Month: February 2022

  • Blood Gnome (2004)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, February 2022) As someone who watches a lot of movies, high and low, it’s confounding to hear arguments about “worst movies of the year” when talking about big-budget, technically competent movies with a well-known cast. Sure, it’s fun to pile on when big projects go awry, and there’s not denying that some of them aren’t very good. But “worst movie of the year”? For that you just have to go digging into low-budget tripe made for non-theatrical distribution channels. Something much like Blood Gnome, for instance, which looks as if it was filmed in a series of garages with people with more mercenary intentions than talent. Writer-director John Lechago combines an invisible murderous gnome creature with the Los Angeles BDSM scene as his angle for Blood Gnome, but the result is terrible no matter how you look at it. Muddily shot will full-framing of actors to ensure that we don’t focus too much on the threadbare sets, Blood Gnome is trash and at least has an awareness of it. The script’s awfulness is not helped by some terrible production values. While the BDSM angle desperately wants to be good for cheap titillation, the best it can do is briefly feature pin-up model Julie Strain as a dominatrix—the rest of it plays with the subculture at a very superficial level. The rest of the film isn’t much better, and anyone looking to get some cheap thrills out of the result is going to be best-served by looking anywhere else. The monsters are mean-spirited enough to go beyond simply killing BDSM enthusiasts to cyberbullying the protagonist in mildly amusing early-2000s chat applications. I’ll give one meagre compliment to Blood Gnome: as ugly and awful as it is, there’s enough dumb stuff in there to keep anyone’s attention. That may be the faintest compliment possible, but you’d be surprised at how many other movies (many of them low-budget horror) can’t even achieve that level of engagement. Oh yes—there’s much worse than Blood Gnome out there if you want to talk about the worst movies of the year…

  • Manhattan Melodrama (1934)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2022) There’s no shame in admitting that I was primed for Manhattan Melodrama. With a cast like Clarke Gable, William Powell and Myrna Loy, how could it be otherwise? Even the rough plot summary seems interesting, as it sets up Powell and Clarke as playing childhood friends growing up on opposite sides of the law, and Loy complicating everything. But the execution of the film feels oddly lacking. Sure, Powell is up to his usual suave persona playing an umpteenth role as a lawyer. Yes, Loy is cute and Gable does what Gable became famous for. But compared to their other performances, there’s no spark in Manhattan Melodrama—although it’s worth noting that, at the time, it was a significant film for all three: It was part of Gable’s ascension to superstardom throughout the decade, solidified Powell’s increasingly heroic persona and was the first of fourteen films that Powell and Loy made together. The success of the film at the time was considerable, helped along by the public knowledge that notorious gangster John Dillinger was shot right after coming out of a screening of the film. This all helps the film be interesting, but it doesn’t necessarily make it all that good or entertaining. Manhattan Melodrama is watchable enough, all right, but modern viewers may get hung up on the truthful “melodrama” of the title, as the ending gets more and more convoluted in its moral choices.

  • Caged— Le prede umane aka Caged Women (1991)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, February 2022) There’s an entire category of, shall we say, more lurid films that doesn’t warrant any critical discussion, and Caged Women is very, very close to the frontier that separates those films from those worth a review. In fact, that may be its most distinctive feature. A self-aware “women in prison” film, Caged Woman doesn’t show any shame in overtly playing with the codes of the genre. The beautiful protagonist spending most of her time in various states of undress; the lengthy soft-core sex scenes; the inevitable lesbian sex contrasted with the ugly rape scenes; the evil wardens; the fact that it’s taking place in some other country is invariably portrayed as primitive and corrupt. The plot could fit on a napkin—By my count, the first fifteen minutes of the film merely serve to show the heroine travelling alone in a tropical country, taking a ridiculously drawn-out shower, meeting a man at the bar and having cinematic sex with him. Fifteen minutes. You can imagine how the rest of the film’s 90 minutes goes. Trumped-up drug charges? Check. Female guard being more sadistic than the men? Check. Fighting between female inmates? Check. More showers or firehose-spraying scenes? Check. Sadistic wardens selling the female prisoners in prostitution for male clients? Check. Prisoners being used as prey in a barbaric hunt? Check. A helicopter being used as a means of escape? Check. Even sticking to non-lurid cinema, there have been many women-in-prison movies like Caged Women—most of them ugly, gory and dispiriting. What sets Caged Women apart—and makes it just a tiny bit more likable as far as I’m concerned—is that it’s not really that interested in the violent aspect of women-in-prison films. Yes, there’s a bad rape sequence and some violence toward the end, but it’s not as ugly as many other films. (Yes, I know that’s a terrible statement to make—but I’m comparing exploitation films to each other, not making a grander statement.)  Caged Women wisely puts the focus on erotic voyeurism rather than out-and-out violence and horror like many other films: writer-director Leandro Lucchetti seems to delight in the naked women and gets through the violence in a perfunctory way, which is how it should be if you have to have violence in women-in-prison film. Pilar Orive is beautiful as the protagonist, and the cinematography sometimes shows intentions of being more than just a shlock-fest. None of these make Caged Women worth watching—even in avoiding the very bottom of the barrel, it remains cheap, exploitative and nonsensical. The scene in which two sweaty female prisoners put in a heat box end up licking the sweat off each other to survive is, ahem, too dumb for mere words. But if we’re going to do some authentic film criticism around here, it’s important to tease apart the less-awful from the truly vile, and if Caged Women does remain an unrecommendable piece of exploitation, it’s important to note that there’s much worse out there. (Note for the completists: The version I watched is the uncut French-language one.)

  • Forever, Darling (1956)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2022) By all rights, Forever, Darling should be a much better film than it is. Put together by Lucille Ball and Desi Arnez after the success of The Long, Long Trailer, the film was clearly meant to capitalize on the success of the pair during I Love Lucy, being shot during the summer hiatus of the show and showing the couple in the lead roles. Even the premise—what with a guardian angel trying to help our character go through marital troubles—is rich in possibilities. It’s even funnier when James Mason, playing the angel, is also revealed to be playing James Mason—the angel taking the appearance of each person’s, ahem, “favourite movie actor.”  (It’s just as funny to learn that while Mason was a sex-symbol at the time, the first pick for the role was Cary Grant… except that he was unaffordable.)  We’ve got Ball in fine form here, wide-eyed expressions of disbelief and surprise doing much of the comedic heavy lifting. But even with all of that put together, the script barely pokes at the comic implications of the premise, and its subservient-wife message has aged very poorly even for an innocuous 1950s comedy about a couple learning to get along. Even a spirited third act set in the wilds of a camping trip fails to gather much traction. Audiences at the time agreed—the film was a commercial bust, which stopped any further Ball/Arnez films from going forward. Too bad in many ways…

  • X aka X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes (1963)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, February 2022) What’s interesting in a film like X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes is how what was clearly meant as a sensational film can become creaky compared to modern production standards… and yet still have something unnerving to it. A favourite of the pulp sci-fi era and still one of Roger Corman’s better-known productions, this is a Science Fiction tragedy about a scientist inventing a serum to allow him to go beyond the limits of human perceptions, testing it on himself and progressively losing control of his senses. The point here isn’t the classic tale of hubris and conceptual breakthrough (although it goes light on the breakthrough and heavy on the increasing horrors) as much as the episodes along the way, shifting the tale into slightly different subgenres along the way. There’s nothing subtle or even credible here—I was particularly amused at a casino’s inaction when a man wearing wraparound glasses comes by, wins at cards and says something like, “They can’t stop me from playing!”  Well, no, any casino in the real world would have kicked you out a long time ago. Another sequence set at a typically early-1960s party goes through amazing convolutions in order to portray the protagonist’s perspective of everyone appearing naked… without showing anything too risqué. It’s all part of the fun, although I was primed from Stephen King’s Dance Macabre to expect a much more hard-hitting ending. (As King writes, “I have heard rumors—they may or may not be true—that the final line of dialogue was cut from the film as too horrifying. If true, it was the only possible capper for what has already happened. According to the rumor, Milland screams: I can still see!” but I had forgotten that it was King’s hearsay rather than what was in the film.)  There have been numerous attempts to remake the film since its first release, and it’s obvious why: there’s a kernel of a great idea here that could support quite a bit of drama and spectacular special effects, not to mention better episodes of the protagonist seeing beyond human senses. I’m not normally a fan of remakes, but if anyone wants to have another go at X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes, then I wish them the best.

  • The Ex-Mrs. Bradford (1936)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2022) Let’s face it: William Powell had such a great presence playing suave amateur detectives that there’s no limit to the number of similar films he could have done without annoying audiences. Every Powell fan is aware of his career-best turn in The Thin Man and its sequels; nearly every fan is also aware of his two turns as Philo Vance. But The Ex-Mrs. Bradford is a bit more obscure, and that probably qualifies it as a hidden gem of sorts for anyone simply wanting more of detective Powell. The murder-mystery plot is both convoluted and strikingly ludicrous, but that’s not the point—the point is watching Powell doing what he did best (clearly beloved by the writers and directors for doing do) and interacting with Jean Arthur as she plays his ex-wife cunningly working through a plan to re-marry him. Their interplay is decent, and their characters are clearly from that tradition of 1930s mysteries fast-talking couples. Like many films of the time and genre, it packs a lot in its 82 minutes, and remains just as delightful today as it was then—no, The Ex-Mrs. Bradford is not a Thin Man film, but even a slightly-less good copy of The Thin Man is still quite a good time.

  • Leslie Caron: The Reluctant Star (2016)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2022) Documentaries starring elderly actors or filmmakers reflecting on their careers are essentially a subgenre by now, and they have to be approached with very specific expectations. Forget about getting the full story, let alone the true story: At their ages, with their reputations, stars sitting down to talk about their careers want a monologue rather than an interview. They will present semi-fictional takes on their lives and careers, impose later conclusions on their earlier actions and generally come out of it having delivered a performance about themselves. Leslie Caron is no exception, as her rather chaotic career is described throughout The Reluctant Star. Going between her native France, Hollywood and London, she never regained the superstardom of her first few years (it’s hard to top early years featuring An American in Paris and Gigi), but says she was happy about that… hence the title. You have to take those statements with a grain of salt, though, as she expresses frustration at being unable to act in more French films. But even as a hagiography, it’s still an interesting portrait. Caron had a very different career than her contemporaries, finding a living through lower-profile dramatic roles in three moviemaking centres but never pursuing or recapturing early stardom. She still comes across as a lively, wise presence with much to say. It’s amusing to see some of my favourite films of hers not getting much attention (namely Fanny and Father Goose), and some of her own favourites being far less known to the general public. In the end, authorized hagiography or not, it’s just a delight for The Reluctant Star to have captured her thoughts. Let print biographers tackle the inner workings of her psychology and the less-admirable aspects of her life, if any—here she describes herself in her own words, and that’s interesting enough.

  • Angel and the Badman (1947)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2022) I am not a John Wayne fan, so I’m seeing his films more out of cinematic history duty than anything else. Angel and the Badman is best known for three very different things these days. First: it marked Wayne’s first film as a producer, meaning that we can get a better idea here of what he really wanted to do, or what he really wanted to play. Second: The film is in the public domain, which means that you can watch it from its Wikipedia page and so it remains more popular than similar westerns due to its wide availability. The third aspect is the most interesting. Rather than make a bog-standard western with the expected gunfights and horse chases, Wayne here plays in a far less action-driven, more romantic kind of western. The story of a wounded gunfighter slowly being nursed back to health by two dedicated women, Angel and the Badman doesn’t feel like a standard western and that very much works to its advantage. While Wayne doesn’t make much of a romantic protagonist (admittedly a major point against the film), it does offer a change of pace from his usual characters… or, rather, as much of a change as possible with Wayne’s limited range. Given the limitations of the lead actor, that makes Angel and the Badman more of an interesting film than a good one. But I’ll take it—My opinion of Wayne’s persona being as low as it is, anything even slightly different is usually a step up.

  • Eddie Murphy: Raw (1987)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, February 2022) Perhaps the most striking moments of stand-up comedy concert film Eddie Murphy: Raw aren’t the comic bits themselves, but the atmosphere surrounding them. Unlike the vast majority of stand-up performances captured on video, Eddie Murphy was a superstar when he toured and shot the film. At the time, he was America’s best-known comedian by virtue of his SNL stint, well-received albums and a dynamite movie career. As a result, Raw blurs the lines between a concert movie and a recording of a comic performance. The vast, vast audience surrounding Murphy and laughing at once is a strikingly different one than the small-venue crowds at most stand-up recordings. You can feel Murphy revelling in his status as a megastar. While I’m not that fond of the cold-open scripted sketch that begins the film, the moments that follow establish, through shots of crowds and fawning fan comments (“I can’t wait to see him in those leather pants!”), just how big Murphy was at the time, and his rock-star status before he even starts his set. Fortunately, much of what follows rises up to his expected standard. I’m not that fond of the meandering last third of the film, but his material on relationships remains cutting and funny, while the moments in which he addresses his fame offer a glimpse at a very different lifestyle. The only thing funnier than the film itself is the experience of watching it as broadcast on BET—since the channel bleeps out profanity and Raw was, at the time of its release, the film containing the most profanity, much of the film’s broadcast time is one bleep after another, with some entire sentences being bleeped out at times. (Don’t worry—the nature of profanity being what it is, there’s no loss of meaning here.)  Eddie Murphy: Raw often gets mentioned in film histories for valid reasons—it remains the highest-grossing stand-up comedy concert film even made (a record unlikely to ever be broken), and an early film by Robert Townsend (director) and a few Wayans brothers (writers and producers). But even for audiences unaware of the historical context, it remains a striking portrait of a comedian at the very top of his profession, and playing to that status.

  • Cry, the Beloved Country (1951)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2022) I’ve been spending some time this February digging into Black Film History—Cable TV channels tacitly programmed black films all month long, and while I had a good grasp at the essentials (I also wrote an essay on the topic during the month), it was an occasion to rediscover the more obscure ones. One notable subcategory I was able to discover are the fairly rare movies featuring black leads during the 1950s—a time with few notable performers, and even fewer films featuring them in roles with deep characterization. Cry, the Beloved Country (from British producer-director Zoltan Korda, brother of naturalized British movie mogul-propagandist Alexander Korda) is a noteworthy footnote in that both lead roles are played by black actors, and no less than Canada Lee and Sidney Poitier. There’s a catch, though: the film had to go overseas to find a subject matter that would allow such a thing. Looking erringly prescient, it heads over to South Africa to talk about apartheid, looking very early on about the impact of such a policy on both white and black characters. The production history of the film is stomach-churning in itself—given apartheid, both lead actors had to pretend to the authorities that they were the director’s indentured servants to be admitted in the country, where they shot the film in near-guerilla conditions. It’s not an easy of a fun film to watch: the subject matter is difficult, and Korda doesn’t go for feel-good material. But it’s an amazing film in its own right—the last of Lee’s career, and one of Poitier’s first—thereby acting as a passing of the torch. Poitier was a self-assured presence even at that stage of his career, and there’s considerable interest watching him this early. I can’t say that I liked Cry, the Beloved Country, but it earns a spot in my version of Black Film History—and isn’t it the point to celebrate such successes?

  • George Washington Slept Here (1942)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2022) It’s tempting to compare George Washington Slept Here with Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House. Both films, after all, are Classic Hollywood comedies about an urbanite (played by an actor with significant comic credentials) who moves to the country and experiences numerous difficulties trying to achieve his rural dream. But the differences are obvious early on: Jack Benny is no Cary Grant, and his first scene, in which he verbally harangues his black servant, is not an endearing one at all. Spending much of the film being annoyed at the protagonist (who spends his time complaining about everything, and barely seems to like his wife) is no way to enjoy a film, and it takes just about everything—most notably a spirited turn by Charles Coburn as a secretly-destitute uncle—not to shut down the whole thing. Now, I strongly suspect that I don’t know enough about Benny’s persona to be sympathetic to it: seen cold, he just seems like a miserable, bigoted, hateful miser and that’s a very poor foundation for any comedy. George Washington Slept Here does have a few chuckles (plus a lovely Ann Sheridan), but it never quite escapes the bad first impression left by its star, nor the far better memories of the admittedly flawed Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House.

  • Dawn of the Mummy (1981)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, February 2022) Let me be clear and unrepentant when I say that I have no objection whatsoever to nudity in movies aimed at adults—sometimes, it’s the only element saving the film from loathing and dismissal. So, in the opening moments of Dawn of the Mummy, when an American photographer shows up in the Egyptian desert with two models eager to bare it all (although no farther than a bikini), you might as well enjoy it because it’s all downhill from there. After the usual shenanigans about ancient curses and such, the film takes a turn toward mummies behaving like zombies, some extreme gore and plenty of the usual monster movie scenes. Given this, the cute models and the Egyptian setting are all that distinguish writer-director Frank Agrama’s Dawn of the Mummy from many other Italian-style zombie films of the early 1980s. Considering that I happen to loathe that subgenre, well—desert landscapes and brief flashes of partial nudity will have to do as small compensation for having to sit through this.

  • The Miseducation of Bindu (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2022) I’m not a big fan of comedies where the main joke appears to be humiliating the protagonist throughout the entire running time, so there are plenty of moments in The Miseducation of Bindu in which I just felt sympathy for the character and loathing for the film. Megan Suri delivers a winning performance as the titular Bindu, a bright young woman of Indian ethnicity who, when forced to attend an American high school and being bullied for being different, immediately sets out to find a way to get out of there. As the film opens, she’s nearly done getting the credits to stop attending: the only thing stopping her is a mandatory Spanish test. She speaks the language all right (take it for granted that she’s ridiculously smarter than anyone else)—it’s the test fee that’s stopping her. Compressing most of the film’s action on a single day in high school, where she must hustle to raise the money to get out of there, is a smart decision—tarnished somewhat by the third act that spills over a few weeks later. Much of the so-called plotting is a conga line of embarrassing moments with her bullies, friends, family and colourful figures that populate her school. Writer-director Prarthana Mohan tries to walk a line between comedy and drama but doesn’t always know on which side to go, and the result is roughly three-quarter of the way there. The clever material and exuberant execution are often undermined by intensely predictable material (such as the heroine’s science-class humiliation, seen -er—coming far in advance) some weird missteps, underdeveloped characters and moments, as well as some expeditious laziness that undercuts the smarter bits of the result. I did like the final result and its feel-good conclusion, but The Miseducation of Bindu shows many signs of having been undercooked or mishandled at the script stage: another rewrite may have strengthened the structure, streamlined some bumps, expanded some telling details and provided more closure while keeping the film’s space/time unity.

  • Valley of the Dolls (1967)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2022) In a classic case of a sequel overshadowing its predecessor, I went into Valley of the Dolls with distant but fond memories of the over-the-top pastiche that is Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. Well, it turns out that screenwriter Roger Ebert was on to something when he wrote the satirical sequel, because this film adaptation of Jacqueline Susann’s trashy 1966 novel is more incompetent than enjoyable. Valley of the Dolls attempts to be a dark mirror to all of those Hollywood fairy-tale films in which a small-town woman travels to Hollywood and becomes a star. Here, we have three young women destroyed by the pressures of chasing celebrity, turning to drugs (the titular “dolls”), bad men and flashy hedonism in an attempt to express the Susann’s glum dissatisfaction. It’s important to note the release year—1967, a turning point in film history when Classic Hollywood retired and New Hollywood took over, with its more realist approach but with the drunken abandon of a moved-out teen boy who finally gets to do whatever he wants. The result is meant to be a bit slummy, but it simply doesn’t have enough skill and finesse to do justice to the material. Valley of the Dolls just feels misguided at every turn, aiming to take down the image of Classic Hollywood (another miscalculation, as it turns out that even twenty-first century audiences like the allure of Classic Hollywood) but not having the right amount of perspective to be able to do so. It wants to showcase sexual freedoms but is stuck in an old-fashioned moralistic mindset. Sharon Tate is there, but not for a long time considering that the plot is scattered over three protagonists. Valley of the Dolls is semi-interesting in the ways it gets it wrong, of course, but the result is still wrong. Watch the Ebert-scripted satirical follow-up instead—you won’t miss much from the original.

  • Madea’s Big Happy Family (2011)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2022) You can feel the irony of Madea’s Big Happy Family titling very early on. Not just because happy families don’t make for good movies, but because writer-director-producer-star Tyler Perry is once again being as unsubtle about it as anyone can humanly be. As a mother receives a terminal cancer diagnosis, her attempts to tell her family about her condition are all sabotaged by unruly characters, simmering resentment, long-held secrets and cheap screenwriting tricks. Madea comes in to save the day with some tough love, but she doesn’t quite get it all right, and as the film goes through Perry’s atonal storytelling, there’s a big tragic moment to make the film come into focus. How you feel about the result will depend on your familiarity with what Perry is doing and your ability to like it even in small bits and pieces. He has his moments as a writer-director—the “Byroooooon” thing is as crude a comic device as possible, but it gets a laugh nearly every time. (Props to Lauren London for committing to such a character.) Madea’s overreach this time gets her to drive through a restaurant window, which also gets a laugh even if it’s an expected one. Perry’s theatrical background serves him well in structuring the narrative, in which tension points are gradually exposed and pressured. He also gets the atmosphere of a fractious Atlanta-area family and some decent character work from a variety of actors—including Loretta Devine as the ill-fated mother. As far as Perry movies go, Madea’s Big Happy Family is somewhere in the middle of a fairly narrow band—good if you like his material despite its flaws, but not something different enough to make converts.