Month: May 2021

  • Under the Scares (2010)

    Under the Scares (2010)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2021) Are you thinking about making a horror film? Don’t. No, don’t let ever-cheaper digital production means convince you otherwise. Don’t let a long history of cheap horror films striking box-office gold tempt you. Don’t think that a passion for the genre is in any way a palliative for a lack of knowledge or experience in filmmaking. And if you need another kick in the pants to convince you, have a look at Under the Scares to dissuade you. The irony, obviously, is that this is a documentary film meant to inspire horror filmmakers: writer-director Steve Villeneuve (who had and has since worked in Canadian horror) goes around interviewing low-budget horror luminaries, gathering hard-won lessons and providing tips for anyone intending to follow in their footsteps. What I liked best about the film is that it’s remarkably candid about how hard it is to make a low-budget film. It goes into near-excruciating detail about what awaits budding directors — lack of budget, flaky cast and crew, indifferent distributors, muddy sound, and overexposed market among them. Think of the film as providing tough-love therapy to an audience that could use a bit of discouragement. If ever, despite what Under the Scares has to say, you decide to still go forward… congratulations, you just passed the test.

  • Child’s Play (1972)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, May 2021) A decade and a half before Chucky’s introduction, there was a Child’s Play movie that had nothing to do with killer dolls, and everything to do with… hmmm, that’s actually a good question: What is Child’s Play about? It’s clearly about a boarding school for boys in which two senior teachers (James Mason as the hated one, Robert Preston as the loved one) have it out for each other. It’s also certainly about mysterious escalating events in which the hated teacher is tormented and maybe the loved one has something to do with it. But while it initially appears to maybe involve the supernatural, the ending apparently tells us that it’s not — but director Sydney Lumet maintains the ambiguity as if even he hadn’t made up his mind. Almost no one escapes from Child’s Play with their dignities intact: this is often derided as Lumet’s worst film (which isn’t that much of a dishonour considering the rest of his filmography), but he does manage to imbue something of an atmosphere by exploiting the dark gloominess of a boarding school and amplifying it with kids who clearly aren’t all right. Mason is clearly the least-disappointing one here, imbuing his character with his usual, polished blend of dignity and menace. Preston merely does OK with the role he’s given and the rest of the players are rather inconsequential. (Beau Bridges is just… there in comparison to the two veteran actors.)  In a historical context, Child’s Play feels like an attempt to ride the paranormal possession train launched by Rosemary’s Baby and The Omen, except without the genre familiarity to do anything with that intention. Which isn’t outlandish, considering that the film is adapted from a Broadway play and Broadway playwrights have seldom been acknowledged as being particularly comfortable with paranormal horror.

  • Extinction (2015)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, May 2021) Let’s face facts: I have watched too many zombie movies. They don’t surprise me any more, they don’t interest me any more, they don’t even make me happy any more. Their painfully generic nature is made worse by dozens of unimaginative filmmakers simply doing more of the same without any self-awareness or wit. At a first glance, Extinction does seem to offer something different, with a glacial northern setting made of gray-blue snow and ice. While purists will argue that zombies, absent heat-generating mechanisms, would simply freeze solid in the winter, the pragmatist in me knows that this kind of logic holds no sway in horror screenwriters’ brains — they want snow zombies and they will get snow zombies. So, Extinction’s other “invention” is a different kind of not-quite-undead zombie led by sound rather than sight. But again: This changes nothing. This is still a post-apocalyptic tale of a small community of survivors being attacked by zombies, killing many of them but being nearly wiped out along the way and this is somehow portrayed as a victory despite the ever-dwindling number of humans kicking around. It’s the same old thing with a not-so-fresh coat of white paint, and I’ve had my fill of it. Writer-director Miguel Ángel Vivas can’t do much that’s either new or effective here: even the attempt at characterization comes across as slowing down the film. I wish I could use Extinction as an excuse to let go of zombie films and never look back, but who am I kidding: I’ll still watch more of them and hope for the best.

  • Salaam Bombay! (1988)

    Salaam Bombay! (1988)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2021) Part of film education is going through good movies that you don’t like, and that’s a lot how I feel about Salaam Bombay! Despite its cheerful title and sun-drenched cinematography, not a whole lot about this film is fun or uplifting. It’s all about kids struggling to survive on the streets of the Indian metropolis, turning to crime and debauchery in order to scrounge the bare necessities of life. Clearly influenced by a neo-realistic approach, it’s utterly unsentimental in how it presents its characters and where it ends up. Salaam Bombay! was the debut feature film for writer-director Mira Nair and it’s an incredibly self-assured film — clearly in the tradition of earlier works of Indian neorealism, but distinctively hers as well. Still, I would be going too far by suggesting that I enjoyed watching it: I’m no big fan of neorealism in the first place, and the unrelenting grimness of the plot didn’t help. But I have this vaguely heretical notion that I don’t have to like a film to recognize its quality, and while Salaam Bombay! will never feature on any of my own lists of favourite films, it’s easy to understand how and why it was critically acclaimed back then, and why it’s still very highly regarded today.

  • Kaijû daisensô [Invasion of the Astro-Monster] (1965)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2021) I’m not really a big fan of classic Japanese kaiju films: a little goes a long way on these things. But they’re fun to revisit once in a while, and the appeal of the later entries of the Toho filmography isn’t so much the tone (which steadily declines toward kid-friendly plotting), but the colour cinematography, the increasingly large menagerie of monsters, and the increasingly demented plotting that builds upon every dumb thing in the series to lead to some seriously crazy material later on. In Invasion of the Astro-Monster, for instance, we have aliens coming to Earth to borrow monsters for help against their own problems, then mind-controlling the monsters to attack Earth after having themselves a good laugh at the expense of the earthlings’ gullibility. The crazy plot, of course, doesn’t make much of a difference when director Ishirō Honda gets down to those scenes justifying the existence of the film: the building-stomping sequences featuring the man in the suit. Owing to budget and production speed issues, the effects here are inconsistent — sometime recycled from earlier films, sometimes made on the cheap, sometime innovating with bigger stomping feet and more detailed miniatures. Alas, this was also the film in which Godzilla did a victory dance, clearly marking the series’ intention to go for much younger and less sophisticated audiences. None of this really makes me look any more fondly on the Toho kaiju films—but it does make Invasion of the Astro-Monster an interesting-enough film to watch—although jumping all around the series chronology in my viewing order isn’t doing me any favours.

  • Cameraperson (2016)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2021) There are a few schools of thought about documentary filmmaking, and one topic that gets brought up is the role of the narrator — many documentaries eschew explicit narration, preferring the images, talking heads and documentary footage make a stronger case than a narrator ever could. It sometimes works… but not always. As a professional documentary cinematographer (one whose images you probably saw in acclaimed films such as Citizenfour and Captain Mike Across America), you can expect Kirsten Johnson to place the raw image above all, and that’s indeed the approach she takes in Cameraperson, digging through years of footage to assemble what’s described as a “autobiographical collage.”  The point here is to present both a scrapbook of experiences, a meditation on being the person holding the camera, an essay on the relationship between filmmakers and film subjects, and plenty of other things in-between. The price to pay, however, is a near-complete lack of guideposts. Absent any narration, or even hints as to why footage is included and why it’s placed at that specific point in the film’s running time, Cameraperson leans heavily on the “make up your own meaning” school of film-viewing, often to the point of infuriation. There are highlights and set-pieces, but the film flies across countries and eras and personal meaning, sometimes presenting Johnson’s life and other times the footage she shot for other filmmakers. It’s not a film made for casual viewing — you have to invest some energy trying to figure it out, and even then, you’ll never be sure to have the intended take, for there is no intended take. As such, it’s a documentary film that requires a change of pace from how we usually see other documentaries, usually so intent on making their points that they leave nothing to chance or interpretation. I can’t say I liked Cameraperson all that much — it often feels like a whirlwind of sequences with no grounding, and that’s not necessarily my forte. But it does eventually (perhaps too late) emerge as something interesting in its own distinct fashion, leading us to ask questions about the very nature of documentaries and what the camera shows or chooses not to show.

  • Movie Crazy (1932)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2021) Even a second-tier Harold Lloyd comedy is still a worthwhile watch, and while Movie Crazy never gets the attention that Lloyd’s silent classics do, it’s probably the best of his sound movies, and it offers a fascinating look at circa-1930 filmmaking to boot. The plot, or rather the excuse on which to hang the comic sequences, is all about a young man coming to Hollywood to seek fame and fortune. But while that plot would serve for countless 1930s comedies, only Lloyd could orchestrate some of the set-pieces here. Highlights here include disrupting a movie set and studio offices, destroying a convertible car’s retracting top, a screen test that plays around with early-sound technology and, in the film’s highlight, wreaking absolute havoc at a formal event with a magician’s suit. For film history buffs, a supplemental attraction is in offering a generous look (even if fictionalized) at how Hollywood sets worked by the early 1930s. But the jokes are the point, as always, with Lloyd’s affable personality building up a considerable reservoir of trust and likability. Movie Crazy may not be among his best, but it offers an interesting portrait of the artist trying to remain relevant in an industry that had moved away from the silent films, where he was used to full control of visual comedy.

  • Love on Repeat aka Stuck out of love (2019)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2021) Time loop movies have the potential to be transcendental, funny, horrifying or uplifting. But they can also be used as engines for lower-common denominator movies like Love on Repeat. Produced within the segment of the film industry that cranks out bland romantic comedies for TV channels, this is low-end low-effort low-budget moviemaking at its basest. The actors really aren’t the best, the direction is utilitarian, the staging is bland and once you get over the time-loop thing, its biggest claim to originality is to take place in nondescript Gunthrie, Oklahoma. But, of course, you can’t avoid the time-loop thing as it describes how a young woman feeling aimless in her life, job and relationship gets to relive the same day over and over again. We know what she’s going to get out of it when she finds true love and contentment, but the film will rerun through the same day for a while until she gets it. On most aspects, director Peter Foldy’s Love on Repeat is a clearly substandard affair — there’s nothing profound or witty here, nothing all that memorable nor surprising either. (You can watch the trailer and get most of it, including the ending we’ve been expecting.)  Still, when you grade it on a curve and compare it to other movies made for Lifetime, Love on Repeat does look a lot better. It’s more interesting on a purely entertainment level than most of the even-blander, even-more-nondescript romcoms in that space, and the lead actors (Jen Lilley and Andrew Lawrence) are good enough to win us over by the end. Still, don’t go in there expecting much — on an absolute scale, it barely struggles to reach mediocrity.

  • Harlan County U.S.A. (1976)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2021) I’m a happily unionized worker and it bothers me that unions have become marginalized in North American society — surely it’s not that difficult to figure out that labour and owners have opposing objectives, and that organized labour is an essential counterweight to management power. I strongly suspect that part of the reason why union membership trends downward is that the great labour victories of the past have largely been forgotten and their gains taken for granted. In this light, documentaries such as Harlan County U.S.A. remain just as important now than upon release, as filmmaker Barbara Kopple documents an ongoing miners’ strike in Kentucky. It’s a rough affair — not only does the strike carry on for months, depriving miners of income, but the company hired goons to roughen up both the miners and the documentary crew. Guns are seen, gunshots are heard and eventually a miner is shot and dies. This is all presented cinema-vérité style, with archival footage and interviews within the community to provide additional context. The result is very effective, and documents a past struggle that’s far more universal than being a strike at a specific mine. Harlan County U.S.A. remains a landmark even today — it won an Oscar upon release, was added to the National Film Archive in 2010 and continues to resonate through a slick Criterion edition. The images may be raw and rough, but the message still carries through.

  • I Am Alfred Hitchcock (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2021) It’s nothing short of fascinating to see the public discourse on Alfred Hitchcock shifting in real time. His place among the great cinema auteurs is unquestionable, but recent years have seen a slew of allegations (some of them admittedly disputable) about his behaviour, allegations that do appear to confirm tendencies, rumours, quotes and outright visual evidence from one film to another. Hitchcock was, to put it simply, not so admirable on set or in dealing with his leading actresses — immensely controlling, outright remaking actresses into his portrait of an ideal woman, maybe even (if we’re to believe the worst accounts) an outright sexual abuser. It adds a lot to his portrait to know about these things, especially in an era where past behaviour is finally recognized as unacceptable and not just boys-of-the-time material. This being said, don’t expect such a radical re-imagining of Hitchcock in I Am Alfred Hitchcock. As with other films in the “I Am” series of documentaries, this one is largely sympathetic to its subject during its fast-forward view of his life and career that polishes the legend. While there is some acknowledgement of his issues, much of the film is an appreciation from directors, actors, relatives, and commentators (including TCM’s Ben Mankiewicz). Hitchcock’s penchant for self-promotion gets quite a mention, but the focus is often on his best-known films. The result is very much an introduction to the character — there’s not a lot of depth here, although it’s slightly more critical than other films of the series about more recent figures where friends and family take centre-stage. Hitchcock is long dead, his relatives aren’t numerous and the historical perspective allows for more distance. Still, if you want more, you will have to look elsewhere — and if you want the dirt, you’ll have to go back to the salacious The Girl (2012) in which Hitchcock is portrayed as a stalker-movie villain.

  • Boy Meets Girl (1938)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2021) I have a fondness for Hollywood movies satirizing Hollywood, but the ones from the 1930s will always have a special place in my heart — Hollywood was still giddy about itself back then, and a bunch of urbane screenwriters were still having fun selling the Dream Factory to the rest of America. Boy Meets Girl (while not strictly meeting the definition of Hollywood-spoofing-Hollywood, being an adaptation of a Broadway play) is one of the better such films of the era, thanks to its witty dialogue, jaded-but-not-cynical approach and having James Cagney in the lead role. Our two protagonists are screenwriters trying to keep their studio job while helping out a pregnant woman, and the film’s stage-bound origins can best be deduced by the number of sequences set in the studio executive’s office. The chaotic humour here is as fast as Cagney’s ability to rattle off dialogue, and the best moments of the film are impromptu improv sessions in which Cagney and his writing partner (Pat O’Brien, gamely keeping up) create new—if repetitive—variations on the old “boy meets girl” story. It’s all in good fun, with a fake over-the-top trailer clearly showing the film’s satirical bend. Marie Wilson is nothing short of adorable as the pregnant young woman that the protagonists are trying to help — and, more importantly, the beacon of sanity that makes the manic energy of the rest of the film mean something. Even acknowledging that I’m an easy audience for this kind of material, Boy Meets Girl is still a lot of fun to watch.

  • S.O.B. (1981)

    S.O.B. (1981)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2021) I’m not saying that Hollywood is a terrible place, but I am saying that you don’t see signers writing diss songs about their record labels, and you don’t see authors write tell-all novels (much) about the publishing world. But movies from writers and directors complaining about Hollywood? Ho boy, I hope you’ve got a week of free time because they keep piling up. One semi-classic case in point is Blake Edwards’ S.O.B., which follows a movie producer (played by Richard Mulligan) left suicidal by a spectacular flop. His comeback solution is to reshoot his ailing film as a soft-core musical featuring his glamorous wife in the nude. The meta-joke here is that he is based on Edwards, and the actress is played by Julie Andrews, who was Edwards’ wife and also had a squeaky-clean image. When she does appear nude, it’s as much a shock for audiences as for the film’s characters. S.O.B. is surprisingly mean-spirited, and it’s a measure of how much it’s intended as an insider’s critique that it focuses on a producer rather than the more public-facing actors or directors. Hollywood here is depicted as an uncaring, mercenary community of back-stabbers who don’t really care about others except for their success. It’s biting, which is made even worse by the matter-of-fact way in which it’s portrayed. The film got very mixed reviews upon release (with its script nominated for both an Oscar and a Razzie), but has aged quite well as a period piece that still has something to say. While not outright funny throughout, S.O.B. is decently amusing and finds its place somewhere alongside The Player and many other examples of Hollywood acidly commenting upon itself.

  • The Feminine Touch (1941)

    The Feminine Touch (1941)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2021) One of my favourite kinds of comedy, especially in the Classic Hollywood era, if when the entire premise of the film causes characters to act in counter-natural ways. The Feminine Touch has that as a driving principle: the idea that an academic working on a book about jealousy would be blithely unable to be jealous, even despite ample provocations from his wife. The story does get more complex when other characters are introduced with non-mutual infatuations for other characters. Notable players here include Don Ameche as a comic/romantic lead playing the academic author, Rosalind Russell as his scheming wife trying to get a reaction out of him, Van Heflin as a romantic pretender, and Kay Francis as the fourth point in this romantic quadrangle. While The Feminine Touch is more charming and amusing than outright funny, it does culminate into a rather spectacular scuffle between the leads, and that’s a nice capper to an entertaining film. There’s a pretty good bit involving Van Heflin sporting an uncharacteristic beard and wolfish attitude. The material here is better than usual for a romantic comedy, and if you’re a fan of any of those actors (if not all four of them, because this is a seriously good cast), then The Feminine Touch is a can’t miss.

  • Behind Office Doors (1931)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2021) So, what did happen Behind Office Doors in the early 1930s? Unsurprisingly, more or less the same as ninety years later, as this Pre-Code drama follows the story of a competent woman letting a man take all the credit for her work, in-between some workplace hanky-panky, quite a bit of unreciprocated lust and succession shenanigans — the office environment of the 1930s being surprisingly understandable to 2020s denizens. Mary Astor stars as the protagonist of the tale and bears the brunt of the systemic sexism of the time — albeit not without a fight and earning considerable sympathy from audiences. There’s a fascinating dichotomy at play in Behind Office Doors (as in many of the 1930s films trying to discuss inequality between the sexes): a clear acknowledgement that this is wrong for the woman, on the one hand, while fully playing into the inevitability of it happening and very little consequence for those men who take advantage of that system (usually romantically or should I say, “romantically”). So, if you’re expecting our female lead to become the company’s girl boss in the end, temper your expectations — she gets the man who gets the company, and that’s the extent of the final triumph. Astor is good, but the other actors (including the male leads) are stuck in dull, unlikable characters. The Pre-Code nature of the film is elusive — the dialogue is slightly spicier, and while the film does get to acknowledge the loutishness of the males, it doesn’t really demonstrate it. Behind Office Doors is interesting if your expectations are in check, but it’s not really a shining beacon of Pre-Code romantic comedy.

  • The Brothers Rico (1957)

    The Brothers Rico (1957)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2021) As the 1940s moved into the 1950s, there was a not-so-subtle shift in film noir — the glumness of the post-WW2 years was slowly being replaced by an awareness of the pervasiveness of organized crime. High-profile congressional investigations created a mythology of gangsters that was quickly capitalized upon by Hollywood. That’s how film noir shifted slightly from smoking private investigators looking into cases of murder that revealed corruption, to a variety of tales involving the mob versus ordinary citizens. In more outlying cases, noir became cinema-verité inspired by real events, with people tut-tutting how crime did not pay. The Brothers Rico feels as if it’s at the junction between noir and crime thrillers — it’s about a retired mob accountant helping his brother get out of the country all the while avoiding going back to a life of crime as he tries to adopt a child. Director Phil Karlson wasn’t a great stylist, but he could move plot pieces with efficiency and, thanks to him, the film works its way to a slow boil that helps explain the interventionist arc of the protagonist. The clearest difference between the chosen tone of this family-versus-mob thriller versus more typical film noir is found in the somewhat upbeat conclusion, in which the protagonist is allowed to go back to a normal life after dipping back into illicit activities. Top-tier noirs are known for the ineluctable nature of fate, but The Brothers Rico plays it audience-friendly. Not a complaint — but it explains why The Brothers Rico, while enjoyable, is not often mentioned as part of the classics.