Author: Christian Sauvé

  • Sanma no aji [An Autumn Afternoon] (1962)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2022) This review of writer-director Yasujirō Ozu’s An Autumn Afternoon can probably be cut and pasted for reuse in discussing most of his work – here’s a filmmaker observing Japan in a sensitive and humane way, cleanly portraying small-scale domestic dramas, often in very specific terms that illuminate his culture for non-Japanese viewers. And… it usually puts me to sleep. That’s integral to the charm of his films, I suppose: their refusal to escalate their drama in extreme or genre-friendly way is the point. Otherwise, their portrayal of characters would be detached from the reality they’re portraying. An Autumn Afternoon, revolving around the responsibilities of an elderly man having to find husbands for his daughters and (more crucially) letting them go on their own, is not about big drama: it’s about the natural passage of life stages, and there’s a lot to commend in the result. The flip side, though, is that you have to be ready for such films – even at a reasonably spry 113 minutes, this is not a film designed to jolt you awake every few moments, and there’s an implicit barrier in trying to understand Japanese social structures from the glimpses provided by the film. If you’re the more impatient viewer, reading a plot summary may help the experience: no, you won’t lose much by having the plot spoiled for you when the plot is about the least interesting thing about the result. Brief yourself thoroughly on what’s going to happen, then spend your time appreciating the nuances. And don’t feel too guilty if, in the end, you conclude it’s not your kind of movie.

  • L’ennemi japonais à Hollywood [Yellowface: Asian Whitewashing and Racism in Hollywood] (2019)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2022) If you know anything about how Hollywood portrayed Asian characters for much of its history, you know that there’s going to be nothing uplifting about a film called Yellowface: Asian Whitewashing and Racism in Hollywood. As the film goes through Hollywood history, noting the stereotypes and attempts to pass white actors as Asian characters, it’s one dismal excerpt after another. I recently wrote a brief history of American black cinema, and one of the things that popped into my mind as I was writing it was “Wow, I’m happy I’m not trying to write about American Asian cinema” – but here’s a documentary to illustrate just how right I was. From yellow-face casting to interment, cheap enduring stereotypes to lack of representativeness, Asians have not been served particularly well throughout Hollywood’s history and this documentary scratches at the issue. Alas, this specific film (especially when I’m measuring it against such top documentaries as The Celluloid Closet) is very disappointing in many ways. Some of it can be explained by its pedigree — A French TV special sometimes popping up as an English-original documentary (understandably so given that its topic, excerpts and interviews are all in English), it’s clearly limited by its 60-minute running time and its lower production budget. There’s a total of four interviewees and there’s a sense that this isn’t enough to fully cover the topic. It does not help that the film spends a lot of time explaining about the American internment camps of Japanese citizens during WW2 – a worthy topic made real by one interviewee’s personal connection to the camps, but one that apparently prevents the film from offering a better look at Asian representativeness in the last few decades of the twentieth century. At times, it feels as if Yellowface skips from the 1950s to the twenty-first century, running roughshod over decades of incremental or temporary progress. Flower Drum Song is barely mentioned, for instance, which casts the completeness of the project in question. (Even using it as an example of a false hope for representativeness would have been something.) I was quite disappointed by the result. Even though the film does have highlights (one of the four interviewees is Tamlyn Tomita, and I’ve seldom liked her more than in seeing her here being incensed, animated and opinionated), there’s a sense that there’s a much better documentary to be made about the laudable issue being half-heartedly tackled here. But then you’d need more effort and budget than was likely available to the filmmakers. Maybe one day we’ll get the documentary that Asian representation on Hollywood really deserves.

  • Brighton Rock (1948)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2022) I have a bit of a soft spot for Brighton as a location, having spent a few days there for a convention in 2010. But while the Brighton of Brighton Rock may sometime look the same as seen from the sea (I swear I’ve stayed at one of the hotels shown by the film), this 1940s noir incarnation is not a fun place for the characters that inhabit it. There’s a malevolent gang leader (played by a very young Richard Attenborough) taking aim at a journalist for having written about the city’s organized crime problem, and murder shapes much of the film once past its first half-hour. 1940s Brighton is portrayed with some flair, and the rough noirish nature of the plotting means there’s always something interesting going on, as the protagonist’s past actions are primed to harm him. British noir was quite a thing, and even if Brighton Rock can’t quite recapture the mounting tension of its first half-hour, it’s still not a bad watch.

  • Sooryavanshi (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Prime Streaming, May 2022) There are so, so many things wrong with Sooryavanshi that I’m not sure where to begin, except perhaps by the counterintuitive conclusion that I enjoyed it a lot more than most of the well-known Indian films that Netflix/Prime has been throwing at me lately. Apparently a fourth film in a series launched by 2011’s Singham (which has been sitting in my Netflix watchlist for years), this is the kind of over-the-top action cop movie that the Americans are too ashamed to be doing these days. And as is the case in high-octane action films, it often betrays social norms a bit too clearly. For Western viewers, the first few minutes set the tone of writer-director-producer-etc. Rohit Shetty’s aggressive, glossy, flashy approach, and clearly points at Pakistan as the source of evils plaguing modern India. Reaching for real-world trauma (the 1993 Mumbai bombings) in an attempt to ground its super-heroic characters, Sooryavanshi quickly, consistently and disturbingly presents its policemen heroes as cool and unimpeachable – always justified by circumstances. Anyone trying to track the morals of the film will be left guessing by the script’s quasi-schizophrenic swings. This is a film in which the villains are clearly Pakistani, but the hero has a long sequence in which he preaches to Muslims the importance of brotherhood and justice – but shoots them dead at the film’s climax in response to a taunt after making a point of capturing them alive. Marital difficulties (as his wife understandably doesn’t want anything to do with him after their son is shot) always resolve themselves in his favour and his wife’s adoring capitulation: it helps when he rescues her from terrorists and a bomb vest – Stockholm syndrome and all that. Psychological torture is played for unconvincing laughs as long as it’s the right person being led to believe their loved ones are being tortured, and there’s a disturbing hero-worship of the cop protagonists that’s as blunt as anything made in Hollywood’s worst years. It would be tempting to propose that the filmmakers don’t know what they’re doing, but I prefer to think that they know exactly what they’re doing: In the Masala tradition, give them a firehose of fallacies and let the audience pick what they like. It’s not that stupid an approach considering that there’s quite a bit to like once you ignore what you don’t:  The direction is energetic, the protagonists are coded as cool (the protagonist of Singham even coming back, earning hushed tones of admiration for his handling of guns), the action scenes have some panache and there’s a vision of modern India here that often feels fun and dynamic. There are plenty of issues with Sooryavanshi (conspicuous musical numbers, blunt-force melodrama, and action sequences that directly contradict themselves in the span of thirty seconds in order to get an extra thrill out of it) but it’s not boring even at 145 minutes –especially when it’s espousing self-contradictory morals and running roughshod over continuity. Let’s face it: you’ve seen worse from Hollywood itself.

  • Ansiktet [The Magician] (1958)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2022) If you have ever wondered what a horror film directed by Ingmar Bergman would have looked like, there’s no finer illustration of that alternate universe than the five minutes of The Magician in which Max von Sydow’s character “comes back from the dead” and stalks a once-skeptical official in a dramatically-lit attic. It’s a well-crafted sequence, certainly the highlight of a better-than-average film for Bergman. Alas, it’s brief – and the rest of the film struggles to be as interesting. Some of the basic blocks are there – the film is about a travelling hypnotist/magician show that may or may not be supernatural, and the efforts made by the local villagers to deal with those strange people in their midst. Gunnar Björnstrand turns in a very memorable performance as a skeptical doctor, and Sydow himself clearly plays into the mysterious nature of his character. Still, this is a Bergman film and you have to spend quite a bit of time in squalid rural Sweden – and if you’re a cut-and-dried genre fan, this is not a film that explains too much of its mysteries. Still, it’s a step up from much of the lower-tier Bergman I’ve been seeing lately… and it’s got five minutes of top-notch horror.

  • Sien lui yau wan III: Dou dou dou [A Chinese Ghost Story III] (1991)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, May 2022) This third entry in the consistently enjoyable series A Chinese Ghost Story course-corrects slightly, going back to the smaller scale and more romantic underpinnings of the first film compared to the wilder, wider scope of the first sequel. The result may be a slight downgrade, but it’s certainly not dull or unenjoyable: With the dynamic camera muscling itself a place in the cast of characters, ambitious pre-digital special effects, fog-filled atmosphere and the wild swings of the film’s imagination, this third entry feels entirely consistent with the previous two films. The story focuses on two monks (the incomparable Tony Leung Chiu-Wai and Jacky Cheung) as they go through many of the motions of the first film’s plot, focusing more on romance while not forgetting about the fantasy fighting along the way. I’m impressed at the way the film’s 1990s patina has endured quite well – A Chinese Ghost Story III is a great example of how in-your-face filmmaking can still manage to impress even the next generations of cinephiles. If you’re going to see any of the previous two films, make it a triple-bill. Or stretch the fun over several evenings.

  • Sien lui yau wan II: Yan gaan dou [A Chinese Ghost Story II] (1990)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, May 2022) I remembered just enough of the first Chinese Ghost Story to be looking forward to the sequel… and I remembered correctly: Anyone looking for a charmingly low-tech film very much in the Evil Dead vein could do much worse than have a look at this fog-drenched maximalist take on fantasy film. This second instalment goes wide in presenting an ensemble cast fighting against demons and imperial soldiers, with plenty of wire-enhanced fighting, wild monstrous creatures and some memorable set-pieces. Director Ching Siu-tung has a lot of fun staging the mayhem, and star Leslie Cheung makes for a great protagonist. The romantic content of the first film (hastily summarized in the sequel’s first few seconds) is clearly toned down in favour of demonic sword-fighting, and that’s fine – it’s enough of a departure to be distinctive. Now, I’m clearly catching only a fraction of A Chinese Ghost Story II’s allusion to Chinese mythology – but the result is high-energy enough that I don’t care all that much. (Although keeping an eye on the Wikipedia plot summary may help keep your bearings.)  This is old-school horror fun with plenty of comedy to soften the blow, and enough fun with the camera (almost a character by itself) to still wow more than thirty years later.

  • Händler der vier Jahreszeiten [The Merchant of Four Seasons] (1972)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2022) Ugh, Rainer Werner Fassbinder.  I’ll watch his films to complete his filmography, but I’m not promising that I’ll enjoy them. While I did like The Merchant of Four Seasons more than usual for his films, it was often out of a sense of fascination for the weird choices he makes throughout it all. The story of a fruit cart merchant who struggles to provide for his family soon spins into melodramatic extremes as he beats his wife, she cheats on him, he ends up hiring the man who slept with her, both of them start plotting against our protagonist, and things escalate from there. It’s filled with curious filmmaking choices– even allowing for the restrained nature of German films, the actors here seem content in delivering flat line-readings in what could appear like a parody of melodramatic acting. In other words, while I found something interesting in The Merchant of Four Seasons, it was a sense of fascination with how it was turning out than any real immersion in the film’s reality. Compared to my flatter-than-flat reaction to other Fassbinder films, that’s almost an improvement.

  • Aces High (1976)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2022) If you want to talk about movies as crude time-travel devices, then Aces High gets you two trips for the price of one: As per topic matter, it travels to World War I, specifically the barracks hosting the English pilots going to the front in their rickety planes. The very specific tone of the film (which borrows its plot from the classic Journey’s End) is dictated by the fighting conditions it describes, with a pilot’s life expectancy being measured in days rather than weeks. With that kind of turnover, there’s a curious mixture of gallows humour and deliberate detachment amongst the pilots brought back in this frat-house-like atmosphere. The second bit of time-travel is in going back to the very specific flavour of 1970s British filmmaking, especially as it relates to war films. While the British film industry’s shift from war-is-an-adventure to war-is-hell was more gradual and mannered than the American abrupt-face throughout the accumulating toll of the Vietnam War, there was such a shift and Aces High is clearly about the butchery of World War I, albeit in a clipped, nearly ironic way. It’s also a chance to see such actors as Malcolm McDowell and Christopher Plummer early in their careers. Working in a pre-digital age where the only way to get aerial footage was either shooting it, or reusing footage shot for other films, Aces High does both – fans of The Blue Max should recognize a few shots. It amounts to an interesting film – the focus on the barracks antics is original enough, and the way the film approaches its anti-war message is affecting without being too clumsy. There’s a long list of World War I films, and while Aces High isn’t necessarily mandatory, it’s not a bad pick.

  • The Loveless (1981)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2022) The best reasons to watch The Loveless today are that it’s the debut of (co-)director Kathryn Bigelow, and that it features a very young Willem Dafoe in a lead role as a biker terrorizing a small town near Daytona. Otherwise, the film is a deconstructive 1980s look at the 1950s, with the bikers not quite being terrors and the upstanding citizens not necessarily being so upstanding. The ending is not bad, in a rather glum way, but it does take a long time to get there: Stuck in small-town America with nowhere to go, The Loveless feels longer than its 85-minute running time. Dafoe makes an impression, though, and so does Marin Kanter as the complex female lead. The sense-of-place is middling at best – this is a low-budget film, after all, and whatever couldn’t be covered through period cars and timeless vistas of small-town America exceeded the production design envelope. The result isn’t too far away from downbeat New Hollywood — Fans of outlaw films may appreciate the slightly different spin eventually provided to the film, but no one will be blamed for not being that enthusiastic about the result.

  • The Last Dinosaur (1977)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, May 2022) The best moment in The Last Dinosaur comes early on, as the film uses a scrapbook to establish its larger-than-life protagonist, a big-game hunter who happens to be a billionaire whose company has discovered a long-lost Antarctic valley where dinosaurs roam. After that, the film can’t help but steadily slide into mediocrity and boredom, albeit not without quirky moments along the way. This being a Rankin/Bass co-production with a Japanese special-effects company, there’s a very odd blend of slap-dash scripting with man-in-suit 1970s visual effects. You can wince because of the casual sexism related to the female characters (although there’s a bit of role reversal when the “easy seduction” of a character is revealed to be a cold-blooded ruse from the seduced) or the unconvincing special effects, but The Last Dinosaur steadily loses interest the longer it goes on and our hunter aims for the biggest target of his life. The film deservedly ended up as a made-for-TV title (even if it wasn’t made for TV) and, even then, probably felt dated in its depiction of a hunter billionaire as a hero. There is a title song over the credits, though, if that’s the kind of thing that can make it better.

  • Two on a Guillotine (1965)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2022) Aw, yeah, another haunted-house story: In order to inherit a fortune, the daughter of a murderous crackpot magician must remain in his creepy booby-trapped house for a full week. Lovely premise, especially for someone like me who can’t get enough “spend the night in the haunted house” stories. The first third of Two on a Guillotine has a nice quasi-William Castle quality, as low-budget filmmakers use cleverness to compensate for deficient production values. I particularly liked the reading of the will theatrically staged at the Hollywood Bowl (something that even the characters find over-the-top), and Dean Jones’s turn as a sarcastic reporter who volunteers to help our heroine make it through the ordeal. Unfortunately, the film takes a dive after that promising opening – while it generally remains watchable until its dramatic ending, Two on a Guillotine can’t quite recapture the banter and the flashiness of its opening. In the end, it degrades into a very standard-issue haunted house thriller, not quite taking full advantage of its opportunities. That’s too bad… but this is hardly the first haunted house thriller to run out of steam after a promising opening. Don’t expect too much and you should be fine.

  • Retro Puppet Master (1999)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, May 2022) Writer-director-producer Charles Band and his Full Moon Pictures studio are known for low-budget films, but if there’s something else that keeps popping up in their filmography, it’s puppets. Puppet antagonists. Puppet supporting characters. An entire thirteen-film Puppet Master series, of which Retro Puppet Master is the seventh. Band did not technically direct Retro Puppet Master (long-time acolyte David DeCoteau did, but that’s not much of a distinction) but his stamp is everywhere on the film. You can recognize the hallmarks of the Full Moon Pictures’ low-budget style everywhere in the production, what with its meandering plot, unconvincing period production values, low-grade actors (including Greg Sestero, eventually made famous by his involvement in The Room) and, obviously, a lot of puppets. No Full Moon films are good, but some of them squeak by on rough charm and quasi-accidental enjoyment. Retro Puppet Master is not one of them – it just limps along with a self-involved plot that doesn’t manage to become interesting, and is clearly part of a cult following for the Puppet Master series. Maybe that’s you, in which case – have fun. Otherwise, there are better movies out there and, more crucially, better Charles Band movies as well.

  • Together (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2022) I’m not sure how I feel about the inevitable wave of Covid lockdown movies that have started making their way everywhere. On the one hand, it was an extraordinary dramatic experience widely shared– we all have our stories of lockdown and how we (and others) reacted to it, and someone somewhere –possibly with a few years’ worth of hindsight—will eventually figure out how to use this in a way that will resonate. On the other hand, well, it may be too soon yet – we may be out of lockdown, or they may become semi-annual occurrences. We’re all tired of the isolation and not eager to go back to it, even for the time of a film. Plus, not to put too fine a point on it —we’ve lived through so many video-chats, so is there anything more than that to say? It doesn’t help that the lockdown movies we’ve seen so far have often been too basic to be interesting – I did like Lockdown because it used the times as a springboard to an unusual heist film, but Safer at Home was flat-out too dumb to be good. Now here is Together to deliver an earnest, stripped-down, almost documentary look at the acute phase of the lockdown, through the lenses of an unhappily married couple clearly not thrilled to be stuck with each other for a long time. James McAvoy and Sharon Horgan star, the first using his Scottish accent to a degree seldom seen in other roles.   As for the form of the film, much of it plays out as a confessional between the two lead characters and the camera, even if who the camera is supposed to be isn’t too clear, and disintegrates over the course of the film. In terms of content, the film feels like an articulate expression of how most of us felt through the experience – trying to come to grips with this, with the additional burdens of life taking place in trying times (here, the death of a parent in a hospice) and how we related to those unable to lock down safely in order to provide essential services. It’s all earnest, sometimes a bit too much so: as if the film was bringing us back there rather than illuminating what happened. In the end, Together feels like it achieves its objectives in recording the event, but not much more than that – it obviously doesn’t have perspective and can’t quite go beyond the obvious, but perhaps that’s enough for now – anything else will need to time to process.

  • Drunk Bus (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2022) On paper, there isn’t much to excite in Drunk Bus’ premise – this is hardly the first film in which we’re asked to commiserate with an aimless twentysomething suffering from a breakup, stuck in a dead-end job and having trouble making new friends. But a few elements make the execution of that premise far more interesting than expected. An unusual job – driving the campus loop bus during winter nights, as inebriated students try to go back home—provides a chilly but distinctive visual identity to the film. While Charlie Tahan is clearly the protagonist of the film, Pineapple Tangaroa is nothing short of remarkable in a supporting role, playing a tattooed pierced Samoan street poet hired as bodyguard to the diminutive protagonist. (The film’s production history also suggests that he’s playing himself in a semi-autobiographical film.)  The plot isn’t quite as important as the ensemble of quirky supporting characters, wacky night-in-the-life-of events and a very specific sense of humour from directors John Carlucci and Brandon LaGanke. Drunk Bus is not an earth-shaking film, but it operates in a subgenre where greatness is unnecessary – merely being watchable, enjoyable and original is enough — a bar that it easily clears.