Month: June 2022

  • Zone Troopers (1985)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, June 2022) Well, here’s a surprise! Before turning to his life’s work in terrible movies featuring puppets, well-known schlock producer Charles Band turned out slightly-less-terrible movies not featuring puppets. Or, at least, puppets meant to be aliens. Clearly a low-end film but not quite as cheap as Band pictures would later become, Zone Troopers has the benefit of an interesting premise: What if American soldiers in WW2 Italy encountered an alien ship? What if they fought the Nazis to rescue an alien survivor? What if the aliens sided with the Americans? What if one of the soldiers punched Hitler in the face? Yeah, there’s plenty of potential to Zone Troopers. Alas, fully unlocking its premise would require far more wit than was collectively assembled here – the approximation of a competent film is haphazard at best, and the constant tonal changes of the film (which eventually slides into a kid-friendly cute-alien kind of thing) are wild and severe. It’s hardly credible as a WW2 recreation, and the script is far from being as fun as its premise suggests. Zone Troopers gets a few points for potential, but hardly anything is left over for execution.

  • Madame Bovary (1949)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, June 2022) Is there a more backhanded compliment as “a professional production”? No question of enjoyment, importance or success: simply an acknowledgement that the production was expensive, that it corresponds to a certain standard of formal presentation and that’s it. At first glance, it’s easy to be excited at the idea of a late-1940s MGM adaptation of Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, especially once you factor in director Vincente Minelli, and actors Jennifer Jones, Van Heflin and James Mason. At the time, the studio was an undisputed champion of costume dramas and could command, as they often repeated, “as many stars as there are in heaven.”  Documentaries have detailed how the studio employed artisans and technicians in over 200 specialties, ensuring that they could throw money and experts at the prestige production that came their way. Madame Bovary wasn’t quite an ultra-lavish production – simply shooting it in black-and-white at a time when colour was available is indicative enough, even considering that black-and-white was seen at the time as more appropriate to serious dramas. Everywhere else, however, the money is on-screen: The film walked away with a well-deserved Academy Award nomination for set design, and the costumes aren’t too shabby either. (There’s even an elaborate ball sequence.)  For twenty-first century viewers, there’s an added fillip of interest in having the novel’s narrative wrapped up in a censor-appeasing framing device that sees Flaubert himself justifying his novel to those who would ban it. It’s a slick production all right – but in the end, it seems to miss the mark with actors who don’t seem ideally cast to get to the dramatic heart of the story (yes, even my favourites Mason and Heflin), and a slow pacing that prevents any energy from emerging from the story. Madame Bovary remains both a success and a misfire – lovely to look at, but not for more than a few moments at a time.

  • The Carpetbaggers (1964)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, June 2022) For modern audience, it can be surprising to go back in Hollywood history and uncover the long list of movies that were considered audacious for their times, pushing the envelope of acceptable content in ways both crass and artistic. Not many of them are quite as shocking today, but even twenty-first century viewers can often detect an air of daring and provocation. In The Carpetbaggers’ case, the film was designed from the get-go to push a bit harder on melodramatic salaciousness – adapted from a novel by once-well-known sensationalist Harold Robbins. It features a strikingly unpleasant protagonist that draws heavily from Howard Hughes in combining the world of aerospace and filmmaking but then goes the extra mile in making him as unpleasant as possible. (The film begins by showing him carrying an affair with his stepmother.)  So it goes for the rest of the film, with terrible and exciting things happening to and between very rich and powerful people in the style of those page-turning naughty bestsellers meant to wow the crowds. George Peppard is convincingly slimy here, with some supporting work from Alan Ladd (in his last performance) and Carroll Baker. Director Edward Dmytryk has his hands full keeping the circus going through 150 minutes densely packed with deliberate melodrama and histrionics. (Some of the dialogue is admittedly pretty good.)  The Carpetbaggers is worth a curious look for those fans of how American culture has been in apparently constant and irremediable decline for decades. Alas, even by those standards, it’s often too unpleasant and dull to be truly fascinating – you can point to other moral-panic films such as Written on the Wind as something far more perverse and enjoyable.

  • Thieves’ Highway (1949)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, June 2022) While classic film noir is often celebrated for its atmosphere, it’s not always as successful in accurately presenting time and place – the smoke-filled, blinds-lit offices of private eyes are creations borne of timeless cinematic fantasy rather than portraying authentic post-WW2 America. Thieves’ Highway’s main claim to fame is that it places its chips in the other direction – director Jules Dassin spends time on the actual streets of San Francisco to deliver a portrait of food trade in the city, from the orchards to the markets. This is accompanied by a credible representation of working-class families trying to get ahead in an uncaring capitalistic system, which in turn motivates the revenge storyline around which the film is structured. Our protagonist spends much of his time in the film looking for the men responsible for his father’s injuries, and barely stops for romance on his way to his satisfaction. After a strong immersive start, Thieves’ Highway unfortunately retreats to a stage-bound second half and loses some of its initial energy. Still, the result is worth a look as something closer to social realism than most films of the noir era lineage – another success for Dassin – not that it would count for much in the following years, as he would be listed in the communist witch-hunt and effectively exiled out of the United States.

  • Murder Bury Win (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, June 2022) I’m not into board games, but I know people who really, really are and it’s been interesting to see the evolution of that market into a mini-industry of passionate creators, crowdfunding projects, exquisitely well-designed games and original concepts that are (to me, anyway) as much fun to read about as to play. Over time, it’s a given that there will be a movie about everything, so there’s some interest in seeing little-known comedy/thriller Murder Bury Win revolve around three game designers trying to bring their game to market, and having a fateful meeting with a well-known authority in the field. Things don’t quite go as planned, however, and before long our protagonists have to put their murder cover-up expertise in play. As far as specialized interests guiding the premise go, Murder Bury Win plunges us into an accessible version of the board game universe lingo, structuring its plot to incorporate as many winks as possible to board game design. The rest of the film, on the other hand, is about as bland and ordinary as it comes. Obviously a low-budget production without enough ideas to sustain a full 90 minutes, the film delivers without exceeding the strictly required minimum, and can’t quite depend on gifted actors or director. This being said, not exceeding basic expectations isn’t necessarily a problem – a far more serious issue is Murder Bury Win’s tonal mismatch. Black comedy is tricky even for top writers, but there’s a sense here that writer-director Michael Lovan doesn’t quite know when to push and when to hold back, reflecting very poorly on the “protagonists” when they turn on each other and transform a relatively innocuous comedy into something far more sombre. Too bad, because I enjoyed the glimpse at the board game universe: I just would have liked the fundamentals of the film to be more successful.

  • Down Three Dark Streets (1954)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, June 2022) Late-noir-period police procedural Down Three Dark Streets is most notable for being an amalgam of three subplots distantly connected by a framing device – a forerunner, in a way, to some modern police TV shows. The filiation isn’t all that accidental, as the film was adapted from a novel titled Case File: FBI, with the intention of showcasing the work of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in spotless glory. (Not that you’ll have any doubt about that after the film’s self-important introductory voice-over telling you it’s going to be about the heroes of the FBI.)  The result is… not that good, albeit not without a few occasional moments of interest. The protagonist is played by a grumpy Broderick Crawford, and Ruth Roman populates one of the subplots. It all ends at the foot of the Hollywood sign. But the biggest problem of Down Three Dark Streets remains that the three subplots are thinly integrated – there’s little chance for thematic resonance or unexpected links when the film is meant as an umbrella on top of three shorter films glued together. The obvious FBI propaganda is familiar to anyone who’s seen movies of that era celebrating the work of the Bureau without any distance or skepticism. The result is middling at best, although it’s delivered with professionalism – Down Three Dark Streets is not that good on its own, but it looks better when compared to much-cheaper productions that didn’t even master the elementary elements of filmmaking.

  • Abe (2019)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, June 2022) Now here’s a delicious concoction of a movie – a small-scale family comedy in which food can unite the world… or at least warring in-laws. Abe’s zippy up-to-the-moment opening sets the tone, introducing our young protagonist through a flurry of social media posts: The young Abe, product of a union between Israeli and Palestinian parents, with consequential fun at the extended family dinner table. Our 12-year-old protagonist sees his native Brooklyn as a smorgasbord of culinary tradition, and his intent is to try it all… and then fuse what he likes into something new. This youth-oriented foodie family dramedy doesn’t quite meet the expectation it sets through its opening moments – but as Abe slows down, it still settles for an amiable experience that clearly works its way to a charming conclusion. Seu Jorge shows up as an older chef who takes our protagonist under his wing, but it’s Noah Schnapp who’s the anchor of the film through a summer that changes everything. (Or does it? He goes from gifted cook to even better cook.)  Abe probably could have been a bit better – funnier, mordant, or able to go beyond the evidence set by its opening moments. Still, it’s about as harmless as it comes – cute and easy, nothing more.

  • Broken Diamonds (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, June 2022) As much as I understand some screenwriting imperatives such as creating a central conflict, clarifying a deadline and providing a compelling hook, it annoys me when scripts go out of their way to contrive false choices. So, when the protagonist of Broken Diamonds is quickly established as a young man with a ticket out of his small town to Paris, where he intends to write, the first question –before the central conflict set up by having to care for his mentally ill sister after the death of their father—is a big fat “why?”  Only poseurs go to Paris to write, especially if they don’t appear to speak French. By the time the sister screws up his plans (most notably by carelessly burning his passport), the film is already on life support when it comes to credibility – look, dude, you’re not going to Paris, so stop pretending that you will. It doesn’t help anything that this basic verisimilitude problem compounds the film’s other overwhelming issue – the sheer unadulterated contempt we have for the characters – the meek brother, the unstable sister and everyone else who pops up on screen. While the film attempts to touch upon an unglamorous portrayal of mental illness, Broken Diamonds doesn’t earn the sympathy required to power through the film’s obligatory low points. There’s an overwhelming familiarity to the way director Peter Sattler builds the film – an approach aping countless other independent small-scale dramas going for an obvious execution of shrug-worthy material. I’m clearly not in the target audience for this, but even then – would it have been so hard to make the script just a bit better?

  • The Beta Test (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, June 2022) There’s no doubt that the star of The Beta Test is writer-director-star Jim Cummings, so clearly does he dominate a film as an actor in a role he co-wrote and co-directed. His turn here as a Hollywood power agent is quite a switch from his previous role as a small-town sheriff in The Wolf of Snow Hollow – he writes, directs and plays the role at maximum intensity throughout, convincingly creating a caricature of the obnoxious hyper-bro. (It’s a misnomer to call the ridiculously multi-talented Cummings an overnight success given that his filmography stretches to 2009, but it’s only in the past few years and his jump in feature-length films with Thunder Road that his profile has really taken off.)  But while Cummings is central to The Beta Test, it wouldn’t necessarily be accurate to call this a character study – there’s a strong concept at the heart of the film that places a bit of weight on the plotting. It begins as our monstrously ambitious protagonist, on the verge of his wedding, gets a formal invitation for no-string-attached casual sex in a hotel room. Revealing the essential stupidity underneath his hard-driving exterior, our protagonist accepts and realizes far too late that he’s just waltzed into a blackmail situation. Never mind paying up — uncovering the identity of the blackmailer becomes his top absolute priority, and there’s little he’s not willing to do, bluff, intimidate or outright bully to get what he wants. The end fillip of the plot is a cute extrapolation of modern anxieties about surveillance capitalism, capping off a neat premise executed in slightly disappointing manner. The portrait of Hollywood in all of its aggressive weirdness is engaging – but the third act still underwhelms by its refusal to satisfy expectations. Still, what remains of The Beta Test (and the title here does have a double entendre questioning the protagonist’s image of self as a so-called alpha male) is Cumming’s triple-pronged performance. Combined with The Wolf of Snow Hollow, it’s enough to make you invest in future Cummings stocks.

  • Metroland (1997)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, June 2022) It’s often amusing to see almost obscure films resurface because they happen to star actors that later became much, much more famous. Case in point: the rather unremarkable Metroland, which plays with an uneasy mixture of British middle-aged married ennui juxtaposed with formative years nostalgia. The plot gets in motion when the comfortable, even boring life of a thirtysomething couple is upended by the return of a long-gone globetrotting friend back in London for a few days. Cue the flashbacks to their wild Parisian years. Not much of this narrative summary is all that promising, so the key to the film’s selection is in the casting: Christian Bale and Emily Watson as the married couple. Everything is a period piece (the flashbacks go from the 1970s London to the 1960s Paris, earning this film an honorary place alongside other May 1968 homages). and there’s a lot more sex and nudity than expected – in keeping with the spirit of 1960s France (or at least what people recall of it), it’s largely a film about letting the 1960s shake up boring mundanity. Bale is young and a bit bland here, but I was rather surprised to see Watson (not often the idea of a pin-up girl) looking much more attractive than usual here. As such, I suspect that both lead actors may have a fond spot for the film in their own private DVD collection – a reminder of what they looked like as up-and-coming actors plausibly starring in an erotic drama that concludes with a torrid reconciliation in bed. By the time the end credits roll on Metroland, you can understand why it’s still getting airtime twenty-five years later.

  • Mahogany (1975)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, June 2022) It’s a disservice to insist that a film should work on all cylinders before finding some value to it. Mahogany, in telling us about a black female fashion model/designer trying to succeed in a tough business in the company of difficult men, is almost a big pile of episodic nonsense, flitting from one dramatic happening to another. This is a film that advances its story by having characters drive fast and die in a crash, freeing their spouse to get close to someone else. But Mahogany is not meant to be a story: It’s about getting Diana Ross to look terrific in high-end fashion outfits (including a few that she designed herself) and getting in a weirdly contrived romance with Lady Sings the Blues screen partner Billy Dee Williams (but only after the wild photographer played by Anthony Perkins is out of the picture… and the French count as well, since this is that kind of film). It’s a film about gloss and fleeting moments, but not necessarily a strong story that makes sense. As such, it often works better than you’d think. Ross is almost always a pleasure to look at, and the film can string along a few pretty sequences. They’re not necessarily strung along in a way that makes sense, but that’s Mahogany. From a historical perspective, there’s something more interesting to say about Mahogany being a film by a black director (Motown founder Berry Gordie!) featuring two leading black performers – especially given its place alongside middle-period Blaxploitation and prior to the genre-killer that was The Wiz. It portrays black characters engaged in activism and being successful in their own fields and, as such, suggests a different 1980s for black film if The Wiz hadn’t been such a flop. Today, you can’t really call it a good movie – but it’s certainly worth a gleeful look for the costumes, Ross, a big unabashed mid-1970s period feel and bizarre plotting turns. Mahogany does not fire on all cylinders… but it’s fun enough based on what does work.

  • Spencer (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Netflix Streaming, June 2022) My expectations for Spencer ran very, very low: combining an actress I don’t particularly care about with a historical figure I have almost no interest in, the film nonetheless manages to create some unexpected sympathy out of its unpromising elements. Kirsten Stewart is far from an actress I like – her very limited “woe is me, a victim” range can be effective in the right context (I keep going back to Adventureland as an example, although she was not badly cast in the Twilight series either) but only a fraction of all roles are fit for someone like her. Meanwhile, I have an almost total lack of attachment to the story of Princess Diana Spencer – as a colonial, I don’t relate all that well to the British monarchy, and could never find anything but sadness in her story. A film featuring Stewart as Diana at a critical (but largely internal) junction in her unhappy marriage with Prince Charles, Spencer does have the credit of matching actress range with the requirements of the role – Spencer is here portrayed as a mopey broken woman going through the motions of conforming to the quasi-impossible requirements of the nation’s princess. The action may take place over a weekend, but there are years of build up to it (and, ironically known to the audience, further years to go afterward). Not wholly dissimilar to other recent works poking at the institution of monarchy (The Favourite comes to mind), Spencer uses fantasy sequences, expressionist moments and a quasi-endless succession of shots showing Stewart staring distantly into space as ways to create a powerful sense of unease. We’re told by people close to the figure that the film captures quite a bit of her personality, and much of that has to go with Stewart’s deadened acting style used in service of an appropriate topic matter. (Meanwhile, if you’re worried that a modern princess film featuring Stewart will not have Sapphic content, don’t worry – Spenser has that covered.)  This is, obviously, not my kind of film – the pacing is deliberately interminable considering that this is a single-mood piece reinforced over a period of time. But I found it far more tolerable than I initially anticipated, and Stewart a most appropriate fit for the material. The film doesn’t raise my interest either in Stewart or Spencer, but that’s not necessarily a problem – it’s mostly about re-creating an experience (that of being stuck with stuck-up royals for the weekend) and it does that rather well.

  • Tykho Moon (1996)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, June 2022) I did not like Tykho Moon – it’s dull, ugly, surprisingly conventional in plot elements and utterly inept in terms of science fiction ideas. On the other hand, it’s a fascinating film that illustrates how much of a gulf there can be between concepts and execution. If I tell you that it’s a sombre espionage/succession tale set on the Moon in a dictatorial future, you’re probably imagining the high-tech immersion required to portray such a tale – the fancy special effects, the details to show a lived-in future, possibly a few sequences at one-sixth Earth’s gravity. But Tykho Moon laughs at your presumptions. It shoots the entire film in grimy industrial settings somewhere in the Parisian suburbs, makes no effort to visualize its otherworldly nature (except for a single unimpressive special-effects shot toward the end) and ignores just about anything to do with the realities of what a lunar settlement would look like. Other than a few clichés about future disease, it also works on an incredibly pedestrian level when it comes to plotting, with depressingly trite plot mechanics and not much in terms of satisfaction. Like the incomparably superior Alphaville, it voluntarily uses its low budget as an excuse to dissociate what we see from what we expect to see in a science-fiction tale. It becomes a surreal exercise in detachment, exploring matters of form versus presentation. I certainly didn’t like it (and I like it less and less the longer I go on writing this review) but it makes for an unusual object lesson in opposing the content of Science Fiction versus its presentation. The lesson would be far more eloquent if it had some substance on the plotting side and a more deliberate approach on the presentation side (rather than fill a room with trash and calling it a day), but Tykho Moon is all about disappointment anyway.

  • Death Line aka Raw Meat (1972)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, June 2022) Repetition is an essential part of movies, especially if they aim at a wide audience – it’s an accepted quirk that everything needs to be repeated two or three times to account for short attention spans, people getting up for the washroom (or, these days, having a look at their phones), wide disparities in cognitive capabilities, and the proverbial common denominator. This usually goes double for horror films – not because they’re more complex, but because there usually isn’t much more to say than “monster bad and kills people” repeated a few times to make sure we get the message and get our money’s worth in gore and death. But even given those accepted parameters, Death Line goes all-out on the repetition thing. Every ten minutes or so, the film’s opening event is brought up again (have you heard about the unconscious man in the stairwell? That unconscious man in the stairwell? Yes, that unconscious man in the stairwell! Isn’t it strange that there should be an unconscious man in the stairwell? What a strange place, a stairwell, for an unconscious man! I know, who could imagine such a thing as a stairwell with an unconscious man? etc.) in what almost becomes a running gag. But the film has more than that – a sombre tale of a police inspector investigating something that ends up being a cannibal tribe hidden underneath the London Underground, the film does have a few stylistic flourishes and odd turns. Donald Pleasance, for once, doesn’t play a mad scientist but a surly hard-working London policeman, and his brief scene with Christopher Lee (as a high-ranking MI5 officer) is a meeting of the greats. There are some nice things here for a 1972 horror film – most notably one long uninterrupted sequence, a good portrayal of the monster, and some unnerving plot elements. Less fortunately, an entire subplot of the film having to do with a young couple (endlessly talking about an unconscious man in a stairwell) takes away some of the film’s energy. Death Line is a bit better than my dismissive comments about repetition may suggest, but it’s hardly a great movie – another script rewrite with fewer young couples and more Christopher Lee could have improved things quite a bit.

  • Thomasine & Bushrod (1974)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, June 2022) Both obvious and transgressive, Thomasine & Bushrod is a film that would benefit from being more widely known. Existing at the intersection between Blaxploitation, revisionist western and the New Hollywood standard of criminal-lovers-on-the-run, it feels at once like a far more modern film than it is, and yet a film that could only come from the 1970s. Much of the story can be fairly summed up as “black-cast Bonnie and Clyde western” and that’s already intriguing enough. It gets better once you realize that the film was directed by Gordon Parks, Jr. (of Superfly and Three the Hard Way fame), that it’s written by co-lead actor-producer Max Julien, and that its viewpoint character is clearly the woman lead played by the magnificent Vonetta McGee. As I write this, the hottest black-cast film of 2021 is The Harder They Fall, which prides itself on being a revisionist black western with strong female roles – so it’s interesting to dig back fifty years and find another very similar film that doesn’t often show up in discussions. Now, let’s be honest — Thomasine & Bushrod is more interesting than good: Despite the overt progressive intentions of the film, the execution often falls back on obviousness, formula and last-minute reversion to tradition. The film’s stated intention to steal from the rich white in order to give back to the poor black is undermined by a moralistic ending that harkens back to the requirements of the Production Code, and also makes the film undistinguishable in this regard from many, many other outlaw-lovers-on-the-run films brought to screens around that time. The film itself does remain worth a watch, though – it still feels daring, McGee looks superb and the film occasionally gets a great moment or two. Thomasine & Bushrod is certainly worth adding to anyone’s deep knowledge of 1970s cinema, just as Blaxploitation was momentarily opening a few unusual doors for black representation in film.