Month: May 2021

  • The Last Party (1993)

    The Last Party (1993)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, May 2021) Maybe incredibly self-indulgent, maybe a reflection of a specific time in American society, The Last Party follows a young Robert Downey Jr. as he pokes around the 1992 presidential campaigns, attends both the Democratic and Republican national conventions, and makes scattered social commentary. Maybe there’s an alternate universe in which Downey becomes a socially-conscious satirical filmmaker like his father rather than Iron Man — or turns to political commentary as an alternative to acting. What that would have been like can be glimpsed in this film, although Downey often chooses the role of a provocative dilettante rather than an authentic commentator. The documentary footage is a tour of American politics circa 1992, with both Bush and Clinton popping up alongside party establishment figures and showbiz rabble-rousers such as Spike Lee and Oliver Stone. It’s a strange mix of entertainment and politics from a time when we thought the two were separate. Downey clearly has democratic sympathies but takes potshots at both parties in questioning the status quo, although don’t expect much more than skin-deep aimless dissatisfaction as a guiding thesis. The result doesn’t have anything deep or new to communicate, but the time-capsule aspect of The Last Party can certainly be entertaining. We twenty-first century viewers aren’t necessarily smarter in looking at the film nearly three decades later, but we know how some things turned out and some never changed — Downey almost torched his entire career over addiction issues and re-became a superstar by an incredible fluke. One of the main American political parties went insane and dealing with that means that scant progress can be achieved. Everyone — literally everyone can now point a camera at themselves and spout inane platitudes that are accessible to the entire world. Are we better off? Let’s check again in thirty years.

  • The Single Moms Club (2014)

    The Single Moms Club (2014)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2021) For all of the well-deserved criticism Tyler Perry gets about his work as a writer-director, there’s a lot to be said about his willingness to feature female protagonists, focus on their issues and propose on female-led casts. Some will say that this is a winning commercial strategy for the kinds of films he makes, and while it’s hard to disagree with that, the results still speak for themselves. The Single Moms Club finds him in mostly-dramatic mode, avoiding the pitfalls of the Madea-led comedies to focus on five single mothers brought together by an incident of school vandalism. Forced together, they find some strength in leaguing against their problems. While this could have gone in several directions, those who are familiar with Tyler’s work won’t be particularly surprised or disappointed to find out that the result is more schematic and melodramatic than anything else. The problems confronted by the ensemble cast of protagonists are not particularly novel or wittily presented: Perry is into brute-force melodrama and one can almost see him schematize his characters’ issues based on a list of the top ten complaints by single mothers. The cast is largely but not exclusively black, with the five titular single moms being split in various ethnicities — and with a few class issues as well. Perry’s streak in working with good and interesting actors continues here, with Nia Long, Amy Smart and Terry Crews being part of the cast. (Meanwhile, Perry also has a supporting role as a likable character.)  The Single Moms Club is not great cinema — at best, it’s a serviceable daytime-TV film that, to its credit, believes in people acting kindly and has the decency to end on a positive note. (Although pairing up every single female character with a man undermines the strong-independent-woman thing that the film may have gone for.) For Perry fans, it’s a less flashy example of a routine kind of work for him — albeit one that does show his continued sympathy for women’s issues and his ability to work with actresses. It may not get much respect, but it’s not something to dismiss too quickly.

  • Midnight Movie (2008)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, May 2021) The only way to get me interested in a slasher film is if the slashing is supernatural by nature, and that’s exactly what Midnight Movie goes for in a bit of metatextual invention. Here, a midnight screening of a slasher film gets more interesting when the killer escapes the film and begins slaughtering people in the theatre. But what could, maybe, have been developed in a comedy poking fun at slasher conventions remains bargain-basement slasher horror in execution: there isn’t much here on a moment-to-moment basis to distinguish Midnight Movie from many, many other similar films, and whatever humour or cleverness the film goes for simply falls flat. So many opportunities lost here — it’s almost as if the script goes out of its way to neuter its ideas, and writer-director Jack Messitt makes sure to execute it with as little distinction as possible. The spark of the premise goes out quickly, and what’s left are not-so-good actors doing their best with gore effects. An underwhelming ending caps it all off as something not really worth the bother. Sure, I was interested in what Midnight Movie had to offer. But it didn’t have anything much to offer.

  • Transylvania 6–5000 (1985)

    Transylvania 6–5000 (1985)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, May 2021) Silly by design, Transylvania 6–5000 is another attempt to put some comedy into typical horror tropes. Don’t expect anything close to Young Frankenstein, obviously — this is much dumber fare, and it’s scattershot enough to aim at the entire stable of Universal monsters rather than just one target. The humour doesn’t fly high: in fact, it’s probably more accurate to say that the film is more amusing (in a somewhat undisciplined, juvenile way) than actually funny. Still, writer-director Rudy De Luca gets a few chuckles. The title of the film alludes to a song that shows up as a phone ring, and a few of the exchanges are funny. But perhaps the most impressive thing about Transylvania 6–5000 is the cast, which bats far above that kind of film: Jeff Goldblum and Ed Begley Jr. in the two lead roles, plus Geena Davis as a sex-crazed vampire (in a PG-rated film, alas) with such notables as Jeff Jones and Michael Richards in smaller roles. All of them somewhat pre-celebrity, but all of them paid (as the film’s production history goes) by Dow Chemical Yugoslavian currency that they were unable to repatriate directly, and so paid for a film co-production. It’s a weird production history for a middling kind of comedy. I liked it mildly, but I can certainly understand if Transylvania 6–5000 strikes others as unbearable.

  • The Times of Harvey Milk (1984)

    The Times of Harvey Milk (1984)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2021) Film has the power to make filmgoers decades apart feel the same emotions, but there’s always something manipulative in fiction creating strong emotional responses. While documentaries are also manipulative (let’s not fool ourselves), they do present facts that can be checked as part of history, and the righteous anger they can cause even generations later can be sharpened or tempered by looking up the rest of the real story that the documentary could not capture at the time. Academy Award-winning The Times of Harvey Milk focuses on the eponymous historical figure — a San Francisco community organizer who became the first openly gay elected official in California’s history. What made Milk a historical figure, however, was his assassination—along with San Francisco’s mayor—by another city councillor (the sole opposing vote to a piece of legislation proposed by Milk) not even a year after his election. Nearly forty years later, The Times of Harvey Milk still has the power to infuriate, even if you’ve seen the Sean Penn-starring 2008 biopic or are otherwise familiar with Milk’s life and death. The film clearly comes from a place of mournful fury, featuring historical footage and interviews. Milk, featured in a generous amount of footage by director Rob Epstein, comes across as a charming man, dedicated to improving matters for his community and a politician motivated by progress rather than more cynical matters. His assassination may be a foregone conclusion, but it still comes as a shock and creates authentic anger. What today’s viewers know that is missing from the documentary, however, is the rest of the story: Convicted killer Dan White, after successfully using the infamous “Twinkie Defense,” served five of a seven-year sentence and was released in 1984. After serving a year’s parole in Los Angeles and being publicly asked to stay away from San Francisco, he still returned, was unable to rebuild his life and killed himself in late 1985 — something that The Times of Harvey Milk could not anticipate. Few viewers of the film will mourn White, whether they saw the film in the late 1980s or now.

  • Películas para no dormir: La habitación del niño [The Baby’s Room] (2006)

    Películas para no dormir: La habitación del niño [The Baby’s Room] (2006)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, May 2021) One of the advantages of French-Canadian TV is that we get a lot of obscure, out-of-the-mainstream movies — as long as they have a French dub. So it is that made-for-TV Spanish film The Baby’s Room wouldn’t necessarily be something you’d expect to have ready access to — but here it is. It does help that the film is a decent one that warrants distribution outside Spain: writer-director Álex de la Iglesia doesn’t quite know how to structure all of his ideas in a coherent, satisfying whole, but his film is at its most effective during the suspense sequences that are strung along with the script. My main issue with the film is that it seems to be an improvisational exercise rather than a sustained story with an effective progression, reinforcing themes and a coherent tone. Maybe it’s a baby-monitor thriller; maybe it’s a home-intruder story, no wait, maybe it’s a parallel world with a sordid backstory. This is really where the writer needed help in structuring the material. Fortunately, de la Iglesia is much better as a director, making effective use of limited means to create decent horror sequences. The Baby’s Room is not all that original and the ending predictably falls flat without a sustained buildup, but the film itself is generally better than most monster-of-the-week horror movies. It’s not such a surprise that it would travel widely — in English, the film is most readily available as part of a DVD box-set called “Films to Keep You Awake” collecting the original run of Spanish TV movies.

  • Tintin et le mystère de la Toison d’Or (1961)

    Tintin et le mystère de la Toison d’Or (1961)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Fourth or fifth viewing, On TV, May 2021) Revisiting Tintin et le mystère de la Toison d’Or is like diving deep into my childhood – the film was a regular staple of French-Canadian TV (especially at Christmas time) and I found myself recognizing a lot more of the dialogue and plot beats than I initially expected. For Tintin fans, this film is noteworthy for being the first of the two live-action Tintin films of the early 1960s featuring Jean-Pierre Talbot as Tintin and Georges Wilson as Captain Haddock. Both were original stories, inspired by the comic books but not adapted from any specific story. As a middle-aged viewer, what’s most striking about the film is its strong atmosphere, as it takes place in circa-1960 Turkey and Greece, with a largely nautical adventure focused on a ramshackle freighter with a backstory suggesting a wild adventure in a Central American coup d’état. The setting is fascinating in its own right, and it’s still amazing to see how the cartoon characters are instantly recognizable (and believable) with live actors. Some younger viewers may not make sense of Tintin et le mystère de la Toison d’Or, but I liked the revisit a lot.

  • The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962)

    The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2021) There’s a recognizable thematic ambition to The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner that’s rather easy to admire — a blend of class metaphors literalized in individual sports, a coming-of-age story that results in quiet rebellion rather than meek acquiescence and a portrait of the dismal state of the United Kingdom in-between postwar austerity and the Swinging Sixties. You can read analyses about the film and nod in recognition of the cleverness of the film’s intentions. But all of this fails when the execution isn’t particularly gripping — this is British neorealism at its dreariest, without an inkling of humour or panache. Director Tony Richardson’s take on the New Wave of cinema sweeping Europe feels as basic as it comes, and you have to like that style in order to get invested in the result. As a result, my appreciation for The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner tends to be more intellectual than personal — I can contextualize it as an important piece of 1960s British cinema, but I will almost certainly never recommend it over the other far more entertaining films of the era.

  • Pajama Party (1964)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2021) The Beach Party series is wild from beginning to end, so noting that fourth entry Pajama Party is only loosely related to the previous three, that it welcomes Buster Keaton to the series (playing a Native Indian stereotype, alas) and that it features an extraterrestrial invader who falls in love with a beach girl is really just par for the course. The leather-clad bikers are back, and so are Anette Funicello (in a leading role) and Frankie Avalon (in a distant supporting one). Bobbi Shaw plays a one-joke “ya-ya” Swedish bombshell, Dorothy Lamour pops up as a ghost of teenage musical comedies past, the popularity of the series clearly steers it toward a more deliberate approach, and throughout it all you can see the formalization of 1960s teenage culture. The humour in Pajama Party is now silly and quaint, but not necessarily terrible — it’s kind of fun to hang out on the beach with teenagers with the period fashions and music and without big problems. (Well, other than an impending alien invasion, although that’s dealt with fairly innocuously.) The Beach Party films are a package deal anyway — like one of them and there’s a chance you’ll like the others, but they’re best not consumed in rapid succession.

  • Sound of Metal (2019)

    Sound of Metal (2019)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2021) While the “musician going deaf” plot device isn’t original to Sound of Metal (It’s All Gone Pete Tong did it in a semi-comic fashion back in 2004), no other film has quite captured the experience in as much eloquent detail. Our protagonist (a great performance by Riz Ahmed) is a drummer in a heavy metal duo, living a hardscrabble life in-between constant touring and meager earnings. Alas, he hasn’t been taking care of his hearing and as Sound of Metal begins, the sonic soundscape of the film is enough to tell us something is very wrong: tinnitus is the least of his worries, as he’s on an irreversible slide to deafness — he can only prolong what remains of his hearing, not reverse the inevitable. The character-driven plotting doesn’t show him taking the news calmly, or rationally — by the middle of the film, his self-destructive behaviour means that he’s without hearing, without a girlfriend, making enemies in his new community and unable to pay for the implants that would bring back some hearing. Much of Sound of Metal is a journey through grief, complications, sudden disability and addictive behaviour, and at very last half-acceptance of new circumstances. This is bolstered by aggressive sound editing trying to give most viewers the experience of being in the protagonist’s situation, all the way to an ending that acknowledges that there’s no going back. It’s not necessarily an easy film to watch: the protagonist’s personality is not one for easy solutions and calm acceptance. Writer/director Darius Marder’s approach and cinematography are both gritty and impressionistic, removing the usual distancing mechanisms that Hollywood often uses to talk about disabilities. Sound of Metal all wraps up into an impressive audiovisual impact, amply deserving of its Best Picture Academy Award nomination. You may not want to watch it more than once, though.

  • White Lightning (1973)

    White Lightning (1973)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2021) Years before Smokey and the Bandit, Burt Reynolds was already playing the Bandit, or at least a reasonable facsimile thereof. Let’s see: In White Lightning, we find him playing a likable rogue — a moonshiner doing time, and recruited by a federal agency to go undercover so they can expose local law-enforcement officials as corrupt. Forced into driving moonshine and seducing a mobster’s girlfriend, he eventually takes on the local sheriff in a southern backwoods car chase that ends up being the climax of the film. There are differences with The Bandit, and the tone isn’t quite comic as the better-known film, but the basics are there and Reynolds does the rest in trying out the mannerisms fully exploited in the latter movie. Look at the credits and you’ll even see Hal Needham (future director of Smokey and the Bandit) doing stunts. The plot does get goofier as it goes on, which doesn’t set the best first impression but at least makes for a stronger back-half. A touch too long at 101 minutes but infused with a remarkable southern-state atmosphere, White Lightning would have been better if it had been more focused on Reynolds and the action. Exactly like what happened latter with Smokey and the Bandit.

  • Go-hyang-i: Jook-eum-eul bo-neun doo gae-eui noon [The Cat] (2011)

    Go-hyang-i: Jook-eum-eul bo-neun doo gae-eui noon [The Cat] (2011)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, May 2021) There’s a cat in a South Korean horror film called The Cat and people soon die. Do I really have to add anything more? As a felinophile, I was guaranteed to watch this film as soon as it popped up on my DVR, but I have to say that there isn’t much here to highlight. Another rather dull ghostly possession story that uses cute felines as a hook, The Cat doesn’t impress much: Feeling overlong at 105 minutes, it strings along the usual number of foreboding musical stings, jump scares, spooky-dark-haired-girl apparitions and steady deaths to play very much like just about every Asian horror film of that time. Cat fans won’t be overly happy in the way the animals are portrayed as evil or dangerous — and it’s to be noted that the most disturbing sequence of the film isn’t as much the spooky ghostly stuff as much as a very realistic euthanasia sequence set in a veterinary clinic. In other words, there isn’t much to recommend here. Sure, it is a South Korean film with cats — that’s already more distinctive than an umpteenth variation on monster-movie horror. But even with those distinctions, The Cat fails to impress much. Do your kitty a favour, and let them sit on your lap for another movie.

  • Double Dynamite (1951)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2021) Let’s skip to the essentials:  Jane Russell, Groucho Marx, and Frank Sinatra, together in the same film. No matter the results (and there’s a clear case to be made that Double Dynamite is far less explosive than its title), there’s an interesting clash of sensibilities right there. Of course, it would help if the three stars of the film actually played up to their personas. But part of the film’s problem is that it’s a comedy that thinks it can get mileage out of its stars acting off-persona. Why have Jane Russell, if she’s going to be this mousy character? Why have Sinatra as a meek bank teller? Marx is much closer to his established persona, but it’s worth noting that this was a film he did solo, in-between the end of the Marx Brothers’ film run and the career renaissance he experienced as a TV personality. As such, he is coasting on his specific charm without much of anything to back him up. (There’s something similar at play with Russell and Sinatra as well — Produced in 1948 and released in 1951, Double Dynamite slightly predates both stars’ fully-developed personas of their mid-1950s career peaks.)  I don’t want to suggest that Double Dynamite is a complete waste of time: it’s amiable enough, satisfying enough, happily-ending enough with two musical numbers with Sinatra and sufficient Groucho bon mots to make any viewer happy. But it’s nowhere nearly as good as you could expect.

  • Unidentified Flying Objects: The True Story of Flying Saucers aka UFO (1956)

    Unidentified Flying Objects: The True Story of Flying Saucers aka UFO (1956)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2021) As someone with a deeply held skeptical streak, I don’t have much patience with UFO mythology. Still, there is something almost refreshing in the proto-UFOlogy “documentary” Unidentified Flying Objects: The True Story of Flying Saucers. Dating back from the earliest days of the UFO delusion, this documentary takes a surprisingly humble approach to the phenomenon of unidentified flying objects. There’s something up the air, no one knows what it is, but it’s not necessarily a reason to start screaming about aliens, abductions and government conspiracies. Much of the footage is fictionalized, meaning that director Winston Jones shows “authentic” 1950s-style takes on the UFO myth, with actors reacting to revelations in ways most closely influenced by Hollywood films of the time. (Don’t watch the film for gripping narrative — it’s too tortured between dramatization and a pseudo-documentary intent to be particularly suspenseful.)  The film presents “real” footage toward the end, making the jump to colour footage as it allows audiences of the time to look at the footage without the benefit of a pause button. For twenty-first century viewers, it’s worth putting the film in the context of the red scare and a barely acknowledged presumption that, maybe, the evil Soviets are behind it all. I was expecting the worst (or rather: the dumbest) from Unidentified Flying Objects, but ended up perhaps more interested by what the film leaves out than what it throws in. You can chart a steady sensationalization of UFO mythology in the decades following this early entry, culminating in 1990s X-Files quasi-hysteria in which every-single-bad-thing in the history of the world could be thrown against mysterious lights in the sky. In this context, the quaintness of this 1956 pseudo-documentary is almost refreshing.

  • Who We Are Now (2017)

    Who We Are Now (2017)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2021) Golly gee, Who We Are Now is such a boring film. I’m obviously speaking for myself here — I’m sure that other people will find far more resonance in this tale of a troubled single ex-con trying to regain custody of her child. But writer/director Matthew Newton’s approach is decidedly gritty and low-key — so much so that it doesn’t take much time to start eyeing the exit. Our main character is a deeply flawed and self-destructive person — fresh out of prison, romancing a veteran for dubious reasons, and not always able to demonstrate why she should get custody of her daughter back from her more stable sister. Of course, the deck is stacked in her favour — Who We Are Now is a mainstream American movie, and it just wouldn’t do to suggest that she’s not the best person for the task… even when she acts in ways that most people (outside the frame of a movie in which she is the protagonist) would find unacceptable. This being said, Julianne Nicholson is not bad as the flawed protagonist, Emma Roberts distinguishes herself as a very idealistic lawyer (under the sometimes-rough tutelage of a mentor played by Jimmy Smith) and the film wraps up in a way that may be conventional and predictable but not actively irritating to audiences willing to stick through the entire journey. This being said, there are far more distinctive and memorable films out there, even in the straight-up dramatic genre. Who We Are Now is about as generic as its title, and a chore to get through.