Month: January 2022

  • Feast (2005)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, January 2022) While Feast is definitely not aiming to be more than a good old humans-against-monsters movie, it does have a certain confidence in its intentions, and doesn’t forget to laugh about its generic premise. Wisely limited to a single night, it’s a film that follows a bunch of strangers in an isolated night as it’s attacked by human-eating demons. There’s nothing new to that premise, but the film shows early on that it doesn’t mean playing the material straight or serious. Intertitles and freeze-frames help introduce the characters, often leading us to narrative red herrings. The special effects work is not that bad despite the film’s low-budget, and while the actors aren’t particularly good, they are directed with a certain energy by John Gulager. The script eventually becomes too self-aware for its own good, but it can be relied upon to keep the plot pieces going from beginning to end. The film has no compunction about doing unexpected things, but that intention eventually gets away from its effectiveness during the third act, as various curveballs end up damaging the pacing rather than enhancing it. Still, as far as cheap monster movies go, Feast does a little bit better than usual thanks to some self-awareness and a crew that understands that when you don’t have much of a budget, an attitude and wittier words don’t necessarily cost much more.

  • All You Can Eat Buddha (2017)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On TV, January 2022) Even by the standards of arthouse French-Canadian movies, writer-director Ian Lagarde’s All You Can Eat Buddha is a weird one. The opening credits of the film waste no time in setting up the off-putting nature of what will follow, as shots of a calm blue sea are overlaid over a fat man, tentacles and dissonant musical stings. What’s in store after that? Plenty, even if it may not make much sense. Taking place at a low-end vacation resort, the film revolves around an overweight, diabetic man who decides that he’d rather stay at the resort than go back home. Which is really curious considering that he doesn’t do much more than eat and look forlorn, not even taking part in the resort’s activities. But the weirdness accumulates: As the world outside the resort steadily degrades, he manages to cure a young woman of her anorexia, make friends with an octopus, have sex with a maid, and befriend the rest of the staff. (Except for the resort owner, who’s driven crazy in trying to understand why people like the protagonist so much.)  Lengthy silences and enigmatic events constantly remind viewers that this is a low-budget art film, not meant to be understood as much as taken in. It all climaxes by what I’m guessing is karmic retribution, as the role of the eater reverts and balance is brought back to another cycle. I wisely gave up early on making sense of All You Can Eat Buddha—I simply wasn’t in the mood for puzzle resolution, so I just let the film wash over me and wasn’t completely bored by the experience. Many will get much more out of it, but the key is not expecting anything as ordinary as a narrative-driven film. It often feels like a dream, so that should tell you enough about whether you’re susceptible to its strengths or not.

  • Evil Under the Sun (1982)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2022) Agatha Christie’s Inspecteur Poirot is back for a third Richard Goodwin-produced adventure in Evil Under the Sun, a follow-up to Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile. This time, we leave transportation vehicles behind to focus on a weekend of relaxation and murder at a small Adriatic Sea resort. When a young actress is killed midway through the film, it’s up to the droll Poirot to interrogate suspects, gather clues and assemble everyone for the shocking solution. There’s been a dearth of good murder mysteries lately (as evidenced by Knives Out’s enthusiastic reception), and I suspect that it’s one of the reasons why Evil Under the Sun still plays so well now compared to when it came out. There’s a rather wonderful double-historical nostalgic effect in now watching a 1980s film set sometime in the 1950s (ish)—and it’s fun to spend some time with characters vacationing. That fun turns to intellectual challenge as the murder investigation starts and testimonies don’t add up. A rather interesting cast surrounds a near-flawless Peter Ustinov as Poirot (thankfully, his French is almost perfect), with Maggie Smith (as a resort owner) and James Mason (playing a character unusually fond of his lack of alibi) being the most recognizable supporting actors to twenty-first century viewers. Red herring abounds, and while the result isn’t as strong as the first two films in the series, it’s still quite entertaining to watch. I have a few quibbles about the rushed ending (not the least being that a bottle would be the physical proof claimed by the characters), but not enough to dislike the result. I’m waiting for murder mysteries to make a comeback, and I just have to point to Evil Under the Sun to make a point about how even mildly successful ones can still be a lot of fun to watch.

  • Gabal [The Wig] (2005)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, January 2022) One of the usual problems with horror cinema is that it has to click on at least two levels to succeed: The scares should be good, and the reason behind the scare should work as well. All too often, filmmakers will focus on spooky set-pieces while forgetting that it should all amount to something—a compelling theme, a sensible plot, and developed characters. Otherwise, why bother? Director Won Shin-yun’s The Wig is only a half-success in that while it gets some spooky scares right, the film has issues tying them into something more. Beginning with a mute woman taking her younger cancer-stricken sister home so that she doesn’t die in a hospital, the scares get going when a wig (purchased so that the bald sister doesn’t feel too out-of-place) starts showing signs of malevolence. As flashbacks explain how we got there (most notably in showing the car accident that made the protagonist mute), the developing story steadily gets wilder and less credible. By the time the origins of the wig are clarified, the amount of preposterous material teetering on a foundation made of coincidences is too much—the film implodes on too many contrivances. The frequency of spooky sequences also goes down during that third act: wrongly convinced of its importance, the film slows down and gives audiences ample time to be skeptical of where the story goes, with unlikely connections between the handful of characters. While moments of The Wig work well, there are simply too many issues with plotting, pacing and character for the entire film to distinguish itself.

  • Breezy (1973)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2022) There are dozens of ways Clint Eastwood’s intergenerational romance Breezy should not have worked. Building a film on the idea of a teenager falling in love with a fifty-something man is already a tricky proposal: any hint of leering, deviance, or wish-fulfillment would have made the film a reprehensible object of derision. As it stands, Breezy is still awkward and suspicious, but it has enough of a patina of good execution to keep it from careening out of control. Historically, this was Clint Eastwood’s third film as a director (he doesn’t star in it) and an occasion to provide classic Hollywood actor Richard Holden with a solid late-career role. As a bitter, divorced fifty-something, his character is brought back from the brink of cynicism by the influence of a precocious seventeen-year-old hippie. While the subject matter sounds and occasionally feels like the kinds of things that older Hollywood executives would enjoy seeing on-screen, much of the film has the decency to be about the problems inherent in such a lopsided relationship. The film is at its strongest when the older man is very conscious of how doomed their affair is—alas, Breezy ultimately settles for a wholly unconvincing ending precipitated by some limp dialogue. Some will be reassured that the film was, even in the early wild and woolly 1970s, not a success and has drawn mixed critical reactions up until today. The best I can say about it is that it doesn’t humiliate itself nor feels unacceptably exploitative. But that’s not necessarily an endorsement: Breezy stinks of the worst aspects of the early-1970s and constantly feels one moment away from a much worse film. That it keeps it together long enough to have a few moments of dramatic interest is probably the best that the film could hope for.

  • Nobody (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2022) There’s much to be said about a genre piece cleverly playing to its core audience. Action comedy Nobody is clearly designed for fans, whether it’s about the premise, the details of its story or the way the action sequences are put together. The film never misses an opportunity to play with the power chords of action filmmaking, delivers just enough of a twist on a familiar premise to be interesting, and manages to provide strong entertainment value on a limited budget. The multi-talented Bob Odenkirk, who has hovered on the edge of stardom for a long time, gets a plum role here as an ex-operative (an “auditor” for a shadowy government agency) who is accidentally brought back from suburban retirement to bone-crushing action against villains of various stripes. The psychological twist here is that he’s not constrained to get back to violence—he simply re-embraces the attraction of that lifestyle that he only suppressed for so long. As a random home burglary revives his bloodthirstiness, director Ilya Naishuller apes the John Wick series (which shares the same screenwriter and producer) for inspiration on how to build action sequences: Clean crisp direction finding a good balance between strong editing and credibly letting the actors sell the choreography of the fights. To that able execution, Nobody adds quirks designed to get the fans whooping it up: One-liners carefully delivered and an inordinate fondness for using slow songs as counterpoint to the action sequences are two of the most obvious elements of how this is an action movie for action movie fans—a good way to wait for the next John Wick volume while presenting a new protagonist. It’s an enjoyable watch throughout—from a repetitively frustrating opening to a conclusion that promises sequels to come. It may not be particularly profound, but Nobody is one of the best action films of 2021 and it knows exactly what it is.

  • Meurtres à Marie-Galante (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, January 2022) One underappreciated strength of the murder-mystery genre is how it’s ideally suited to exploring an unusual setting. Beyond the expected elements of a murder, a criminal and an investigator, authors are free to tailor the plot to the specifics of the setting in which they’re telling the story, whether it’s a high-finance corporation, a space station or, in the case of Meurtres à Marie-Galante, a picturesque island near Guadeloupe. Under French administration, it’s a good and unusual “local” destination for French filmmakers to use in order to present an exotic location without travelling to another country. They certainly make the most out of the gorgeous setting—despite what feels like a low production budget, the film benefits from the natural landscapes and an opportunity to present a murder mystery in the Caribbean. This leads to some great casting choices, perhaps the best being Pascal Légitimus as a mainland policeman going back to his native island to write a book, but is immediately swept up by a mysterious murder. His most immediate colleague on the island has reasons to dislike him, and local politics and history soon inform the investigation. Meurtres à Marie-Galante is not that slick of a film, but it’s rather wonderful to watch in the middle of January: unusual faces, great accents, terrific local details, gorgeous sunny beaches and a decent-enough story have all it takes to make this a pleasant watch, especially if you go in with low expectations.

  • Stars Fell on Alabama (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2022) By now, the Hallmark Channel romantic comedy formula is not only famous enough to have been dissected in thorough detail, it’s being imitated across an entire swath of low-budget films all going for that same market audience. I keep waiting for the genre to become self-aware and poking fun at itself, but that may have to wait a while. Until then, we get exercises like Stars Fell on Alabama that play with subgenre convention without quite giving in to them entirely. Here, our male lead is a Hollywood agent who, in order to impress the Alabama locals during a class reunion, brings back a Hollywood starlet to town and pretends that she’s his girlfriend—something made more difficult by a local ex-flame still having an interest, and the superstar ex-boyfriend of the starlet not being happy about the paparazzi shots coming out of Alabama. You can see an inversion of clichés in Stars Fell on Alabama, but it’s half-hearted at best—the local ex-flame barely has one scene to make her case before going back to her local husband, while the rest of the film clearly settles into the “fake-it-till-you-fall-for-it” subgenre rather than wholly committing to the small-city romance angle. The low production values and slapdash script are most obvious in an awkward prologue set in Los Angeles—fortunately, things get more credible and interesting once the film settles in Alabama. Stars Fell on Alabama doesn’t amount to much, with a very obvious conclusion handled in the most obvious way possible, but it’s generally watchable and not offensive at all. Its portrait of small-town Alabama (while shot in South Carolina) is more affectionate than you’d expect (although, once again: target audience) and gets a couple of passable leads in James Maslow and Ciara Hanna. The supporting characters are usually more fun to watch as the film monster-trucks predictably from beginning to end. Not good, but not terrible either if your expectations stay low. But it’s certainly not the film that will make fun of other films like it.

  • Mr. Jones (1993)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, January 2022) If you often find professional movie reviewers obsessing over a specific film’s reason to exist, there’s a good reason for that. Knowing about Hollywood’s greenlighting process means that there are dozens more film proposals than finished films, and something always tilts the balance toward what shows up on screen. Usually money, but more often money with added purpose. By the time Mr. Jones was filming in 1991, Richard Gere (who co-produced the film) was arriving at the top of his superstardom following well-regarded performances in Pretty Woman and Internal Affairs—it’s natural for actors with that level of clout to start looking for acting showcases. He certainly gets one here, as a protagonist with bipolar disorder that gives him the chance to go from one emotional extreme to another in the same scene. In director Mike Figgis’ hands, the film turns into a slickly overproduced romantic drama that keeps the focus on Gere at all times, whether he’s going through several emotional states, cajoling a foreman, rushing an orchestra, romancing his psychiatrist or threatening to jump off a building. It’s a showy performance that overshadows a script built on contrivances and nice Hollywood sentiments—the romance between patient and doctor means that Mr. Jones could be subtitled “Medical Malpractice: The Movie,” and the pat overemotional ending rings hollow during the entire end credits. Still, credit should go to Gere: it’s a terrific performance and it does much to make us forget about the rest of the film. It exists to showcase Gere, and it does just that.

  • Ripoux contre ripoux (1990)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, January 2022) I was very dubious that Ripoux contre ripoux would be interesting, considering the unlikely success of the first film in the series, Les Ripoux, in making audiences sympathize with a pair of crooked cops shaking out their neighbourhood for cash and favours. How can you make a fun sequel to that? (Aside from the obvious problem of the previous film’s conclusion—which this one cheerfully ignores.)  Well, the solution, as the opening act of the sequel, is to have them fall from grace (after an act of honesty, ironically enough) and be replaced by even worse crooked cops that set out to squeeze the neighbourhood for all it’s worth. That leads the oppressed neighbourhood shop owners to head to the rural retreat of our horse-raising protagonists to beg them to come back and get rid of their replacements. No, it’s not quite as neat or original as the first film, but Ripoux contre Ripoux still manages to extend the dubious charm of the previous film—Thierry Lhermitte and especially Philippe Noiret are in fine form as the crooked cops asked to prevent an even greater evil from taking over, even when their allies prove fickle and their allegiances uncertain. The sense of neighbourhood is muddled somewhat by the protagonists’ temporary exile, but the film does roar back to a better tempo during its last half as the action returns to Paris. It’s more of the same, but pleasantly so—while I still have substantial moral qualms about making heroes out of crooked cops, there’s still some charm to the series and its lead actors.

  • The Last Gangster (1937)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2022) As the story goes, Edward G. Robinson was getting tired of playing gangsters but was remodeling his house and needed the money. An offer from MGM (rather than his usual Warner Brothers) later—voilà, one more gangster role in The Last Gangster, albeit one that greatly benefited from Robinson’s experience in lending depth to what could have been a caricature. More significantly, it offers a singular film in which Robinson, in his prime, plays an ascendant James Stewart—two recognizable actors going at each other with their own styles. Stewart is quite good (even with an unusual moustache) as an urbane, compassionate newspaperman who rivals Robinson’s gangster for the affection of his ex-wife and son. It all escalates, providing Robinson with a few showcase sequences and a heroic guns-blazing finale with an even worse criminal. Executed by the professional standards of the time, The Last Gangster is not quite as grandiose as its title suggests, but it’s a nice actor’s showcase and the best opportunity to see two screen legends on opposite sides. (They’d later reunite on Cheyenne Autumn, but not as direct opponents.)

  • Ray Donovan: The Movie (2022)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2022) I watched just enough of the first season of Ray Donovan to be interested in the film epilogue, but clearly not enough to get the most out of it. Meant as a crash-conclusion to the series after it was unceremoniously cut short, Ray Donovan: The Movie focuses its plotting on the melodramatic family matters that got me to stop watching the series in the first place—Donovan as a Hollywood fixer is interesting, but Donovan as a man stuck between the criminal activities of his father and his highly dysfunctional family is far more ordinary. But the series made its choices seasons ago, driving Donovan cross-country back to the less sunny skies of New York City and Boston, and keeping the tension high between father and son. As this movie begins, flashbacks quickly get viewers up to speed as to the deaths, betrayals and fat stack of valuable paper driving the final confrontation. There’s both a framing device in which Donovan discusses killing his father with a therapist, and a series of flashbacks to the 1980s to explain how and why there’s such an enmity between the two. Liev Schreiber is his usual dependable self as Donovan-fils, while Jon Voight is still suitably slimy as the aged Donovan-père. The film is clearly meant for series viewers, though: little time is spent reintroducing characters or plotlines, and the stakes of the rather glum film are clearly aligned with the series rather than pump things up for broader audiences. While there’s an attempt to upgrade the directing to a feature-film quality, the results are still very much aligned with that’s commonly seen on cable TV. In other words (and unlike similar spinoff The Many Saints of Newark, riffing off The Sopranos), there’s no real reason to check out Ray Donovan: The Movie unless you’re a confirmed fan of the show looking for closure: the highlights are few, the stakes are minimal if you’re not already invested in the characters and the presentation is humdrum at best. Fans of the show will feel differently and that’s fine—everything benefits from closure even if it’s not the graceful last season the show-runners initially wanted.

  • The Cross of Lorraine (1943)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2022) The first draft of history usually resembles but is not identical to the more definitive version, and so there’s a constant sense of underlying weirdness to the way the French Résistance is portrayed in The Cross of Lorraine. It’s not just about seeing Gene Kelly (clearly a Francophile even at this early stage of his career) in a straight dramatic role as a Frenchman who suffers from a crisis of courage but ultimately chooses to fight against the Nazis—it’s about the portrayal of Vichy France and the burgeoning Resistance even as it was going on. By the time The Cross of Lorraine was released, let alone produced, there was no D-Day to draw upon and no oral histories of partisans fighting the Nazis. If the film feels like a piece of propaganda high on ideals and low on details, it’s because no one knew what la resistance was doing at the time: this was aimed at the American home front as a way to shore up support for the war effort, not as a serious historical examination of what was going on. So, if The Cross of Lorraine feels quite different from what you’ve seen elsewhere about France’s WW2 occupation, there’s a good reason for that, and it’s one of the factors why the film feels more interesting than it should. Not that it doesn’t have a few intrinsic qualities of its own: besides a rather good turn from Kelly, it also features small roles for Hume Cronyn and Peter Lorre and competent technical credentials thanks to MGM’s usually high standards. Still, for modern audiences, the propagandist aspect of The Cross of Lorraine takes the first spot, as is the film’s ignorance of the tropes that would come to dominate any representation of La Résistance in later years.

  • Speedy (1928)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2022) Travel back to another time and place with Speedy—a Harold Lloyd production featuring his “Glasses” character as a well-meaning young man trying to save the last horse-pulled transit car in Manhattan from being put out of service by an unscrupulous tycoon. (He’s not doing this out of a simple good heart: there’s a girl involved.)  Lloyd’s last theatrical silent film shows the filmmaker with a competent ability to put together a fast-paced silent comedy. A number of highlights pepper the film, whether it’s the opening sequences demonstrating how much of a baseball nut the protagonist can be (all the way to rearranging a pastry display to update a game score for his co-workers), a trip to Luna Park, a pair of thrilling high-speed vehicle chases, and a big street brawl—Speedy isn’t always as well-regarded as other Lloyd films, but it still packs a few laughs or two: a Babe Ruth cameo, a cute turn from Ann Christy as the love interest, and perhaps, best of all, an incredible depiction of late 1920 Manhattan. As a silent film send-off to the memorable Lloyd and his bespectacled character, it’s a lot more fun than I expected and it ranks high on the list of silent movies that still pack some entertainment value today.

  • Retfærdighedens ryttere [Riders of Justice] (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2022) The problem with films that deliberately try to upset you is that, well, they either don’t work, or they do succeed at upsetting you. There’s an early series of hints in Riders of Justice that the film is about cosmic coincidences in the vein of films that seek some kind of statement about the universe. Well, ignore that hint to your peril, because this is not a film about fine-tuned algorithms and fail-proof analyses. It’s about human obsession with finding links where there are none, and the rather vexing consequences when people make the wrong decisions. Anchored by a typically solid performance from Mads Mikkelsen, Riders of Justice nonetheless does not want to be the kind of revenge thriller that it initially suggests. Rather than avenge the death of the protagonist’s wife, this thriller has its characters create more problems for themselves by seeking connections where there are none, and taking action on people who don’t turn out to be all that innocent. Resolutely unwilling to play by the rules of Hollywood, it ends up like a film that nearly has something to say but seems determined to meander along the way. In messing with expectations, it doesn’t feel like a tight film—a damaging quality for a thriller. If, indeed, it’s meant to be a thriller, because for all of the gunplay and violence, there’s a feeling that Riders of Justice is really more interested in doing its own things, even if it leaves viewers unsatisfied and shrugging.