Author: Christian Sauvé

  • The Disorderly Orderly (1964)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, January 2022) Much like that other Jerry Lewis film, there are two personalities battling for control in The Disorderly Orderly—a cartoonish comedy complete with fast-forwarded movement, silly sound effects, slapstick scenes, big set-pieces and broad overacting; and a more sensitive drama in which an orderly pines for a young woman who wants nothing to do with him, even as he works overtime to pay for her stay in psychiatric services. Obviously, the comedy wins—especially in the end stretch of the film, where a long series of physical gags and daring stuntwork provides an over-the-top climax to the events. (You can thank writer/director Frank Tashlin’s background in animating Looney Tunes shorts for that lunacy.)  But it’s the intrusion of the other genres that give pause, as the film criticizes for-profit healthcare (ahead of its time!) and tangles with an unsatisfactory romance. There’s clearly a satirical intent is having the protagonist and his crush unsuccessfully try to get together despite not feeling any spark (the follow-up romance with another character feels tacked-on) but it does point to the film’s flaws as something not entirely cooked all the way through. As for Lewis himself, his performance is aligned with his other movies of the time—there’s occasionally an attempt at pathos (see “the movie’s other personality”) but he’s clearly more at ease yukking it up, such as in the scene where he demonstrates his debilitating “neurotic identification empathy,” hammering a point twelve times just to make sure we get it and get that he’s trying really hard to make it obvious. The result does have its moments, but The Disorderly Orderly feels too disconnected and tonally inconsistent to fully appreciate.

  • Trapped Ashes (2006)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, January 2022) Perhaps the most difficult trick in writing horror movies is making you believe in the impossible—the necessary suspension of disbelief in order to accept that there’s a supernatural entity hunting our characters, or that occult forces are influencing the plot. Much of this willingness to play along is helped by what viewers want to see: if we’re paying to see the monster, the monster can’t make it on-screen fast enough. But horror can take this suspension of disbelief for granted, and any film that doesn’t put in the necessary work to make us believe places itself in trouble. The problem with horror anthology Trapped Ashes isn’t necessarily the over-the-top nature of its segments, its copious nudity or inconsistent tone—it starts in the framing device, as a bunch of strangers visiting a movie studio are lazily brought to a locked room and asked to spill their secrets. Nothing about the framing device makes sense, especially the passing tourists’ eagerness to go when they should not and unanimously get trapped on a set. Henry Gibson may be a lot of fun as a tour guide, but he’s also stuck in a script that doesn’t even put in the minimal effort to make us believe. Things don’t get better once the segment starts: in the opening one, an ambitious starlet doesn’t even blink when told that her breast implants are made out of human tissues. When, later on, her breasts start exsanguinating her intimate partners (don’t think too much about the mechanics of that), we viewers shrug, having done the whole, “Are you kidding? What did you expect?” thing a few minutes earlier. Horror fans will note that a number of cult-favourite genre directors are involved in the anthology: Joe Dante does the framing segments, Ken Russell does the bloodthirsty breasts one (which may explain a lot), Sean S. Cunningham goes to Japan for ghostly hijinks, and SFX supervisor John Gaeta turns in a tale that draws parallels between pregnancy and tapeworms. The one promising segment that should have worked well, about a filmmaker and his undead lover, falls flat on screen. Not that it’s a lone misfire: The Gaeta segment never takes off despite a squirm-inducing premise and the Japan-set segment doesn’t go anywhere either. The Russell one may be weird and poorly justified, but at least it does have an odd sense of humour. As for Dante’s contribution, it has good bits and pieces even if it doesn’t manage to put them together effectively. In that, the framing device does feel representative of a film that could have been much better but appears satisfied to coast on audiences doing most of the work for them. Trapped Ashes is not a film that works on anyone with slightly higher expectations than basic horror tropes.

  • Slaughterhouse-Five (1972)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, January 2022) If Slaughterhouse-Five is a disappointment, much of it has to do with how it reaches for more than it can deliver on at least two levels. First, in adapting the classic Kurt Vonnegut novel, it measures itself up against impossible odds: Vonnegut’s narrative approach is unique and maybe impossible to adapt faithfully to the screen. I last read the novel decades ago and it left such a strong impression that I can still quote moments of it—and didn’t find much of that in the film. But even if everyone agreed not to criticize the adaptation for not having the flavour of the original text, there’s still another insurmountable obstacle in the story’s immensely ambitious scope, spanning decades in the protagonist’s life: the firebombing of Dresden, a brush with near-incomprehensible aliens and eventually becoming unstuck in time. Little of this was possible to credibly portray on-screen with middle-budget early-1970s filmmaking, so it’s not a surprise if the result feels so disappointing. Vonnegut reportedly liked the result—but then again, he was a quintessential gentleman. Following in his footsteps, let’s be indulgent and at least acknowledge that Slaughterhouse Five remains interesting to watch even if it can’t grasp what it reaches for: The unstuck-in-time device is ideally suited for editing tricks (even if it doesn’t fully exploit the possibilities there) and the film does attain a darkly comic detachment about itself that does honour Vonnegut himself. I’m not even sure if it fully achieves the goals if set for itself—there’s a very long car mayhem sequence that had me thinking, “I hope this insufferable character dies” before exactly that happens, except that the film thinks it’s a tragedy. But weirdness is what Slaughterhouse Five has to offer, and then-veteran director George Roy Hill does his best in accomplishing a project fraught with pitfalls. As much as I don’t like the idea of remakes, I’m really not opposed to seeing someone take Slaughterhouse Five out for another spin, with modern innovations (SFX and audience literacy) that have made a mockery of what was formerly called “impossible to adapt.”  So it goes.

  • Melvin and Howard (1980)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, January 2022) I didn’t even realize that Melvin and Howard was based on a true story while I was watching it. Yes, I knew who Howard Hugues was—in fact, it was one of the things that drew me into this film. But what I only found out after the end credits was that the film is based on real events. Or rather—real affirmations of what may or may not have happened. To recap: In our timeline, eccentric billionaire Howard Hugues died without having a formally recognized will. That much is true. What is also true is that hundreds of claims to his fortune and fraudulent wills emerged in the years following Hugues’s death, all of them found wanting. One of those claims was “The Mormon Will,” which apparently awarded one sixteenth of Hugues’ fortune to an everyday man named Melvin Dummar, who claimed that he had once given a lift back to Los Angeles to someone claiming to be Hugues, and had the will dropped in his gas station by a mysterious stranger. There are a lot of dubious “claims” in these assertions (which were resoundingly proven false in court), but Melvin and Howard plays it straight—what if Melvin’s side of the story was the truth? (Suddenly, I don’t feel too bad about not immediately knowing that this was a “true” story.)  That hook ends up being a reason for director Jonathan Demme to deliver a compassionate character study of struggling Americans throughout the 1970s. If you, like me, don’t know from the get-go that Melvin and Howard is supposed to be a true story, the resulting film feels oddly mis-structured. After an opening in which Hugues crashes his motorcycle in the desert, Dummar picks him up out of happenstance (and the kindness of his heart) and the two men bond over the following truck ride. Then the film forgets about Hugues for more than an hour as Dummar struggles to keep a job, remarries his ex-wife, moves to another state and generally tries to keep things together through divorce and unemployment. Dummar is near the bottom of the American society, often a single step ahead of repossession and being fired. Paul Le Mat gives a credible and likable portrait of a lower-class working man making poor choices, even if the always-wonderful Mary Steenburgen steals the movie as his long-suffering (then re-divorced) wife. It’s only late in the film, as the opening moments have been nearly forgotten, that a will is mysteriously left on his desk and the film renews with Hugues’ legacy. From that point on, Melvin and Howard is not necessarily to be trusted on factual grounds: the film tells it squarely from Dummar’s perspective, and the trial that convincingly determined that the “Mormon Will” was a hoax is here presented as the persecution of an honest man. It does make for an interesting film, even if not necessarily a cohesive one: A portrait of a working-class schlub bookended by much jazzier fiction about a billionaire’s intrusion on his life. What makes the film special is its affection for its erring protagonist—and the slice-of-life portrayal of a struggling family. While not exactly truthful, Melvin and Howard does poke at universality.

  • Something Beneath (2007)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, January 2022) There is nothing to be learned from Something Beneath except that, often, the reviews are right. Any online source will tell you that it’s a terrible film with sub-average reviews from critics and general audiences alike. In presentation, it seems to be nothing more than a monster-of-the-week straight-to-DVD movie with low production values and even lower ambitions: the kinds of things cranked up by the dozens for low-end content providers. The result is… exactly that. Riffing from much better films, Something Beneath has an environmentalist message (led unironically by notorious right-winger Kevin Sorbo) tying a climate change conference with an environmental threat that gives life to people’s worst fears. Executed on the cheap, the result rarely rises above the roughness of similar films—dull direction and low-end special effects characterize the dispiriting viewing experience. Oh, it’s not quite at the lowest rung of the ladder—Sorbo does make for a likable presence, and the script has occasional moments of inspiration. Still, there’s little here to justify any effort at seeking out Something Beneath. Even at the lowest-effort level (“This says environmental conference and Kevin Sorbo. I wonder if they’ll play the material straight? Might as well watch it.”), it’s not much worth remembering.

  • Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse (1991)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2022) It’s funny how, with the widespread availability of movies from all eras on a variety of platforms, middle-aged cinephiles such as myself can see a title pop up and remember that, years if not decades ago, they really wanted to see it. I’ve been curious about Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse for a long time—While Apocalypse Now isn’t among my favourite films, its infamously troubled production has long been well-known, and many of the summaries of what happened punt readers toward this making-of movie as the definitive source. It’s also a relative curio in that it’s a standalone making-of documentary that predates the DVD era by more than half a decade—while it was relatively commonplace to see extensive documentaries included on DVD (and then Blu-ray) special editions before streaming took over, Hearts of Darkness was made in a pre-digital era, painstakingly put together with an intent that isn’t purely mercenary about its film. (Although I defy anyone to watch it and not be moved to another rewatch of the original.)  What makes it fascinating is that what happened on the set of Apocalypse Now, so candidly discussed more than a decade later by those involved, is what often happens on other sets—but cranked to spectacular extremes. Actor ill on set? How about Martin Sheen having a heart attack? Production difficulties with the sets being damaged? How about a typhoon tearing through the entire area? Difficulties working with partners? How about a director having to argue with the Marcos-era Phillipinese armed forces? Creative differences between director and star? Marlon Brando showing up overweight and undermotivated. Reshoots? How about an entire production delayed by a year? Directors pouring everything into their project? Here’s Francis Ford Coppola scrambling to find enough of his own money toward the completion of the project. Everything that can go wrong did go wrong, apparently, and Hearts of Darkness benefits from footage shot by Coppola’s wife during production to illustrate its carnival of misfortune, along with various interviews and news headlines to flesh out the material even more. While the story is well-known enough to be familiar to interested viewers, it still carries a punch as a reminder of how complicated an enterprise a big-budget film can be. It’s also good enough and even-handed enough to remind us that there are other movies out there that had an exceptionally troubled shoot, and we can’t rely on publicists to learn more about it. (I have a feeling that, in a decade or so, we’ll learn plenty more about the production of such marquee movies as The Amazing Spider-Man 2, Rogue One or Solo. But only if The Mouse allows it.)

  • Charulata (1964)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2022) Ah well—after being unexplainably taken by Satyajit Ray’s The Big City, here’s Charulata to bring me back to normal:—I just find his films uninteresting. This is not necessarily a condemnation of his work—I’m just not particularly taken by the result. Charulata does poke around some interesting themes, as a rich housewife gets bored and finds an intellectual awakening with her husband’s cousin. In a society where people aren’t necessarily free to act on their desires, the film is built around a textured blend of lust, trust and characters weighing the consequences of their next actions. A showy one-shot opening sequence is matched by a closing freeze-frame, with Ray being his usual precise self as a director in-between beginning and end. It’s well-done, evocative of a certain lifestyle and careful about its characters, but I simply wasn’t grabbed by it all. It doesn’t help that the film runs about twice as long as I would have liked, with a very slow pacing combined with a quietness of effect. You can say that Charulata made me appreciate The Big City even more—at least there’s one Ray film that I like, the rest being most appropriate for others.

  • Feast (2005)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, January 2022) While Feast is definitely not aiming to be more than a good old humans-against-monsters movie, it does have a certain confidence in its intentions, and doesn’t forget to laugh about its generic premise. Wisely limited to a single night, it’s a film that follows a bunch of strangers in an isolated night as it’s attacked by human-eating demons. There’s nothing new to that premise, but the film shows early on that it doesn’t mean playing the material straight or serious. Intertitles and freeze-frames help introduce the characters, often leading us to narrative red herrings. The special effects work is not that bad despite the film’s low-budget, and while the actors aren’t particularly good, they are directed with a certain energy by John Gulager. The script eventually becomes too self-aware for its own good, but it can be relied upon to keep the plot pieces going from beginning to end. The film has no compunction about doing unexpected things, but that intention eventually gets away from its effectiveness during the third act, as various curveballs end up damaging the pacing rather than enhancing it. Still, as far as cheap monster movies go, Feast does a little bit better than usual thanks to some self-awareness and a crew that understands that when you don’t have much of a budget, an attitude and wittier words don’t necessarily cost much more.

  • All You Can Eat Buddha (2017)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On TV, January 2022) Even by the standards of arthouse French-Canadian movies, writer-director Ian Lagarde’s All You Can Eat Buddha is a weird one. The opening credits of the film waste no time in setting up the off-putting nature of what will follow, as shots of a calm blue sea are overlaid over a fat man, tentacles and dissonant musical stings. What’s in store after that? Plenty, even if it may not make much sense. Taking place at a low-end vacation resort, the film revolves around an overweight, diabetic man who decides that he’d rather stay at the resort than go back home. Which is really curious considering that he doesn’t do much more than eat and look forlorn, not even taking part in the resort’s activities. But the weirdness accumulates: As the world outside the resort steadily degrades, he manages to cure a young woman of her anorexia, make friends with an octopus, have sex with a maid, and befriend the rest of the staff. (Except for the resort owner, who’s driven crazy in trying to understand why people like the protagonist so much.)  Lengthy silences and enigmatic events constantly remind viewers that this is a low-budget art film, not meant to be understood as much as taken in. It all climaxes by what I’m guessing is karmic retribution, as the role of the eater reverts and balance is brought back to another cycle. I wisely gave up early on making sense of All You Can Eat Buddha—I simply wasn’t in the mood for puzzle resolution, so I just let the film wash over me and wasn’t completely bored by the experience. Many will get much more out of it, but the key is not expecting anything as ordinary as a narrative-driven film. It often feels like a dream, so that should tell you enough about whether you’re susceptible to its strengths or not.

  • Evil Under the Sun (1982)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2022) Agatha Christie’s Inspecteur Poirot is back for a third Richard Goodwin-produced adventure in Evil Under the Sun, a follow-up to Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile. This time, we leave transportation vehicles behind to focus on a weekend of relaxation and murder at a small Adriatic Sea resort. When a young actress is killed midway through the film, it’s up to the droll Poirot to interrogate suspects, gather clues and assemble everyone for the shocking solution. There’s been a dearth of good murder mysteries lately (as evidenced by Knives Out’s enthusiastic reception), and I suspect that it’s one of the reasons why Evil Under the Sun still plays so well now compared to when it came out. There’s a rather wonderful double-historical nostalgic effect in now watching a 1980s film set sometime in the 1950s (ish)—and it’s fun to spend some time with characters vacationing. That fun turns to intellectual challenge as the murder investigation starts and testimonies don’t add up. A rather interesting cast surrounds a near-flawless Peter Ustinov as Poirot (thankfully, his French is almost perfect), with Maggie Smith (as a resort owner) and James Mason (playing a character unusually fond of his lack of alibi) being the most recognizable supporting actors to twenty-first century viewers. Red herring abounds, and while the result isn’t as strong as the first two films in the series, it’s still quite entertaining to watch. I have a few quibbles about the rushed ending (not the least being that a bottle would be the physical proof claimed by the characters), but not enough to dislike the result. I’m waiting for murder mysteries to make a comeback, and I just have to point to Evil Under the Sun to make a point about how even mildly successful ones can still be a lot of fun to watch.

  • Gabal [The Wig] (2005)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, January 2022) One of the usual problems with horror cinema is that it has to click on at least two levels to succeed: The scares should be good, and the reason behind the scare should work as well. All too often, filmmakers will focus on spooky set-pieces while forgetting that it should all amount to something—a compelling theme, a sensible plot, and developed characters. Otherwise, why bother? Director Won Shin-yun’s The Wig is only a half-success in that while it gets some spooky scares right, the film has issues tying them into something more. Beginning with a mute woman taking her younger cancer-stricken sister home so that she doesn’t die in a hospital, the scares get going when a wig (purchased so that the bald sister doesn’t feel too out-of-place) starts showing signs of malevolence. As flashbacks explain how we got there (most notably in showing the car accident that made the protagonist mute), the developing story steadily gets wilder and less credible. By the time the origins of the wig are clarified, the amount of preposterous material teetering on a foundation made of coincidences is too much—the film implodes on too many contrivances. The frequency of spooky sequences also goes down during that third act: wrongly convinced of its importance, the film slows down and gives audiences ample time to be skeptical of where the story goes, with unlikely connections between the handful of characters. While moments of The Wig work well, there are simply too many issues with plotting, pacing and character for the entire film to distinguish itself.

  • Breezy (1973)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2022) There are dozens of ways Clint Eastwood’s intergenerational romance Breezy should not have worked. Building a film on the idea of a teenager falling in love with a fifty-something man is already a tricky proposal: any hint of leering, deviance, or wish-fulfillment would have made the film a reprehensible object of derision. As it stands, Breezy is still awkward and suspicious, but it has enough of a patina of good execution to keep it from careening out of control. Historically, this was Clint Eastwood’s third film as a director (he doesn’t star in it) and an occasion to provide classic Hollywood actor Richard Holden with a solid late-career role. As a bitter, divorced fifty-something, his character is brought back from the brink of cynicism by the influence of a precocious seventeen-year-old hippie. While the subject matter sounds and occasionally feels like the kinds of things that older Hollywood executives would enjoy seeing on-screen, much of the film has the decency to be about the problems inherent in such a lopsided relationship. The film is at its strongest when the older man is very conscious of how doomed their affair is—alas, Breezy ultimately settles for a wholly unconvincing ending precipitated by some limp dialogue. Some will be reassured that the film was, even in the early wild and woolly 1970s, not a success and has drawn mixed critical reactions up until today. The best I can say about it is that it doesn’t humiliate itself nor feels unacceptably exploitative. But that’s not necessarily an endorsement: Breezy stinks of the worst aspects of the early-1970s and constantly feels one moment away from a much worse film. That it keeps it together long enough to have a few moments of dramatic interest is probably the best that the film could hope for.

  • Nobody (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2022) There’s much to be said about a genre piece cleverly playing to its core audience. Action comedy Nobody is clearly designed for fans, whether it’s about the premise, the details of its story or the way the action sequences are put together. The film never misses an opportunity to play with the power chords of action filmmaking, delivers just enough of a twist on a familiar premise to be interesting, and manages to provide strong entertainment value on a limited budget. The multi-talented Bob Odenkirk, who has hovered on the edge of stardom for a long time, gets a plum role here as an ex-operative (an “auditor” for a shadowy government agency) who is accidentally brought back from suburban retirement to bone-crushing action against villains of various stripes. The psychological twist here is that he’s not constrained to get back to violence—he simply re-embraces the attraction of that lifestyle that he only suppressed for so long. As a random home burglary revives his bloodthirstiness, director Ilya Naishuller apes the John Wick series (which shares the same screenwriter and producer) for inspiration on how to build action sequences: Clean crisp direction finding a good balance between strong editing and credibly letting the actors sell the choreography of the fights. To that able execution, Nobody adds quirks designed to get the fans whooping it up: One-liners carefully delivered and an inordinate fondness for using slow songs as counterpoint to the action sequences are two of the most obvious elements of how this is an action movie for action movie fans—a good way to wait for the next John Wick volume while presenting a new protagonist. It’s an enjoyable watch throughout—from a repetitively frustrating opening to a conclusion that promises sequels to come. It may not be particularly profound, but Nobody is one of the best action films of 2021 and it knows exactly what it is.

  • Meurtres à Marie-Galante (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, January 2022) One underappreciated strength of the murder-mystery genre is how it’s ideally suited to exploring an unusual setting. Beyond the expected elements of a murder, a criminal and an investigator, authors are free to tailor the plot to the specifics of the setting in which they’re telling the story, whether it’s a high-finance corporation, a space station or, in the case of Meurtres à Marie-Galante, a picturesque island near Guadeloupe. Under French administration, it’s a good and unusual “local” destination for French filmmakers to use in order to present an exotic location without travelling to another country. They certainly make the most out of the gorgeous setting—despite what feels like a low production budget, the film benefits from the natural landscapes and an opportunity to present a murder mystery in the Caribbean. This leads to some great casting choices, perhaps the best being Pascal Légitimus as a mainland policeman going back to his native island to write a book, but is immediately swept up by a mysterious murder. His most immediate colleague on the island has reasons to dislike him, and local politics and history soon inform the investigation. Meurtres à Marie-Galante is not that slick of a film, but it’s rather wonderful to watch in the middle of January: unusual faces, great accents, terrific local details, gorgeous sunny beaches and a decent-enough story have all it takes to make this a pleasant watch, especially if you go in with low expectations.

  • Stars Fell on Alabama (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2022) By now, the Hallmark Channel romantic comedy formula is not only famous enough to have been dissected in thorough detail, it’s being imitated across an entire swath of low-budget films all going for that same market audience. I keep waiting for the genre to become self-aware and poking fun at itself, but that may have to wait a while. Until then, we get exercises like Stars Fell on Alabama that play with subgenre convention without quite giving in to them entirely. Here, our male lead is a Hollywood agent who, in order to impress the Alabama locals during a class reunion, brings back a Hollywood starlet to town and pretends that she’s his girlfriend—something made more difficult by a local ex-flame still having an interest, and the superstar ex-boyfriend of the starlet not being happy about the paparazzi shots coming out of Alabama. You can see an inversion of clichés in Stars Fell on Alabama, but it’s half-hearted at best—the local ex-flame barely has one scene to make her case before going back to her local husband, while the rest of the film clearly settles into the “fake-it-till-you-fall-for-it” subgenre rather than wholly committing to the small-city romance angle. The low production values and slapdash script are most obvious in an awkward prologue set in Los Angeles—fortunately, things get more credible and interesting once the film settles in Alabama. Stars Fell on Alabama doesn’t amount to much, with a very obvious conclusion handled in the most obvious way possible, but it’s generally watchable and not offensive at all. Its portrait of small-town Alabama (while shot in South Carolina) is more affectionate than you’d expect (although, once again: target audience) and gets a couple of passable leads in James Maslow and Ciara Hanna. The supporting characters are usually more fun to watch as the film monster-trucks predictably from beginning to end. Not good, but not terrible either if your expectations stay low. But it’s certainly not the film that will make fun of other films like it.