Month: October 2022

  • Bebe’s Kids (1992)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, October 2022) There’s something fascinating about Bebe’s Kids that comes across even when the animated film itself isn’t particularly good. Adapted from a stand-up routine from Robin Harris, it describes how a man’s first date with a woman turns awry when she comes accompanied by not only her son (a rather well-behaved boy), but also her friend’s three unruly kids. The day-long visit to the zoo turns chaotic, then apocalyptic as the kids run through the place causing mischief. What makes the film special is that it’s clearly, undeniably from American black culture—I could feel the cultural references wooshing over my head as the film got into pointed observations about black dating expectations and the experience of navigating such a fraught situation. The rough animation style, while clearly hampered by a low-budget, is surprisingly expressive as it follows a narrative constantly on the edge of a tall tale. The dialogue is an extension of a stand-up act, meaning that it too can feel very stylized even in addressing mundane moments. The late-film sentimental turn isn’t surprising nor subtle, but it does give a bit of heart to a film that could have run a bit too close to meaningless comedy. While I’m not overly invested in Bebe’s Kids, it remains a rather rare example of a black-driven feature film animation from an earlier generation, and there’s not denying the power of that.

  • The Big Bus (1976)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (YouTube Streaming, October 2022) It’s too bad for The Big Bus that the ultimate parody of disaster films (Airplane!) not only came out four years later, but is also one of the best comedies of all time. That doesn’t leave a lot of room in cultural memory of The Long Bus, and that’s kind of too bad, because it’s an enjoyable spoof comedy that’s never afraid of getting as absurd as the classic Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker spoof movies of the 1980s. Taking the disaster film genre to its dumbest extreme, it imagines a nuclear-powered bus (two stories high, two bus-lengths long) able to cross the continent from New York to Denver without stopping. The sheer absurdity of the concept becomes increasingly apparent, as the bus is revealed to fit a seating area, dining area, kitchen, lounge (complete with piano player), pool and bowling alley inside. No, it’s not meant to be realistic—in fact, The Big Bus gets better the more ludicrous it becomes. Some of it is clearly due to budget (it’s funny how a trip from New York to Denver looks exactly the same as a trip from Los Angeles to Denver…), but there are some surprisingly large-scale physical gags in here: The long bus actually “existed” in physical form as a loosely-bolted combination of two buses, but there’s no denying the thrill of seeing such a monstrosity interacting with its physical environment. The script’s stream of jokes feels low-density compared to later genre efforts, but is still higher than most comedies of the time. Not every gag lands well, but that’s the nature of that kind of film. Joseph Bologna plays a disgraced driver (who never resorted to cannibalism when his previous bus got stuck in the mountains, oh no) trying to redeem himself, while Stockard Channing is very cute as the daughter of the bus’s lead scientist/designer—she gets the “attractive woman delivering the exposition and reacting to the craziness” role, but she does have a bravura sequence of physical comedy towards the climax. It’s all profoundly silly, but in a charming way—even if tons of comic opportunities remain on the table, leading to a result that’s slightly too laborious to be top-notch. Director James Frawley would prove here his ability to steer big physical comedy set pieces that would land him the job of directing The Muppets Movie three years later. Still, as far as mostly-forgotten films go, The Big Bus is far more fun than expected—it’s got plenty of chuckles in store, and it’s much closer to its inspiration than many other spoof movies. I’d even suggest it as a hidden gem of the mid-1970s.

  • Firecreek (1968)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2022) The appeal of Firecreek is that it brings together two of Classic Hollywood’s best-known leading men—two lifelong friends, actually—into a story leading to a fatal confrontation. James Stewart isn’t too far away from his 1950s western heydays here, playing the “sheriff” of a small dead-end town made of rejects, oddballs and cast-offs. He, too, would like nothing more than to be left alone. Alas, outlaws ride in town and start making trouble. They’re led by Henry Fonda and while Fonda’s character may be a tad more respectable than his hoodlums, he’s still creating chaos in a small town, and must be stopped. In a reprise of High Noon, Stewart seems to be the only one willing to do what it takes to stop the outlaws, as everyone else cowers inside. As a blueprint for a dramatic Western, this isn’t too bad—it’s stealing from the best, and somewhat reflective of the growing disillusionment of its era. Seeing Stewart facing off against Fonda is a show by itself, even if Stewart chooses weary lassitude over his more typical aw-shucks mannerisms and if Fonda isn’t quite at ease playing the villain. (He would do much better as a villain in Once a Time in the West.)  This being said, Firecreek is too long at 104 minutes—the opening act drags, and there’s a sense that the final confrontation could have been made more meaningful. Still, as far as westerns go, this one is accessible enough: there’s a clash between civilization and anarchy brewing here, and the clean-cut colour cinematography gives a sense of place. While Firecreek won’t turn up in many best-westerns lists (especially considering how, at the time, the western was going for much rougher and violent material), it’s a competent, somewhat well-handled effort that doesn’t waste its leads even in taking too long to get to the point.

  • Town Creek aka Blood Creek (2009)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, October 2022) As obvious as it may sound, the one fundamental difference between reviewing relatively new films and older ones is context—when it comes to classic films, we know how historical events turned out, we know how many more movies a star made, we understand what arc a director’s career took, and all of this feeds into a very different critical perspective than writing the first draft of film history in which anything may happen tomorrow. Most of the time, stable context solidifies decades years later. In other cases, it comes sooner. Joel Schumacher, for instance, died at 80 years of age in 2020, putting a final punctuation mark to a career that lasted longer than most people expect. While he gained directorial fame in 1985 with St. Elmo’s Fire, he had been working in the industry since 1970, starting at the relatively seasoned age of 30. As a result, his death caught a few people by surprise—and it feels weird to look at a 2009 film like Blood Creek and place it in a relatively solid historical perspective. There’s no doubt, for instance, what this film was completed on the descending slope of Schumacher’s career: While he gained near-household name recognition during his 1990s streak from Flatliners to Batman & Robin, that last film clearly marked the high-water mark of his career. The 2000s saw him direct a few solid genre pieces, but by the end of the decade he was down to minor straight-to-video thrillers—and his last work was in 2011. Blood Creek, alas, clearly wasn’t a prestige project: it feels more or less on an equal footing as other low-budget independent horror films of the time. Schumacher’s lifelong eye for good cinematography means that the result feels more polished, but in the end, we’re still fighting Nazi zombies on a farm. The cast, however, is intriguing: In addition to Dominic Purcell in one of the lead roles, we have pre-fame Henry Cavill as the lead, and then-unknown Michael Fassbinder as the antagonist—a cast that would cost about ten times as much, not even five years later. Still, the result isn’t much of a film. Half-intriguing ideas and one big special effects showcase don’t combine to offer more than a mediocre rural horror film. It’s clear that Blood Creek was a mercenary project for Schumacher—perhaps in the hopes of a payday or simply proving he could still deliver in anticipation of other projects. Little of this makes the film any better by itself—but in the context of a long career that spanned growing fame and a return to obscurity, it makes for another poignant milestone.

  • The Oklahoma Kid (1939)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2022) I’ve long held a fascination for the sheer weirdness of the Oklahoma land rush, and I like both Humphrey Bogart and James Cagney, so The Oklahoma Kid should be a lot of fun to watch, right? Well, mostly. The depiction of the land rush isn’t up to what we saw in Cimarron (both versions)—nor is it strictly factual, considering issues in sticking with the right time and place. Then there’s Bogart—by 1939 an increasingly valuable player in the Warner Brothers troupe, but not yet the legendary Bogart of posterity. There’s no way late-1940s Bogart would have accepted a role as a stereotypical black-clad villain cowboy, but this is what we have here. Finally, there’s Cagney, not quite at ease out of the city streets of his urban screen persona but giving it all he’s got in a typically exuberant role—and he gets to play the virtuous protagonist too! The rest of the film is rather standard good-versus-evil-in-cowboy hats stuff, but the comparatively slick execution and lighthearted tone of the result make it still quite watchable—plus, there are a few lines of dialogue here that come close to acknowledging the appropriation of Native lands, which is about as progressive as a western could be in 1939. While The Oklahoma Kid hasn’t gone down in history as a particularly fine or well-respected western (even if you’re limiting yourself to 1939, there’s Stagecoach, Destry Rides Against, Union Pacific and maybe Young Mr. Lincoln to contend with), it’s still reasonably entertaining, and maybe that’s enough. Well, that and Cagney fighting it out with Bogart.

  • La sirène rouge [The Red Siren] (2002)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2022) I suspect that few people these days go “Oh, there’s La Sirène rouge! I’ve got to watch that!” but completionism is a strange disease, and there were enough fascinating oddities in the film’s creative credits to intrigue me. The biggest one was seeing that it’s an early effort from writer-director Olivier Megaton, who went on, a few years later, to make a modest splash in the Hollywood B-movie action scene by directing four mildly-received thrillers from the Luc Besson Eurocorp movie factory. (Of those four, only Colombiana was okay—The Transporter 3, Taken 2 and Taken 3 were all various shades of disappointing)  Megaton’s filmography has been sparse since 2014’s much-excoriated Taken 3, so it’s safe to presume he’s now in the mythical director jail. But what about his pre-Hollywood movies, the ones that presumably were the calling card that had Besson knocking at his door to direct? Could it be a case of “I liked his earlier, less-Hollywood stuff better”? Well, no: it turns out that La sirène rouge is of a piece with his later Eurocorp films: preoccupied by visual cool, but lacking in the narrative and coherency departments. He’s not much of an actor’s director either—the now-disgraced Asia Argento shows up here as a dogged police officer chasing after the daughter of a powerful mob madam, but her limitations are obvious. The script has a few surprises for Science Fiction fans in that even it’s co-written by Megaton, two other writers and expatriate American SF legend Norman Spinrad (what?!?), based on the debut novel from controversial writer Maurice G. Dantec, since then deceased. (This makes more sense when you find out that Dantec and Spinrad once played in a band together.)  Alas, that’s probably the most interesting thing about a by-the-numbers story that blends clichés without quite managing to turn them into something compelling. Some of the execution is better than the material, but not by much—the film feels instantly dated to the early 2000s through its overprocessed colour grading and some musical choices, but the sense of lassitude that comes from the dull action sequences and showy (but useless) directorial flourishes is timeless. A few good moments hint at a much better film if Megaton could just calm down and care about continuity… but the rest of La sirène rouge blares for itself as a disappointment. So yes—this is where Megaton’s pre-Hollywood creds come from, and no: he’s not some kind of misunderstood auteur.

  • Born to Be Bad (1950)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2022) While the natural narrative of film noir is one of a crime thriller, you don’t necessarily need murders, conspiracies and hardened criminals to do bad—perfectly average people can be terrible in their own ways without necessarily breaking the law. So it is that the film noir definitions can expand to cover melodrama, especially when you take a look at something like Born to be Bad, in which the lead femme fatale isn’t a murderess as much as a chronic liar, a manipulator and a back-stabber when it comes to getting what she wants. Most of it is perfectly legal… if reprehensible. It’s up to Joan Fontaine to play the cute and deceptively evil lead, and actors such as Robert Ryan and Zachary Scott (but not Mel Ferrer, oh no) to be the victims of her schemes. What could have been a perfectly acceptable “women’s picture” melodrama of no interest to film noir fans is given an extra dimension or two by director Nicholas Ray, as he draws parallels between his anti-heroine’s actions and larger social forces, plus a bit of moody cinematography. Still, I can’t help but suspect that about half of the film’s claim to the film noir club comes from film historians really wanting to include another Nicholas Ray movie in the canon, even if it doesn’t completely fit. But, ah, no matter whether you consider this an overwrought melodrama or a sentimental film noir, Born to be Bad is still a modest success that explores how a cute young woman can get away with just about anything… at least for a while.

  • La chiesa [The Church] (1989)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, October 2022). It’s a bad idea to place too much stock in expectations. In The Church’s case, it would have been easy to look forward to a gothic cathedral supernatural thriller featuring the involvement of both Argentos: Dario producing and writing, Asia co-starring. But keep those expectations in check (which isn’t all that difficult considering both Argentos’ steady fall from grace)—The Church occasionally works in small moments, interesting images and potential ideas, but falters in many crucial areas. The pacing is deathly slow, for instance—with far too much time spent explaining a historical prologue that’s not that interesting when measured against contemporary events. (This is a surprisingly common issue in staging elaborate historical flashbacks to show what could be a few lines of dialogue—they can work as supplemental visuals to audio, but it’s wasteful when they restage things without adding or contradicting anything said in the current day.)  While director Michele Soavi stages an acceptable amount of mayhem with characters going violently crazy under the influence of the cursed church, the film barely works itself up in a climactic frenzy: even the coda is depressingly ordinary. While The Church has enough good moments to avoid anything like a bad rating, it mishandles its own potential—considering how crazy and in-your-face the film gets about sacrilegious depictions of a Catholic cathedral, the film should have reached a feverish pace far earlier. Too bad—but then again, my expectations were modest.

  • Angel Face (1952)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2022) If you’re looking for a characteristic of film noir during its 1950ish heyday, it’s somewhere in Angel Face. Robert Mitchum as a tough guy with a weakness for the ladies; Jean Simmons as femme fatale; directed with his usual frankness by Otto Preminger; sombre deaths worth investigating; cynical view of the judiciary system; prickly subtext; moody black-and-white cinematography; up-to-date technological thrills; and an ironic ending that dispenses justice when humans can’t. There’s even some face-slapping that doesn’t stop at the usual 1950s man-slapping-the-woman: she hits back! (There’s also a persistent story that, at the end of the multiple slapping takes, Mitchum gave one to the bullying Preminger.) In other words—this is one crunchy noir from the glory days of the genre, cleanly shot and vigorously delivered. At 91 minutes, Angel Face is crisp, efficient and moves forward at all times. Even its flaws are those typical to film noir—and may arguably enhance the result. I’ll wrap it up here—this is a short review by my standards, but then again there’s only so much you can say when the verdict is that of a good film.

  • Chafed Elbows (1966)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2022) As a movie, Robert Downey (Senior)’s Chafed Elbows is quite unlike anything else: It’s a still-picture film where most of the content consists of black-and-white photos, with narration tying it all up. If that sounds like the dullest thing in the world, let me correct you right away, because you haven’t heard the film. Yes, it’s an experimental movie, but the narration is going right for a surrealist’s funny bone. Transgressive material, oddball concepts, deadpan delivery and clever wordplay all combine for a surprisingly laugh-out-loud experience that could probably work just as well as an audiobook. (It’s been a while since I’ve read some Mark Leyner, but there’s a strong kinship there.)  I’m up to maybe an amputated handful of Downey Sr. films, but my favourites are clearly the ones he intended as comedies. Utterly offbeat, memorably zany and constantly entertaining, Chafed Elbows makes for a great trailer for Downey’s masterpiece Putney Swopes.

  • Corvette Summer (1978)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2022) If you want to talk about late-1970s charm, you could do much worse than have a go at Corvette Summer. In some ways, it’s a great “also played into” for two actors—Mark Hamill (obviously typecast for his work in Star Wars) as a high-school mechanic desperately tracking down his stolen refurbished Corvette, and Annie Potts (often best known for her turn in Ghostbusters) as an equally young woman going to Vegas to become a prostitute. Bouncing between Los Angeles and Las Vegas, the film often deals in serious issues (stolen car ring, prostitution, mentor betrayal, deadly threats) but does so in a cheerfully entertaining way. The adventure-type plotting also helps, with a new hopeful development every few minutes as our hero tracks down a rumour bringing him to Vegas, sees his car driving past but can’t catch it, gets a job that allows him to keep an eye on the city streets, tracks down the thief, etc. As a period piece, it has aged well—and remains watchable because it does something that hasn’t really been done all that often since then. The appeal for gearheads is there, obviously, but not limited to them—and there are also plenty of fine character moments. Some sequences are a bit slap-dash (not all car chases are equally well-staged—the final one, in particular, seems more convenient than organic) but we get the gist anyway. Most of all, though, we get a youthful Hamill doing the kind of role he may have done more often had he not been completely typed as Skywalker, and Potts doing so well in her film debut that she ended up being nominated for a Golden Globe for it. Corvette Summer is not a big, a great or an ambitious film—but it delivers what it meant to, and does so in entertaining low-key style.

  • American Pop (1981)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2022) I didn’t like American Pop as much as I expected to. On paper, the project sounds terrific—a multi-generational trip through twentieth-century America via a Russian Jewish immigrant family history with pop music, fully animated. Produced and directed by notorious animation renegade Ralph Bashki, it’s an immensely ambitious attempt at elevating the nature of animated films, tackling very different subjects than the norm for the genre (even today). Unfortunately, being confronted with the result is the definition of disappointment. For one thing, almost the entire film is rotoscoped—footage of actors being painted over in solid block colours. I can’t overstate how ugly I found the result—even allowing for the technical imitations of the time, the choice of colour is more psychedelic than realistic, and the art direction seems to be wildly inconsistent even when going through the decades. Some of the material is pulled from obvious sources—you can instantly recognize the snippet traced over the Nicholas Brothers’ performance in Stormy Weather, for instance. Then there’s the story, which sweeps large but often ends up being a pretext for a jukebox musical. It doesn’t help that the film ends in 1980—from today’s perspective, this is a conceit that could have used another twenty years to bring it to the end of the twentieth century. Most of those problems are much worse now in 2022 than they must have been in 1981—in other words, this is not a film that has aged well in execution or in principle. I still like the ambition of American Pop, and the subject matter helps make it the most interesting Bashki film I’ve seen so far—but the problem with big ambitions is that they make disappointments look even worse. If anyone wants a go at a remake with today’s technology and hindsight on the twentieth century, well, go ahead…

  • The Arrival (1991)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, October 2022) Be careful about the 1991 version of The Arrival: it’s not the much better 1996 The Arrival starring Charlie Sheen, let alone the infinitely superior 2014 Denis Villeneuve film Arrival. All three of them have something to do with alien arriving on Earth, but this 1991 film goes the cheap-horror route, degenerating into a slasher film with an alien rejuvenation hook. It’s easy and dull in the same way countless other serial killer films of the 1980s-90s are, the same way most horror films equating change with murderous psychopathy are. It feels like a slasher film by and for slasher fans, except without much skill in executing it. The script may have one idea rattling around (I hesitate to say it has a second one), but director David Schmoeller –a veteran of low-budget filmmaking—can’t do much with it. The result is insipid—maybe more interesting to low-budget slasher fans; otherwise, be careful not to confuse it with anything better if it pops up in a listing.

  • Mr. Lucky (1943)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2022) I thought I was done watching most of the good Cary Grant films, but as it turns out—no, there are still a few left, and while Mr. Lucky is easily not top-tier Grant material, it finds him in fine form, inhabiting the kind of utterly charming character he was best at. Possibly drawing upon similar sources of inspiration as Casablanca, the film takes us to a foreign port city on the eve of World War II, where a roguish man (Grant in fine charismatic con-artist mode) falls for a wealthy, beautiful heiress (Laraine Day). Much of the fun is not really in the standard romantic angle or the arc of the selfish cad learning to be a better, more heroic figure—it’s in the small ways Grant plays his character, turning relatively mundane material into, well, classic Grant charm. His scoundrel is rarely less than completely likable. There’s a reason why Mr. Lucky rarely pops up even in extended Grant retrospectives—it’s very tied to its time in overtly selling war bonds and the script, while competent, isn’t particularly stellar. But it’s well worth a look: it’s a good showcase for him, and even the wartime sensibilities can be intriguing. There are far worse movies in his filmography.

  • Babycall aka The Monitor (2011)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, October 2022) Since her explosive breakthrough role as Lisbeth Salander in the film adaptations of Stieg Larssen’s thrillers, Noomi Rapace has found a strange niche—she’s often the best part of substandard genre films. That trend apparently started early on, considering the example set by Babycall in-between her Salander roles and Prometheus. This thriller at first seems on familiar grounds—the single mother moving into a new apartment, fearful of an abusive ex-husband and being slightly too attached to her son. But then the film seems to delight in throwing nearly every single other premise of that kind of film: strange noises coming from the child monitor device she uses to keep tabs on her son when he’s sleeping; strange men who want to date her; a weird new friend at school; allegations that she is abusing her kid; and many more. By the end of the film, writer/director Pål Sletaune pulls the dumbest possible card as climax, invalidating more than four fifths of what has come before it in a gigantic plot hole. Rapace, on the other hand, does wonderfully well: she plays the material as if she hadn’t read the last few pages of the script, giving it everything she has and, for once, not necessarily playing the tough woman. Still, it’s hard to overcome the film’s gaping narrative issues, which are made worse by the film’s positively glacial cinematography and atmosphere. There’s very little payoff for the ordeal, unless you’re really completing your Rapace filmography—in which case you’ll get what you’re here for.