Month: November 2022

  • Canal Street (2018)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, November 2022) By the standards of BET-broadcast thrillers, Canal Street is both completely on-brand and a bit weird—and by that, I mean “weirder than the usual kind of BET weirdness.” It’s a clunky crime thriller with a socially conscious intent and a religious angle, a tapestry of family drama and political ambition, an attempt at looking at the social ramifications of a thriller plot, and a manipulative melodrama all at once. It’s markedly less fun to watch than the usual BET house brand (which is often so deliberately ludicrous as to court comedy even in the harshest of thrillers) but it just may be slightly more respectable than usual. The plot revolves around a few minutes we don’t see until the very end of the film: what happened between a black teenager riding along with a former white rival, and the moment in which the black teen was seen holding his white classmate’s lifeless body. As a racially charged murder trial roils Chicago media, the film focuses on the black teen’s father, a lawyer who takes on his son’s defence and investigators untangling the thick web of complications leading to the night’s tragedies. From the get-go, a chorus of talk-radio voices (real-life personalities playing themselves, I gather) attempt to contextualize the melodrama in wider social terms, while interludes show the impact of the character’s religious beliefs on their actions. The problem is that the film’s two sides don’t mesh cleanly—in fact, the loftier ambitions of the film in decrying racial discrimination by police are undermined by a basic story that’s too ludicrous for words—you don’t need to be a police or judicial expert to spot one inconsistency after another, contrivances and dramatic shortcuts that don’t create the aura of credibility that Canal Street needs to succeed. (Seeing the incomparable Lance Reddick in a small role helps a bit, but not enough.)  What’s more, the socially conscious ambitions of Canal Street rob it of the trashy entertainment value that the film’s main plot suggests it should have: by the final twist, we’re left with a dismal and sad tale. Even the religious content, which could have been a source of inspiration, points too clearly to the screenwriter’s divine hand rather than create more much-needed verisimilitude. Rewatch value is low—writer/director Rhyan LaMarr has his intentions in the right place, but he needs to figure out what story he’s telling and stick to it.

  • Bedtime Story (1941)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2022) As far as innocuous late-era screwball comedies go, Bedtime Story isn’t fun as much as it’s bland—familiar actors doing their shtick, characters from the stock repertory of genre archetypes, a plot built around a predictable comedy of remarriage, and so on. Fredric March and Loretta Young have starring roles as, respectively, a playwright and an actress—she wants to retire to the countryside, but he wants to keep working, and he wants her to star in his next play. (Twenty-first century viewers, however, may be more interested in Robert Benchley and Eve Arden in supporting roles.)  It’s all meant to be fun and frothy and innocuous at the end, except that from today’s perspective there are some very dodgy things going on in the male character tricking and manipulating his wife into doing his bidding, not to mention the not-so-fun aspects of her divorcing him and remarrying another man, something that the film presents him as justified in stopping. Such plot devices were distressingly common in screwball comedies, though—even the better ones—so think of them as the price to pay (if you want: no one’s forcing you) in order to appreciate the results. Otherwise, Bedtime Story doesn’t really break new ground or leave much of an impression.

  • The Automat (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2022) Considering that I have been mesmerized by the idea of automats ever since seeing them in older movies, you can say that TCM broadcasting the documentary feature The Automat was as close as it came to a film custom-made for me. Automats, for those who have yet to encounter the concept, were the upscale automated cafeterias in New York City and Philadelphia during the middle twentieth century—meticulously engineered to allow for economies of scale and no-frills service, they offered cold and hot food available for mere quarters, fed into machines that opened a door to let you bring the food back to your table. Automats were big business in the northeastern United States from the 1920s to the 1960s, and you periodically see them pop up in movies of the period. They all closed in the 1990s, victims of changing market forces (namely fast-food restaurants and inflation), although periodic attempts have been made to revive the concept at an age of digitalization, no-touch service and automated payment systems. In The Automat, director-producer Lisa Hurwitz puts her fascination for automats to good use, tracking down surviving members of the Automat Corporation’s last days, celebrity testimonials (Colin Powell and Ruth Bader-Ginsburg!), a terrific interview with Mel Brooks (who also contributes an original song and, hilariously, provides a meta-commentary on how the documentary is structured). It’s quite an impressive film—for its evocative nostalgia for something long gone, but also for the depths of expertise and first-hand testimonials it’s able to unearth. I loved every single second of it—and I can’t wait until someone brings back the automat for the twenty-first century.

  • April in Paris (1952)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2022) See Doris Day. Doris plays April. April is a Broadway chorus girl. April is mistakenly selected as a representative of American culture to Paris. Hence April in Paris. While clearly a second-tier musical, the film does have its good moments. Day is effervescent as she was at that stage of her career, and Ray Bolder is amusing as a stuffy government representative profiting greatly from selecting April as an exemplar of fine American culture. (His tap-dancing number “Life Is Such a Pleasure,” alongside dancers playing Washington and Lincoln, is one of the film’s highlights.) The film also lets loose with “That’s What Makes Paris Paree,” with a bit of extravagant set design and amusingly repetitive lyrics [“The Eiffel Tower!”] and the catchy “I’m Going to Rock the Boat” for choreography. Alas, the overall result is thin gruel compared to other musicals of the era—the plot fits on a napkin, with contrived complications merely delaying the inevitable happy ending. “Slight” is not necessarily a synonym for “bad,” however: it’s just an acknowledgement that there are much better musicals out there. Still, if you have seen those musicals, April in Paris works well enough to be worth a watch. If nothing else, Francophiles will get a chuckle or two.

  • The Desert Fox: The Story of Rommel (1951)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2022) Frankly, it took guts for Hollywood to even think about making The Desert Fox—a film halfway sympathetic to a Nazi hero barely six years after the end of WW2, at a time when paying audiences wanted nothing else but be reassured that their wartime experiences shooting Nazis in the face were fully justified. But as WW2 historians will note, if you were going to make a film about a non-despicable Nazi, Edwin Rommel was the right choice. An acknowledged superior military strategist, Rommel was also a Nazi supporter of convenience rather than ideologically driven (he wasn’t technically a Nazi Party member, but, you know…) and—best of all—he was an active participant to the failed 1944 plot to kill Hitler, something for which he was forced by the Nazi regime to commit suicide. The other good move of the film biography was to get James Mason in the lead role—an actor known both for refinement and his ability to play ambiguous villains. The result is surprisingly good, and just-as-surprisingly mature for the time. It’s certainly not faultless—film historians and military historians agree that, in being too favourable to the historical figure, The Desert Fox gave rise to a pernicious “Rommel Myth” that exaggerated the man’s qualities and downplayed his troublesome facets. Still, as a movie, The Desert Fox is, at the very least, an effective piece of propaganda. It’s not that much of a war film—much of the battle footage is recycled from earlier films or news footage, while much of the occasionally scattered plotting is made of parlour conversation. There is a much, much better film to be made about Rommel and his complexities, but for a 1951 production, The Desert Fox remains surprisingly effective.

  • Honeymoon Hotel (1964)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2022) In the pantheon of 1960s sex comedies, Honeymoon Hotel seems a mere footnote—rarely broadcast, seldom seen and almost never mentioned as part of the corpus of movies that, in their own now-quaint ways, reinvented American cinema in the waning days of the production code. Part of this obscurity is certainly due to the film’s overall failings—you have to be in a good mood to be particularly enthusiastic about it, considering that the plot barley makes sense, that plenty of comic opportunities are left untouched, that the film can be grating at times, and that its sense of comedy has not aged well in most matters. You would not recommend it as an introduction, or even a solid second-place choice at anything it stands for. This being said… if your expectations are already well-calibrated, if you’ve seen the better sex comedies of the 1960s, if you’re a fan of the actors involved and if you’re looking for a tiny but wholesome bit of social progress, then Honeymoon Hotel may be worth the sit. As far as I’m concerned, the film’s biggest assets are its lead trio of actors—Robert Goulet (yes, that Robert Goulet, except without the moustache) as a James Gartner-type playboy, Robert Morse as a jilted groom trying to forget his cancelled wedding, and Nancy Kwan as the object of their affections. The plot gets cracking when, in the wake of his cancelled wedding, the ex-groom finds himself, along with his playboy friend, in a hotel designed for couples. Two things to note here: We’ve got two Caucasian men vying for the affections of an Asian woman without the racial component ever being mentioned—three years before Loving v. Virginia legalized interracial unions across the United States. Then we’ve got some comedy in which our leads are mistaken for a homosexual couple and the worst thing that happens is a few raised eyebrows for comic effect. That’s… not bad at all for a film made five years before Stonewall. It goes without saying that, despite being stuck in a substandard vehicle, Goulet is cool, Morse is frantically funny and Kwan is remarkable. Some of the film’s sex farce material still works well, although all the material having to do with the native population falls flatter than the rest of the lacklustre comedy, and you have to be awfully indulgent about ludicrous plotting in order to even get into the film. Still, there are a few interesting things in Honeymoon Hotel. Not many, and not enough to warrant an effort, but enough to have a look at the film if it pops up on your listings.

  • La ch’tite famille [Family is Family] (2018)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, November 2022) French comedian writer-director-actor Danny Boon is at it again with La ch’tite famille, “it” being a comedy about rural folks teaching a few lessons to urban protagonists. The setup here is that our protagonist (Boon) has escaped his Northern France origins to become a successful designer in Paris—and his estranged family eventually comes calling, triggering a succession of events that leaves him amnesiac and speaking the thick ch’ti patois of his native area. There’s more (such as a plot by his father-in-law to take over his business), but you get the gist of it. While the specifics of the Paris-contre-ch’tis comedy are very, very French, more or less the same story could be re-located to rural Alabama and New York City without missing much—it’s a basic slobs-versus-snobs story that doesn’t hide its sympathies for the populist life. (The recurring gag about unusable hypermodern chairs is emblematic.) One sequence in which a refined character tries to understand spoken ch’ti is a lifeline to non-French audiences, but also shows some empathy for the simple folks. La ch’tite famille obviously builds on the monster success of Boon’s previous Bienvenue chez les ch’tis, but is not a sequel in most senses of the word. Still, it is a decent broad-spectrum comedy made for box-office success. It combines Boon’s solid comic instincts with decent production values and fine supporting actors. It may not be great cinema, but it manages to entertain for a while.

  • Wander Darkly (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2022) Mark me down as solidly mixed about Wander Darkly. While I sort-of-get the ambition of its purpose, its intention to portray the process of choosing life after trauma, and the occasional (make that very occasional) vivaciousness of its execution… Haven’t we seen enough of those movies already? This may have more to do with the movies I pick, but it seems to me that we’ve been up to our necks with imaginary protagonists, heightened reactions to trauma, disorienting editing and psychological dramas that (while not impossible) are exceptionally implausible. At least writer-director Tara Miele has a clear vision (inspired by her own story), and two fairly capable actors in Sienna Miller and Diego Luna: their characters may be flawed to the point of distraction, but at least they give it all they’ve got. I do have something against the length of the film—even at 97 minutes, Wander Darkly indeed wanders because there simply isn’t a whole lot of plot to go around: everything seems to take about twice as long as it should, and exasperation at the way the film obstinately refuses to get to a point is an integral part of the third act. It’s a film that depends a lot on audience mood, though—not just temperament (although that’s a part of it) but very specific in-the-moment mood. Something to keep in mind as I straddle the fence in my assessment.

  • The Unfaithful (1947)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2022) While The Unfaithful’s kinship to the film noir genre may not be as obvious as the private-eye-murder-thriller exemplars of the genre, it does have murder, morally dubious actions and there certainly, to a degree seldom acknowledged in other noir movies, a clear sense of time and historical consequences driving the plot forward. It starts with the murder, as a woman alone in a house kills a male intruder. She says he’s unknown to her, but that lie is exposed in the form of a bust of her made by him—exposing a wartime affair between the two. If you’re looking for more death, you’re out of luck: the initial murder is all you get. But if you’re looking for near-fatalistic “suffering with style,” then this is where the film’s meatiest moments start, as the husband of the woman is incensed at her affair and threatens divorce, but a stern talking to (from an exceptionally well-cast Eve Arden) introduces some complexity in what could have been a punitive moralistic conclusion. While noir almost always takes place in the shadow of WW2 and the reintegration of a fighting force into a general population (something seldom explicitly mentioned), The Unfaithful squarely talks about the toll of wartime separation, and suggests that, since the war drove everyone to behave in less-than-ideal ways, maybe we should be compassionate about it. That explicit call-out may be the noirest thing about The Unfaithful, and a good reason to take it in as a companion to other more conventional film noirs. It remains what they called “a woman’s picture,” but there’s a four-quadrant appeal in what the film has to say.

  • Restons groupés (1998)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2022) Being French-Canadian carries with it near-honorary cultural kinship with both France and the United States—the first for its still-considerable cultural influence on French-Canadian content, the second for, well, dictating popular entertainment around planet Earth. So, it’s with some very strange pleasure that Restons groupés plays like a mashup of French attitudes crashing into American soil. The fun of the film gets going when a guided tour of French tourists ends up stranded in the American south-west thanks to the abrupt bankruptcy of the company. Falsely reassured that money will eventually start flowing again, the tour guide stays quiet and tries to manage the tour’s tight budget no matter the absence of reimbursements. That lie doesn’t last all that long, but it launches the clash of cultures that lies at the heart of the film. As the tourists play Ugly Frenchmen in Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Arizona, Utah and points in between, it becomes a group dynamics study, an excuse for bewilderment at American culture, and an opportunity for broad comedy. Interestingly enough, the film hasn’t aged much in nearly twenty-five years. Aside from an antiquated computer (easily becoming a gag about the rural community in which it’s located) and an easily overlooked absence of cell phones (which would have destroyed the initial premise of the film), much of the material still works well. (Although the satirical bit about reactionary forces in the US feels a bit soft these days.) While not a great comedy, writer-director Jean-Paul Salomé’s Restons groupés remains quite watchable, often likable, and even insightful at times. France meets America has seldom been funnier. (But I’m not sure if the film is available in the US.)

  • World of Comedy aka Harold Lloyd’s World of Comedy (1962)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2022) The one weird thing about Harold Lloyd’s World of Comedy is not its place as an anthology showcase for Harold Lloyd’s virtuoso mastery of early comedy—that’s well known. It’s that, for all of its status as a retrospective of early cinema, it was released in the early 1960s, qualifying it as a classic film of its own! There’s a fair case to be made for World of Comedy being one of the reasons why Lloyd’s work is still well known today—it was an interim introduction to his work for “younger” audiences before home video and later online streaming made his work available to all. One thing we don’t appreciate from our twenty-first century perspective is just how precarious movie history was in the decades between then and now—entire careers were forgotten or lost during these years, only to be revived by dedicated historians. Lloyd, on the other hand, was not one to let posterity dictate its terms—as a canny businessman, he himself put together this retrospective, selected the excerpts and wrote the film’s narration. He clearly knew what to highlight—if the attribution of a few clips is less-than-clear, Lloyd often lets excerpts run long to showcase the sustained genius of his comic pacing, always topping the current situation with a more outrageous one. I had seen maybe half of the film’s content, but gladly watched it again just for the sheer joy of it. World of Comedy is a terrific introduction to Lloyd’s work, and an incredible comedy showcase no matter how familiar you are with him.

  • The Wraith (1986)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, November 2022) Now here’s something interesting—a 1980s hybrid of Science Fiction and car-racing action, featuring no less than a young Charlie Sheen. The action takes place in a small Arizona town, where hoodlums challenge others in dangerous races, only to be challenged, in turn, by a mysterious figure sporting gear that’s clearly not of this Earth. Explaining the plot quickly leads to a bunch of nonsense, but as far as teenage-focused fantasies go, this is not the worst film around. Some care has clearly gone into making the racing sequences, for instance, with quite a few good stunts and dangerous-feeling footage to go with it. (Alas, there was a price to be paid—a camera operator died while filming the action sequences and a crewmember was seriously injured.)  Sheen does have that youthful swagger going for him, and the supporting cast includes Sherilyn Fenn, Randy Quaid, Clint Howard and Nick Cassavetes. But it’s the blend of subgenres that’s interesting in The Wraith—more than the execution, but less than the stunts.

  • The Middle Man (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2022) The line between a black comedy and an unbearably glum drama is not always obvious, and that’s where The Middle Man comes it. Executed in Ontario but conceived by Norwegian writer-director Bent Hamer, the film feels like a glimpse at a parallel universe where laughter is unknown, depression is the norm, and people act according to half-robotic behavioural patterns. It’s as if a complete stranger with a shaky grasp of English set out to write a story about a Rust Belt city without quite understanding that there’s more to life than news headlines about industrial decay and rising suicide rates. No, I’m not a big fan of The Middle Man: While you can occasionally recognize attempts at very tight-lipped mirth, much of the story (about a man hired to communicate bad news to a declining Midwestern community) is at such low intensity that it’s a surprise that characters aren’t falling asleep in mid-scene. There are probably symbolic links here that I’m not seeing… but then again, I’m not really interested in digging deeper: seeing that film once was more than enough.

  • La morte viene dal pianeta Aytin [Snow Devils] (1967)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2022) In the mid-1960s, Italian director Antonio Margheriti (as “Anthony Dawson”) helmed four Science Fiction movies whose ramshackle production values couldn’t quite erase a certain vivacity of execution, wild premises and a clumsy attempt at future-building. (Those were the “Gamma Quadrilogy,” also made of The Wild, Wild Planet, War of the Planets and War Between the Planets.) His unrelated Snow Devils is almost interesting for being a precursor to 1996’s The Arrival in positing aliens hell-bent on terraforming Earth’s climate prior to colonization. Fortunately, our heroes are on the case, and eager to take the fight all the way to the alien base orbiting Jupiter. It’s a terrible film in most ways, but it has good pacing and a few ideas (if fewer than its predecessors). This early attempt at making something of climate change is more accidental than anything else, but the bit about the aliens being the originator of the yeti myth is fun (but not as much fun as their garish blue makeup). Snow Devils is really not an essential SF film, but it may illuminate the very, very low bar that was considered acceptable for the genre at that time, whether it’s in concept or execution.

  • Escape the Field (2022)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2022) Oh, such wasted potential. I don’t mind movies built on big mysteries—set up a good solid hook and I’ll follow. But I have one condition, and it’s that I’m given a substantial answer to the mystery at some point… otherwise I’m liable to think that the writers were too cowardly to come up with a conclusion. While the setup of Escape the Field isn’t all that startlingly original in putting its characters in the middle of an apparently infinite cornfield (see 2019’s In the Tall Grass for more), the mystery is enough to get us through a few rough early patches—whether it’s incredibly annoying characters (too bad for Tahirah Sharif, stuck in a bad role), an inconsistent tone and a development that somehow borrows from escape rooms. Our six characters bicker a lot, and as the film advances, it becomes clear that they’re not only stuck in a supernaturally large field or an enigmatic puzzle, but also in a slasher horror movie. By the time the slasher thing becomes central to the plot and some military mumbo-jumbo is dropped into the third act, the mystery becomes exasperating—and that’s well before the film ends on some incredibly tired “GOVERNMENT EXPERIMENT!! HA-HA-HA!” clichés. The problem is not just that Escape the Field can’t manage even a mildly satisfying ending—it’s that the entire film promises something that it ultimately can’t deliver. Bad writing set up the film for failure, which is too bad considering that writer-director Emerson Moore does much better on the directing front, wringing much out of the limited landscapes of an endless corn field—or, more specifically, what does not fit in such a setting. But in the end, direction can’t compensate for a hollow narrative, or rather an incomplete narrative without much else in the way of characters, dialogue or narrative rhythm. Don’t le the intriguing premise seduce you—there’s nothing to see in Escape the Field.