Author: Christian Sauvé

  • Ninotchka (1939)

    Ninotchka (1939)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2020) As unfair as it can be to judge a film by its remake, I do like Ninotchka quite a bit, but not as much as its musical remake Silk Stockings. Of course, there’s the star factor to consider: While Ninotchka has an impressive pairing with Melvyn Douglas and Greta Garbo, Silk Stockings has Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse—a most unfair comparison. Silk Stockings has finger-snapping tunes, while Ninotchka is a straight-up comedy. It’s really too bad for Ninotchka that Silk Stockings happens to be one of the most successful musical remakes in a subgenre littered with inferior results. Still—Ninotchka, what about it? It’s a story about three bumbling Soviet men coming to Paris to get back a piece of artwork, but being seduced by the hedonistic French lifestyle… which leads the Soviet government to send a hard-as-nail operative to clean up the mess. A perfect plan, except when she, too, falls under the charm of a Frenchman. The lead pair in nigh perfect: Melvyn Douglas approaches William Powell’s levels of pure suave charm, while Greta Garbo is a legend for a good reason. Ninotchka is one of the few comedies she’s even made (the tagline for the film was the fondly remembered “Garbo Laughs!”) and the film cleverly uses her persona as a façade against which Douglas’s charming powers crash time and time again. The bumbling Soviet emissaries are a lot of fun in the way they succumb to the pressures of Paris, but the highlight here is the interplay between Douglas and Garbo. The pro-Western jabs and Soviet rigidity are somewhat prescient of the Cold War, and do help the film feel more modern than its 1939 production date. Director Ernst Lubitsch turns in another success here, although perhaps a bit less impressive than some of his other features. Occluding unfair comparisons with its remake, Ninotchka remains a decent-enough romantic comedy, with sly one-liners and some good flirting dialogue.

  • Young Adult (2011)

    Young Adult (2011)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, February 2020) When we get around to Charlize Theron’s career retrospective, I suspect that most will be gobsmacked by the sheer range of performances, roles and physical transformation that she has kept up throughout her career. Rather than coast along on classic beauty roles (which she could have done), Theron has played glamorous, homely, tough, fast, furious, comic, tragic and whatever comes in-between, often jumping from one role to a very different one in an entirely different genre. Films like Young Adult are further evidence of her range, as she takes on a somewhat repellent character; a woman in her thirties who still thinks and behaves like an overgrown teenager, and whose trip back to her small hometown doesn’t necessarily translate into personal growth—not that she was heading back for noble reasons either. Physically, Theron’s character is attractive, but her personality is the issue and the film does cleverly play with that distinction. Although, with Cody Diablo writing the script and Jason Reitman directing, we could have expected that. (Patton Oswalt also turns in an effective polar-opposite performance.) A fairly intense drama under the occasional guise of a silly comedy, Young Adult doesn’t bring us anywhere comfortable or inspiring: the conclusion does not force easy epiphanies on a character who refuses to have any. It’s quite good at sketching small-scale character studies and upending expectations at least half the time. While the result certainly won’t qualify for any feel-good awards, Young Adult is a well-handled drama with some surprisingly funny moments in-between the protagonist’s destructive cluelessness. It’s significantly more interesting than even the best plot summary would suggest.

  • Of Human Bondage (1964)

    Of Human Bondage (1964)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2020) In retrospect, it wasn’t such an idea to watch all three filmed adaptations (1934, 1946 and 1964) of W. Somerset Maugham’s novel Of Human Bondage back-to-back-to-back. Not so much because they all blend together (they all have their own particularities) but because their story is so trite that a triple dose of it can be overdoing it. This third version is, in almost a tautological way, the most modern of them: the camera moves and the staging are self-consciously cinematic as opposed to the quasi-theatrical way the first two movies were directed. The use of deep shadow, more naturalistic sets and less expensive costumes don’t necessarily work in the film’s favour, especially when measured against the first film. While this Of Human Bondage is a bit more daring, story-wise, than its Hays Era predecessor, it does remain curiously stiff and old-fashioned, something that the black-and-white cinematography doesn’t help even at its most visually three-dimensional. While the film’s technique narrowly gives it a second-place finish in the remake trilogy, the narrowness is against the third-place finish for the 1946 version and not the untouchable 1934 one.

  • Of Human Bondage (1946)

    Of Human Bondage (1946)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2020) In retrospect, it wasn’t such an idea to watch all three filmed adaptations (1934, 1946 and 1964) of W. Somerset Maugham’s novel Of Human Bondage back-to-back-to-back. Not so much because they all blend together (they all have their own particularities) but because their story is so trite that a triple dose of it can be overdoing it. This second version is probably the worst of the three—or at least the least interesting. It does crank up the melodrama, but doesn’t quite manage to catch up to the grandeur of the first adaptation—although it’s probably a bit more accessible, taking into account twelve years of improved filmmaking and decreased stiffness from the actors. This being said, it’s also the weakest from a cinematographic standpoint: Even when broadcast on TCM—known to use the highest-quality copies available—, this Of Human Bondage suffers from high-contrast cinematography, with details being absorbed in the overwhelming blackness of the picture. Story-wise, the film also suffers (read: is made boring) from having been made at the nadir of the Hays Code era—it’s remarkably tamer than its pre-Code forebear or post-Code successor. This 1946 version is nowhere as essential as the first film’s star-launching role for Bette Davis nor as relatively modern as the 1964 version…, which is another way of saying that’s probably not worth watching unless you’re really going to be a completist.

  • Of Human Bondage (1934)

    Of Human Bondage (1934)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2020) In retrospect, it wasn’t such an idea to watch all three filmed adaptations (1934, 1946 and 1964) of W. Somerset Maugham’s novel Of Human Bondage back-to-back-to-back. Not so much because they all blend together (they all have their own particularities) but because their story is so trite that a triple dose of it can be overdoing it. This first version is probably the best—or at least the most interesting. Casting makes it worthwhile: With Bette Davis’s star-making role here, the film becomes a showcase for both her (in a shrill, somewhat unpleasant role) and for co-star Leslie Howard—although we know who’s the biggest star here. The film’s most striking moment is simply seeing Davis in full frame, her big eyes staring at the camera and showing where the Kim Carnes song comes from. Other than that, this Of Human Bondage does manage to make good use of its pre-Code status by showing a destructive love affair between two flawed individuals. It does have the qualities of 1930s prestige productions: Despite the restrained camera techniques, rough technical qualities and acting styles, the sets and costumes are lush, and the brightly-lit cinematography does have its own charms. The antagonistic romance between the two leads is interesting, and the literary origins of the story are never too far away. (Although the film, like its later remakes, does occlude a lot of detail from the original novel in the interest of focus and length.) Even today, the film is best remembered for offering Davis a plum role that would define her persona—she was at her best playing devious, often unlikable characters and she gets a good dose of that here. Given that the film is in the public domain, who can even watch it from the film’s Wikipedia page.

  • McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971)

    McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2020) In retrospect, it makes sense that the western genre—for years the stereotypical Hollywood exemplar, would have been one of the most deconstructed genres by the 1970s. New Hollywood was eager to show how different it was from the old one, and in that context it’s not surprising to see Robert Altman squarely taking on the genre in McCabe & Mrs. Miller. Though technically a western, it’s almost at the opposite end of the usual Western iconography. It’s set deep in a forest in snowy cold northwestern American, with flawed characters unable to resist the corrupt business interests against them. Visually, nearly every optical trick in the cinematographic art is used to give a distressed look to the film: Washed-out colour, rainbow highlights, hazy soft focus and so on. It’s all gritty and dirty and colour-muted like many 1970s films, which viewers are liable to love or hate. To be fair, the period recreation is a lavish representation of a western work camp—it’s just the way it’s captured that’s liable to make some viewers crazy. Warren Beatty is quite good as McCabe (it’s a kind of role he’d often play in his career, all the way to the tragic conclusion), while Julie Christie is also remarkable as the other half of the lead sort-of-couple. Even with nearly fifty years of subsequent Western deconstruction, there is still something in McCabe & Mrs. Miller that feels unique—perhaps because no one else since has dared to be so resolutely indifferent to audience expectations. The early 1970s were another time entirely in Hollywood history, for better or for worse.

  • The Chapman Report (1962)

    The Chapman Report (1962)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2020) Expectations are a dangerous thing, especially when we’ve been conditioned by later movies to assume a certain style or tone given plot summaries. Considering the spate of 1960s sex comedies exploring the loosened mores of mainstream America, you would be more than forgiven for thinking that The Chapman Report, revolving as it does around academics researching the sexual habits of average Americans, would be a silly farce. Something light and perhaps naughty, if dozens of later movies are any guide. But light and naughty are exactly what it is not: This is an early-1960s movie that clearly shows signs of being stuck in the 1950s—from the opening few minutes, it’s clear that this will be an earnest drama about characters coping with sexual permissiveness and how it can ruin their lives. As our sex researchers become entangled with their volunteer subjects, the heavy relationship drama becomes increasingly suffocating. Even on those terms, it becomes long, turgid and so incredibly dull that I had to make a conscious effort to remember why I had recorded it—because it’s from director George Cukor, far better known for his Classic Hollywood lighthearted comedies. But 1960s Cukor wasn’t as nimble at 1930s Cukor—his growing misanthropy is reflected in the high-contrast colour cinematography, with entire character’s clothing disappearing in the deep blacks of the background. It’s essential to remind ourselves that The Chapman Report was daringly made for an audience still tittering uncomfortably over the Kinsey Report on human sexuality (obviously the inspiration for the film)—it’s almost inevitable that the film would become abnormally boring to today’s far more sophisticated audiences. It certainly doesn’t help that the film is far more analytical than emotional, putting an atmosphere of dishonesty over something that could have been animated by honest emotions. (There are far more restrained movies from the Hays Code that are more heartfelt than this one, and much of it has to do with real emotions being used rather than couching it in quasi-legal dramatic analysis.) Ah well—I didn’t expect all Cukor movies to be worth my time, but The Chapman Report is particularly disappointing.

  • Thoroughly Modern Millie (1967)

    Thoroughly Modern Millie (1967)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2020) Common wisdom has it that the 1960s were terrible years for the movie musical, but I don’t quite agree with that—the overly serious 1970s were far worse, and there are plenty of enjoyable 1960s musicals to be watched now… even if the box-office receipts at the time were less than the studios expected. Thoroughly Modern Millie is a particularly fun and weird take on the genre. It’s a sixties-style musical set in the 1920s, with a flapper protagonist played by Julie Andrews. (I’m not a big fan of Andrews, and was particularly amused to find that the opening makeover number makes her less attractive and closer to her persona at each step.) Despite my own reservations about Andrews (legend has it that Mary Tyler Moore was intended to be the film’s lead until Andrews signed up, at which point the film was recentred around her and made into a musical), the result is a fun farce with inventive musical numbers. I quite liked the xylophone dancing in “Jazz Baby,” or the entire “Tapioca” number, which best showcases the exuberant filmmaking of the movie. Going well beyond musical numbers, there are flashy scene transitions through irises in/out, title cards to tell us what the heroine thinks as she looks at the audience and a lot of practical comic effects (such as an apple deflating). The twice-stylized 1960s execution and 1920s setting make for a doubly interesting viewing experience. As a farce, it’s probably a bit too long for its own good at more than two hours and a half (weariness sets in the second half), and the easy Asian stereotypes have not aged well at all. Still, it’s cute and fun most of the time—I would have preferred Mary Tyler Moore than the androgynous Andrews as a heroine (while keeping Stockard Channing as the film’s MVP), but Thoroughly Modern Millie remains a fun farce, amply earning a spot on a list of good 1960s musicals.

  • Soapdish (1991)

    Soapdish (1991)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, February 2020) I wasn’t expecting much of Soapdish, a comedy revolving around the world of daytime soap operas. But much to my surprise, the film proved far more interesting than I expected, and got a few good laughs out of me. Sally Fields does well as an aging actress obsessed by her age, and convinced that the staff of the show is working against her. As it turns out, she’s not wrong—everyone around her despises her diva behaviour, and the showrunner sets a plan in motion to get her to quit. This goes through an old ex-flame of hers, a washed-up actor (Kevin Kline, hilarious) rescued from the tragedy of overacting in dinner theatre. Robert Downey Jr. is not exactly the best choice as the showrunner (at least not compared to his later persona) but he does get a few of the movie’s best lines, often delivered halfway to the camera at the end of his scenes. Whoopi Goldberg also gets a few choice lines (although, checking the quotes of the film, I realize that Soapdish is far funnier in English than the French dub). For someone my age, seeing Leeza Gibbons show up as herself is a welcome sight, almost outdone by Teri Hatcher as a self-aware sexpot. Hollywood does love to talk about itself, and using soaps as a satirical playground does offer it some plausible deniability. The script does occasionally teeter between comedy and drama, but much of the drama eventually reveals itself to be a mere setup for further comedy. The big third-act twist is a lot of fun, and it speaks to the success of the film that I didn’t bother anticipating it despite ample evidence pointing to its nature. The score is very catchy, with Latin influence and a main melody fit for humming. The one thing that hasn’t aged all that well is one late-movie transphobic joke—to be clear, having a character revealed as a transsexual (or transvestite—the film isn’t too clear about that and that’s an issue in itself) is not necessarily a problem: but having characters react as if it’s the worst thing in the world is what feels so terrible. Still, the rest of the film is far funnier than I would have expected, and Soapdish will score high on the rewatch desirability index.

  • Silverado (1985)

    Silverado (1985)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, February 2020) By now, even the tiny number of Westerns that I’ve seen (compared to the entire corpus) is enough to last me a lifetime, or at least establish clear eras in Hollywood Westerns. There’s the innocent period (until 1939’s Stagecoach) where Westerns were cheap and easy to shoot in Hollywood’s backyard. There’s the heroic period (1940s–1950s), which shaped the myths of the genre, followed by the revisionist period (1960s–1970s), which did everything it could to question the heroic era of Westerns. By the 1980s, however, anything could happen in those now-rare Western films—movies that either celebrated or condemned the genre. Silverado, thirty seconds in, clearly announces its filiation to a more classical idea of westerns, although one that consciously exploits the iconography of the heroic period. As the opening shootout of the film ends and our protagonist opens the door of the dark cabin in which it took place, the camera crosses the threshold and the image expands to the limits of the widescreen frame to take in a gorgeous look at the American west in its most iconic glory. The credit sequence follows the protagonist by framing him against picture-perfect western backdrops and sets the tone for a film that reconstructs a fun kind of western, filled with good and bad guys shooting it out over cattle rights and revenge over past transgressions. Writer-director Lawrence Kasdan clearly wants to have a blast doing this film, and so Silverado never lets an occasion go to feature power chords, striking images and self-aware dialogue—or all three, such as when Danny Glover’s character holds up two rifles and says, “This oughta do.” Silverado manages to walk a fine line in recreating classic westerns with gusto yet without falling into the excesses that many imitators would adopt—it’s got action but few obviously over-the-top scenes; it doesn’t take itself too seriously without being a parody; and it finds an entertaining balance between drama and action. The story is very familiar, but it’s really a vehicle for Kasdan to show off that he could direct a straight-up western, and that works well enough. Special mention should be made of the ensemble cast, which features many actors what would become much bigger a few years later: Kevin Kline is a perfect example of civility in an uncivilized world (only topped by an unrecognizably bearded John Cleese as a merciless sheriff), Linda Hunt is a welcome bit of eccentricity, Jeff Goldblum pops up a few times, and a then-unknown Kevin Costner is a revelation here as a cocky gunslinger. Silverado ends up being a pleasant surprise: an unrepentant western not interested in critiquing the genre as much as in playing according to its rules. In many ways (including the gorgeous cinematography), it does feel like a more modern 1990s film. But no matter when it’s from, it’s still quite a bit of fun to watch today.

  • Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986)

    Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On TV, February 2020) Some movies are gritty, but Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer is grimy. Shot with an ultra-low budget, it certainly looks like it, with terrible cinematography, a handful of actors, and a sordid subject matter overcompensating for a multitude of other issues. Michael Rooker shows up at the titular Henry, who—as announced—spends the movie killing people. If you squint, you may pretend that this is a character study — but really, it’s not much more than an exploitation film with an appetite for gore. I’ll give it something, though: the atmosphere of the movie, being this close to cinema-verité, can often be unnerving. Henry is painted as such an irremediable monster that everyone in the film can be (and becomes) a target. It doesn’t make for a pleasant viewing experience, but it’s more effective than most of the horror movies out there that play safely with familiar genre elements. I still don’t like Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer and would gladly never see it again, but it gets quite a bit of mileage out of limited means—for better or for worse.

  • Ma (2019)

    Ma (2019)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2020) I’m happy that Octavia Spencer can have a career in which she can play a murderous woman-child who goes psycho on a bunch of teenagers, but on the other hand… Ma is thin gruel for a talented actress, even if she just wants to have some fun once in a while. While there are a few interesting elements in this story about a middle-aged woman befriending and then stalking teenage protagonists, Ma is the kind of movie that comes and goes without leaving much of a trace. It’s a Blumhouse special, meaning high profit margins on a high-concept but ultimately familiar premise. Competently made but often too timid for its own sake (although I do like the relatively upbeat finale over the rumoured original script), Ma is too often too bland for its own good. The great antagonist meets barely sketched-in protagonists and the Midwest small-town horror atmosphere doesn’t bring anything new. While I’m not that happy about the attempts to explain the roots of the antagonist’s madness, even I have to admit that the film would be poorer and less meaningful without it. Still, this is a lower-end horror movie and it feels like it. Ma will do the job is this is the kind of thing you’re looking for, and it’s a surprisingly good turn to show off Spencer’s range, but otherwise there are far better horror movies out there.

  • Yentl (1983)

    Yentl (1983)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Criterion Streaming, January 2020) So, Barbra Streisand dressing up as a boy is… curiously sexy? I didn’t have that on my list of expectations in tackling Yentl. [August 2020: Oh, and now there’s Seth Rogen making the same joke in An American Pickle…] It’s a surprising film in many ways—as the story of a Jewish girl who crossdresses in order to gain an education reserved for men in 1904 Poland, you would be right to expect a fairly maudlin tale with little entertainment to it. But the result, co-written and directed by Streisand herself, is a lot more than the pat drama you could expect—it’s got humour, intensity, musical numbers (although not that memorable), a pivotal revelation scene, a young Mandy Patinkin and what feels like an education in Jewish culture. Plus, Streisand is looking far too attractive with short hair, although I’ll note that since Streisand remained a significant screen beauty from the mid-1960s to well into the 1990s, it’s not that unexpected of a turn here. No, the real surprise is that Yentl is surprisingly watchable—far lighter on its feel than you’d expect for a labour of love fifteen years in the making, and yet dense with thematic material. I don’t exactly love it, but I found it far more interesting than I expected.

  • Shivers (1975)

    Shivers (1975)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Criterion Streaming, January 2020) I would expect a mid-1970s horror film to be fairly tame, but that’s not a word to apply to writer-director David Cronenberg’s early-effort Shivers. Narratively, it’s basic horror stuff—scientific experiments, parasites, violently-sex-obsessed victims, gruesome deaths, an epidemic raging out of control: We’ve seen all of this before and since then. But Cronenberg tackles this project with youthful energy, and the film is far more aggressive in its execution than you’d think, even with unconvincing special-effects work and muddy nighttime cinematography. For Cronenberg fans, it’s an opportunity to see him work with the raw materials that he would later refine: the off-putting sexual content, the gory body horror, the sense of a normal situation terrifyingly turning out of control. It’s a bit of a laugh to see such a horror film explicitly set in Montréal (specifically on L’île des soeurs), with very typically 1970s Quebecker background actors. So, Shivers may or may not be familiar, but it’s rather well done for its budget class and technical limitations of the time. Not essential viewing (except for Cronenberg fans and anyone interested in tax-shelter-era Canadian exploitation films) but still watchable.

  • The Curse of La Llorona (2018)

    The Curse of La Llorona (2018)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2020) Slick, overproduced and yet so, so underwhelming, The Curse of La Llorona is about as ordinary a horror movie can be when it’s the result of dozens of other movies blended together. Mixing ethnic folk horror with demonic possession, evil-fighting priests and child endangerment (plus a single mother as hero!), it still can’t make any of those surefire elements spark. Plenty of jump scares from director Michael Chaves can’t compensate for a lacklustre script and rote elements. The only thing that mildly works is the ethnic atmosphere of Mexican folklore that set up La Llorona, but don’t expect too much here either—although I’m told the movie did good business in Latin communities. Linda Cardellini is wasted here and can’t rescue the film on her own. At least the images are clear, crisp and clean—but that’s not much of a comfort when they don’t show anything of much value. It’s a bit sad to see “The Conjuring universe” get less and less interesting at every successive movie in the series, but what else do you expect? The real horror villains are always the Hollywood studio executives.