Month: November 2022

  • Gunpowder Milkshake (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Netflix Streaming, November 2022) By now, any (hypothetical) regular reader of my movie reviews should be tired of my standard rant against “men are garbage” movies—those weirdly hailed films portraying all female characters as virtuous or likable and all male characters as scum in a way that would clearly be misogynistic if the genders were flipped. It’s a surprisingly common trope these days, and I can’t wait for it to be seen for the mean-spirited sexist tripe it is. Gunpowder Milkshake definitely belongs to that subgenre: Its protagonists are female, its murderous antagonists are male, and moral alignment generally follows gender roles. (The occasional exception, such as the soon-to-die father, merely reinforces the overall message.)  But unlike other “men are garbage” movies, Gunpowder Milkshake has one crucial quality—it’s a lot of fun. It’s not completely self-absorbed in its message, it’s almost restrained in the way it gleefully murders males, and it makes some great casting choices along the way. I mean—a scene in which Carla Gugino, Michelle Yeoh and Angela Bassett play librarians who are secretly a front for a secret sisterhood of assassins? Yes! Written and directed with energy by Navot Papushado, Gunpowder Milkshake is at its best when it goes full bore in action movie tropes, ripping off everything it can from John Wick as a starter and topping itself at each successive action sequence. The clichés are big, the moral alignment of the film is non-existent (the protagonist gets a huge pass from another character for killing her father—but that’s okay, since he’s a male!) and we’re clearly closer to live-action cartoon than anything credible, but the result is a decently entertaining action film with strong art direction, a few original ideas (both structural and on a moment-to-moment action-beat basis) and plenty of attitude. There are a few wrong notes and missed opportunities here (most notably, Karen Gillan is a bit bland here—I can think of many other actresses her age who would have been more distinctive) and I obviously won’t let the “men are garbage” thing go. But in that subgenre, Gunpowder Milkshake is much better than average, and it’s the kind of action film meant to make fans happy until the next remarkable one rolls around.

  • Cinderella Jones (1946)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2022) The nice thing about once-popular movie genres is that if you like the classics in that category, there’s plenty more to enjoy. Light-hearted but meaningless Cinderella Jones, for instance, is clearly not a great musical. But it is a musical, so if you like the tone (and are ready to overlook a few execution issues), then you’ve got a perfectly fun little movie that plays well even if it leaves no great impression. Here, we have Joan Leslie as a likable but dim singer who discovers she’s the heir to a fortune… if she can meet the conditions of the will and marry a certifiable genius. Given that this is a musical, the next logical step is, of course, to enroll in an elite all-male college to find a suitor. For a film directed by Busby Berkeley, the “musical” aspect of this musical comedy is lacking—there isn’t much here in terms of dancing or choreography. All the effort seems to have gone into the comedy, which is occasionally amusing but again not all that great. Still, even an amusing comedy can be interesting, what with a few zingers along the way and a showy little part for S. Z. Sakall. There’s a bit of systemic misogyny that is, for once, the butt of mild potshots. Calling Cinderella Jones a wartime musical may seem weird for a 1946 release, but that’s not taking into account that the film was completed in 1943, then held back for years. By the time it was released, it had to be re-edited to reflect the end of the war, leading to a few glaring inconsistencies (and probably many more unseen issues) within the film. Don’t watch Cinderella Jones because you’re expecting a top-notch musical—watch it because you’ve seen everything else, and like the overall atmosphere of such movies. Then it becomes a lot more fun.

  • Une histoire d’amour et de désir [A Tale of Love and Desire] (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, November 2022) I was, frankly, surprised by Une histoire d’amour et de désir. My motives in watching the film were not noble—the film’s log-line promised something about “erotic Arab literature” and that was enough for me. But this French-Tunisian film belongs to a category of movies nearly extinct on this side of the Atlantic: The slow-burn romantic drama that (not being held back by American puritanism) eventually veers into eroticism. Much of the story focuses on a young freshman during his first year at La Sorbonne—a singularly conservative, straightlaced, even boring young man of Algerian origins who meets a firebrand of a classmate, a Tunisian girl who couldn’t be more different from him. Their courtship is drawn-out, filled with reversals (mostly due to him lacking the nerve to follow through) and is surrounded by other subplots, from his sister being a bit too promiscuous to the need for him to reclaim his origins by, say, learning enough Arabic to read the inscription she left him in a book. This kind of material could have gone wrong (or at least felt dull) in very many different ways, but writer-director Leyla Bouzid has a solid handle on her material, and benefits from two good young actors in key roles. Zbeida Belhajamor easily gets all of the attention: her role, after all, is to be an object of pure lust for the protagonist, and she achieves that—even if her glorious curly mane does half the work, the other half remains crucial. In comparison, Sami Outalbali gets a more difficult role as an indecisive, rigid, stick-in-the-mud protagonist who has to get out of his shell—but he eventually makes it work. It’s a fairly rare romantic drama from a male perspective (and executed by a woman, to make things even more interesting—from the first moments of the film, there’s quite a bit of female gaze going on) and it’s through a bunch of bittersweet moments that it earns its uplifting ending. Its portrait of young people in Paris is held back by shooting in South Africa, but the child-of-immigrants mindset portrayed here is culturally interesting. But it’s in comparison with other movies that Une histoire d’amour et de désir finds an additional dimension, perhaps as proof of what could be possible if filmmakers let go of formula and self-censorship: maybe, then, we’d get movies exploring more facets of humanity as it truly lives.

  • The Rental (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Netflix Streaming, November 2022) While I don’t, in theory, object to mid-film genre shifting, some swerves are rougher than others. Taking a creepy paranoid thriller built on secrets, infidelities, voyeurism and resentment against the rich is a pretty good foundation for any genre shift…. But following that up with a psycho killer slasher that doesn’t resolve any subplots as much as it kills everyone involved in them is really not the way to go. I suppose that part of my seething hatred for The Rental has its roots in my overall dislike of the slasher subgenre. The other part of it is that the film seems to be doing a lot of work in setting up its dramatic subplots (not being particularly interesting at it either, but that’s a separate issue) that by the time an unknown and unrevealed killer starts slicing the pretentious and unlikable characters of the film, it seems like a darker take on lazy “it was all a dream” storytelling clichés. In this case: we killed everyone for no particular reason, so the story has ended without really needing us to go through the work of offering a conclusion. This isn’t satisfying, and the film doesn’t make any kind of point about, I don’t know, reclaiming rental properties from rich arrogant out-of-towners; the banality of evil; or even a satire of psycho killer movies. But no: in the hands of writer-director-producer Dave Franco, The Rental has little point, and no perceptible sense of humour even as it kills off its last remaining character not through stabbing but by making her fall off a cliff. From annoying in its first half, The Rental gets exasperating in its second half by not caring about storytelling structure, character or genre. The only way The Rental could have been worse is if its insipid characters had survived.

  • The Double Man (1967)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2022) The Cold War years were rife with thrillers in which vigilant Anglosphere spies had to defeat the perfidious Soviets, and many of those films have sunk into near-obscurity by now. This only makes them more interesting to rediscover, even if their quality if far from being uniformly good. You can’t really make a case for The Double Man, for instance, as being a top-notch thriller. It’s both ludicrous and boring at once, wasting several promising elements and not doing much with the assets in its custody. But here’s the thing: Yul Brynner. Yes, that proto-bald-chic icon is at play here, and he automatically makes the film better. While most casual fans will focus on the guy’s missing hair, he did have the intensity to complete the package. His protagonist here is nicely hard-edged as he plays a top-level American secret agent going to Europe to investigate the ski-related death of his son, where he finds a complex plot to replace him with an exact double. He brings much of what The Double Man needed simply to stay afloat in a sea of ludicrous plot points. After all—if you’re going to double an actor, might as well double an actor worth doubling! So, there’s definitely an interest in seeing Brynner fight Brynner, and the film does keep that going until the very end. Alas, that’s probably the one single thing it does well, because the rest of The Double Man (excepting maybe Britt Ekland) isn’t nearly as exciting. While directed by veteran Franklin J. Schaffner (whose career would really take off with his next few films) and taking place in the picturesque wintertime Alps, much of the film feels bland and unremarkable. This is further reinforced by a script that can’t seem to take its one striking central idea and execute it in a way that remains compelling: it’s all routine bits of spying business stuck together, leaving Brynner to do most of the work in making us care. There are, to be fair, far duller Cold War spying thrillers. But there’s also a sense that The Double Man is wasting more opportunities than its contemporaries.

  • Toys in the Attic (1963)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2022) The more you know about Dean Martin’s debonair screen persona (whether it’s as a contemporary lush or as a western hero), the more his presence in heavy southern-gothic melodrama Toys in the Attic will surprise you. If so, you’re in good company—cinephiles since 1963 have been raising eyebrows at this oddball entry in his filmography. Martin, as certified King of Cool, was far better known as a sometimes-lazy actor who took on roles where he could transfer his public persona without doing too much work so that he could go golfing the rest of the day. Any role that didn’t have him wearing a suit with a glass of amber liquid on hand (or a cowboy outfit with a liquor bottle on hand) was considered a departure. That’s far, far away from starring into a theatrical adaptation of an intense family drama featuring resentment, jealousy, implied incestuous lust, large sums of money and, eventually, a man breaking free from his sisters in order to have a functional marriage. Legend has it that Martin’s agent got the role for him, but legend also has it that Martin worked hard to be good at the role, and the film somewhat bears this out: he’s not bad (albeit not great) as long as you manage to forget about the rest of his filmography. He doesn’t overpower the rest of the film as one might have feared. The rest of the cast is not bad (what with Yvette Mimieux being a bit too good at playing the naïve newlywed bride, Geraldine Page as the heavy, and Gene Tierney also going for darker-than-usual) but Martin remains the centre of attention here. The film itself is not all that good: coming from a play by Lillian Hellman, Toys in the Attic feels like a bit of a Tennessee Williams-light tale of the decadent South, but without really committing to the bit. Despite a few fine westerns, Martin wouldn’t play as intense a dramatic performance ever again as he aged and became even more golf-focused.

  • Ghost Shark (2013)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, November 2022) In theory, a movie called Ghost Shark, with a premise as bonkers as a ghost shark, should be easy to bring to completion. Since the premise makes no sense, make it a comedy in which people get ripped apart by, well, a ghost shark and you’ve got a solid template. There are enough horror/comedy hybrids out there that taking inspiration shouldn’t be a problem, and churning out funny dialogue in that frame is a basic-level writing assignment. But no; or rather, Ghost Shark takes its lessons from all the wrong places. Rather than trying to be authentically funny, it’s inspired by terrible SyFy garbage, and believes that the goofy premise (a ghost shark eating people from a pool! A bathtub! A bucket! A cup of water!) is enough to call it a day. “In the SyFy tradition,” is enough of a warning, but to make it clear to anyone who has blissfully missed this slice of sub-cinematic disappointment: writer-director Griff Furst’s Ghost Shark is terrible. It’s a low-budget monster film that has little horror and practically no comedy. It’s all high-concept and incompetent execution, lazily running through the motions of filmmaking without having anyone bothering to make it good. Every single aspect of this film is awful—there was clearly a decision to push this forward as a gimmick in the hopes that social media would run with the inanity of the bite-sized memes without bothering to look at the entire thing. (If you’re having Sharknado flashbacks, you’re not crazy—both films came out on the SyFy channel within a six-week period in the summer of 2013—Sharknado on July 11, Ghost Shark on August 22—and were clearly aping the same business model.)  Alas, absent a live-tweeting crowd, the film is unbearable.

  • Quo vadis, Aida? (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Netflix streaming, November 2022) There are times where a title card does most of the work, and fictional fundamentals do the rest. In the case of Quo vadis, Aida?, the only things you really need to know are: The film takes place during the mid-1990s Bosnian war, specifically during one of the worst episodes of the war—the Srebrenica massacre of 8000 men and boys. Our viewpoint character is a schoolteacher working as a translator for the UN, and is privy to the discussions taking place during that time. I don’t really need to tell you more for you to understand that this is not going to be a fun movie. Indeed, much of it is about futile efforts to get anyone (starting with the UN) to intervene in the light of mounting deaths. Soberly written and directed by Jasmila Žbanić, Quo vadis, Aida? is film-as-moral-lesson far more than film-as-entertainment and as such should be approached carefully. It’s also a necessary rewrite or rather a reminder that the 1990s were not, contrary to some emerging portrayals, the calm and golden decade between the fall of the Berlin Wall and 9/11—pair it with something like Shake Hands with the Devil and you’ll have enough to convince you that international morality took a holiday during that time.

  • Cousins (1989)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2022) I do believe in treating movies with matching intent—that is, watching them according to their intentions. But there are a few genres, plots and tropes that make it hard to keep a straight face as the filmmakers intended, and Cousins gets to work early at showing those overdone elements. Much of the narrative, for instance, is an elaborate rationalization for an affair—a man and woman (newly cousins-in-law) finding out that their spouses are having an affair with each other, and deciding to have one of their own. Since this is one of those “good” affairs, it starts slow and remains hesitant until it blossoms into True Love (aw) as opposed to their spouse’s affair, which is a despicable immature temporary thing. The epitome of self-conscious romantic drama that only works if you take a very selective protagonist-centred view of events, Cousins is the kind of movie that only works as a movie. Ted Danson and Isabella Rossellini both star as the good couple (what an ironic casting coup in featuring Rossellini in an affair drama, considering her pedigree), with Sean Young and William Petersen ending up as the bad one. (Plus, Lloyd Bridges as an elderly eccentric.) But it’s the director’s name that’s most surprising here: Joel Shumacher, during his initial ascending period as a mostly dramatic director. I strongly suspect that the film will strike most other viewers as a mostly innocuous romantic dramedy. But sometimes, the suspension of disbelief thing doesn’t work, and a movie looks like a hideous assembly of forced elements, and that’s how Cousins felt to me this time around.

  • Curse of Aurore (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2022) Part of being French-Canadian is an uncanny ability to be simultaneously part of American culture and outside of it—the exposition to Anglo society and entertainment is quasi-constant, but the language barrier, as permeable as it is to bilingualism, is a quick reminder that they are not like us and we are not like them, not really. We may watch the same movies, drive the same cars, build houses with the same construction material (albeit with more insulation) and eat more or less the same food until the global domination of poutine becomes obvious to everyone, but French-Canadians are not Americans and vice versa. The culture isn’t the same, the attitudes aren’t the same and there’s an added layer of French-Canadian references that Americans can’t understand. This makes American-made Curse of Aurore a very strange cultural object to contemplate, as this found-footage film follows three American filmmakers as they try to understand the famous-in-Québec criminal case of Aurore Gagnon. The film plays on a number of levels that may not be completely obvious to its own anglo filmmakers: For one thing, the 1952 movie La petite Aurore: l’enfant martyre is widely acknowledged to be the first noteworthy made-in-Québec movie—it benefited from the notoriety of the infamous child-abuse case that inspired it and further made Aurore a cause célèbre for many more generations, revived by the 2005 remake. I mention this because for American filmmakers to come to Québec and take on Aurore Gagnon is going right for one of the biggest deals in Québec culture—as clear a case of cultural appropriation as it’s possible to get. Looking at Curse of Aurore from that lens is highly instructive. Once past a weak framing device (apparently featuring a big-name paranormal YouTuber), much of the first half of the film approaches comedy, as the American protagonists shooting a quick on-location documentary can’t quite deal with the weather or the small-town culture confronting them. Not that they make things easier on themselves by acting like dumb ugly Americans (one of them a kleptomaniac stealing stuff every few minutes) and being called on their outsider status at the local convenience store. There are strange glitches, events and eerie moments, but things really get going in the last third, as they end up in pure Québec terroir folk horror, with a cult having sprung up around the demonic presence of Aurore, that cult taking deadly aim at the three Americans out of their elements (and good riddance at that). The film is made as horror but gets increasingly funnier, as rural Québec ends up being a place of unspeakable terror and human sacrifice—show this film to French-Canadians and the last half-hour is one burst of incredulous laughter after another. Some of the unintended laughter comes from the less-than-convincing acting of the locals—including a surprisingly high number of “rural Québec folks” speaking with a strange European accent rather than the expected French-Canadian joual. Not that the three actors are necessarily more believable, as YouTubers are stuck in a found-footage film… but anyway. As much as writer-director Mehran C. Torgoley doesn’t get Québec right, at least he gets it very entertainingly wrong: Curse of Aurore is an insult, but I’d love to organize a screening at a local SF convention and hear the crowd howl.

  • Road to Bali (1952)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2022) The textual and metatextual often entwine in Road to Bali, one of the last and most popular of the “Road to” buddy comedies starring Bob Hope and Bing Crosby. By that time, the sixth in a seven-movie series (although the seventh was filmed much later), both Crosby and Hope had developed an easy faux-antagonistic rapport, sometimes even breaking the fourth wall to take the spotlight away from each other. This was the only entry in the series film in colour, and one that was clearly comfortable with the tropes of the series. An out-and-out comedy, it features walk-on cameo roles, jabs at other movies of the time, and a stream of jokes so steady that one of them is bound to be funny—and, hopefully, one after the other. It’s not a bad watch, although twenty-first century viewers may have to leave a few scruples at the door in order to not wince at the sexist, racist or simply foolish material. (As is often the case in boys-comedy of any age, the relationship of the characters is complex—can’t stop thinking about women, but can’t resist poking fun at them.) Perennial series distaff foil Dorothy Lamour gives as much as she gets, though—and it’s hard to notice that their best-laid plans always run aground on the shoals of female characters. Road to Bali is mild but steady fun, with the biggest laughs coming from the brazen interplay between text and context: It’s funnier if you’re up to speed on both Hopes and Crosby’s shtick, and even funnier if you can pick The African Queen’s Bogart out of a lineup. I’ve got half a mind to make myself a Road to series marathon.

  • Johnny Angel (1945)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2022) Being a fan of film noir is often simply being a fan of atmosphere. Take Johnny Angel, for instance—it’s readily watchable, executed with some competence, and has what fans expect of noir: murder, mystery, a square-jawed hero, one or two femmes fatales, plenty of stylish atmosphere… but in the end, does it do anything distinctive? There’s the opening mystery, I suppose, as a ship is discovered without anyone aboard—the kind of spooky-horror premise that her leads to a far more humdrum mutiny plot. There’s George Raft, if you insist: The gangster-adjacent leading man of the 1930s who got eclipsed by “backup Raft” Humphrey Bogart at the beginning of the 1940s. There’s the setting, maybe, taking place in New Orleans’s shipping underworld. None of these strengths amount to much in the end, though: the impression left by Johnny Angel is one of a core film noirs without being a particularly good or distinctive one. Maybe its place as an early entry in a developing subgenre that reached its potential late in the 1940s explains much. That’s fine: The interest of a corpus (of being a fan of a corpus) isn’t as much the best of the genre as much as the most average of the genre, and Johnny Angel certainly gets closer to that than being a top-notch example of the form.

  • A Perfect Enemy (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2022) As I’ve mentioned a few times (and will keep mentioning), I’ve had it up to there with so-called psychological dramas that think that protagonists working their way through past trauma are a great excuse to feature imaginary characters, nonsensical reality shifts and voluntarily incoherent storytelling technique. There’s a rug-pulling aspect to those movies that gets increasingly grating when it’s not done well, and it comes with a complementary tall order of “Why should I care when none of this is real?”  A Perfect Enemy makes things even harder for itself by not being particularly good at bringing viewers inside its hermetic madness. From the get-go, there’s something noticeably off with the dialogue between a middle-aged architect and a rebellious young woman: the style is stilted, in a showy and self-congratulatory way that can’t be explained by the film’s European origins. The actions of the characters don’t make sense, and their antagonist relationship is so strident as to defy explanation as to why he should stay close to her even despite the hardship that she carelessly imposes upon him. It arguably gets worse as the building blocks of the imaginary construction are put together—the past trauma that he’s revisiting, the nature of the fictional construct creating the “dialogue” here. In the end, A Perfect Enemy becomes noticeable in its exasperating subgenre by taking a much darker conclusion—one that allows delusions to remain intact and trauma to be once again sealed out of sight. It’s not enough for writer-director Kike Maíllo to distinguish himself in the crowded subgenre—a limp middle section doesn’t help the mild loathing for the characters, although a stylish crescendo of a conclusion brings a bit of much-needed style to shore up the wobbly substance. I probably would have been more impressed by A Perfect Enemy in pre-Fight Club 1997—but it’s twenty-five years later, and these days some movies have more imaginary characters than real ones.

  • Finch (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (YouTube streaming, November 2022) “Post-apocalyptic Tom Hanks and his pet robot” is about as succinct a description of Finch as you’re likely to get. Hanks is on-screen for most of the film, and remains its only significant human character. His character has the luck of being a genius engineer with access to a state-of-the-art industrial laboratory once the apocalypse hits, and the story picks up a few years later as he scrounges through the remnants of St. Louis and builds himself an android. Alas, his careful plans for long-term survival are threatened when a major storm forces him to pack up his dog, his robot and his motor home (abandoning his machine learning curriculum at 72%) and head west where, maybe, there could be other humans. If you’re a fan of post-apocalyptic survival, then Finch at least looks like it belongs: grey-brown landscapes, destroyed remnants of human civilization and nothing more than a guy, a dog and a robot. As a screenwriting challenge, Finch does its best with its self-imposed restraints and its clear objective: the human is dying and wants to provide care and companionship for his dog once he’s gone—hence the robot. The westward quest narrative is enlivened by as many character moments as a single human and an immature robot can provide, although there isn’t anything new here if you’ve seen at least one other “What does it mean for a robot to learn how to be human?” kind of story. Director Miguel Sapochnik keeps things moving at a steady but not rollicking pace. There’s an obviousness of execution to Finch that both comforts and disappoints—a strange premise executed as familiarly as possible to keep audiences comforted even against an apocalyptic background and the impending death of its main character. Hanks certainly helps the film keep an upbeat tone despite its story elements—Finch is nowhere near as depressing as it could have been. The film’s production history intriguingly suggests that an entire final act was shot but abandoned in editing—most probably the right call in order to keep the film’s focus well-defined. But in the end, it suggests that the director was playing it safe here—as safe as the rest of the film. But safe also means unremarkable, and that’s where Finch clearly chooses to go.

  • Going Home (1971)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2022) I started watching Going Home for Robert Mitchum, and as the film ended, he remained the only reason to watch the film. In a long career playing compelling cads and dubious anti-heroes, Mitchum is already at home as a freshly released convict who tries to reunite with his son after murdering his mother (his wife) a decade and a half before. Considering that grim premise and the film’s origins in the thick of the New Hollywood era, you can already have, sight unseen, an accurate picture of the film’s grimy atmosphere, dark-on-black cinematography and an utter lack of interest in being likable to mass audiences. Further compounding the problem, studio meddling led to cutting off several minutes of content, leading to a choppily edited result. So, no, commercial flop Going Home is still not a good time at the movies: it’s dark and brutal and tonally suspect. But the reason to watch the film, as usual, is Mitchum himself—now clearly older and with mileage that matches the world-weariness of both the actor and the character. For Mitchum completists, Going Home offers a chance to see the actor in grimier surroundings than usual, playing more for drama than genre thrills. The result falls short of him, but Mitchum is why Going Home still gets eyeballs five decades after its disastrous release.