Month: October 2022

  • Hollow Man II (2006)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, October 2022) The first Hollow Man was high-end trash exploitation, with a big budget and Paul Verhoeven to make even a disappointing psycho-thriller feel polished. So, there’s something appropriate in having the made-for-DVD sequel (as was they were called then) embrace its trashy nature by settling for an equally exploitative script, substandard special effects and low-budget shortcuts. Christian Slater stars as a soldier turned invisible who (inevitably, in those kinds of horror thrillers) turns psychotic and violent. While Slater is the top-billed star, much of the film is spent watching Peter Facinelli protect a scientist (Laura Regan) against the attacks of the invisible psycho soldier. The plot is not as polished as the first film but is arguably more interesting with a bunch of twists and turns. On the other hand, the budget for this instalment was low: special effects are used sparingly, and the big showcase sequence is, if I’m not mistaken, taken straight from the first film. It’s bad in the ways that mid-2000s straight-to-DVD films were bad, but not completely unwatchable. If someone can magically exchange this script for the polish and production values of the first film and vice versa, we may have something more interesting.

  • The True Don Quixote (2019)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2022) So a modern man, slightly off his rocker, imagines himself as Don Quixote in the age of social media and, uh, that’s it. Profoundly uninteresting despite a committed central performance by Tim Blake Nelson and a few modern updates to the age-old literary classic, The True Don Quixote is a film that works on superficial recognition and eccentric small-town humour. It’s all rather good-natured and innocuous—nothing really bad will happen here, you can rest assured—but also profoundly empty and meaningless. The film doesn’t make much in terms of using its premise for thematic commentary—it plays, it ends, and that’s it. As a result, it feels fleeting as well: why watch The True Don Quixote when there are plenty of other movies to watch? Go tilt at windmills elsewhere.

  • Mazes and Monsters (1982)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, October 2022) In today’s instalment of “Is this a real movie or a fake one?” I propose to you Mazes and Monsters: a film adapted from a moral-panic book of the early 1980s in which Dungeons and Dragons players are associated with schizophrenia and violent crime, featuring a young Tom Hanks as an unbalanced college student who loses the ability to distinguish between reality and fantasy, who kills a few people and who ends up going to the top of the World Trade Centre to get to the end of his delusions. Real or fake? REAL. But it’s not clear whether this made-for-TV movie goes all-in on the D&D hysteria, as it also features three players who remain well-balanced throughout, and some impressively tone-deaf descriptions of what D&D is about (“The point of the game is to amass a fortune without being killed”). Still, you can recognize the way new and innocuous phenomena are played up as scary threats for kids (a script we’ve seen endlessly re-used for the past four decades). Hanks is rather cute to watch here in his screen debut, as a gangly young man whose comic persona was still left undefined. But the film itself is unmitigated nonsense that defies comprehension—the low-budget is one thing, but the over-the-top condemnation of LARPing is really something else. Mazes and Monsters is now best enjoyed as “What were they thinking?” viewing material for your own D&D playing group.

  • Better Living Through Chemistry (2014)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, October 2022) I’m going to file Better Living Through Chemistry in the seemingly infinite list of movies I should have seen earlier. A neo-noir parody set in an unthreatening small town, the film focuses on a pharmacist who turns to the dark/fun side of life when he’s seduced by a trophy wife and uses his knowledge of pharmacology to create chemical cocktails of quasi-superheroic power. A great cast starts with Sam Rockwell in the lead role and a curiously blonde Olivia Wilde as the vamp, but eventually extends to Ray Liotta as a rich man targeted for pharmaceutical murder, Michelle Monaghan as an emasculating wife and Jane Fonda (of all people) as the film’s narrator. Quite a bit of the film is steadily amusing—Rockwell is in his element here, and the early part of the film works as a descent into perdition for his character. The film noir parody becomes more and more insistent as the film advances, with a finale that delights in not providing conventional narrative closure (although there is definitely is some closure). Where Better Living Through Chemistry falters is in comparing it to the film it could have been—maybe it’s a case of a middling idea that lands a few great sequences and a terrific cast, but the film doesn’t meet the possibilities of its premise: You can imagine a renegade pharmacist turning far worse than the mild hedonist described here, especially with an entire small town ripe for corruption. The ending can also be argued to wuss out at the last moment—handing over an ironic and ill-deserved victory even if that’s the point. There’s also something incredibly familiar in small-scale filmmakers taking shots at suburban ennui—like that’s the first time anyone has ever thought about it. Still, it’s watchable enough… as long as you keep your expectations in check. Approach it as a little-seen indie film and you’ll see for yourself.

  • Chameleon Street (1989)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2022) What a curio: A film about a lifelong impersonator that goes about life passing himself as others for personal gain. No, it’s not about Frank Abagnale, whose purported exploits eventually became the basis for Catch Me If You Can—this is based on another real-life character, William Douglas Street Jr., who worked in the Detroit area. But there are two far more important differences between both movies. For one thing, writer-director-star Wendell B. Harris Jr. is writing this film from a black perspective, which introduces an entirely different level to the idea of “passing” for another, for showing to others what they want to see—a thematic concern that seems so rich as to make the Spielberg film look inconsequential. The other difference is just as stark: Harris is not going for a conventional narrative here: the film often feels like a loose collection of comic sketches, rants, character moments and loose biographical touchpoints. It’s not obvious what proportion of this is intentional, and which proportion is influenced by production constraints from a low-budget. As a result, Chameleon Street feels more experimental and scattered than it should have been—there are some brilliant moments and quotes in the mix (anything French-related is doubly hilarious to me), but also a narrative that jumps forward in time without elegance or unified tone. Still, this is one fascinating film. For those interested in Black film history, or in forgotten masterpieces, this is a film that won a Grand Jury Prize at the 1990 Sundance Film Festival… but then sank away from view almost completely until it was rediscovered decades later. The expression “Unlike anything else you’ve ever seen” is broad and overused, but it applies quite well here, and Chameleon Street has the added value of being quite funny at times—not just a dour arthouse favourite.

  • Dear Best Friend (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2022) Aw, yes, BET, you know what I like in a thriller: Something completely ludicrous, so over-the-top that it doesn’t feel threatening in any way. All the ingredients that writer-director DeShon Hardy’s Dear Best Friend has to spare. The broken-up chronology of the film makes it feel more complicated than it is, but the gist of the film’s plot is this: A woman still plagued by the sudden death of a friend two years earlier starts reading a novel that seems to eerily describe what happened to her friend… and predict the danger now facing her. The explanation for that plot element is so far-fetched as to defy a sane description (although, thankfully, it’s not supernatural), but not so far-fetched as the main character seemingly taking days to read the entire book. (Much of Dear Best Friend becomes far more understandable once you presume it features morons as characters.)  Still, considering that kind of film, exactly no one will be surprised to learn that the danger is coming from inside the house—murderous husbands have been a favourite tool of BET thrillers for a long time and this one is no exception. (Part of the jumbled chronology also serves to delay the moment of realization that, wait, she did marry her dead best friend’s husband, at which point the rest of the film becomes even more than incredibly obvious.)  So, yeah, Dear Best Friend is trashy—but the trashiness is part of the appeal, at least if you’re used to that specific kind of made-for-TV thriller.

  • The Dawn Patrol [Flight Commander] (1930)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2022) How can something made to be so exciting end up being so dull? I’m not kidding when I say that The Dawn Patrol was meant to be a spectacle: Directed by real-life aviator Howard Hawks, it’s a big re-creation of WW1 air combat, duelling with Howard Hugues’s Hell’s Angels for the same topic matter. It’s executed with the finest technical means of the time, resulting in some footage that remains impressive—the bombing sequence, in particular, still has a nice kick to it. And yet, for all of the technical razzle-dazzle, the large-scale battle sequences and the obvious affection for the material that Hawks had, the result is… not so impressive. (In fact, the 1938 Errol Flynn-starring remake is often cited as being more popular, something easily proved by both films’ total IMDB votes.) The dramatic aspect to the film is slightly humdrum, more clearly limited by the technical issues of the time. I’m also aware that there were a lot of big spectacular WW1 aviation films made in the same decade (Wings, Hell’s Angels, etc.), and their impact is blunted somewhat by repetition. This certainly doesn’t make The Dawn Patrol a lesser film… but perhaps one that exists in a too-crowded space.

  • The Secret Land (1948)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2022) You would think that a government-sponsored late-1940s documentary on Antarctic exploration would be hopelessly outdated, and you wouldn’t be wrong—but you wouldn’t be capturing the value of The Secret Land either. There is some incredible enduring value in capturing the state of the art (especially in colour) and being able to revisit it. There is some built-in excitement to the topic of the documentary—conditions in the Antarctic remain just as challenging as they were seventy years ago even if the technology has improved. It’s rather interesting to hear Hollywood notables such as Robert Montgomery, Robert Taylor and Van Heflin lend their voices to the narration. Much of the footage is quite interesting, and the film does get its best material not in explaining the US military effort, but by focusing on smaller slice-of-life (or work) moments. The more you focus on The Secret Land as a presentation of a specific military mission, the less satisfying the film gets: it’s far better seen as a grab-bag of all things Antarctic by the late 1940s, as experienced by military personnel.

  • Termination Point (2007)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, October 2022) You don’t often see as big a difference between ambitions and execution as Termination Point. The script is not that good, but it’s insanely ambitious and would easily power (with a few tweaks) a big-budget blockbuster. The problem is that the film was executed in 2007 with bargain-basement TV-movie means: limitations are visible in nearly every frame. The premise is big, what with time-travel wormhole technology being put aboard a passenger plane and the US military doing its best to destroy it. The prologue alone is a banger, as it shows the debris of a plane appearing on a farm… the day before it crashed. The plot oscillates between a surprising number of characters (for a film in its budget class), including Lou Diamond Phillips as a fleeing scientist and Jason Priesley as a government investigator. The script features plenty of high-tech action, with military jets trying to shoot down the airliner and being sucked into the wormhole. But Termination Point sets itself up for failure with some slap-dash execution. (That mini-mall destruction sequence… yikes.) Limited by the means at its disposal, much of the film becomes an expressionist approximation of what a better-executed film would have looked like. For viewers, it can be difficult to reconcile the ambitions of the plot with the inadequate ways it’s put on screen. At least it’s more daring than the usual made-for-TV dreck of the time. The special effects have certainly improved since then, and it really would be interesting to see a more polished take on the same material.

  • American Refugee (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2022) As I sometimes say, if you want to understand the not-so-hidden psychoses and fears of an era, don’t go looking at the best movies of the time—go poking in the cheap exploitation material. I strongly suspect that when future historians will want to understand the neuroses of circa-2020 Pandemic America, they could do worse than have a look at American Refugee, a film openly pretexting social order breakdown (via economic collapse) as backdrop to a power struggle with social resonance. The definition of protagonist is very much negotiable in this film featuring an estranged black couple (he: an academic; she: a doctor) whose upper-end rural home becomes a juicy target when roving bands of criminals flee the city and ransack the countryside. Fortunately, or not, their (white) neighbours are crazed survivalists who need a doctor—they end up living together in a tense philosophical standoff about who brings the most value to the arrangement. As a cut-throat, strictly utilitarian depiction of a pecking order, director Ali LeRoi’s American Refugee isn’t subtle—the opening and closing statements of the film explicitly link everything to animalistic power struggles. It feels like a tedious screed from someone who just discovered a blend of NRA propaganda and Objectivist tracts—whoever has the gun and the will to make decisions will rule, and that’s the OBJECTIVE EVIDENCE. That the one holding the gun at the end may not be a white male is not really any comfort. I expect many such thrillers over the next few years as pent-up anxieties about economic status, about vacillating democracy and ascendant fascist sympathies metastasize into an uncomfortable brew of violence and near-threats. Some analysts looking at the current state of America are predicting that the next decade (at least) will be a low-grade civil war along the lines of The Troubles—and under that lens it’s worth asking: Are movies like American Refugee reflecting or fuelling the underlying unease?

  • The Argyle Secrets (1948)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2022) The question beckons: Is The Argyle Secrets a film noir, or a subtle spoof of one? You can blame a lot on the film’s production circumstances, with a $100,000 budget and seven days of shooting—granted, those things went a lot farther in 1948 than today, but still: the entire production has the feeling of something shot quickly and cheaply, not really caring about the details. Inevitably, the slap-dash script and face-slapping casualness of the acting can feel as if it’s lampooning the seriousness of the subject matter. This is, after all, one of the rare 1940s films to suggest that American government benefited from naturalizing Nazi scientists (a historical fact, just not acknowledged at the time). But it’s in the execution that The Argyle Secrets either gets sloppy or funny. As our framed reported protagonist goes around collecting clues, he slaps a woman in the face and strangles another with her consent—bits of business that now appear more alien than the cheap sets and black-and-white cinematography. The chaotic plotting is difficult to follow, but director Cy Endfield (who would later direct the far slicker Zulu) keeps things hopping for a snappy 64 minutes. As a poverty row production, The Argyle Secrets is better than slick—it’s lively.

  • A Slice of Chicago Romance (2022)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, October 2022) Here we go again: another made-for-TV romantic comedy revolving around food, this time all about Chicago-style pizza. (Don’t worry: New York-style is briefly discussed and diplomatically called something different than Chicago-style.)  In A Slice of Chicago Romance, the new owner of a pizzeria, following the retirement of her parents, unites with the sexy son of her family’s historical rivals to take on a chain that just opened in their neighbourhood. Everyone understands where this is going, but the trick is whether the film, shot in Atlanta, can actually be fun along the way. It gets… a middling grade. It’s not really surprising if the plot relies on an outrageous simplification of possible issues (she has the sauce, he has the crust—whoah there), borderline-delusional characters (such as the protagonist thinking that transforming a traditional neighbourhood pizzeria into a gastropub is a good idea!), and a narrative approach that ensures you can zone out for minutes at a time without missing much. The integral litany about that kind of movie’s limitations is to be found here: second- or third-grade actors (not many of them as ethnic-Italian as they’re supposed to be), a bland heroine, brute-force dialogue, terrible staging, unconvincing sets, and utilitarian direction from Danny J. Boyle. I’m not blaming anyone here: they’re delivering a budget product under very specific constraints for a target audience that can’t (or won’t) distinguish between food-as-fuel and food-as-art, or rather film-as-filler and film-as-art. A Slice of Chicago Romance is watchable, barely, and hardly worth getting animated about.

  • The Illustrated Man (1969)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2022) I certainly didn’t need to be told that The Illustrated Man is an anthology film of Ray Bradbury’s short story adaptations—that was my reason for watching the film. But despite my fondness for the source material (or, rather, the Science Fiction genre as was written at the time), I can’t say that I’m as taken by the film adaptation. Let’s face it: A few exceptions aside, the 1960s were not a terribly good decade for filmed Science Fiction. Few filmmakers took it seriously, and that issue is further compounded by the nature of Bradbury’s prose, equally simple and poetic. I have no trouble imagining that many of today’s filmmakers would be able to do it justice. But in 1969? Well, you don’t have to imagine that—you can just watch The Illustrated Man and measure the disappointment. A framing device has to do with Rod Steiger as a man covered head-to-toe by skin illustrations (“Don’t call them tattoos!” he snaps at one point) that lead us to three smaller segments, each adapted from a Bradbury story. But while the premise of each story is workable (although often simplistic, as was the short fiction of the time), the execution is a sometimes-laughable mixture of shoddy sets, hilariously outdated conception of the future, laborious explanation of basic concepts and actors who seem bewildered to be in speculative environments. Add to that the weight and lack of grace of director Jack Smight’s execution and the result becomes more interesting for graphically illustrating (ahem) the shortcomings of Science Fiction at the time. Steiger is the exception to the bewildered-actors criticism: he seems far too at ease, chomping in an oversized role with relish. A modern remake of The Illustrated Man would probably add two or three more stories in the same amount of time, and do a much better job at portraying Bradbury’s touch and intentions.

  • Single Black Female (2022)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, October 2022) Ah! Made-for-TV thrillers—one of my many weaknesses. No, they’re not good. Low-budget, low-polish, low-brow… and yet they’re often high fun. Lifetime film Single Black Female is different in that it doesn’t go the psycho-male route but instead takes the less-travelled psycho-female route. The results are largely the same: trusted person becomes worst nightmare, starts assaulting and killing pets and people, and has to be put down definitively by the end of the film. As the title clearly suggests, it’s a race-flipped take on Single White Female, except with enough different bits of business to not completely ape the previous film. (The larger plot is the same, but it’s also the same as countless other thrillers that don’t bother citing their influences.)  Here, an up-and-coming TV personality gets an assistant who looks a lot like her, and brings her into her life before realizing that she’s not exactly the most level-headed confidante. It’s fair to expect that newcomer to have a secret and a grudge, both of which are revealed as the film goes on. As for the third act, well, you know what to expect: screaming, stabbing, and death. So, you have to look elsewhere for the fun of the film. For instance, there’s something refreshingly different in having both female co-leads (Amber Riley and Raven Goodwin, eerily similar thanks to great casting) being plus-sized without this ever becoming a plot point—in fact, both of them are clearly presented as being attractive. But let’s be honest: we’re here for the over-the-top violent melodrama and that’s where the film delivers. It’s hilarious to read some shill-like online reviews of the film seriously maintaining that this is a film “Everyone can relate to”—so you too are a TV star with a psychotic assistant that beheads people because of a long-buried family scandal? OK, cool, I must be living a sheltered existence. But that bonkers quality helps Single Black Female remain watchable throughout—the bad staging, the quick escalation of threats and violence, and the spectacularly dumb characters are what make the film worth a look, not necessarily its slapdash qualities. As far as made-for-TV thrillers go, Single Black Female is acceptable trash—it’s not that gloriously over the top (despite beheading—at least they tried) but it’s much better than other movies that take themselves too seriously. There are hints that director Shari L. Carpenter is aware of what she’s doing and the constraints she has to work with, and the result is just disreputable enough to be interesting.

  • La main du diable [Carnival of Sinners] (1943)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2022) Deals with the devil aren’t uncommon in horror movies, but when they’re done well, they will always hold a special thrill. So it is that from wartime France comes La main du diable, director Maurice Tourneur (father of the better-known Jacques Tourneur, also active in horror at the time) delivering a short but punchy tale of an artist who agrees to a seemingly innocuous bargain in exchange for success and fortune. Let’s be blunt: the first half of the film is not why it’s fondly remembered today. It’s talky, atmospheric but otherwise rather ordinary in its depiction of a man getting into a bargain he doesn’t understand, even when it’s spelled out to him through Pierre Palau’s delightfully devilish performance. By the time he’s offered a way out of the deal before exponential growth, every viewer will be screaming for him to take the loss. But he doesn’t (with some suspiciously inconvenient happenstance) and that’s for the best, because the film’s most interesting moments come after that, as the history of those who took the deal (and the titular devil’s hand) is described. You can argue that, even at what should have been a zippy 80 minutes, La main du diable doesn’t have quite enough plot to go around—but the uneven pacing and sometimes-aimless storytelling eventually become part of the charm and fun of the finished film. It may not necessarily work all that well or be finely structured, but the last fifteen minutes leave a strong impression and sometimes that’s quite enough.