Month: January 2022

  • Jeopardy (1953)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2022) There’s much to say about solid thrillers featuring well-known actors. While they may fade into obscurity, they remain satisfying entertainment pieces, especially if you’re not expecting all that much from the result. All Barbara Stanwyck devotees will eventually make their way to Jeopardy, a genre suspense film that manages to add just enough dramatic complexity to a straightforward race-against-the-clock thriller. It begins innocently enough, as an ordinary American family (mom, dad, son) heads over to Baja California for their holidays. After quite a bit of throat-clearing and scene-setting (probably a by-product of the original story coming from a 22-minute radio play), the thrills begin in earnest once Dad gets his leg stuck underneath an unmovable piece of timber… on a beach… as the tide is rising. It’s up to Mom to get help, except that (in the kinds of contrivances that only make sense in genre thrillers) the only person available to help is an escaped convict who has already demonstrated his ability to kill. Will she convince him to help? Will they make it back to the beach before the tide rises? And what will be the cost? Well-known genre suspense director John Sturges was still in the ascendant phase of his career when he completed Jeopardy, and his work here heralds the long string of successes he would later have. Stanwyck has what looks like an inglorious role as a typical 1950s housewife largely dependent on her husband (that “car driving” scene… eek) but she makes it work, especially as the film suggests increasingly darker trade-offs necessary in getting the help of the escaped killer. That last element adds a nice patina of dramatic weight to the more conventional rescue plot, and it’s what makes Jeopardy more surprising than you’d expect. No, it’s not going to be a film that will often be mentioned in contemporary discussions. But as an example of a rough-and-tumble thriller, it’s surprisingly watchable and just substantial enough to impress.

  • 10 Rillington Place (1971)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2022) Everything about 10 Rillington Place is terrible and uncomfortable, and you may use this as a recommendation if you want. Telling us about the real-life crime story of a serial killer at work in post-war England, this film has the unfortunate characteristic of coming from the early-1970s… meaning that when it gets dark, it gets really dark in look and subject matter. I could continue describing it, but it’s just going to get more and more depressing. The historical facts are bad enough: the killer looked like a kindly older man pretending to be a doctor, but he was really a serial killer necrophile who counted his wife among his victims and disposed of the corpses of his victims in his garden, or stuffing them into the walls of the flat he was living in. Awful stuff, but it doesn’t stop there, as an innocent neighbour was framed by the killer, accused of some of the crimes and hanged by the British judicial system before the truth was revealed. If that dry recitation of facts isn’t dispiriting enough, consider that 10 Rillington Place itself pulls few punches, and revels in the grimy, damp realism of its presentation. You may want to take a shower at the end of it… if you make it to the end, that is, because it just gets worse and worse the longer it goes on, with a written epilogue barely bringing some closure to the entire awful affair. This true-crime story makes few concessions to good taste, restraint or genre elements—it feels as terrible as the real story was. Richard Attenborough will surprise a few twenty-first century viewers by his portrayal of the killer, with John Hurt playing the patsy unjustly hanged for the murders. 10 Rillington Place is certainly not a terrible film, but if you’re already refractory to early-1970s cinema for its deep and unrelenting grimness, this is not the film that’s going to change your mind.

  • Nothing in Common (1986)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2022) Tom Hanks did many small disposable 1980s comedies before becoming America’s favourite everyday man, and while Nothing in Common is really not one of his best-remembered ones, it does have two or three elements worth highlighting. The first is most obvious in the first half of this disjointed film, as he plays a fast-talking adman who’s got exactly the kind of life he wants: an upward career, a fast pace, a devoted crew of employees, a different woman every night, a jeep, fancy vacations, etc. Hanks is a delight, as he jokingly rampages throughout his office, negotiates horizontally with a client’s daughter, and seemingly has the world on a string. But such characters aren’t meant to stay like that in American cinema, and so the first cracks in his perfect life appear once his parents separate, his dad falls ill, he learns quite a lot about his parents’ dysfunctional relationship and his newest client gets skittery. Nothing in Common has a clear inflection point that makes it feel like two different films in one—a silly comedy at first and then (predictably) a more heartfelt film about a father/son relationship through hard times. While the increasingly serious result is not going to everyone’s liking, you can see why such a role would interest the young Hanks and how it shows, in a microcosm, the arc of his career as a whole—first as a comedian, then as a more serious actor. The problem with Nothing in Common isn’t necessarily its shift from the comic to the dramatic—it’s that once all is said and done, it feels as if everyone was enjoying themselves far more in the first half, pushing it perhaps too far into fun considering the inevitable let-down of the second half. There’s nothing subtle about the opening moments, but then the last few scenes all deal in small victories, textured arrangements and going back to the basics that the protagonist cheerfully ignored at first. That’s traditional and respectable, but unsatisfying by design. It would be easy to say that the two halves of Nothing in Common have too little in common.

  • River’s Edge (1986)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2022) When I ask you to picture a “1980s teenage film,” you probably have an impression in mind that’s half-John Hugues romantic high school comedy and half-Porky’s sex comedies. That misguided impression is probably the single best thing you can bring into River’s Edge, because it highlights that it’s a film at the polar opposite. Inspired by a terrible true-crime story, it’s about bored and apathetic small-town teenagers who barely react when one of their own murders his girlfriend and leaves her near a river. One of them (played by Keanu Reeves in an early role, fortunately the closest that the film has to a hero) has enough sense to understand that this is wrong and reports it to the authorities… which leads teenagers to talk about betrayal and snitching. At the opposite side of this narrow moral coin, Crispin Glover plays a much darker teenager who actively plots to hide the murder, protect the killer and punish the snitch. (As that wasn’t enough, there’s an even younger character who’s even darker, but there’s a limit to how much terrible things I can fit in a paragraph-long review.)  No, River’s Edge isn’t your standard 1980s teenage film, and it’s worth noting that it seems to be inhabiting a singularly joyless version of our world where nihilism is key and nothing really matters. Drugs and hedonism define the characters in the absence of anything worthwhile. (In related news, Dennis Hopper plays a supporting character with a surprisingly important plot function.) River’s Edge is still impressively dark and hasn’t aged all that badly if you’re the kind of person who believes that teenagers are (and, apparently, will forever remain) dangerous feral creatures. It’s no fun at all to watch and there’s a weight to the result that will linger long after the credits roll. Just understand that you’re not going into a typical 1980s teen movie film with this one.

  • Mockingbird (2014)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, January 2022) I thought I was reasonably aware of the Blumhouse film catalogue, so it was a small surprise to see their logo pop up at the beginning of the lesser-known Mockingbird. There’s a reason for that. Two of them, in fact: After enjoying some early success with overperforming horror hits, Blumhouse expanded just a bit too fast in the early 2010s, and the quality of the results suffered, leading to lengthy delays before some movies were quietly dumped through streaming services rather than theatrical releases. Mockingbird was one of those, and it doesn’t take a long time to realize that it’s not particularly good. As a matte of fact, the longer you watch it, the worse it becomes. The premise itself doesn’t make sense, as three groups of people are gifted a video camera on their doorsteps and immediately start filming everything before being shown that they will die if they don’t keep filming and obey. But it gets worse with a lazily-justified setting of 1995, character actions that defy any kind of plausibility, impossible logistics (such as a camera with no off button, infinite batteries and infinite capacity), and a conclusion that flies off the rails of what’s possible even in a horror film. The film’s found footage is as irritating as the most mediocre examples of the genre usually are, and that also goes for the characters as well. Nothing is believable here—it’s all clumsily handled through authorial fiat, with the characters being puppets for something that turns out to have no point. Forget about thematic meaning: this is a film that just wants to be mean-spirited, much like writer-director Bryan Bertino previous effort, the intolerable The Strangers. There’s some rough competence to the way it’s put together, but it’s going to be up to the viewer to decide whether that’s enough to offset the constant irritation of the rest of the film. It’s o surprise if Mockingbird remains near the bottom of the Blumhouse list in terms of impact, fun or quality.

  • The Catered Affair (1956)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2022) I suspect that most modern viewers of The Catered Affairs will be drawn to the film for its cast (as I was): With names such as Bette Davis, Ernest Borgnine, Debbie Reynolds and Rod Taylor (plus Barry Fitzgerald for an even-deeper cut of classic Hollywood), it’s the kind of film worth watching if only to see those actors going up against each other. The first half of the film has plenty to offer, as a “simple” marriage between two young people of different classes (Reynolds and Taylor) soon spins out of control thanks to the meddling of their parents. Before anyone knows it, the projected event will include several hundred guests and costs so much as to alter the lives and plans of the poor girl’s parents. There’s a quiet desperation in evidence here, as we understand that the girl’s mother is pouring decades of past dreams into this catered affair. Davis (affecting an Irish accent) adds a lot to an unglamorous character that could have been played as deluded, and Borgnine is quite effective, as he lays out the impact that such a folly will cost them. Beyond that promising setup, however, the film runs out of gas long before a rather predictable ending. Despite a script written by Gore Vidal from a Paddy Chayefsky play, what should have been a collaboration between two screenwriting legends ends up being both trite and boring once the conflict has been set up. The low-key working-class backdrop is not fancy and neither is Richard Brooks’ straightforward direction, all contributing to a growing sense of blandness to the result. In the end, what remains are the actors’s performances, some of them stretching acting muscles in ways not often seen in their best-remembered work.

  • Bruiser (2000)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, January 2022) Acclaimed directors can be justifiably proud of their best-known work, but they usually have an entire body of work to consider. The fun begins when you get into the completion game of watching movies because they’re directed by a Known Name, and make your way to those lesser-known works. George A. Romeo is best known for his zombie movies (something that would come to define and take over his career, especially in the last decade of his life), but thirteen of his nineteen films are not “of the Dead” (including Juice on the Loose, a 1974 documentary about then-football player O. J. Simpson?!?). Bruiser was the last of those. It’s… not that good. The premise does have a kick to it, as a put-down milquetoast man suddenly acquires/imagines a mask that allows him to unleash his inner violent fantasies and goes on a killing spree against the bullies in his life. There’s some psychological depth to the dissociation mechanism that would allow such a thing to happen, and the ambiguity about whether the mask is evil or merely a pretext. But Romero wasn’t interested in such subtleties. What starts Bruiser on the wrong foot is the caricatural depiction of the protagonist’s terrible life, with an abusive boss, a best friend who defrauds him, an openly contemptuous wife (who’s openly carrying an affair with his boss and his best friend), a maid who steals from him… it gets to be laughable, but it’s the foundation on which everything is built. Violent fantasy sequences become real murders and the film is off to some predictable business, although the ironic finale (which disposes of the mask until it’s needed again) is better than average. It’s not a terrible film, and a cast headlined by Jason Flemyng (as protagonist) and Peter Stormare (as deliciously evil boss) does make it work. But compared to the potential of its premise, the film ends up short of its ambitions and turns out to be a relatively ordinary entry. Romero wasn’t infallible—something made even more apparent when he followed Bruiser with three more “of the Dead” movies with diminishing returns.

  • Enhanced (2019)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2022) The problem with good ideas is that they often end up being copied by people who don’t have the creativity to have good ideas of their own, don’t understand the reasons why they’re good ideas and don’t have the skills to execute them well. Super-powered mutants aren’t necessarily a terrible idea, but by this time in the superhero era, you better bring something fresh or competent to the table if you want good reviews. Enhanced, sadly, does neither—and could be entered as a contestant in the category of Blandest Superhero film. I’m not sure anyone can make a more generic super-mutant film if they deliberately tried to. A blend of tired tropes executed in snooze-inducing fashion, it’s a film that feels satisfied by stealing ideas from much better movies without putting in the effort to make itself distinctive. The cinematography is a familiar blend of dark urban landscapes and laughably ridiculous super-secret military installations. The plot is familiar to the point of making sense even if you should happen to miss entire minutes of it. The actors are there for the paycheque, and writer-director James Mark barely manages to present the material he’s got on screen. There’s a very late blip of interest as we finally get to the ending confrontation but it’s far too little for what feels like a substantial investment, even at 99 minutes. The only superheroic thing about Enhanced is how quickly it’s forgotten after viewing.

  • Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2022) While my favourite kind of cinema is heavily plot-centric, fast-paced, funny and imaginative, there’s plenty of space out there for a different kind of cinema that breaks the rules. For instance, I’ve been mulling over the perfection of Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles as a title for its film. It’s long, it’s memorable despite its utter blandness, it’s innately domestic considering that it’s a name and address and it often acts as a plot summary. You’ve never seen a film like this even nearly half a century later. For most of its deliberately punishing three-hour-and-twenty-minute duration, it’s about a middle-aged housewife going about her domestic business. She cooks, she cleans, she runs chores and the camera never blinks. Her conversations with her teenage son during suppertime are terrifyingly mundane and stilted (something that doesn’t come across in subtitles is how unrealistic their speech cadence is), which serves to submerge the kernels of interest into a morass of ordinary details. Why do men visit her apartment during the day? And why is the carefully observed routine of her first day degenerating during the second and third days depicted in the film? It all leads to a shocker of a conclusion that wouldn’t be nearly so effective has viewers not been lulled into complacency, then unease as small details accumulate. Now, let’s be honest: I may admire what writer-director Chantal Akerman has done here as a pure piece of unconventional cinema… but I can’t imagine sitting through this one again. I remain convinced that it would have been just as effective as a 75-minute film: 200 minutes is pushing it way past the point of diminishing returns. The plot can fit on a napkin and for the film’s vaunted naturalism, there’s no denying the deliberate stylishness of the acting. But I’ll rally to the majority opinion: this is one weird and wonderfully unique film. Still, you may want to consider watching it at double speed until the last five minutes. [December 2022: A quick comment about Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles being named “the greatest film of all time” in the 2022 Sight and Sound poll—it makes no sense. While a striking and important film, it’s also something that works because it’s not like other movies: in other words, it depends on other films to make its mark, and that’s a lousy pick as “the greatest film of all time” considering that it does not stand on its own. But the respondents to the poll were making their own individual point by picking the film, and this being 2022 that’s what we end up with, until next decade. Meanwhile, I’m still in the Citizen Kane camp.]

  • The Gospel According to André (2017)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, January 2022) The only good thing about the January 2022 death of fashion authority André Leon Talley is how it led to a brief and well-deserved uptick of interest in his life and achievements, including the rebroadcasting of The Gospel According to André, a 2017 look at the man’s life and his achievements. Set against the backdrop of the 2016 presidential election and its aftermath, it’s a look back at his life bolstered with archival footage, as well as candid interviews with him and his friends. The term “grander than life” seems unusually apt to describe Talley and his life—a big and tall man cutting an unusual figure on the worldwide fashion scene, Talley came from North Carolina with a degree in French literature and a fluent understanding of the language that helped him when he ended up in Paris (by way of New York) as a roving reporter beloved by fashion designers. His mystique grew over a nearly forty-year period when he was active in the industry, helped along with a grandiose sense of personal style that included numerous capes. The Gospel According to André may presume that its viewers are convinced about the importance of fashion, but it does a rather good job positioning Talley and what made him such a remarkable figure. It’s not without shortcuts and unsaid material (seeing him compliment the fashion sense of the newest First Lady in 2017 would be more interesting if the film remembered to point out how he served as her fashion consultant years before), but as a quick primer and reflection on the character, it’s entertaining enough. There’s a palpable sense, watching the documentary after his death, that the world is a little duller, a little less colourful without him—and that’s the best epitaph he could have hoped for.

  • The Last Horror Film aka Fanatic (1982)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, January 2022) It’s weird to compliment a 1980s slasher film for its atmosphere—most of them were visually indistinguishable, existing in a bland universe made up of college campuses or suburban houses that didn’t do much to impress. But if The Last Horror Film has one distinction, it’s how it’s unabashedly set at the Cannes Festival, where a serial killer is targeting victims connected to a scream-queen (Caroline Munro) on location to promote her newest film. The plot and structure are familiar, but the real treat is setting it against real footage of the 1981 festival—complete with posters and promotions of the movie presented at the time! Anti-heartthrob Joe Spinell is the protagonist, a dangerously obsessed fan and wannabe-director who would normally be a creep stalking a young actress… if it wasn’t for the even-worse murderer having himself on a rampage. Writer-director David Winters’ playful approach to its material means that there’s quite a bit of blurring of the edges between reality, publicity and fiction, teasing that the protagonist is a killer and then taking a headlong plunge into metafiction. I usually despise slasher films and am certainly not a Spinell fan, but there’s something more interesting than usual in The Last Horror Film that does catch even a jaded viewer’s attention—a slightly comedic approach (such as suggesting a scream queen could have a shot at the Academy Awards) and conscious intention to set it somewhere unusual that helps distinguish it from countless other VHS offerings. Call it one of the least awful examples of the genre and you’ll get where I’m coming from.

  • Jag är nyfiken—en film i gult [I Am Curious—Yellow] (1967)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2022) It’s amazing how pop culture can fixate on small yet distinctive things. For people of a certain age, there are traces of I am Curious — Yellow scattered all across jokey references from The Simpsons to Mad Men. The film itself, after a brief flurry of interest in the late 1960s, was forgotten, whereas later combination of “curious” and “yellow” could be used for a cheap laugh. Seeing the film itself make a short appearance in Quentin Tarantino’s self-novelization of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood reminded me that there was a movie to watch there, and having TCM oblige by showing the film uncut and unabridged helped satisfy my curiosity. What gets forgotten fifty-five years later is that, by the standards of 1960s movie distribution, this was a filthy, filthy art-house import. Coming from Sweden, where it pushed even the loose Scandinavian decency standards, the film has more nudity by itself than decades of cumulative Hollywood film until then. It became a reference because it was quasi-pornography at a time when audiences were eager but not used to it, and that should explain why it left such a reverberating (if dwindling) mark in corners of American culture. The film itself is certainly arthouse — a blurry narrative talking about an affair between a young promiscuous woman and her 24th partner (she documents them) with more casual nudity than even the trashiest of 1980s sex comedies. Not that it is a comedy — Writer-director Vilgot Sjöman does get a few laughs here as he increasingly blurs the barrier between documentary, fiction and metafiction but the film has bewildering moments of documentary cinema-vérité (including a startling apparition by Martin Luther King, Jr. himself), languorous digressions, an intense argument between two nude lovers and a shift from fiction to fiction-about-fiction that’s as wild as anything else. Half of I Am Curious — Yellow is boring, but the other half still has the power to surprise and puzzle. (It’s apparently a companion piece to I Am Curious — Blue, but that one never gets punny pop-culture references.)  I am convinced that more references have been made to I am Curious — Yellow than people have seen it, so it’s something of a revelation to open up the much-referenced title and find what’s in there.

  • Electra Glide in Blue (1973)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2022) If I was to take all of the reasons why I generally dislike the New Hollywood of the 1970s and package them up in a single film, I’m not sure I could do better than Electra Glide in Blue. Coming from one of the darkest periods in film history, it’s a dirty, dispiriting film that finds no heroes in either police or hippies and manages to pull a tragedy out of a murder mystery in its last thirty seconds. Much of the film’s plot has to do with a murder investigation, with an ambitious patrolman looking to be transferred over to homicide and working with a partner to investigate a shotgun death. But this isn’t your usual police thriller, and soon enough the defeats accumulate more quickly than progress in identifying the killer. Everyone is morally dirty here, and there are no refuges. Splendid Arizona exterior cinematography is met with 1970s-dark-and-ugly interior shots, with the characters not coming across as timeless. While Robert Blake does quite well as a short-statured good cop punching above his height, the rest of the film isn’t always as interesting, and the gut-punch of a conclusion is an undeniable downer. But those were the early 1970s in cinema—no wonder Hollywood war roaring to go back to popular crowd-pleasers before the end of the decade.

  • Madea Goes to Jail (2009)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2022) I’m not going to seriously claim that Madea Goes to Jail isn’t truth in titling (because she does indeed go to jail), but it approaches misrepresentation when about two thirds of the film isn’t about Madea’s imprisonment, but rather an adjacent story about a likable District Attorney: one of his ex-flame is in serious trouble and his current girlfriend is proving herself to be a terrible person. I’m not blaming writer-director Tyler Perry, though: As a title, Madea Goes to Jail is infinitely catchier than anything else, and keeping her as a comic supporting character is a wise choice given how much space she takes in any story. Still, the bait-and-switch does hint at the film’s biggest issue and an ongoing problem in Tyler’s filmography: the wild swerves between tones that are a constant feature of his work. Madea is an out-and-out comic character: grander than life, caricatural in conception and not necessarily able to sustain the weight of a dramatic story. Meanwhile, we’ve got a story of characters suffering from drug addiction, past guilt, being trapped in prostitution and eventually being carelessly thrown under by the judicial system. But such things are to be expected in Tyler Perry’s films—you get the pathos and the laughs and never mind the transitions. It doesn’t quite work in totality, but it does have moments. Tyler, as a director, is unremarkable—but as a writer he relies on blunt force and occasionally succeeds: even if you can wish for the experience to be smoother, he ultimately gets his goal. In Madea Goes to Jail, it means that the female protagonist is portrayed with sympathy and layers, while the female antagonist is a caricaturally terrible person with no redeeming qualities beyond her looks. Ah well—but as the title suggests, the film’s most interesting moments come from Madea as she unleashes righteous fury on people who annoy her or threaten her friends. (One of them, a serial killer, is played by a pre-stardom Sofia Vergara.)  As, once again, the very specific title suggests, this is a film for those willing to forgo the flaws in Perry’s films and enjoy the high points.

  • The Onion Field (1979)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2022) Hailing from the heyday of gritty dark depressing movies, 1970s exemplar The Onion Field is the kind of film that Hollywood explicitly rejected when it rejuvenated itself in the 1980s—a slow, uneasy crime drama based on a true story of a cop killer and the destruction left in the wake of a murder. Interminably paced, the film does pick up whenever a very young James Wood, apparently doing a Richard Widmark impression, shows up as the charismatic antagonist. Mindful of showing everything before and after its pivotal murder, The Onion Field (written by crime novelist Joseph Wambaugh, adapting his own true-crime book) takes care to set up its characters, the elements leading up to the murder, the ensuing judicial and personal trials that follow, and barely ends as characters, years later, come to grips with what happened. It’s certainly not meant as a tidy genre story of crime and punishment—it doesn’t help that much of the story chronicles how the murderers played the legal system afterward to escape the initial punishment. That does build some frustration in the film’s goals—this is not a comforting viewing and viewers may want to set their expectations as such. But so it went with movies during the 1970s, especially as they strayed from simple genre formulas.