Month: April 2022

  • Big Business Girl (1931)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2022) If you’re looking for a defining trope of the pre-Code era, it’s difficult to find better than ambitious, sexually independent women. Not yet restrained by the enforced tut-tutting of the Production Code, early-1930s female characters were free to use their intelligence and sex appeal in order to get what they wanted. Big Business Girl bakes in that concept right in its title, as the story follows a young university graduate (played by an equally young Loretta Young) as she threads a fine line between seducing business clients and keeping the affection of her romantic partner. It’s not that progressive by today’s standards (she’s far too subservient to her man’s wishes), but it’s often better than much of the later decades of neutered Production Code nonsense. Joan Blondell briefly pops up, but this is Young’s show and she does rather well even if the film itself doesn’t quite measure up to other independent-women pictures of the same time. Still, Big Business Girl is just salacious enough to be interesting to watch, and it does exemplify, even in a muted way, why the brief years of Pre-Code Hollywood still resonate better with today’s audiences than later films unable to make even semi-daring points.

  • Halloween Kills (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2022) I’m done with slashers, done with Halloween movies, done with endless meaningless remakes of the same garbage that was repellent in the first place. Middle instalment of what’s threatened to be a three-film final trilogy, Halloween Kills picks up moments after 2018’s Halloween reboot (the third, sixth or tenth such reboot, depending on how you count – and I’m not even including the incomparable Season of the Witch in that higher number) to show what else happened on that Halloween night. This time, the focus thankfully shifts a bit from the psycho killer to the citizens of the town he’s terrorizing, leading to the film’s best bits (I use the term loosely) as vigilante justice ends up being almost as frightening as the nut with a knife. Alas, writer-director David Gordon Green flirts but does not commit to a more grounded and ironic take – boogeyman Michael Myers is just as supernaturally immortal here, and any attempt at social commentary on mob justice is immediately undone by the film’s gleeful slaughter of its victims in so-called inventive and gory ways. I thought I would have been disturbed by the death of a returning character played by an actress I quite like, but that would presume that I had any attachment whatsoever. The truth is that any character in any Halloween movie is mere meat to be butchered in the quest for cheap thrills. Jamie Lee Curtis once again plays a survivor and gamely commits to the role, but at this point – who cares? The next instalment is supposed to be a conclusion of sorts but we all know what that means: Impervious to bullets, guns and nuclear explosions, Myers can only be killed by poor box-office returns.

  • The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2022) If there’s one adjective that I don’t often use in talking about film, it’s “monumental” – but it fits unusually well in describing The Greatest Story Ever Told, a staggering three-hour-plus epic film tackling the biggest topic in Christianity: the story of Jesus, seemingly unabridged. Writer-director George Stevens spent years getting this film completed and was rewarded with five Academy Awards nominations for his efforts – and you’re going to feel every minute of the film’s production history, as it unhurriedly (even in the now-abridged version cut down from an original four-hour running time) paces through Jesus’ life in the most pedantic, obvious way. If you know about circa-1962ish Hollywood, one of the film’s attractions lies in spotting celebrity cameos, big and small (such as John Wayne’s infamous “Truly, he is the son of God”) from a star-studded cast of supporting characters. You don’t watch The Greatest Story Ever Told as much as you let it impose itself as the blandest take possible on the story of Jesus from birth to resurrection. If that feels like a backhanded document, it’s because it is: this thing is impossible to watch for fun. It’s too long, meandering, unfocused. It’s the epitome of the 1950s religious epic, and audiences at the time weren’t any more receptive to it than modern audiences: it flopped hard at the box office (enough to kill the religious epic genre) and got uniformly bored reviews. It shows up at Easter as a kind of station of the cross for viewers, but there’s a reason why it’s rarely trotted out at other times of the year. I might have seen it once or twice in Catholic grade school, projected in the auditorium around Easter time, but I would not be surprised to find out that it was the shorter King of Kings we saw instead. In any case – it’s a monumental film for all of the right and wrong reasons: it’s lavishly produced, deliberately paced and more readily admired than enjoyed. You don’t go to monuments to be entertained but rather to be impressed.

  • Under the Yum Yum Tree (1963)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2022) Jack Lemmon played his share of cads, but he really pushed the line between daring and detestable in Under the Yum Yum Tree, a sex comedy that features him as the landlord of an apartment building who only rents to young women, helping him to find his next romantic conquest. What was probably obnoxious in 1963 (as per some supporting characters’ reactions to his scheme) does feel far more noxious today, and that may explain why the film struggles to gather any chuckles for a very long time. Even by the standards of early-1960s sex comedies (both innocent and sleazy), having Lemmon’s character demonstrate how his bachelor pad is fully automated for seduction feels a step too far – there’s a lot of unexamined background in the lead character’s pathologies, and it’s a fair bet that the film would have been flat-out repellent had anyone else but the amiable Lemmon had starred. It certainly helps that much of the film shows the limitations of his approach whenever a new female renter shows up and (through misunderstandings and gender assumptions) gets her boyfriend included in the apartment occupancy – the fun lies in seeing a seasoned predator getting his comeuppance from both the object of his affection and his enablers (notably one played by Imogene Coca) suddenly unwilling to participate in the schemes. Still, there are far better films in the same subgenre, and most of them are far less irritating than Under the Yum Yum Tree. Maybe you’ll be able to tolerate a first viewing of the film, but this is one of those 1960s “comedies” that turns to borderline horror the more you contemplate it.

  • Zazie dans le métro (1960)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2022) It’s always thrilling to find an older movie that plays like a far more recent one, and it would be easy to assume that Zazie dans le métro is much more modern than its 1960 copyright date. An all-out comedy that is never afraid to be absurd or nonsensical in its pursuit of laughs, it features a foul-mouthed ten-year-old girl as she travels around Paris, wreaking havoc alongside an ensemble cast of characters. But no mere plot summary can do justice to the fast-paced, anarchic gags that pepper the film. Owing as much to Looney Tunes cartoons as any other film tradition, Zazie dans le métro reaches a comic peak in a foot chase sequence in which the young Zazie tries to escape a pedophile (yes, you read that right – and it’s funny) while the film goes crazy around them, with a zippy succession of gags that escape physics and logic just for jokes. Not that the rest of the film is a slouch, with sequences set at the Eiffel Tower, or a slapstick fight destroying not just a restaurant, but the set of the restaurant. Louis Malle’s direction is self-assured and crazy at the same time, with a succession of short quick cuts that do much to make this film an honorary precursor of the spoof comedy genre of the 1980s. Catherine Demongeot is quite good and game as the titular Zazie, while an incredibly young Phillipe Noiret (unrecognizable without moustache if it wasn’t for the distinctive voice) is having a lot of fun monologuing atop the Eiffel Tower. Zazie dans le métro is a pure joy to watch, especially if you go into it expecting some kind of dull French Nouvelle Vague forerunner – it’s more Zucker-Abrams-Zucker than Truffaut-Godard. I expect to rewatch it soon.

  • The Horizontal Lieutenant (1962)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2022) As the tallest contract players in the MGM stable, Paula Prentiss and Jim Hutton were a frequent on-screen romantic pair, appearing in four films from 1960 to 1962 (leading many to erroneously assume that they were a real-life couple). The Horizontal Lieutenant is the last of those four films, and perhaps the weakest. Set during WW2, it’s a comedy in which Hutton plays a lieutenant recovering from a concussion on a small island in the Pacific, with Prentiss as a nurse who may or may not be on her way to becoming a romantic interest. But much of the film downplays that romance in order to take a look at some slight comedic back-line drama of apprehending a Japanese thief pilfering American supplies on a liberated island. Prentiss and Hutton don’t have that much time together, and the film suffers from that deficiency, and it’s not the stereotypical portrayal of Japanese characters that makes up for it. The amiable but unmemorable comedy of the film doesn’t really help – there’s none of the bite or sexiness of their previous three films, and the very limited objectives of the film don’t do much to help elevate the rest. But The Horizontal Lieutenant is significantly better when Prentiss and Hutton are on-screen together, so at least there’s that. But don’t start with this one if you want to see what made MGM pair up those two so often, or why people liked them as a couple so much.

  • La signora senza camelie [The Lady Without Camelias] (1953)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2022) I repeat myself, but here goes: Italian neorealism boo; Italian expressionism yay. (Or, in other words: Early Fellini zzzz, later Fellini woo-hoo.) Given that prejudice, The Lady Without Camelias had a hill to climb before I started enjoying myself… but it did. Sort of. While it’s clearly a work of mimetic realism (sigh), it does have the added appeal of taking place in the early-1950s Italian cinema industry, offering a passing glimpse at filmmakers while showing the various problems of a beautiful woman trying to build a career as an actress. Writer-director Michelangelo Antonioni does have an undeniable asset in Lucia Bosé, as she plays a young woman swept up in the movie business for her looks, but having to deal with the vagaries of producers trying to mould her into something specific, men vying for her affection and the passing of time and hype. Anyone curious about getting a glimpse of Cinecitta before the Hollywood-on-the-Tiber era will get at least one good panning shot of the studio. Unfortunately, it’s hard to get enthusiastic about much of the rest of the film, which treads more familiar grounds. Still, the meta-movie aspect of The Lady Without Camelias is undeniable, and distinguishes the film from its contemporaries.

  • Clean and Sober (1988)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, April 2022) Michael Keaton spent most of the 1980s working as a comic actor, so it was really clever for him to use Clean and Sober as his breakout dramatic role. The genius of it was picking a dramatic role that relied a lot on the instincts he developed as a comedian: his easily likable demeanour, fast-talking patter, and comic timing all come into play in the role of a real estate agent with an addiction issue who thinks he can trick the judicial system by faking his way through a recovery program. The protagonist has no intention of committing to the process – he just wants people to think he does, and he’ll use his charm to fool others. It’s a good plan, even one with good comic potential – but Clean and Sober is written from the trenches of addiction recovery, and both the script and its characters are there to remind us that it’s not an easy process and that it’s designed to take into account those who don’t really want to get sober. There are many interesting names in the case, from Morgan Freeman (already old in his earliest roles!) as a tough addiction counsellor, M. Emmet Walsh as an impossibly wise ex-addict mentor, and Claudia Christian in a small but striking role as a fellow addict. The film, like many of the 1980s best dramas, feels lived in with credible performances yet packed with compelling narrative hooks. Directed transparently by Ron Howard, Clean and Sober implausibly crams a year’s worth of events into a mere month, and does reach for a sombre finale on the way to the protagonist’s recovery –capping a superfluous romantic subplot that is increasingly at odds with the main theme of the film. Still, it marks an enjoyable turning point in Keaton’s career. (Word on the street was that this is the film that led to him getting the lead in Batman, with the rest of his career being subsequent history.)  It’s surprisingly compelling even in dealing with such downbeat themes, and it makes for an engrossing viewing even if you think you’re familiar with what the film has to say about addiction and recovery.

  • Gli orrori del castello di Norimberga [Baron Blood] (1972)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, April 2022) There’s not a while lot to say about the unremarkable Baron Blood. It has its points of interest: If you’re looking for Joseph Cotten’s late-career 1970s horror film (as most classic Hollywood stars seem to have one), then this it. If you can’t get enough of Elke Sommer for whatever reason (I find her rather dull), then this is your chance to see her screaming for minutes on end. If you’re tracking Italian horror director Mario Bava’s career, then this is unarguably one of his movies. But as far as what these people do when they work together, well, Baron Blood feels about as median-quality as possible. The story has one American young man accidentally resurrecting his murderous vampiric ancestor, and a castle acting as a very gothic setting for the ensuing mayhem. It’s directed by Bava with professional aplomb, but the result is more efficient than effective. In the end, it’s more fun to see Cotten cackling and Sommer running through the castle’s corridors than anything else. A film with very specific appeal, then – even I, as a fan of haunted castle stories, can’t quite bring myself to recommend it.

  • The Lost Squadron (1932)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2022) The 1920s were a wild time for movies, and you get a strong flavour of that in The Lost Squadron, a rather unusual film that takes WW1 aviators, then has them confront their return to civil society by landing them jobs as Hollywood stunt flyers — where they get to participate in the making of a war epic very much à la Hell’s Angels or Wings. There’s a meta-referential aspect to the film that’s more fun than a pure war film could have been, even if, at the end of the day, we’re there to watch the aerial stunts more than anything else. This early sound film does feature such notables as Mary Astor, Joel McCrea in an early role, and Erich von Stroheim cast rather well as a tyrannical film director. I’m not going to exaggerate the appeal of the film – it can feel repetitive at times, and perhaps a bit too glum to be fully enjoyable – but there’s something unique about The Lost Squadron and the glimpse it gives into those quasi-madmen who were inventing the discipline of stunts at the dawn of big-budget movie-making.

  • Undercover Brother 2 (2019)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, April 2022) My first and probably biggest laugh of Undercover Brother 2 came from its TV Guide listing, which (instead of the usual plot blurb) read – in its entirety – “A sequel to the 2002 comedy Undercover Brother.”  It’s blunt, descriptive, and probably the best thing anyone can say about the film. (It’s also the current description of the film on IMDB, which tells you something about the care and enthusiasm through which the film was released and greeted.)  Considering the high regard in which I hold the original film (which must be widespread considering that they green-lit a sequel), my expectations for the sequel were certainly too high. Eddie Griffin is not only replaced by Michael Jai White as the titular character, but he himself is put out of action for most of the film’s duration, as the plot instead focuses on his younger, lesser brother. (Yes, that means “Undercover Brother’s Brother,” which probably would have been a better title for it.)  Otherwise, we are in frank low-budget sequel territory here: unconvincing sets, substandard actors, paper-thin plot (albeit with a fun twist or two) and an overall feeling of everyone simply getting through the entire thing to collect their paycheque. Wit and style are largely optional here, although the film does take a surprising aim at the so-called woke culture of outrage along the way. (It’s all co-opted by The Man anyway.)  While not intolerable per se, Undercover Brother 2 is a much lesser film than the original by all measures. It occasionally works its way to a chuckle, but at that point we’re more pitying the film for being unable to meet its objectives than anything else. I don’t exactly regret my time watching it because I would have been curious about it anyway. But I can’t say that the viewing gave me much. If I’m to watch substandard all-black cast films, I might as well go for the gonzo plotting, earnest limitations and cute actresses of BET Original films. It is indeed “A sequel to the 2002 comedy Undercover Brother,” but nothing more.

  • Infinitum: Subject Unknown (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, April 2022) It’s perfectly acceptable to be unsure about liking a film for the longest time, especially as it unfolds. While most movies show their colours early on, others remain on a razor’s edge throughout their duration. Those are often high-concept plot-driven films where the conclusion may have a much more pronounced role in any overall appreciation, or where we’re not completely sure of what’s happening before the big final revelation puts everything back into context. A pure product of the early Covid film era, Infinitum: Subject Unknown looks and feels as if it was shot in mid-2020: It features a handful of actors, and spends the vast majority of its running time focused on a single character moving in deserted landscapes empty of any other human presence. The narrative hook is not bad, as a character wakes up in an attic and tries to understand why she’s alone and why everyone else is missing. Meanwhile, a prologue has Ian MacKellen as some sort of scientist-entrepreneur-philosopher (a performance entirely delivered by videoconference for headliner value – he’s not in the film for more than five minutes) and we sometime cut to observers commenting on the actions of the protagonist. At regular intervals, our protagonist gets too excited and wakes back in the attic, having to redo everything done until then. There are many ways this scenario could have gone (VR, gaming, aliens, and multiverses are just a few explanations that come to mind) but Infinitum: Subject Unknown makes two fatal mistakes in the way it goes about it: First, its naturalistic execution quickly replaces intellectual suspense by tedious boredom. Then it makes some incredibly boneheaded decisions along the way (such as the trapped protagonist meekly poking around the attic, which has both a chair and a window to smash, before simply lying on the floor to sleep) and reruns the same sequences far too often to be effective about it. Then, at the very end, the film falters by not really providing any satisfactory answer to any of its mysteries. Having held on to such an unsatisfactory payoff until the very last moment, Infinitum: Subject Unknown is unsatisfying by design. A steady drip of revelations may have lessened the blow, but then again it becomes clear that our lead character is far too dumb to understand any of it. I applaud the bare-bones low-budget production history of this husband-and-wife film (Tori Butler-Hart stars and co-wrote/produced; Matthew Butler-Hart directs and co-wrote/produced), but since good dialogue costs the same to write and shoot as bad dialogue, would it have killed them to offer something more than a platitude at the end? Hey, I would have been proud to emerge from the lockdown months with a completed movie – but there’s a difference between having one and having one that’s interesting to others.

  • Les amants [The Lovers] (1958)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2022) If you’re looking for the film that originated the famous Supreme-Court-approved “definition” of pornography, “I know it when I see it,” then Les amants should be on your viewing list. (For the record, the writer of that statement, Justice Potter Stewart, meant that the film was not pornography.)  It should also be there because it’s an early effort from French director Louis Malle and it’s a splendid exemplar of French cinema in all of its specific sensibilities. Moving away from the film noir style of his debut film Ascenseur pour l’échafaud, Malle here goes to that old French cinema chestnut: the married woman having an affair to emancipate herself. That recognition that women may find contentment away from inattentive husbands probably fuelled much of the American outrage about the film – seen from a twenty-first century perspective, Les amants has mellowed into an unremarkable drama of adultery, with a short moment of nudity to make it clear they’re not playing pattycakes. The film features Jeanne Moreau in a star-making role and she does deserve the attention she got – she’s at the centre of the film, and her performance spans quite an emotional range. As for the film itself, it’s now far more conventional than it was back then. Some episodes are still amusing (such as the sequence that brings the protagonist in contact with her lover, and then makes it clear that he’s not going away as quickly as she hoped for) and the feel of a French drama taking on matters of happiness, sex and love remains very distinctive. If you don’t know the film’s storied history in the United States, you may find yourself lulled into complacency about the very familiar result. But let’s cut Malle some slack here: Les amants predates almost all of the French Nouvelle Vague, so what was provocative then soon passed into comfortable norms within years of its release.

  • Fade to Black (1980)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, April 2022) As a certified cinephile, Fade to Black has some appeal: it’s hard not to be impressed by its copious references to classic cinema built into the themes, scenes and even climax of this horror film featuring a psychotic cinephile as its lead character. Pushing movie geekery to its homicidal conclusion, the narrative tracks a lonely, bullied film nerd as he turns evil and starts murdering his tormentors in ways that owe much to past movies. The film begins in a film distribution warehouse and ends at the Grauman’s Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard, to give you an idea of how profoundly enmeshed it is with the reality of Los Angeles film geekery. Having a Marilyn Monroe look-alike (Linda Kerridge) is also a stoke of good fortune for the film. Unfortunately, I’m not quite as taken by the end result as I wanted to be. Part of it is that Fade to Black takes on the structure of a slasher, with a succession of gruesome murders packaged in sequences flavoured in a specific old-school movie style. Having a psychotic film enthusiast as a protagonist is integral to the story, but there’s a sense that the target is obvious, and that writer-director Vernon Zimmerman takes advantage of maybe half the possibilities at his disposal. (But there may be budgetary reasons for that.)  Some of the film’s episodes are very contrived, in keeping with its premise, but a few moments clearly go overboard and make the result feel more artificial than expected. The cheap dark early-1980s cinematography isn’t to the film’s advantage either, but that’s to be expected as well. I did like the result more than I like most slashers, but it’s clearly working at a disadvantage most of the time. At least Fade to Black gives a few down-to-the-ground glimpses at the non-glamorous side of the LA film business. There’s an opportunity there for a contemporary reimagining.

  • Shaft’s Big Score! (1972)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2022) The original Shaft was a defining moment in Blaxploitation’s history, but it’s useful to remember that it was put together on a threadbare budget – producers weren’t sure that there was such a thing as a market for black-cast thrillers, and director Gordon Parks had to stretch his production money to make it look good. One year later, with Shaft’s Big Score!, it was obvious that there was money to be made from the character, and this sequel visibly has more money to play with – all the way to a climax involving a warehouse and an exploding helicopter. (Alas, even quadrupling the budget couldn’t get Isaac Hayes back to score the sequel.)  Parks being freer to execute his vision, the cinematography is more impressive as well – wide-scoped, more frequently outdoors, not quite as grimy as the first film. The flip side of that more assured approach, however, is that the rough-hewn charm of the original is lessened, along with its novelty: Shaft is an established quality here, and he behaves as if everyone is expecting more of the same from him. I’m curiously ambivalent about Shaft’s Big Score! – as someone who found the original film more scattered, gritty and unpolished than its reputation suggests, I appreciate the better production values of the sequel… but can’t deny its mechanical impression.