Month: February 2022

  • Metropolitan (1990)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2022) If ever you wondered what kind of film Woody Allen would have directed in 1990 had he been forty years younger, Metropolitan looks like a solid answer. A very dialogue-based, quasi-theatrical experience featuring preppy Manhattanites on the cusp of their true adulthood, it’s a film based on the accidental inclusion of a lower-class young man in rarefied social circles, and the tension, drama, conversations and ideas that spark from the ensemble cast of characters. Writer-director Whit Stillman makes his debut here, and the film’s threadbare production history is a succession of heroic filmmaking almost unexpectedly resulting in a solid movie. There’s a compelling rhythm to the dialogue of the young adults grasping at understanding the world and their place in it, especially as they feel that the once-structured society that was built for people like them in changing in ways they can’t predict. Some of the dialogue is charmingly naïve; other moments are simply compelling, as ideas build upon each other. The ensemble cast (still largely unfamiliar) makes a good go at the film’s blend of social concerns, romance, jealousy, drama, breakups, exits and desperate rescue. The film is at its strongest when it portrays Manhattan as a playground for aimless rich young people, creating a timeless sense of place and time that still works rather well. I wasn’t necessarily expecting to be swept up in Metropolitan’s very stylized execution, or characters that I would usually find annoying in a the-rich-aren’t-better-than-others way. But it works, and it works in a distinct way that has few equals… except perhaps Woody Allen in some of his films.

  • Edge of the World (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2022) Considering the very long history of colonialist films, I really shouldn’t be criticizing Edge of the World all that much for its critical look at the British rule over its far-flung empire, especially when it’s lushly located in Malaysia (meant to be the historical Raj of Sarawak) and taking as a premise the existence of a white ruler after a series of events. It’s all in the jungle, confronting the realities of British imperialism and characters finding their own direction so far away from London. Boasting some impressive cinematography, complex performances and a story with a built-in hook for western viewers (it’s adapted from a true story that also led to the classic The Man Who Would be King), Edge of the World nonetheless fails to achieve much of its potential. To put it bluntly, it’s not particularly interesting. The script wastes the elements at its disposal, and the result feels like a spoon-fed history lesson. I expect opinions to vary widely depending on personal preferences—but director Michael Haussman can’t make the result as snappy or compelling as it should be, and that feels like a missed opportunity. It feels like a twenty-first century film about colonial history, though, so not quite a complete waste.

  • Devi (1960)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2022) Ah well—another classic Satyajit Ray film that I don’t quite like. As usual, I can recognize the kernel of something interesting in Devi—namely, the way a young woman is literally deified by her surroundings, showing both the lunacy of religion, but also the terrible costs paid by the woman, as others begin to consider her as more than herself. But while that’s a solid premise, I was rapidly bored by the execution. Ray’s typical style is slow from the get-go, but Devi seems to take things even more leisurely than usual. I can’t deny the cultural barrier either, as the film takes place deep in historical India with very few reference points and explanations for non-Indian viewers. (I recommend reading the plot summary prior or during watching the film, just to have a holding hand to unlock much of the film’s less-than-obvious meaning.)  I can see the care through which the film was made, I can appreciate the credibility of the historical recreation, and I can’t say much against the actors involved in the production. But when it comes to the essential “Well, did you like it?”, I can think of several Ray films I liked more than Devi (and just about as many that I liked equally, which is not very much). But so it goes—not all international cinema is as effective for everyone, and that’s part of the game.

  • Jungle Cruise (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Disney Streaming, February 2022) There are some good moments in Jungle Cruise, but then there are others where the film struggles to keep its traction. Unfortunately, many of the best bits are toward the beginning of the film, and many of the worse ones toward the end, which doesn’t help the film leave a good impression. Dwayne Johnson stars as an Amazonian River captain who is recruited by a female adventurer (Emily Blunt) to find a long-lost wondrous plant. If much of director Jaume Collet-Serra’s work feels incoherent and apparently designed by a committee, some clues can be found in how it’s from Disney, it’s adapted from a theme park ride, and it’s apparently written by no less than five people in what looks like at least three separate writing teams. You can see the flavour of Jungle Cruise’s plotting steadily slide from much-heightened “realism” to out-and-out supernatural fantasy à la Pirates of the Caribbean the longer it goes on. Johnson’s charisma helps make the entire thing hold together, but even him and Blunt can’t quite manage to smooth the bumps out of a script that makes sure to fit, in slightly more than two hours, not only a supernatural historical adventure, but socially-conscious quips, a CGI jaguar, as much of the original ride’s patter as possible, and a German proto-Nazi submarine to boot. By the time bees are telling the German captain where to navigate his submarine through the estuaries of the Amazon (don’t laugh or acknowledge the average depth of the river), well, Jungle Cruise is the kind of film it’s meant to be. It doesn’t work and the ride is not quite as smooth as it should have been. By the end, it all becomes too much: in the tradition of films that overstay their welcome and don’t accelerate their pacing in their third act, the final complications are more exasperating than anything else and prevent Jungle Cruise from ending while we’re still entertained by its antics.

  • Jai Bhim (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Amazon Streaming, February 2022) It’s uncomfortable to be against films that espouse virtue. Jai Bhim is, at its core, not that different from a long tradition of Hollywood films in which a lawyer goes to fight against injustice in a system designed to marginalize the oppressed. Here, Suriya plays an idealistic lawyer who takes on a case in which a tribe member is falsely accused of theft by an upper-caste woman, and then disappeared by the police. At its best, Jai Bhim gets deliciously overdramatic in portraying its protagonist in slow-motion going through the halls of justice, tirelessly fighting for justice and equality. It may all be a bit too much, but at least they’re entertaining moments of too much in a film that vastly overstays its welcome at two hours and 44 minutes. Despite the crisp images, slick direction and heartfelt intention to denounce a social problem, Jai Bhim feels interminable, repetitive and obvious. I did like Suriya and many moments of the film, but in total it all becomes overbearing—and that’s all without mentioning the de rigueur musical numbers that kill the pacing of the film even more. This assessment won’t go over very well in some corners of the Internet, as IMDB votes for the film appear to have been subject to an organized campaign to make this the highest-rated film on the site. This kind of organized brigading is frequent for Indian films on the platform—but in doing so, they expose flawed films to greater scrutiny—I expect the ratings to go down significantly over time. In the meantime, Jai Bhim ends up recommended to anyone trying to keep track of highly-rated Indian films… but even that may be putting expectations far too high.

  • Blades (1989)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, February 2022) There’s a long and strong tradition of horror comedies going for a parody of horrifying plot devices while trying to be funny about it. The trick, however, is making it funny—when that doesn’t work, you can be stuck in a film that doesn’t seem to do anything right. There is, notionally, something amusing about Blades—trying to transform Jaws into a golf-course horror film by way of an autonomous killer lawnmower. You can even see how using protagonists best known for being golf professionals would be somehow amusing. (Although, as a Canadian, my pick would be hockey players spending the summer on the links.)  But Blades simply and continually flubs the most elementary condition of horror comedies: it’s not funny, and it’s constantly pulling its punches as so not to be an extreme horror film. What remains isn’t much of a film. Coming from Troma, it’s surprisingly toothless and, well, safe: it’s as if writer-director Thomas R. Rondinella thought so much of the premise that he stopped putting in any effort after that. The result is a failure of execution built on a very thin foundation. A disappointment if you were expecting anything… which isn’t necessarily absurd considering the number of horror comedies that at least got a few smiles out of their audiences.

  • Weary River (1929)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2022) From a contemporary perspective, the most striking thing about Weary River is how it straddles the frontier between silent films and the earliest sound era—parts of the film are silent, whereas others have sound and music. It doesn’t work all that well—the sound segments overpower the silent passages (especially given how the title song is so predominant toward the end), and there’s not that much of an artistic justification for the passage from one medium to another. (There’s obviously sound whenever the characters are singing, but there’s not as big of a structural justification as would have been, say, the protagonist leaving prison behind to take up a music career.)  At 86 minutes long, it still feels long—one of the underappreciated impacts of sound film was a more consistent narrative rhythm, but this too is only partially achieved here. There’s some visual innovation from director Frank Lloyd (including a shot taking us “inside” a radio to the studio—fancy!) and some of the gangster/prison material prefigures what Warners would churn out throughout the 1930s. Otherwise, though, Weary River remains more a curio for students of the transition between silent and sound film—it’s not completely dull, but there’s an artificiality to the way it transitions from one paradigm to the other that calls attention to both.

  • I Walk Alone (1947)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, February 2022) As far as film noir headliners go, it’s hard to do better than Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas (even if Douglas here plays a supporting character—he would get top billing later in his career). In I Walk Alone, Lancaster is a gangster coming out of prison after 14 years, and finding that his old partner (Douglas) has built a successful nightclub. Getting him to honour an agreement to share past criminal proceeds, he’s met with a frosty reception. A nightclub singer becomes involved and soon transfers her affection from one man to another. It’s all crunchy noir, with nightclubs, singers, criminals, characters slapping each other, revenge and a finale that makes sure to resolve matters. The film originally attracted some controversy for not quite sticking to the Hays Code and leaving the main character profit from his crimes… which works rather well today. Lancaster fully uses his bulk for implicit menace here, with Douglas playing a meeker character. Lisbeth Scott is in-between them as the nightclub singer/girlfriend. As with other late-1940s films, there’s a touch of melodrama underscored by the insistent soundtrack, but it all works rather well in the end. I Walk Alone remains a solid noir, even if Douglas doesn’t quite occupy the space he would later in his career.

  • This Christmas (2007)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, February 2022) Considering the all-Christmas-movies-all-month-long nature of the BET channel in December, it’s worth asking why this Christmas would find a spot on its January schedule. Aren’t we satiated until at least mid-November after such an overdose of Christmas cheer? The BET channel, after all, believes in quantity more than distinction in scheduling its holiday films: anything goes as long as Christmas is somewhere in there. Part of the suitability of this later scheduling can be found in This Christmas’ pedigree: Compared to the usual “BET original” Christmas movies, This Christmas has a budget at least a magnitude larger, with competent cinematography, decent technical credentials, a successful theatrical release and a roster of well-known actors. No, Loretta Devine doesn’t count—she’s practically a BET original mascot at this point. But Delroy Lindo, Idris Elba and Regina King are something else, and so this Christmas aims to be a well-crafted Christmas film with theatrical aspirations, at least one or two levels of quality higher than the channel’s original films. The difference is mostly in execution: the cinematography is fine, the actors are good and the film feels lived-in. The plot, unsurprisingly, isn’t that much better: yet another story of a fractious family finding peace at Christmas. Not that it matters all that much: Christmas movies, more than perhaps any other subgenre, rely heavily on comfort and reassurance that everything is going to be all right in time for the end of the big holiday get-together. Familiarity and predictability are key. No matter the budget or the pedigree.

  • Skymaster Down (2022)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, February 2022) Now here’s an interesting hook for a documentary: In January 1950, an American military transport plane with 44 passengers went down over the Yukon, triggering a massive search for survivors and then the wreckage. Even 70 years later, no trace of the 1950 Douglas C-54D disappearance has ever been found—even if dozens of other smaller plane crash sites have since been located in the area. Skymaster Down deliberately aims to popularize this near-forgotten incident in three ways—by presenting an overview of the 1950 events with historical documentation, by giving voice to the surviving relatives of the missing, still haunted by the lack of closure, and by following the efforts of those people still trying, seventy years later, to find the wreckage. It’s difficult to dislike the result—it’s a fascinating story, and the lingering mystery takes us in the wilds of the Canadian North, in a very special environment of forests, mountains and lakes that could hide much. Some of the most evocative footage in the film approaches known identified wrecks to show us what a downed plane looks like from up close—whether in the forest, or scattered on a mountainside. Following the efforts of the modern wreck-hunters is also fascinating—but the film is equivocal that even modern technology is no match for the limited resources and difficult weather conditions of the area. But even as good as it is, there’s a sense that writer0director Andrew Gregg’s Skymaster Down doesn’t quite reach the greatness it could aspire to. Reading about the historical events confirms the film’s version of events but also suggests ways in which the film could have been better presented. (The hunt for the wreckage throughout 1950 ended up uncovering other wrecks… and causing a few more.)  The low-key presentation of the film is too restrained at times, and a bigger budget with better use of drone cameras may have allowed for better, more sweeping shots. Still, it’s an unusual topic… and it may be destined to remain as such: As of this writing (February 2022), the film isn’t listed on IMDB nor Wikipedia. I should probably do something about that. [2023: I wrote to the producers, and the film now has an IMDB page—but I don’t claim causation between the two]

  • Way Out West (1937)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, February 2022) When it comes to Laurel and Hardy, I’m in the largely indifferent camp. Yes, they are funny—even I recognize that. But I have a hard time whipping up any enthusiasm for the pair. Some films are funnier than others and some routines work while others don’t. Way Out West is a piece of their filmography, but not one of the most often mentioned ones. It has the distinction of parodying 1930s westerns, which may please viewers who overdosed on the genre, but otherwise feels like a string of middle-grade gags strung together. The ending is fortunately a bit more spirited than the opening, but otherwise it’s a somewhat average entry for the pair—not terrible, not hilarious, usually amusing without being all that memorable. I’ll take it—there’s much worse out there.

  • Night Unto Night (1949)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2022) You don’t have to scratch all that deeply to find plausible excuses to watch Night unto Night, even if they may leave you unsatisfied. It’s an early effort from director Don Siegel, who would go on to have a long and significant career up to the New Hollywood era. More amusingly, it stars Ronald Reagan as a scientist (!) grappling with issues of faith and spirituality in the face of impending death and developing romance. Broderick Crawford shows up in a supporting role, bringing his comforting gruffness to the role. There’s some supernatural melodrama, with the (unsatisfactory) mushy-spiritualism conclusion never being in doubt, considering the usual ideological alignment of major studio films in Hollywood history. The cinematography (helped along by some audacious special effects) is more interesting than the humdrum plot and its dull flights of philosophy. Released two years after its production, Night unto Night does have the mark of a disappointing film—not exactly bad, but nowhere near what could have been, and viewers even today will feel the lack of satisfaction.

  • Mother’s Day (2010)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, February 2022) There are good reasons why many people don’t like horror, and Mother’s Day feels like a distillation of those reasons in one handy package. It’s bleak in cinematography and dark in outlook. That, in itself, isn’t that unusual, but where this film takes it one step further in some exceptionally mean-spirited structure that, in the end, doesn’t lead to anywhere but a bleak ending. Building from a home invasion story (itself a rather tired cliché for needlessly dark horror), Mother’s Day occasionally shows glimpses of interest in the way it justifies its conceit. But that’s a very brief moment in a much longer-feeling package that delights in being pointlessly cruel. Our home invaders seem to style themselves after wannabee-jokers of sadistic choices. A repetitive tic of the film is for armed people asking unarmed people to do bad things to each other. It wouldn’t be as bad if it actually gave the impression of leading somewhere, or having some thematic depth to justify it. But there doesn’t seem to be—the best thing one can say about the film is that Rebecca de Mornay is thoroughly detestable as a domineering psychotic mother—but again, the character is so mean-spirited that her transgressions feel like a cheap trick with no point. Director Darren Lynn Bousman has a hit-and-miss filmography, but Mother’s Day doesn’t impress much. It’s basement-level horror without anything that makes the genre interesting.

  • For the Defense (1930)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2022) I do like William Powell’s screen persona a lot, but much of the interest in his early-1930s film is seeing that persona gradually being honed, from the villains and cads he played during the silent era to the droll, suave and clever leading man from the mid-1930s onward, with The Tall Man being the yardstick against which the rest of his career was measured. For the Defense sees Powell in one of his many lawyer roles, but less-typically as a slimier sort of character playing fast and loose with the law, and being willing to be the patsy for a criminal act committed by someone else. It’s both similar and not similar to his later roles, and that’s what makes it perhaps more interesting than some of the same films of the period, even if it doesn’t end up being as satisfying as his other films. Cinematographically, there’s not much to say—For the Defence fits within the aesthetics of the early-sound era, with a plot that has its moments (such as a nitro-fuelled courtroom confrontation) but degrades as it goes on to a perfunctory conclusion that won’t make anyone particularly happy… although it does make good use of the latitudes allowed in a Pre-Code film. The judicial technicalities feel ludicrous and subservient to the melodramatic requirements of the script. Kay Francis shows up in one of her earliest frequent pairings with Powell, but there’s not much to say about her character or her acting: she’s nowhere near what she’d do in later films. For the Defense is, in many ways, a typical early-Hollywood courtroom melodrama elevated (and overshadowed) by Powell’s presence and later filmography. It’s for completists.

  • Burden of Dreams (1982)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2022) Ask any knowledgeable cinephile which films had the most difficult, tortured, accursed production and I guarantee that Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo is going to be on the list. After all, simply watching the film is cause for amazement, as its characters drag a boat over an Amazonian mountain and the film clearly shows how it was done for real. How do you get to that point where it’s a good idea? How do you execute such a thing? Fortunately, there’s Burden of Dreams to tell us all about the making of Fitzcarraldo, and it turns out that the boat-over-a-mountain thing is a rather minor and straightforward episode in a hellish production. If it was just about the logistics of dragging a boat over a steep hill, Herzog could laugh about it—but the production simply looked cursed at times. The original stars, Jason Robarts and Mick Jagger, were replaced early in production when Robarts suffered severe medical problems and Jagger had to go on tour. Undaunted, Herzog went to Klaus Kinsi (further adding to his problems) and ended up in the middle of a small-scale war between two tribes. Weather problems exacerbated a shot that went on and on, eventually stopping for several months until conditions on the ground became better. Throughout the ordeal, Herzog sounds like a mad philosopher king, increasingly expounding on philosophical tangents inspired by his experience. The analog period feel of early-1980s filmmaking creates a distinct atmosphere, and director Les Blank does his best to assemble the location footage, historical material and interviews create a narrative, even if it’s not smooth all the way through. It’s good that Burden of Dreams exists, though, because this is the kind of troubled production that would seem too unbelievable if there wasn’t at least some shred of evidence to suggest that it all really happened.