Author: Christian Sauvé

  • The Humans (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2022) Ugh, what an ordeal. But that’s probably the reaction expected of The Humans’ filmmakers. Taking the notion of a secrets-filled Thanksgiving family get-together to its creepiest manifestation, the film begins as a middle-class family from Pennsylvania gathers at their youngest daughter’s newest apartment, in a semi-dilapidated Manhattan apartment building. While there’s little in the subject matter of the film to evoke horror, the setting does most of the work in making the film repugnant: dimly lit hallways with flickering lights, creaking dripping pipes, power outages and disquieting noises from the urban jungle all combine to make the film feel far darker than warrants its subject matter. Writer-director Stephen Karam positively delights in shooting it all like a film where the first brutal murder is only thirty seconds away, with distant long-shots meant to deemphasize the humanity of characters stuck in an alien environment that doesn’t care about them. Absent the setting, the film plays like a far more traditional Thanksgiving family demolition derby: Everyone’s got a secret or two, and we get to hear it all by the end of the film. A few familiar names pop up on the cast list: most notably Amy Schumer in a decidedly serious role and Richard Jenkins maintaining a façade of civility on a character with much to atone for. So, does it work? I expect it may on audiences who fear the intrusion of genre upon drama – The Humans is all build-up and no payoff (especially for those hoping for a psycho killer to put this entire irritating family out of their misery) and there’s an audience for that kind of material even if I can’t understand why. For genre fans, however, The Humans is all that’s wrong with pretentious arthouse drama movies convinced they don’t have to be conventional. I mean – they’re not wrong: there’s nothing forcing filmmakers to stick to a solid three-act structure with a satisfying denouement. But then again, nothing forces the audience to like the result either. But if your idea of a fun time is a dysfunctional Thanksgiving dinner with unlikable characters in a run-down apartment, well, The Humans is for you.

  • Mad Holiday (1936)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2022) Hollywood history is littered with passable films that work rather well but don’t leave any lasting memories. Mad Holiday, caught in-passing from a rare TCM broadcast because I have a fondness for films about films, is a good example of the form – it’s practically obscure today, not exactly a good movie and yet you can watch it and feel as if you’ve gotten a decent deal for your time. (It also clocks in at 71 minutes, which helps make it feel like time not wasted.)  It features Edmund Lowe as an actor tired of being pigeonholed as a detective in a popular series of mystery movies (Mad Holiday opens by depicting the conclusion of his most recent film, then switching to off-camera complaints by the actor), who decides to go on a cruise to clear his mind. Alas, trouble follows – and our fake detective must become a real detective, uneasily allied with the author of the mystery novels he dislikes so much. Zasu Pitts shows up in a familiar ditzy role. Otherwise, though, Mad Holiday is competent in the way the Hollywood studios were getting by the 1930s in churning out acceptable entertainment to fill theatre screens. It’s mildly entertaining, the dialogue isn’t too bad, heroine Elissa Landi is quite cute, and it crams a surprising amount of plot in its short running time. (Some of this breakneck pacing is very intentional, as it prevents viewers from thinking too much about what’s happening. For modern audiences, it will distract from the regrettable yellowface depiction of an Asian character.)  Having an actor team up with the author of the novels he’s bringing to the screen is just metafictional enough to be interesting, and director George B. Seitz’s style is unobtrusive enough. No one will ever recommend Mad Holidays as a good example of anything, but it can certainly be watched well enough, which is a distinction we can’t necessarily give to much-better-known films.

  • This Is the Night (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2022) There’s plenty to admire in the idea of a filmmaker using the medium to deliver a semi-autobiographical period piece – it’s common enough in written fiction, but films are expensive enough to produce that it takes clout to be able to swing such a project. So, if writer-director James DeMonaco -fresh off the box-office returns of a few Purge movies- wants to take us back to 1982 Staten Island for a low-stake day-in-the-life coming-of-age family drama, the least we can do is being open-minded about it. Alas, there’s a limit to the amount of indulgence we can give to what This is the Night becomes. There is, certainly, a good sense of time and place to this take on May 28, 1982 – not so coincidentally the opening night of Rocky III, a cultural event which seems to bring the Italian-American borough to a frenzy. It’s against that landmark that the family drama is set, with overlapping stories about the male members of the Dedea family:  The youngest son has teen-movie issues with a crush and public humiliation; the older son has gender-conformity problems; and the father struggles to keep the mob at bay when his restaurant is in financial trouble. (The family also features a mom, played by Naomie Watts, but her only role is to be supportive of her elder son’s coming-out.)  This is not unpromising material, but various decisions made during the execution of This is the Night limit its effectiveness, starting with using such a milquetoast film as Rocky III as a cornerstone. Blending genres from silly implausible teen comedy to attempted sensitive trans-coming-out drama (in 1982 – but this film is hardly unique in imposing modern sensibilities to period pieces) doesn’t work on a tonal level, let alone confronted with the triumphant machismo of the milieu in which the story takes place. The movie’s screenwriting is often more puzzling than effective, with implausible scenes building on top of each other until there’s no mistaking DeMonaco’s overwhelming contrivances. Putting it bluntly, there are plenty of examples to show that while DeMonaco can deliver a commercial horror script, he doesn’t have the subtlety, sensitivity or wit to carry out something that doesn’t rest on a wildly implausible premise and a very indulgent teenage audience. But, hey, Frank Grillo gets to beat up a guy in the course of a single night so, at least, This is the Night isn’t too far away from DeMonaco’s Purge comfort zone. It isn’t a terrible film, but it fails at being good and ends up somewhere in suspicious mediocrity. There’s a much better movie to be made out of many of the bits and pieces brought together here, but it’s not going to come from DeMonaco himself.

  • The In-Laws (2003)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On TV, May 2022) One of the problems of having been an active cinephile throughout the 2000s (evidence of which is freely available elsewhere on this site) is that it was difficult, in the moment, to identify what was so characteristic during the decade – it’s harder than you think to identify fads from lasting innovation, and so the elements that make us associate film to a specific era. Until you see a film much later than that era, of course. So it is that The In-Laws now feel irremediably dated to the early 2000s, with a fake gloss, dubious stylistic choices made easy by the technology of the time, and a slap-dash approach to plotting that assumes a very decade-specific kind of stupidity from its audience. A remake of the quirky 1979 Alan Alda/Peter Falk vehicle, this version features Michael Douglas as a loose-cannon CIA agent, and Albert Brooks as the milquetoast in-law who suddenly gets drawn into comic international schemes. From the opening “action” scene, featuring very dubious action sequences and -more crucially- the use of “Live and Let Die” that creates Bond comparisons that the film can’t sustain, The In-Laws is in trouble: It’s polished and expansive, but not that funny, the action isn’t that good and the result feels useless. While Douglas and Brooks are well cast (perhaps too much so – Douglas can’t help but be cool and credible, while Brooks can’t help but be neurotic and terrified), the rest of the film is silly rather than amusing, and the plot mechanics are intensely predictable. An overlong ending proves that the film has overstayed its welcome. Perhaps most damning of all, twenty years later, is realizing that this was a wholly unremarkable mainstream Hollywood release at the time – so unremarkable that it didn’t seem like the kind of thing I had to watch at the time. Hence one doubt in revisiting a decade I actively lived through: maybe it’s not quite as good as I remembered it.

  • The Green Knight (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Amazon Streaming, April 2022) I don’t particularly like The Green Knight, but I like what it’s trying to do. That isn’t a paradox: I don’t have any specific fondness for Arthurian legends, I don’t care all that much about gritty fantasy, and I can think of plenty of more interesting genres than oneiric fantasy. On the other hand, I am supportive, almost by default, of any film that doesn’t go for the post-Lord of the Rings paradigm of fantasy films. Writer-director David Lowery does have a short but interesting career so far, with films spanning everything from family fare (Pete’s Dragon) to gentle thriller (The Old Man and the Gun) to more esoteric material (A Ghost Story). The Green Knight is closer to that last film, with enigmatic material, elliptic sequences, an unclear delineation between reality and fantasy, and a refusal to play the material like most other films. It’s bold enough to portray the protagonist’s death before literally changing direction and showing up how he avoids it. It gets gross with bodily fluids, presents a vision of medieval life that’s gritty to the point of unpleasantness, questions heroism and finally cuts right before either triumph or tragedy. There isn’t another film quite like The Green Knight, and that’s a good thing regardless or whether I enjoyed the (overlong, obtuse, ornery) result. What it boils down to is: This is a very A24 production, and it’s going to make some people really happy and others really angry and others kind of appreciative even if they recognize it’s not for them. The surest way to recognize a jaded movie reviewer is to ask them whether they prefer slick-but-familiar fare, or unsuccessful-but-audacious material. Anyone who answers the later will find much to admire (but not necessarily like) in The Green Knight.

  • Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2022) The influence of What Happened to Baby Jane? and the resulting boom in psycho-biddy thrillers is obvious in Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte – once again, Bette Davis (with support from elderly classical Hollywood stars such as Olivia de Havilland, Joseph Cotton and Mary Astor) plays in a gothic thriller, this time heading to the American South in a vast and coveted mansion for a story reaching a few decades earlier and weaving a big web of deception. Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte is interesting in the ways those kinds of films are supposed to be interesting, but there’s a feeling that it’s aping better movies, and adding a layer of hagsploitation that feels more exploitative than worthwhile. It’s not bad, but it feels redundant – maybe I’d like it more if I had let more time elapse between it and its most obvious inspirations.

  • Moonfall (2022)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Amazon Streaming, April 2022) Roland Emmerich has been making disaster movie for longer than some of Moonfall’s audience has been alive, but he’s not necessarily getting better at it. Sure, the special effects are much improved, but what’s their use when they can’t patch a terrible script, a disappointing structure and atrocious dialogue? For my money, Emmerich peaked during the first two thirds of 2012 – about as good a blend of spectacle and enjoyable nonsense as he’s able to orchestrate, with better special effects than Independence Day and Godzilla, and a better script (relatively speaking) than Geostorm or Moonfall. This time around, the moon is behaving mysteriously and drawing ever close to Earth – the only hope for humanity being a mission with a hastily recommissioned Space Shuttle. A usual, Emmerich disaster films get worse the longer they’re not spectacles – you get the usual crew of disgraced professionals, conspiracy crackpots who happen to be right (the sooner we can get rid of that trope, the better) and divorced characters. There is a long and not-completely interesting essay to be written about disaster movies and script structure (as in: the disaster film was born the moment screenwriters understood that you could stretch the thrills over an entire film rather than have it at the beginning of the third act) and Moonfall doesn’t quite know how to get that right: The opening half of the film is duller than expected, with some subplots that are mind-numbingly rote or useless (including Kelly Yu in a redundant role solely fit to affirm the film’s Chinese production money). While the disaster itself has its moments, you can see the energy running out of it fast enough to justify the film’s third-act slide into pure undiluted science fiction with two alien races battling it out inside Earth’s “moon.”  There are, to be fair, some good showpieces – sure, you’ve seen plenty of rocket launches in other movies, but what about a shuttle launch from underwater? But at other times, the script becomes obnoxious-to-irritating – the Elon Musk worship was a bad idea from the get-go, and is only going to become even more troublesome. Even the last-third slide into pure SF – which I should like – is hampered by ham-fisted exposition and a refusal to explore some of these possibilities. It probably doesn’t help that I’ve read plenty of SF novels taking a far more grounded look at the moon exploding (McDevitt’s Moonfall and Baxter’s Moonseed, among many others) and this feels like a pale, preposterous copy of that. Emmerich can still be depended on for short bursts of excitement and trailer-worthy shots, but I think it’s time to let go of the hope that he’ll ever be able to rope it all again into a satisfying film.

  • American Utopia (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2022) There’s no sense in pretending otherwise: I watched American Utopia less for a David Byrne concert than for Spike Lee’s direction. It’s not that I don’t know Byrne or his work – there are at least three songs in here that I recognized – but more that he’s not really anywhere near my list of favourite artists, and concert films are invariably aimed at fans. As such, what struck me about American Utopia is how clearly and specifically it aims at Byrne fans: there are pauses for applause, cheers and whoops that are mystifying if you’re not already invested in Byrne’s career, and the pandering to people who already have a parasocial relationship with the artist can be very curious. This being said, I’m marginally closer to being a Byrne fan after seeing the concert: While the music isn’t always to my liking (even if “Lazy” is an old-school favourite), Byrne himself is a likable presence, with his age adding gravitas and contrast to his lighter moments. His humanistic approach is refreshing even when it has to engage with American politics, and his take on Janelle Monáe’s “Hell You Talmbout” is a highlight that also helps explain why Spike Lee directed the film. If you stop to read on American Utopia’s production, the technical elements of the concert (with dynamic lighting and wireless musical instruments allowing for musical performances to be blended with choreography) are quite amazing in their own ways… and transparent enough to allow the result to speak by itself. Even if you feel like a newcomer to Byrne’s music, his silver-suited candid patter will win you over.

  • Eat Locals (2017)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, April 2022) The surest way to make a film reviewer mad is not necessarily to show them a bad movie – it’s to ask them to talk about a film that had many reasons to be good (or fun, or at least entertaining) yet couldn’t manage much more than a handful of good moments. There’s something promising in the situation set up early in Eat Locals – a gathering of powerful vampires in an isolated country house, surrounded by a team of vampire hunters. The point of the meeting is to carve up England’s population for vampire use (they use quotas), and some of the vampire hunters have mercenary motives. This should be a solid foundation for a film, but actor-turned director Jason Flemyng doesn’t have much to work with – the script fails to take advantage of what it has at its disposal, and turns out something surprisingly boring. Even though it’s not taking itself seriously, Eat Locals is considerably less funny than it could have been, and the production’s limited budget clearly stops it from relying on action sequences or special-effects set-pieces that could have mitigated the dullness of the script. Sure, it’s rather fun to see Anette Crosbie as an elderly vampire mowing down attackers with a machine gun… but when that’s the highlight of the film, that more or less confirms my point. Eat Locals is nowhere near as witty as its title – it may appeal to vampire fans having seen nearly everything else, but there are much better horror comedies out there that deserve attention before this one.

  • Gycklarnas afton [Sawdust and Tinsel] (1953)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On TV, April 2022) All right, Ingmar Bergman fans, here’s the deal: I don’t have a good batting average when it comes to his films. There are a few I like, a few more I can tolerate, and far many more that I don’t really care about — except for a vague sentiment of having wasted my time watching something I don’t care about. Sawdust and Tinsel goes into that last category – it’s one of his early films, it takes place at a circus and it’s not about anything much. It’s not perceptively funny (in keeping with Bergman’s comedies) and not particularly dramatic and, most of all, not really involving. So there it is: Sawdust and Tinsel. Need I go on? Not really.

  • Ningen no jôken [The Human Condition III: A Soldier’s Prayer] (1961)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2022) One of my core beliefs as a critic is that endings can make or break a film. They’re not everything (and that’s why I’m not averse to explaining the nature of endings with little regard for overly protective spoiler alerts), but they shape the meaning of movies and how viewers react to them. In this light, the supremely depressing ending of The Human Condition III: A Soldier’s Prayer is monumental, because it caps nine hours of film designed as a single story. What viewers may be able to forgive after a ten-minute subplot or a ninety-minute horror film may not be the same as how they’ll feel after nine hours of gruelling suffering for the central characters. But writer-director Masaki Kobayashi makes his choices and sticks to them here, all the way to an impressive bleakness that does give a very different flavour to the trilogy than what it would have been with an upbeat, satisfying ending. As much as I have painfully slogged through those nine hours (well, fewer than that – there was a liberal use of fast-forwarding), I am ready to concede that The Human Condition, designed as it was as a humanistic anti-war statement, would be a far lesser achievement with a happy ending. The masochistic suffering of its viewers is the point, one could say while suffering echoes of Stockholm’s syndrome. Compared to the first two volumes, this final act is far more anarchistic: there’s little wartime glory here, and plenty of incidents to show how it’s impossible to hold on to ideals in wartime, especially after the fighting is over and the real survival efforts begin. I am not likely to revisit the trilogy any time soon, but it’s going to haunt me – few other works of that magnitude would have dared such uncompromising nihilism.

  • Songwriter (1984)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2022) I don’t have much to say about Songwriter’s plot – it’s something about country singers, the predatory elements in the genre, and holding on to song rights – but neither does the film itself: It’s a film of moments and observations loosely structured around a narrative clothesline. I do have much nicer things to say about the film’s quasi-documentary atmosphere, its portrayal of the country music industry and its performers: Director Alan Rudolph makes the good choice to film things as if the camera was almost irrelevant to the staging and actors, and this allows the performers to be showcased in a quasi-documentary fashion. It certainly helps that the film was first conceived by singer-actor Willie Nelson as a semi-autobiographical rant, and that he was able to rope in the always-likable singer-actor Kris Kristofferson as co-star. They know what they’re talking about, and that credible authenticity carries to the end product. The music is terrific if you’re in that genre, and having Nelson and Kristofferson as performers makes for a nice time-capsule capture of their performances. Kristofferson had a great run of films in the 1970s and early 1980s, and you can add this film to the list – he always comes across as compelling. The echoes of New Hollywood are apparent in this mid-1980s effort, through gritty cinematography and de-glammed presentation. Songwriter is not going to be for everyone, but country fans will enjoy this throwback to the 1980s, and everyone looking for a specific portrayal of a musical niche at a specific time and place will get the full immersion.

  • Stage Fright (2014)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2022) I’m not sure it’s right to say that there’s a lot of opportunity wasted in Stage Fright – after all, what’s the reasonable ceiling on a camp slasher film adopting musical comedy tropes? Still, there’s a sense that the film achieves only a portion of its potential. As someone who loathes slashers but likes musicals, I probably shouldn’t be surprised at my mixed reaction: the musical aspects buoy my reaction to the slasher elements, and the slasher elements limit my liking of the musical bits. That tension comes into play from even the first sequence, as the joy of seeing Minnie Driver (yay!) as a Broadway star is almost immediately cut short by her being the first victim in a series of gory murders. The story really picks up ten years later, as her children are on the staff of a musical summer camp teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. But financial problems soon become the least of their worries when people start being killed (once again with maximum gore) all over the camp. The rest is rather standard slasher material, with kills every few minutes to keep audiences awake (or unimpressed, if they don’t like the genre) until a conclusion that’s slightly better than average for the genre. In between the kills, we have musical sequences (not an easy structural conceit!) – nothing particularly memorable, but enough to establish the film’s dual allegiances. Allie MacDonald is not bad as the plucky final girl, which Meat Loaf seems to have the most fun in a role that’s not particularly glamorous. There’s clearly a novelty to Stage Fright that will interest fans of genre hybridization, and a few cute quirks here and there that show how clever writer-director Jerome Sable can be. But there’s something missing, or a clear limit to how good this blend of elements can be. Perhaps pulled back by the different directions of its inspirations, Stage Fright may be worth a very marginal curious look, but don’t expect much conventional satisfaction no matter which way you approach it.

  • Mitt liv som hund [My Life as a Dog] (1985)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2022) Meh. Big meh. Visible-from-orbit meh. I’m not big on slice-of-life movies in the first place, so it’s hardly surprising that I would have an unimpressed reaction to My Life as a Dog. Taking us back to late-1950s rural Sweden, it’s a film that follows a young boy as he is sent to live with his aunt and uncle while his mother faces a terminal illness. New friends, eccentric characters, grief and obsession about the fate of Laika (sent in orbit without ways of making it back on Earth) are the stuff that the film is made of. Clearly a labour of nostalgia from writer-director Lasse Hallström (who parlayed the film’s unexpected American success into a Hollywood career), the film is amiable, wistful, funny and often far more imaginative than you’d expect. Rather than harp on how I didn’t care all that much for the result, I‘ll let you decide whether this is the kind of film that would interest you, and act accordingly.

  • Le doulos (1962)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2022) I would like to be more appreciative of Le doulos – after all, it’s in a likable genre (French criminal thrillers taking their cues from American noir), directed by the solid Jean-Pierre Melville in one of his most accessible movies, featuring no less than French screen legend Jean-Paul Belmondoin an involving plot of deceit and murder, and it remains very well-regarded even today. Alas, probably due to a quirk of mood or cumulative viewing of other similar films, I can’t muster up much enthusiasm for it. Feeling a lot like many, many very similar films, Le doulos washed over me without finding much purchase. Even writing this review a few days later, I struggle to find much worth noticing, so well does it blend with other more striking movies (even from Melville himself, as Le doulos is chronologically stuck between Bob le flambeur and Le Samourai). That’s not a great review, but don’t fret, French noir fans – I’ve got every intention of revisiting Le doulos eventually, hopefully in a more receptive mood, and report back if anything has changed. After all, it took me two attempts at Bob le Flambeur to get the most of it.