • The Invisible Boy (1957)

    The Invisible Boy (1957)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2021) Hollywood history is littered with projects that beg explanations as to how they came to be. This is particularly true in the Science Fiction genre, whose subtleties are often downplayed or ignored by those who think the genre is an excuse to do whatever they want without rigour. (True practitioners of SF know that the genre derives its power from following some demanding rules, but I digress.)  So it is that The Invisible Boy is a particularly wretched example of 1950s Science Fiction in which various buzzwords were thrown together without much care toward plausibility. Director Herman Hoffman executes the material with competence, but the script itself is a jumble. Here, a lonely boy sits down at a supercomputer, is gifted with superintelligence, builds a robot (Robbie the Robot from Forbidden Planet, sent back in time to the 1960s), flies on a kite, is turned invisible and discovers that the supercomputer is plotting world domination. No, it’s not a comedy. What’s most remarkable is the inclusion of an increasingly dark AI plot within a kid’s film. None of it makes any sense, but at a mirror into the techno-fears of 1957, The Invisible Boy pretty much suggests that very little has changed more than sixty years later. I’m frankly not sure I’d recommend the film for casual viewing, though — it may be fascinating to SF and science historians, but an ordeal otherwise.