Author: Christian Sauvé

  • This Christmas (2007)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, February 2022) Considering the all-Christmas-movies-all-month-long nature of the BET channel in December, it’s worth asking why this Christmas would find a spot on its January schedule. Aren’t we satiated until at least mid-November after such an overdose of Christmas cheer? The BET channel, after all, believes in quantity more than distinction in scheduling its holiday films: anything goes as long as Christmas is somewhere in there. Part of the suitability of this later scheduling can be found in This Christmas’ pedigree: Compared to the usual “BET original” Christmas movies, This Christmas has a budget at least a magnitude larger, with competent cinematography, decent technical credentials, a successful theatrical release and a roster of well-known actors. No, Loretta Devine doesn’t count—she’s practically a BET original mascot at this point. But Delroy Lindo, Idris Elba and Regina King are something else, and so this Christmas aims to be a well-crafted Christmas film with theatrical aspirations, at least one or two levels of quality higher than the channel’s original films. The difference is mostly in execution: the cinematography is fine, the actors are good and the film feels lived-in. The plot, unsurprisingly, isn’t that much better: yet another story of a fractious family finding peace at Christmas. Not that it matters all that much: Christmas movies, more than perhaps any other subgenre, rely heavily on comfort and reassurance that everything is going to be all right in time for the end of the big holiday get-together. Familiarity and predictability are key. No matter the budget or the pedigree.

  • Skymaster Down (2022)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, February 2022) Now here’s an interesting hook for a documentary: In January 1950, an American military transport plane with 44 passengers went down over the Yukon, triggering a massive search for survivors and then the wreckage. Even 70 years later, no trace of the 1950 Douglas C-54D disappearance has ever been found—even if dozens of other smaller plane crash sites have since been located in the area. Skymaster Down deliberately aims to popularize this near-forgotten incident in three ways—by presenting an overview of the 1950 events with historical documentation, by giving voice to the surviving relatives of the missing, still haunted by the lack of closure, and by following the efforts of those people still trying, seventy years later, to find the wreckage. It’s difficult to dislike the result—it’s a fascinating story, and the lingering mystery takes us in the wilds of the Canadian North, in a very special environment of forests, mountains and lakes that could hide much. Some of the most evocative footage in the film approaches known identified wrecks to show us what a downed plane looks like from up close—whether in the forest, or scattered on a mountainside. Following the efforts of the modern wreck-hunters is also fascinating—but the film is equivocal that even modern technology is no match for the limited resources and difficult weather conditions of the area. But even as good as it is, there’s a sense that writer0director Andrew Gregg’s Skymaster Down doesn’t quite reach the greatness it could aspire to. Reading about the historical events confirms the film’s version of events but also suggests ways in which the film could have been better presented. (The hunt for the wreckage throughout 1950 ended up uncovering other wrecks… and causing a few more.)  The low-key presentation of the film is too restrained at times, and a bigger budget with better use of drone cameras may have allowed for better, more sweeping shots. Still, it’s an unusual topic… and it may be destined to remain as such: As of this writing (February 2022), the film isn’t listed on IMDB nor Wikipedia. I should probably do something about that. [2023: I wrote to the producers, and the film now has an IMDB page—but I don’t claim causation between the two]

  • Way Out West (1937)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, February 2022) When it comes to Laurel and Hardy, I’m in the largely indifferent camp. Yes, they are funny—even I recognize that. But I have a hard time whipping up any enthusiasm for the pair. Some films are funnier than others and some routines work while others don’t. Way Out West is a piece of their filmography, but not one of the most often mentioned ones. It has the distinction of parodying 1930s westerns, which may please viewers who overdosed on the genre, but otherwise feels like a string of middle-grade gags strung together. The ending is fortunately a bit more spirited than the opening, but otherwise it’s a somewhat average entry for the pair—not terrible, not hilarious, usually amusing without being all that memorable. I’ll take it—there’s much worse out there.

  • Night Unto Night (1949)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2022) You don’t have to scratch all that deeply to find plausible excuses to watch Night unto Night, even if they may leave you unsatisfied. It’s an early effort from director Don Siegel, who would go on to have a long and significant career up to the New Hollywood era. More amusingly, it stars Ronald Reagan as a scientist (!) grappling with issues of faith and spirituality in the face of impending death and developing romance. Broderick Crawford shows up in a supporting role, bringing his comforting gruffness to the role. There’s some supernatural melodrama, with the (unsatisfactory) mushy-spiritualism conclusion never being in doubt, considering the usual ideological alignment of major studio films in Hollywood history. The cinematography (helped along by some audacious special effects) is more interesting than the humdrum plot and its dull flights of philosophy. Released two years after its production, Night unto Night does have the mark of a disappointing film—not exactly bad, but nowhere near what could have been, and viewers even today will feel the lack of satisfaction.

  • Mother’s Day (2010)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, February 2022) There are good reasons why many people don’t like horror, and Mother’s Day feels like a distillation of those reasons in one handy package. It’s bleak in cinematography and dark in outlook. That, in itself, isn’t that unusual, but where this film takes it one step further in some exceptionally mean-spirited structure that, in the end, doesn’t lead to anywhere but a bleak ending. Building from a home invasion story (itself a rather tired cliché for needlessly dark horror), Mother’s Day occasionally shows glimpses of interest in the way it justifies its conceit. But that’s a very brief moment in a much longer-feeling package that delights in being pointlessly cruel. Our home invaders seem to style themselves after wannabee-jokers of sadistic choices. A repetitive tic of the film is for armed people asking unarmed people to do bad things to each other. It wouldn’t be as bad if it actually gave the impression of leading somewhere, or having some thematic depth to justify it. But there doesn’t seem to be—the best thing one can say about the film is that Rebecca de Mornay is thoroughly detestable as a domineering psychotic mother—but again, the character is so mean-spirited that her transgressions feel like a cheap trick with no point. Director Darren Lynn Bousman has a hit-and-miss filmography, but Mother’s Day doesn’t impress much. It’s basement-level horror without anything that makes the genre interesting.

  • For the Defense (1930)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2022) I do like William Powell’s screen persona a lot, but much of the interest in his early-1930s film is seeing that persona gradually being honed, from the villains and cads he played during the silent era to the droll, suave and clever leading man from the mid-1930s onward, with The Tall Man being the yardstick against which the rest of his career was measured. For the Defense sees Powell in one of his many lawyer roles, but less-typically as a slimier sort of character playing fast and loose with the law, and being willing to be the patsy for a criminal act committed by someone else. It’s both similar and not similar to his later roles, and that’s what makes it perhaps more interesting than some of the same films of the period, even if it doesn’t end up being as satisfying as his other films. Cinematographically, there’s not much to say—For the Defence fits within the aesthetics of the early-sound era, with a plot that has its moments (such as a nitro-fuelled courtroom confrontation) but degrades as it goes on to a perfunctory conclusion that won’t make anyone particularly happy… although it does make good use of the latitudes allowed in a Pre-Code film. The judicial technicalities feel ludicrous and subservient to the melodramatic requirements of the script. Kay Francis shows up in one of her earliest frequent pairings with Powell, but there’s not much to say about her character or her acting: she’s nowhere near what she’d do in later films. For the Defense is, in many ways, a typical early-Hollywood courtroom melodrama elevated (and overshadowed) by Powell’s presence and later filmography. It’s for completists.

  • Burden of Dreams (1982)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2022) Ask any knowledgeable cinephile which films had the most difficult, tortured, accursed production and I guarantee that Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo is going to be on the list. After all, simply watching the film is cause for amazement, as its characters drag a boat over an Amazonian mountain and the film clearly shows how it was done for real. How do you get to that point where it’s a good idea? How do you execute such a thing? Fortunately, there’s Burden of Dreams to tell us all about the making of Fitzcarraldo, and it turns out that the boat-over-a-mountain thing is a rather minor and straightforward episode in a hellish production. If it was just about the logistics of dragging a boat over a steep hill, Herzog could laugh about it—but the production simply looked cursed at times. The original stars, Jason Robarts and Mick Jagger, were replaced early in production when Robarts suffered severe medical problems and Jagger had to go on tour. Undaunted, Herzog went to Klaus Kinsi (further adding to his problems) and ended up in the middle of a small-scale war between two tribes. Weather problems exacerbated a shot that went on and on, eventually stopping for several months until conditions on the ground became better. Throughout the ordeal, Herzog sounds like a mad philosopher king, increasingly expounding on philosophical tangents inspired by his experience. The analog period feel of early-1980s filmmaking creates a distinct atmosphere, and director Les Blank does his best to assemble the location footage, historical material and interviews create a narrative, even if it’s not smooth all the way through. It’s good that Burden of Dreams exists, though, because this is the kind of troubled production that would seem too unbelievable if there wasn’t at least some shred of evidence to suggest that it all really happened.

  • Quai des Orfèvres (1947)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2022) Solid crime thrillers can feel timeless, and Quai des Orfèvres is a very competent take on familiar plot elements. Written and directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot (who reportedly adapted a novel from memory, which is wild enough), it quickly throws in a lovely singer (Suzy Delair, very cute), a bickering jealous husband, a creepy admirer, a lesbian photographer with a crush on the heroine and who herself becomes a crush of the police inspector asked to investigate the murder that soon follows. The police procedural aspect of the film is reinforced by some very solid dialogue (better in the original French than in the functional English subtitles) and cleverly sketched characters. Quai des Orfèvres is a decent genre exercise that gives us a good glimpse at the uneasiness of post-war France, executed in a straightforward but polished style. Not a bad pick for students of French cinema, perhaps as another piece of evidence to inform the idea that poetic realism influenced much of film noir and then the French New Wave.

  • Cutting Class (1989)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, January 2022) I bet Brad Pitt doesn’t mention Cutting Class all that often these days. A cookie-cutter high-school slasher film in which Pitt plays a bland boyfriend role, this is the kind of movie that would be practically forgotten today if it didn’t happen to star him. (Not that it’s all that popular even with his name on the marquee.)  As a product of the late 1980s, it’s clearly aware that it has to go a bit beyond the obviousness as a slasher, but the way it goes about it is terrible: it skirts toward comedy but isn’t really good at it, meaning that you’ll watch most of the film dumbfounded at its idea of what’s funny. I strongly suspect that Pitt aside, the film probably plays worse today than upon release—the move of slasher films toward being whodunnits is now de rigueur, and so is the use of comedy to defuse the tension of horror films made for teenagers. No matter the datedness of tis intentions, though, Cutting Class still doesn’t work: even when you can see where the filmmakers were going, it’s simply too misguided to get its intended effect. You would have to be a dedicated 1980s slasher fan to even want to watch this.

  • Campus Code (2015)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2022) It doesn’t take more than fifteen seconds of footage to understand that Campus Code scrapes the bottom of the barrel of cinematic competence. Obviously shot with a low budget, a quick schedule, bare-bones special effects and a half-comatose cinematographer, it’s the kind of sub-sub-cinema that makes Razzie nominees look good. That ultracheap look doesn’t necessarily work against the film—if you can somehow manage to convince yourself that this is a student project made on a threadbare budget, you may even start feeling sympathetic to it all. Heck, there’s even one impressive shot that has a character jumping out of a window. But then Ray Liotta shows up as a bartender and Martin Scorsese has two scenes as a doctor and you may feel as disoriented and unsure of reality as the film’s protagonist. In order to ground yourself again, look up the name of the film’s director: Cathy Scorsese, daughter of the other Scorsese. That should explain the cameos, but it won’t do much to explain the deliberately confusing plot in which four characters discover that they have superhuman powers and that their campus is filled with oddities. If you’re thinking “computer game!” after a few minutes, give yourself no pat on the back—it’s rather obvious from the title. But you may want to stop thinking about the premise beyond that, because it’s increasingly obvious that the screenwriter hasn’t either: After Campus Code throws up all sorts of strangeness on-screen as prelude to a laborious revelation that “we’re in a game!”, the film stops right there. No payoff, nothing beyond a twist so obvious that it barely qualifies as one. The additional red herrings are not justified and in fact, the more you think about the explanations, the less it makes any kind of sense. But all too often, that’s ultra-low-budget filmmaking for you, no matter the parents of the filmmakers. Digging deeper into Campus Code’s production history suggests that the film is a mash-up of an attempt at non-traditional filmmaking for a now-defunct website—it was patched together from webisodes meant to follow an ensemble cast of characters. But while this explains a few things, it doesn’t excuse the very disappointing result. If you feel that it’s going to be a long slog only a few moments in the film, then stop there: Campus Code never gets any better.

  • Ripoux 3 (2003)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2022) If you thought that resurrecting long-dormant franchises was purely a Hollywood problem, then I’ve got bad news for you: it’s a worldwide issue, as Paris-set Ripoux 3 illustrates. Picking up twelve years after Ripoux contre RIpoux, this third instalment does acknowledge the passing of time in the series’ very loose chronology: Our younger crooked cop has become a senior officer and hasn’t seen his mentor in corruption for a decade. That mentor has fallen on hard times—living on a boat and still gambling beyond his means. When a score goes wrong, the two meet again briefly, then spend the rest of the film pushed and pulled by a fake death, younger protégés, enmity from the mob, a growing police investigation and one last score. At least both Philippe Noiret and Thierry Lhermitte are in fine form here, easily slipping into familiar characters. Less heavy on police corruption but more insistent on traditional comic devices, Ripoux 3 only makes a middling argument in favour of its existence. It comes as a relief that it doesn’t try to repeat the same things as its predecessors, but it’s not clear why that story deserved to be told. In keeping with that thought, writer-director Claude Zidi’s film itself is watchable but not overly impressive—a comedy that ends up as a heist film, with both characters passing the torch to the younger generation. Hardly essential, but not the worst scenario if you were looking for one more quick lap around the track with those two lead characters.

  • Lord of Illusions (1995)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, January 2022) Although largely forgotten these days, there’s quite a lot to like in Lord of Illusions despite its now-terrible special effects. After all, it begins with a sequence that would be worthy of a climax in a more routine film, as a bunch of young adults take down a supernatural cult leader and bury him after making sure that an iron mask is drilled into his face. After that fast-paced opening, the real story picks up decades later with a private detective investigating a stage magician who apparently dies onstage. But there’s a lot more to it, and the buried threat is coming back, at it always does in horror films. What’s perhaps most interesting in Lord of Illusions is the depth of its middle act, as familiar genre elements (the supernatural private eye, the growing cult, the traumatized survivor) are combined with an over-the-top look at stage magic. It ends up, as we expect, with a showdown between good and evil, but there’s quite a bit of texture along the way. What hasn’t aged as well are the digital effects: coming from the inglorious mid-1990s where computers were no match for practical special effects, the film has a bizarre mixture of rather good (practical) gore and thoroughly unconvincing CGI—unavoidable given the budget and time of the film, but still noteworthy. Other than that, however, it’s a competent genre exercise. Some of the writing from writer-director Clive Barker, adapting his own short story, is even quite good—I was particularly fond of “You were my lambs, but I was never your shepherd.” [February 2022: Amusingly enough, I just checked and that good quote is better in the French dub which I just back-translated. The original, as per the script, is “You just waited like lambs. (beat) Well, I’m not your shepherd.”]  Lord of Illusions is not, to be clear, a terrific horror film. But it does qualify as something of an underrated genre exercise, still entertaining decades later. If nothing else convinces you, just know that Famke Janssen stars in an early role.

  • The Tomorrow War (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Amazon Streaming, January 2022) I like many of the elements that went into The Tomorrow War. The idea of the future coming back to the present to ask for help fighting an alien opponent; the concept of conscripting ordinary citizens to fight; the relationship between the present and future; the third-act twist bringing the fight closer to home. That’s strong stuff (even if familiar to prose Science Fiction readers) with a lot of promise. Combine that with a big-budget execution, fast-paced action sequences, likable performers such as Chris Pratt and J. K. Simmons and an expansive direction from Chris McKay and this should be an unmissable proposition. But an undercooked script brings everything down a few levels. The moment you start asking questions about its science-fictional premise (and science fiction practically invites such questions) is the moment The Tomorrow War starts falling apart. For all of the occasional lamp-shading of the more obvious objections to the premise’s crazier elements, the film often feels more beholden to a misguided sense of dramatics than any sense of logic. Taking ordinary people off the street, giving them a (largely ineffective) rifle and sending them off to fight killer aliens will, of course, result in a mere 20% survival rate. But, you know: it’s better for the audience to be surprised at all this. Science Fiction, as a genre, often has to do a lot of inglorious work in order to marry outlandish premises with personal stakes, but The Tomorrow War takes an unbelievable number of shortcuts to do this in the bluntest, least credible way one could imagine. The third act takes unlikeliness to ludicrousness and stays there far longer than it should, and that’s after completely missing the point of the future reaching to the present in order to save itself. The characters become increasingly stupid until the only thing left to do is to ask a high-schooler for advice. It’s a funny moment, but an ill-fitting one for a grimdark film talking about the end of humanity. Not that it’s the only such moment—the tone of the movie can feel oddly comedic despite its end-of-time atmosphere, and I’m not sure if that’s a welcome bit of relief, or an inability to commit to a serious tone without undermining it. Suffice to say that The Tomorrow War is a frustrating experience—it’s constantly undercut by big and small objections, repeatedly taking viewers out of its narrative flow. I can still appreciate a big-budget one-shot original Science Fiction film, but that script needed at least one rewrite to fix its most egregious elements.

  • Reminiscence (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2022) Perhaps the most entertaining element of Reminiscence is how hard it works at re-creating a futuristic setting fit for a noir thriller. It frequently looks great, occasionally feels different but never feels convincing. In the admirable Science Fiction tradition of smashing together two separate elements, it takes for granted both a technology to explore memories and climate change bad enough to submerge the land around Miami. Splashing in this backdrop is a memory retrieval expert (Hugh Jackman, appropriately grizzled) who gets embroiled in a sombre story the moment an alluring client (Rebecca Ferguson) walks into his office. The noir DNA in this film is omnipresent—and it doesn’t take much to start seeing how much it seems to be inspired by Chinatown, with its private investigator, water motif and reproductive misconduct by a land tycoon. Even the post-WW2 feeling of classic noir, where nearly everyone was a traumatized veteran, is duplicated thanks to references to climate-change wars. Not much of it makes a lot of sense—a submerged Miami would lose buildings on a weekly basis (let alone keep its electrical power), the memory-retrieval tech somehow isn’t limited to first-person perspective; and someone’s got a plan so convoluted that it only makes sense in movies. But if you’re going to even start to enjoy Reminiscence, you better come with a large bag of indulgence, because writer-director Lisa Joy (of Westworld fame—you’ll recognize several common names between the two) is more about atmosphere than logic. That doesn’t absolve the film of its flaws, though: shaky world-building and rough plotting are accompanied with some tonal inconsistency (such as an out-of-nowhere action sequence dropped in the film at the midway point just to wake people up) and some major shortcuts taken. I did like the film’s attempts to ape noir style, can’t fault Jackman, will always enjoy watching Thandi (w)e Newton, but Reminiscence itself curdled the more I thought about it and started poking at the root of my lack of satisfaction with it. Science Fiction is not an excuse to throw up anything on screen—in fact, SF fans will tell you that it’s a genre that’s even less forgiving of logical holes than other genres: by building another reality, SF movies invite scrutiny they must sustain.

  • With Six You Get Eggroll (1968)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, January 2022) There’s both a familiar and an unusual aspect to With Six You Get Eggroll that makes it interesting even if it’s not an exceptional film. On the one hand, it’s Doris Day in a very Doris-Dayish comedy: a twist on the usual romance angle, a bit outrageous but not necessarily outlandish. Day herself plays the usual kind of character that characterized her biggest box-office years: white middle-class slightly-goofy American girl, perhaps a bit more independent than most by virtue of playing a widow running her ex-husband’s blue-collar business. The more unusual key to the film comes from treating Day’s character as someone her age rather than trying to pass her off a thirtysomething virginal debutante: here she plays a woman with accumulated history (although the film clearly avoids talking about what happened to her former husband) and what happens when she begins a romance with another middle-aged man. (Brian Keith, not bad.)  Much of the first half of the film is an amiable look at middle-age romance with a few misunderstandings and complications. Then, following a smash cut that’s arguably the funniest thing in the film, the second half of With Six You Get Eggroll focuses on the we’re-married-now-what reality as they tell their kids and try to blend their two families into one. There’s the usual amount of stepparent hate from the kids, practical issues (although their solution to “Let’s get an extra bedroom” is mildly amusing) and external complications ultimately bringing the family together. It’s not that much of a film, but it is interesting to see Day playing older and into a world that is very recognizably the late sixties rather than the fifties most closely associated with her. While With Six You Get Eggroll was reportedly a commercial success, it proved to be the final film performance of her career—maybe acknowledging that such plum roles for middle-aged women working in her comic style were (and remain) few and far apart. As last performances go, it’s not a bad one: she gets a few comic showpieces, she’s rarely less than likable and it’s still recognizably a role that fits her, even if it takes place about a decade later, both in tone and setting, than the string of movies that made her famous.