Author: Christian Sauvé

  • Admission (2013)

    Admission (2013)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2013) While it’s refreshing to see a comedy avoid the usual formula for the genre, Admission risks audience sympathies by doing its own off-beat thing.  The unusual choices made by the script and director Paul Weitz (who’s done quite a bit better in the past) may be explained by it being an adaptation of a novel, but once it becomes clear that Admission is not going to play by the usual rules of film comedy, much of the film becomes predictable and so is the resignation that it will withhold a complete release.  Still, there is a lot to like here: the look at competitive college admission procedures may feel odd to this Canadian viewer, but it’s interesting, and the quasi-satiric look at academia is good for a few laughs.  As leads, Tina Fey and Paul Rudd are at their usual most charming selves, with a remarkable supporting turn by Lily Tomlin.  It’s amiable enough, and the film does try hard to be something more than a generic romantic comedy.  Still, there’s a sense of missed opportunities, of watered-down comedy and intentional misdirection here that makes it hard to wholeheartedly endorse.  Admission will certainly do as a good-enough film, but there are certainly funnier, more heartfelt choices out there.

  • Furious 6 aka Fast & Furious 6 (2013)

    Furious 6 aka Fast & Furious 6 (2013)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Video on Demand, December 2013) I am unapologetic about my enthusiastic love for this series ever since the first 2001 installment: I’m not much of a car guy, but I love the blend of action, machines, and humor that the series offers.  Fast Five was a notable pivot in that it took the series away from strict street-racing action (no more girl-on-girl kissing!) towards globe-trotting heists and adventure, with considerable broadening of the franchise’s appeal.  Now Furious Six capitalizes on this shifting dynamic, and takes audiences to Europe in the search for bigger and better action scenes.  The highlight is a highway sequence that pits muscle cars against a tank, leading to a climax set on a massive cargo plane rolling down a seemingly endless runway.  With “vehicular warfare” (oh yeah), we are far from the Los Angeles street-racing origins of the series and yet not that far, given how the series has adopted “family” as an overarching theme and eventually manages to bring back everything to the humble neighborhood where it all began.  Fast and Furious 6 successfully juggles a fairly large ensemble cast, while giving a big-enough spotlight to series superstars Vin Diesel and Paul Walker, with able supporting turns by Dwayne Johnson and a spot for newly-resurrected Michelle Rodriguez.  The script is more blunt than subtle (the ham-fisted dialogues really bring nothing new to the film) and the direction could be a bit less tightly focused so to let the action scenes breathe, but for existing fans of the series, this is nothing except another successful entry.  There are even a few jokes thrown in: The street-racing sequence is introduced by Crystal Method’s circa-2001 “Roll it Up”, while Johnson not only gets at least two jokes referencing his wrestling background (mentioning “The Walls of Jericho” and a final tag-team fighting move with Vin Diesel) but also a few Avengers shout-outs in-between “working for Hulk”, “Captain America” and “Samoan Thor”.  By the post-credit end, the film not only straightens out the series timeline to include Tokyo Drift, but introduce a wonderful bit of casting in time for the next installment.  It’s going to be a bit of a wait until the next film…

  • The Lone Ranger (2013)

    The Lone Ranger (2013)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Video on Demand, December 2013) On paper, it’s clear that The Lone Ranger tries to replicate the surprise success of the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy: Same star (Johnny Depp), producer (Jerry Bruckheimer) and director (Gore Verbinski), along with two screenwriters (the Elliott/Rossio duo) and the hundred-plus other crew that the movies share.  Once again, we go back in time for thrilling adventures, lavish action sequences, more than two hours’ worth of stuff and an off-kilter supporting character played by Johnny Depp that ends up overshadowing the so-called protagonist.  It’s very familiar, and it’s partly why The Lone Ranger feels like such a slight disappointment.  There is, for one thing, a bit too much of everything: The 149-minutes running time feels more bloated than generous, with numerous side-stories that don’t do anything to further a focused plot.  Even the fantastic action scenes, as detail-oriented as they are conceived, can’t escape a certain lassitude past their halfway mark.  I can’t help but blame Verbinski for a failure to tighten up the film and even up the tone: The Lone Ranger often loses itself momentarily in side-scenes that don’t bring much, indulges in a far grimmer tone than expected (gee… Eating a heart? Genocide twice?) and the framing device isn’t good for much more than a few unreliable-narrator gags.  While Depp does fine as Tonto, his character’s eccentricities seem more studied than fascinating, and by the time his Big Trauma is explained, viewers may be tempted to shrug and motion for the film to move along.  This being said, there is something grand and wonderful about truly-big-budget filmmaking: It seems as if every penny has been spent on-screen, with careful period recreations even in the most fleeting scenes, to say nothing of the extravagant craft with which the action sequences have been put together.  The two train action sequence that bookend the film are worth seeing for anyone who appreciates the kind of big action beats that only hundred of SFX technicians can deliver.  While the film isn’t particularly good, it’s nowhere near a disaster, and it’s sad that Armie Hammer’s career may suffer from the film’s lack of financial success: he’s likable enough in the lead role, and anyone who maintains that this among the year’s worst clearly hasn’t seen enough films yet.  The Lone Ranger has plenty of visual delights, even if it could have benefitted from a few judicious trims at the screenplay level. 

  • Indie Game: The Movie (2012)

    Indie Game: The Movie (2012)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2013) I may not have gamed seriously in a while, but I’m still sympathetic to the scene, and films such as Indie Game: The Movie are a good reminder that, even as the Gaming industry has grown large enough to create thousand-employees monsters such as Call of Duty or Grand Theft Auto, there is still a place for the independent game creator, especially now at a time when digital distribution makes it easier than ever to reach an appreciative public.  While the creators of Indie Game have, I’m told, interviewed a large number of independent gaming scene creators and pundits during development, the finished film focuses on four creators: Phil Fish of Fez, Edmund McMillen and Tommy Refenes of Super Meat Boy, and the irreplaceable Jonathan Blow of Braid fame.  (Confession: While I have Steam keys for both Super Meat Boy and Braid, Braid is the only one of those games I played before my voluntary hiatus away from the gaming scene began in late 2011.) By focusing on three games (well, really only two, since Jonathan Blow is featured mostly as an accomplished veteran –the others are fighting it out with their development as the documentary is shot), Indie Game is able to tell heartfelt stories of creators struggling with the practical realities of business even as they aim to provide a transcendent experience.  Two interviewees openly equate non-development to literal death (as in: “I will kill myself if the game is never released.”), while the financial, emotional and romantic toll of protracted development is starkly shown.  While Indie Game eschews overt narration, subtitles provide just enough context to make the film accessible to anyone not steeped in community lore, and the film thankfully provides a third-act moment in which we are reminded that games are still largely about fun.  Cleverly put together by Canadian filmmakers Lisanne Pajot and James Swirsky (with bit of help from their Kickstarter friends), Indie Game is an heartfelt, revelatory and compelling look at a very particular field of human expression in which individuals still put their health, fortune and emotional sanity on the line in order to provide an entertainment experience for other people.  The film is perhaps most wonderful when it taps into this vein of creativity and doggedness that make independent game-making so different from more corporate creations.  It’s a blend of exotic technical know-how, absolute dedication and straight-up mania.  Though I would have wished for broader commentary on the field, the choice to focus on a few creators makes for dramatic viewing.  All have interesting things to say (I have rarely found Jonathan Blow less than fascinating on-line: it’s a treat to see him on-camera in a similar mode), and their struggles in bringing those games to release day are worth telling.  Fascinated viewers should hit Wikipedia immediately after Indie Game to find out what then happened to the games and creators… so far.

  • Everything or Nothing (2012)

    Everything or Nothing (2012)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2013) As an officially-sanctioned history of the first fifty years of the James Bond film franchise, Everything or Nothing: The Untold Story of 007 is satisfying: Through a mixture of talking heads, narration, archival footage and clips from the movies themselves, the film cobbles together a highlight reel of the franchise’s distinct eras, behind-the-scenes upheavals, cultural impact and passing whims.  Its single best asset is in featuring all Bonds (except for Sean Connery, for reasons that quickly become obvious) reflecting upon their tenure as Bond and the reasons behind their exit from the franchise.  George Lazenby rebelling from The Establishment? Pierce Brosnan cackling over kite-surfing a tsunami?  Entertaining stuff.  But this overview of the franchise’s history only skims the surface, and no amount of good words from Bill Clinton himself can fully explore the infighting between the Broccoli family and legal challengers to the Bond franchise, or the various issues faced by the filmmakers in shooting Bond movies.  It’s also curiously quick to dispense with entire eras of the Bond franchise, some movies barely earning a mention.  (It’s also inevitably flawed in having been released alongside Skyfall, a Bond film that will stand on its own as worthy of further discussion in later retrospectives.)  The film isn’t above a bit of mythmaking (I’m not sure that the Fleming novels were as innovative as the narration makes them out to be), and for its entire often-surprising candor, it remains an authorized documentary that doesn’t dare criticize the official version of events.  While an entertaining and superbly-edited film, Everything or Nothing is most likely to make viewers do two things, neither of which are entirely bad: First up, make everyone see the Bond films over again.  Second: have them look for a more detailed and more objective history of the franchise, if only to more fully explore elements barely mentioned within the confines of a 90-minutes documentary.

  • Mars et Avril [Mars and April] (2012)

    Mars et Avril [Mars and April] (2012)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, December 2013) As a French-Canadian Science-fiction fan, shouldn’t I be thrilled to see a French-Canadian Science-fiction movie for once?  Well, putting aside the fact that there have been French-Canadian SF movies before (from 1989’s Dans le Ventre du Dragon to 2004’s Dans une Galaxie Près de Chez Vous (and sequel) to 2005’s Saints-Martyrs-des-Damnés to 2008’s Hunting Grounds, among others), I’m reminded of the old cynical observation about getting what you’d wished for: While Mars et Avril is, I think, the first decently-budgeted SF film to tackle a future vision of Montreal with the visual polish you’d expect from a modern SF film, it’s hobbled with a number of idiosyncratic ideas that don’t make sense.  It’s deeply weird even by the standards of the genre: whether it’s musicians playing instruments based on body parts, the worst set of teleportation engineering imaginable, musings on whether Mars is real or not, or a climax in which a character may or may not disappear in his own imagination, Mars et Avril benefits and suffers writer/director Martin Villeneuve’s strong artistic passions.  It frequently looks great, to the point where it’s hard to believe it was made with a budget barely above two million dollars, but it also exists in a dreamlike universe where it’s difficult to reconcile the film with reality as we know it.  From a boring hard-SF perspective, Mars et Avril is a string of nonsense loosely connected together, with dumb plot points, a non-cohesive vision of the future and a story that may best be described as fantastical rather than well-plotted.  On the other hand, I’m having a hard time working up more than a slight annoyance at the result.  Noted pop-philosopher Jacques Languirand is an inspired choice as the melancholic protagonist of the film, while there’s some good work by Paul Ahmarani and Robert Lepage in supporting roles.  The star, though, remains Martin Villeneuve: while I may not care for the haziness of his vision, he has managed to do what has eluded many French-Canadian filmmakers so far: he has put it up on-screen in all of its flawed glory, and dared everyone else to do as well as he did.  If nothing else, this makes Mars et Avril a landmark of sorts.  I just wish the next attempt at a big bold French-Canadian SF film will take place into something more closely approximating our own reality.

  • The Last Stand (2013)

    The Last Stand (2013)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2013) Fast cars and big guns are near-essential ingredients of B-grade action films, and if nothing else, The Last Stand doesn’t try to camouflage its high-concept plot devices.  There’s a crazed Mexican druglord high-tailing it to Mexico with a fast car, and there are plucky heroes who literally stand in his way.  The entire film leads to its final confrontation, and it’s the kind of structure that’s ideally suited to a low-budget action film.  The Last Stand is most notable for being Arnold Schwarzenegger’s first starring role in a decade (you may recall him as acting as California’s governor during that time), and it’s an adequate return to form for him: his role is generally (despite the usual action-hero heroics) age-appropriate, and while he stars, he doesn’t hog all of the spotlight.  Much of the film is forgettable, though: the night-time action scenes blur together, while the engaging cornfield climax leads to an overlong bridge fistfight.  While The Last Stand remains well-directed enough (by acclaimed South Korean director Kim Jee-Woon in his American debut) to hover comfortably above most direct-to-video titles, it’s not special enough to warrant more than an evening’s easy entertainment.  It would have been nice to see something a bit more ambitious.

  • The Call (2013)

    The Call (2013)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2013) I wasn’t expecting much from this low-budget serial-killer thriller, and while The Call doesn’t quite escape the confines of its chosen genre, it does have one or two high-concept moments that make its first hour worthwhile.  The chosen focus on 911 responders is novel, and the way the script uses the limits of the caller/responder link to set up a lengthy car chase sequence is the kind of stuff fit to rejoice even the most jaded thriller fan.  Halle Berry and Abigail Breslin are both initially sympathetic as (respectively) the responder and kidnapped caller, while director Brad Anderson seems to be able to wring the most out of his low production budget.  The highlight of The Call has to be the titular call, a lengthy sequence in the middle of the film where the kidnapped victim, stuck in the trunk of a car, dials 911 and tries to piece together clues as to where she is, where she is headed and who her kidnapper may be.  It’s a sequence with twists and turns and clever little moment and sadly it ends well before the film does.  Inevitably (for so are Hollywood thriller written), the character played by the lead actress has to inject herself in the action, go investigate on the ground, find clues that trained investigators have missed, go into a lair without calling for backup, and execute vigilante justice with a heavy side-order of sadism.  The Call would be a far better film without its trite and unpleasant last act –too bad that the screenwriter couldn’t recognize that the script’s best assets would be undermined by a conventional end sequence.  But so it goes with the Hollywood theory of converging premises: No matter how original the set-up, it usually ends up with a female hero facing down a serial killer in a basement. 

  • The Watch (2012)

    The Watch (2012)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2013) This may be the fifteenth alien-invasion film in the past four years, but it’s certainly one of the most inconsequential. As a peaceful suburban community hosts an imminent alien invasion beachhead, the mysterious death of a Costco™ security guard prompts a few post-adolescent males to gang up into a neighborhood watch in order to catch the killer.  Part Costco™ product placement, part adult male fantasy fulfillment, part more-of-the-usual from Vince Vaugh, Ben Stiller and Jonah Hill, The Watch never hesitates to reach for the lowest-common-denominator joke when it’s within reach, and the result feels as immature as you’d think.  For all of the premise’s potential, and occasional good work from either Stiller or scene-stealing from relative British newcomer Richard Ayoade, The Watch quickly finds its level by allowing Vaughn and Hill to wallow in their usual screen persona (or, more fairly, in Vaughn’s usual man-child character and Hill’s early aggressive-teen shtick.)  It should work for anyone who already likes that stuff; otherwise, it’s just a dreary way to go from one plot point to the next, leading all the way to the Costco™ store showdown.  (The product placement is even more blatant considering that in order to shoot the film they had to convert a closed-down store into a Costco™.)  From a Science-Fictional perspective, The Watch is hollow: it doesn’t have a single new idea to offer, and merely treats the alien invasion as a plot-driver for juvenile comedy.  From a comic perspective, the film has little more to offer, but it does land a chuckle or two.  Alas, it feels compelled to insert a few scenes of a more serious emotional nature in the middle of the dumb jokes, creating more forced atonality.  Perhaps the most intellectual thing The Watch has to offer is a not-so-unwitting study of the modern American suburban male’s uneasiness: Which SUV-driving North-American doesn’t dream of killing dangerous foreigners, punching their daughter’s creepy boyfriend, being invited to secret orgies, increasing their sperm count and earning the macho respect of authority figures?  If you don’t share those obsessions, well, The Watch may feel a bit long.

  • Killer Joe (2011)

    Killer Joe (2011)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2013) Matthew McConaughey’s recent career renewal has been a beautiful thing to watch ever since The Lincoln Lawyer and it reaches an apogee of sorts here within this pitch-black Texan crime thriller.  Though sometimes billed as a comedy, Killer Joe is more lurid than funny, as it features a deeply dysfunctional family plotting to kill for purely monetary gains.  Complications more than ensue when an implacable hit-man (McConaughey, deliciously evil) is brought in to execute the plan, and when the money goes missing.  Twisted, sordid, at times asphyxiating, Killer Joe is not pure entertainment as much as it’s watching a train-wreck in motion.  Sometimes in very slow motion, as the theatrical roots of Tracy Letts’ script show up most visibly in a series of lengthy dialogue-heavy scenes.  (You may hear about the fried-chicken scene and you may think you’re ready to see it as just one more thing in your jaded filmgoer’s experience, but you’re not.)  While Killer Joe ends a bit too early to earn a satisfying pay-off, there’s no denying the skill with which veteran director William Friedkin puts together the film, or the talent of the actors having fun with their slummy characters.  Emile Hirsch is particularly credible as a dim-witted wannabe hustler who gets outplayed by everyone, while Gina Gershon gets the least-glamorous role as the fried-chicken-gobbler. (And now I feel dirty for having written this, and I haven’t even mentioned the twisted sex-slavery plot device.)  Unpleasant yet fascinating, crafty and exploitative at once, Killer Joe may best be considered as showing how far McConaughey has gone from his beach-bum rom-com persona… and how good he is at playing dark.

  • 500 Essential Cult Books: The Ultimate Guide, Gina McKinnon

    500 Essential Cult Books: The Ultimate Guide, Gina McKinnon

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Sterling, 2010, 384 pages, C$20.00 pb, ISBN 978-1-402-77485-0

    If you’ve come here for a detailed, well-argued review of Gina McKinnon’s 500 Essential Cult Books: The Ultimate Guide, then prepare to be disappointed, because I’m going to use the book as an excuse to blather on The State of My Reading Habits circa 2013.

    A bit of a recap may be in order: For most of my life, I’ve considered myself at the far end of the reading bell-curve.  I scoffed at those 50-books-a-year blogging challenges: At my peak, I could knock off between 250 and 300 books per year and review a hundred of them thanks to a quiet single life and a lengthy bus commute.  That gradually stopped once I got married, became a father and moved dramatically closer to my place of employment.  As a result, I’m going to close 2013 having read fewer than thirty books –most of those late at night, on a handheld device while sitting in the smallest room of the house.  Things change!

    So you can imagine my mixture of delight and bitterness at receiving, as a birthday gift from my sister, 500 Essential Cult Books: The Ultimate Guide.  Oh sure: Rub some salt in those wounds, won’t you?  I’m already complaining that I read a tenth of what I read before, and now here are more reading suggestions?  Well-played, sister.  Enjoy your pre-mothering days.  We’ll talk again in a few years.

    My first impulse was to throw the book into one of the dozen boxes where my “to-read” pile has come to roost following The Great Household Move of 2013.  But 500 Essential Cult Books had a few things going for it: An attractive visual design, bite-sized text snippets describing the titular 500 books, and an appeal to my inner bean-counter: How many of those essential cult books had I actually read?  (As it turns out: roughly 111, although I’d like to claim half-credit for roughly 30 more due to having either seen the movie or read abridged versions.)

    So I packed the book in my work bag and resolved to read a little bit of it every day at the office while my workstation was booting up, or during those inevitable downtimes where I was stuck between a few minutes to waste and a good book at hand.  It took two months to make it from one cover to another, but I did… and that feels like a victory in itself.

    The most obvious comment about 500 Essential Cult Books is that McKinnon’s definition of a cult book is quite expansive, in both the best and not-so-best sense.  If you’re particularly picky, describing The Da Vinci Code as a cult book will strike you as nonsense: How can a massively successful book, mainly read by people who hadn’t picked up a suspense novel in years, even qualify as cult?  But McKinnon’s argument is solid: the novel has inspired an unusual devotion amongst its readership, leading to countless spinoff books, tourism tours and passionate commentary –not to mention the movie adaptation.  (As an aside; a significant proportion of those 500 cult books have been adapted to the big screen –a clear indicator of a readership passionate enough to risk the vagaries of moviemaking) So it goes –if you prefer, call McKinnon’s book “500 books that inspired a lot of people” and drop the “cult” as inconvenient shorthand.

    Otherwise, there’s a lot to like about the breadth and variety of the books that McKinnon has selected.  She gets to pick works originally written in other languages than English, has no trouble mixing fiction and non-fiction, seems to enjoy graphic novels as much as I do, and subdivides the book in categories (“Incredible Worlds”, “Thrilling Tales”, “Inner Spirits”) that are more suggestive than restrictive.  Each book gets a plot summary, a critical commentary and further reading suggestions, and if it all feels a bit short, her list of 500 titles is broad enough to reach anyone and everyone.  If nothing else, it’s a far more entertaining set of “read this” recommendations than yet another attempt at canon-making: McKinnon is positively joyous in suggesting the kind of oddball and unusual titles that earn devotion rather than mere respect.  So it is that as I made my way through the book, my nods at “yeah, I read that and it deserves to be on the list” were followed by a number of “Oooh, that sounds interesting and I want to read that”. 

    That last, obviously, is a harder sell now than it used to be: long gone are the days where I could just order a dozen books on Amazon and dispose of them in a few weeks, or embark on a year-long massive reading project.  I have bought fewer than half a dozen books for myself in 2013, and given the sheer amount of stuff to be done around the house alongside an active toddler, I’m not foreseeing 2014 as being any less punishing than 2013 in terms of free time left for reading.

    But I am exactly where I want to be in my life, and far wiser avid readers have assured me that it’s normal and expected for everything else to pause while raising young children.  To risk an old cliché, I’ve learned quite a bit more this year caring for a little person than I’ve gotten from the books I would have read otherwise, and there’s no way I’d be tempted to trade the experience.  Those 500 books will still be there, just as intact and fascinating, once I get a bit more time; isn’t that the best thing about reading?

  • The Baytown Outlaws (2012)

    The Baytown Outlaws (2012)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2013) I’m becoming increasingly fond of the small-scale gems that emerge from the muck of Cable TV movie channels, and The Baytown Outlaws pretty much qualifies as such.  It’s not a big, profound or even all that clever film, but it’s executed with a decent amount of energy and skill.  It helps that the tone of the film is the kind of snarky crime/comedy/action hybrid that I can watch all day long.  Here, Billy Bob Thornton and Eva Longoria slum a bit as (respectively) a crime lord and his abused ex-girlfriend who hires three vigilante anti-heroes to rescue her godson from him.  The plot is slight, but the incidents along the way are certainly off-beat, ranging from a killer group of prostitutes, road pirates and native bikers.  The Baytown Outlaws is anarchic, scattered, cartoonish (sometime literally so, to good effect) and morally off-center, but it’s also steadily amusing as what it does.  Writer/director Barry Battles clearly stretches his modest budget beyond what could have been expected from such a production.  Best seen as part of the grind-house exploitation sub-genre, The Baytown Outlaws exceeds expectations, and that alone distinguishes it from most little-known movies that show up on cable TV alongside the most familiar titles.

  • Monster Brawl (2011)

    Monster Brawl (2011)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2013) This “film” isn’t any good, but at least it gets points for monster-movie homage, unorthodox narrative structure and cost-effectiveness.  A low-low budget Canadian production, Monster Brawl is less a movie than an attempt to put horror monsters into a 90-minutes wrestling brawl special: Eight monsters battle it out until only one is left, and everything else is context… which is to say filler.  Much of the filmmaker’s cleverness is spent stretching their reported 200,000$ budget to accommodate eight distinctive monsters and moody brawling pit.  (The graphic design work of the film is pretty good, though, as so is Lance Henriksen’s God-voiced video-game narration.)  Color commentators, either taken from the wrestling world or clearly inspired by WWE specials, add very little to the proceedings: While it’s fun to see Dave Foley in just about anything, he doesn’t get much to do but simulate inebriation and spout sports-commentator clichés.  The problem with Monster Brawl is that the fights are dull and everything surrounding them is even duller: The fleeting attempts at a narrative framework are undermined by a conclusion that cuts away without resolving anything or providing satisfactory closure.  The acting isn’t particularly good, although the make-up makes up for it somewhat.  With a decent budget and more imaginative writers, this could have been quite a bit better.  But failing that, and given the above, it goes without saying that if you’re not a fan of wrestling and/or monster-movies, then there’s little of interest in Monster Brawl.  Trust me; I’m one of you and I just checked on your behalf. 

  • The Host (2013)

    The Host (2013)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2013) I read Stephenie Meyer’s The Host shortly after publication five years ago, but while I recall buying, reading and eventually giving away the book, I recall almost nothing from the novel beyond “romantic twaddle featuring parasite aliens and teenage love triangles”.  As it turns out, this also describes the film pretty well: While The Host features body-riding aliens having taken over Earth in a fit of benevolent eradication, there’s no real science-fiction to be found here: no extrapolation beyond base sentimental melodrama, no extrapolative surprises, no real world-building.  It’s not really surprising to see Meyer stick close to what made Twilight such a runaway young-adult success; it’s what she presumably knows and does best –but the real bitter disappointment here is seeing writer/director Andrew Niccol waste his time and energy by slumming in a framework so far away from his cerebral track record: The Host needs a lot of sloppy romanticism to work, but Niccol seems to have far more sympathy for the gleaming-chrome cleanliness of the aliens than for the messy humans in the story.  That’s fine (I liked the aliens better than the human as well), but when it’s played straight it means an interminable and somewhat silly film.  Saoirse Ronan does as well as she can with the material she has (and it’s a measure of her potential that her reputation as a fine actress will survive this film intact), but The Host is a clear example of how some aspects of a novel don’t survive the literalisation process of the movie medium: Having a protagonist engage in internal dialogue works fine on the page, but just sounds silly on-screen.  Saying that the film is aimed at teenage girls sort of misses the point given how many car crashes are crammed in a story that didn’t even have any on the page.  Some of the details are mildly entertaining (the cars, the ultra-generic “store”, the mirror-powered cavern fields) but there’s little else to lift the film above its basic problems: The dialogue is bland (try reading the IMDB quotes page and try not to fall asleep), most of the young men of the cast can’t be told apart, the story doesn’t go anywhere interesting once it becomes obvious that Meyer’s intent is far too nice (“You’ve been doing it all wrong!” our protagonist says of the alien-removing effort, “You need to do it with love!”).  Give me a year, and I’m pretty sure I will remember nothing more from The Host as a film than I do from the novel.

  • The Frozen Ground (2013)

    The Frozen Ground (2013)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Video on Demand, December 2013) There isn’t much about The Frozen Ground’s script that’s in any way special.  Based on the sordid story of Alaskan serial killer Robert Hansen, this is a film that does the usual serial-killer thriller in more or less the expected fashion.  Much of the execution is equally bland: Newcomer writer/director Scott Walker is entirely too fond of shaky camera tight close-ups and the result can be a bit annoying.  But location and casting both manage to raise this B-grade thriller to a level that’s worth watching.  Most noteworthy here is Nicolas Cage as the lead investigator: For once, he dispenses with the usual Cage histrionics in order to deliver a far more measured performance, and the result is an interesting throwback to early-era Cage, before he started playing a grander-than-life himself in every role.  (Make no mistake: I love operatic “nouveau shamanic” Cage, but the occasional change of tone is nice.)  It isn’t the only against-type casting coup of the film, as the repellant antagonist is played by John Cusack (far best known for smart good-guy roles) while Vanessa Hudgens, moving farther away from her earliest squeaky-clean roles, plays the vulnerable victim who is the key to breaking the antagonist’s secrets.  The Frozen Ground’s other big asset is location: by setting itself in cold dreary Alaska, the film gains a distinctive visual atmosphere, and seems to crank up the tension of the events a notch further.  The most satisfying scenes come late in the movie, as a subdued Cage and a wily Cusack face off against each other in an interrogation room.  None of those strengths make The Frozen Ground any better than a run-of-the-mill thriller, but they help make the film more memorable than another cursory effort at the serial-killer sub-genre.