Author: Christian Sauvé

  • Escape Plan (2013)

    Escape Plan (2013)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2014)  Once upon a time, in the early nineties, a film featuring both Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone would have been An Event fit to explode all box-office records, fannish expectations and critical snark.  Now, more than twenty years later, Escape Plan is… just another action B-movie, anchored by familiar faces but not nearly as earth-shattering as it could have been.  It probably doesn’t help that the film revolves around Stallone (rarely a good actor, now increasingly ridiculous in his mumbling old age) and a rather hum-drum plot the likes of which we’ve seen a few times already.  The action sequences are limp (although two of the fight scenes offer the expected pleasure of seeing Stallone and Schwarzenegger trade a few body-blows), the villains are bland and the film doesn’t build up to much more than the obvious conclusion.  Sure, there’s a few twists and turns and flashy “here’s how I did it” explanations… but the film simply has the feel of a low-budget action movie that just happens to feature two of the biggest box-office stars of two decades ago.  Escape Plan has the merit of not being actively bad or unpleasant, just not as distinctive as it should have been considering the past caliber of its stars.

  • The Divide (2011)

    The Divide (2011)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2014) Every so often, the jaded reviewer that I am is pushed out of his complacency by an extraordinarily dislikable film.  Lately, I’ve been feeling increasingly irritated by nihilistic horror films: I can’t see their reason to exist, and having to go through 90 minutes of bleakness to be told another variation on “they all died” at the end is infuriating when even freeing up half an hour of my time to watch movies is a challenge.  This, obviously, brings us to The Divide, a pointless post-apocalyptic horror film in which unpleasant characters do terrible things to one another until only one is left.  To be fair, the opening sequence is pretty good (as residents of a Brooklyn apartment building see nuclear destruction rain down and force their way to a basement bunker) and the first half-hour suggested a much bigger film opening up.  But as The Divide turns inward after an unexplainably early jaunt outside the bunker, things get less and less interesting as torture, rape and murder come to dominate the proceedings.  Our heroine is one by default, being the only one not actively trying to inflict harm on others.  Not that there are any credible alternatives, given the way nearly everyone turns cartoonish psychotic.  Successive deaths come as a relief to the viewer as they hint at a film that will end out of lack of characters.  While Xavier Gens doesn’t do all badly as the director, there are some very dumb decisions baked into the script, from a first-act escapade outside the bunker that is then ignored for the rest of the film, unanswered questions, limp characters and an ending that doesn’t resolve anything as much as it stops out of bodies to ruin.  Intense? Perhaps –although my attention wandered during the increasingly bleak second half.  (How bleak? Well –and there’s no nice way to put this– a character is raped to death.) I’d rather call it meditative, although not in the sense that the filmmakers intended: As the onscreen ugliness intensified, my attention wandered to all that is good and beautiful about our world.  Life’s too short and beautiful to suffer through nihilistic trash like this.  I’ll take any meaningless romantic comedy over a second viewing of The Divide.

  • After the Dark aka The Philosophers (2013)

    After the Dark aka The Philosophers (2013)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2014) Now here’s something unusual: A framing story set in a philosophy class being used as pretext to present three different scenarios of post-apocalyptic survival.  As the seemingly logic-driven teacher plays head games with his students, interactions between the scenarios and the framing story become more obvious, logic is challenged by passion and we get a hefty dose of ethics and morality along the way.  Not bad, even though much of the interplay between the classroom and the scenarios could have been strengthened, even though the setup of logic as the enemy to be defeated is tiresome, even though some characters are given severe short thrift, and even though the ending becomes increasingly atonal as comedy and melancholy each compete for attention.  Still, After the Dark has a pretty good sense of humor, indulges into elaborate games of philosophy, upends tedious lifeboat ethics lessons and becomes, reassuringly enough, a rare example of humanist post-apocalyptic fiction.  Writer/director John Huddles should be proud of the result. The appealingly multiracial cast is used effectively, with Sophie Lowe acting a luminous beacon of empathy against the logical mind-games of James D’Arcy’s teacher character and Daryl Sabara getting the film’s biggest laugh near the end.  It’s an unconventional film in many ways, but it does linger on questions rarely addressed in any other ways, and gets honorable Science-Fiction credentials for its willingness to play with big ideas on a restrained scale.

  • Kick-Ass 2 (2013)

    Kick-Ass 2 (2013)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2014) I disliked several aspects of the original Kick-Ass, so in saying that this sequel isn’t as bad merely means that I’m not as repulsed by the results.  Not that it’s all that better: the same hypocrisy that permeated the original is on full display here, as an attempt to somehow satirize superheroes conventions ends up doing exactly the same thing, except with extra puerile arrogance.  Kick-Ass 2 seems inordinately pleased with its ability to swear as much at it likes, or to indulge is as much pointless violence.  The film isn’t merely hobbled by its male gaze –it’s made actively unpleasant by its teenaged male gaze: When more mature viewers are already convinced that taking up a superhero identity is for idiots, the film’s inevitable attempt to show normalcy turning on the characters is far more annoying than satisfying.  There are a few good things to say about the film’s younger actors (Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Christopher Mintz-Plasse and Chloë Grace Moretz have all grown up a bit since the previous film, and it generally suits them) but Jeff Wadlow’s direction is far more ordinary than Matthew Vaughn’s work in the first film, and whatever shocking qualities the original had are here dispersed into a multiplicity of calculated subplots shot indifferently.  So: not as unpleasant, but still not good.  Hopefully there will never be a third film.

  • American Grindhouse (2010)

    American Grindhouse (2010)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2014) Given the renewed interest in self-aware exploitation filmmaking lately (largely thanks to the Tarantino/Rodriguez 2007 film Grindhouse), American Grindhouse offers a quick and entertaining primer on the history of seedy disreputable filmmaking.  A talking-head documentary with a copious amount of footage, the film reaches back to the beginning of cinema and makes its way to the present in describing the evolution of less-respectable cinema, ending with the somewhat surprising conclusion that exploitation cinema merged with the mainstream sometime during the seventies as blockbusters such as Jaws took on the lessons of grindhouse cinema.  (I’m not so sure –there is alternative cinema everywhere still, although I’ll agree that it’s harder to define as a single coherent entity against a non-existent mainstream)  The footage shown and movies discussed are enough to provide anyone with a list of must-see titles, while the various people interviewed collectively reinforce the film’s various theses and explain various topics.  (The best interviewee has to be director John Landis, as profane and entertaining as he is knowledgeable.)  Writer/Director Elijah Drenner has done a pretty good job of condensing decades of social changes in a mere 80 minutes, illuminating a number of sub-genres along the way.  Everyone will be reassured to learn that a film describing lurid movies features equally-lurid footage.  American Grindhouse is definitely worth a look, especially if you’re already sympathetic to the subject.

  • The Nut Job (2014)

    The Nut Job (2014)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, August 2014) The good news are that the universe of computer-generated movies is expanding, allowing newer players to compete against the Pixar/Dreamworks powerhouses of the field.  Of course, this is an unfair comparison for most of the new players out there: it takes time, money and expertise to develop animation studios and the best one can hope from new payers is a decent showing.  Which is why even if Toonbox/Redrover’s Canadian/South Korean collaboration The Nut Job may not amount to much more than a semi-successful attempt to deliver an animated animal adventure for kids, it’s perhaps more interesting for what it promises next than for what it delivers now.  There’s certainly a number of dumb decisions built into the script itself: While the need for a protagonist that emotionally evolves along the course of a story is understandable, there’s no reason to make this protagonist as purely unpleasant as he is.  The script has occasional moments of brilliance (interweaving scenes, cleverly exploiting the elements initially set up), but it doesn’t quite have the flow and sustained build-up of better animated films.  The Nut Job opens itself up to all sorts of second-guessing from an audience wondering why the characters don’t use other means to get to achieve their goals, and the roughness of its edges doesn’t gain it any sympathy points.  By the time the credits roll, we’re more confounded by the instantly-dated decision to include a computer-animated Psy dancing to “Gangnam Style” alongside the film’s animal characters than anything else.  As an avowed fan of squirrels, I’m all for movies featuring one of them as a main character –but it would be even better if I could cheer for him throughout rather than wait for the last-act redemption.  Still, let’s see what’s next from Toonbox/Redrover.

  • Nested Scrolls: The Autobiography of Rudolf Von Bitter Rucker, Rudy Rucker

    Nested Scrolls: The Autobiography of Rudolf Von Bitter Rucker, Rudy Rucker

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Tor, 2011, 336 pages, C$30.00 hc, ISBN 0-765-32752-X

    Despite having head more than half a dozen of Rudy Rucker’s books, I can’t say that I’m much of a fan of him as an author: While I have enjoyed the first half of many of his novels, Rucker writes weird and there’s usually a point somewhere in the narrative where my suspension of disbelief smashes against his surrealism and breaks, after which I can’t (or won’t) make sense of the rest.  I’ve seen the pattern repeat all the way from Master of Space and Time to Hylozoic, and even within his best-known Ware tetralogy.  I suspect that I’m far too square to be the ideal audience for his novels, and I’m fine with that.

    Still, it’s hard to come away from a Rucker novel and not feel that the author himself is a character sorely in need to be the hero of his own book, and that’s exactly what we get with his autobiography.  Motivated by a cardiovascular near-death experience in early 2008, Nested Scrolls is Rucker’s attempt to make sense of his experiences so far, a warm and wonderful trip through a rich life.

    Going into the autobiography, I didn’t know much about Rucker beyond his back-cover blurbs and that’s for the best as it allows for surprises, fortuitous discoveries and the basic suspense of wondering what would transform Rucker from an underperforming student to an elder SF-writing Computer Sciences professor.

    It starts out leisurely enough, with a lengthy section detailing Rucker’s childhood and adolescence –a section that many biographies usually skip out of irrelevance.  But Rucker’s memories of growing up in a small Midwestern city hold some nostalgic value, and the deceptively simple prose (“It was great.”) sets the tone for the rest of the book.

    Things do get more interesting as Rucker enters university and gradually develops an ambition to become a beatnick SF writer, more interested in SF because of its innate potential for surrealism than anything else.  The first few years of Rucker’s post-graduate career take us to a few places within the US and Germany before he comes to settle down in Silicon Valley just in time for the nineties high-tech boom.  Along the way he becomes a punk rocker, a professor, a popular science writer, a computer programmer, a father of three children and (oh yes) the beatnick SF writer he wanted to become.

    I was most interested by those chapters set in the early nineties where he becomes involved with the geek culture of the time.  Rucker, as it turned out, was involved in many of the things that fascinated me back then, from cellular automata, fractals, virtual reality and cyberpunk. (He even edited the Mondo 2000 book that I so distinctly remember reading back in 1993!)  That, plus the chapters in which he discusses his perennial outsider status within the SF genre community, were the sections of the book that spoke the most directly to me.

    But there are other, more heartfelt passages that I also found compelling.  Rucker mentions the issues that he had with mind-altering substances (mostly alcohol, but also soft drugs) before deciding to give them up when they proved more troublesome than they were worth.  Most positively, his descriptions of family life are heart-warming, especially in describing his early days with three children, and the way they transformed into fully-independent adults with lives of their own –one of the most affecting passages late in the book describes their rare get-togethers now that they span three generations, and how Rucker himself can draw upon his memories to see across five generations, the same people occupying different roles.  By the end of the book, Rucker is retired, a grandfather many times over, happy with what he has achieved and curious to see what’s next.

    SF readers familiar with his body of work will enjoy the descriptions of the creative process that led to his novels, and especially how his “transrealism” approach involves writing autobiographical passages that are transformed by the inclusion of frankly science-fictional elements.  I can testify first-hand about readers recoiling in confusion while reading his books, but Nested Scrolls goes a long way toward explaining why Rucker writes such surreal science-fiction, and why this very surrealism is at the core of the Rucker literary experience.  In many ways, Nested Scrolls exactly fulfills the ambition of all biographies: tell their lives and explain their subject, making us more sympathetic to them.  I have never met Rucker (although we’ve been to the same SF convention at least once) but if I ever do, it’s this autobiography more than his novels that would make me shake his hand and say “well-done.”

  • Homefront (2013)

    Homefront (2013)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, August 2014) Another six months, another Jason Statham movie.  Here he is again in the utterly-generically-named Homefront, playing a cop with rough methods, this time with the slight twist that he’s supposed to be retired and living easy somewhere in the Louisiana countryside.  It doesn’t work out that way, of course: a bullying incident involving his daughter escalates and brings him to the attention of the local meth lord, who in turn goes and involves an even bigger mob boss with scores to settles.  It leads predictably into the kind of mayhem we expect from Statham movies.  So what is different from this one?  Not much, but Homefront has qualities to appreciate:  The Louisiana scenery is nice.  Rachelle Lefevre gets another small but likable role as a sympathetic schoolteacher.  Statham is up to his usual standards as a dad trying to protect his daughter from harm.  But it’s James Franco who gets the most distinctive role, bringing his usual lack of intensity to a reluctant meth kingpin antagonist.  Winona Rider also gets a small role as a waitress with ambitions.  Still, this is another one of Statham’s archetypical roles, and this continuation of his usual screen persona is successful in that it neither challenges nor undermines his position as an action star.  The workmanlike direction is good enough without being in any way impressive, which is roughly what’s to expect from Statham vehicles.  Homefront doesn’t amount to much of a film, but it’s entertaining enough in its own generic way.  Of course, it’s going to be hard to remember it in a few days, let alone after it blurs into a string of so many similar Statham films.

  • Rush (2013)

    Rush (2013)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, August 2014)  Given the speed and excitement of Formula 1 racing, it’s a wonder that there aren’t more movies about the sport.  Considering Rush, though, the wait has been worth it: Easily eclipsing 2001’s Driven, this historical bio-drama has everything we’d wish for in a racing film, and strong historical accuracy as a bonus.  Centered around the 1976 Formula 1 season in which British racer Daniel Hunt competed against Austrian legend Nikki Lauda, Rush is an actor’s showcase, a convincing period recreation, a virtuoso blend of special effects and crackling good drama.  Expertly directed by Ron Howard, it’s gripping from the very first moments, pitting a charismatic playboy and a valorous technician against each other.  Howard’s direction doesn’t stay still for long, and does a fine job at summarizing an eventful season’s worth of incidents into a striking whole.  The atmosphere of the high-flying 1970s Formula 1 circuit is impressively conveyed, including impressive race sequences with period cars. (Was is done with CGI or practical?  It doesn’t matter when the film is that good.)  Much of Rush‘s effectiveness boils down to its two lead actors: Chris Hemsworth makes full use of his charisma as the seductive Hunt, his brashness clashing against the methodical Lauda very well-played by Daniel Bruhl.  The two make for compelling rivals, and Rush makes maximum use of their conflict in allowing us a peek into the mind of top-notch race drivers.  As exciting for its dialogue scenes than for its racing action, Rush may not look like much on paper, but becomes steadily engrossing without any effort from the viewer. 

  • Closed Circuit (2013)

    Closed Circuit (2013)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, August 2014)  It may or may not be a trend, but I’ve now seen three post-9/11 British thrillers about terrorism in the past 18 months (Dirty War, Cleanskin and now Closed Circuit), and they all eventually end up concluding that their secret services are to be feared just as much as the terrorists.  The setup, in Closed Circuit‘s case, promises a bit less than full-blown paranoia: As the case against a terrorist heats up, two lawyers are asked to take the suspects’ defense, one operating publically while the other one defends the client in secret court.  The suicide of a previous lawyer assigned to the case weighs heavily in the picture.  When both lawyers (previously romantically involved, in a twist that initially promises much) discover increasingly troubling details about their client, they too become the target.  The first half of Closed Circuit has a good escalation of thrills as our lawyer protagonists discover far more than expected about their client and his connections to the British Secret Services.  But it all tips over to a fairly standard conspiracy/chase thriller that, in the end, doesn’t do much than shrug and deliver a weakly comforting epilogue.  It’s all well and good to point at the British establishment and argue that they are all-powerful, but that’s not much of a conclusion –I expected a bit more.  Still, Closed Circuit does have a few assets.  Eric Bana makes for a fine protagonist, while Rebecca Hall once again plays brainy heroines like no others.  Jim Broadbent is unexpectedly menacing as a political force warning our heroes against overstepping unspoken boundaries, while Ciaran Hinds once again ends up as a powerful character who can’t be trusted.  (Julia Stiles is also in the film, but almost as a cameo.  Anne-Marie Duff is far more memorable with even fewer appearances.)  The direction is competent (with an expected visual motif of surveillance cameras), the focus on legal proceedings is fascinating in its own way and the first two-third of the script are built solidly.  It’s a shame that after such a promising and unusual beginning, the conclusion disintegrates to so much generic pap that we’ve seen countless times before.  At least the British pessimism is enough to keep it distinct from what a typical American thriller would have gone for.

  • Inside Llewyn Davis (2013)

    Inside Llewyn Davis (2013)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, August 2014) My current life circumstances mean that I usually see movies 6-9 months after their theatrical release.  In order to “stay current” and understand much of the ongoing conversation regarding movies, I often spoil myself silly on movies I haven’t seen but eventually will.  This usually works pretty well and doesn’t ruin movies as much as you’d think.  But there are exceptions and Inside Llewyn Davis shows the limits of the spoil-yourself-rotten approach in tackling plot-light interpretation-heavy movies.  Having read many descriptions of what made Inside Llewyn Davis so interesting a while ago, I now find that most of the theories about the film are more substantial than the film itself.  A ramble through 1961 Greenwich Village before the folk-music explosion, Inside Llewyn Davis is about a talented but prickly musician who may be at the end of his moribund career.  The film follows him during an eventful week, but don’t expect much in terms of plotting or conclusion: As with many of their previous movies, the Coen Brothers don’t settle for neat dramatic arcs, fully-tied subplots or self-contained screen characters: they hint, leave plenty to the imagination, play with chronology and cut to the credits five minutes before other directors would.  It’s maddening and yet in my encroaching old age, I don’t find it as frustrating as I would have years ago.  (But then again, if you follow the Coen Brothers you’ve already seen No Country for Old Men and A Serious Man)  The music is great if you like folk (I don’t, but the artistry is remarkable and then there’s “Please Please Mr. Kennedy” to amuse us uncouth barbarians.), and as a look at a specific time and place, it’s fascinating in its own right.  The cinematography is remarkable, as this is a cold winter movie and there’s no visual comfort for anyone here.  Oscar Isaac is fascinating as the titular protagonist while Justin Timberlake and Carey Mulligan have short but striking roles.  While I like individual elements, themes and sequences of Inside Llewyn Davis, I’m not sure I like it as much as the idealized version I had made up in my head while reading the chatter surrounding the film.  You can probably figure out that this is a problem with me rather than the film itself.

  • Scarecrow Returns aka Scarecrow and the Army of Thieves, Matthew Reilly

    Scarecrow Returns aka Scarecrow and the Army of Thieves, Matthew Reilly

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Pocket, 2013 reprint of 2012 original, 496 pages, ISBN C$9.99 mmpb, ISBN 978-1-4165-7760-7

    There are a few thousand reviews on this web site, and only a handful of them contain the word “escapism”.  Being mainly a fan of genre fiction, I think the word is not only derogatory to most readers, but based on false premises: genre fiction at its best should be a way to understand the world a bit better by studying how people behave under extraordinary circumstances.  But it’s also true that until recently, I simply did not understand the concept of escapism: Reading was a large part of my life and trying to escape from reading by reading led to unsolvable tautological conundrums.

    Then life happened: I became a husband/father, took on more responsibilities, went on a reading semi-sabbatical and eventually realized that I hadn’t taken holidays in years, nor sat down to read a paperback from beginning to end in roughly as long.  Taking a week off for summer holidays “doing nothing around the house”, I build my schedule around a number of key activities such as “reading a paperback sitting outside”.  Stars aligned and I eventually found myself with some free time, a big jug of ice tea and favorable weather.

    Of course, I picked a Matthew Reilly novel.  Reilly, after all, is the very model of a dependable genre writer: He delivers more or less the same kind of experience to his readers, book after book after book.  The Michael Bay of prose techno-thrillers, he builds his novels like videogames, high on action-movie set-pieces, a series of increasingly difficult levels, mapped-out settings and bare-bones characters largely distinguished by their call signs.  Reilly may not be deep or literary, but he is clever and astonishing good at what he chooses to do: He’s a natural choice for anyone looking to reconnect with notions of escapism.

    So it is that this novel returns to the character of Shane “Scarecrow” Shofield, indestructible hero of four previous high-tech action novels.  This time, he happens to be up in the Arctic Circle just as a terrorist group takes over a Russian base and threatens the world with wholesale destruction.  Grabbing on to a small motley group, he boldly heads toward more dangers and insane action sequences than you can count.

    Readers of the series so far will be completely comfortable with this new instalment: High-tech weapons, large-scale geopolitical premises, nick-of-time escapes from certain death are all featured here, along with the usual in-book diagrams, in-prose exclamation points and usual bon mots from the characters.  Reilly still manages to make me chuckle out loud at the absurdity of his action sequences, and he’s never too shy to tell you how to feel at any given moment. (i.e.; it’s not enough for the characters to swing heavy objects from cables in unlikely configuration: you will be told explicitly that “it was an incredible sight”)  The more you know the series, the more amusing it is: at one point, a character in desperate circumstances asks herself “What would Scarecrow do?” The answer is to go for the most insane explosive alternative… and it works.  Scarecrow Returns also comes back to the enclosed-environment settings of early Reilly novels (unlike the globe-spanning of his last few books), and actually nods heavily toward continuity by taking in account the psychological trauma suffered by its protagonist in previous novels.

    None of this is meant as a recommendation for those who are not already familiar with Reilly’s brand of explosive fiction: It takes a special kind of reader to appreciate the relentless pacing, crude plot mechanics and slam-bang prose.  Still, there’s respectability in consistency, and Scarecrow Returns is exactly what fans would be looking for in a new Reilly novel.  It’s so over the top that it creates its own reality, sucking readers out of their usual lives.  Escapism?  Yes, please.

  • Machine Gun Preacher (2011)

    Machine Gun Preacher (2011)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, August 2014) It feels vaguely improper to take apart a film as well-intentioned as Machine Gun Preacher.  It is, after all, the inspiring story of a junkie criminal who finds religion and embarks on a quest to save children in war-torn Africa.  How can you possibly criticize something like that?  But as noble as Machine Gun Preacher can be, its intentions don’t matter as much when the film itself proves to be so disappointing.  Even at nearly two hours, much of the film feels like a half-baked sketch, filled with diversions that are never explored and not particularly good at hitting its specific emotional targets.  Gerald Butler gets another thankless role as the titular preacher, with a script that doesn’t do much with the various ethical issues of seeing an ex-criminal taking up arms in the cause of peace.  A few secondary characters voice objections (as in “you should focus on your family first”, as in “if you take up arms, you may become part of the problem”), but those are ignored or blown away like so many troublesome subplots.  What’s maddening is the amount of material at the edges of the film, begging to be used more effectively with just a little bit more introspection.  The subject matters deserves better than this strange mix of gritty drama and action-movie heroics –to say nothing of the uncomfortable way Africa is saved by Yet Another White Hero. Machine Gun Preacher feels as if good intentions were mangled by Hollywood story meetings and possibly someone with a hankering to make an exploitation film along the way.  The result just feels limp despite its potential, and badly serves its inspiration.

  • The Art of the Steal (2013)

    The Art of the Steal (2013)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, August 2014) I’m a sucker for fast-moving crime comedies, and so it is that Canadian low-budget The Art of the Steal manages to hit all of the right buttons.  From the get-go, it presents itself with narration-heavy stylish grace, zipping along its plot points while keeping a pleasantly cynical tone throughout.  Kurt Russell stars as the protagonist/narrator, a master thief who’s been burnt once by an accomplice (Matt Dillon, as slickly slimy as he can be).  When both of them are reunited for One Last Caper, you can guess where the story goes.  Jay Baruchel becomes another good neurotic oddball (alongside veteran Terence Stamp for an added touch of class), but it’s writer/director Jonathan Sobol who delivers the most stylish performance.  While The Art of the Steal liberally borrows from other similar films down to the expected twist ending, the result is pleasant enough to excuse any familiarity: sometimes, comfort is what we’re after, and fans of caper films should be more than happy with the result.  Best of all; this is a cheerfully Canadian film both in origins and in setting: For something shown partially to fulfill CanCon requirements for home-grown cable channels, it’s surprisingly entertaining and slickly made as a bonus. 

  • The Wolverine (2013)

    The Wolverine (2013)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, August 2014) The good news are that this take on comic-book superhero Wolverine is quite a bit better than the dismal 2009 Origins film.  Taking place almost entirely in Japan, this Wolverine digs a bit deeper into the character’s traumas, attempts a more respectable kind of story and manages once or twice to deliver action sequences that make full use of Wolverine’s special powers.  The bad news are that for all of the characterization, exotic setting and occasional thrills, The Wolverine is a bit… dull.  Hugh Jackman is the character but the script doesn’t give him much range to show: he’s still the same stoic figure, slashing and dicing as soon as he’s repowered.  The Japanese setting is unusual enough to be interesting, but it suffers from a bad case of occidental gaze: by the time the film is through, we’ve been served the same exotic-yet-familiar cocktail of samurais, yakuza, ninjas and pachinko.  (That last in an arcade parlour where people are curiously unconcerned about the destructive mayhem surrounding them.)  At times, the film promises more than it can deliver: while the bullet-train sequence is original enough and the cardiac self-surgery reaches into character-specific thrills (after a too-long interlude in which the character is depowered), much of the rest is generic in the way only superhero movies can be, including a third act that rushes back to tired old superhero movie clichés.  The plot twists are seen coming well in advance and while Svetlana Khodchenkova’s Viper initially promises to be something more striking than usual, the script eventually relegates her character to the usual villain.  By the time The Wolverine is over, it has retreated to a comfortable middle-ground, neither silly enough to be dismissed like its predecessor, nor exceptional enough to be considered as anything more than a competent summer spectacle.