Month: May 2022

  • Truck Turner (1974)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2022) I’ve mentioned it before, but while most Blaxploitation film recommendations go to the early defining examples, my own viewing preference goes to the middle-period films of the subgenre – more technically proficient, they also better understood the tone that these films were going for. Truck Turner, featuring no less than Isaac Hayes, Yaphet Kotto and Nichelle Nichols, couldn’t be more blaxploitation if it tried – the protagonist is a bounty hunter who has to deal with unforeseen consequences after the death of a pimp. Hayes (who also composed the soundtrack) has a good screen presence as the protagonist, but it’s Nichols and her spectacular outfits that clearly steal the show. If you’re in-tune with Blaxploitation’s gritty lower-budgeted characteristics, you’ll find a lot to like here. It even ends on a somewhat unusually hopeful note. Truck Turner may not be that polished or sophisticated, but it moves its genre elements with some assurance, and includes a few amusing sequences in the mix (even if some of them, such as when our protagonist frames his girlfriend as a shoplifter to get her into custody and out of danger from their pursuers, may be a hard sell to modern audiences). Truck Turner delivers when people think “Blaxploitation” – it’s an honest example of the genre, and it will fit the bill if that’s what you’re looking for.

  • Riding the Bullet (2004)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, May 2022) If it wasn’t for writer-director Mick Garris, we would have far fewer Stephen King film adaptations since the 1990s. I have a fondness for the cat-craziness of his Sleepwalkers, and thought that his take on Desperation punched above its weight as a made-for-TV movie adaptation, but I hadn’t seen Riding the Bullet until now. Nominally the story of a road trip in which a young man goes back home to visit his sick mother, the film ends up being a hallucinatory succession of episodes as he hitch-hikes his way across Maine, experiencing mental health issues and supernatural occurrences along the way. Broadly faithful to King’s original novella, the film does run into the unfortunate issue of often feeling like a string of disconnected episodes, all trying to spook even when it doesn’t make sense. Still, Riding the Bullet is more than a succession of jump-scares, especially when it goes for ambitious flashbacks and sentimental themes. The limit of that approach, unfortunately, is that the focus of the story is often lost – it may be about a young aimless man’s self-harm tendencies, or it may be about a pact with the devil (an aspect more pronounced in the novella), or about taking care of aging parents, or something else – it feels like a few disconnected things stitched together. The result is still fun (and it’s a great deal more interesting than a monster-of-the-week horror movie), but Riding the Bullet remains the least interesting King adaptation from Garris.

  • Batman: Mask of the Phantasm (1993)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2022) Animated Batman movies are now commonplace, but in 1993, the idea of taking the character of the still-iconic Batman: The Animated Series to a feature film was reasonably novel. Fortunately, Batman: Mask of the Phantasm can still be watched without too much trouble today:  The effectiveness of series/film director Bruce Timm’s vision is still unquestionable, and the strong art direction makes even early-era CGI look really good. Blending Batman’s first year as a superhero with a years-later plotline in which Batman gets a more violent opponent plays with familiar themes, but the result is not that bad, and still interesting despite repeated overexposure of the character in popular media. I’m not overly fond of the film spending time on very familiar material, but suppose that not having Mark Hamill voice The Joker in a TAS-inspired film would have been unacceptable. To be honest, Mask of the Phantasm isn’t anything new, but it’s well made enough to have aged quite gracefully. It’s still worth a look for fans of the character, often more so than many of the later animated films.

  • Hollywood Hotel (1937)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2022) There’s a reason why “Midwestern hopeful comes to Hollywood for fame and fortune” is such a cliché, and it goes way back to the 1930s, a decade in which studios released a flood of such films. There was clearly some mythmaking at work, and some laziness as well: if you’re supposed to write what you know, then Hollywood was ideally suited in talking about Hollywood. Some of those films have had decent legacies (the original A Star is Born, for instance), while others are near-undistinguishable TCM fodder. They’re still enjoyable in their own way, but don’t be surprised if you can’t quite tell them from others. (For an extra challenge, have a look at the multiple Broadway musicals from the same era!)  Hollywood Hotel does manage to distinguish itself in a few ways. For one thing, its Midwestern hopeful is a man (Dick Powell), a singer/musician lured to Hollywood by way of a contest. (In the film’s over-the-top opening sequence, the entire town and Benny Goodman make a show of his departure.)  As another wrinkle, the love interest comes into the story as a substitute for a temperamental diva (Lola Lane, quite amusing). While the film follows a solid arc of early success, discouragement and ultimate stardom, the way getting there goes through a few evocative tangents, including a bit of comedy at a drive-in restaurant. (Also, alas, some unfortunate blackface that annoys even the film’s characters.) If you’re familiar with Hollywood history, you’ll see an early for Ronald Reagan, a screen appearance from gossip columnist Louella Parsons, and a supporting role for Benny Goodman and his orchestra – including a performance of the now-standard “Hooray for Hollywood.”  Oh, and it’s directed by Busby Berkeley, even though he doesn’t add much of his visual touch to the musical numbers. This doesn’t make Hollywood Hotel all that good – but it does add some additional interest to something that could have been far more generic – you have no idea of how many hopefuls-to-Hollywood movies were made in the 1930s, and most of them are far duller than this one.

  • The 355 (2022)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2022) My muted reaction to many gender-flipped movie projects isn’t so much about reactionary tendencies than disappointment at the laziness of many such flips. Or the weird celebration of ideas that were terrible when played by males in the first place. It really doesn’t help when such projects come with a breathless self-celebration of their progressive credentials, conveniently forgetting decades of prior examples. So, when writer-director Simon Kinberg’s the 355 comes complete with auto-congratulatory back-patting as a female version of espionage thrillers, it comes across as more than a little obnoxious… especially considering that the film itself is not particularly impressive. (Also, not to put too much of a fine point on it: Kinberg’s career as a writer-director is no shining beacon of excellence. His work as a producer is not all bad, though.)  There are a few decent ideas floating around the project – celebrating teamwork rather than hermetic individuality, spending some time thinking about the domestic challenges of being a working spy, Jessica Chastain in a role fully playing to her screen persona. There’s even, to be charitable, one good sequence set in a Moroccan city. The cast is also quite promising: Chastain is joined by such notables as Penélope Cruz, Diane Kruger, Lupita Nyong’o and Fan Binbing (whose English seems notably worse here than in previous films). But the rest of the 355 is not distinctive enough to be remarkable – tired tropes, indifferent characters, very familiar punching bags (are you surprised than most of the male characters are evil or victims? Mostly evil, though.), terrible dialogue and bland directing all combine to make this a deeply unimpressive genre entry. While the 355 is hardly unusual in going for a fantasy depiction of espionage – expect the characters to band together to save the world from an international criminal rather than being anything like a nuanced look at real espionage—it seems unwilling to go beyond the clichés. This is probably the third or fourth film I’ve seen in the past year where the MacGuffin is a magical high-tech device that can bring down planes, electrical devices and governments, and I’m tired of it. In manipulating the elements of espionage fiction, the 355 doesn’t do much more than the usual, and so makes a very poor case about how it’s different (let alone better) from so many other dull thrillers. The gender-flipping also becomes noticeably more insistent in its third act, calling further attention to its limitations. I want strong, competent female protagonists and I want to question the crudest assumptions of genre cinema, but a disappointing movie that loudly calls itself progressive only makes things worse for everyone.

  • Death of a Vegas Showgirl (2016)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2022) There are a few layers to dig into when considering Death of a Vegas Showgirl. If you’re near-randomly picking it to watch, hoping for a slightly seedy crime thriller, the first layer is disappointment. Rather than a soft-core thriller or a quasi-noir crime story, this is a made-for-Lifetime TV movie, so expect the usual graceless cinematography, shaky acting, insipid direction, rough technical values (ugh, those “special effects”) and by-the-number screenplay, at least in the film’s first two thirds. As a story, it’s not much – an aging Vegas dancer is given one more chance to prove herself in a prestige role, and gets involved in a tempestuous relationship with another dancer. The issue of those events is right in the spoiler-filled title of the film. Roselyn Sanchez looks great in the lead role but isn’t a particularly subtle actress –still, she comes out of the film better than everyone else. The Vegas surroundings are under-exploited (fittingly enough, since much of the film was shot in Vancouver) and anyone who watches the film hoping for some of that Vegas mystique will be brought back to the desperate behind-the-scenes lives required for Las Vegas’ glitz to exist. But the film does take an unusual turn toward its conclusion that is best explained by one thing not necessarily obvious if you’re just stumbling on the film: it’s not only based on a 2010 true story (the murder of Debbie Flores-Narvaez), but one that was still in legal proceedings by the time the film was put together. As a result, the film does not commit to a single story, but presents four different versions of how things may have occurred in order to keep the production from legal problems if the appeal process overturned the initial conviction. That’s more than slightly unusual for a Lifetime film, even if the rest of the movie faithfully follows the usual formula for that kind of thing. What’s perhaps most impressive about Death of a Vegas Showgirl, in fact, is that they managed to cram a real-life story into such a formula, inventing characters and making a dramatic plot out of true crime. Your reaction to the film is liable to span everything from disappointment to amazement, depending on how you choose to see it.

  • Miss Sloane (2016)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On TV, May 2022) It’s really early in Jessica Chastain’s career to make any definitive assessment, but if the last ten years have been any evidence (crowned with an Academy Award in 2022), she has done an awe-inspiring job of typecasting herself as a competent career woman – and making sure she’s going to have a long career if she wants it. Squint, and she is the image of the characters she played in Zero Dark Thirty, Interstellar, The Martian, Molly’s Game and Ava – someone whose undeniable beauty takes a distant back seat to her cool, self-assured, utterly competent persona. One of the best examples of that chosen niche can be found in Miss Sloane, in which she plays one of Washington DC’s most feared lobbyists, someone so competent that she manages to change the national conversation about gun regulation (whew!) when she decides to campaign for effective laws on that issue. Yes, yes, that may be the film’s wildest excursion in fantasy – but Chastain’s challenge here is to make an unbelievable film believable and she does quite well at it. Her character (and it’s not an accident if the film is named after the character) is portrayed here as a magnificent mastermind – always two or three steps ahead of everyone, which is the bare minimum required when going against the American gun lobby. Somewhat reminiscent of The West Wing in acting like a left-leaning idealistic soapbox, Miss Slone nonetheless succeeds in presenting a clear-eyed, appropriately cynical view of the way power is truly wielded in the American capital – an exchange of favours, coercion, bribery, re-electoral chances and overlapping dirty tricks. Some great supporting actors round up the cast (most notably Mark Strong, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Alison Pill and John Lithgow), with director John Madden managing to give some energy to what could have been an overly didactic civics lesson. But Chastain is the anchor keeping the film grounded and compelling, at least until the script fails her and the disappointing conclusion arrives. While bits and pieces of the end do work well, there’s a sense that it doesn’t quite get to the next level, that it takes an easy way out, considering what the character should have been capable of achieving. But that may be a consequence of outsmarting itself — the script does so well through complex sequences that it arguably runs out of gas right at the climax. Still, I enjoyed Miss Sloane – it appeals to my policy wonk side, and Chastain is rarely less than compelling when she’s portraying highly intelligent characters going against the system. I can think of far, far worse fates than being typecast playing those characters.

  • Beau Geste (1939)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2022) I have the opposite of a soft spot for the colonialist adventures that were so popular in Hollywood during the late 1930s. Few films have earned as much seething hatred as the one I still hold against colonialist celebration Gunga Din (1939), and finding out the cruelty against horses that made The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936) possible did not help me warm up to the subgenre. At the time, Americans loved to use the British example as a way to affirm the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon colonizer (keep in mind: 1930s and the rise of ethno-nationalism across the west…) and the idea of staging wide-scale battles between a small number of white protagonists and faceless hordes of non-white antagonists was nothing short of irresistible. Now, I’m being slightly too hard on Beau Geste for the hideous faults of its cousins – after all, it’s a film that spends a lot of time in dignified British sets, then sends its protagonist through a harsh apprenticeship in the French Foreign Legion and a finale that can’t be described as a happy one. But in the end, the climax remains a bunch of white people in a fort fighting off hordes of non-white people coded as inferior and no number of shenanigans about blue diamond theft is going to erase that. Cary Cooper is his usual stoic, imperturbable, bland self here – he was much funnier when excerpts of his performance we reused in the 1977 farce The Last Remake of Beau Geste. While this version (among many) of Beau Geste is more tolerable than many other colonialist adventures, I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s all that enjoyable. But, hey, if it’s your thing, or if you like Cooper better than I do…

  • Mogul Mowgli (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2022) If you’re going to be typecast as something, “a musician who experiences a major medical condition that forces him to re-evaluate his life” is quite a pigeonhole. But here we are: Riz Ahmed, after playing a drummer struck with deafness with life-altering consequences in Sound of Metal, revisits some very similar material in Mogul Mowgli, in which he plays a rapper struck with degenerative immune disease with life-altering consequences. The down to-the-ground approach of the film, halfway between neon-lit bleakness and lived-in grittiness, also reinforces the links between both films. Ahmed does have the good fortune of repeating a great role with a good role – it may feel very familiar, but it’s in service of a decent story. Still, you can probably guess that most of the comparisons between Oscar-nominated Sound of Metal and Mogul Mowgli don’t work at the second film’s advantage – the first film is richer, harsher, and more distinctive due to its use of sound as an immersive device. Mogul Mowgli fares better when considered on its own, not only as a story of a musician forced to cut short his career on the cusp of mega-success (handing it over to a successor who’s not necessarily worthy of it) and also dealing with issues of Pakistani representation in the cultural sphere. The cast is very much non-Caucasian, and Ahmed gets to play with a lot of verbal material as a loquacious rapper making a mark. If you’re looking for an excuse on why Mogul Mowgli is worth seeing even if you think you’ve seen it already, it’s the plunge into British-Pakistani culture in its rich complexity – with Ahmed pouring himself in the requirements of the role. It doesn’t seem so familiar once you get to the expression of it.

  • Fear Street: 1666 (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Netflix Streaming, May 2022) So here we are, travelling to the seventeenth century for the conclusion of the Fear Street Trilogy. It’s an understandable misnomer to call this Fear Street: 1666 considering that only the first half of the film takes place at that time –the film itself has a “Fear Street: 1994 Part 2” title card to introduce its second half. The result is understandably uneven. While writer-director Leigh Janiak spends a considerable amount of time making colonial-era America accessible to teenage audience, the re-use of the same actors in both periods, unwillingness to be too faithful to the reality of the time, and genre requirements often combine to make 1666 feel like The VVitch cosplay with of-the-moment representativeness. That feeling I had in the first film that the heroine, being lesbian, was both virtuous and invulnerable? Confirmed to the Nth degree here, especially as the film assembles its pieces to reveal that (wait for it…) the witch was a victim framed as a threat and the white guy was the true evil all along. Not only that, but the Shadyside/Sunnyvale divide was a multi-generational effort of systematic oppression. The fact that our heroine isn’t white? Not an accident either! Whew! Although, I admit, this is far better material for a slasher trilogy than I could have hoped for… even if it seems to be hitting the white-guy piñata as gleefully as many other 2021 films. The return to 1994, on the other hand, often feels like an exercise in narrative housework – making sure all the loose ends are tied up, making sure to get more value out of that mall-refurbishing effort, making sure our witches ride off into the sunset having triumphed over patriarchy. It generally works, but I can’t help but feel that it would have been possible to cram the entire story in a single two-hour film, considering how much of it feels like filler. But I have to admire the audacity of the concept. I also liked series lead Kiana Madeira quite a bit better here than in the first film – she gets more to do in both the 1666 segment and in orchestrating the climax of the series back in 1994. It doesn’t amount to much, but it’s reasonably entertaining for something like five hours and a half, right about the length of a Netflix series. Watching the trilogy back-to-back-to-back was the right choice:  It may feel like a lot of repetition, but at least I’m done with it.

  • Fear Street: 1978 (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Netflix Streaming, May 2022) Slasher nostalgia gets a mildly amusing twist in Fear Street: 1978, the second instalment of a series that began in 1994 and promises to keep going in 1666. In the middle of a 1994-set framing device, we travel back one generation in time to find ourselves (where else?) at camp, on the shores of a lake not named Crystal. A new cast of character sets the stage for another camp slasher, with the links to the 1994 being more mythological than anything. This camp, after all, is the destination for both the scarred survivors of the small-town murder capital of the United States Shadyside, and their privileged neighbours of Sunnyvale. Characters are introduced (one or two of them younger versions of people we’ve met in 1994, although the film allows itself some identity-blurring shenanigans for good measure), then spooky events happen, one unfortunate murder is swept under the rug and everything climaxes on a blood-soaked night when the witch and her acolytes come back once more to murder everyone in sight. While 1978 revels in the fashions of the late 1970s like its slasher predecessors, writer-director Leigh Janiak once again isn’t interested in being too faithful to the period in terms of themes or technique: despite the beige, it feels like a 2021 film and there are clear hints that the mythology is moving toward an explanation about its witch antagonist rather than outright destruction. Sadie Sink makes for a good lead, and the result does have enough to keep interest even if this all feels like a drawn-out tangent from the story begun in 1994. This being said, Fear Street: 1978 will be far more effective for viewers who actually like the first wave of late-1970s camp slashers – I found them intolerable in the first place, and the only thing keeping me interested here is in seeing how we’re going to go to 1666 for the series’ conclusion.

  • Fear Street: 1994 (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Netflix Streaming, May 2022) If there’s a genre I’m not feeling nostalgic at all about, it’s the 1990s revival of the 1980s slasher genre: a terrible rip-off of an even worse movie subgenre that should be stomped back into its grave then covered with a load of concrete. But here we are, two decades later, about to re-engage with it as part of the Great Nostalgic Regurgitation of everything that’s come before. Fear Street, adapted from R. L. Stine’s YA horror series, at least has the intriguing distinction of being a more ambitious project than most, going for a story presented in a pre-written trilogy of films, each of them going back to a different era as part of a single story. (I was about to be appreciative of Netflix for allowing such storytelling experiments, but reading about the film’s production history clarifies that everything was supposed to be theatrically released before Netflix bought it all due to the COVID-19 theatrical closures.)  Alas, it takes only a few moments for the film to temper viewers’ expectations, with a bit of blunt high-concept (a tale of two small towns: Shadyside, the murder capital of the United States located right next to Sunnyvale, which has no discernible crime rate) that reveals a lot about where the series is headed and can only work for undemanding teenage audiences. Much of this 1994 instalment of Fear Street works on inertia, reusing 1990s neon nostalgia, the usual slasher plot template and teenage archetypes to reassure audiences on how they should be feeling. Writer-director Leigh Janiak is not interested in a stylistic pastiche: the filmmaking approach is transparently 2020s and so is the representativeness of its characters. I had to laugh when the main character was established as a lesbian, because in the modern pantheon of teen movies that essentially guarantees her virtue and her survival to the end of the series – we are (thankfully, but also schematically) a long, long way away from The Celluloid Closet here. Fear Street: 1994 is mediocre material all the way through: it’s only slightly better than most slashers in introducing a strong supernatural element and clearly having more in mind for the later instalments. I did like one of the characters (who sadly gets killed, and not nicely) and some of the production design gets a lot out of a modest budget. While the story could have ended thirty seconds prior to this first film’s end credits, there’s a lot of background material that could have been used for depth in other films but is here more likely to gain further significance in the follow-up films. I’m wondering how the conceit will be kept, though: Are we going to spend all of Fear Street 1978 in 1978, and all of Fear Street: 1666 in 1666? What’s the framing device? That, more than the issue of stopping the killing, is what interests me in this series.

  • Sanma no aji [An Autumn Afternoon] (1962)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2022) This review of writer-director Yasujirō Ozu’s An Autumn Afternoon can probably be cut and pasted for reuse in discussing most of his work – here’s a filmmaker observing Japan in a sensitive and humane way, cleanly portraying small-scale domestic dramas, often in very specific terms that illuminate his culture for non-Japanese viewers. And… it usually puts me to sleep. That’s integral to the charm of his films, I suppose: their refusal to escalate their drama in extreme or genre-friendly way is the point. Otherwise, their portrayal of characters would be detached from the reality they’re portraying. An Autumn Afternoon, revolving around the responsibilities of an elderly man having to find husbands for his daughters and (more crucially) letting them go on their own, is not about big drama: it’s about the natural passage of life stages, and there’s a lot to commend in the result. The flip side, though, is that you have to be ready for such films – even at a reasonably spry 113 minutes, this is not a film designed to jolt you awake every few moments, and there’s an implicit barrier in trying to understand Japanese social structures from the glimpses provided by the film. If you’re the more impatient viewer, reading a plot summary may help the experience: no, you won’t lose much by having the plot spoiled for you when the plot is about the least interesting thing about the result. Brief yourself thoroughly on what’s going to happen, then spend your time appreciating the nuances. And don’t feel too guilty if, in the end, you conclude it’s not your kind of movie.

  • L’ennemi japonais à Hollywood [Yellowface: Asian Whitewashing and Racism in Hollywood] (2019)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2022) If you know anything about how Hollywood portrayed Asian characters for much of its history, you know that there’s going to be nothing uplifting about a film called Yellowface: Asian Whitewashing and Racism in Hollywood. As the film goes through Hollywood history, noting the stereotypes and attempts to pass white actors as Asian characters, it’s one dismal excerpt after another. I recently wrote a brief history of American black cinema, and one of the things that popped into my mind as I was writing it was “Wow, I’m happy I’m not trying to write about American Asian cinema” – but here’s a documentary to illustrate just how right I was. From yellow-face casting to interment, cheap enduring stereotypes to lack of representativeness, Asians have not been served particularly well throughout Hollywood’s history and this documentary scratches at the issue. Alas, this specific film (especially when I’m measuring it against such top documentaries as The Celluloid Closet) is very disappointing in many ways. Some of it can be explained by its pedigree — A French TV special sometimes popping up as an English-original documentary (understandably so given that its topic, excerpts and interviews are all in English), it’s clearly limited by its 60-minute running time and its lower production budget. There’s a total of four interviewees and there’s a sense that this isn’t enough to fully cover the topic. It does not help that the film spends a lot of time explaining about the American internment camps of Japanese citizens during WW2 – a worthy topic made real by one interviewee’s personal connection to the camps, but one that apparently prevents the film from offering a better look at Asian representativeness in the last few decades of the twentieth century. At times, it feels as if Yellowface skips from the 1950s to the twenty-first century, running roughshod over decades of incremental or temporary progress. Flower Drum Song is barely mentioned, for instance, which casts the completeness of the project in question. (Even using it as an example of a false hope for representativeness would have been something.) I was quite disappointed by the result. Even though the film does have highlights (one of the four interviewees is Tamlyn Tomita, and I’ve seldom liked her more than in seeing her here being incensed, animated and opinionated), there’s a sense that there’s a much better documentary to be made about the laudable issue being half-heartedly tackled here. But then you’d need more effort and budget than was likely available to the filmmakers. Maybe one day we’ll get the documentary that Asian representation on Hollywood really deserves.

  • Brighton Rock (1948)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2022) I have a bit of a soft spot for Brighton as a location, having spent a few days there for a convention in 2010. But while the Brighton of Brighton Rock may sometime look the same as seen from the sea (I swear I’ve stayed at one of the hotels shown by the film), this 1940s noir incarnation is not a fun place for the characters that inhabit it. There’s a malevolent gang leader (played by a very young Richard Attenborough) taking aim at a journalist for having written about the city’s organized crime problem, and murder shapes much of the film once past its first half-hour. 1940s Brighton is portrayed with some flair, and the rough noirish nature of the plotting means there’s always something interesting going on, as the protagonist’s past actions are primed to harm him. British noir was quite a thing, and even if Brighton Rock can’t quite recapture the mounting tension of its first half-hour, it’s still not a bad watch.