Month: January 2022

  • In the Earth (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2022) There are movies that I like better once I figure out where they’re coming from, and In the Earth is one of them. I still don’t like it after learning its full story, but at least I can now understand the achievement in making it happen. In a few words: In the Earth is a quick-and-dirty project for writer-director Ben Wheatley, who shot the entire thing in fifteen days in-between his work on the far bigger Rebecca and Tomb Raider 2. Wheatley may be a big-budget director working with comprehensible plots these days, but his first few movies were far less accessible low-budget horror with esoteric components, and even his first few “big” movies, like Free Fire or High Rise, were unusual pieces of work. In the Earth goes back to those roots as it follows hiking scientists when they enter a mysterious forest and meet some very strange people. Going for folk horror, body mutilation and psychedelic experiences, In the Earth is clearly a quick-and-low-budget effort: the cinematography benefits from the forested surroundings, but remains gritty and almost accidental. A few savvily-used special effects (and an impeccable sense of design aping Penguin classics for the credits) help raise the visual polish of the production. The handful of characters is easy to manage, and the film regularly goes for occult imagery to create unease. It doesn’t amount to much, though: strange spooky stuff, forest spirit, and homicidal humans. So what? The ending doesn’t satisfy much. But contextualizing this as a 15-day production in the middle of a pandemic between two bigger projects does make it slightly more sympathetic. Most filmmakers would have enjoyed a few weeks off—but Wheatley heads into the forest and makes a movie. I have to admire that, even if the result itself leaves me cold. In the Earth will appeal most to those looking for a specific flavour of British occult horror—there are plenty of parallels to make here with Wheatley’s earlier A Field in England.

  • False Positive (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2022) There’s something incredibly primal about making horror movies about pregnancy, and while that can provide a strong narrative hook, exploitation always looms. False Positive definitely has a few strong moments, but it ultimately falters on its blend of delusion and reality, an underwhelming conclusion and a sense that it’s not doing the extra work to go beyond obviousness. Writer-star Ilana Glazer makes the jump from comedy to serious drama in an effective fashion—she’s rarely less than likable at first, and then a heroine that we’re willing to follow to the end of the film even as her fantasies become more unhinged. (Pierce Brosnan is also quite fun as the out-and-out villain of the piece.)  The slow but growing sense of unease is built effectively, and False Positive rarely holds anything back as it seeks to disturb viewers—first with unpalatable choices then with outright gore. But two or three things harm the film in its ending stretch. I’m not going to be overly critical of the film’s “all men are garbage” stance, because that’s fairly standard material for the current crop of women-focused horror films (even more so with pregnancy-focused films) and we can postpone having a discussion about that unexamined assumption for a while longer. I’m more concerned by the story settling on a trite resolution that essentially apes daytime-TV specials with more gore and horror. (Yes, I know that fertility doctors impregnating their patients is a real and terrible thing—but that plot has been done many times already as Lifetime movies of the week, and False Positive only differs in tone, not story.)   The other problem is that False Positive flirts with something better but does not commit to it: in showing the protagonist’s descent into pregnancy delusions, it sets up a shaky sense of what’s-real-and-what’s-not that is scarcely capitalized upon in the end. A much punchier ending is held back by writer-director John Lee’s refusal to go further in literalizing the protagonist’s craziness. Let’s commit to her being the surrogate mother for her garbage husband and her evil doctor. Let’s go to the end of her imagining a magical holistic doctor. Let’s uncover a eugenics conspiracy by evil white men and committing infanticide as a result. But no—Maybe it’s real, maybe it’s not, maybe I just don’t care after being jerked around. Messing around with primal matters carries with it a responsibility to do justice to the material, and this is where False Positive falls flat.

  • The Rat Pack (1998)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, January 2022) In my continuing exploration of Hollywood history, I keep going back to the Rat Pack as something of a high point—which is really strange, because there’s not much in the Vegas lifestyle espoused by the Ratpackers—gambling, booze, womanizing—that I find admirable: they would have kicked me out of their group with no hesitation. But over the years, the idea of a few performers forming their own close-knit friendship does have its appeal: Circa-1960 Las Vegas is vintage these days, and the sins of past generations don’t appear so degenerate. It does help that the Rat Pack still exemplifies an appealing idea of cool: Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr. and Dean Martin are still references when it comes to looking good and being terrific performers. So, a fictionalized take on the Rat Pack was a can’t-miss proposition, even if the film itself is a made-for-cable biopic that overboils its subject matter to the point of almost missing the point of it. Largely focusing on the 1960 presidential campaign as a flashpoint, The Rat Pack is an interesting but often disappointing way to fictionalize a never-ending evening of song, game, drinks and women. The Rat Packers came together to party, and there’s a limit to how much of that you can fit into frame (although there’s a brilliant montage to “Ain’t That a Kick in the Head” showing the Rat Packers in various bedroom activities). No, much of the film is dedicated to the Rat Pack’s attempt to get into politics, and how the two worlds ultimately didn’t mix—the racism affecting Davis, the mob connections affecting Sinatra, and Dean Martin maybe being above it all. The biopic condenses years of events into a much shorter period and ultimately focuses on Sinatra (as the Chairman of the Board) far more than the others. It works in fits and spurts—I came away from it understanding a little bit more how Sinatra could have been seen as having mob ties (essentially: “I was a performer in their clubs; they helped me out”) and why he could have had aspirations to being involved in Kennedy-era politics. On the other hand, there’s so much dramatization going on that it’s difficult to trust the film on details. Ray Liotta has too-big shoes to fill as Sinatra and Joe Mantegna is limited by Martin’s low-key approach, but Don Cheadle is nothing short of terrific as Davis. Other actors get their chance to play past celebrities (perhaps the next-best being Deborah Kara Unger as Ava Gardner) and there’s some undeniable fun in seeing Hollywood turn the spotlight on itself like that. Director Rob Cohen was near the top of his career at the time, and that translates into a made-for-TV film that is slightly more ambitious than usual, and also held back by its limited budget. As a narrative, The Rat Pack ends up being less interesting than the myth, the stories and the fantasy of partying with the group in a more innocent Vegas.

  • Don’t Look Up (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Netflix Streaming, January 2022) Sometimes, the situation is just so horrible that all that remains to do is laugh. That, in a nutshell, seems to be Don’t Look Up’s approach to jet dark comedy, as it shows a comet heading to earth for an extinction-level event, and humanity is unable to agree that there is an issue, let alone how to stop it. Post-truth degeneration, government capture by corporate interests and inability to distinguish substance for entertainment are only three of the planks on which the film builds its acid sarcasm. From the opening moment, where scientists having discovered the impending event are rushed to the White House… only to wait endlessly for a dismissive President, the film announces its viciously cynical approach to the material. Originally written in response to inaction on climate change but executed during the Covid pandemic, Don’t Look Up manages to hit its targets, often too precisely: it often gets difficult to laugh at the film, considering the uneasy knowledge that much of it could indeed play as stupidly in reality as the film’s most sarcastic musings. Leonardo DiCaprio is rather good in the lead role, even if Jennifer Lawrence is not always well-used. Among the supporting actors, Mark Rylance is an infuriating highlight playing an evil corporate version of Mister Rogers, while Meryl Streep and Jonah Hill are convincing to the point of being despicable as the film’s delusional villains. The uniqueness of the film’s approach suggests that the transition of writer-director Adam MacKay from silly comedies to politically-charged satire over his last few films (the best of which remains The Big Short) culminates into something special here—a big-budget primal cry. But while it’s easy to agree with Don’t Look Up in its informed depiction of human stupidity, the film’s execution is disappointing. The uneven comedy levels of the film are one thing, but they’re not as damaging as the curious lulls and weird pacing—the first half-hour doesn’t quite match the rest of the film in temporal terms, and the film can’t quite land on a secondary comedic approach beyond dark cynicism. I’m not going to hit the film too hard on its scientific mistake (never mind that comets are dirty snowballs with few precious metals; or that suddenly spotting a comet from the middle of a light-polluted city is more contrived than plausible), but there’s a lingering impression that the screenwriters were so happy with their central metaphor that they didn’t invest more time in smoothing out the details. In many ways, Don’t Look Up is one of the films that best encapsulates the oppressive absurdity of 2021—and I hope that it will soon be perceived as dated and hysteric rather than dated and made naïve by later events.

  • Eternals (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Disney+ Streaming, January 2022) I’ve been having a not-so-good time with the Marvel Cinematic Universe since the wrap-up in Endgame, and it’s not simply a feeling of having to begin again after a big climactic event—the movies themselves have been underwhelming. Black Widow and Shang-Chi were mediocre at best, with a few tepid ideas drowned into overly familiar execution. Eternals doesn’t have the same problems, but it does remain underwhelming. Striving to add another cosmic chapter to the MCU, it runs aground on many of the same issues that plagued the first two Thor films: It all makes less and less sense the longer you think about it, and this conceptual hollowness is not exactly mitigated by overlong execution. It’s certainly not a flop—the ensemble cast is a schematically diverse group of likable actors, and letting go of the Avengers continuity does allow the story to go hard on team dynamics that would be unthinkable with the mainline heroes. Adding a writer-director like Chloe Zhao at the helm means that the film can be more dramatically ambitious, but other than some nice visuals, a globe-trotting narrative and some character moments (many of them overlong), Eternals flails for a long time before finding its groove. I did like most of the cast: Led by the ever-likable Gemma Chan, bolstered by people such as Kumail Nanjiani and Lauren Ridloff, it’s a nice mix of people even if the insistent diversity can feel forced. (Meanwhile, veterans such as Salma Hayek and Angelina Jolie look a bit lost.)  There are some nice images along the way, notably in an earth-shattering final act. But the execution sputters: endless action scenes, intrusive exposition, and dialogue that run the ragged edge of pretentiousness, and while the serious execution aspires for cinematic weight, it often forgets the zippy core values of what brought audiences flocking back to MCU films. Perhaps the worst consequence of its leaden execution is that it allows audiences ample time to take apart the nonsense passing itself off as ideas—a supposedly humanistic film undermining humanity by claiming some of its most impressive achievements for its godlike characters (“the Manhattan project—yeah, I did that” except “oh no, we never interfere with human history”), and an awkward expansion of the MCU mythology trying to cram more ill-fitting cosmic and historical directions. The overall plot barely makes sense, and offers a surprisingly unconvincing case of anthropocentrism where the mythological characters are captured by their charges. (Which leads us back to the nonsensical nature of the overall plot—don’t give amnesia to your characters if you don’t want them to go native and work against you.)  Generally speaking, I have a feeling that the MCU is having issues that directly stem from its intention to get closer to the comics: all the stupidities and incoherencies of the serial comic-book format that were papered over so effectively during the first two phases of the MCU (less effectively in Phase Three) are now roaring back in this fourth phase and they take centre stage while we’re waiting for the overall plot to take hold. It’s worth noting that the next few films in the series are straight-up sequels to well-received instalments, with returning directors—embracing a measure of comfort after three experiments in a row. As for Eternals itself, it all boils down to a persistent feeling that it should be more than it is—more fun, more spectacular, more satisfying. But it sputters and swerves so much (and so languidly) along the way that it can’t match its own expectations.

  • Talk Radio (1988)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2022) One of writer-director Oliver Stone’s lesser-known 1980s efforts, Talk Radio takes us inside a recording studio while a shock-jock (or at least the 1980s’ version of a shock jock) goes through a few pivotal shows. His Dallas-based show is about to open nationally in syndication, but that’s happening as he deals with a number of crises, the understanding that he’s a prisoner of his confrontational attitude, and he’s inextricably linked to an audience that he despises. Eric Bogosian is magnificent in the lead role, as he adapts his own script and performance in the original play. While Talk Radio’s theatrical origins are best seen in how it stays in the recording studio where much of the action takes place, the film does expand the reach of the action slightly to cover the days in-between those shows, and expand on the various relationships that illustrate the character study. The self-loathing protagonist is not a simple character, as his rapid-fire delivery flits from one unorthodox view to another, haranguing his callers and being a difficult person to live with. It’s quite a performance, and much of the entertainment of the film consists in sitting back and letting Bogosian do his love-it-or-hate-it thing. As the callers multiply, however, the script also switches genres—comedy, tragedy, and drama all combine here. Stone keeps things moving forward and find ways of making even a radio studio feel exciting. I’m not so fond of the rather obvious ending, but it does bring some kind of closure to the film, and it’s perhaps the audio epilogue that gives meaning to the climax more than the climax’s events themselves. While Talk Radio has an air of timelessness, it seems fated to become a period piece: today’s shock-jocks are less likely to be whip-smart provocateurs than partisan rabble-rousers promoting dangerous conspiracy theories and madcap pseudo-scientific nonsense, and that breed of professional nutjobs wouldn’t make as interesting a character to follow.

  • The Power and the Prize (1956)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2022) It takes a very, very long time for The Power and the Prize to find its way, as this blend of boardroom drama and straightforward romance has to wait until its third act before the tension really rises to the occasion. Robert Taylor stars as an upwardly-mobile executive, engaged to the boss’ daughter and widely expected to succeed him at the helm of a large company. Except that his plans for the future are derailed when he’s asked to fly over to London for a bit of corporate skullduggery and instead falls in love with a woman with a troubled past. After an hour of patient plot assembly, it all finally reaches a climax, as the love affair threatens his career and the twin strands of the plot finally cohere. It doesn’t leave such a bad impression (going back to the classic “Love and integrity conquers everything” does help, as does a typically likable performance from Burl Ives) but it does take a while to get there. The dynamics of 1950s corporate America are more timeless than we’d expect (even if thoroughly Hollywoodized) and there’s an intriguing cloud of then-recent WW2 history hanging over some of the main characters that was not often portrayed in films of the time. The Power and the Prize doesn’t impress during its first hour, but it does redeem itself in time to become good enough by the end. Not bad—but it could have been better. (Unrelated, but: If you’re looking for a wildly unrelated triple bill, schedule The Power, The Prize and The Power and the Prize.)

  • Gloria (1980)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2022) I’m not a big fan of the gritty 1970s style of filmmaking, but it is an integral part of Gloria, and you can almost see in the film a transition from the doom-and-gloom of the 1970s to the more hopeful 1980s. The titular Gloria (a terrific performance from Gena Rowland) is a tough and sullen middle-aged woman with an intimate history with the Manhattan organized crime underworld. But she’s not prepared when she’s asked to protect a boy when his parents are gunned down for informing. On the run, she gets to befriend the boy, keep ahead of the mob and grow up along the way. This is all handled against the dispiriting backdrop of Manhattan during some of its worst years, with the mob being powerful enough to prevent them from leaving the island. Fortunately, the protagonist is up to the task—picking off mob enforcers every time they get too close, and eventually confronting them in their den. Writer-director John Cassavetes was working to order when he wrote the script (the assignment: a star vehicle for a child actor, then a good role for his wife) and almost accidentally ended up with one of his most accessible films in the process. Despite the familiar nature of the story, Gloria fights hard for its happy ending—it’s a film best taken in as a series of moments anchored by Rowland’s strong performance. Not quite as bleak as the NYC mob stories of the 1970, you can retrospectively see in Gloria the way the New Hollywood was re-aligning itself for broader commercial appeal by the time the 1980s rolled in—not necessarily a victory for proponents of that movement, but something that has aged rather well for everyone else.

  • The Disorderly Orderly (1964)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, January 2022) Much like that other Jerry Lewis film, there are two personalities battling for control in The Disorderly Orderly—a cartoonish comedy complete with fast-forwarded movement, silly sound effects, slapstick scenes, big set-pieces and broad overacting; and a more sensitive drama in which an orderly pines for a young woman who wants nothing to do with him, even as he works overtime to pay for her stay in psychiatric services. Obviously, the comedy wins—especially in the end stretch of the film, where a long series of physical gags and daring stuntwork provides an over-the-top climax to the events. (You can thank writer/director Frank Tashlin’s background in animating Looney Tunes shorts for that lunacy.)  But it’s the intrusion of the other genres that give pause, as the film criticizes for-profit healthcare (ahead of its time!) and tangles with an unsatisfactory romance. There’s clearly a satirical intent is having the protagonist and his crush unsuccessfully try to get together despite not feeling any spark (the follow-up romance with another character feels tacked-on) but it does point to the film’s flaws as something not entirely cooked all the way through. As for Lewis himself, his performance is aligned with his other movies of the time—there’s occasionally an attempt at pathos (see “the movie’s other personality”) but he’s clearly more at ease yukking it up, such as in the scene where he demonstrates his debilitating “neurotic identification empathy,” hammering a point twelve times just to make sure we get it and get that he’s trying really hard to make it obvious. The result does have its moments, but The Disorderly Orderly feels too disconnected and tonally inconsistent to fully appreciate.

  • Trapped Ashes (2006)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, January 2022) Perhaps the most difficult trick in writing horror movies is making you believe in the impossible—the necessary suspension of disbelief in order to accept that there’s a supernatural entity hunting our characters, or that occult forces are influencing the plot. Much of this willingness to play along is helped by what viewers want to see: if we’re paying to see the monster, the monster can’t make it on-screen fast enough. But horror can take this suspension of disbelief for granted, and any film that doesn’t put in the necessary work to make us believe places itself in trouble. The problem with horror anthology Trapped Ashes isn’t necessarily the over-the-top nature of its segments, its copious nudity or inconsistent tone—it starts in the framing device, as a bunch of strangers visiting a movie studio are lazily brought to a locked room and asked to spill their secrets. Nothing about the framing device makes sense, especially the passing tourists’ eagerness to go when they should not and unanimously get trapped on a set. Henry Gibson may be a lot of fun as a tour guide, but he’s also stuck in a script that doesn’t even put in the minimal effort to make us believe. Things don’t get better once the segment starts: in the opening one, an ambitious starlet doesn’t even blink when told that her breast implants are made out of human tissues. When, later on, her breasts start exsanguinating her intimate partners (don’t think too much about the mechanics of that), we viewers shrug, having done the whole, “Are you kidding? What did you expect?” thing a few minutes earlier. Horror fans will note that a number of cult-favourite genre directors are involved in the anthology: Joe Dante does the framing segments, Ken Russell does the bloodthirsty breasts one (which may explain a lot), Sean S. Cunningham goes to Japan for ghostly hijinks, and SFX supervisor John Gaeta turns in a tale that draws parallels between pregnancy and tapeworms. The one promising segment that should have worked well, about a filmmaker and his undead lover, falls flat on screen. Not that it’s a lone misfire: The Gaeta segment never takes off despite a squirm-inducing premise and the Japan-set segment doesn’t go anywhere either. The Russell one may be weird and poorly justified, but at least it does have an odd sense of humour. As for Dante’s contribution, it has good bits and pieces even if it doesn’t manage to put them together effectively. In that, the framing device does feel representative of a film that could have been much better but appears satisfied to coast on audiences doing most of the work for them. Trapped Ashes is not a film that works on anyone with slightly higher expectations than basic horror tropes.

  • Slaughterhouse-Five (1972)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, January 2022) If Slaughterhouse-Five is a disappointment, much of it has to do with how it reaches for more than it can deliver on at least two levels. First, in adapting the classic Kurt Vonnegut novel, it measures itself up against impossible odds: Vonnegut’s narrative approach is unique and maybe impossible to adapt faithfully to the screen. I last read the novel decades ago and it left such a strong impression that I can still quote moments of it—and didn’t find much of that in the film. But even if everyone agreed not to criticize the adaptation for not having the flavour of the original text, there’s still another insurmountable obstacle in the story’s immensely ambitious scope, spanning decades in the protagonist’s life: the firebombing of Dresden, a brush with near-incomprehensible aliens and eventually becoming unstuck in time. Little of this was possible to credibly portray on-screen with middle-budget early-1970s filmmaking, so it’s not a surprise if the result feels so disappointing. Vonnegut reportedly liked the result—but then again, he was a quintessential gentleman. Following in his footsteps, let’s be indulgent and at least acknowledge that Slaughterhouse Five remains interesting to watch even if it can’t grasp what it reaches for: The unstuck-in-time device is ideally suited for editing tricks (even if it doesn’t fully exploit the possibilities there) and the film does attain a darkly comic detachment about itself that does honour Vonnegut himself. I’m not even sure if it fully achieves the goals if set for itself—there’s a very long car mayhem sequence that had me thinking, “I hope this insufferable character dies” before exactly that happens, except that the film thinks it’s a tragedy. But weirdness is what Slaughterhouse Five has to offer, and then-veteran director George Roy Hill does his best in accomplishing a project fraught with pitfalls. As much as I don’t like the idea of remakes, I’m really not opposed to seeing someone take Slaughterhouse Five out for another spin, with modern innovations (SFX and audience literacy) that have made a mockery of what was formerly called “impossible to adapt.”  So it goes.

  • Melvin and Howard (1980)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, January 2022) I didn’t even realize that Melvin and Howard was based on a true story while I was watching it. Yes, I knew who Howard Hugues was—in fact, it was one of the things that drew me into this film. But what I only found out after the end credits was that the film is based on real events. Or rather—real affirmations of what may or may not have happened. To recap: In our timeline, eccentric billionaire Howard Hugues died without having a formally recognized will. That much is true. What is also true is that hundreds of claims to his fortune and fraudulent wills emerged in the years following Hugues’s death, all of them found wanting. One of those claims was “The Mormon Will,” which apparently awarded one sixteenth of Hugues’ fortune to an everyday man named Melvin Dummar, who claimed that he had once given a lift back to Los Angeles to someone claiming to be Hugues, and had the will dropped in his gas station by a mysterious stranger. There are a lot of dubious “claims” in these assertions (which were resoundingly proven false in court), but Melvin and Howard plays it straight—what if Melvin’s side of the story was the truth? (Suddenly, I don’t feel too bad about not immediately knowing that this was a “true” story.)  That hook ends up being a reason for director Jonathan Demme to deliver a compassionate character study of struggling Americans throughout the 1970s. If you, like me, don’t know from the get-go that Melvin and Howard is supposed to be a true story, the resulting film feels oddly mis-structured. After an opening in which Hugues crashes his motorcycle in the desert, Dummar picks him up out of happenstance (and the kindness of his heart) and the two men bond over the following truck ride. Then the film forgets about Hugues for more than an hour as Dummar struggles to keep a job, remarries his ex-wife, moves to another state and generally tries to keep things together through divorce and unemployment. Dummar is near the bottom of the American society, often a single step ahead of repossession and being fired. Paul Le Mat gives a credible and likable portrait of a lower-class working man making poor choices, even if the always-wonderful Mary Steenburgen steals the movie as his long-suffering (then re-divorced) wife. It’s only late in the film, as the opening moments have been nearly forgotten, that a will is mysteriously left on his desk and the film renews with Hugues’ legacy. From that point on, Melvin and Howard is not necessarily to be trusted on factual grounds: the film tells it squarely from Dummar’s perspective, and the trial that convincingly determined that the “Mormon Will” was a hoax is here presented as the persecution of an honest man. It does make for an interesting film, even if not necessarily a cohesive one: A portrait of a working-class schlub bookended by much jazzier fiction about a billionaire’s intrusion on his life. What makes the film special is its affection for its erring protagonist—and the slice-of-life portrayal of a struggling family. While not exactly truthful, Melvin and Howard does poke at universality.

  • Something Beneath (2007)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, January 2022) There is nothing to be learned from Something Beneath except that, often, the reviews are right. Any online source will tell you that it’s a terrible film with sub-average reviews from critics and general audiences alike. In presentation, it seems to be nothing more than a monster-of-the-week straight-to-DVD movie with low production values and even lower ambitions: the kinds of things cranked up by the dozens for low-end content providers. The result is… exactly that. Riffing from much better films, Something Beneath has an environmentalist message (led unironically by notorious right-winger Kevin Sorbo) tying a climate change conference with an environmental threat that gives life to people’s worst fears. Executed on the cheap, the result rarely rises above the roughness of similar films—dull direction and low-end special effects characterize the dispiriting viewing experience. Oh, it’s not quite at the lowest rung of the ladder—Sorbo does make for a likable presence, and the script has occasional moments of inspiration. Still, there’s little here to justify any effort at seeking out Something Beneath. Even at the lowest-effort level (“This says environmental conference and Kevin Sorbo. I wonder if they’ll play the material straight? Might as well watch it.”), it’s not much worth remembering.

  • Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse (1991)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2022) It’s funny how, with the widespread availability of movies from all eras on a variety of platforms, middle-aged cinephiles such as myself can see a title pop up and remember that, years if not decades ago, they really wanted to see it. I’ve been curious about Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse for a long time—While Apocalypse Now isn’t among my favourite films, its infamously troubled production has long been well-known, and many of the summaries of what happened punt readers toward this making-of movie as the definitive source. It’s also a relative curio in that it’s a standalone making-of documentary that predates the DVD era by more than half a decade—while it was relatively commonplace to see extensive documentaries included on DVD (and then Blu-ray) special editions before streaming took over, Hearts of Darkness was made in a pre-digital era, painstakingly put together with an intent that isn’t purely mercenary about its film. (Although I defy anyone to watch it and not be moved to another rewatch of the original.)  What makes it fascinating is that what happened on the set of Apocalypse Now, so candidly discussed more than a decade later by those involved, is what often happens on other sets—but cranked to spectacular extremes. Actor ill on set? How about Martin Sheen having a heart attack? Production difficulties with the sets being damaged? How about a typhoon tearing through the entire area? Difficulties working with partners? How about a director having to argue with the Marcos-era Phillipinese armed forces? Creative differences between director and star? Marlon Brando showing up overweight and undermotivated. Reshoots? How about an entire production delayed by a year? Directors pouring everything into their project? Here’s Francis Ford Coppola scrambling to find enough of his own money toward the completion of the project. Everything that can go wrong did go wrong, apparently, and Hearts of Darkness benefits from footage shot by Coppola’s wife during production to illustrate its carnival of misfortune, along with various interviews and news headlines to flesh out the material even more. While the story is well-known enough to be familiar to interested viewers, it still carries a punch as a reminder of how complicated an enterprise a big-budget film can be. It’s also good enough and even-handed enough to remind us that there are other movies out there that had an exceptionally troubled shoot, and we can’t rely on publicists to learn more about it. (I have a feeling that, in a decade or so, we’ll learn plenty more about the production of such marquee movies as The Amazing Spider-Man 2, Rogue One or Solo. But only if The Mouse allows it.)

  • Charulata (1964)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2022) Ah well—after being unexplainably taken by Satyajit Ray’s The Big City, here’s Charulata to bring me back to normal:—I just find his films uninteresting. This is not necessarily a condemnation of his work—I’m just not particularly taken by the result. Charulata does poke around some interesting themes, as a rich housewife gets bored and finds an intellectual awakening with her husband’s cousin. In a society where people aren’t necessarily free to act on their desires, the film is built around a textured blend of lust, trust and characters weighing the consequences of their next actions. A showy one-shot opening sequence is matched by a closing freeze-frame, with Ray being his usual precise self as a director in-between beginning and end. It’s well-done, evocative of a certain lifestyle and careful about its characters, but I simply wasn’t grabbed by it all. It doesn’t help that the film runs about twice as long as I would have liked, with a very slow pacing combined with a quietness of effect. You can say that Charulata made me appreciate The Big City even more—at least there’s one Ray film that I like, the rest being most appropriate for others.