Author: Christian Sauvé

  • Frankenfish (2004)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, June 2022) As I accumulate decades as an avid film-watcher, it’s interesting to look at the careers of a few people, and see whether (and how) they made it or didn’t. I was rather charmed by China Chow’s debut performance in the forgotten 1998 Mark Wahlberg action comedy The Big Hit, for instance – and thought she’d go on to have a decent follow-up career: after all, wasn’t she cute, funny and young? Well, it turns out she became Wahlberg’s girlfriend following this film, and apparently wasn’t all that interested (or interesting) enough in acting to stick it out: As of today, her filmography as an actress barely stretches over ten titles in the decade following The Big Hit, with a few other assorted odds and ends since then. That happens! As unbelievable as it may seem to non-cinephiles or filmmakers, not everyone means to be a big movie star. Aside from The Big Hit, her other noteworthy film is Frankenfish, and it’s not much of a highlight – a rather standard creature feature in which mutated fish terrorize a dwindling cast of characters in the Louisiana Bayou, it’s the kind of horror film that seems made for casual consumption and immediate forgetfulness. Chow shows up for half the film and gets a horribly striking death scene (she’s not the final girl) but otherwise there’s not a lot more to say. Some of the English-language dialogue is amusing, but you wouldn’t know it from the French dub. The scenery is above average for a film of that type, although the CGI is clearly cheap and from the mid-2000s. Even for those rare filmgoers still curious about Chow, there’s not a lot to recommend here – Frankenfish is more or less what anyone would expect from the stock premise and budget level.

  • Panama Hattie (1942)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, June 2022) My interest in Panama Hattie was in watching one of the last performances from Virginia O’Brien that I hadn’t yet seen, but there’s something charming about the overall film –a frothy musical comedy that heads over to a stage-bound Panama hotel for sailors yukking it up (led by Red Skelton, up to his usual standards), songs (with the screen debut of Lena Horne, and O’Brien actually not going all-in on her deadpan shtick) and a bit of romance featuring star Ann Sothern. An early production of the famed Freed Unit, it’s a Broadway musical with elements of MGM’s roster. The plot doesn’t make a whole lot of sense and the tone keeps changing all over the place, but the fun of Panama Hattie is in the bits and pieces loosely strung together. O’Brien is a hoot as always (notably in “Did I Get Stinkin’ at the Savoy”), while Skelton and his two pals clearly play to a specific comedy register. Horne is never less than compelling, and Sothern is good enough in this middling vehicle to make anyone wonder why she wasn’t a bigger star. The final cherry in the blend of elements is a rousing final war-propaganda musical number that clearly sets the audience in a WW2-fighting mood followed by the usual exhortation to go buy war bonds. Behind the scenes, the picture was rescued from disastrous test screenings by musical number reshoots directed by Vincent Minelli, who added much of what’s still remarkable about the film, albeit at the expense of the film’s overall tone and continuity. Panama Hattie is not a good film, but it’s enjoyable if you know what you’re getting into, and especially if you’re deliberately trying to complete the filmographies of its stars.

  • Dracula (1979)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, June 2022) As far as I’m concerned, Dracula is up there with The Three Musketeers and Sherlock Holmes (and A Star is Born) in the pantheon of stories that become more interesting for the particularities of their various film adaptations than their cinematic substance. I know the original story more or less from beginning to end and I’m not that interested in seeing the perfect adaptation of it – I’m more likely to pay attention to the differences between various versions, or, if you’d prefer, the specific characteristics of each version. The 1979 version of Dracula (which makes an interesting contrast to Warner Herzog’s 1979 version of Nosferatu) comes with some pedigree – directed by John Badham (an interesting choice!) and featuring such notables as Frank Langella, Laurence Olivier and Donald Pleasence, it’s already interesting before it even gets started. The other initial surprise is that the film begins well into the events usually covered by adaptations of the story – skipping over the initial Transylvania segment to skip directly to the ominous arrival of Count Dracula in England. Things get weirder after that – working from a stage version of the story, the film focuses on romantic themes and inexplicably switches the names of Mina Van Helsing and Lucy Seward (the director thought it sounded better). While the colour cinematography looks good, the film feels choked in a characteristic late-1970s kind of foggy horror cinematography – not necessarily a bad thing if you’re looking to differentiate the various versions of Dracula, but not necessarily a good thing by itself. I enjoyed watching this Dracula even if I didn’t enjoy the film itself—it’s a diversion from the usual versions of the story, even if hardly the best one.

  • The Night House (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, June 2022) As a movie reviewer, I don’t often play the ”Totally saw the ending coming!” card. It’s cheap, it undermines my conviction that execution trumps concept, and most movies are predictable anyway. But once in a while, there comes a film that really annoys me in trying to set up an absurdly predictable mystery, then wanting us to act surprised when it reveals its twist. This is all the more regrettable in that I went into The Night House with the best of intentions – if nothing else, it stars Rebecca Hall, one of the most intriguing actresses in the business today. It starts on a pleasantly mysterious note, as a teacher grieving her dead husband discovers that he harboured dark secrets. By the turn of the second act, however, the film tips its hand too obviously, and the true nature of the dead husband’s actions becomes crystal clear… to everyone except the oblivious heroine spending the next hour chasing down a patently false path. The low density of plotting doesn’t help matters, as the film is slow enough to allow viewers to measure each new “revelation” against what we know will suspect. That quickly becomes the film’s second problem, because The Night House has a bad case of protagonist-centred morality that is punctured by anticipating the ending. To put it bluntly and with spoilers, her dead husband may have had the best intentions at heart for her, but he’s still a mass murderer and the film is too consumed by the revelation of his love for her that it skims over the most damning bit. Each good facet of the film (such as some intriguing work with silhouettes emerging from specific camera angles) either becomes overused or is balanced by some deeply dumb stuff (such as a mistress seeking out the wife). The deathly dull pacing further compounds the film’s other issues, and the ending really isn’t as effective as it thinks it is. In the end, director David Bruckner’s The Night House is a dud. An occasionally ambitious, intermittently effective one (largely thanks to Hall’s typically good performance) but a dud nonetheless. I shouldn’t have been this way, but the intense predictability of its “twist” undermines it and then the interminable pacing finishes it off.

  • Candyman (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, June 2022) I’m usually the last to call for remakes – especially of horror films – but I was definitely curious about a Candyman remake for a few reasons. The first being that Candyman remains one of the good horror films of the 1980s, using horror to discuss racial issues decades before it was cool to do so, with a couple of strong assets – not the least being Tony Todd and Virginia Madsen – in service of its thrills and themes. The idea of revisiting such charged territory in the 2020s, with black filmmakers able to make good use of the material, was impossible to resist. But even I was more than pleasantly surprised at the remake’s impact. This newest Candyman is a top-to-bottom success, artfully tackling themes in ways that make the film far more about social justice than gory thrills. Writer-director Nia DaCosta (with some assistance from co-writer Jordan Peele) delivers a film that’s rich in visual motifs (Bees! Candy!), social issues, carefully restrained filmmaking technique and expressionist moments. It starts well with Sammy Davis Jr.’s “The Candy Man” song over mirrored studio logos and goes on all the way to an eloquent end-credit sequence using shadow puppetry. One of the most striking elements in the tapestry is that, despite the copious amount of blood and violence, it takes until the very end of the film for a death to be graphically shown on-screen – and even then, it’s in soft focus in the background of the lead character doing something else. The script cleverly integrates the first film as a mythological construct that adds depths to the result, and even picks the best elements of the disappointing sequels (a focus on the art world) as part of its script. There’s a real thrill to see the material being presented with visual flair and horror being used not as an end in itself (despite how effective it is) but as a springboard for larger-scale discussions. Teyonah Parris is quite good in the real protagonist role (after an initial focus on Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, also quite good) – and her character even speaks a little bit of French. In many ways, Candyman is an exceptional film, an exceptional remake, and exceptional horror. It steps in Get Out’s footsteps more assuredly than Us, and even crams storytelling into the fabric of its execution.

  • Princess O’Rourke (1943)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, June 2022) Even the least consequential movies can poke at big issues, and what’s interesting about Princess o’ Rourke isn’t as much the incognito-princess romance, but the way the film makes backflips in order to fulfill the twin dualities of the American character. To wit: many Americans like to think of themselves as fierce independents of exceptional character, but at the same time roll over like subservient pets whenever confronted with an authoritarian figure. Yes, sure, I’m talking about the crazy turn that the right-wing has taken toward authoritarianism over the past few years, but I’m also referring to how monarchic figures still inspire romance. In Princess O’Rourke, the humble-class male lead is a supporting player to the female protagonist (Olivia de Havilland, beautiful and clearly in a star vehicle made for her) who passes herself off as a humble maid rather than an authentic princess of unspecified European origins. The fun begins when the commoner discovers that his newest crush is of aristocratic stock and finds himself uneasy at the decorative role he’s meant to play. That rugged American individualism must manifest itself! That’s when the backflips from writer-director Norman Krasna come in – Princess O’Rourke’s climax is set in the White House, with the character making a big speech about what it means to be American and no less than Franklin D. Roosevelt himself and a Supreme Court judge intervening to ensure that the happy couple gets married in a way that allows the lead to get a princess for himself while not compromising his American character. Whew. There’s more interesting material in the film’s making-of and legacy – most notably in de Havilland using the film to sue Warner Bros and get a landmark decision that would chip away at the studio system—but it’s all around a trifle of a film that ends up playing with concepts much bigger than it intended to pursue. It makes for fascinating viewing, especially for non-American viewers who aren’t as close to American Exceptionalism as the film’s intended wartime audience. Propaganda was strong in WW2-era Hollywood, and it manifests itself in more entertaining fashion here than in the overtly militaristic films of the same era.

  • Coming 2 America (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Amazon Streaming, June 2022) As someone who only moderately liked the original Coming to America, I’m not the target audience for a sequel. But Coming to America does have quite a following, and you can see follow-up Coming 2 America realigns itself to please that audience. Numerous call-backs and fannish references often grind the film to a crawl and don’t shore up the film’s shoddy plot foundations. But this is not a film made to be nitpicked – it’s pure fun for fans of the original, a sure vehicle for Eddie Murphy and something made to shore up Amazon Prime’s original offerings. As with the first film, this one is a black movie directed by a white director – but Craig Brewer’s filmography is far more black-themed than John Landis and –more importantly– he previously collaborated with Murphy on Dolemite is My Name, earning the actor some of his most positive reviews. Here, Murphy is back in full comedian mode in reprising his royal character. A shame, then, that the film is built on such a shaky excuse for a plot: as a royal succession plot taking place in the 2020s, there’s an obvious narrative dead-end in how “my daughter can’t become the king” – we know that’s going to be taken care of before the end. But watching Coming 2 America for plot is useless – it’s specifically made for the comic riffs, the musical moments and watching Murphy re-embrace a comic persona. If the plot is a ramshackle sequence of episodes, so what? Sure, it’s weird that the film ends up taking place largely in Africa aside from a few quick jaunts back to New York City, but so what – at least we’ve got a hilariously well-timed death sequence featuring James Earl Jones, a cover of “What a Man,” various good interludes and a good soundtrack. While Coming 2 America is far more markedly a mercenary product with contrived set-pieces and more than a few nonsensical tangents, I’m not that disappointed – it delivers entertainment, gets its actors a few chuckles and generally has enough going on to keep things interesting. But then again – this film wasn’t made for me, and that’s all right.

  • A Question of Faith (2017)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, June 2022) I don’t often go looking at the parallel universe of films made for Christian audiences. Part of it is due to lack of access (sure, there are streaming platforms – but even they don’t showcase the kind of low-budget religious films) but much of it is due to lack of interest: often showcasing morals over other cinematic virtues for less-demanding and self-selecting audiences, they tend to be cheap, disposable and utterly without impact outside their own sphere. Still, it’s not a bad idea to challenge ourselves once in a while, so when A Question of Faith popped up on BET – well, why not give it a look? The story of three families brought together by a fatal accident caused by texting-while-driving (something insistently mentioned), the film makes a lot out of organ donation and you can probably guess how the three families are linked together. Director Kevan Otto’s film is innocuous in more ways than one. For one thing, its thematic focus on forgiveness virtually ensures that the ending will be a big happy tear-jerker. For another, it’s relatively relaxed about its religious stance: there’s little of the oppositional persecution complex that you’ll find in other religious films, and its bland message of virtue is something that can reach audiences well outside the usual audiences for such movies. The black-dominated cast makes this feel a lot more like a BET movie (complete with melodrama, flat cinematography and lovely actresses) than a religious film… and that’s a great thing. The plotting is biblically contrived (“God works in mysterious ways” and all that), which adds to the melodrama. Still, A Question of Faith is watchable, sometimes even likable in how earnestly it portrays itself. Worse than usual for BET movies, better than expected for religious film – and another reminder that there isn’t much to see in this subgenre.

  • Master (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Amazon Streaming, June 2022) The good thing about the globalization of film distribution through streaming platforms is that we get exposed to quality cinema from around the world, most notably the many film industries of India. The not-so-good thing is that going off-Hollywood is not necessarily a guarantee of originality. Master may be unusual in that it comes from the Tamil film industry, but it’s incredibly familiar with what it ends up showing: the story of a capable man going up against impossible odds, fighting criminal corruptions through big action sequences and a few musical numbers. Writer/director Lokesh Kanagaraj does score a few hits: Thalapathy Vijay is good as the protagonist, Vijay Sethupathi does well as the out-and-out villain, and notable action sequences include a metro car fight as well as a late-film sequence involving trucks and archery. I’m also partial to the musical numbers, even if they contribute to the film’s overbearing and unjustifiable three-hour length. For an action film, that’s a lot – especially given how there’s no significant romance to make it more varied. In that, though, Master also feels like far too many other Indian films – they would be much better if they were shorter: they dilute their strengths in far too much… more. The generic nature of the plot doesn’t help, which is a shame considering that, from a cinematographic standpoint, Master (and its brethren) often feel just as polished as Hollywood productions (if not even more so, considering how they eschew pseudo-realistic shaky-cam aesthetics). Ah well – no matter the language barrier, Indian films aim for a very specific effect, and Master certainly delivers on those expectations.

  • Start Cheering (1938)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, June 2022) While no one will ever mistake Start Cheering for a particularly noteworthy film, there is a pleasant blend of familiar 1930s elements at play in this comedy that makes it a fun watch if you’re familiar with the era. The bare bones of the plot say it all, as a Hollywood actor decides to go back to university to complete his education, and gets involved in the football team – that’s already three rich sources of comedy, and that’s before we bring in Jimmy Durante as the ringleader of the actor’s entourage trying to get him to quit school and go back to movies. It’s the blend of tropes, as the film goes from one familiar setting to the next, that makes up most of the film’s fun – plus Durante hamming it up, Louis Prima’s big band and a few dance numbers. Otherwise, there isn’t much to say: Start Cheering isn’t that good nor coherent as it jumps from one small bit to another, but it’s watchable enough. Although it’s much better if you’re knowledgeable enough about late-1930s Hollywood cinema to recognize all the pieces being put together.

  • La bestia debe morir [The Beast Must Die] (1952)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, June 2022) While I’ll argue that film noir is an essentially American genre forged in the distinctive cauldron of post-WW2 Los Angeles, it’s useless to deny the influence it had outside America, or the successful examples of the genre in languages other than English. The French school is obvious, but Argentine also had a vigorous film noir movement and writer-director Román Viñoly Barreto’s The Beast Must Die is one such example of the form. This story of a father seeking revenge on the unknown driver who fatally hit his son starts with a portentous narration (“I am going to kill a man. I don’t know his name. I don’t know where he lives. I have no idea what he looks like, but I will find him and I will kill him.”) and keeps going, often with pleasantly melodramatic acting that never relies on subtlety. The cinematography is pure noir delight, and the plot cleanly plays with big genre tropes. The Argentinian setting adds some flavour to a familiar story, and the ending satisfies. All in all, a good discovery – The Beast Must Die was restored from obscurity by the specialist Film Noir Foundation, and it’s a public service to make it widely available once more.

  • Eternal (2004)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, June 2022) In the world of Canadian cinema, Eternal made a few headlines when it came out in 2004. After all, it was a generously-budgeted (by Canadian standards) erotic horror thriller that was explicitly set in Montréal, featuring a few actors that straddled the border between the French and English-language industries. Alas, even that hype is more than the film deserves. Loosely based on the legends about Elizabeth Bathory, the film plays like baby’s first erotic thriller, teasing a lot but never delivering on the most basics of expectations. About as basic as it comes, Eternal does itself no favours by multiplying mistakes of execution. The acting is terrible (made even worse in the French-language dubbed version, as it features Québec accents that make the entire thing feel even cheaper), the plotting miserable and while the atmosphere certainly tries to be dark and sexy, writers-directors Wilhelm Liebenberg and Federico Sanchez merely settle for murky and pretentious. While there’s some fun in seeing Montréal as backdrop, that feeling fades as the action moves elsewhere, piles up the obviousness and keeps going well after enough is enough. There’s a bit of trashy fun to Eternal, but it doesn’t last for the entire film and the rest is spent waiting for the end to come. (Which it eventually does, but after a lacklustre climax and an overlong epilogue.)  It’s not because it’s local that it’s worth seeing. While I often beat myself up for missing out on a few landmark French-Canadian films until years after their release, seeing Eternal was all it took to reassure me that I hadn’t missed much in the meantime.

  • Penitentiary (1979)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, June 2022) If I’ve got my notes right, the rather short filmography of writer-director Jamaa Fanaka is sometimes seen (along with the L.A. Rebellion movement) as a transition from blaxploitation to the social issues black cinema of the late 1980s. Penitentiary certainly plays into that transition, being concerned about racial injustice (as in: a young black man unjustly arrested, blamed for the death of a white man and sent to prison) but very much using the tools of exploitation cinema in order to keep audiences invested in the film. In this case, imprisonment drama turns into an underdog boxing match, with the winner of the bout being assured of parole. Decidedly as raw as low-budget filmmaking was at the time, Penitentiary has roughly a napkin’s worth of plot stretched over 99 minutes, sometimes in the most obvious of ways – how else can you explain the sequences of inmates sharing a few intimate moments with girls in the prison’s bathroom? I’m not objecting on aesthetic grounds – the girls are attractive – but it does highlight that the film often slows to a halt in-between its weightier thematic material (the prison being a metaphor for, well, yes) and plot progression. The boxing sequences are raw (the worst being the sweaty and bloody bare-knuckles fight that marks the end of the first act) and so is the rest of the film, but Penitentiary is watchable enough – even though I like Fanaka’s Emma Mae quite a bit better.

  • Babes on Broadway (1941)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, June 2022) I’m going to make this review rather short, considering that it could almost double as the one I just wrote about is quasi-prequel Babes in Arms.   Here goes: Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney both star in this Broadway-themed variation on the “backyard musicals” they so often did together in the early stages of their career. She sings, he emcees and together they put on a show. Much of the filmmaking crew is the same, working under the celebrated Freed Unit of MGM musicals. There’s quite a bit of wartime propaganda, including pulling up a few adorable British poppets for sympathy. Alas, well, the film does introduce its climax with, well, let me quote that for you: “What’s wrong with doing something old? Something tried and true. Well, how about a minstrel show? Does that appeal to you? A good old-fashioned minstrel show!” at which point twenty-first century audiences are screaming NOOOOO. That’s right: after a rather sweet and unremarkable film, Babes on Broadway, exactly like Babes in Arms, concludes with an expansive Busby Berkeley extravaganza featuring… dozens of people in blackface. As with the first film, it’s a significant minus in a movie that doesn’t have a lot of unique pluses. It’s exactly why it’s one of the least-seen, least-broadcast Arthur Freed-produced musicals in the twenty-first century. (Whenever it dusts it off, TCM is careful to accompany it with a verbal warning AND a blackface documentary as follow-up.)  See it once to say that you did, then never think about it again.

  • The Beast Must Die (1974)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, June 2022) There’s something almost endearing at the showmanship of William Castle-inspired filmmakers that deliberately broke the fourth wall of film in order to draw in their audiences. So it is that The Best Must Die begins with a dare to the audiences: we’re told it’s a mystery in which one of the characters is a werewolf, and the film will stop at some point to ask audiences to guess which character it is. What follows is a surprisingly conventional film that’s often better in concept than execution: a wealthy man bringing together a number of people in his isolated British estate, where they have to guess which one of them is an actual werewolf. At some point, the film indeed stops to ask the big question during its “werewolf break,” and if you’re guessing that this was all a device added in post-production, you’re right – and film history records that director Paul Annett hated it. But it does add a certain grandiose panache to the result, adding to the rather cozy isolated-manor mystery. Playing with the usual tropes of the subgenre, The Beast Must Die does have a few interesting moments and performances – including lead roles for black actors (Calvin Lockhart and the beautiful Marlene Clark) in an otherwise white-cast British film, some deliciously over-the-top moments and Peter Cushing to deliver some tasty exposition. The Beast Must Die is not that good (if you’re expecting werewolf transformation special effects, look elsewhere) but it is decently fun, and the “Werewolf Break” certainly plays into this kind of fun all right.