Month: November 2022

  • Undergods (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2022) If you accept that movies offer a vision, then the best that writer-director Chino Moya’s Undergods can manage is a fog. A dark, incoherent, deliberately off-putting Science Fiction anthology of very dark tales. But not tales with dark panache, no—rather the stories of a dying world moulded on Eastern Europe, perpetually shrouded in darkness and quotidian despair. Too grim to be comedy but too dull to be horror, Undergods settles for nothing much more than a blur of dark bland, as it barely manages to tell fourth-fifths of a story before blurting another lame and repetitive one. Much of the dour, unfocused nature of the film’s barely distinguishable episodes is made on purpose to trick reviewers into creating an interpretation of a film that doesn’t have much on its mind. But the stark bottom line is that Undergods is a mushy slurry of depressive mood without much in terms of narrative, character development or point. I can’t possibly imagine anyone recommending this film for any purpose.

  • CODA (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (YouTube Streaming, November 2022) If there’s one interesting trend in the last dozen Best Picture Academy Awards winners, it’s that most of them could be called “the film that should not have won” (all the way to the Moonlight/La-La Land kerfuffle). The other thing that characterizes a lot of them is an insistence on social themes—sometimes to the dismay of some watchers prone to screaming, “Message Movie!”  CODA, which most improbably walked away with the prize in 2022, fits the pattern of the decade: There are many reasons why it should not have won according to the old rules (it’s an exclusive release from a new Internet streaming platform; it’s a modestly budgeted small-scale film adapted from a foreign movie; it relies a lot on subtitles; etc.) and yet it does fit the new rules: it’s clearly a social-message movie, it offers leading roles to non-traditional actors, it offers a fresh glance at a marginalized group; it blends together at least three favourite subgenres of the academy; and it treats everything with a rather genial touch. Much of the plot focuses on a young woman, the only hearing member of a northeastern fishing family. (It’s adapted from a French film in which the characters are farmers, but this is more picturesque.)  As CODA goes on, strands of familiar subgenres are woven in: Our heroine is tired of being the interpreter between her family and the outside world; she is exasperated by the blue-collar hardscrabble of their lives and wants to pursue higher education in singing (an incomprehensible pursuit for her family), leading her to be inspired by a great teacher; the family gets tired of working for another and decides to go into business for themselves; and then there’s the miscellanea of being a teenager dealing with more-embarrassing-than-usual parents. It’s a lot, but fortunately, it’s handled with a deft touch—CODA is surprisingly funny, quite accessible and if not exactly suspenseful, then involving enough to want to watch what happens next. Academy award-winning deaf actor Troy Kotsur is quite good here, and Marlee Matlin is almost as good in a supporting role—and seeing her here brings to mind all the ways in which CODA seems substantially more mature in its look at deaf characters than the comparable Children of a Lesser God: for one thing, the film is comfortable using subtitles rather than having a character repeat verbatim the ASL dialogue for the hearing audience. The low stakes of the film allow writer-director Sian Heder to spend time building characters, even if the jumble of competing subplots can be tricky to navigate at times. I’m not going to suggest that CODA was my favourite or even the best of 2021’s films (after all, the Academy has also abandoned this goal in making its picks, going instead for movies meant to make everyone feel good about their choices) but it’s certainly watchable, unusual, and even a bit daring in how it presents something that feels new. As far as Best Picture Winners go, I don’t expect that CODA will be particularly remarkable (and the question of its streaming exclusivity does rankle), but neither will it embarrass the Academy.

  • The Chocolate War (1988)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2022) As a film reviewer, one of the big foundational questions about any movie is a plain simple “Why?”  As in—why was this film made? What compelled hundreds of people to do their part in bringing this story to the screen? For a surprising number of films, the question can be answered by, “It’s adapted from a best-selling novel.”  Such is the case with writer-director Keith Gordon’s The Chocolate War, a teenage drama set in a boarding school where much of the action revolves around… a chocolate fundraising effort. Of course, it’s not about selling chocolate—it’s about one young man’s rebellion against established order, against how a personal error (as in: buying far too many boxes of chocolate to sell) can lead to abuse in a system set up to reinforce existing power structures. It’s such an out-there concept that, yes, the “why” of the film boils down to—it’s based on a classic YA novel by Robert Cormier. Alas, if you think this is going to be funny, you’re mistaken: As dark as its setting in an austere Catholic boarding school where no fun is ever allowed, The Chocolate War offers little in terms of triumphs for the protagonist refusing to engage in chocolate-selling—and that’s after the novel’s original ending was revised to be lighter and more hopeful. It makes for a decent, but not overly engaging viewing experience: it’s very much a novel of awful people perpetuating the means through which they remain awful, and the refusal to lend a light touch to what could have been a satirical premise is the kind of thing that takes a toll, however justifiable it is. As boarding school dramas go, The Chocolate War also pales in comparison to contemporary heavyweights of the subgenre. Still—not bad: glum, dispiriting and dismaying in its social implications, but it clearly achieves its targets even after altering the events in the original novel.

  • Island in the Sun (1957)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2022) There are many reasons why Island in the Sun is interesting, but far fewer to call it good. Oh, it’s certainly respectable: As a prestige picture adapting a well-known novel to the screen, it comes with a mixture of pedigree, dramatic ambition and production means. For contemporary audiences, the most noteworthy thing about the film is how progressive it feels compared to other 1950s dramas—it talks about race relations and interracial relationships in a fictitious Caribbean setting, and isn’t afraid to go for high melodrama to make its points. The multi-stranded plot makes good use of its ensemble cast, and a generous amount of on-location shooting lets the colour cinematography of the film escape from studio sets. For celebrity watchers, the film has an embarrassingly rich cast: everyone from James Mason (playing his usual blend of malice and panache) to Harry Belafonte (terrific!) to Joan Fontaine to Joan Collins to Dorothy Dandridge and the always-entertaining John Williams in a minor but showy role. Beyond racial issues, Island in the Sun also acknowledges matters of class and wealth, with a few set-pieces of populist unrest. Reading about the film’s controversial reception is unsurprising, but it reflects its complexity compared to many of the blander 1950s social-issue dramas. All of this clearly combines to make Island in the Sun a minor recommendation in looking at 1950s cinema, and a film that’s still watchable for many good reasons. On the other hand, it doesn’t quite cross the frontier separating interest to enjoyment—it often feels ponderous and limited, with morals that don’t feel coherent, as it makes a point of its anti-racism but goes soft on marital rape. Watching Dandridge deal with a complex but stunted dramatic role is a sheer waste of talent—especially considering how few movies she made as a leading actress. The warnings attached to Island in the Sun may be lighted than others of the time, but they’re still there—and perhaps it’s best to be forewarned that it’s not going to be enjoyable as much as it’s going to be interesting.

  • Fear of Dancing (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, November 2022) I don’t really want to be too hard on Fear of Dancing’s writer-director Michael Allcock, but really: This is a film about the fear of dancing and that’s that. I’ll dress it up a bit: the formal name for fear of dancing is chorophobia and while some people don’t have it, some other people clearly do. Allcock travels around the world from Toronto to Africa in a quest to understand, well, fear of dancing. But how much of a documentary can you do on that? What if you get to interview Stephen Fry and the result is merely quite interesting? I should be a natural audience for this film—I only dance when no one’s looking, and somehow ended up in a place in life where an unwillingness to dance has zero impact on my life. But I gamely failed to be anything but mildly interested by Fear of Dancing. Parts of it appeared unbearably obvious, while other moments felt incredibly overdone. The climactic sequences (in which Allcock dances by himself on an isolated beach, away from his camera crew, wearing VR goggles, and then dances with a high-school crush) led to a big shrug—or was it my shoulders telling the rest of my body to dance? Ah well—not all documentaries are winners.

  • McLaren (2017)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2022) While the McLaren name remains dominant in the auto racing world, comparatively little is known nowadays about the founder of the company Bruce McLaren—a New Zealander who improbably became one of the top racing car drivers in the world, and the founder of the illustrious car company that still bears his name. In documentary McLaren, director Roger Donaldson captures recollections from the aging men and women who were there during his brief moments of fame—the pilots, friends and engineers who worked with him as the company created racing cars and earned notice by winning. McLaren died in a track car crash in the early 1970s and so the film has a lot to do in order to find historical footage, talk to interview subjects, re-create a few sequences through animation, and even stage a few historical re-creations of key moments in McLaren’s life. It’s rather good, although interest may be heightened or tempered by one’s affection for car racing. Some of the best moments happen in covering the Mosport Can-Am era with its gloriously over-the-top cars. A decently well-made film, McLaren is both a tribute, but also a time machine back to a time when auto racing changed radically: Watching the cars McLaren drives at the beginning and the end of his career illustrated just how quickly things changed throughout the 1960s. Combined with the portrait of a short but fascinating life, it makes the film worth a look for those interested in the topic matter.

  • Bigger Than Life (1956)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2022) Digging into Hollywood’s back catalogue can be weird at times—you can find socially conscious films well before it became acceptable or fashionable to discuss those topics, except that this high-minded intention is often undermined by a sensationalist, less-than credible execution. So it is that Bigger Than Life delves, in 1956, into the topic of painkiller addiction, but then goes on to make its main character an unbalanced murdering psychopath due to a rare interaction between cortisone and his body chemistry. Director Nicholas Ray was doing good work for the time here—even if a modern view on the film will more readily see the melodramatic plotting, overdone drama and naïve treatment of its topic. On the other hand, well, we have Walter Matthau beating up James Mason (even throwing him through stair rails!) to prevent Mason’s character from murdering his wife and child, so that’s something. (Of note for Matthau fans: In Bigger Than Life, his third feature film, he beats up James Mason; in King Creole, his sixth, he gets beaten up by Elvis Presley. I’m sure you didn’t expect that.)  More seriously, though, Ray couldn’t have found a better lead actor than Mason—the English legend’s smooth voice and refined manners allow him to switch from hero to villain on a dime, and that’s what he ends up doing here as the drugs take over. The scene in which he puts down a parent at a PTA meeting is simply delicious, and plays into an overhanging suggestion that the nuclear family was a sham even in the 1950s. Mason is good enough, in fact, that he makes it much easier to ignore the script’s ham-fisted “drugs will make you a psychopath” thrust—if anyone’s going to go crazy, Mason makes it supremely entertaining. The result is… fair, although I suspect that I was interested in Bigger than Life for reasons that didn’t have much to do with Ray’s original intent. But, you know, that’s still a perfectly valid way to enjoy a film.

  • Christiane F. —Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo (1981)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (YouTube Streaming, November 2022) I don’t often watch movies without subtitles in languages that I can’t understand, but Christiane F. —Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo presented a special case: It was the remaining pick in one of my list of must-see movies, and it was impossible to locate a version with English subtitles or dubbing. So… I treated it like opera. I grabbed the programme (in this case, the film’s Wikipedia entry), thoroughly absorbed the plot and then watched it without obsessing about understanding the dialogue. Surprisingly, it worked… but then again, Christiane F. has a very specific appeal. The story of a young teenager falling through the drug-filled netherworld of late-1970s Berlin, Christiane F. becomes this near-hallucinatory accumulation of grime, filth and decay. The portrait of nighttime Berlin feels proto-cyberpunk, as its leads fall lower and lower in search of a score, and come to exist solely when the sun is out. For many viewers, the film will have another significant appeal: it features none other than David Bowie as an object of fascination by the heroine (through a soundtrack dominated by Bowie songs) and then with a concert sequence in which Bowie plays himself. Given all of this, I could understand (without understanding much German) how, plot-wise, there isn’t anything here that we haven’t seen in other sad stories of teenage drug addiction: from a dull middle-class existence to living in flop-houses, soliciting strangers for sex and seeing friends die with needles in their arms. It’s all adapted from a true story that becomes even more fascinating after the film’s release, as the real Christiane F. never quite became clean, and (as of 2013) was unrepentant about it. Still, back to the movie—it’s still remarkably effective on a visual and atmospheric level. It’s probably less hard-hitting now than it was about its subject matter, but that’s really the viewers’ fault for getting jaded about teenage drug addiction. No matter the language, Christiane F. still speaks clearly about it.

  • The Great Diamond Robbery (1954)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2022) There isn’t much worth highlighting in The Great Diamond Robbery except, perhaps, that it’s the last of Red Skelton’s MGM films. The story is a blend of diamond trade comedy, criminal capers, romances and abandoned-child tropes. Skelton is subdued here—still in his usual mode, but a bit older (hence less able to play young clueless romantic lead), a bit less invested in the manic energy of it. Biographers will note that he was in the process of transitioning to a long-running TV show at the time—and his kind of comedy was clearly, perhaps belatedly, hitting its expiration date in the movie world. The film meanders in between too many subplots, finding its way too late in its mere 70 minutes. Cara Williams looks nice as the love interest, but much of the rest of the production feels like the contractual obligation that it was, with MGM eagerly shoving him out the door even as Skelton was eyeing greener pastures. Despite a title that promises much, you can classify The Great Diamond Robbery as “interesting” for Skelton completists, while being bland and featureless for anyone else.

  • Buffy Sainte-Marie: Carry It On (2022)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2022) There’s been a fascinating third (fourth?) act to singer-activist Buffy Sainte-Marie’s life over the past twenty-five years or so. After a number of lower-visibility years, she re-emerged as a legendary figure of sorts, her history being more relevant to a more socially conscious age embracing First Nations figures. In Canada, she has been claimed as a national treasure—which seems a bit limiting, considering how her life and career spanned both Canada and the United States. Tribute shows, lifetime achievement awards, renewed media attention, well-received activism, and a stamp issue complete with a collector’s framed blow-up (which I bought as a gift) are all evidence of her new stature despite/because having been marginalized from the United States musical mainstream after (we’re told) government intervention. Buffy Sainte-Marie: Carry It On is a fully authorized portrait of the artist’s career and her life now. The tone will be a familiar one for fans of collaborative biopics: She gets to narrate much of the material, and the film focuses on her story as told by herself. She goes have a striking screen presence: She looks amazing at eighty (!), and her ability to get us to listen remains exceptional. Then there’s her record, which speaks for itself—from participating in the legendary Manhattan mid-1960s folk scene to more radical activism that got her banned from airplay lists, from being a recurring Sesame Street guest to winning an Academy Award for writing “Up Where We Belong,” to innovating in matters of electronic music production and being an accomplished visual artist: It’s a lot! Now, still speaking her mind sixty years after emerging on the international scene, the film offers us a portrait of nothing less than a First Nation elder: wise and serene, but not complacent. It’s a really good overview if you accept the limits of what a fully authorized tribute can do: for instance, there’s a rather less-than-convincing moment in which a guest tries to excuse some bad business decisions by claiming that she wasn’t trying to do the same thing as everyone else. (That bit may have been better left as an outtake.)  Sainte-Marie was eclipsed by many of her contemporaries, but anyone can now argue that she’s far better placed than them—still alive, revered and generous in passing her wisdom to younger generations. This film is one of the main exhibits. [December 2024:  Ooof, this review has not aged well at all, considering the December 2023 CBC exposé that demolished Sainte-Marie as a pretendian, and no serious rebuttals in the year since then. I’m leaving it up anyway—although, in retrospect, I should have listened more closely to my “but what’s her specific link to indigenous ancestry?” alarm that chimed dimly as I watched the documentary. For a reviewer, it’s useful to be humbled from time to time.]

  • The Town That Dreaded Sundown (1976)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, November 2022) Seemingly custom-made to annoy me, The Town That Dreaded Sundown combines nearly everything that I dislike in cinema—a slasher, a New Hollywood muddle, a wide-open ending that eschews conclusion, a dirty neo-realistic (read: low-budget) approach, a script that’s less of a story than a string of death sequences, bland actors and a faux-historical approach that can’t disguise its exploitative intent. Director Charles B. Pierce’s film is not strictly unwatchable, but it’s not pleasant either: while it’s historically noteworthy as a minor horror classic, there’s very little here that hasn’t already been remade much better by other movies. Some moments are downright awkward, with ill-placed comedy grotesquely out-of-place—tell-tale signs of an independent low-budget production that wasn’t really working with the best talent in the industry. All in all, you probably know if you’re going to like this from the description alone; grimy low-end 1970s proto-slasher set in Texarkana. Some viewers live for this stuff; I can live perfectly well without it.

  • The Decks Ran Red (1958)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2022) The James Mason vehicle thriller The Decks Ran Red may not be all that well known today, but it does have a few things going for it. I could say that the first is Mason’s good-guy performance as a cargo ship captain dealing with murderous mutineers, but I won’t lie: I only had eyes for Dorothy Dandridge in a supporting turn as the ship’s sole female presence. It’s an ungrateful role—she’s ethnically miscast as a Polynesian woman brought aboard the ship as a stewardess because she’s the wife of the new cook, and spends much of her time being threatened by the mutineers—but it’s not as if we’ve got a large number of substantial Dandridge roles available to us, so I’ll take it (especially given how the character has a full arc and a moment of triumph). The Decks Ran Red itself isn’t much more than a straight-ahead thriller, albeit with the claustrophobia of being stuck at sea with a bunch of criminals who see murder as a profitable enterprise. Mason is pleasantly heroic here: the film isn’t particularly interested in subtlety, so it’s not as if the captain is provoking the mutiny by his actions. By the time he comes aboard, the villains (led by a suitably gruff Damien Broderick) have already figured out their murder-sabotage-and-salvage scheme: but the rotten rascals hadn’t planned on everyone fighting back. It all culminates into an extended fight aboard the ship, and an unusual climax with a ship headed for a lifeboat. Shot in spare, more realistic style than many other thrillers of the time, The Decks Ran Red can’t be called a great film… but it’s a surprisingly decent one, and it can boast of three great screen presences in its cast.

  • The Dustwalker (2019)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, November 2022) Unfortunately for some independent filmmakers armed with the best of intentions, sometimes the only response to 90 minutes of mayhem and violence is a middling shrug and an encouraging “okay”? I won’t try to pretend that if I, from my perch as an unknown and irrelevant film critic, somehow managed to produce a feature-length horror movie taking place in a local small town, I’d be pleased as punch. And there is some interest to The Dustwalker’s depiction of alien/zombie horror in a small rural Australian town—if only for the local colour. For what’s clearly a low-budget production, this is an acceptable film: nothing is particularly impressive, but it’s reasonably engaging if you’re willing to play along with it. The slow burn of the film’s first hour is either promising or exasperating, but the last half-hour goes a bit wild, which will either play as a good payoff or accumulating nonsense. The Dustwalker, in other words, is a film that teeters on the edge of being enough or not enough. It can’t just be dismissed as being terrible, but it doesn’t have enough to make it anywhere close to a likable low-budget effort. It generally sputters in place until the end. No amount of satisfaction for the filmmakers translates into real viewing enjoyment. So, to writer-director Sandra Sciberras: “Okay?” and better luck next time. To viewers: make sure you’re in a generous mood.

  • Pitfall (1948)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2022) If you subscribe to the (accurate) theory that film noir is a style more than a set of plot elements, then Pitfall makes for an intriguing entry in the genre, both at the heart of its thematic concerns and at the periphery of what we think about when we think noir. It does, at first glance, include everything we’d expect from a noir: an ordinary man seduced into a tailspin of temptations; a femme fatale to lead the protagonist astray; a criminal element to add danger; and a jaundiced outlook that the post-WW2 social order was a façade hiding underlying rot. But the mixture of elements is not what we’d expect—writer/director André de Toth spends a lot of time detailing the tawdry affair between its all-American protagonist (Dick Powell, once again finely straddling the line between matinee idol and dark anti-hero) and a criminal’s girlfriend (the timelessly beautiful Lizabeth Scott)-an affair apparently born out of boredom and cheap thrills. (Raymond Burr also has a good turn as an element of chaos.)  The criminal element of the film remains until the end, but it’s definitely subservient to the examination of a suburban man going astray—and the surprisingly amoral conclusion does not deliver a definitive punishment for the wayward husband… while having a great deal of sympathy for the femme fatale. Long underrated as “merely an ordinary noir,” Pitfall has undergone a renewed uptick of interest in the past decade—another example of great movies in Hollywood history just waiting to be rediscovered with today’s sensibilities.

  • Ground War (2018)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, November 2022) All nature is wholesome, right? Right? Having a gold course next door is far better than another skyscraper or a highway, right? Right?? Well, as writer-director Andrew Nisker’s Ground War suggests, maybe it’s not so simple. Maybe the incredible effort to keep carefully manicured greens requires so many dangerous chemicals that it’s not worth it. The driving thread through Nisker’s film is a very personal quest: Why did his father die of Hodgkin’s Lymphoma when he was so healthy, when he spent so much time exercising on gold courses? Nisker’s questions take him deep beyond the façade of “natural” golf courses, in a world where harmful (but not illegal!) pesticides are used by the bucketful, and where industry representatives clam up very quickly when anyone asks questions about carcinogens and the heightened risk of deadly disease. It also takes us into the world of environmental activism—how Canada is slightly (but not much) better than the United States thanks to stricter laws. How some people will deliberately avoid stepping on golf grounds for their knowledge of how many harmful products are used in the pursuit of perfect lawns. Don’t be surprised, after seeing this film, to hope for a rewilding of golf courses, for stricter regulations, and for no longer seeing the neighbourhood school’s athletic field so benignly. This should not be such a new message, nor is Ground War all that finely crafted. And yet, it lingers.