Month: November 2022

  • Coda (2019)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2022) This is not the 2021 Oscar-winning CODA about a Child Of Deaf Adults—this is the small under-seen 2019 Coda about a renowned elderly pianist getting his mojo back after meeting a young woman. No, not like that—although there’s subtext there that could have become text without too much effort. Still, the main selling point of this Coda is that it’s anchored by none other than Patrick Stewart, exceptionally well cast as an older pianist cast adrift by the death of his wife. By the time the film begins, it’s been years since he has performed in public (a consequence of his wife’s death) and getting back on stage leads to bouts of severe stage fright. Fortunately, there’s a younger woman (Katie Holmes, at least in her forties) to get him back on the saddle—plus a trip to Sils Maria for some mountain air and landscapes. It’s not much of a film in terms of plot or suspense, but Holmes has a good role, and we have another film role for Stewart—a serious actor whose theatrical performance remains legendary, but who has not been captured enough for posterity in movie roles. Otherwise, well, director Claude Lalonde (better known as the writer of a few much-broader French-Canadian films) keeps things going at a nice simmer. Coda is more contemplative than intriguing, but it achieves most of its goals.

  • The Seventh Veil (1945)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2022) Film history has no shortage of films that can be called problematic or troubling, but even those steeled against much of the worst may find themselves unpleasantly surprised at the conclusion of The Seventh Veil, in which the heroine goes running back to her abusive, possessive, controlling second cousin for romance. Not that it’s the only weird thing in this hypnotherapy film about a pianist who has lost the use of her (intact) hands—yet this was a box-office success in 1945 United Kingdom and won an Academy Award for best screenplay. What maybe saves it (well, aside from the fascination of an unavowable undercurrent of gender-aligned domination/submission) is a sense of melodrama, some choice lines (including the explanation for the titular seventh veil) and James Mason as the utter cad at the centre of the mixture. One of Mason’s most endearing trademarks is that he could be both very likable and completely repulsive in the same role (usually by playing impeccably mannered villains) and this duality is perfectly showcased here. The Seventh Veil can’t really be recommended as innocent entertainment viewing—but it is a mesmerizing film to watch, a piece of old-school filmmaking that really wouldn’t (or shouldn’t?) work today.

  • È stata la mano di Dio [The Hand of God] (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Netflix Streaming, November 2022) As far as foreign-movies-in-which-writer-director-hyphenates-reflect-on-their-early-years go, The Hand of God is really not as dull as many others. Here, Paolo Sorrentino takes us back to 1980s Naples to follow a young man apparently much like himself, as he deals with a large and boisterous family, goes through a sexual awakening, cheers for Maradona, finds his way and learns the sound that motorboats do at high speed. Explicit references to Fellini (as a character auditions for one of his movies) reinforce the kinship between this film and other affectionate autobiographical pictures. But The Hand of God isn’t stuffy—crisp cinematography helps present a film that’s comic, tragic, self-reflective and often surprisingly entertaining. There are traces of self-indulgence here, but they’re inherent in the project itself—how else to make an autobiographical film? While the result may not be entirely within my wheelhouse, I can only respect the result.

  • Freebie and the Bean (1974)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2022) I’m jaded enough about Hollywood history, seen enough of the classics, and read enough film histories that it’s rare for a film to surprise me as much as Freebie and the Bean. I was not expecting such a gleefully nihilistic slam-bang action movie featuring two amoral cops, nor its demented approach to car chases throughout San Francisco, or its utter lack of adherence to the now-familiar expectations of what a buddy-cop action movie should be. In retrospect, I should not have been that surprised: The early 1970s New Hollywood era was a time when anything and everything could go, and there was so much of that craziness going on that we may be forgiven for forgetting a few. Then there’s the fact that Freebie and the Bean is, to put it bluntly, not a classic. It wasn’t meant to be a film for the ages; it relied on a heavily reworked script, it focused on mid-budget populist entertainment and those are not necessarily the movies that linger in popular culture. But those mid-level movies are often fascinating to rediscover—they offer good production values and a sometimes far more evocative sense of their era than the timeless classics. Still, watching Freebie and the Bean when not expecting much more than a standard-issue cop thriller/comedy is eye-opening: Seemingly parodying the conventions of buddy-cop movies a decade before the genre was formalized, it features no less than James Caan and an explosive Alan Arkin as two corrupt policemen trying to arrest a racketeer despite outstanding threats on the criminal’s life. But plot is really not the reason why Freebie and the Bean is a refreshing watch—the three different car chases throughout San Francisco streets are. They’re notably mean-spirited, especially in a sequence when a criminal plows through a crowd and the policemen keep going after him without thinking too much about the casualties. This is entirely in-keeping with the film’s ultra-dark streak of humour. Considering that one of the policemen is a vice cop who openly takes bribes and the other is dangerously paranoid about his wife having an affair, they’re morally degenerate protagonists that test the notion of anti-heroes. The other thing that will make modern audiences twitch is the shaggy-dog resolution to the entire plot, which yanks the rug under viewers’ expectations in a nihilistic finale that makes the entire thing feel meaningless. And that’s not counting a far-too-violent final bathroom fight against a transvestite that would instantly get the film pilloried nowadays. In that context it’s a good thing that the film has three solid (exciting, well filmed, well choreographed) chase sequences—it gives you something to like (along with the dark comedy) even as the rest of the film seems purposefully designed to frustrate. What if a sour New Hollywood revisionist cop thriller crashed into a 1980s buddy-cop comedy? Watch Freebie and the Bean to find out.

  • Min and Bill (1930)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2022) While “soundies” technically replaced silent films from 1927 to 1930, it took slightly longer for Hollywood to adjust and grow comfortable with the new medium—new actors with melodious voices, cameras that could accommodate sound requirements, new pacing possibilities and even the basic building blocks of sound editing had to be figured out. In many ways, Min and Bill feels like a silent film with audible dialogue: Featuring first-generation film performers Marie Dressler and Wallace Beery (the first of which got an Oscar for her performance, while the second was one of the highest-paid stars in the business), it’s a ponderous melodrama that is more challenging than expected to watch: The editing is rough, the flow is clunky, and the heightened emotions belong more to theatrical actors trying to reach the back rows. There’s an amusing boat chase sequence early on, but the rest of the film becomes increasingly dark, as it depicts an adoptive mother trying to protect her daughter against the evil nature of her biological mom. The drama is less compelling than the film’s early comedy, and so the film worsens throughout its running time, becoming increasingly overblown yet less effective as it makes its way to a conclusion. Min and Bill reminded me of how high the accessibility bar can be for silent dramas compared to silent comedies—and acts as a signpost about the not-so-obvious transition from silent to sound.

  • Unwritten Obsession (2017)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On TV, November 2022) As someone who knows a lot of professional fiction writers, a guilty pleasure of mine is watching movies about authors and wondering why the profession is so misrepresented on the big screen. Never mind the neurotic writer unable to cope with the real world—that’s the least insulting way the movies portray novel writers. Far more common is the writer who seems incapable of having an original thought, and is incapable of writing until something happens to them in real life. Far more ludicrous (yet fairly popular) are portrayals of a “writer” as someone without original ideas… who ends up plagiarizing the work of other better writers. Unwritten Obsession is a cheap made-for-Lifetime “thriller” that begins with the portrait of an unlikable writer in search of inspiration (and money) after the suicide of her boyfriend, clearly stuck in a big house without means to pay for it. (This is your first clue that the main character is an unlikable idiot.) She reluctantly agrees to mentor a younger woman for petty cash, and then things get out of control as secrets are revealed and the two women come to blows. Stuck with a ludicrous script, director David Martín Porras’s Unwritten Obsession never once makes sense—aside from the stealing-manuscript thing that can be seen far in advance, it fails to address any questions about, “Well, what did she think was going to happen?”  The hidden catch to any “stole the manuscript and published it as my own” premise is how much work it is to be an author beyond just having a manuscript—the re-edits demanded by the editor, the ancillary writing required for it, and the sheer luck of any manuscript becoming a published novel -let alone a commercially successful one. A manuscript is not a treasure chest you can cash in immediately—and that’s before we get into the monumental egos that writers have about their work and how they love just pointing at a book to say, “That’s mine.” But such practical concerns are, frankly, not even the main reason why Unwritten Obsession is a terrible film. Unlike many straight-to-Lifetime films, this one is not fun at all. The protagonist is a terrible person, and while the antagonist may have some moral justification, she’s still a psycho armed with a sickle. That the protagonist gets away with her deception is another nail in the film’s coffin—at that point, you may be forgiven for asking what was the point of it all, and Lifetime movies are not equipped for ironic finales. The utter seriousness of the entire thing (despite its ludicrousness) is another issue: there’s scarcely any moment-to-moment enjoyment of the film, and considering it leads nowhere then why bother?

  • Slither (1973)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2022) It’s not rare for me to watch a 1970s movie and become concerned about everyone who was alive back then. Granted, New Hollywood meant throwing standards of decency out the window and breaking the rules of crowd-pleasing narratives—but even given that trend, I often watch films of the period and wonder: were these people all right? (Hopefully, that’s what they’ll say watching films of our era.)  Slither is my latest example, because it seems determined to be an anti-comedy—a film that shares a few superficial similarities with humour, but is more interested in perverting the elements of the genre than actually being funny. People start dying a few minutes in, the central quest turns out to be one shaggy-dog dead-end that comes accompanied with shaggy-puppy subplots that mock audiences’ expectations. It’s a road movie that goes nowhere, and a quirky character drama with people we don’t care about. It’s willfully determined not to reward audiences in any way, while wasting several good actors staring with a bemused James Caan. It’s a kind of film that Hollywood could not have made a decade earlier, and one that would be made far more infrequently once the genre returned to its entertainment roots a decade later. Underwhelming is too soft a word to describe Slither’s impact, because it seems unapologetic in being even less than that.

  • El vampiro negro [The Black Vampire] (1953)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2022) Now here’s a curiosity: El vampiro negro is a remake of the classic M in a 1950s Argentinian setting, expanding the cast to include female characters and adopting the fully formed film noir aesthetics of the time. While this interpretation doesn’t have the historical impact of the German original, it’s better-crafted in many, many ways, keeping some of the most striking material such as the musical leitmotif. Many of the more disquieting elements of the original are sanded in more familiar mainstream elements, providing some empathy with the serial killer and pitting a traditional pair of protagonists (one of them a nightclub singer, so that we can have a musical number) rather than digging into the grey underworld of shaded characters like Fritz Lang did. Visually, at least, writer-director Román Viñoly Barreto’s film clearly bridges the expressionism of the original with the film noir style in vogue in the US and in Argentina at the time—for a very satisfying result that reflects the darkness at the heart of the story. The conclusion works rather well in its own way. While it’s not to El vampiro negro’s advantage to be compared to M, it’s well worth some respect of its own as a strong straight-ahead thriller.

  • It Lives Again (1978)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2022) Any Larry Cohen film is usually a trip, and It Lives Again doesn’t disappoint—especially how it arrives with built-in high expectations. As a sequel to the over-the-top killer-baby horror film It Lives, this follow-up had to match the first film’s craziness and develop it further. The clear answer was to throw in more killer babies—three of them—and to double down on the social commentary, government conspiracies and environmental anxiety. There are also some in-your-face late-1970s signifiers that work as entertainment in the first half of the film. It’s certainly not all that good (a few lulls, a scattered theme, some missed opportunities) and it doesn’t really qualify as horrifying due to its inherent silliness, but It Lives Again is weird enough, crazy enough and darkly funny enough to qualify as a passable experience—and it fits well with much of writer-director Cohen’s filmography at the time.

  • The Missing (2022)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, November 2022) I’ve been vocal about how BET thrillers are better when they’re crazy, but it turns out that there is a definite limit to the amount of crazy I can tolerate before I start crying foul. It’s one thing to have crazy amplify a familiar plotline, but it’s another to have crazy in order to side step or avoid obvious plotting issues. Director Patricia Cuffie-Jones’s The Missing, unfortunately, uses crazy as a smokescreen and a crutch. A familiar but interesting premise is at the core of the story —an abusive husband masterminding the abduction of his child from his runaway wife. But, in the inept slapdash way BET thrillers are often put together, this one goes the extra mile to be nonsensical. The gratuitously abusive husband thing is one familiar element to take for granted, but then the script goes out of its way for having characters behave in dumb ways, holding on to information that would clear things up in an instant, even arguably lying to the viewers about a few things. The narrative becomes increasingly incoherent as it goes on, and The Missing doesn’t really make an effort to ensure that our sympathies are with the protagonist—it blithely assumes that any victim of domestic abuse is virtuous, and sort of… stops there. Adding a white policewoman to the plot feels like an imposition half-heartedly obeyed, while everything else also feels undercooked. The Missing is crazy, but not in the good ways—it’s not overblown, or daring in its ineptitude: it just seems like it’s going for the lower-possible effort, even when it forgets about important bits of the plot along the way.

  • Son of Frankenstein (1939)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2022) Considering that the first Frankenstein created an iconic character and the sequel Bride of Frankenstein is unanimously regarded as an improvement on the first film (thus creating another iconic character), no third film could live up to the example left by its predecessors. Indeed, Son of Frankenstein does not—while professionally made and pitting Boris Karloff (as the monster) versus Bela Lugosi (as Igor), the film feels like very familiar material made lukewarm. It’s not terrible (although some moments are sillier than expected), but it marks the inflection point between the all-time classics of the Frankenstein series and the somewhat sillier, shallower fare that would follow. As it turns out, the later intrusion of Abbott and Costello into the Universal Monsters series wasn’t a radical departure as much as it reaffirmed existing tendencies. Also worth mentioning: the capital influence of this third entry over Mel Brooks’ pastiche Young Frankenstein.

  • Eye of the Devil (1966)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2022) A generations-old folk tradition, blood sacrifices for the harvest, an intriguing cast of actors, the last gasp of black-and-white cinematography at MGM—given those ingredients, it’s a surprise that Eye of the Devil falls flat. As amazing as it is to see David Niven, Deborah Kerr, Donald Pleasance and Sharon Tate share time in the same horror film, the rest of it often feels too mechanical to be interesting. I suppose that part of this may be due to better known The Wicker Man taking up similar themes just a few years later, or the atmospheric black-and-white cinematography being unable to rival the pop of colour. Niven is his respectable self as the owner of a vineyard who understands that the fate of his harvest is directly linked to him, while Tate makes a good impression in a first big-screen role. Still, the troubled production history of the film (with Kim Novak being replaced by Kerr three-quarter of the way in the production) is arguably more interesting than what we see on-screen.

  • Stalked Within (2022)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, November 2022) Oh yeaaaah, BET has updated its slate of original thrillers as part of its “Shocktober” event, and Stalked Within is one of the new players on the lineup. (If you’re worried you missed it, don’t fret—BET only has something like 50 movies in its playlist, so you’re sure to catch it again a few dozen times over the next year.)  Better yet—Stalked Within is exactly the kind of ridiculous over-the-top nonsense I’m specifically craving from a BET original thriller. Pitting the beautiful Megan Tandy against the very Caucasian Wes Brown, this thriller follows a young black woman as she is harassed by a home security operator. With access to her home, omnipresent security cameras and fancy technological gadgets, the evil white guy escalates his infatuation to stalking and violent abuse. It ends exactly how you think it’s going to end. Clearly playing to its target audience, Stalked Within doesn’t make a shred of sense, but who cares? It plays with the rules of the subgenre and does so with sufficient glee that it’s practically impossible to take seriously. (You may think this is a problem, but it’s not—at this level of budgeting and filmmaking, it’s much better if the film can be seen with an ironic distance.) It’s really not an accident if the protagonist and her friends are darker-skinned, whereas the antagonist is whitey-white—again, BET knows its audience and writer-director Glen Owen makes it sufficiently ridiculous that even white guys such as myself can get in on the fun. In other words: Stalked Within is predictable generic trash, but it’s exactly what I wanted. Good job, BET.

  • Pyewacket (2017)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, November 2022) I keep saying it in vain: If you’re a small-scale filmmaker on a budget, the best thing you can do to distinguish yourself is to find a fascinating premise that works within your limits. Do like Canadian writer-director Adam MacDonald, who makes good use of an isolated rural location (and a few small-town sequences) to deliver a tight, memorable, somewhat original story. As Pyewacket begins, our protagonist is a teenage girl whose mercurial widowed mother decides to move far away from her school, friends and other things taken for granted. Needless to say, this doesn’t go over well, and before long our supernatural-obsessed protagonist is busy placing a ritual death curse on her mom. This works too well—by the time they reconcile a few moments later, our protagonist realizes what she’s done and her objectives change to undo the curse. While there would be comic potential for such a story, Pyewacket keeps things dramatic, and in doing so has a few things to say about complex mother/daughter relationships, about being stuck in small towns, and about guilt. The film sustains a rational “all in her head” explanation for the less imaginative viewers, but is far more satisfying to genre fans as an exploration of occult meddling that goes wrong. MacDonald is also able to build an atmosphere of dread that benefits from the low production values. Best of all, it does all of this with a (very) low six-figure budget, getting a lot of bang for its (Canadian) buck. There are a few things that ring false (including much of the climax), but the result is pretty good—another decent entry in the Canadian horror filmography, and a bit of CanCon that I won’t mind seeing rerun on cable channels for years.

  • Easy Come, Easy Go (1967)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2022) In Easy Come, Easy Go, Elvis Presley stars as a Navy diver (also a nightclub singer) who retires and spots a nearby sunken Spanish ship with a fortune in ancient coins. Working with a yoga instructor who exemplifies the then-cutting edge of American culture (while Elvis plays the comfortable, relatable exemplar of a more conservative approach—what a shift!), he launches an expedition to raise the treasure. Since this is a latter-day Elvis film, don’t expect much here but a serviceable plot, plenty of clichés and a few musical numbers from The King. By now, I’m somewhat immune to the so-called terrible nature of Elvis movies: My expectations run low, and I understand the secondary nature of the plot in those films. In fact—the sillier the film, the better it is. As such, I don’t have major complaints about Easy Come, Easy Go—it is that it wants to be, and that’s that. Elvis’ shift to a conservative viewpoint making fun of the wilder gyrations of the hippie generation is probably what’s most interesting here, speaking much about his evolving place in the cultural landscape and explaining why this was one of his last star vehicles. Easy Come, Easy Go becomes an evocative title pointing to more than the bittersweet ending of the film—Former rebels becoming establishment representatives and all that, cultural cachet accumulating then evaporating.