Month: September 2022

  • L.A. Tea Time (2019)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, September 2022) I was immediately hooked by L.A. Tea Time’s premise, as a young woman and her friend go on a cross-continental road trip from Montréal to Los Angeles. I not-so-secretly have that itinerary on my tourism bucket list, and I was curious to see how writer-director Sophie Bédard Marcotte would depict the experience, especially in a semi-documentary fashion. The result, alas, will not appeal to everyone, and certainly not at all times. Executed on what feels like a micro-budget (something good for a joke, as the sound blanks out during a sequence where the car radio plays a song whose rights the filmmaker can’t afford), it feels a lot like a few YouTube travelogues stitched together. To the best of my knowledge, most of the “semi” in this semi-documentary comes from the quixotic quest to meet Los Angeles-based filmmaker Miranda July. It propels the plot (and leads to a few running gags), while the episodes along the way feel like found footage of real encounters and experiences. The result is a thoroughly mixed bag that’s not for every viewer. Copious references to July and Chantal Akerman (who’s hilariously listed as first lead cast in the film’s scarce IMDB page) clearly associate L.A. Tea Time to a very specific kind of filmmaking, more admired as a filmmaker’s statement than an entertaining experience for the viewer. It’s an intensely self-gazing film and if you’re not OK with interminable sequences belabouring the same points, well… you’ve been warned. While I have some admiration for how a plucky no-budget filmmaker can transform a road trip into a film, there’s a 50/50 chance at this point that my eventual Ottawa-to-Los Angeles travelogue will be more thrilling than L.A. Tea Time.

  • In Harm’s Way (1965)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2022) I thought I had seen most of the big WW2 epics by now, especially those revolving around Pearl Harbor, but In Harm’s Way had somehow slipped past me. There’s no denying its pedigree: Directed by Otto Preminger, featuring no less than Kirk Douglas, John Wayne, Henry Fonda and a few other familiar names in smaller roles, it’s clearly made with a good budget and long enough (at 165 minutes) to qualify as an epic, even if the black-and-white cinematography in 1965 makes it one of the last big monochrome films. The tone of the film also feels like one of the last of an era—while it’s considerably more even-handed, realistic and occasionally cynical about military politics than the propaganda films of WW2 or the war-is-an-adventure films of the immediate post-war era, it’s still part of the noble-war zeitgeist that existed between 1954 and 1970. Wayne remains one of my least favourite superstars of the classic Hollywood era, but he’s almost tolerable here—less histrionic than usual (a consequence of serious health issues during the film’s production), in a role that’s not quite so reverential. Preminger does well in orchestrating a big story with a sweeping scale—the battle sequences are fine for a film of its era. (Amusingly enough, though, the stylistic focus of the film is 1940s events with 1960s fashions, creating an almost-parallel reality atmosphere.) Where In Harm’s Way falters, however, is when it’s measured against other films: It particularly goes wanting against the much-superior Tora! Tora! Tora!, made barely five years later. But there’s a sense that Preminger was pushing as hard against the grain as he could in a pre-Vietnam era, and in this light In Harm’s Way is perhaps more interesting both as a demonstration of what a seasoned director could do, but especially as a transitional film in-between the soldier-friendly films of 1945–1965, and the far harsher war films of the post-Vietnam era.

  • Elvis (2022)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2022) Seldom has there been a better match of subject matter and filmmaker than seeing Baz Luhrman take no less than the King of Rock and Roll himself Elvis Presley in the newest entry in his too-sparse filmography. The first few minutes are classic Lurhman—nestled flashbacks and visual effects sequences almost acting as a trailer for its own movie, flashing back and forth between the beginning of the relationship between Presley and his manager “Colonel Tom Parker” (who acts as the film’s narrator). It’s all stylized, outrageous, over-the-top and visually inventive—exactly the introduction needed for fans of the director to settle back and enjoy a too-rare Luhrman extravaganza. True to form (see his previous films), Elvis settles down slightly after that—even if it picks up from time to time for some showcase sequences. It all makes the biopic a lot of fun to watch even if the broad outlines and specific details of Elvis’ story are well-known to many. Tom Hanks hams it up as Parker in a thick southern drawl, but it’s Austin Butler who’s most surprising here, delivering an Elvis that’s certainly not a carbon copy of the historical figure but nonetheless works well at evoking the man. In the jukebox-musical tradition, the use of familiar songs to evoke specific emotional moments usually works well, the best being the use of “Trouble” to illustrate the civil-rights era. While this may not be the best Elvis biopic on substance (and skips over some fascinating tangents, such as his relationship with Nixon), it tackles some material more at ease in contemporary discourse—including the appropriation of black music by a white performer and the power of merchandizing over art. You can make a case that the film is (ironically) too glitzy and stylish to delve too deeply into the man behind the jumpsuits—but then again, this is a Luhrman film (only his sixth!), and it had been nine years since his previous ones. The result was worth the wait: this is exactly what we could have expected from “Elvis, a Baz Luhrman film.”

  • Flag Day (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2022) Money, sex and power are not the only justifications imaginable for reviewers trying to decode why filmmakers attach themselves to a project: Art, ego and social conscience are real possibilities—with awards being a superset of that. So, in deducing what attracted Sean Penn to Flag Day, both as a director and actor, something that may help is knowing that female lead Dylan Penn is Penn’s daughter, and that the film revolves around a complex father/daughter relationship. (Hopper Penn is also on the cast list.) The story, adapted from real-life events, spans decades and describes how a young woman, on her way to becoming a respected journalist, deals with the legacy left by her father, an accomplished con-man with a long list of scams, frauds and arrests. You can certainly see the appeal here in how Flag Day came together, giving Penn père a chance to work with his kids, both as an actor playing their father, and as a director pulling the whole project together. There’s even a frisson of award potential, at least conceptually, in how the film could delve into emotional material heightened by the identities of the actor—historically speaking, not a bad bet during award season. But there’s also a familiarity to the material: a movie-of-the-week collage of clichés that, coupled with the impossible logistics of 62-year-old Penn trying to pass himself off as decades younger, pretty much torpedoes the film’s award potential before the thirty-minute mark. Things improve slightly once everyone plays their age, once daughter and father are on-screen, once we get past the extended throat-clearing of the first act in order to get to the substance of the film. But the damage is done, and Flag Day never recovers from a shaky beginning—in fact, you can even argue that it starts dipping down again with an overdone final act that doesn’t do much. Not every interesting family history has the built-in structure to sustain a movie adaptation, and I presume that the book on which Flag Day is based works better as a biography than the film. A few known names pop up from time to time (the best being Regina King), and Penn can occasionally find a striking visual, but much of Flag Day is too much of a mess to be more than an overwrought family drama. Congratulations to Penn for finding a way to spend more time with his family, I guess, but that doesn’t mean we have to enjoy the result all that much.

  • Dalida (2016)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2022) While most musical biopics follow a certain format, that format usually remains (Hollywood sarcasm aside) shaped by the true history it’s trying to tell. Most acclaimed musicians can actually look back on a dark, dramatic period, but they usually pull through. 1950s-60s French singing sensation Dalida, unfortunately, had a horrifying personal life alongside her musical career, and biopic Dalida certainly hews close to the sad facts of her life. As singers go, Dalida still remains a unique figure—not so much for some great songs, but for a career that spanned multiple languages, a beauty that owed much to her Italian parents and a cosmopolitan outlook inherent in a life that began in Cairo, blossomed in Paris and took her all around the world at a time when the jet-set was becoming a thing. But as the film insists, her romantic life was in shambles from beginning to end, with multiple affairs, an unsuccessful marriage, suiciding friends and partners (four of them), an abortion making her sterile, a suicide attempt in 1967 and a self-inflicted death in 1987. So, there’s a lot of drama in-between renditions of classic songs (I remain impressed how many tunes are still familiar, decades after the end of her stardom) and some mildly effective historical recreations. Sveva Alviti had a tough assignment in trying to incarnate Dalida, and she doesn’t do too badly. And while the film does a fine job at presenting the multiple facets of its subject’s life, there’s a point at which the accumulation of misery (on which the film focuses, rather than the musical success) becomes almost too much. Still, Dalida is a good reminder for the younger generations of what a great performer she was at her prime, and the incredible challenges she faced throughout her life—and if you want more, have a look at the rest of her biography for even more misery that the film was too short to contain.

  • The Queen and I (2018)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2022) I often don’t care for films, or remain unmoved by them—but it’s far rarer that I’ll go out of my way to outright hate a movie. And I suppose that low-budget British comedy The Queen and I is a weird choice for a hateable film—it’s meant as an innocuous satire, after all. But as I write this, the world is in the middle of a ten-day mourning period commemorating the life and reign of Elizabeth II: clearly, the broadcast of The Queen and I isn’t accidental. On the other hand, it’s a terrible film. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not trashing the film because of some excessive attachment to the crown (I am, at best, a lukewarm procedural monarchist). It’s just that there’s a line between satire and stupidity, and The Queen and I crosses it early and never looks back. A TV movie adapted from a 1992 novel by Sue Townsend, the film takes place in an alternate timeline where hard-core republicans have been elected in the United Kingdom, and the Royal Family finds itself destitute, forced to move in low-cost housing and interact with the real world as the ruling party systematically dismantles the British state. That, by itself, is ludicrous (never mind the constitutional crisis—although the recent history of United Kingdom politics suggests that no scenario is too weird or too dumb) but not necessarily fatal. Still: aren’t we aware of just how filthy rich the British royals are? What is fatal and brings me in the haters’ camp is just how cheap and moronic the production is—working with a clearly inadequate budget and a script that seems to have escaped from a feverish hack’s/trash/folder, The Queen and I doesn’t have either the wit or the budget to do justice to its own satirical material. The royal family is a rough ersatz of how it looked in the early 1992 (hence a much younger Elizabeth, Queen Mother, Charles and the William/Harry brothers) and I suppose you can’t blame the actors for grabbing a paycheque when they can (except for David Walliams as the caricatural republican prime minister—he’s terrible and he should know it), but there’s no excuse for a script so mind-bogglingly awful that I checked several times that this wasn’t meant to be for a grade-school audience. (But no: it was a Christmas special, but one aimed at adults.)  The shoddy production values undermine everything else, and the cheap ending is an arbitrary reset button that restores the monarchy in place, despite them not proving to be worth anything. Well, except for the Queen herself (played by veteran Samantha Bond):  There’s a reason why her passing is much mourned, and that her absence is expected to re-shape public opinion of the crown. Although if they keep rerunning The Queen and I, audiences are liable to hate both the monarchy and the republicans.

  • The Sender (1982)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, September 2022) While supernatural horror film The Sender dates from the slasher heydays of 1982, there’s something slightly more interesting going on here than a psycho-with-a-knife. Harkening more to the small wave of psi-power thrillers of the late 1970s, it features a young man able to create havoc with his mind—stuck in a psychiatric hospital, and far more troublesome a patient than his initially skeptical doctors can suspect. A few dream sequences blend with reality in weird ways. Much of the film is dull, but there are one or two sequences where director Roger Christian lets loose with the chaotic craziness and the film shows glimpses of what it could have been had it maintained that energy throughout. As it is, The Sender feels uneven—a slow start, an increasingly conventional plot and plenty of missed opportunities often highlighted by intriguing moments. The slightly-more-ambitious directing style works for and against the film in that it helps distinguish it as something more than a cheap thriller, but also slows down the pace of something that would have been more successful as a B-grade genre film. Still, there’s something there that prefigures more oneiric films along the lines of the Nightmare on Elm Street series.

  • Zéro de conduite : Jeunes diables au collège [Zero for Conduct] (1933)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2022) As with many influential films, Zéro de conduite has been imitated so often that it feels hackneyed. The idea of portraying school life with a jaundiced eye is now commonplace, but in the early days of cinema is seemed like a small revolution, and indeed Jean Vigo’s film was quickly banned upon release and rediscovered later, thus inspiring the French New Wave (most notably, and visibly, Les 400 coups). So, there’s definitely some historical interest there—but if you’re taking the film at face value, it’s perhaps duller (certainly shorter, at 49 minutes) than expected. The tale of schoolboy rebellion feels at once familiar and still a bit upsetting, far removed from the sentimentality of childhood and making clear parallels between prison and the schoolyard. It’s short enough that it doesn’t eat up time… but, at the same time, leaves less of an impression. If I’m not enthusiastic about Zéro de conduite, it’s probably because I have the feeling I’ve seen it elsewhere, with much slicker technical credentials.

  • The Shopworn Angel (1938)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2022) Some of the weirdest things about 1930s Hollywood are the surprisingly numerous films that, in talking about the American experience during World War I, ended up prefiguring what would happen during WW2—sometimes with the same actors that would go on to star in very similar wartime propaganda films. Many films seemingly custom-made for WW2 home-front morale boosting actually date from a few years before WW2 was even declared. Tearjerking romantic drama The Shopworn Angel is one of those, with Margaret Sullavan and James Stewart playing a mismatched couple whose romance is ill-fated from the start. Sullavan is the usual generic female protagonist (sub-variant: weary Broadway star), while Stewart reaches the end of his gangly young premier phase (and the beginning of his dominant screen persona) as a naïve aw-shucks soldier headed to war. She falls for him but in a complicated way that tells you that this isn’t meant to be a feel-good film: she’s got a serious, far more suitable (read: rich and older) boyfriend and her adventures with the soldier are just a sideshow to what she’s got going on with the other suitor—she marries the young man in the casual way typical of 1930s romantic films, but everything is thankfully resolved by the maudlin sad finale. There are some interesting comparisons to be made with the numerous previous versions of the same story—all of them predating the Hays Code, leading to some unwieldy creakiness in this one. The theme of soldiers going to war seems custom-fit to tell the young ladies in the audience to expect heartbreak when their boyfriends/husbands are shipped overseas—a reality that would hit only a few years later. This being said, The Shopworn Angel isn’t exactly a film to watch for fun. Sure, Sullavan and Stewart do what they do best here (without forgetting about Walter Pidgeon as the older, richer man) but the film itself is designed to be a downer, and seems artificially plotted to placate the Production Code censors in taking a story that demands more narrative freedom. The Shopworn Angel is an interesting piece of film history (and I’m skipping over its tumultuous production history), but saying that it’s a conventionally satisfying film by itself would be stretching it.

  • Trapped in Paradise (1994)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, September 2022) Yeah, no, not feeling that one. Trapped in Paradise had its promise: Nicolas Cage, Dana Carvey and Jon Lovitz as three brothers (two of them career criminals on probation, the third one freaking out) stuck in a small town at Christmastime. They intend to cause mischief (can’t help themselves from causing mischief, actually), but they end up learning a lesson about family and community being more important than money. Actually, now that I’ve typed the summary, there’s not even a good premise to go on: Cage is always fun, but Carvey and Lovitz are annoying performers most of the time and the hackneyed life lesson at the heart of the film is nothing special. So, it’s fairer to say that Trapped in Paradise has a lame premise that becomes even less interesting once you get into the execution. Cage is fine, but the Carvey and Lovitz are worse than usual, and the saccharine handling of the film by writer-director-producer George Gallo quickly and consistently sucks the energy out of the film’s assets. (Gallo, incidentally, has an interesting filmography ranking from the terrible to the not-so-terrible—he strikes me as the kind of filmmaker who would be really interesting to talk to.)  The small-town atmosphere is pure Americana fantasy, and the Christmas theme that should be giving the film a pass on its worst maudlin excesses simply falls flat when seen in September. There’s some amusement from the film having been partially filmed in quaint Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario (an almost-mandatory diversion for anyone on their way to Niagara Falls, as I did a few weeks ago) but otherwise Trapped in Paradise is about being trapped all right, but nowhere near paradise.

  • Spy Hard (1996)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Second Viewing, In French, On Cable TV, September 2022) I remember paying good money to watch Spy Hard in theatres during its opening week, and getting nothing good out of the ordeal. For a Babylon 5 fan, the film’s sole highlight was spotting super-cute Shari Shattuck in a very short role—otherwise hearing Weird Al Yankovic sing the theme song over the opening credits. Still, it was a disappointment even then: By the 1990s, Leslie Nielsen’s spoof comedies were fast declining even if we viewers had no idea how terrible the genre would become by the late 2000s. Fittingly enough, Spy Hard was the first film co-written by the harbingers of the spoof apocalypse Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer—and as unimpressive a job they did here, they would do much, much worse over the following decade and a half. But Spy Hard is terrible enough by itself, with Nielsen sleepwalking through a weak Bond parody that doesn’t have much pep. (As many have noted, the opening song is funnier than the rest of the film, exploding head excepted.)  If Spy Hard has one overall saving grace, it’s that it’s dull, not actively unfunny like much of the later Friedberg-Seltzer catalogue. Gags still try to build a comedy with a distinct identity (rather than just as assemblage of re-created scenes), and there are occasional smirks. One of them would be Marcia Gay Harden in a sexpot take on Miss Monneypenny—something she reportedly regrets now, but actually feels funnier than in 1996 considering the oh-so-serious turn her screen persona later took. But the rest of the film? There isn’t much there even if you’re being generous. In historical context, Spy Hard is most remarkable as another entry in the downward trajectory of spoof comedies from their 1980s heyday to their 2010 nadir (and subsequent disappearance). That’s not something to be proud of.

  • Eye for an Eye (1996)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, September 2022) Isn’t it fascinating how failed manipulation ends up creating hatred for the manipulator? I’m not giving psychological advice here—I’m talking about Eye for an Eye, a thoroughly detestable thriller from the depths of the mid-1990s. To its rare credit, it does announce its reprehensive colour early, as the opening moments race to its first manipulative set-piece—the murder of a young girl by a psychopath, heard by her mom on the phone as she’s stuck in a traffic jam. The histrionics coming out of Sally Field during that sequence, added to the naked manipulation required to get there in less than five minutes, are all the warnings you need to figure out that the entire film is going to be like that. Built on paranoid reactionary propaganda in order to create debilitating fear and retributive anger among the lowest common denominator, Eye for an Eye goes through the clichés at a blistering pace: The cute kid is killed, the hilariously over-the-top killer is caught, legal technicalities ensure that the killer is set free to kill again, and the mom decides to take justice into her own hands. And go it goes until the wearily predictable finale. There are no surprises here (although a subplot featuring Charlayne Woodard almost gets the film questioning its own assumptions, but not really), only disappointments and hollow attempts to make viewers blind with rage. No matter if the film piles on the absurdities: this is a film made for Fox News viewers, and the dumber Fox News viewer at that. Why did Field, Ed Harris and Kiefer Sutherland end up in this? Well, I suspect that Sutherland at least had some fun playing the single worst imaginable antagonist with a great deal of over-the-top gusto. Director John Schlesinger directs this vigilante fantasy with the slickness of 1990s thrillers, but none of the qualities—Eye for an Eye remains a deeply unpleasant film: cheap, trite, ugly… and manipulative.

  • Five Minutes to Live aka Door-to-Door Maniac (1961)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2022) Oooh boy. As much as I like Johnny Cash, respect Johnny Cash, hum Johnny Cash and often dress like Johnny Cash (all in black, that is), the man had his limits, and seeing him trying to act in late-noir (or early-neo-noir) thriller Five Minutes to Live is an eloquent testimony that not everyone is meant to be a multi-hyphenate. Starring in such a low-budget, sparsely plotted film doesn’t help. While the film aims to create sensation by focusing on a criminal holding a housewife hostage while his accomplice is at the bank demanding a ransom from her banker husband, director Bill Karn can’t quite master what’s required to build a tight little thriller, let alone overcome Cash’s limitations as an actor. The result is certainly a curio for Cash fans (or for the then-young Ron Howard), but not much of a rewarding experience for film fans: the cheap production values don’t necessarily justify the semi-documentary approach and the grim finale doesn’t exactly leave everyone smiling. I have to commend Cash for his willingness to play a thoroughly detestable psychotic killer (with a guitar!) in his screen debut—most other people would have gone for a far easier character. But good intentions don’t make a good performance, and he’s both the most fascinating and the weakest element here. Sure, go ahead and take 80 minutes to take in Five Minutes to Live… but don’t say you weren’t forewarned.

  • Soundies: A Musical History Hosted by Michael Feinstein (2007)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2022) I don’t often comment on a documentary’s style, because most often there’s nothing to say: documentaries often try to deliver their information as seamlessly as possible—sometimes with a friendly narrator and sometimes not, but usually not making that much of a fuss about themselves. Soundies: A Musical History Hosted by Michael Feinstein definitely takes another tack, especially when it comes to Michael Feinstein presenting everything as clearly coming from Michael Feinstein. No, I didn’t know who was Michael Feinstein prior to the film (a signer/historian, as it turns out) but you will see plenty of him as he introduces the film’s rather more interesting topic: soundies, the WW2-era short films that focused on a single musical performance in video jukebox format, essentially the precursors to modern music videos. Soundies are fascinating in that they captured music performances by many of that era’s top performers, and often featured black musicians and racially integrated bands. Soundies was made just in time to capture recollections by some people involved in that brief industry, and make that link to the modern era. If you’re aware of some of the era’s greats, some of the snippets are nothing short of fascinating in-between Liberace, Dorothy Dandridge, a pre-stardom Cyd Charisse and Doris Day, Louis Armstrong, Gene Krupa, Cab Calloway and many others. Talking heads such as Leonard Maltin (is a Hollywood history documentary complete without him?) and Hugh Hefner (!) provide additional context, and then there’s Feinstein walking on-screen in his mellifluous voice to tell us more about soundies. I kid a bit, because that style of presentation felt outdated in 2007, let along right now. Still, it’s a minor (and perhaps even charming) aspect of a rather strong documentary that delivers a thorough history of a minor artform that has largely been forgotten along the decades.

  • A House on the Bayou (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2022) I wasn’t expecting much of A House on the Bayou, and that may explain why I’m so pleased with it. It doesn’t start on a particularly promising note, as a warring couple (he got caught cheating; she won’t divorce him but she won’t make life easy for him) head out to a vacation retreat with their teenage daughter. Plenty of horror thrillers have started on that note (most recently: You Should have Left) and there’s scant reason to believe that we’ll get anything different than the usual haunted house story. But then things get creepy: A trip to the grocery store mixes marital lies, hillbilly horror and ominous warnings. Two uninvited guests show up for supper, but they seem to know things that they should not. As further revelations pile up (and some of them are great fun!), the film does this little Todorovian dance between the real and the supernatural, going back and forth several times between otherworldly and twisted psychological explanations for what’s going on. The resolution is not bad, albeit not necessarily as strong as it could have been. A House on the Bayou, a lower-profile made-for-TV Blumhouse production, is rather well-executed on a technical level: The Louisiana bayou is suitably moody, production values are up to the requirements of the plot, and the actors do fine. Paul Schneider is fine in a role that morally bounces back and forth, but the women have more fun: It’s very entertaining to see the striking Angela Sarafyan in a meatier role than usual, Lia McHugh is good as the teenager stuck in the middle of her parents’ warfare and Lauren Richards is lovely in a small but pivotal role. I’m not sure if A House on the Bayou is all that good (and I’d like a break from the “all of the male characters are terrible people” cliché), but it’s plot-heavy in a way that horror films usually aren’t, and writer-director Alex McAulay’s twists are fun to follow to the creepy end. Not bad, especially if your expectations are low in the first place.