Month: May 2021

  • Dracula A.D. 1972 (1972)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2021) It’s amusing that the then-modern Dracula A.D. 1972 is now retro-dated even in its title, but let’s not underestimate both the concept of letting Dracula loose in then-hip times, and the fun of being able to travel back to the 1970s thanks to a film meant to be cutting-edge. The intention from Hammer Studios was to update their series of Dracula movies by moving it to the present and reboot the franchise. It sort-of-worked in that Dracula (Christopher Lee) here infamously meets hippies, and that it helped launch another film in Hammer’s Dracula series: The Satanic Rites of Dracula. Alas, that next film ended up being the nail in the series. But time has generally been kind to Dracula A.D. 1972: What was then a cash-grabbing novelty courting young viewers is now about as exotic as a Victorian-era Hammer horror movie, the kind of film that would feel like a period homage if it was done today. It’s still very basic when it comes to plot — don’t expect much here in terms of filmmaking quality or story refinements. Nearly all of its interest comes from the early-1970s atmosphere and the dislocation of seeing a Victorian monster rampaging through post-Swinging Sixties London. But that’s more than good enough.

  • Some Came Running (1958)

    Some Came Running (1958)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2021) For a rather low-key drama, it’s interesting to see how often Some Came Running comes up in classic film discussions. The facts are that this is a film directed by Vincente Minelli and adapted from a doorstop best-selling novel, that it starred Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Shirley MacLaine, that good chunks of it were shot on location in a small middle-America town and that it was an example of widescreen colour cinematography at a time when Hollywood dramas usually went for black-and-white Academy ratio. That last factor does help explain the film’s longevity, as it remains more accessible on modern widescreen colour displays than many of its contemporaries. The story is small-potato stuff, as a writer-turned-veteran (Sinatra) returns to his hometown after a long absence, with a loose woman (MacLaine) in tow, and reunites with his brother (Arthur Kennedy), later befriending a likable gambler (Martin). While the original novel is reportedly 1,200 pages long, this stripped-down adaptation fits everything in slightly more than two hours and seems almost lackadaisical in its drive to the ending. But a host of reasons explain why the film stuck in the popular imagination. For one thing, it got five Academy Award nominations (including MacLaine’s first). It was the first screen pairing of Sinatra and Martin, prefiguring the Brat Pack series of movies they’d do together. Its location shooting comes complete with wild tales of fans mobbing Sinatra, wild nights of partying with Martin, and made such an impression that you can still tour Madison, Indiana to see the shooting locations. Minelli’s widescreen colour direction was much admired among fellow directors. None of this really improves the middle-of-the-road impression left by Some Came Running, but sometimes it’s instructive to realize why a film endures… especially if it doesn’t have to do with its quality.

  • La vie d’Adèle [Blue is the Warmest Color] (2013)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, May 2021) I did try to watch La vie d’Adèle a few years ago, lured in by the promise of an award-winning movie that also included significant adult content. Alas, I couldn’t make it to the end — even the lure of plentiful sex and nudity couldn’t compensate for the endless three-hour running time and deathly slow pacing. Writer-director Abdellatif Kechiche’s film, adapted from a French graphic novel, follows a young woman through tumultuous years at the end of her teenage years and the beginning of her twenties. It’s largely a story about her relationship with another woman, but not entirely — as the running time suggests, there’s plenty of room for tangents and details, even if the overall plot complexity of La vie d’Adèle could have comfortably fit in half its running time. Much was made of the film’s incredibly graphic lesbian scenes, but in the context of the film, they play as yet another boring directorial indulgence that keeps the narrative standing still. Considering that this is not the first Kechiche film that I bounced off from (I couldn’t make it very long in Vénus noire, another interminable drama far less interesting than its premise), it’s fair to say that he’s working on a kind of cinema that’s not to my liking in general: a kind of naturalistic, observant, mediative drama that I find trivial in most cases and actively irritating in the worst. I’ll grant that he’s clearly no amateur—he knows what he’s doing, and gets his desired effects—if nothing else, the performances he gets from Léa Seydoux and Adèle Exarchopoulos are exceptional. But goodness gracious is La vie d’Adèle boring. I made it to the end thanks to a liberal use of a second screen, and I’m not eager to come anywhere close to it ever again.

  • The Return (2020)

    The Return (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2021) At first, The Return looks like a fairly traditional haunted-house thing — as a young man returns to his childhood home to clean it out after his father’s death and bizarre things start happening to him and the two women who accompany him (one is his girlfriend; you won’t be surprised to learn that the other wants to be. ). There’s plenty of spookiness to go around, and if the scary beats aren’t exactly new, writer-director B J Verot makes decent use of a small budget in creating an atmosphere. Then there’s the last-act genre shift into Science Fiction (which can be safely predicted by the fact that the protagonist is brilliant, his parents were scientists and there’s a whiteboard filled with equations earlier in the film) that either feels daring or redundant depending on your tolerance for genre-blending. It’s not quite a case of genre rug-pulling considering that the SF bits are announced well in advance, and the horror intention of The Return doesn’t really let up. Still, it does give an impression of a film that blends its elements to puree without considering if they actually go well together. There’s a more serious charge to be made about the film’s languid pacing that pushes back nearly everything interesting in the last act (perhaps out of a misguided attempt to keep the genre twist for as long as possible). The bigger problem with a Science Fictional twist is that it opens up the story into possibilities that seem under-exploited. If you’re going to throw time travel in your haunted house story (and The Return is far from the first to go there), then the possibilities of the story multiply, and so do the promising story points left unused. While The Return does have a slight low-budget horror appeal, it’s ultimately disappointing in how it chooses to develop its early moments. Not terrible, but not that good and ultimately a bit bland because of its slowness, despite an unusual side jump into SF.

  • One Night in Bangkok (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2021) How hard to you have to work in order to mess up a premise like “Mark Dacascos plays an assassin who forcibly retains the services of a cab driver while killing his way through a night spent in Bangkok?” Well, not to belabour the point but you just have to watch One Night in Bangkok to find out. While taking advantage of Bangkok’s nighttime neon lighting, the film remains an inert attempt at an action thriller, mishandling nearly every element at its disposal. Writer-director Wych Kaosayananda certainly does not redeem himself for Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever (2002) nor The Driver (2019) here — his capacity to build a film remains doubtful no matter whether you’re focusing on the overall story or moment-to-moment emotion. (I’ll grant him a better-than-usual visual sense, however.)  Unable to distance itself from how its premise seems blatantly stolen from Collateral, this is a film that drags on and on without much of a point. Whatever narrative twists the film sets up for itself are blindingly obvious, and it doesn’t culminate into anything feeling like a climax. The only one who escapes from this with his reputation intact is Dacascos, who keeps hovering at the edge between direct-to-streaming stalwart and headlining action star. It’s not a bad thing that he’s the best thing out of a dull movie — but it would be better if he was one good thing about a good movie. Make One Night in Bangkok a layover — nothing to see here.

  • Lock Up (1989)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, May 2021) Oh, hey, look at that: one of the lesser-known Sylvester Stallone movies among the many, many ones he starred in during his 1980s heydays. Lock Up doesn’t often come up in conversations —chances are that if you talk about the “Stallone prison movie,” people are more apt to remember Tango & Cash. Or the more recent Escape Plan and its two sequels. But if Lock Up was and remains a very generic vehicle for a limited actor, it’s not that hard to watch. The basics are simple, as Stallone plays a prisoner who has to deal with a sadistic warden who personally hates him. Various prison-movie clichés are thrown into an overall dramatic arc of resistance and revenge. If you don’t really remember the film a few days later, that’s not unusual: It’s one expected beat after another, with director John Flynn struggling to make it distinct (and working against Stallone’s filmography, which includes much stronger examples of similar films). But it’s executed in palatable fashion, with a few high points culminating in an electric chair fake-out. Donald Sutherland plays the antagonist with energetic relish, bringing another highlight to the film. Those who like Stallone will like Lock Up better than others — no matter what you think about the film, it remains another of Stallone’s star vehicles.

  • Soul Food (1997)

    Soul Food (1997)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, May 2021) The overarching thesis in Soul Food is one I can get behind: No problem in life can’t be solved by food. Dysfunctional family? Food. Relationship problems? Food. Sudden absence of the matriarch? Food. Police arrest? Food. Financial strains? Food. Knife fight? Food. Kitchen fire? Food. Well, Food and a united family, which goes back to food in the film’s mythology. (Or rather: food, family and a stash of money.)  No, Soul Food is not meant to be that profound. But as a depiction of a family threatening to come apart absent the Sunday ritual of bonding over food, it’s well-intentioned, pleasant and heartwarming to watch. There’s a good sense of the relationships between the characters, and the actors (headlined by Vanessa Williams, Vivica Fox and Nia Long) go rather well in inhabiting the roles. Writer-director George Tillman Jr. has a clear idea of where he’s going, and the film finds a happy medium between comedy and drama in the final stretch. Like food itself, Soul Food is familiar, unchallenging and a bit heavy on the grease but sometimes exactly what you need.

  • The New Corporation: The Unfortunately Necessary Sequel (2020)

    The New Corporation: The Unfortunately Necessary Sequel (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2021) Il waited a surprisingly long time between recording The New Corporation: The Unfortunately Necessary Sequel on my DVR and actually watching it. The original 2003 documentary The Corporation was good enough to stick in mind even after a few years, and I knew I had to be in the right mood for another meaty denunciation of the evils of unbridled capitalism. In the right frame of mind, however, this unfortunately necessary sequel delivers: There’s still a lot to say about the amorality of corporations and, now, the ways in which they attempt to masquerade their true nature. It’s probably important to note, for those slower-yet-delusional students in the back, that The New Corporation does not necessarily advocate for an end to capitalism and a forceful conversion of all corporations to cooperatives: it criticizes uncontrolled capitalism and corporations, which unfortunately seems far too common in today’s world. Left to its own devices, repeat writers-director Joel Bakan and Jennifer Abbott, the corporation will act in its own interests: it’s only through government regulation that we can ensure effective restraint and progress. That’s hardly a novel or unreasonable thesis — as we have seen time and time again the demonstration of such corporate excesses. But that’s repeating what the original film had to say. This sequel takes a look at the last seventeen years and focuses on a few growing tendencies as specifically troublesome. Social washing is the first of their targets, as corporations spend a lot of money and effort to convince citizens that they are responsible, moral actors when they clearly are not. A second target is the private sector’s takeover (presented as virtuous) of public functions, often schematizing public good as another revenue stream that can be delivered without understanding the reasons behind that service. (The demonstration of education being reduced to following a flowchart was… troubling.)  Alas, The New Corporation does get more scattershot as it goes on, identifying the COVID crisis as yet another means through which corporate influence grows. It ends, as most fire-alarm documentaries should, with a glimmer of hope — evidence of political power pushing back, not solely as evanescent populist movements but as durable power. (As the film points out, these progressive reformers get re-elected.)  In many ways, this sequel doesn’t have the impact of the first film — absent the corporation-as-psychiatric-patient gimmick of the original, it feels less focused and I suspect the pandemic threw a wrench in the filmmakers’ original plans. On the other hand, the absence of an easy metaphor ends up making the film more credible, because you’re not distracted by a facile analogy. I’m happy that a follow-up exists, not for the evils it shows and the dispiriting trends it announces, but because it means we still have watchdogs to warn us. Of course, the unescapable irony is that the filmmakers had to partner with some of Canada’s biggest and least trustworthy corporations to do so… but if it can make you feel better, you can refer to the first film and Michael Moore’s wry observation that capitalists will sell you the rope they can be hung with.

  • Dog Days (2018)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2021) Okay, so hear me out: Dog Days is a movie about a day in the life of dogs and their owners… need I say more? Okay, how about this: Dog Days is a movie made of five shorter movies about a day in the life of dogs and their owners, with subplots criss-crossing each other across Los Angeles. Does that make it better? For a specific audience, it sure does: Dog Days is clearly meant as an ensemble romantic comedy featuring dogs and their owners in multiple configurations meant to be recognizable by a large public. As a cat owner, I’m not that well-suited to assess the result in its full dogginess. But I can testify that the result is watchable if hardly memorable. Director Ken Marino delivers what’s expected of him here: a light, fun, occasionally poignant (or is that emotionally manipulative?) film that can act as filler in-between more substantial fare. This is not necessarily a put-down: Dog Days is the film that many people will want to see, and it will deliver on its promise.

  • Army of the Dead (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Netflix Streaming, May 2021) On paper, Army of the Dead sounds pretty good: blending a casino heist film with a post-apocalyptic zombie-infested setting is reasonably newish and certainly a great fit for writer-director Zack Snyder’s filmography. Unfortunately, there’s always a “but…” or two to any Snyder project, and this one is certainly no exception. The core of the film is fine — present Las Vegas as a zombie-infested zone on the verge of being nuked, assemble a team hyped to be able to do the heist, drop them in the zone, have them fight out various dangers, suffer the inevitable betrayal, whittle their numbers down and have the survivors narrowly escape the impending nuclear explosion. Good bones on that story, and Snyder sometimes knows how to make it look great. It’s the rest that doesn’t quite work. After a dynamite opening sequence cramming an entire film’s worth of exposition (and two or three low-budget movies’ production expenses) in five minutes, Army of the Dead gets down to business and almost immediately gets weird. And I don’t mean weird as in quirky, atmospheric or eccentric, but weird as in indulging in excess, puzzling tangents, extraneous bits of worldbuilding and elements that are far less interesting than they should have been (namely, the “Alphas” smart zombies). The most charitable explanation that has been provided for all this is that Army of the Dead is the first chunk of a more expansive imaginary universe that may expand to include aliens, robots, time-travel, parallel universes and (depressingly, once again…) a complete zombie takeover of the Earth. Maybe. [October 2021: First spinoff Army of Thieves, which I preferred to Army of the Dead, offers some support for this theory.]  But it does make the film a bit vexing to watch, as its overinflated running time keeps diverging in tangents. (But not all tangents are bad: the tiger zombie? Terrific.)  Other areas of the film are disappointing for more familiar reasons: Snyder likes gore a lot more than I do, and his sense of story is often deficient — witness the dumb ways team members are taken out. But at least we’re on more familiar ground with those issues. At least things are handled with a decent amount of energy and some appropriate actors in key roles. Dave Bautista is rarely less than charismatic and this time is no exception, Matthias Schweighöfer is a bit of an audience stand-in between obvious action heroes, and while Tig Notaro was added to the film during post-production (replacing a problematic actor via CGI and careful editing), she ends up being one of the clear highlights. It all adds up to a film that delivers the goods, but is held back in many ways from going beyond that. Worse than that is the feeling that Army of the Dead, like far too many corporate products of the 2010s and beyond, is incomplete by design — we may get the full story later if the vagaries of the market allow for it, or we may never do. (Or by the time it’s delivered, it may have mutated into something else.) But so it is in today’s mass-market movie industry: have a bite now, stay hungry for more. Just once I’d like a story with a resolution, a zombie film where they’re all destroyed in the end, a Snyder film I could just enjoy without going “but…”

  • I Propose We Never See Each Other Again After Tonight (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2021) The plot summary of I Propose We Never See Each Other Again After Tonight does sound like a mad lib challenge with a Canadian twist: “During a [snowstorm] in [Winnipeg], a young man of [Mennonite] origins and a young woman of [Filipino] origins meet and start a romance that is threatened by [infidelity] and [bad communication].”  So, boom: you have your keywords… now let’s see the script. Romantic comedy is a tricky genre: it has strong conventions that can feel like a straightjacket, but it also offers a strong framework on which to hang memorable characters, witty dialogue, demonstrative set-pieces and a strong feeling of satisfaction when it’s executed well. So how well does writer-director Sean Garrity do? Not too badly, actually. While limited by low-budget production means, he gets mileage out of the Winnipeg location, tries a few things with his script and gets rather good performances out of his leads. The title comes from a first act plot beat in which, after meeting cute, both talk their hearts out over drink having agreed that they would never see each other again. Fate has other plans, however, and before long we’re in more traditional romcom territory with a relationship in the balance. Highlights include a good supporting cast of characters to bring comedy in the first half of the film, then provide some bad advice that somewhat inelegantly fuels much of the film’s second-half drama. The film can also boast of one of the best sex scenes in recent memory — not so much for nudity or eroticism as for moving the plot forward and providing a showcase for the actors, as the characters keep talking and create a few fresh issues for themselves during consummation. Of the two leads, it’s Hera Nalam who walks away having made the strongest impression, but this may be a reflection of a showier role than for Kristian Jordan, who plays things in a more subdued fashion. While having plenty of room for improvement, I Propose We Never See Each Other Again After Tonight does get one thing right, and it’s to create sympathy for both the protagonists and the film itself. It’s an underdog all right, and it’s easy to like.

  • I Accuse! (1958)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2021) The Dreyfuss affair is one of those all-time classic scandals, blending treason, false accusations, antisemitism and (later on) public embarrassment for the French government, its military, the exile of a well-known writer and much more. It lasted roughly twelve years from 1894 to 1906 and led to several films, including the 1937 Academy Award-winning The Life of Émile Zola, and the somewhat lesser-known film I Accuse! two decades later. There are a few differences between the two — the 1958 film is presented in colour, focuses far more on Dreyfuss than Zola, and stars José Ferrer rather than Paul Muni. Simply changing the performer does a lot — while Muni’s specialty was being a chameleon as per the requirements of his role, Ferrer (a Francophile who also played such icons as Cyrano de Bergerac and Toulouse-Lautrec) is a far more distinctive presence: a star rather than a character actor. He also, significantly, directed the film from a script by Gore Vidal. This (plus the incorporation of new information about the case that was not available in the 1930s) gives I Accuse! a sufficient distance from the previous film to make it a worthwhile watch. It is, admittedly, a bit detached and overlong at times — Vidal’s cerebral screenplay plus Ferrer’s journeyman direction doesn’t quite ignite the material. But it’s still watchable without trouble, even if a more definitive recounting of the entire scandal, free from Production Code restraints and lingering national embarrassment, still awaits.

  • Enter the Ninja (1981)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2021) If you want to track down where the popularity of ninjas comes from, maybe you can follow the trail to a B-movie ninja craze in the 1980s, and you can probably pin down the source of that craze to 1981’s Enter the Ninja, a cheap Golan-Globus action movie that took full advantage of accommodations by the movie-friendly Marcos regime to film in the Philippines. The plot is a thin affair, with a ninja-trained American having to defend a friend’s farm from attackers. But that story is merely meant to justify the fight sequences, so as long as good guys and bad guys are scheduled to be at the same place and the same time, then the screenwriters can just call it a day. Unfortunately, we’re not talking Hong Kong-grade martial arts here — this is all fairly basic material, choreographed without much cinematic flair or storytelling sense. Enter the Ninja also has an unpolished first movie’s disadvantage, in that the filmmakers didn’t quite know what worked and what didn’t, and so limp along with substandard fight scenes when compared to later, more self-conscious works. It’s watchable only by genre fans that have an interest in historical work. What’s undeniable is the commercial success of the film — it directly spawned a trilogy of ever-wilder Ninja movies, as well as a few follow-ups (like the very similar American Ninja) and scores of imitators sensing that there was something to do with martial arts in a B-movie context. Not very many classics came out of that subgenre (it’s worth noting that the boom in prestige martial arts films in 2000s Hollywood cinema was far more influenced by 1990s Hong Kong action movies than 1980s low-end Hollywood) but it did create a few enjoyable B-movies, so that’s something.

  • Daddy’s Little Girls (2007)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2021) Every so often, writer-director Tyler Perry gets out of his Madea-adjacent comedy comfort zone and tackles a straight-up drama, often leaving himself out of the cast. Such is the case with Daddy’s Little Girls, a small-scale romantic drama where a down-on-his-luck blue-collar single father (Idris Elba) comes in personal contact with a high-powered lawyer (Gabrielle Union) at a time of personal crisis. It’s not meant to be a grandiose movie, which fits Perry’s fast-and-direct filmmaking style quite well. But the flaws in Perry’s style are also more glaring when he’s not playing the class clown, and so the story is brought down by caricatural antagonists. It’s not enough for the protagonist to be in a custody battle with an ex-wife; she’s got to be an enabler to a violent drug dealer who beats the kids and threatens them into selling drugs at school. So, yeah, so much for “small-scale.”  Fortunately, the film does better when it focuses on staider stuff — the parenting bond between the protagonist and his three girls, and the cross-class romance between the two lead characters. Perry is constantly gifted with great casting, and it’s hard to resist the Elba/Union pairing here with such charismatic performers. This doesn’t necessarily make Daddy’s Little Girl a good movie, but it’s tolerable — and of greater interest to those tracking down Perry’s filmography as one of the least distinctive films in his body of work.

  • The V.I.P.s (1963)

    The V.I.P.s (1963)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2021) In the end, I expected too much from The V.I.P.s. Admittedly, it’s easy to be seduced by the all-star cast and the simple premise: As fog envelops London Airport and prevents departures, an ensemble cast of characters has a last chance to resolve their problems. How can you resist a cast headlined by Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Orson Welles, Maggie Smith, Rod Taylor, Louis Jourdan and many others? But in the execution, the film falls flat — the rhythm is not a match with the sense of urgency that the characters are supposed to feel, the subplots scatter, the drama doesn’t build up and the pieces don’t come together to make something more than a collection of subplots. (Had they added a mad bomber à la Airport, mayyybe we’d have something to pull the strings together.)  The characters aren’t the only ones stuck here — viewers may tap their feet often during the nearly two-hour running time. This being said, it’s not a complete waste of time either — the accumulation of familiar actors has something interesting, and there is at least a minimum of drama going on, even disguised under British restraint. It does, if nothing else, offer the chance to hang out in an elite airline boarding lounge in the early 1960s, which is not a bad privilege. But even that may outstay its welcome in the end.