Author: Christian Sauvé

  • Krush Groove (1985)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2022) Joining films such as Beat Street and Wild Style in chronicling the early days of hip-hop, Krush Groove takes us to early-1980s New York City to follow a music promoter (loosely inspired by Russell Simmons) trying to cope with increased attention. The featured acts here include Run-D.M.C., Beastie Boys, LL Cool J and The Fat Boys (among others), with plenty of incidental period details to make it more interesting. The film is executed in a relatively unobtrusive fashion, with acceptable early-1980s technical credentials and an unobtrusive directing style from Michael Schultz, who wisely leaves the spotlight on the performers. The plot is not bad, but the film’s reason for existing is found in the various musical numbers that pepper the film, energetically showing a burgeoning scene and its participants. Fans of 1980s hip-hop are sure to love Krush Groove—for everyone else, it’s a document capturing a unique era in pop-culture history.

  • Buck Privates (1941)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2022) Considering the flood of propaganda films that Hollywood churned out in the early 1940s, it’s almost a surprise to find out that the Abbott and Costello army comedy Buck Privates is technically a pre-war film: entirely produced and released months before the attack on Pearl Harbor that precipitated the United States’ entry into the war, it nonetheless could anticipate the direction things were going in Europe. (Indeed, there were two more military-themed Abbott and Costello movies before the end of 1941, covering the Navy and the Air Force.)  That’s for the geopolitical context—as for the comedy, well, you’ll be on familiar grounds if you’ve seen other movies from that pair: a mixture of verbal and physical comedy adapted from their years performing on the stage. It’s decently funny, and a way to see some of the classic routines captured on film. You also get to see the Andrew Sisters perform a few songs, which is a nice bonus. Otherwise, there’s not much more to say: if you like Abbott/Costello, then you know what to expect with Buck Privates.

  • Jupiter’s Darling (1955)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2022) The next time you witness a big-budget Hollywood film crash and burn on a mixture of hubris and bad ideas, remember that Hollywood’s history is littered with expensive what-were-they-thinking flops. Today’s timeless example is Jupiter’s Darling, a movie musical taking place… during Hannibal’s advance toward Rome. Featuring aqua-darling Esther Williams. With painted elephants. I’m not making any of this up. Clearly drunk on the historical epic craze of the mid-1950s and bereft of anyone asking if this was really a good idea, Jupiter’s Darling simply defies comprehension. At that point in her career, Williams was clearly not willing to dive in the pool as often… but audiences then and now still had expectations, and so the aquatic numbers in Jupiter’s Darling feel useless, padding a lengthy-feeling picture even longer. George Sanders has a small role, but his singing scenes were reportedly cut in editing. It’s not a good movie, but perhaps more damningly, it’s not a terribly memorable one either: it’s badly conceived, but executed with enough professionalism that it doesn’t become terrible. All in all, it’s more boring than anything else, and that’s perhaps the worst of it. Apparently conceived as a satire, Jupiter’s Darling doesn’t come across as such: it feels like a misfire. Who authorized such a thing? Well, the result is still there for contemplation decades later.

  • The Velvet Touch (1948)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2022) Aside from a leading performance from the ever-reliable Rosalind Russell, there really isn’t much to say about film noir The Velvet Touch. It does start on a promising note, as our heroine accidentally kills her producer, and the film then (through flashbacks) takes noir archetypes to the Broadway circuit. As usual for the genre, there is a very comforting quality in tackling murder and mayhem in the late-1940s context: it’s dark and suspenseful enough to be interesting, but you know that there are limits to how far the film will go. Executed as slickly as most of its contemporaries, it tries to go beyond the sordid crime story to tackle the neuroses of an actress pursuing dramatic fulfillment. The fusion of noir themes and Broadway backdrop works well in bringing together two of Hollywood’s most enjoyable subgenres, but The Velvet Touch can’t quite sustain the expectations created by its premise. The dialogue is triter, not quite as hard-boiled as it should be, and the conclusion can be inferred from the aforementioned limits of Classic Hollywood. Sydney Greenstreet does turn in one of his last performances here as a dogged policeman on the case, and he’s the one with the best lines as the film wraps up. Not terrible, not exceptional, The Velvet Touch may work better as comfort material for viewers wanting a bit of crime in their Broadway stories or a bit of Broadway in the noir films.

  • Thousands Cheer (1943)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2022) Hollywood propaganda musicals were a surprisingly robust subgenre in 1942–1945 and you can easily picture why: From a production standpoint, it meant that studios could get away with a threadbare story to focus on a string of guest appearances by musicians, comedians and other entertainers. From an exhibitor’s perspective, it meant solid revenue from people interested in a variety show featuring some of the era’s better-known names. From a propagandist’s point of view, it meant an uplifting film celebrating American values and promoting the war without being depressingly about the war. (Also: Buy your war bonds today!) For overseas soldiers, it meant an easy-to-watch film featuring songs, music and cute girls without the burden of complex plotting and unpleasant issues. For modern historians, well, it means that those films captured in high resolution and audio fidelity some timeless and ephemeral entertainers alike. Thousands Cheer is perhaps more interesting in that it’s not the best of such films. It’s certainly not timeless, and its selection of stars is not immortal. Perhaps more significantly, it’s a film where nearly everyone brought their B-game, maybe even their C-game: even known names aren’t quite as interesting as they are in other films, and the entire production has the feel of an afterthought, made to answer concerns far removed from artistic quality. But as I’ve mentioned a few times before, the best representation of an era is not found in the timeless classics as much as the more ordinary material unconsciously reflecting life as it was. There are two halves to Thousands Cheer—a romantic melodrama about two young people trying to achieve their dreams, and a show being put on for soldiers. While Kathryn Grayson and Gene Kelly (in a largely, but not entirely dramatic role) make for likable romantic leads, the second half of the film relegates them to supporting roles in order to feature the MGM stars on display during the show. Kelly’s presence here is not wasted, as he performs a well-known routine with a mop—but despite an amazing cast, the impact of the rest of the film remains muted. Eleanor Powell shows up to tap-dance (in colour!), Kay Kyser and crew have a bit of orchestral fun, Virginia O’Brien sings a typically oddball take, Lena Horne is typically solid, Red Skelton showboats, pianist-conductor José Iturbi makes his first of many film appearances and there’s some space for Judy Garland, Lucille Ball and Mikey Rooney to do their thing. Rooney’s shtick has not aged well at all with the aggressive catcalling, but remember what I said about ordinary films being better representatives of their times. Despite this amazing cast, Thousands Cheer remains stubbornly second-rate: It’s certainly enjoyable—especially if you already know who these people are—but the result feels like outtakes from better films of the time. Still, audiences have been happy with the result, and we twenty-first century viewers can revel in the film’s colour capture of some early-1940s legends.

  • Paris Blues (1961)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2022) Few filmographies are as rock-solid as Sidney Poitier’s work in the 1960s, and Paris Blues is certainly a great, if lesser-known, entry in the list. Like a few other Hollywood films of the time, it goes overseas to make a point about American racism—this time to Paris, where two expatriate best buddies (played by Poitier and Paul Newman) have fun playing jazz music… until two vacationing American women (Joanne Woodward and Diahann Carroll) lead to a reconsideration of their lifestyle. The richness of the film means that you can appreciate it in many ways. There’s the jazz angle, obviously, with Louis Armstrong even dropping by briefly for a cameo. There’s the romantic aspect of it, with an attractive cast of lead characters against the strong Parisian atmosphere—and some romantic conflict bubbling into wider societal considerations. There’s the matter-of-fact interracial friendship between Newman and Poitier’s characters—still a rarity in American cinema at the time. There’s the strong discussion of American racism, obviously, with two characters arguing about whether it’s best to live a happy life abroad in Paris’ relatively accepting environment, or go back home and become an activist despite the unpleasant consequences. While Caroll looks stunning here, Newman and Poitier competing with each other to see who’s cooler means that the clear winner is the audience. But even if you strip all of those qualities, Paris Blues still remains a story about two young men figuring out what they want out of life and measuring facility against achievements. I didn’t expect much from Paris Blues (and I maintain that its Parisian décor would have been much more effective with colour cinematography), but director Martin Ritt has an underappreciated success here: perhaps not as striking had the story retained the interracial romance angle of the original novel, but still a quietly effective piece of work that acts as a lead-in to the more engaging material that would follow later during that decade. I’m also noting a strong kinship between Paris Blues and the 1950s Italian dolce-vita Hollywood-on-the-Tiber subgenre, which may be enough of another incentive to watch the film. No matter why, it’s worth a look.

  • The Scarlet Letter (1926)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2022) As horrifying as it may sound to purists, the secret to enjoying silent dramas may be watching them in fast-forward. There’s a noticeable change in pacing that goes with the passage from the silent to the sound era, and having the text IN YOUR FACE as title cards rather than subtitles makes the fast-forward strategy quite viable even on less optimal viewing platforms. This is not necessarily recommended for comedies depending on physical humour, but dramas? Silent-era dramas are deathly dull—the pacing is off, the emoting is difficult to take seriously and the title cards barely summarize the action (in addition of further ruining the pace on their own). But slam The Scarlet Letter in fast-forward and the result becomes much more interesting, with a density of plotting that starts approaching sound-era standards. A classic of American literature, The Scarlet Letter has been made and remade many times, but this silent-era version has a few things going for it. Lilian Gish stars as a woman whose romantic indiscretion with the priest of her small New England community leads to further complications. There’s enough narrative substance to make it interesting once the story gets going, and it helps that the production values of the film were good enough. Director Victor Seastrom credibly re-creates a settlers-era small town, and some of the exterior shots are much, much better than we’d expect from films of that era—early in the film, there’s a rather amazing long tracking shot of two lovers walking along an outdoor path that seems far more modern than it is. In the end, I was not exactly bowled over by The Scarlet Letter—but thanks to the fast-forwarding, I didn’t waste as much of my time as I anticipated, and finally could be swept up in the increasingly dramatic nature of the plot as it went along.

  • 13 Sins (2014)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, February 2022) While 13 Sins is not, strictly speaking, that bad of a movie, it has the bad luck of being squarely in a subgenre that I don’t like, which is the “ordinary people coerced into corruption via game.”  A lot of those have come out recently—you can pick off an entire list just by searching plot summaries for “dark web,” as many hand-wave “sadistic game shows for amoral billionaires… through the dark web!” as their plot justification. 13 Sins is slightly more subtle (and is adapted from an earlier Thai film), has some dark humour to it and actually manages a few fun plot twists along the way… but it remains a film about someone coerced into becoming a terrible person and I think that’s a cheap way to get thrills. “Kill this person or your family gets it” is about as exploitative as the genre gets, and there’s little narrative satisfaction from that. 13 Sins writer-director Daniel Stamm does understand that, at least, you have to go beyond that and so the film hits its best moments when it takes a step back into comedy (albeit dark, dark comedy), or multiplies its twisted plotting to unbelievable melodramatic heights. Mark Webber is not bad as an initially meek young man who becomes empowered by the amorality of the tasks he’s forced to complete (an interesting wrinkle in itself), with Ron Perlman lending a lot of gravitas to an otherwise minor role, and Rutina Wesley being a welcome island of wholesomeness in the middle of a darkly amoral film. There’s some polish to 13 Sins’ visual style, even if the writing is uneven both in tone and content. I didn’t particularly enjoy it, but I have to recognize that it’s slightly better than most comparable films.

  • Fiesta (1947)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2022) I haven’t seriously started digging into that filmography, but Classic Hollywood often looked south of the nearest border for inspiration, and there’s a not-inconsiderable corpus of films embracing Mexican culture even in the 1930s–1950s. Not many of them are particularly good or well-remembered, though. Fiesta feels like a lot of them: More exotic than the usual Hollywood films of the time, but still curiously dull despite an impressive cast and some melodramatic flourishes. Hailed as Richard Montalban’s Hollywood debut (and indeed, you can use much of Montalban’s early filmography as a first cut at the whole Hollywood-does-Mexico subgenre), it also features Esther Williams and (in a very minor role) Cyd Charisse cast as Mexican women. (While admittedly weird for Williams, the dark-haired Charisse had a substantial number of roles in which she was cast as being of non-white ethnicity.)  The story itself is a toreador melodrama in which Williams passes herself off as her brother in order to fight bulls in the arena, while said brother finds artistic achievement as a music composer. It sounds wilder summarized like that than it does in the film, where the slower pacing and colourful asides almost help viewers overlook the insanity of the plotting. Fiesta itself is okay—not particularly engaging despite the atmosphere, but with just enough interest to prevent viewers from drifting away. A young pre-stardom Charisse is striking in her few short scenes, while young Montalban is a delight and Williams gets away from the water-based roles that characterized much of her filmography. But Fiesta doesn’t measure up to its own wild production history as summarized on Wikipedia, with on-location shooting leading to the death of two crewmembers by cholera, bullfighting sequences leading to four stuntmen being injured badly enough to require hospitalization, fighting between the crew and the locals, as well as considerable controversy about the local toreador hired (or rather: not-hired) for the film and the bulls being killed (or rather initially not-killed) at the end of it. Never mind remaking Fiesta—I’d want a movie about the making of Fiesta.

  • Fanatic aka Die! Die! My Darling! (1965)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, February 2022) It’s a good thing that the TV channel I was watching decided to go with the lurid American title Die! Die! My Darling! rather than the staider original British title of Fanatic. For one thing, it drew me in. For another, it represents better the lunacy at the heart of this low-budget thriller. The story gets going once a young American woman travels to England in the lead-up to her wedding with her British beau. There’s a problem, though: In visiting her future mother-in-law, she grows increasingly concerned about the older woman’s craziness, and is prevented from leaving as the matriarch blames her for her other son’s death. Much of the film consists in having our plucky heroine attempt to escape captivity, or watching Classic Hollywood actress Tallulah Bankhead in her final film performance as she tries to chew as much scenery as possible as an unhinged biddy. (You can certainly include this film on the filmography of horror movies made by slumming screen legends.)  This being a Hammer film, it’s not meant to be taken all that seriously—it’s not a comedy, but the drama and suspense are both cranked up to extremes and the result is, well, far closer to Die! Die! My Darling! than anything as simple as Fanatic.

  • Magic (1978)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2022) I certainly did not have “seeing Anthony Hopkins as a mad ventriloquist” on my list of things to do when I woke up this morning. But that’s the wonderful thing about exploring cinema history, especially as you leave the classics behind and start poking at lesser-known work. Not that Magic is obscure, exactly: Directed by Richard Attenborough, featuring no less than Anthony Hopkins and Ann-Margret, and written by William Goldman from his own novel, it wasn’t meant as cheap exploitation—although the horror/psychological thriller angle certainly doesn’t make it an awards-seeking film. After a rather long period of throat-clearing, the story really begins once our protagonist, a ventriloquist with some severe mental health issues (Hopkins), flees impending TV fame to seek refuge in his hometown, where he picks things up with a long-time crush (Ann-Margret, quite good even when subdued) and lets his dummy do the talking… and the killing. Literalizing the metaphor by having the dummy kill anyone who displeases the hero, Magic steadily becomes darker and darker, poking at the notion of a dummy’s personality taking over that of the ventriloquist and the only option left for the ventriloquist’s escape. It’s not great material (and it’s clearly not meant to be supernatural even when the dummy is doing the sarcastic stabbing) and it often feels too long at even 107 minutes but there are a few good moments here and there, especially as the film wallows in the characteristic gritty darkness of the 1970s cinematic palette. It does leave an impression, though, because let’s face: Hopkins conversing with a killer dummy is strange enough to be memorable. Magic may not be that different from any other killer-dummy movies, but it does have casting on its side.

  • Housebound (2014)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, February 2022) I really wasn’t expecting much from Housebound, and there are several moments where the film sorely tests anyone’s patience or indulgence. But it does eventually work much better than expected, with a few twists and turns that all play to its central theme and a pace that gets cracking when it needs to do so. The opening act is truly not very promising, though, as a too-irritating protagonist is put in house arrest following a botched robbery. The problem is that she’d probably like being in prison better than going back to her semi-rural childhood house for six months: she keeps picking fights with her mom, and strange sounds coming from the house are not calming her down—nor her mom’s insistence that the house is haunted. In a plot development that nearly blows up suspension of disbelief, she then discovers that her home was the site of an infamous grisly murder—something that somehow never came up while she was living there. If you can somehow get over that inanity long enough and also somehow ignore how incredibly annoying the protagonist is, Housebound then swerves into a last straight sprint to the finish, uncovering secret identities, twists and counter-twists in such a way that the film essentially redeems itself in time for the end credits. It’s not quite a comedy, but there are a few moments here that are funnier than expected, and the counter-twists are both creepy and more original than expected. I don’t think that it makes Housebound anywhere near a hidden gem or anything like that, but writer-director-editor Gerard Johnstone exceeds low expectations (some of them he lowered by himself), and that’s already not that bad. It could have been improved in many ways, but it does make an interesting addition to the New Zealand horror canon.

  • Trog (1970)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2022) If you’re building yourself a nice little filmography of” terrible horror films that Classic Hollywood actors did in their late careers,” then Trog is a mandatory entry. Featuring no less than Joan Crawford as a scientist who gets to care for a troglodyte having made it to the modern era, the film clearly means to be a low-budget creature feature. The special effects are ridiculous, the production values are threadbare and the script is a bizarre blend of exploitation with just enough drama to distinguish it from a run-of-the-mill creature feature. Crawford was not doing well in her career by the time she paid the bills with Trog, and the film’s production history is rife with stories of her on-set alcoholism. But the producers got what they paid for: Her on-screen performance is significantly better than the rest of the film. It helps that the lead role is more substantial than in most other monster films. Here, she plays the good angel to the troglodyte’s nature, trying to tell others that it’s a peaceful creature to be treated well. But, of course, audiences paid to see violence, horror and a rampaging creature so that’s where Trog goes for much of its third act, as a villain frees him and riles him up enough to get him on a murderous rampage before the ending. Despite loftier aims, the script itself is an unpolished, atonal piece of work that fits well with the scattershot nature of the film’s execution. Some will like it because it’s so ridiculous: Trog has become something of a cult classic since its release. But if you’re not a fan of the so-bad-it’s-good school (and why should anyone, considering the sheer number of so-good-it’s-good films?), then Trog may boil down to an illustration of what a gifted actress can do even in the middle of terrible material and an even worse production.

  • Western Union (1941)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, February 2022) If you really want to know how I feel about Western Union, you’ll have to delve deep into the realm of quantic compliments. There’s nothing terrible about this big-budget Fritz Lang western: It even looks about ten years younger than it is considering its skillful use of colour at a time when most productions of its calibre were happy shooting in black and white. The topic matter is as grandiose as anything westerns ever tackle, considering that it’s about the construction of a telegraph line across the far west—you can compare it to railroad construction epics à la Union Pacific, or more modern takes on fibre-optic line construction. But being slickly executed is not necessarily enough to please, and I had a harder time than expected getting to care about the film, especially since it has no intention of being all that rigorous about the construction of the telegraph line itself. Aside from some background detail, it becomes a pretext for some very obvious drama built in Hollywood from nothing. Much is made of the Native opposition to the line, for instance, which is apparently historical nonsense, since the construction of the line was met with very little opposition. Western Union clearly plays to audience expectations, as it strings along genre tropes such as shootouts with bandits, southern white men passing themselves off as Native in an attempt to stir some trouble, capture and escape and climactic justice in a way that only plays in Hollywood. It works if you like westerns, but (colour cinematography aside) it feels roughly the same as dozens of other westerns from that time—not to mention the deluge of westerns that would follow in the 1950s. Lang does well as a director, but is nowhere as interesting as in the thrillers that make most of his Hollywood filmography. As such, Western Union is watchable, but not much more: you’d have to be a much bigger western fan than I am to dissect what really sets it apart from most other examples of the genre.

  • The Artists (2018)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, February 2022) You can feel lucky if movies appeal to one facet of your personality, but here TV documentary The Artists (a fix-up of ten shorter episodes) manages to reach me twice: first, by straight-on making a sustained argument that video games can be art (it opens with that Roger Ebert quote,) and then by taking a look at something I lived through: the early days of computer games. It hits many of the high points of the burgeoning videogaming scene (Atari designers leaving to found Activision, the creation of Electronic Arts with the famous “Can Computers make you cry?” ad, Infocom text adventures, MULE and the personal transition of its designer, Chris Crawford raising hell in his own industry, Doom, etc.) and bolsters its argument by interviewing several legends of the field, from Crawford to John Romero, Trip Hawkins, Nolan Bushnell and others. It’s fascinating when it describes how, even at a comparatively laughable level of technical sophistication, programmers were becoming artists in a brand-new field, being portrayed as rock stars and grappling with the meaning of what they were doing. The documentary has a nerds-to-fame quality but doesn’t necessarily brush over the less-pleasant parts of that history:  The ostracism that followed Danielle Bunten Berry’s gender transition, the failure of Atari, the post-Doom breakup of id, the market forces discouraging innovation, Chris Crawford’s legendary Dragon Speech and so on. But as someone who still has an original copy of the “Can Computer Games be Art?” ad, who was reading reviews of Crawford’s Balance of Power when it came out, who played MULE on the Commodore 64, who lived through the PC gaming transition from CGA to EGA and then VGA—this documentary hit all the right spots. Better yet, it seriously considers the obvious notion that video game designers are artists striving for emotional reactions, marrying technical elements with evolving notions of game design to produce something that can be considered an art form in its own right. Roger Ebert’s hasty declaration that video games cannot be art (something that he entirely recanted later on) did have the positive effect of leading to an entire corpus of games demonstrating what was obvious to players since, well, at least the 1980s: video games are a new artistic field, building upon other fields to create something that cannot exist in any other medium. That argument is stronger now than it was back when Ebert opined, given how the greater accessibility of game-building tools now enables individual designers to deliver highly personal works. Much, indeed, like the pioneer days of the 1980s when you could assign artistic ownership of a game to a single designer. The Artists could have spent more time making that link, but no matter—what’s presented in rather stylish way is a coherent documentary on a fascinating topic, and I can affirm that it gets its facts right.