Month: April 2022

  • Dead Heat on a Merry-Go-Round (1966)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2022) Some movies you almost like, such as Dead Heat on a Merry-Go-Round. A film that features James Coburn as a conman/thief in the middle of a mid-1960s caper is a hard proposal to refuse. But despite some promising elements and a great deal of charisma from Coburn (alongside co-stars such as Aldo Ray and Camilla Sparv), the film doesn’t rise up to its potential. Yes, there’s Coburn romancing several beautiful women (not necessarily a characteristic that has aged well), a heist that involves the visit of the Premier of the Soviet Union in Los Angeles and a wonderfully ironic finale, but it’s all a bit laborious and unfocused (the action moves from Boston to Los Angeles) and not quite as lighthearted as it could have been. Most modern reviews of the film don’t fail to mention Harrison Ford’s brief screen debut as a bellhop discussing phone matters with Coburn – it’s that kind of film ripe for a walk-on scene stealer. (To be clear: Harrison isn’t particularly remarkable, but neither is the film.)  Well-done heist movies feel as if they’re the easiest thing to put together, but a lot of work and wit are required to create something that flows gracefully, and writer-director Bernard Girard can’t quite get the mixture correctly: While the misogyny of the film now feels much worse than it must have back then, it betrays an unbalanced ratio between toughness and humour that simply keeps Dead Heat on a Merry-Go-Round on the ground when it should be flying away. No amount of Coburn charm and lovely actresses can compensate for that.

  • Playmates (1941)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2022) Alas, I’m getting to the end of the Kay Kyser filmography. Kyser was a most unlikely movie star – a bookish band leader who parlayed success as an entertaining radio show host into a short-lived but substantial movie career spanning thirteen titles (nine of them feature films) in merely six years, playing himself in all but one of those films. Kyser had a distinctive, almost underwhelming screen presence – an academician somehow presented as a leading man. One of Playmates’ biggest assets is how it plays on this dichotomy, overtly presenting Kyser as someone in need of acting lessons and positive news stories. The other asset of the film is his co-star – American acting legend John Barrymore in his last film, playing a bombastic caricature of himself as a puffed-up thespian reduced to giving acting lessons to Kyser. Their water-and-oil mixture powers much of the film as Barrymore chews scenery under Kyser’s amused stares. Additional entertainment comes both from Lupe Velez in her usual scene-stealing fiery persona and the usual Kyser acolytes (notably bowl-haired Ish Kabibble, accompanied by attractive Ginny Simms as his band’s assigned lead singer). But the more you know about the players involved, the more there’s a tragic undertone to Playmates – after all, both Barrymore and Velez would be dead a few years later (for different reasons) and Barrymore fans usually wince at the thought of his last film being spent playing second fiddle to Kyser and parodying his own tattered image. But on a surface level, Playmates does get a few laughs (as well as one impressive sequence, played completely straight, of Barrymore delivering the sole filmed version of his much-lauded rendition of Hamlet’s best-known soliloquy). It’s not high art, and it loses quite a bit of steam between the end of its first act and its conclusion, but it delivers what’s expected for Kyser fans and a certain kind of Barrymore devotee. For all of the finality of this being Barrymore’s last screen performance, I’m more concerned that I‘ve got only one more Kyser feature film to watch.

  • The Batman (2022)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2022) I was really not convinced that we needed The Batman, or this specific incarnation of it. The idea of a grittier, darker, more realistic Batman is really not what I thought I wanted – we’ve gone that route with the Nolan films, so why not go wilder this time around? (It’s not for nothing that I think that The Lego Batman Movie is as good as it is.) But as The Batman put its pieces together, I was gradually intrigued, then satisfied by the way it integrated the “Greatest Detective” aspect of Batman’s character (often given short thrift in film adaptations), its overt New Hollywood 1970s influence, and its willingness to give us not quite an origin story but neither a polished superhero yet. It’s got a good sense of realism even in putting forward the ridiculous gallery of Batman villain, and it does spend some time exploring personality facets of what it would take to be The Batman. Even the actors do much better than I expected: Robert Pattinson is surprisingly solid as Wayne/Batman, while Zoe Kravitz is suitably slinky/sexy as Catwoman. Decent actors in supporting roles also help, from an unrecognizable Colin Farrell having more fun than ever as an antagonist, to John Turturro being quite menacing as a gangster. It all amounts to a good contemporary take on the character, one that makes Batman a more modern figure while trying to pay homage to his multiple decades’ worth of backstory. Writer-director Matt Reeves successfully translated his fondness for the character in a film that should convince many skeptics and launch a new trilogy. Where my appreciation for the result reaches its limits is in the over-the-top three hours running time, especially during a third act where the rhythm should accelerate rather than keep going, and going, and going – the extended farewell between Batman and Catwoman being a particularly egregious example. Still, I am a convinced viewer, happy to have been proved wrong in my initial skepticism. Now let’s see the sequels, considering that Reeves has given himself plenty of room in which to manoeuvre Batman’s character development.

  • Jésus de Montréal (1989)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, April 2022) It’s Easter, so all TV channels are unfurling their Jesus-themed films – even the iconoclastic Jésus de Montréal, a semi-reverent modern transposition of the Passion of the Christ in 1989 Montréal, with a heavy dose of metafiction, as the titular Jesus is an actor re-creating a bold new take on the Way of the Cross. Helmed by Denys Arcand (a former Catholic and atheist at the time of the film’s production), it’s a mixture of dark comedy, slick filmmaking and religious/philosophical themes that probably couldn’t exist outside French Canada. (A society that was barely a generation and a half past quasi-theocracy La Grande Noirceur by the time the film was released.)  It starts on a quasi-comic tone, as a clergy member contacts a young gifted actor to put together a new live show of Jesus’ last days on church grounds. There’s an entertaining “Let’s get the band together” first act, as members of the ensemble cast are brought together to create the show. But then the film shifts into more serious territory when the show proves too intense for stars and spectators alike – leading to outbursts of Christlike righteous rage from the protagonist, and the clergy shutting down the show. Then it’s off, inevitably, to tragedy, as the stations of the cross are re-created in late-1980s Montréal. It’s a provocative film, but not a disrespectful one – like many Catholic-atheists (counting myself among them), Arcand has a respectful but not deferential attitude toward the church and, more importantly, the teachings it champions: the film works because it’s not a satire, a parody or an angry takedown. Some of the themes get muddled late toward the film; some characters are given short thrift and some points are made as effectively as they could. But for fans of Arcand’s cerebral-but-accessible work, Jésus de Montréal ranks as a decent entry in his filmography – interesting to watch, and not quite as meaningless as it could have been.

  • The Mangler 2 (2002)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, April 2022) Some movies come with a reputation, and there’s scarcely a mention of The Mangler 2 that doesn’t specify that it’s a terrible, terrible film. This capsule review will be no exception: It really is wretched. A follow-up in name only to a film loosely based on a Stephen King short story, this “sequel” adapts the concept of evil industrial equipment to the twenty-first century, with a school installing a “military-grade” security system and a rebellious student corrupting the system with a magical virus. Or something. Once it gets going, The Mangler 2 is nothing more than a high-tech haunted house story with a few students trying to avoid being slaughtered by a berserk AI once it gets through the expendable adults in the place. If this plot summary has you intrigued, slow down: the execution is much worse than you can imagine, with wholly unconvincing sequences undermining any build-up of suspense. I’m not saying it doesn’t have a few weird odds and ends in the corners of the frame (including a separatist French-Canadian janitor with fleur-de-lys and anti-Canadian stickers decorating his workplace – the film is a Canadian production) but it’s all far less than the sum of its parts. Heck, even the sight of Daniella Evangelista running around in a bikini for much of the third act doesn’t do much – the film is beyond saving by that point, and even when it stumbles upon a halfway effective idea or visual (such as humans being wired into the AI to act as drones), it can’t really do anything with it. Wretched in the way only direct-to-DVD horror sequels can be, The Mangler 2 lives up to reputation… even if it’s not a particularly positive one.

  • Night Raiders (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2022) This isn’t a fun review to write. Canadian film reviewers have their marching orders: First Nations films are to be lauded. First Nations films taking aim at past trauma inflicted by the colonizers are terrific. And First Nation Science-Fiction movies using extrapolation to confront those issues? Can’t think of a better thing! But despite our best intentions, the movies themselves have to work… and Night Raiders doesn’t. Lazily propping up a drone-fuelled dystopian future in which our brave protagonists (mostly First Nations) are chased, pursued, oppressed, killed, tortured, demeaned and disrespected by totalitarian oppressors (mostly Caucasian), it’s a film that scarcely goes beyond blunt-force obviousness. There’s something very cool about a Canadian/New Zealand co-production exploring matters of systemic oppression and setting it into a dystopian future, but I expected more than the same contrived clichés half-heartedly executed. It’s not as if the film doesn’t have its assets – I quite liked Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers and Brooklyn Letexier-Hart in the lead roles, and writer-director Danis Goulet occasionally gets a great moment or two – by the time the film works itself to a climax in which drones are manipulated like birds, there’s a fusion of themes, symbolism and science-fiction devices that should have been the bare minimum for such a film. Alas, the way getting there is long, repetitive and often obnoxious in its lack of nuance. Good people are good people because of their ethnicity, and evil white people could not possibly be worse if they tried. In many ways, Night Raiders seems to be muttering to itself in YA tropes and in doing so doesn’t do the work required to reach anyone who’s not already sympathetic to its goals. It’s even more frustrating considering that, in some ways, it gets halfway to its destination – but the missing half is significant enough to limit the film’s effectiveness, even for those reviewers who would like nothing more than to give it a recommendation.

  • The Outside Story (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2022) It’s almost amazing to realize that The Outside Story was not shot during the early months of the pandemic, given that it’s addressing self-isolation, community and stepping outside after a protracted period of being focused inward. Brian Tyree Henry plays an extremely introvert freelance video editor (working for TCM, no less – although fans of the channel will tell you that the channel reacts in weeks if not months to celebrity deaths, taking away one of the film’s dramatic drivers) who accidentally locks himself outside his Brooklyn apartment/fortress and has to rediscover the neighbourhood around him, and the neighbours willing to help him get through his recent breakup and insecurities. The Outside Story is all decidedly low-stake stuff – the action doesn’t venture very far by design, the issues remain very personal and the same cast of characters keeps revolving around the protagonist. But it’s clever, likable and even poignant at times. Henry does well as the protagonist, while Sonequa Martin-Green looks terrific, and I’m increasingly taken with Sunita Mani every time I see her on-screen. I don’t think it’s perfect – elements of the romantic climax had me gritting my teeth – but it’s a happy discovery. The Outside Story is the kind of unspectacular, low-profile film that doesn’t look like much on paper, but eventually develops into something quite successful and effective in its own way. It also happens to carry a message that we need to hear in this bleary dawn of 2022, where we’re not quite sure to relate to the people around us after being told to isolate ourselves for so long.

  • Moonshot (2022)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2022) It took me a much longer time than I expected (or is ideal) to warm up to Moonshot, but I eventually came around. It doesn’t start all that promisingly with an atonal blend of young adult fiction tropes, comedy, romance and science fiction. Our protagonist is a lovelorn loser who’s apparently not too good at school, dismal in romance and repeatedly rejected by the budding Mars colony. (The film takes place against a vaguely dystopian but never questioned set-up where a wacky billionaire has control over Martian colonization –could that ever happen?)  After a laborious set-up, the film and his life finally kick into high gear as he encounters an attractive girl leaving for Mars, gets into an argument with another girl rich enough to pay her way over there and incompetently smuggles himself onboard the latest flight to Mars. (There’s apparently a monopoly on Mars travel or something. Also, artificial gravity. I’m not sure which one is least plausible.)  A good chunk of Moonshot is spent aboard that multi-month trip from Earth to Mars: As the predictable engines of romance get going, our protagonist gets closer to the girl he disliked and bluffs his way through the flight in impersonating someone else rather than spend the trip hiding in air ducts. Much of Moonshot is off kilter – amusingly so, but sometimes in ways that are enough to make anyone wish the script had been more finely tuned. Still, it eventually grows on everyone. Cole Sprouse eventually makes his character work, awkwardness and all, but it’s Lana Condor who becomes the film’s biggest asset, with Michelle Buteau getting to steal a few great scenes. The special effects are quite good for a straight-to-HBO release, and the Science Fiction elements generally work in ways that didn’t in the similar film The Space Between Us. Director Chris Winterbauer has a few good moments up his sleeve, and despite a few sputters here and there, Moonshot eventually brings together the elements for a winning formula. Cute, sweet, not too stupid and generally likable: it may not be an all-time classic, but it eventually becomes watchable enough.

  • Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold (1986)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, April 2022) I don’t often criticize a film’s set design, but then again Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold isn’t your usual film. It’s much, much worse than most of them. Even offered as a tongue-in-cheek take on the kinds of adventure films made red-hot in the 1980s by the success of the first two Indiana Jones films, this second Richard Chamberlain-as-Quatermain film is terrible no matter how you look at it. So terrible that some canyon action sequences are clearly shot in the studio with obvious flooring barely covered by dirt, taking away any tense of tension that it could have. So terrible that even the comedy falls down with a thud, looking more puzzling than amusing. So terrible that the dialogue is trash, the plot developments painful and even Cassandra Peterson can’t save the film’s last half. So terrible that you can’t even appreciate a young Sharon Stone as the female lead. So terrible that… well, you get it by now. It’s clear that the film aims far higher than what it can deliver on its budget and special effects: the “thrilling” adventure through the African landscape to reach a mysterious city feels like a cut-rate amusement park ride. The progressiveness of the 1980s compared to earlier repulsive takes on the Quatermain character isn’t obvious at all considering James Earl Jones’ role as a tribal warrior. Chamberlain escapes mockery, but not by much – after all, he’s stuck with the same terrible dialogue as everyone else, and has to react to the same unconvincing papier-maché threats. Indifferently conceived and ineptly executed, Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold is perhaps best watched as a convincing argument about the skill required to make a decent adventure film: pulp-fiction tropes aren’t nearly enough to satisfy.

  • To the Devil a Daughter (1976)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, April 2022) As far as Satanist movies go, To the Devil a Daughter is mediocre fare – playing with familiar elements with an intriguing cast, but not going any further and feeling incongruous when it does finally take it to a gorier level. Known as the last of the “original” run of Hammer Studio films, it features studio mascot Christopher Lee as an evil excommunicated priest with dark designs on a teenager raised to be part of occult rites. Lee is formidable enough, but the film also features Richard Widmark (add this one to the filmography of Classic Hollywood stars slumming it in 1970s horror films) as a heroic writer/protagonist, and Nastassja Kinski young enough to make her nude scenes reprehensible and perhaps more horrifying than the rest of the film put together. Much of To the Devil a Daughter progresses at a very tepid pace, with endless exposition keeping the film from going where it wants to go. By the time the noticeably gorier and more upsetting climax rolls around, it’s too late to save the film – it just feels atonal, misguided and exploitative. You can watch it for Lee, but he has done better in many other films.

  • The Seven-Ups (1973)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2022) Digging through Hollywood history, it’s sometimes fascinating to uncover films that were clearly meant to be follow-ups to far more famous titles, but failed to achieve any notoriety on their own. Yes, I’m talking about sequels that nobody saw but also thematic follow-ups, such as The Seven-Ups, a film clearly meant to be another attempt to capture the magic of The French Connection. The primary link to the previous film is obvious, with Roy Scheider playing a character named “Buddy” in both movies (even if they’re not meant to be the exact same character), but they extend well into the credits with numerous crewmembers and above-the-line crew. Same producer, screenwriter, composer and stunt coordinator, for instance. Same intention to present a gritty universe of evil criminals and unorthodox cops. The same general idea for an extended stunt sequence as the highlight of the film. While The Seven-Ups certainly isn’t as well known as The French Connection, it does have its moments. Some of the suspense and action set-pieces have aged relatively well for a 1970s film, and Scheider was a top actor for a reason – his ability to keep us engaged is clear here, even as we’re asked to consider a group of crooked cops as the heroes. Still, if you’re looking for a reason to watch the film, there’s no debate: The car chase sequence that starts in a parking garage and proceeds furiously to the outskirts of New York City is the slam-bang sequence that justifies the film. It starts slowly, but the truck-smashing climax is as abrupt as it’s spectacular – and try not to notice that it doesn’t narratively advance the film for something like twenty minutes. The rest is a more brightly-lit-than-usual 1970s cop thriller: Unpleasant, cold, harsh and glum, but more engaging than many similar films and not unpleasant to watch either. Still, the point of the film was the car chase, and that’s well-worth watching at least once – especially if you had no idea The French Connection led directly to The Seven-Ups.

  • Kismet (1955)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2022) As far as remake crazes go, the brief subgenre of 1950s musical remakes has much to go for it – At their best, Silk Stockings, High Society and A Song is Born didn’t necessarily improve upon their inspirations, but presented something different enough to be enjoyable in their own right. Add 1955’s Kismet to that list – while it’s nowhere as good as those three films, it’s significantly more interesting as a musical than its original was as a tepid Arabian-Night-style drama. That a relative assessment, obviously – more interesting than a dull original doesn’t necessarily make Kismet all that worthwhile compared with the towering classics of the musical genre that were released throughout the 1950s. But I’ll take what I can, and watching this Kismet musical comedy right after the 1944 version was like a breath of redeeming fresh air for the double bill. (The relationship between the two films isn’t as direct as you’d think – This 1955 version of Kismet is far more closely associated with the 1953 Broadway musical than the 1944 film, or the three previous versions of the story brought to the big screen.)  Directed by Vincente Minelli, this Kismet features good production values (under the influence of producer Arthur Freed) a semi-decent male lead in Howard Keel and a good-looking Ann Blyth as the female lead (even if co-star Dolores Gray looks livelier – her take on “Not Since Nineveh” is a highlight). Some of the songs aren’t too bad, and there’s something comfortable in watching a Freed-unit MGM musical right past the very peak of the form. But Kismet’s effectiveness is more temporary (or relative!) than lasting – after an acceptable opening, the film struggles to keep an even rhythm, hampered by a curiously flat and ponderous direction that lets neither comedy nor music shine all that brightly. Oh, it’s still better than the 1944 film – but there’s a real sense of missed opportunities and botched execution to the results.

  • Kismet (1944)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2022) Lavish and expansive, the 1940s version of Kismet nonetheless fails to take off. Clearly meant to be a big-budget colour production (it was eventually nominated for four technical Academy Awards) and act as a late-career showcase for MGM’s beloved Marlene Dietrich as a harem queen supporting role (alongside Ronald Coleman playing a “King of the Beggars”), the film nonetheless feels ungainly and ineffective. Set against a non-fantastic Arabian-Night-style backdrop of long-ago Bagdad, the film will strike many twenty-first century viewers as a proto-Aladdin, and as pure cultural appropriation with little regard as to accuracy or respect for the other culture. It’s not terrible, but once again – for all of the big-budget care given to the production’s technical qualities and its escapist intentions in the middle of World War II, Kismet isn’t that much fun to watch. As much as I don’t like to highlight it, the one part of the film worth watching has Dietrich “dancing” (with a body double) with gold-painted legs. Otherwise, well, Kismet does the bare minimum that could be expected of a Hollywood-style Arabian epic (especially considering its pedigree as the fourth movie adaptation of the same original story), but fails to impress as much as earlier or later productions in the same ballpark. (It’s no Thief of Baghdad, for instance – although the thought of having Dietrich in that other film is interesting enough.) This 1944 Kismet even pales in comparison to its own musical 1955 remake… but that’s another review.

  • Procès de Jeanne d’Arc [The Trial of Joan of Arc] (1962)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2022) Some viewers will be able to approach writer-director Robert Bresson’s docufictive Procès de Jeanne d’Arc as its own thing, but I can’t help but see it largely in comparison to other Jeanne d’Arc movies. There’s obviously a kinship between it and the earlier 1928 classic film La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc written-directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer – like the earlier film, Bresson seems to be building a script as directly as possible from historical documentation, and his sparse style feels like a close match to Dreyer’s stripped-down aesthetics. Given the near-legendary stature of the silent film and its portrayal of Jeanne d’Arc, it would have been impossible for Bresson not to tailor his film in opposition or reinforcement to the original. But I can’t help but measure Procès de Jeanne d’Arc against other, newer depictions of the historical character – and specifically Luc Besson’s (not Bresson!) 1999 maximalist approach to The Messenger: The Story of Jeanne d’Arc, which showed an exemplary demonstration of how far the state of the art in cinema had evolved in the decades between silent cinema and the turn of the millennium. In this three-way comparison, Bresson ends up feeling like a barely updated version of the silent film – with sound, sure, but not much else – and a lead performance that can’t possibly measure up to the still incredible performance by Renée Jeanne Falconetti. Oh, on a basic level, it fulfills its basic task: Jean d’Arc’s trial is presented properly, and you can even argue that the film doesn’t go quite as hard on its religious themes as its predecessor. But it’s still a sparse, austere piece of cinema that barely reflects what else the medium was able to do after thirty-five years of progress. I’m not much of a Bresson fan either, so saying that the film is “fine” is already a step up from some of his more irritating works. No wonder I’m having more fun comparing it to other similar films than taking it on its own.

  • She Freak (1967)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2022) If you think that She Freak is an ungainly mixture of a trite story with a fascinating atmosphere, well, you’re not wrong – meant as a pure exploitation film reprising the classic 1932 Freaks, it’s meant to titillate on a small budget and run roughshod over verisimilitude or even basic human psychology. Our lead (gone-too-soon exploitation player Claire Brennen) is a waitress stuck in the worst roadside restaurant ever presented on film, to the point that signing up to do exactly the same job at a travelling carnival is a step up. But as exploitation films need at least a simple morality tale to justify their plotting, escaping is not enough: seducing the carnival owner is the next step, and as the power of that success goes to her head, she starts making enemies in the carnival crew. Since you’re probably aware of how its inspiration ends (“One of us! One of us!”), then you’re probably comfortable knowing that She Freak goes the same way. The fun here (and I use “fun “loosely) is not really in going through a stretched-out paper-thin narrative over 87 minutes, but taking in the colour cinematography of footage shot in a real carnival, sometimes interminably featured as atmosphere. There’s a real quasi-documentary time-and-place quality to She Freak, especially when it seems to pause its plotting in order to showcase its carnival. Then it’s up to viewers to wait until the final meant-to-be-horrifying shot as a cap on the whole thing. I wouldn’t call She Freak good, but considering that it was an ultra-cheap production meant to rake in easy dollars, the results went far beyond expectations. The fact that it’s still available (even restored!) today is a hint that there’s something memorable to the result. Yes, She Freak could have been sexier, bloodier, freakier, faster-paced or more than utilitarian in its basic filmmaking qualities. But it still leaves a mark when so many much better films fail to do so, and that’s something worth noticing.