Author: Christian Sauvé

  • Mud (2012)

    Mud (2012)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2014) A coming-of-age drama blended with a crime thriller may not strike anyone as particularly promising movie experience, but thanks to writer/director Jeff Nichols’ savvy, Mud quickly becomes compelling viewing. After two teenage boys discover a fugitive living alone on an abandoned Mississippi island, they get drawn into a dangerous game between his girlfriend, bounty hunters and the adults in their lives. Matthew McConaughey scores another solid post-Lincoln Lawyer role as the titular Mud, a fugitive who ends up fascinating audiences as much as he mesmerizes his two teenage helpers. From a deceptively slow-paced first act, Mud gets wilder and more urgent as it goes on, culminating in a strong shoot-out that settles things for most characters. The sense of place in rural Arkansas is well-presented, and the banter between the two teenage leads is just as well-crafted: At times, the images were powerful enough to strongly remind me of my own teenage antics in rural Quebec. There’s a good heart in this picture, but enough hard edges to avoid it turning into a mawkish collection of clichés. While it may not sound like much of a high-concept on paper, Mud is quite a bit better than expected.

  • Dylan Dog: Dead of Night (2010)

    Dylan Dog: Dead of Night (2010)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2014) Urban fantasy is a hot literary genre, but it seldom works on-screen in a context smaller than a TV series: the work required to set up an entire mythology of creatures running around large cities is significant, and most “supernatural private investigators” usually end up in a series of books, or with their TV show. With low-budget one-offs like Dylan Dog (adapted from an Italian comic book series that I haven’t read and will continue to ignore), the danger is both in repetition and lack of depth: The film feels like a TV series pilot in the way it sets up a familiar underworld of werewolves, vampires and zombies. Which isn’t to say that the film is completely without interest: Some of the world-building bits are clever, and Brandon Routh is quite likable as the square-jawed titular protagonist. (This being said, Sam Huntington gets the film’s best dramatic arc and one-liners as a recently-resurrected zombie who has to cope with his new condition.) Otherwise, Dylan Dog: Dead of Night is weakest in its rote fight sequences and clunky plot mechanics: director Kevin Munroe can’t bring anything new to the private investigation shtick, while the whole “talk to people, visit places to collect clues” rhythm gets a bit tiresome. Fortunately, the New Orleans atmosphere occasionally comes through, and the comedy works better than the horror. As a TV series pilot, Dylan Dog: Dead of Night would have been tolerable. As a standalone film, it’s best appreciated as a wholly generic take on the urban fantasy genre: not too bad if you’re not asking for much more, but nowhere near what a film like this could be.

  • Save the Cat!, Blake Snyder

    Save the Cat!, Blake Snyder

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Michael Wiese, 2005, 195 pages, ISBN 978-1932907001

    If you feel that most Hollywood movies these days all feel the same, well, you may have a point: As a recent Slate article explained, writing for blockbuster movies has become a highly structured process and many writers are following the “beat sheet” as explained in Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat!

    Hollywood, as you may guess, hasn’t waited until recently to codify script-writing. Syd Field’s classic Screenwriting has been telling budding screenwriters what to do since the late seventies (Dared by a friend to “do better”, I wrote two screenplays in the mid-nineties faithfully following Field’s formula), and Robert McKee has been giving his story seminar since the early eighties, leading to a massive book version of his theory, Story, in 1997. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg: in addition to stacks of how-to manuals on bookstore shelves, screenplay-writing seminars are nearly everywhere in Hollywood. Most of them champion strong structure, admonish writers to show rather than tell, emphasise the importance of sympathetic characters and try to impress upon novices the importance of theme.

    But Blake Snyder’s book manages to stand out even in a saturated environment. For one thing, Snyder (unlike Field or McKee) was a working Hollywood screenwriter prior to his death in 2009. His filmed output is admittedly meager (a largely-forgotten 1994 kid’s comedy called Blank Check, and the widely-derided 1992 Sylvester Stallone vehicle Stop! Or my Mom Will Shoot!) but Snyder reliably sold his own original scripts to studios during the nineties “spec craze”. Not coincidentally, Save the Cat! is focused on a single thing: writing a script that sells. Everything else is secondary.

    It also means that everything else is slave to the “write to sell” mantra. In Snyder’s world, there are no surer arbitrators of taste than studio checks and box-office numbers. Save the Cat! memorably goads idealistic cinephiles by dismissing Memento out of hand –the oh-so-wonderful writing gimmick of the film being irrelevant given how little money the film made. (Of course, savvy cinephiles will be prompt to point out that Memento not only made a profitable twenty-five million dollars out of a nine million production budget, but also it led writer Christopher Nolan to a career that now includes four movies having grossed more than two hundred million dollars. But, you know: that’s the art of trolling film nerds.) Snyder, writing from his perspective inside the red-carpeted ivory towers of Hollywood, has little use for art when structure and cute epigrams can do the job.

    Still, it’s easy to be sucked into Save the Cat!‘s focused charm. Snyder writes using more recent examples than either Field or McKee (in a strange coincidence, it even discusses an in-development film, Ride Along, that finally debuted on screens at the same time I was reading the book, nearly ten years after publication), and can rely on a long personal history within Hollywood to give anecdotes and glimpses at the writer’s life. It’s redundant to say that it’s written to sell itself: even non-screenwriters who just want to learn more about the business of writing movies will be entertained by the entire book.

    For those cinephiles not yet ready to let go of the same story-driven idealism that led to oddballs such as Memento, it’s worth wondering if Snyder’s book represents a distillation of all that is wrong with Hollywood. The Slate article mentioned above amply demonstrates what contemporary filmgoers already know: blockbuster screenwriting has become even more formulaic as of late, and Snyder’s “beat sheet”, which specifies the script page on which twists and turns should occur (don’t worry, it’s not new: Field’s theory pretty much had the same prescriptions for acts) is an easy way to sell a story to risk-averse studio executives.

    But as a movie reviewer, I’m not completely outraged by the thought that nearly everyone in Hollywood is using the methods suggested by Blake and others. For one thing, originality is overrated: execution is what matters, and the modern blockbuster is often far more interesting for its action-driven set-pieces than for its overall plot. For another, the structure found in Save the Cat! is a reliable way to ensure at least a minimal level of quality.

    Oh, stop laughing: the beat-sheet structure provides a structural safety net for screenwriters, and while it may process every single premise into a conveyor-belt of similitude, it often prevents far worse material from making it on-screen. I may not share the current craze for all things adapted-from-comic-books, but the truth is that nerd-favorite properties cost a lot of money to film, and if banging out a script according to Blake Snyder’s beat sheet is the way to green-light risky prospects, then we’re better off with competent scripts for actual movies rather than perfect scripts for non-existent films. Furthermore, one suspects that conventional success finances artistic risk-taking. Directors use the profits of a franchise entry to get a green-light for their passion projects, studios take the profits from one comics-adapted blockbuster to finance those mid-budgeted original screenplay. The Dark Knight directly leads to Inception, and we get two awesome films out of the deal.

    So it is that despite Snyder’s monomaniacal drive to sell, I’m not quite ready to dismiss his methods out of hand: Save the Cat! offers a revealing look beyond the scenes of Tinseltown, and I got quite a kick out of it as a film reviewer… even though for a while I may be a touch too competent at spotting the story beats as I see movies unspool. But the magic of movies are that they work even if you know everything about how they were made. So it is that if Hollywood wants to use story scaffolding such as Save the Cat!, then let them knock themselves out: I’ll be waiting to see if the result is worth the trouble no matter the path it took to get there.

  • Freeloaders (2012)

    Freeloaders (2012)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2014) I have some affection for dumb comedies, and that sometimes translates into a satisfied shrug to describe a film that’s objectively bad. So it is with Freeloaders, an unchallenging comedy about a group of moochers forced to move out of a Los Angeles house when their rock-star host decides to sell his home and move to New York. A few episodic sequences ensue, followed by a tackled-on ending that the protagonists don’t really have to work for. Structurally, the script is a mess and the characters barely deserve any sympathy. But if you’re in the mood for this kind of comedy, Freeloaders fits expectations: It’s not meant to be smart, but it has a few celebrity cameos (Olivia Munn has an unflattering walk-on, Denise Richards only has to be nice, while Richard Branson is asked to look bemused) and The Counting Crows’s Adam Duritz, who also produced the film- is the house owner being so kind to the titular freeloaders, ends up concluding the film with a spirited performance of “Hanginaround” that you will be humming for days. Freeloaders features actors doing their best at being likable and lays on the jokes until a few of them sticks. Dave Foley is most remarkable in a heavily self-deprecating role as himself, while Jane Seymour gets a few laughs as a high-powered real estate agent. Otherwise, it’s a bunch of cheap jokes and irresponsible behavior that make up most of the film, with a few ill-advised romantic moments meant to bloat the film up to 77 minutes. Still, it has a bit of charm and charm is often enough to make a difference in low-budget, low-wit comedies. Freeloaders will make you grin if that’s what you’re looking for, but it’s worth remembering that it’s not going to be a particularly good film and that better comedies are likely to be available from the exact same sources that will rent, show or stream this film.

  • Spring Breakers (2012)

    Spring Breakers (2012)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2014) I would really like to dismiss Spring Breakers as just another piece of exploitative trash, badly-shot and hazily written in an attempt to revel in the debauchery of American Spring Break antics. And much of it is exactly that: Written and directed by notorious trash-master Harmony Korine, Spring Breakers does portray, in gritty pseudo-documentary style, the excesses of Spring Break and the depravity of modern teenagers. But only the most obstinate viewers won’t find a few deeper themes and artistic flourishes running throughout the film. The story of four college girls headed to Spring Break and gradually lured into the criminal lifestyle, Spring Breakers does have a few undeniable strengths doing for it. For one thing, it’s hard to avoid noting that despite the rampant and casual nudity of the film, it often resolutely avoids simple exploitation: picking four young women as protagonists with their own agendas partially frees the film from the girls-gone-wild male gaze, and does much to increase the viewer’s uneasiness at the increasingly violent onscreen antics. Spring Breakers is designed to unsettle and play as societal horror, the excesses of the generation heralding an era of unbridled boozed-up nihilism. Scratch a normal college student, seems to suggest Korine, and a crazed criminal will come out, guns blazing. Alarmism at its finest, but the film does manage to become an impressionistic mash-up of ominous flash-forwards, sampled flashbacks and dissonant montages. From the first scene (featuring a pitch-perfect use of Skrillex’s “Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites”, which makes sense given how Skrillex helped score the film), the film makes viewers bounces between the light and dark sides of hedonism, eventually scoring a crime spree to an acappella rendition of Britney Spears’s “Baby, One More Time” before juxtaposing a shootout with innocent flashback narration. Suffice to say that the usual fans of Vanessa Hugens, Selena Gomez and James Franco may be in for a bit of a shock –Franco, in particular, turns in a distinctive performance as a top-dog gangster. None of it is especially easy to watch, but the effect is more powerful than expected. Audiences with weak constitutions may not make it to the end –even seasoned viewers may be tempted to reach for the fast-forward button once in a while. Suffice to say that it’s a memorable viewing experience, even though its merits may be obscured by a lot of surface flash.

  • The Numbers Station (2013)

    The Numbers Station (2013)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2014) I have a minor fondness for minimalist thrillers set in closed-off environments where characters race against the clock to find out important answers, and that’s essentially what The Numbers Station is: aside from one or two scenes of context and denouement, the entire plot works as a theatre piece as characters are stuck inside an isolated station, confronted with a mystery and besieged by enemies. John Cusack has another go at his stock “assassin grows a conscience” role, whereas Malin Akerman isn’t asked to do much as the requisite brainy damsel-in-distress. The plot is by-the-number, but the restricted scope makes it feel a bit more urgent, and while the film clearly takes place in an espionage fantasy-world where the CIA guns down people at will with impunity, it makes good use of stock elements. What’s less fortunate is that much of the computerized screens are nothing more than techno-gobbledygook, and that the limited sets do mean that the film repeats itself even within 90 minutes. Kasper Barfoed’s direction could have used a bit more energy, but the simplicity of the film does have the advantage of leanness. While The Numbers Station won’t find a huge audience, it’s an adequate film compared to other Direct-to-Video offerings, and one that is likely to pleasantly surprise a number of casual viewers.

  • The Colony (2013)

    The Colony (2013)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2014) “It starts snowing… and never stops” is a particularly Canadian nightmare, so it’s no surprise if low-budget Canadian SF/horror film The Colony starts with that premise as an excuse to justify its post-apocalyptic premise. There is some intriguing world-building in depicting self-sufficient underground bunkers, and some of the underlying universe surrounding the Colonies would have been fascinating to explore. Unfortunately, The Colony eventually degenerates into nothing more than a zombie cannibal schlock-fest: couldn’t anything been more interesting than yet another one of those? And yet, The Colony isn’t to be dismissed entirely, mostly for the way it stretches its budget and for the chilling atmosphere it sustains from beginning to middle. Laurence Fishburne and Bill Paxton are the featured actors and do fine work, although their screen presence is more limited than you’d think. Otherwise, there isn’t anything particularly noteworthy here: the meagre plot is dull, derivative and barely manages to be stretched over to nearly 90 minutes. The thrills are familiar, and the conclusion could have used a ray of sunshine. Direct-to-VOD fodder it is.

  • White House Down (2013)

    White House Down (2013)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Video on Demand, January 2014) Director Roland Emmerich is a consummate entertainer, and showing White House Down alongside Olympus Has Fallen, the other great White-House-siege film of 2013, only serves to list why he’s so good at what he does: Good balance between action and humor, clean editing, just-enough character development and a willingness to go insane at appropriate moments… along with self-acknowledgement of outlandish material. The numerous points of comparison between both films only serve to highlight what White House Down does best: Channing Tatum is credible enough as the accidental hero (he’s got confidence without swagger, making him relatable), Jamie Foxx is just fine as a “47th president” clearly modeled after the 44th one, the “threat matrix” idea for the antagonist is ingeniously-executed, the action sequences are vivid without being gory, and the film manages to navigate a tricky line between national symbolism and overblown jingoism. White House Down‘s crowd-pleasing dynamism means that the film as a whole feels like one big competently-executed formula and that’s just fine: the film is easy to watch and enjoy, the only sour note coming late in the conclusion as another wholly-unnecessary antagonist is revealed with a Scooby-Doo-level lack of subtlety. The film is possibly never better than when it acknowledges its own presidential-lawn car chase absurdity with a well-placed “Well, that’s not something you see every day.” –although the “just like in Independence Day” quote comes close. Good turns by numerous supporting players (Maggie Gyllenhaal, Richard Jenkins, James Woods and a remarkable Jason Clarke whose character is best imagined as being exactly “that guy” from Zero Dark Thirty) add just enough to make the film even more enjoyable. While White House Down comes with the usual action-blockbuster caveats (formula all the way, and don’t think too much about it), it’s a remarkably successful example of what it tries to do, and it’s hard to give a better recommendation for this kind of film.

  • Red 2 (2013)

    Red 2 (2013)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Video on Demand, December 2013) The original Red dared to combine aging action stars with quirky comedy and strong action sequences to deliver a film that wasn’t entirely successful, but remained distinctive enough to distinguish itself in a crowded field.  This sequel is slightly improved by a better understanding of how to combine humor with action, and it can dispense with the tedious work of introducing its main characters.  Bruce Willis plays his familiar world-weary tough-guy role, quipping when he’s not exasperated at being thrown once again out of retirement.  Among the returning cast, Helen Mirren is as much fun as ever as a top assassin, while John Malkovich is a bit less crazy (but more sympathetic) this time around, even as Mary Louise Parker furthers her transition from adrenaline junkie to rookie operative.  There’s a fascinating “throwback to the cold war era” atmosphere as the action goes well beyond the borders of the United States and to Europe, with Anthony Hopkins bringing new laughs as a crazed weapons designer and Catherine Zeta Jones earning a few chuckles of her own as a once-fatale assassin.  While the CGI works gets a bit tiresome by the end of the final chase sequence, most of the other action scenes are good enough.  Red 2 doesn’t work on a particularly high level, but it’s adequate and in some ways moves past the whole “retired action heroes” shtick into a post-Cold War plot that seems to grow organically out of the characters’ age.  It works just fine as an unassuming action film, and even a little better as a sequel.

  • We’re the Millers (2013)

    We’re the Millers (2013)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Video on Demand, December 2013) There’s little in We’re the Millers to suggest that it’s more than a middle-of-the-road Hollywood family comedy, but sociologists and policy wonks may be fascinated to note that public acceptance of soft drugs is now high enough that a mainstream Hollywood comedy can feature protagonists smuggling tons of marijuana into the United States without raising much of an eyebrow.  It helps a lot that the film is both broad and amiable enough to soften the blow: Our hero-dealer (Jason Sudeikis, making a career out of playing lovable pushers and likable perverts) is nowhere as bad as the other dealers in the story, and at its core this is a film about misfits building a family together, which pretty much fits Middle-America’s core values.  Not that this is a PG-rated film by any stretch of the imagination: it earns its R rating through copious drug references, sexual content, comic violence and pervasive profanity.  However, We’re the Miller seems almost innocuous compared to some of its gross-out R-rated comic brethrens of a decade ago: it’s never mean-spirited, keeps its wilder references implied rather than demonstrated (for instance, while the entire plot is drug-based, you never see anyone doing drugs) and eventually builds toward the kind of conclusion that everyone can cheer for.  The jokes are numerous enough that some will stick even when others won’t, earning enough chuckles to make the film a success for nearly everyone.  While We’re the Millers may not be as hilarious as it could have been, and suffers from Jennifer Aniston’s bland screen persona (she earns a laugh when revealed as a stripper, but it’s a laugh at her expense –many other actresses could have done quite a bit better in this role), it’s good enough to keep audiences satisfied, and that’s in keeping with the film’s place as a big Hollywood comedy.

  • Tropa de Elite 2: O Inimigo Agora É Outro [Elite Squad 2: The Enemy Within] (2010)

    Tropa de Elite 2: O Inimigo Agora É Outro [Elite Squad 2: The Enemy Within] (2010)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2013) It takes a long while for Elite Squad 2 to get going, but when it does it almost entirely upends the certitudes of its predecessor.  2007’s Elite Squad was a Brazilian action film that took a hard look at the war between favelas drug dealers and the quasi-military police forces fighting them.  After seeing the first film’s brutal display of violence and retribution, anyone could have been forgiven for coming to the conclusion that extreme violence is the appropriate response to impose law and order in violent slums, no matter the price paid in dehumanization.  But writer/director José Padilha is willing to push his vision further.  As Elite Squad 2 begins, our returning narrator, once again played by Wagner Moura, is clearly against those “left-leaning intellectuals and potheads” that are threatening his work in cleaning up the slums.  But the film progressively shifts as the drug dealers are replaced by corrupt policemen working alongside equally-corrupt politicians.  Soon enough, the protagonist finds himself fighting “The System” of protective rackets and excess taxation imposed by the very same people who once got rid of the street dealers.  By the end of the film, he’s forced to make allies with the same left-wing intellectuals he once despised, in an attempt, perhaps ineffective, to fight against his new enemies.  While Elite Squad 2 may be a bit too light on the action and a bit too heavy on the drama (there’s little focus to the script for foreign audiences, as it seems more willing to settle scores within Brazil), it’s certainly admirable for the way it graphically describes a complex system of corruption, shifts allegiances and even unceremoniously kills off a recurring character.  When corruption comes from within, there are no easy answers, and even fewer excuses for a shoot-‘em-up climax.

  • Elysium (2013)

    Elysium (2013)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Video on Demand, December 2013) Writer/Director Neill Blomkamp made a splash in 2009 with his debut feature District 9, an exceptional blend of kinetic thrills and thematic wit.  Elysium may not benefit from the same element of surprise, but it certainly operates in the same vein: Drawing a clear line between impoverished Earth and privileged space station Elysium, the film tackles social issues in an explicit SF setting with gritty aesthetics and impressive action sequences.  Matt Damon is quite credible as a lower-class working man who is forced to become a hero through desperate circumstances while Jodie Foster is perfectly ice-cold as the orbital protector, but it’s Sharlto Copley who steals scenes as a crazed mercenary.  The film’s other unassailable highlight are the action sequences, shot a bit too close, but with a documentary-style dynamism that works pretty well.  In-between clever visual design and various bits of post-cyberpunk plotting, there’s enough here to keep true Science Fiction fans happy.  Unfortunately, Elysium has enough small problems that it seems somewhat less than solid as a whole.  The intention to discuss issues of class, wealth and privilege is laudable (there’s even a historical reference to the mercenary class taking over the rich elites when the barbarians come knocking), but it’s ham-fisted and riddled with inexplicable bits of world building.  Never mind the open-sky design of Elysium or the software-based plot to overthrow the station’s social order: the lack of a shown middle-class to keep the poor in line is historically strange (it can’t be explained solely by robotics), and it would have been nice to see a bit more nuance beyond the Manichean Earth-is-poor-Elysium-is-rich world-building.  The ending makes little logistical sense, and even less political sense –it med-beds are so effective, wouldn’t it be an effective instrument of social control to install them downside?  The problem with Elysium may not be that it’s as nonsensical as most Hollywood SF blockbusters, but that it’s so thematically and visually ambitious that it invites greater scrutiny, and that its world-building isn’t able to sustain more than surface-level contemplation.  (As an aside, I expect that as Hollywood Science-Fiction gets better and smarter -pushed along by, yes, people such as Blomkamp and movies such as Elysium-, the contrast between its stated sophistication and brute-force Hollywood-style plotting will be more and more apparent.)  Elysium is, all things considered, pretty good at what it tries to do.  But it’s missing the extra little bit of credibility that would have vaulted it from merely good to potentially great.

  • World War Z (2013)

    World War Z (2013)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Video on Demand, December 2013) Historically, zombie films were popular because they allowed filmmakers to do big horror on a small budget: Find yourself a secluded location, a few shambling extras and you had yourself a movie.  Now, thanks to the current craze for all thing zombies, a studio can end up spending nearly 200 million dollars to produce a large-scale globe-spanning zombie thriller.  With this budget comes the freedom to do things that haven’t been seen over and over again: a wide-screen takeover of an American downtown; a wider-screen zombie fighting sequence set in a middle-eastern city, and zombies taking over an airplane.  Add to that a rapid opening and two unsettling visual motifs (raining zombies, and people being thrown to the ground by a CGI zombie jumping from the left edge of the screen) and the result is a zombie film that warrants viewing despite the genre’s overexposure.  The quasi-legendary production problem encountered by the film (including star Brad Pitt reportedly not speaking with director Marc Foster and a third act that was completely re-written as the film was shooting, leading to the cutting of an entire large-scale action sequence) are still visible in the more restrained third act, but the result hangs together relatively well, even despite a spectacularly dumb “vaccine” plot running throughout.  Brad Pitt is fine as the hero jack-of-all-trades; he escapes unscathed from the film’s more serious issues.  World War Z (which, perhaps thankfully, has little to do with Max Brooks’s epochal source novel) is best seen as a collection of four big set-pieces rather than a coherent whole.  While one may regret the film’s wasted opportunities to tie those exceptional action sequences to more serious geopolitical themes, as was the case with the original novel, World War Z still manages to fulfill the most basic expectations of viewers, and should be hailed for that.  While we all wait for a tenth-anniversary Blu-Ray edition that will unlock the deleted sequences and detail the film’s production problems, unsatisfied viewers will probably want to go read Brooks’ novel for more context and substance.

  • Warm Bodies (2013)

    Warm Bodies (2013)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2013) Either I’m reaching terminal boredom with the zombie genre or my expectations ran too high for this unusual take on the zombie mythos: Warm Bodies has exceptional qualities, and yet I found myself bored through most of its duration.  On the positive side, Warm Bodies attempts something new(ish) with the zombie genre: Setting up a romance between a zombie guy and a human girl.  Making Johnny Undead sympathetic, of course, requires two complementary strategies: Making our hero more human than zombie, for once, and setting up something-worse-than-regular-zombies for another.  Once you figure out the course of Warm Bodies, though, there isn’t much left to watch: This Romeo-and-Juliet adaptation goes to the expected places, and while it does so with a certain amount of wit, the shambling walk to the next plot point feels overly long.  At least Nichola Hoult is fine as the narrating zombie protagonist, and director Jonathan Levine does the most with his material.  Montréal-area viewers will delight to see a film explicitly set in the city: not only featuring Mirabel airport and the Olympic Stadium, but showcasing a few long-shots of the city as seen from Mont-Royal.  I suspect that my mind may have wandered during Warm Bodies, and that it should work a little better for most.  It remains another quirky entry in the zombie canon, one that shows better than most the inevitable domestication of even our starkest fears.

  • The Family aka Malavita (2013)

    The Family aka Malavita (2013)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Video on Demand, December 2013) Luc Besson’s work over the past dozen years has been frustratingly uneven, so even a run-of-the-mill action comedy can seem like good news.  Co-written and directed by Besson, The Family is about an American mob family being relocalized in deep France and dealing with the local elements before facing down retribution from their past.  Featuring Robert De Niro, Michelle Pfeiffer and Tommy Lee Jones for instant characterization (neither of the three in any way push beyond their usual screen persona, although with De Niro we’re used to the parody aspect), The Family moves along quickly and without a fuss, its comedy occasionally interrupted with a few action sequences.  On paper, it shouldn’t work all that well: The paper-thin justification for the premise is weak, the American characters are borderline sociopaths and the third act hinges on a coincidence so massive that the film spends a solid three minutes establishing it.  That it does work is a testimony to the talent of the actors, the skill of the director and the unassuming lack of pretension for the entire film.  It ends a bit abruptly and leaves many subplots dangling, but The Family seems like a return to form for Besson: Not only is he directing after repeatedly announcing his retirement, but many of his most unpleasant writing tics seem to have been swept under the rug for once.  The result is good enough for a few dark laughs.