Author: Christian Sauvé

  • Pogey Beach (2019)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2021) Considering that much of movie Canada seems to take place either in Montréal or Toronto (with a third-place finish for Vancouver), it’s refreshing for Pogey Beach to head eastward—not just to the Maritimes, but to Prince Edward Island itself, the beautiful but often neglected smallest province that almost never makes any national headline. But there’s a catch, a really big catch, as suggested by the title: “Pogey” is Canadian slang for unemployment benefits, and Pogey Beach plays up an affectionate caricature of Islanders living off government largesse in an economically depressed region, correctly answering unemployment questionnaires with a mantra (“No, no, no, yes, no”) and spending their days drinking and flirting on the titular beach. When a pair of hilariously caricatured father-and-daughter Torontonians arrive with dreams of providing gainful employment to the region, they quickly learn better. She is seduced by the lifestyle and soon becomes an even more ardent pogey moocher; meanwhile, he hires a retired “pogey narc” to infiltrate the beach and gather evidence to send them all to… Pogey Jail. (Really a fish packing line.)  In the vein of “Shameless” and the Maritime comedy classic series “Trailer Park Boys,” Pogey Beach is a funhouse reflection of a world in which mooching from government is an admirable lifestyle, and the big enemy is Service Canada with its reasonable expectations of fair work for money. The script is rife with too-obvious dialogue, crude scene construction, slapdash characters and excessive profanity, but that’s not actually a bad thing considering how off-the-wall Pogey Beach presents itself. The comedy’s not bad even in its worst excesses, and the film presents a Maritimer’s satire on the Maritimes (writer-director-producer Jeremy Larter is a PEI native)—the regional expressions run so thick that even the film’s closed captioning gives up on understanding it at times. Adapted from a web series, Pogey Beach carries some of that hermetic vibe of a cult classic—but the payoff is a fully realized comic vision that dares viewers to keep up with its insanity. Considering how much it commits to its premise, perhaps the worst thing one can say about Pogey Beach is that its cinematography suffers from its limited budget—no one is going to use it as a visual showcase for PEI, and there are times when just a little bit more effort (in framing characters against available light, in working out better staging) would have led to a more pleasant film to watch. Although pleasantness really isn’t the point here.

  • By the Sea (2015)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On TV, January 2021) I’m not sure what fans of the Angelina Jolie/Brad Pitt celebrity couple expected from their passion project By the Sea—probably not the glum look at a married pair working through some deep-seated issues, probably not the amount of voyeurism and nudity in the film; and almost certainly not its tone, pacing and cinematography aping Mediterranean arthouse films from decades past. The thin storyline has Jolie and Pitt as a married couple on the rocks going to a seaside French resort in an attempt to reconnect. They eventually become close to another younger couple occupying the room next to them, with a handy hole in the wall providing them with a full-coverage look at what they do in their room. The protagonists aren’t particularly admirable nor likable: the first half of the film is told from his viewpoint as a dried-up novelist barely tolerating a withdrawn wife; the second film is told from her perspective as an unstable former dancer unsuccessfully trying to reach a distant husband. It’s all artistic, dramatic and with far more nudity than you’d expect from a 2015 American film (although not a 1980s French or Italian film), but those same qualities also make the film a lengthy sit. Stretching a simple plot over 132 very long minutes, By the Sea takes too long to get going and, thus offers far too many opportunities to its audience to grow weary, then derisive of the results. There’s an echo of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf? here in terms of a superstar couple working out marital tensions on-screen, but By the Sea has little of the breathtaking wit of the Taylor/Burton vehicle. Writer/director Jolie Pitt (as she bills herself here) is not a bad director within her chosen mode of filmmaking, but she delivers a trying, sometimes exasperating film—the frigid critical and commercial reaction may have had as much to do with a simple mismatch between expectations and product. Who’s willing to bet that By the Sea would have been far better received from a lesser-known filmmaker?

  • Tekken (2010)

    Tekken (2010)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On TV, January 2021) I know, I know—I should not have gone in a movie adaptation of a fighting game and expected more than, well, the fighting sequences. But even with those expectations, Tekken remains irritating—a mixture of lazy Science Fictional worldbuilding (or rather set-dressing), coupled with ugly cinematography, dull characters, a by-the-numbers plot and a repetitive nature. No, it’s not good. Despite the efforts of the martial artists and stuntmen involved, it’s not even good by the standards of fighting movies by having nothing beyond the fights. Every match looks the same, set in a dark arena with the requisite post-apocalyptic grimy neon highlights. The film is intensely repetitive and can’t be bothered to have interesting characters (let alone going beyond the crudest clichés). It’s hard to do anything sophisticated from a fight’em up foundation, but still—couldn’t they find anything better? If the film has a saving grace, it’s in the fighting performance of the actors involved (notably lead Jon Foo)—there are some decent moves there. Unfortunately, it’s shot in a way that invites derision from aping the worst action movies of the 2000s. Ah well—it’s ten years later, and Tekken is now playing in dubbed French in the middle of the night on a channel known for getting cheap stuff to fill in the gaps in their scheduling. I really shouldn’t have expected anything better. But I’m glad I can now strike this one off the list and never see it again.

  • Wendy Williams: The Movie (2021)

    Wendy Williams: The Movie (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, January 2021) I watched quite a bit of Wendy Williams’ show for a few years when I was married (“How you doin’?”), and her oversized personality is enough to make Wendy Williams: The Movie sound like an interesting topic. Even casual Williams fans know quite a bit about her struggles—candid honesty has been one of her trademarks for a long time, and the biography illuminates what we’ve known or suspected. Everyone should note that this Lifetime biography is practically a Williams vanity project: Produced by her own production company and presenting the story as explicitly narrated by Williams (who closes the film by appearing on-screen to talk to the viewers), the film presents Williams as being right even when she’s behaving badly or being done dirty: Body issues from childhood spurred on by her parents; a date rape that leaves her more determined than even to forge her own way ahead; cocaine addition kicked in an instant after realizing it didn’t do much for her; the discovery of her husband’s double life that gives her the excuse to behave like the spurned heroine of her own movie… it’s also a film made for Williams fans, with very little second-guessing allowed. Even a cursory recall of Williams’ various controversies (Despite her intelligence, Williams has said a lot of outrageous stuff over the years and some of it was incredibly stupid) is enough to remind us that a lot goes unsaid or unaddressed in this “tell-all” biofiction. Ciera Payton gets plenty of praise for playing Williams despite not looking all that much like her—but then who else does?—while director Darren Grant gets things moving within the confines of a TV movie’s budget and time constraints. The narrative is too raw on the drugs, rape and betrayal side to qualify as fluff entertainment, but viewers are going to be reminded from beginning to end that this is Wendy Williams as seen by Wendy Williams, which may not always be the most interesting angle.

  • Ship Ahoy (1942)

    Ship Ahoy (1942)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2021) The combination of Eleanor Powell’s tap-dancing talents and Red Skelton’s rubber-faced comedy must have been an irresistible commercial prospect in the early 1940s, and Ship Ahoy mostly delivers on that promise, with a few extras on top. The best of those, to me, has to be Virginia O’Brien in a strong supporting comic role, her deadpan singing being limited to one sequence. (But what a sequence: A romantic ditty first performed straight by a young Frank Sinatra, reprised with heartfelt romantic humour by Skelton, and then mercilessly skewed by O’Brien’s usual flat singing and sarcastic interjections: “Wow!”)  Surprisingly enough, Skelton keeps a lid on his worst tendencies, even conforming to the demands of a romantic lead role (as a hypochondriac writer) rather than overindulge in comic showboating. The plot itself gets ingenious at times, with Powell’s character being duped into taking a piece of high technology out of the mainland states to the benefit of foreigners, being kidnapped, then alerting US agents by tap-dancing Morse code. One more highlight is a substantial performance by legendary big-band leader Tommy Dorsey and his orchestra as the source of many of the film’s musical numbers. While I’ll agree with those who point out that Ship Ahoy is a lesser effort than the second Powell/Skelton collaboration I Dood It (a Skelton catchphrase that you can hear as a line of dialogue here), there are enough bits and pieces here and there to make it great fun to watch—I never get enough of O’Brien anyway, and this film does let her do more than just a novelty song.

  • Piranha (1978)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, January 2021) In retrospect, I really shouldn’t be surprised that the original 1978 Piranha reminded me so much of its detestable 2010s remake. Isn’t that the point of it? But there’s a crucial difference in how the original, for all of its terribly dated visuals, muddy cinematography and primitive special effects, actually benefits from its limitations. Not feeling forced to show everyone being graphically dismembered, this film does have the sometimes-amusing spirit of a classic monster movie, with the horror being tolerable rather than ultraviolent. It only barely qualifies as a horror/comedy considering how often women and children are the targets of the hungry piranhas. Director Joe Dante directs a John Sayles script with some skill, and the results of both filmmakers’ efforts are apparent: the justification for the monstrous piranhas is hallway witty, while the direction steadily cribs from 1970s disaster films and, most obviously, 1975’s Jaws. Alas, Piranha does remain a bloodbath of a monster film, so my liking for the result remains limited—but it’s a bit better than I expected.

  • The Gunfighter (1950)

    The Gunfighter (1950)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2021) I don’t particularly like westerns, but the specific sub-genre that had to do with the end of the wild west always has me intrigued—it’s as close to an original take on deliberate colonization as American cinema gets, and I find those issues to be more inherently interesting than the typical desperadoes-on-their-horses too often seen. 1950’s The Gunfighter, in some ways, can be seen as a precursor to a wave of revisionist westerns that would build on the clichés of the genre. Here we have a familiar figure—the fastest hand in the west—treated in a more realistic fashion: the trouble with being known as the top dog is that others will target you to make their own reputation, and there’s no end to that except, well, being shot by the newest and fastest kid in town. Gregory Peck stars as the titular gunslinger, portraying him as a man who’s tired of being at the top and is looking for a way out. The film dangles a quiet retirement in front of him, but we know it won’t be so simple, and the elegiac ending has hints of inevitability that almost puts The Gunfighter alongside film noir themes. Unfortunately, the film does not have the snappy rhythm than its 85 minutes and almost real-time chronology would suggest—some of the plot screws could have been tightened. But it’s an interesting western that heralds many similar end-of-an-era films—including the superior The Shootist—and survives a modern viewing better than many of its contemporaries.

  • Brute Force (1947)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2021) If you’re looking for a midway point between prison movies of the 1930s and film noir of the 1950s, Brute Force fits the bill. Directed by Joe Dassin (who would become a noir auteur before his Blacklist-forced exile to Europe) and clearly playing rougher than movies from the previous decade, the film continues to codify tropes of the subgenre. Prisoners that aren’t that bad; a sadistic warden who’s worse than the prisoners (to the point of machine-gunning them with relish) and a daring escape plan that, in noir tradition, is doomed to failure. The ending moments of Brute Force are unusually harrowing and nihilistic for a film of that time—everyone is doomed to failure, and even the women outside the prison have their share of responsibility in leading their men to crime. Burt Lancaster shows up as the lead character in one of his first screen appearances, but the standout performer here is no less than Hume Cronyn, whose sadistic and violent prison warden character here completely undoes a screen persona with decades of meek appearances. All in all, Brute Force is a bit of a surprise—as brutal as its title promised, and occasionally a gripping piece of suspense and action.

  • Beach Party (1963)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2021) While Gidget may have sparked interest, it’s Beach Party that formally launched the “Beach Party” movie subgenre of the 1960s, featuring Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello in a series of seven films that spawned about twice as many imitators. This first instalment, as usual, doesn’t quite have the formula nailed down: While most of the recurring players are there, while the tone is very similar, there’s some narrative weirdness in spending so much time on an academic character (played by Bob Cummings) studying teenage mating habits—with a beard so thick and out-of-place that it’s fated to come off at some point. It’s a character that exemplifies how dumb movies portray smart people, but the caricature is very much in line with the absurdist comedy style of the film, with some fourth-wall breaks along the way. It’s all in good fun—even Vincent Price joins in with a special cameo that heralds more to come in the series—although the musical numbers are a bit weaker than in the follow-ups. The key to the series is probably found in the unobjectionable material featured here—some flesh but no nudity, some inept bikers but no real threat, some tension but no breakups. Plus, an academic who learns better from the teenagers.

  • Queen Christina (1933)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2021) Famously unamusing Greta Garbo stars in Sweden-set costume drama Queen Christina, going for a bit of gender-bending drama, as she is somehow temporarily mistaken for a man when she goes incognito in a humble inn. The mistaken gender bit doesn’t last long, as she ends up in bed with a dashing Spanish suitor who ends up being a diplomatic enjoy to the court she presides. Garbo has an unusually contemporary character, espousing antiwar sentiments and a constant push for her people’s well-being. Which only complicates the third act, as she has to choose between love or country. Queen Christina is intermittently interesting—Garbo is a legend, but her appeal was very specific and under her influence the film quickly heads to tragic romance, complete with a stoic ending shot. The film certainly doesn’t stick to history—the real Queen Christina was indeed progressive, but uninterested in marrying. It’s widely hailed as one of Garbo’s most striking performances, and the role is clearly tailored to her. Of course, that means that how to feel about the film will be tied to your own appreciation of Garbo…

  • The Harvey Girls (1946)

    The Harvey Girls (1946)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2021) I’m overdosing on Broadway musical comedies at the moment, so any musical comedy that heads out in a different direction is good news to me right now, and The Harvey Girls does offer a noticeable change of scenery—heading out west on a train, with a small crew of young girls ready to start working at the frontier Harvey House. Following the tangents of classic Hollywood movies is often as much fun as watching the movies themselves, and that’s how I ended up reading about the Harvey Houses (whose openings, as railway lines were extended throughout the 1880s, marked the arrival of modern comforts in the west) and the Harvey Girls (who often found husbands in frontier towns, further contributing to colonization). But little of that knowledge is essential to enjoying the song and dance numbers of the film. Judy Garland stars as a young woman seeking an engagement to a pen pal, with some support from notables such as Angela Lansbury (playing a dancehall madam), Cyd Charisse (in her first speaking role) and my own favourite Virginia O’Brien in what is best called a featured half-role. (The arc involving her character was cut midway through during the very long shooting due to her advancing pregnancy—but she gets “The Wild, Wild West,” a rather wonderful comic scene in which she sings in time with some blacksmithing and horse comfort.)  If you’ve been waiting for a film in which Garland, Charisse and O’Brien share a musical number—here it is, to the tune of “It’s a Great Big World” (even though Charisse is dubbed). The film’s biggest number is probably “On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe” (which ended up being a national hit song), with an honourable mention to Ray Bolger’s energetic tap-dancing during “Swing Your Partner Round and Round.”  The combination of favourite actors, memorable numbers and a more original than usual setting makes The Harvey Girl at least a second-tier musical and a solid hit for MGM’s Freed unit. It’s decently funny, historically interesting (as per my extracurricular reading), and romantic enough to wrap things up when the comic numbers end. I wonder what kind of career O’Brien would have had if she had been able to complete her character arc here—The Harvey Girls came toward the end of her brief filmography, with only a few more roles (including the female lead in the following year’s Merton of the Movies) before the end of her MGM contract and disappearance from the big screen.

  • The Exorcist III: Legion (1990)

    The Exorcist III: Legion (1990)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, January 2021) The good news is that The Exorcist III: Legion is quite a bit better than its ridiculous predecessor… but that’s not saying much considering that The Exorcist II is widely hailed as one of the worst sequels of all time (certainly one of the sharpest quality drop-offs between original and follow-up). This one, written and directed by William Peter Blatty (who wrote the screenplay for the first film, based on his own novel), does get closer to the spirit of the original by having a good-versus-evil face-off that often plays in conversation, tying it with Catholic mythology and a contemporary horror such as a serial killer with demonic affiliations. The Exorcist III does turn weird very quickly, though, with plenty of oddball moments that are nonetheless constrained into an overall vision rather than just a grab bag of strange stuff. George C. Scott (as Good) and Brad Dourif (as Evil) are somewhat fun to watch as they respectively try to outdo each other, but the film is perhaps a bit too sedate to accommodate such moments without creaking. Despite some scenes that work more through suggestion than schlock, the film is curiously talky and unevenly interesting. Furthermore, well-documented studio interference forced the inclusion of a climactic exorcism scene (ensuring that the studio got what it paid for as an entry in the series) despite Blatty’s initial intentions—and while the shift in tone is noticeable, I’m not convinced it necessarily made the film any worse. Still, by avoiding the unexplainable looniness of its predecessor, The Exorcist III: Legion merely settled for being an ambitious but underwhelming horror film—which is still quite a bit better than many other examples of the genre.

  • The Ambulance (1990)

    The Ambulance (1990)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, January 2021) One of my emerging cinephile rules is simple: If I see Larry Cohen in the credits, I watch the movie. He was a clever writer-director, and so there’s nearly always something interesting in the mix whenever he’s involved. Despite lower budgets, his determination to remix familiar elements into something quirky and compelling carries through—as does his obvious affection for New York City. While The Ambulance may look like a typical horror film, it plays with slightly more wit and originality than the norm. Eric Roberts (in his regrettable mullet phase) plays a young comic book illustrator who, smitten with a cute young woman working nearby, work up the nerve to ask her out… and is dismayed when she faints and is carried away in an ambulance driven by sinister characters. His day gets worse when he can’t find her at the hospital she was supposed to go, and his attempts to warn the authorities about this mysterious ambulance are greeted with shrugs and derision. James Earl Jones shows up as a skeptical policeman, but the biggest casting surprise goes to comics legend Stan Lee making his first movie appearance playing himself as the protagonist’s boss. The rest is a chase conspiracy thriller with many paranoid moments and refreshing side characters, including a crusty veteran journalist played by Red Buttons and an attractive policewoman played by Megan Gallagher. The film keeps our interest by being clever, sidestepping some clichés of the genre while reinforcing others, and keeping its biggest irony at the very end. (But you won’t feel too bad for the protagonist, as women throw themselves at him throughout the entire film.)  The Ambulance is not what I’d call a great movie, but it falls straight into that more interesting subgenre of solid B-grade films, wittily imagined and decently executed. It fits with the rest of Cohen’s filmography and it has a few surprises in store, even for jaded viewers.

  • Mighty Joe Young (1949)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2021) You’d have to be willfully ignorant of film history not to see the obvious parallels between 1933’s King Kong and 1949’s Mighty Joe Young—in both cases, a giant ape is brought back from exotic lands to so-called civilization (i.e.: America, this time Los Angeles rather than New York) until there’s some inevitable mayhem—and a young woman saves the day. The resemblance was not accidental—much of the same filmmaking team was behind both movies, and there’s a clear intention in the later film to one-up the special effects of the first. In this respect, you can consider Mighty Joe Young to be a remastered version of the previous film, with just enough differences to be both familiar and interesting. What the filmmakers could scarcely have suspected back in 1949 is that the wunderkind to whom they entrusted the stop-motion special effects, Ray Harryhausen, would go on to become one of the titans of movie special effects. His skill is already apparent here—the special effects are still convincing, charming and filled with character, even to modern jaded eyes. The sequences are more ambitious than in King Kong, the integration with the live action more daring, and the details of the characters being animated as sufficient to give them a personality—something that would become a Harryhausen trademark. Some other aspects of the spectacular production still impress—nearly everything set inside the nightclub is very impressive from a filmmaking perspective. The film is also far more kids-friendly than King Kong—funnier, but more specifically graced with a happy ending that wouldn’t have fit in the earlier film. In other words, Might Joe Young may be closely affiliated with its illustrious predecessor, but it holds up admirably well as its own production. Rewarded with a Best Visual Effects Academy Award, it’s still a treat to watch.

  • The Clock (1945)

    The Clock (1945)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2021) Having a sailor on leave meet and woo a young woman was a surprisingly familiar premise of 1940s movie musicals, and one of The Clock’s most surprising characteristics is seeing this common trope being used as a basis for a romantic drama rather than sing-and-dance. The surprise gets bigger considering Arthur Freed as producer, Vincente Minelli at the helm and Judy Garland as the female lead—this was Garland’s first serious role as a young woman rather than a girl, and she doesn’t sing once. The film is decidedly low-key, with the stakes being almost entirely focused on the boy-meets-girl plot. Mid-1940s New York is convincingly portrayed, especially given that the entire film was shot in Los Angeles. Clearly meant to be less spectacular and more romantic than the previous Freed/Minnelli/Garland production Meet me in St. Louis, The Clock will strike some as a well-executed intimate drama and others as a bit of a disappointment compared to its most immediate contemporaries. But Garland is quite good here—attractive and playing in a dramatic register that is arguably more interesting than the roles for which she was pigeonholed through her career. The Clock is also notable for at least glancing at the issues raised by a whirlwind romance—it states that our couple of lovebirds will be fine once he comes back from the war, but at least it entertains the notion that this may be rough sailing for a while. While it doesn’t have the re-watchability of its closest equivalents, The Clock is perhaps best seen as a change of pace for everyone involved in it.