Month: February 2022

  • The Best Man Holiday (2013)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2022) I have some admiration for the way The Best Man Holiday manages to deliver a fourteen-year-later sequel to a film that didn’t necessarily need one, navigating a tricky path between comedy and tragedy, repeating the same formula yet branching out, and showing character growth while not making it all about the events of the first film. It’s visibly a different film: the image quality is less grainy and more luminous, the male actors have much less hair, and everyone (actors and characters) clearly has more than a decade’s worth of experience under their belt. The film finds a way to get everyone back under the same roof (not always convincingly), and updates everyone on their achievements since the last film. Our protagonist writer is in a difficult situation: no longer a best-selling author, his editor is pushing him to collaborate on the biography of his about-to-retire football star friend. But since no one behaves entirely rationally in this film, this becomes one of many secrets that the film’s pressure-cooker Thanksgiving holiday will reveal. Quite a bit of the film’s structure feels artificial—not just the nonsensical elements required to get everyone together, but the triple-climax whammy—as if writer-director Malcom L. Lee didn’t want to choose between a football game triumph, a good tragic cry or a frantic birth sequence and said to himself what if I could have all three? Inevitably, this requires a few awkward transitions, tonal inconsistency, two regrettable time-skips and other contrivances. Still, it works, and largely on the strength of the actors… and the script during specific moments rather than its overall construction. The exceptional cast of the first film is back for more, and the increased maturity of the cast and crew is best seen in how a one-joke character played by Melissa de Sousa is developed sympathetically throughout the film. Otherwise, this is a film with Taye Diggs, Sanaa Lathan, Nia Long, Harold Perrinau, Terrence Howard and Regina Hall… who could ask for more? Cleverly re-using the first film’s accumulated goodwill to a significant purpose, The Best Man Holiday manages to be a sequel that pivots from the previous film to its own strengths, and delivers a buffet of entertainment in the end.

  • Darling (1965)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2022) I’m not usually the kind of movie reviewer who’s harsh on whether films have aged gracefully or not. Most of the time, I tend to accept them as product of their era, and I can distinguish between good intentions at the time versus what we expect as the modern standard. I can grit my teeth at the kind of low-grade racism and sexism that was Hollywood’s baseline, and know enough about filmmaking history to tolerate technical limitations all the way back to the silent movie era. Being well-intentioned counts for a lot! But if there’s one era that I have more problem processing, it’s that weird mid-1960s to early 1980s New Hollywood period… largely because it seems so intent on upsetting the status quo that it often loses itself. I had a much harder time than expected watching the British New Wave’s late entry Darling, for instance. Focused on Julie Christie’s performance as a young woman with a chronic inability to make up her mind, it’s a romantic drama that explicitly refers to earlier film eras by having the woman’s duelling older lovers played by then-veteran Dirk Bogarde and Laurence Harvey. At the same time, it desperately wants to be of its time—specifically the Swinging Sixties sweeping Great Britain at the time, loosening morals and creating new icons for a post-post-war generation. Our characters seem as aimless as it must have felt at the time—too many possibilities, too few commitments, and an intent to upset institutions that seems irresponsible in retrospect. As a result, Darling feels curiously naïve and childish today—both on a personal level with the protagonist incapable of growing up, but also in the wider social experimentation that didn’t pan out as hoped. It’s a film that, in its desperation to feel different yet its inability to settle on a way forward, feels much longer than its 127-minute duration and much more irritating than it was intended. Not every Oscar-nominated picture ages well, but Darling seems even more dated than most—not because it’s technically limited, not because it’s particularly retrograde, but because it intently proposes ideas that just feel immature generations later.

  • The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2022) Urgh. I had a hard enough time mustering much enthusiasm for British pro-colonial ode The Charge of the Light Brigade at face value. Now that I’m reading in the film’s production history that twenty-five horses were killed as a result of its action scenes, I’ve got no sympathy left. Part of a particularly irritating subgenre of 1930s Hollywood that took up grandiose adventures of British colonialism as a pretext for spectacle (Gunga-Din is particularly difficult to digest), this is a film that should otherwise be a romp to watch. It’s directed by Michael Curtiz! It stars Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland! It’s got David Niven in a small role! The action all climaxes during a spectacular battle sequence between the British and the Russians! And yet, and yet, and yet… I just couldn’t get into it. As a colonial of oppressed French-Canadian heritage, I’ve spent too much time delving into the ugliness of British colonialism to be all that enthusiastic about it, no matter how sanitized it is through wide Hollywood distribution. (Fun fact: In historical terms, the incident that inspired this pro-British film is widely seen as a major failure of British military leadership.) And that was before I found out about the film’s infamous place in movie history. The best thing The Charge of the Light Brigade ever did was to lead to the creation of laws regulating the welfare of animals in movie production—and a famous moment in film history during which star Flynn tried to hit director Curtiz in sheer outrage at his indifference to animal cruelty. Not that you’ll see that in the film, regrettably.

  • The Legend of Lylah Clare (1968)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2022) I’m going to be very brief about The Legend of Lylah Clare because I’m so disappointed in it. Hollywood satires are right in my wheelhouse, and yet the film doesn’t work. It’s a clunker almost all of the way through, playing with Hollywood archetypes but not achieving anything along the way. It’s not really funny, it’s certainly not insightful and it’s entertaining only in seeing how a film with a big budget and even larger intentions can fail to achieve anything. You can see where and how the same elements could have been combined for a much superior result, but that’s not it—The Legend of Lylah Clare simply doesn’t work despite Kim Novak in the lead and plenty of call-backs in the details. Even for a Classic Hollywood buff, it’s a dud.

  • The Color Rose aka The Sinners (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2022) Most of the movies you’ll never see are those that fail to fulfill their potential. They’re inert, perhaps bolstered by a few good technical qualities, but otherwise singularly uninvolving compared to what they could and should have been. They don’t catch anyone’s attention, and sink away from memory and distribution channels. So it is that The Sinners, in getting interested in a clique of mean girls styling themselves after the seven deadly sins in a small religious high school, could have gone in any number of really interesting directions—some of them as wild as could be imagined. But as the dark dour tone of the first minutes suggests, it rather settles for a trite slasher thriller in which the girls are killed one after another. If you’re looking for levity or entertainment, forget it: this is all meant to be dark and rather depressing. The cinematography isn’t bad at all, especially considering the usual low budget of a Canadian horror film, but it’s all in one monotonous tone that leaves much potential untapped. The casting isn’t diverse enough to compensate for a flat screenplay that doesn’t do enough to distinguish the seven girls… or make us care about it all. By the time The Sinners unspools its final twists meant to be shocking, the best it can get is a bored shrug. First-time writer-director Courtney Paige gets a few things right, but doesn’t fulfill her potential, nor can create much excitement along the way. Too bad—there’s quite a bit of potential left on the table and the result is much duller than it should have been.

  • The Best Man (1999)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2022) Writer-director Malcolm D. Lee seldom gets any respect—he may be Spike Lee’s cousin, but his work over the past two decades has largely been in the comedy and romance genre, and despite his strong all-black-cast films delivering copious entertainment, he flies well under the radar of most commentators. His debut film, The Best Man, does showcase him at his best—efficiently managing a great cast for an ensemble romantic comedy that is both familiar and matter-of-fact in its unconventionality. Featuring a cast of upwardly-mobile middle-class black characters, it’s a film that otherwise plays along familiar lines: long-buried secrets suddenly emerging over a short momentous period, as a book written by the best man of an imminent marriage blows open affairs and lust in a small group of friends. (As with most other movies about writers, our “novelist” character can’t imagine his way out of a short story and has to write an autobiographical novel. Why he thought this would go undetected is beyond the scope of the film’s logic.)  The story pretext may be thin, and some of the scenes may feel lazy, but The Best Man is indeed at its best when it indulges in the interactions between its characters. Taye Diggs is not bad as the not-so-secretive writer protagonist, but most of the film’s attention goes to Terrence Howard in his breakout role as an unrepentant womanizer, and Harold Perrineau as a man trying to escape his domineering girlfriend. On the distaff side, The Best Man is an embarrassment of riches, with Nia Long and Sanaa Lathan competing for the protagonist’s attention, Monica Calhoun as the sweet bride-to-be with a secret, and Regina Hall’s short but striking debut as a lap dancer. The pacing of the film goes steadily forward, and even the largely useless flashbacks to the characters’ college years don’t break up the flow too much. It all culminates in a warm but honest reckoning in which no characters hold a grudge as they look forward to the future. Which includes a sequel, The Best Man Holiday.

  • Dream Horse (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2022) While Dream Horse ends up being a very familiar, suspiciously contrived feel-good comedy, I frankly expected something much duller. Hurrah for low expectations, I guess—but those expectations were set by an underwhelming opening sequence in which we’re stuck in a small English town alongside a protagonist going through the repetitive motions of a boring life. Her job is unfulfilling, yet still more interesting than her marriage. The town is sleepy and the neighbours are dull. The spark comes as she hears about a racing horse syndicate—the idea being to sell shares into a racehorse, and hopefully benefit from its winnings. Before long, a large cast of eccentric characters joins in, the mare gives birth to a promising foal and (time-skipping forward to the good parts) the horse starts winning race after race. Dream Horse is adapted from a true story, but the dramatization dictates that something bad is about to happen and indeed we’re soon asked to consider whether the injured horse should be put out of his misery. They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? this isn’t, though, as the third act goes for a comforting arc that sees everyone get some money and the horse retire quietly to the good pasture. Toni Colette is the anchor here, as the godmother of the syndicate and the one who experiences the most personal growth along the way. There’s something a bit weird and convenient is showcasing a story about winning against incredible odds without spending much time talking about those odds—as if anyone could come up with a race-winning foal, and find contentment in winning money (recast as “being part of something great” and “finding fulfillment in life”) from gambling. But such questions are beyond the intent of Dream Horse, which is meant to make viewers happy without asking too many questions. It does work as such—and as mentioned, I expected much worse. Who doesn’t like a winning horse?

  • The Hating Game (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2022) It’s easy to be swept up in The Hating Game. While it starts with interpersonal dynamics that feel contrived for the requirements of the plot, its fast-paced dialogue, likable leads and contemporary direction from Peter Hutchings do much to hook us in, at least long enough for the film to make good out of the finer elements of its premise. Lucy Hale and Austin Stowell make great romantic foils to each other as career-driven overachievers competing in the same publishing office, an enormous amount of sexual attraction hanging over their petty sniping while sitting at their facing desks. The film definitely takes a two-steps-forward, one-step-back approach to plotting, as nearly every significant move forward (a torrid elevator kiss, a passionate hotel-room tryst) is immediately set back by some other obstacle. The rip-roaring motormouth dialogue brings to mind screwball comedies of the 1930s, while the structure underpinning of the romance harkens back to Austen. (The Hating Game pairs up exceptionally well with Modern Persuasion if you’re looking for a great contemporary romantic comedy dual bill.)  The script, based on a novel, is hardly perfect: there’s no time to tie up some of the loose narrative ends, and much of the climax is predicated on the kind of stupid plotting (she overheard something! He never told her something! Also: Everyone conspired not to set her straight for kicks and giggles!) that feels considerably below what the film achieves elsewhere. But it all works out in the end: the weird setup, the episodic progression, the silly third act all lead where it should have led, and by the time The Hating Game wraps up, it’s a good enjoyable romantic comedy, the likes of which aren’t as frequent as they should.

  • Shershaah (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Amazon Streaming, February 2022) For those used to the war movies of the Anglosphere, taking a look at other conflicts can be interesting in its own right. So it is that Shershaah drops us on the Indian side of the 1999 Kargil war, and uses that as the flashpoint to tell us about the story of real-life hero Vikram Batra. This is, to be clear, a propaganda film. It’s utterly uninterested in being even-handed in its depiction of the conflict, and equally uninterested in anything but a hagiography of its lead characters. You can get swept up in it, though: despite the lengths (135 minutes!) and tangents typical of big-budget Indian productions, Shershaah tells a familiar tale of a man becoming a hero, and illustrates it spectacularly with action sequences that aspire to the Hollywood standard. (They don’t quite get there due to substandard CGI, but they clearly get the point across even when they grossly overdo the explosions.)  Sidharth Malhotra is credible when it counts as the heroic lead, and few expenses have been spared to deliver a credible war movie from the Indian perspective. It’s hardly perfect with a largely useless framing device, a slow first hour and other assorted quirks—I suspect that its appeal falls sharply the moment you go beyond the Indian diaspora. Still, I had a better time with Shershaah than many other recent Indian films, so its popularity is not a mystery.

  • Penelope (1966)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2022) I’m always amused at how you can gauge the popularity of an older movie shown on Turner Classic Movies just by its image quality. Pristine resolution, colour and sound? We’re probably talking about a well-known, widely-seen, big-budget film that has earned significant restoration work, making it look even better than what audiences saw in theatres at the time. Muddy picture with fuzzy sound? Well, then we must be watching something like Penelope, which was good enough (or rather—starred actors bankable enough) to be worth a perfunctory rescue from the archives during the standard-definition era of TCM broadcasts, but has not been revisited since then. It’s easy to see the film’s mixed impact. On one hand, you’ve got a very attractive Natalie Wood as a banker’s wife running around robbing banks and rich people out of sheer boredom, and Peter Falk doing an early run in the Columbo mould as a dogged police investigator. That, by itself, is enough to rescue the film from obscurity. On the other hand… it doesn’t do much with the rest. Despite taking place in mid-1960s Manhattan, having Wood looking her best and playing around with heist plot elements, director Arthur Hiller struggles to make something out the premise’s strengths. The more it delves into the psychology of the protagonist, the uglier the comedy gets, and the film makes surprisingly little use of the irony of a banker’s wife robbing from her husband’s bank. (Although there’s a cute moment late in the film when insurance payouts trump honesty.) Penelope simply doesn’t spark into anything worth remembering (especially considering the existence of several much stronger mid-1960s heist movies) and there’s a lack of focus on the comedic potential of it all. No wonder it’s still considered with the same lack of enthusiasm that greeted its initial release. So, yes, the next time you see Penelope on TCM and squint at the fuzzy picture, remember that the alternative isn’t as much a crystal-clear restoration as the film sitting unseen in the archives.

  • The Last Duel (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Disney Streaming, February 2022) I haven’t felt this bored during a Ridley Scott film since Exodus: Gods and Kings (and before that, Kingdom of Heaven), and I suspect that it’s my own problem. Taking us back to medieval France for a story of two men, a woman, and a judicial duel meant to settle a case of rape, The Last Duel is a sumptuous production… and frequently a dull one. As usual, Scott delivers quite a visual atmosphere—unfortunately, he goes for a monochrome presentation with flashes of cold blue, playing far more on contrast than palette. This doesn’t do much to make the dirty, rough atmosphere of the medieval era any more palatable. The subject matter isn’t any less ugly, with three characters’ perspectives outlining systemic misogyny and a rigid hierarchy. There’s really no reason to spend any extra minute in this terrible setting, but at 153 often-interminable minutes, The Last Duel clearly doesn’t get that message. There are, to be fair, a few good points. The meticulous detail in which the film is assembled is impressive, and does justice to a true story. A heavier, radically-coiffed Matt Damon looks like a trucker transplanted in the medieval era, while Adam Driver does well as his opponent—and Ben Affleck shows up as an impish lord over them both. (Damon and Affleck also co-wrote the screenplay with Nicole Holofcener—all three also co-produced.)  In no way is The Last Duel bad—but it feels overlong and far too grimy for its own good, giving ample excuses to audiences to start looking for the exit.

  • Spin (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Disney Streaming, February 2022) As far as Disney Channel original movies go, Spin is an amiable blend of familiarity, different cultures, hip music and not-quite romance. It features the likable Avantika Vandanapu as a young American woman of Indian ethnicity working in her family’s restaurant, who picks up DJing and a boyfriend, then spends the rest of the film trying to combine those new interests with her more traditional family… and her abandoned friends. Pleasantly enough, the romance angle doesn’t last long: After a perfunctory second-quarter subplot, the boyfriend becomes a rival, only to be evacuated from the happy ending in a nod to empowerment. (Less happily, the film’s structure minimizes the other romantic subplot featuring Kyana Teresa, who should have been more of a presence in the film.)  While Spin doesn’t stray too far from typical narrative structure and remains hampered by some convenient plotting choices and a limited budget (something best shown during the otherwise quite good “Festival of Colors” scene), it doesn’t do too badly for its target audience. The bright cinematography is audience-friendly, and its values are in the right places. The combination of influences makes the result more interesting, and the actors do well—with special notice to Meera Syal as the supportive matriarch. I can confirm that the film was a hit with this household’s target audience—and led us to some Indian cuisine.

  • The Sight (2000)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, February 2022) Director Paul W. S. Anderson gets a lot of flak for his low-brow action movies (having produced-directed-written a series of Resident Evil movies will do that) but there are interesting exceptions in his filmography. Made-for-TV The Sight may be one of the lesser-known ones. Meant as a pilot for a series that was never picked up, it follows an American architect as he travels to London and discovers that he’s been chosen as the human representative for a group of ghosts trying to right injustice. While not the most original of premises, there’s something to the execution of the film that makes it halfway interesting. Andrew McCarthy is moderately likable as the lead, but the prime role goes to the City of London, and the idea of a fellowship of ghosts trying to effect positive change on the world. This is the first time I’ve seen a well-known Londonian architectural distinction (the replacement of WW2-bombed buildings with more modern ones) used as part of a plot, and the not-entirely-negative repercussions of ghostly influences is something that would have been interesting to see play out. Visually, the film is audacious for 2000, which means that some of the material will definitely look dated today—whether the poor image quality of the version I saw is an artefact of its TV origins or a result of the older French dub shown on a channel known for poor image quality is something I don’t know. Still, I was expecting the very worst of the film and was pleasantly surprised at a few ideas, set-pieces and moments. For Anderson fans, this is worth tracking down. For horror junkies, The Sight has something slightly better than the average to offer.

  • The Bribe (1949)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2022) I suspect that The Bribe is far more remarkable to post-1980s audiences as the film that provided much of the re-used footage for Dead Men Wear Plaid’s last act. That makes sense in that it’s a film noir that dares escape the metropolitan streets to get to a slightly more exotic locale: down the west coast to a Central American island where corruption runs rampant. Visually, it’s got something different to offer, and once you add in all of the featured marquee names (Ava Gardner, Robert Taylor, Vince Price, Charles Laughton), then it becomes an irresistible destination. Alas, the film itself—while certainly watchable—is a bit of a mess. Produced by MGM at a time when the studio was riding high on expensive prestige productions and film noir was the province of smaller studios with smaller budgets, The Bribe feels like insincere slumming. The plot has small stakes executed in confusing fashion, but it does allow Price and Laughton to chew some delicious scenery along the way, and have Gartner in a low-cut blouse. If that’s not entertaining enough, there’s the flywheel-dominated finale to give a big send-off to a small story. Despite the big-budget aura of MGM’s production, The Bribe ends up being only a middling noir—a middle-tier pick at best, and then again only for the actors and being quoted by a spoof of the genre.

  • Stunts (1977)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2022) I keep wondering why there aren’t more movies about stunts, but there have been a few in the past, and Stunts is clearly one of the more earnest. Taking place during the production of an action film with dangerous set-pieces, it’s both a murder mystery and a look at stunt industry and the kinds of characters it attracts. Our protagonist is the brother of a stuntman who dies in the film’s opening sequence, highly motivated to find the truth and escape alive. Few genres are best-suited to the exploration of a subculture as the murder mystery, especially if the investigator gets to explore relevant aspects of the subculture. It’s in that context that Stunts finds its true calling, featuring characters and details to give enough of a flavour to larger audiences. The result isn’t perfect—in trying to marry the requirements of a murder investigation with those of an action film aping the shooting of an action film, Stunts often plays hard and fast with credibility versus convenience. It’s not completely successful at maintaining tonal consistency (where the tragedy of euthanasia co-exists with the obvious comedy of shotgun affair discovery) nor all that good at realism. But director Mark L. Lester makes it watchable, even entertaining if you lean into its origins as a B-movie thriller with a focus on behind-the-scenes material. It pairs up really well as an opener to the similar Reynolds/Needham comedy Hooper if you want some more stuntman fun. Were the later-1970s the high point of films about stunts? Maybe… but it doesn’t have to stay that way.