Month: November 2022

  • Barfly (1987)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, November 2022) I can’t say that I’m much of a Charles Bukowski fan, but I’ve read one or two of his books, and it’s hard to avoid his boozy street-poet influence on American literature. Accordingly, I was disappointed by semi-biographical drama Barfly. The film tries to present a Bukowski stand-in (played, appropriately enough, by classic-era Mickey Rourke) through a few days of dead-end existence in the dregs of downtown Los Angeles—fighting, stealing and drinking being the main events. Much of the story revolves around his courtship and relationship with a kindred woman (Faye Dunaway), and the temptation of escaping his situation. It’s all consciously seedy and considering that Bukowski himself wrote the script, you really can’t accuse the film of being unfaithful to his writing. And yet, there’s more to a film than a screenplay—Bukowski sent mixed messages about the film in the years following its release, going from admiration to reservation, although he did get a book (called Hollywood) out of his experiences during the film’s production. In the end, though, it feels like a restrained version of the Bukowski legend—and it’s useful to acknowledge that Bukowski’s persona is often far more interesting and cinematic than his lived-in reality as he wrote it for the screen. This is one project where an exaggerated version of the character could be more interesting than the character itself. Something to reflect upon when we keep dinging Hollywood for “printing the legend” when it invented that technique to make its audience happy.

  • The Bob’s Burgers Movie (2022)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2022) Part of why I keep watching movies based on unfamiliar properties is the challenging aspect of it: Will The Bob’s Burgers Movie make sense if I haven’t seen more than five minutes of the TV show? Is it built to accommodate new viewers? Does it work as a standalone piece of fiction rather than a parade of self-referential winks? Does it feel like a movie-level story or an extended episode? Here, the answers are generally positive: The film does an acceptable amount of work in introducing what you need to know, tackles an ambitious story, and can be enjoyed as a standalone film even if the more pointed references remain for fans. As helmed by showrunners Loren Bouchard and Bernard Derriman, The Bob’s Burgers Movie begins as a sinkhole appears in front of the restaurant, effectively closing it down until the characters get the obvious idea of taking the restaurant outside the restaurant. But that sinkhole gets more interesting once some exploration reveals a body, and so a murder mystery with an active killer still on the loose. The nearby pier has a number of secrets to reveal, and the characters are all swept along on a rollercoaster of eccentric events. The whodunit aspect is effective at creating interest while the characters are reintroduced (although some character-driven subplots feel slight), and the musical numbers are an excuse for the film to stretch itself a bit. In the end, I was satisfied by The Bob’s Burgers Movie—although not particularly moved to try the show.

  • Residents of Arcadia (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2022) Low-budget filmmaking shouldn’t mean low imagination, and the way Residents of Arcadia combines a bit of horror with Science Fiction, a commentary on Canada’s immigration policies and some very personal drama makes it an object of contemplation far more interesting than many higher-budget genre features. It starts with something both creepy and familiar, as the idyllic lives of two influencers are punctuated by off-camera arguments, and then a countdown clock appearing on all of their house’s screens. At zero, “they” wake up—their subscription to the utopian Arcadia expired, and their Canadian work visas are about to expire. Who were they? Well, that’s where the film gets a bit murky in an attempt to heighten virtual reality drama with more complex issues—an avenue that ultimately harms the film by introducing irreconcilable issues and muddying clear themes. But still—there’s an attempt by writer-director Dom Cutrupi to cast a wide net and even poke at national points of pride. (Canadians generally like the country’s immigration policy, but often don’t completely understand its harsher facets.)  Nick Preston and Ishaval Gill turn in likable performances as lovers of very different origins whose Canadian romance looks ill-fated, while Michael Stephen Perry and Kamantha Naidoo are their more perfect equivalents. (Conversely, while I understand what Cutrupi and Stella Lai were attempting with her brainy exposition-spouting character, I don’t think it’s successful.)  There is a lot to like in Residents of Arcadia—in fact, the film goes out of its way to make itself likable, and that papers over a number of real flaws with the results. In its hurry to metaphorize a literal issue, it loses itself in a metaphor that creates more questions than illuminates answers. (This is a film that would have been better in virtual reality rather than augmented reality, so to speak.) There are also plenty of subplots that remain underdeveloped and further contribute to the fuzziness of what the film was trying to say—some judicious script-level editing or a bigger budget could have helped focus, develop and satisfy. Despite those significant issues, though, I did like Residents of Arcadia—it’s bold in ways that most films of its budget bracket simply aren’t, it speaks about a contemporary Canada, and it’s really trying hard. Likability is an underrated objective, especially in the low-budget genre category, where horror filmmakers seem delighted when mundanes recoil in disgust at the result—Residents of Arcadia goes for a different, far more humanistic approach and that makes it easier to forgive when the script logic isn’t where it should be.

  • The Devil Comes at Night (2022)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2022) Low-Budget Canadian feature film The Devil Comes at Night doesn’t look like much at first—much of the story takes place in an isolated house at night, featuring mysteriously sketched characters that may or may not be lying through their teeth. But as the film progresses, everything comes into focus—the backstory of the male lead, the appearance of a female lead who won’t be defined by her job as a librarian, and the nature of the threat posed by Satanists outside the doors of a rather strange house. It’s all a bit simple by the end, but it’s effectively delivered with cinematography that doesn’t often show the limits of its budget. The result isn’t perfect—after all, the film gets fuzzy with its mythology, as the supernatural rubs shoulders with the realistic, the time-limited nighttime cinematography gets duller than it should, and some of the plot points could have been streamlined. Still, The Devil Comes at Night is not a bad showing from writer-director Scott Leaver and writer-star Adrienne Kress, considering their limited means and carefully scoped intentions.

  • Scream, Queen! My Nightmare on Elm Street (2019)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2022) One of the reasons why I enjoy reading non-traditional perspectives on film is that they often offer compelling takes on things that would normally escape me in part or completely. Queer cinema theory, for instance, is one way to unlock the secret history of Hollywood, as it employed several gay cast and crew who brought their sensibilities to the big screen even when it was forbidden to be too explicit about it. That’s how, after a recent viewing of Nightmare on Elm Street 2, I learned about the substantial (but barely-visible-to-me) gay subtext to the film—the coding of the male protagonist as a female character, the references to mid-1980s Los Angeles gay culture, male-gaze cinematography, and the coded relationship between protagonist and antagonist. I was very, very late to the party on this one—gay audiences since the release of the film immediately noticed the almost-text-subtext, and the star of the film, Mark Patton, had to confront the stigma of playing a character seen as gay at a time (mid-Reagan administration, height of the AIDS crisis and reactionary politics) when he was closeted like every other gay actor in Hollywood. Scream, Queen! My Nightmare on Elm Street details the ways the film was made with gay allusions, how the director was blind to them (“too busy with the details to see the whole” is the official excuse), and the lingering impacts of its reception on Patton’s career. The film also acts as a yardstick to measure progress in sexual orientation inclusivity within the film industry since 1985, as Patton left Hollywood but was eventually recognized and found a second (third?) career as an activist telling his own story and advocating for greater inclusiveness in Hollywood. Much of the film’s structure is built around a less convincing quest for truth-seeking, as Patton long resented screenwriter David Chaskin’s denial that he had crafted the film’s screenplay with gay subtext. This leads to a somewhat disappointing “confrontation” between the two men that leaves Patton unsatisfied and viewers wondering, “Geez, quit while you’re ahead, won’t you?” Still, the rest of Scream, Queen is quite interesting on its own—a sliver of queer theory as applied to a narrow, but welcoming field—genre horror in its wonderful diversity.

  • For Madmen Only: The Stories of Del Close (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2022) Most biographical documentaries desperately want you to like and admire their subjects. They want to make you feel that their person of interest made a meaningful contribution to the world. They bring in friends, acquaintances, family and tell you how wonderful the person is. Things are a bit more complex with For Madmen Only: The Stories of Del Close, and it starts with “Who’s Del Close?”  Most people outside the comedy industry have never heard of Del Close—and his death in 1999 means that his star is fading somewhat. But Del Close, as the film breathlessly explains, is one of the great hidden influencers of North American comedy from 1960 to well into the 1990s, acting as a coach, trainer and influence on improvisational comedy, which he capriciously called “Harold.”  Ironically enough, the documentary ended up identifying Close as responsible for what I consider to be a scourge upon modern comedy—I don’t necessarily dislike improv, but I always prefer meticulously planned, structured and delivered comic material to looser improvisational riffs, which feels disconnected and absent larger coherency. But that’s not the only problem you can have with Close, a famously difficult personality with a penchant for self-aggrandizing lies, drug abuse, abrasive relationships and self-destructive habits. And yet… the list of his students reads like a who’s who of late-twentieth-century North American comedy (Close harmed comedy not only in Chicago and Los Angeles, but also in Toronto) with several eloquent testimonies bemoaning the man as much as they’re praising his impact. See for yourself and decide whether he was a saviour or a scourge.

  • Outside the Wire (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Netflix streaming, November 2022) Casting is a tricky, tricky art. Putting some actors in specific parts creates backstories or sympathies seen nowhere in the script. Counter-persona casting can create surprise or discovery. But the trick doesn’t always work, and anchoring Outside the Wire with Anthony Mackie in a lead role leads to some curious disbelief late in the film when we’re supposed to believe in a hero-to-heel turn that doesn’t work because, well, he’s Anthony Mackie! Of course he’s the hero! Granted, my exposure to Mackie’s roles has been very specific… and Outside the Wire has other issues anyway. I like the setup of the film—in a near-future where advanced technologies are common features of the battleground, the United States deploy a drone operator in need of discipline with a hard-edged operative (Mackie) who ends up being an advanced android. A dangerous mission behind the lines shows both the android’s talents and a darker side as well. As a near-future wartime thriller, Outside the Wire has a few noteworthy moments: veteran director Mikael Håfström knows his way around action or suspense sequences, and the weaving of new technologies with depressingly familiar little peacekeeping operations (this one set in Ukraine, eerily enough) is more credible than it should be considering “surprise, android!”  Unfortunately, the other thing that’s surprising about Outside the Wire is how generic it feels—despite some good ideas and decent action sequences, the film struggles to develop much of an identity, or warrant more than the effort to watch it. As a Netflix original film, it seems to suffer from the same homogeneity of presentation as similar movies also available on the platform, and settles for some broad dialogue and dramatic situations. And then there’s the casting thing—Mackie is a terrific actor, but his casting choices have not properly led him to this movie.

  • The Window (1949)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2022) Considering that film noir is often considered the epitome of film genre for adults, it’s remarkable that The Window features what other noirs usually exclude: a kid as a protagonist. Clearly working with blunt suspense tropes that show up everywhere but in the film noir genre, this is a film that combines explicit boy-cried-wolf themes with honest suspense when a kid witnesses a murder and the murderer comes to clean up witnesses. Straightforward at 73 minutes, this is a film that doesn’t waste time in niceties: it roars along with each essential scene. Young Bobby Driscol is quite good here, especially since he holds the film together far more than the adult actors. There’s some genuine menace in having a kid threatened with murder (not often done at the time, or even now) and the wonder here is in seeing such topics executed within the stylistic framework of film noir. While the result may be a bit formulaic to be that striking in a fatalistic film-noir sense (clearly, they’re not going to kill the kid!), The Window is an interesting entry in the genre’s canon.

  • Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Amazon Streaming, November 2022) Bizarrely enough, I became convinced that Everything Everywhere All at Once was a serious pick for my favourite movie of 2022 during a silent set of shots featuring two rocks overlooking a lifeless landscape. But that feels appropriate enough for a film that defiantly refuses to do anything like anything else. Boldly reclaiming the multiverse concept from soulless attempts to smash different “Intellectual Properties” together, writers-directors the Daniels (Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, working on an entirely different level from their previous Swiss Army Man) combine the sublime with the ridiculous, the Science-Fictional with the domestic. The story revolves around an older woman (the divine Michelle Yeoh, getting an incredible third act in her acting career) who finds herself pulled into a complex story of diverging timelines in an attempt to keep her laundry business afloat. Mere words can’t quite describe the calculated insanity, branching timelines, multiple roles, comic inventiveness and, ultimately, heady concepts brought down to earth here. It takes a while to get into Everything Everywhere All at Once as the film begins in depressing mundanity and then gradually accumulates the concepts that it eventually deploys as a thematic symphony. What can initially feel like a throwaway joke or sight gag can pop up against as part of a sustained sequence spanning multiple universes, and it’s that joyous inventiveness that sets Everything Everywhere All at Once apart from so many other cookie-cutter films. It fully digests science-fictional concepts, movie grammar, other directors’ styles and spits out something wholly admirable. There’s a lot that goes essentially unremarked in a film with such wild inventions (such as a matter-of-fact treatment of ethnicity and sexual orientations) and that’s part of the viewing experience: a full all-engaging, all-encompassing movie confection that piles on small details and grand concepts. I didn’t just like it a lot—I loved it, and I will be a very disappointed cinephile here if it doesn’t get Oscar recognition. Normally, I wouldn’t bet on a science-fiction action comedy to get top nominations or wins, but seeing how the past decade of Academy Award winners has been filled with “movies that should not have won,” let’s just say that we’re no longer living in the same universe as we did a decade ago. [March 2023: I’m astonished to have been right on this one.]

  • The Grifters (1990)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, November 2022) Confidence games meet neo-noir in The Grifters, a now often-overlooked film that nonetheless goes farther than most would expect. Featuring the intriguing trio of John Cusack, Annette Benning and Anjelica Huston, the film isn’t your fun-and-games con-comedy, but a harsh tale of survival in a cold and murderous world. Cusack plays a conman; Huston plays his mom; and Benning is the seductress that comes between them. There are also, significantly, mob figures and marks to be fleeced—but the trouble starts when the mob figures are seen as the marks to be fleeced. What follows at that point is implacable in the purest noir sense, and that still lends The Grifters some solid credentials even today. Otherwise, director Stephen Frears (working from a script by none other than Donald E. Westlake) keeps an interesting balance between the yellow sunniness of Los Angeles and the growing darkness of the tale. Cusack is young and likable; Benning looks much sexier than usual; while Huston looks far less attractive in dowdy blonde curls—but all do great work in their own ways. The Grifters is meaner than its noir forebears, but that’s the point: it goes where those earlier films couldn’t. The result has aged rather well: it’s not quite a period piece yet, but it does have a timeless quality that still makes it work.

  • The Life of the Party (1930)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2022) The point of Pre-Code films, from a contemporary perspective, isn’t necessarily to be found in suggestive outfits, risqué lines or looser language—it’s usually in the less-than-moral attitudes that the characters can adopt in ways that would disappear in 1934 and not reappear before the late 1960s. In The Life of the Party, for instance, we have two Manhattan young women who, after being fired and abandoned by men, decide to adopt the gold-digger lifestyle and work their schemes in Havana (then a playful spot for the rich). There are horse races and millionaires and gigolos working the same scheme from a gender-flipped perspective and, in the end, The Life of the Party feels naughty just for suggesting that romance can take a back seat to material comfort. (But don’t worry—romance comes back by the time the credits roll.)  Director Roy Del Ruth keeps things light, even if the film itself is clearly not the best possible take on its own ideas. The Pre-Code atmosphere makes the film interesting despite some rough early-soundies technical qualities. Some of the film’s shortcomings can be explained by an ambitious production (featuring colour cinematography and musical numbers) that got severely cut down when the American appetite for musicals faltered in late 1930. Maybe, one day, we’ll rediscover the full film.

  • Sleep. Walk. Kill. (2022)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2022) Let’s not mince words: the amateurish execution of Sleep. Walk. Kill. hovers at the edge of acceptability. Here we clearly have non-professional actors, material shot in crewmembers’ suburban homes, slapdash ultra-low-budget production values, a tiny crew, and an overall feel of “Look, Mom, I made a movie—remember those weeks we spent shouting in the basement?”  But writer-director Justin Miller has a few aces up his sleeve here, and the biggest of them is a strong understanding of his strengths and limits. Sleep. Walk. Kill. goes for a horror/comedy tone that allows funny lines and standard zombie thrills to take the spotlight away from the production values—the narrative is a twist on the usual zombie fluff (in this case, being that if you fall asleep, you turn into a flesh-eating zombie) but the execution had family members and acquaintances cracking wise as they try to deal with a world-altering situation on a quotidian, domestic basis. The script has a few ideas and some good one-liners to go with a COVID-sympathetic theme that real horror is being stuck in a house with other people. This Philadelphia-produced low-budget film was apparently made with local talent from the comedy scene and it shows, with all of them trying just a bit too hard to drop some punchlines in between horror sequences. It sort-of-works in an interesting way, as the film itself feels like a homegrown attempt to fight against zombified bigger-budgeted productions. It’s got some underdog energy that makes even the terrible acting work in its favour: a fusion of style and substance in a self-aware package that feels more alive than many slicker horror films. It won’t make Sleep. Walk. Kill. easier to watch for audiences just looking for a good time—but for seasoned horror viewers looking for something slightly more interesting than yet another monster-movie formula, this just may do the trick.

  • Portraits from a Fire (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2022) There’s a good chance you will have problems making it through Portraits from a Fire. No, it’s not a dire film—but in being executed on what feels like an ultra-low-budget, its presentation and execution are rough. Entirely taking place on a Canadian First Nation Reserve, the film has its heart in the right place, especially for viewers fascinated by the craft of filmmaking—it presents a teenage protagonist obsessed with making movies, using even the barest means at his disposal to film fantasies taking him beyond his quotidian existence. There’s some kinship here with other, more gentrified portraits of how middle-class white filmmakers become fascinated by their heart, but writer-director Trevor Mack doesn’t stop there in exploring the legacy of trauma in ways that go beyond mimetic realism. In conceptual terms, there’s a lot to like in Portraits from a Fire—it’s the execution that’s abrasive. The limits of the film can be seen at several levels, many of them intentional. The dialogue is often unsophisticated, the plot twists brought forward bluntly, the cinematography often amateurish (by design?) in showcasing many sequences from a customer-grade digital camera. Many of the roles are played by non-professionals, and while much of the visual design of the film comes from opposing the natural splendour of the reserves with the less-than-impressive human occupancy of that space, the result is still not quite as slick as it could have been. A lot of these choices are artistic, and do work in presenting an endearing DIY aesthetic that reinforces the themes of the film. But they don’t make it any easier to watch the film from a base audience perspective—the use of TV-like glitches at plot-important moments, for instance, takes viewers outside the reality of the film into the real, while a more consciously showy glitch style would have paradoxically worked better within the logic of the film. So; while there’s a lot to like here, the presentation appears self-limiting in reaching the potential of the concept. Portraits from a Fire is still a lovely film with strong underdog likability—but it could have been quite a bit better.

  • The Lady Gambles (1949)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2022) Poor Barbara Stanwyck. Or rather: poor character played by Barbara Stanwyck, as she gets swept up in gambling addiction after a trip to 1940s Las Vegas and eventually loses everything she’s got. A rather unusual (and progressive, in its own way) film dealing with social issues, The Lady Gambles aims to be a procedural drama chronicling how someone (a woman, unusually enough—most of the time, even well into the twenty-first century, gambling addiction is portrayed as a male issue) can gradually become seduced into increasingly high-stakes gambling from a little taste of Vegas. Much of the film (which is already fairly thin to begin with) probably wouldn’t work without Stanwyck—in her hands, the character is not a meek woman who gets taken despite herself, but an imposing presence who gradually succumbs. Robert Preston has the good role as the ex-husband who gets to extract the story in flashbacks, while Stephen McNally plays a Lucifer-like figure further tempting the lead character. The result is not always smooth, limited as it is by its exploitative vision, and the limits of the Production Code at the time—sure, you get to see Stanwyck’s character being beaten up in an alley, but the censorship in place prevents the film from going too deep in her implied prostitution. Still, the film remains interesting even as it plays things conventionally—The Lady Gambles has aged well after decades of further understanding of how gambling addiction works (or has even become something celebrated—the Las Vegas of 2022 is not the one portrayed in 1949) and Stanwyck, as she often did, took on roles that still make her one of the smartest actresses in film history.

  • Opération Luchador (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2022) While Opération Luchador doesn’t quite click at a higher level, what’s on-screen is a remarkably odd fever dream of a concept, surprisingly well researched in its attempt to create a hilarious secret history of World War II. That it comes from French Canada is a bonus. Presented as a documentary about the secret history of the Nazi regime, it focuses on the mysterious figure of a luchador who fought the Nazis and eventually stopped them from bombing Manhattan. A lot of fake interviews are intercut with narration, “historical” footage and other standard mockumentary techniques. Writer-director Alain Vézina does get very clever (and playful!) if you’re into WW2 or even Hollywood history, as he weaves historical detail with a very specific brand of comedy. The result is certainly not perfect—in trying to work within a secret history framework, the film is limited by a certain adherence to history, and its comic sensibilities don’t always have a lasting power: the joke can become thin and stretched at times. As a low-budget production, it’s also limited in strange ways—such as the interview footage with a wrestler who speaks English with a thick French-Canadian accent that can’t be justified in-story. But as far as off-the-wall movies go, Opération Luchador is just different enough, just amusing enough to be worth a look.