Author: Christian Sauvé

  • Scarborough (2018)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, July 2022) It wouldn’t be exact to refer to the Toronto neighbourhood of Scarborough as a slum, but as Scarborough-the-movie makes it clear, this isn’t a place of stately mansions and expensive cars. Focusing on three kids following the same drop-in reading program at a community centre, it’s an ensemble drama of misery at the bottom of the social ladder, with kids not being protected by their parents and any overly empathic response being discouraged. Adapted from the novel of the same title by author Catherine Hernandez herself, it’s a gritty, depressing, often infuriating ensemble drama that doesn’t spare any misery for the innocent. It occasionally feels like a grab bag of every possible social issue—by the time gender dysphoria is introduced late in the film, it’s not as much a plot development as the last item to be checked in a specific list. Still, for all of its heaviness, grittiness and formulaic uplifting end, Scarborough has a few aces up its sleeves—most notably Aliya Kanani as an engaged young teacher doing her best to take care of kids despite a system that tells her not to care too much, and a street-level authenticity engineered by directors Shasha Nakhai and Rich Williamson. In a certain grand tradition of Canadian movies, it may not be fun to watch, but it’s respectable to have seen. Too long at two hours and a quarter, it’s often an ordeal but ultimately a very humanistic one.

  • Antebellum (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, July 2022) There’s no frustration quite like giving a disappointed review to a film that has its social conscience at the right place. It’s repulsive that we would need a full-throated denunciation of the evils of American slavery in 2022, but, well; here we are. Given this, the opening moments of Antebellum pack a punch, graphically portraying plantation slavery and then revealing that a modern, well-educated black woman is among the slaves. It’s after that strong opening that the film goes into a tailspin. Much of the problem is that, beyond a provocative premise, the film runs out of plot very quickly—Antebellum is a Twilight Zone episode stretched over 115 minutes, and the hollowness of its execution quickly becomes apparent as it moves to the “modern” day and spends far too much time establishing irrelevant subplots and characters. It doesn’t help that the script can’t follow up its premise with something interesting—it takes the cheapest, least imaginative road to its conclusion. Antebellum being a black horror story, it goes without saying that the white characters are irremediably, cartoonishly evil here—even if Jena Malone does have an interesting role as Queen Racist. Never mind the practicalities of their plan! Janelle Monáe is good within the confines of her role, while Gabourey Sidibe is tremendously fun to watch but plays a useless character. Antebellum cheapens its most distasteful moments by having nowhere to go—when so much of the film doesn’t have a reason for existing, it becomes much harder to justify the exploitation of its most striking moments—especially by the time the third act rolls round. There are about a dozen more interesting, substantial and wittier directions the film could have gone, but in the end, it retreats to cheap shots, empty empowerment slogans, excruciatingly executed obviousness and filler material for more than half its length. Much to my dismay, Antebellum is a thriller that should have been science fiction, or a film that should have been an episode, or knee-jerk cheap horror that should have been nuanced systemic drama—anything but what it is right now.

  • Measure for Measure (2019)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, July 2022) Adapting a lesser-known Shakespeare play to modern-day lower-class urban Australia, Measure for Measure goes for a complex web of modern-day issues (drug dealing, Islamophobia and romance being only a few of them) featuring an ensemble cast led by Hugo Weaving. The result may have its moments, but remains unremarkable and is not worth a recommendation. For all of the potential complexities of its ensemble drama, much of the film eventually boils down to a generic crime story interacting with a forbidden romance. Weaving is as good as usual as an elderly crime lord, while Megan Hajjar/Smart is quite likable in the lead female role. Alas, bland execution from writer-director Paul Ireland makes the film slower, duller and grittier than it should have been, making it difficult to remain interested in what’s happening before the precipitating burst of violence. While the glimpse at an Australian housing project can be interesting at times, Measure for Measure doesn’t manage to use its elements effectively, and the result is surprisingly forgettable.

  • The Lost Daughter (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Netflix Streaming, July 2022) Slow-moving psychological dramas aren’t my style, and The Lost Daughter tested me. The first film written and directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal (working from a novel) is about motherhood but not the kind of stereotypical motherhood held up as ideal. No, in this case we follow the summertime adventures of an accomplished academic as she experiences the lifestyle of the Greek island she’s visiting, and flashes back to her own progressively unhappy experiences as a young woman. Olivia Coleman stars and features a typically finely honed performance, alongside such notables as Dakota Johnson, Ed Harris, and Peter Sarsgaard. From a certain viewpoint, The Lost Daughter is a successful film: it’s generally well directed, offers a strong showcase for its actors and delves into unconventional topics that are not seldom tackled. But the same film excels in a very specific niche that may not appeal widely: it’s slow-moving, and showcases a rather unlikable protagonist while remaining uninterested in any kind of moral condemnation or celebration. Much of the action being an internal character study, it’s not a film made for suspense or action. And then there’s the Hollywood-dynasty pedigree of its writer-director. In other words—you can see exactly how the film would appeal to critics and the Academy and understand why it ended up with a very long list of accolades—including three Oscar nominations. That doesn’t make it a crowd-pleaser, though: The Lost Daughter’s glum, unsentimental, naturalistic style takes patience and a specific kind of mood to appreciate.

  • Gun Hill (2014)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, July 2022) In theory, there’s enough good stuff in Gun Hill’s premise to make the film viable as good evening entertainment. In practice, though, this BET original film quickly reverts to the dull routine of such low-budget made-for-TV movies. The hook here is the idea of twin brothers on opposite sides of the law, with one of them taking the other’s identity when he’s killed. Writer-director Reggie Rock Bythewood should have been able to parlay this premise (along with a rather good double turn from Larenz Tate) into a compelling result. But the result is held back by a few things—most notably the requirement for being a pilot for a later series that never materialized, hence dangling subplots not properly resolved. (BET did the same thing with the even-more-frustrating Sacrifice, except it did lead to a TV show.)  The low budget doesn’t allow for many flourishes, and the “BET house-style” is usually synonymous with amateurish screenwriting. Gun Hill suffers from all of this, but fares even worse in the dullness of its execution: it rarely rises above mediocrity in terms of viewing interest, and it’s a measure of how thoroughly it squanders its assets that by the film it springs a surprise revelation right before ending, most viewers are liable to shrug for utter lack of caring. Too bad, really—I still think a much better film could have come out of this.

  • The White Tiger (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Netflix Streaming, July 2022) I’ve seen more than a few reviews comparing The White Tiger to Slumdog Millionaire, which initially feels like a cheap comparison. After all, it’s not because you’ve got two western-produced rags-to-riches movies set in India that they are the same—you could argue that it’s an act of western imperialism to conflate films based on mere setting, and that’s before even getting into the vitality of the Indian film industries, or the bewildering diversity of India by itself. But despite first instincts, there is an interesting point of opposition between two films, one that has a lot to say about the way western filmmakers/studios/audiences/reviewers perceive films in so-called exotic (ack, ptui) contexts. The White Tiger, at a very superficial glance, does seem to typify the kind of story that audiences crave: how a promising young man rises through a stratified society to become his own boss, acquiring riches along the way. Entire genres of American literature have been built on such narratives. Who doesn’t love an underdog? But from the very first moments of the film (which is framed as a letter from our protagonist to the visiting Chinese Prime Minister), something feels off—and the rest of the film all leads to a conclusion that trashes the usual standards of decency, eventually flaunting its transgressions as a demonstration that the future does not belong to the honourable white man. It gets very, very dark, and in a way that has far more to do with sociopathic glorifications of hustling than the Horatio Alger plucky-young-man-does-good literary archetype. The tone is deeply cynical to the point where the film (adapted from a similarly caustic novel) doesn’t really go for outright moral condemnation. If the future does belong to those ready to kill in order to succeed, perhaps everyone else should stay in the coop where life is predictable and usually bearable. It does (or doesn’t?) help that the film is slickly executed by screenwriter-director Ramin Bahrani—grittily portraying a slice of Indian life over the past few decades with a minimum of sentimentality and plenty of jaundice. It’s disturbing if you dig into its amoral core, and as such offers quite a contrast to Slumdog Millionaire: it’s not sweet, not romantic (almost anti-romantic, in fact), and definitely not honourable. For western viewers, it presents a conundrum about expectations—is it a realistic reminder that “the other,” in reclaiming a multipolar world, is not beholden to hypocritical standards of western morality? Or does it skirt racist agitprop by demonstrating how “the other” will not be stopped by the niceties held as ideal by western movies? Maybe both, maybe neither: the unfortunate byproduct of adapting one of tens-of-thousands of novels into one-of-dozens prestige films (especially in a rarefied area such as “western films about India”) is that the film acquires the force of a geopolitical statement that the novel is not really built for. Far more people will ever see The White Tiger than will read it, and far more opinion pieces will be written about it as well.

  • Crawler (2009)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, June 2022) Given my laughable credentials as a film reviewer, my connections to the film industry are tenuous, outdated and almost entirely tied to the French-Canadian market. One of the particularities in reviewing the little-known, little-seen horror film Crawler is that I remember attending a few Montréal-area genre conventions alongside its writer-director S. V. Bell back in the late 1990s – I don’t recall interacting with him, but I’m reasonably sure we were in the same room together a few times. But anyway – Crawler is a low-budget Québec-made horror film that clearly apes Stephen King’s films of the 1980s – mysterious not-really-explained horror taking the form of a bulldozer that kills people. But not in the way you imagine – sure, that bulldozer crawls over a few people, but it also hosts various horrors of imaginary, tentacular and ichorific forms. All of this to say – it doesn’t end well for most of the construction crew around the bulldozer. What’s perhaps most remarkable about this clearly low-end production is how sunny and colourful it often is, with much of the action taking place on a rural construction site with bright yellows, greens and blues. Some of the practical special effects are not bad when graded against their 1980s inspirations. The acting is not so good, but as with the rest of the film… I’ve seen worse. You’ll have to work overtime to see Crawler: shown at Fantasia 2009 but otherwise not theatrically screened, currently unavailable on physical media and streaming media, the film briefly popped up on French-Canadian horror channel Frissons TV as part of their occasional unearthing of obscure local genre films. The amusing thing is that it’s better than much of what else plays on the channel!

  • The Lineup (1958)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, June 2022) I know that most people (especially those who haven’t discovered the joys of Classic Hollywood) refer to “old movies” as if that was a damning epithet by itself — as if newer movies were automatically better, or maybe that all movies become steadily worse as soon as they’re released in an echo of new cars driving off the dealership. But even letting slide the idea that great movies are timeless; that this attitude reflects the power of crass marketing making you crave new movies; that all movies appeal to a fundamental human condition… the truth is more complicated. Some very ordinary films can be appreciated in time for mirroring their era, making them special decades after they were commonplace and unremarkable. Maybe they innovate with things that have since become more obvious, maybe they show images that would be impossible to capture today. I’m not going to point at The Lineup and say that it’s an ordinary film that has become great while we weren’t looking. But I will suggest that, in presenting a thriller set against the backdrop of late-1950s San Francisco, it shows a unique glimpse at the city as it existed then, with landmarks now gone or altered. I will rally to the opinion that it features one of the most intense car chases made during the 1950s. I’ll point to its director, Don Seigel, as historically important considering that he’d go on to direct films such as Dirty Harry -also set in San Francisco- and mentor Clint Eastwood. None of these reasons elevate The Lineup over what it is – a competent thriller featuring psychopaths going after an innocent woman and her daughter. But they do manage to make this film better now than in 1958 – a classic case of film as a time capsule.

  • Illicit (2017)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, June 2022) Please forgive me if I get some of Illicit’s details wrong – I’m writing this review only a few days after seeing the film, but already it’s blurring into an indistinct morass of very, very similar black-cast infidelity dramas also broadcast on BET. Let me check the plot summary for details – oh yes: a parole officer and a model-turned-housewife are a few years into their marriage, so both decide on their own to start an affair. The hallmarks of a BET infidelity drama are all there, except for the slightly different ending: attractive cast (which is more than half my justification for watching — Michele Weaver looks fantastic in curls and glasses), lingerie scenes, appearances by patron saints of straight-to-BET movies Vivica A. Fox and Essence Atkins, and plotting so wonky that I’m not sure the filmmakers were working with adult supervision. Aside from attractive actresses, what keeps me coming back to BET films is the delicious sense that their movies are not slick or particularly competent: their storytelling mistakes are so confoundingly inept that they feel like fresh air in a world of overengineered filmmaking. In Illicit’s case, for instance, it means setting up the two adulterous relationships, then slowly cranking up the pressure on both partners until they’re blackmailed, revealing the connections between the various characters, getting all of them in the same place and threatening to blow all the secrets wide open… then walking away from the whole potential climax. Both husbands and wife end their affairs. No serious consequences. Never mind the blackmail that seemed so urgent ten minutes earlier. Roll credits. Who ever thought this was a good finale, ready to air? Even the most twisted “subvert all expectations” fan would find this unacceptable. In the end, films like Illicit have this bizarre blend of crowd-pleasing titillation (yet with nothing more explicit than lingerie), conservative morality (affairs are bad!), stupid characters (you would think parole officers would know not to mess with parolees), straight-ahead basic filmmaking (don’t go looking for directorial style from writer-director Corey Grant!), low-budget expediency and yet an embarrassing amount of rookie mistakes that stop the entire thing from being enjoyable as more than a catalogue of things not to do. I still liked Illicit, maybe in part because of its faults, but would it be too much to ask for a conventionally good film of that ilk once in a while?

  • Ging chaat goo si 4: Gaan dan yam mo [Police Story 4: First Strike] (1996)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Second Viewing, On Cable TV, June 2022) Jackie Chan goes from Hong Kong cop to international secret agent in Police Story 4: First Strike – such a change of pace that the film was marketed in North America as its own standalone film. I actually saw it in theatres back then, a month or two before I started reviewing every film I saw on this web site, but I still had to watch a few minutes of First Strike before confirming that, yes, I had already seen it. (Chan’s koala briefs was the thing that made me go from “this is familiar” to “yup, seen it.”)  This lack of certitude about whether this was a first or second viewing is not a reflection on the quality of the film – almost any Jackie Chan film from his golden period (roughly 1978–1998) is guaranteed to be comic Kung fu entertainment worth seeing on its own, but there are so many of them that anyone may be unsure which one it is. First Strike is “the stepladder one” – because, after some lengthy throat-clearing that humorously shows Chan in the middle of a Bond-like international adventure going from Hong Kong to Ukraine to Australia, the film really finds its usual footing in a terrific athletic sequence in which Chan uses a stepladder to defend himself from attackers. It’s a sequence as good as any other Chan showpiece, with an incredible integration of environmental elements to enliven great stunts – an exceptional showcase of Chan’s team approach to blocking a scene from scene elements and riffing ever-crazier action beats from what’s available. The comedy is the usual for Chan – an innocuous blend of an incredible athlete’s self-deprecation and family-friendly action. First Strike amounts to a film that sits solidly in Chan’s middle-tier filmography – not a classic, but a respectable, solid entry that showcases him doing what only he could do.

  • The Big Cube (1969)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, June 2022) If you ever wanted to experience a late-1960s soap opera-style drug melodrama, then The Big Cube is your otherwise indescribable pick for the evening. Headlined by Lana Turner, the film was shot in Mexico and heightens its inheritance-thriller foundation with LSD-infused sequences. Turner plays a widowed actress gaslit by her stepdaughter and no-good boyfriend through drug ingestion and spooky recordings at night. The same drug-less plot would have been perfectly viable Hollywood fare in earlier decades, but this being the late 1960s, we get a lot of LSD talk and semi-trippy visuals as bonuses. Turner here turns in one last role for the big studios, while George Chakiris is deliciously slimy as a deceptive LSD-dealing medical student. The Big Cube often feels like a period case study of how pre-New Hollywood desperately tried reheating old formulas with new 1960s elements – there’s a comfort in well-worn plotting, with a spicy dare of the forbidden in roundly denouncing drugs. Not necessarily a classic, but something that has some interest even today.

  • Skidoo (1968)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, June 2022) Some movies end in elation, others in disappointment, many more without making much of an impact and a few in flabbergasted perplexity. Skidoo goes straight in that last category, because the most likely response to making it to this film’s end credits is an awed “…what?”  It’s blindingly from 1968 – calling it “dated” is like dismissing a calendar of previous years, so clearly does it present a (satirical) picture of what the late 1960s must have felt like to older adults at the time. Directed by renowned iconoclast Otto Preminger, the film sets up an old-Hollywood archetype in the form of ultraconservative gangsters, set against the then-weirdness of the hippie youth lifestyle. Drugs prominently feature in the storyline, and so do about a dozen well-known comedians: If you want to see Groucho Marx’s last film role, it’s right here alongside such notables as Jackie Gleason, Carol Channing, Frankie Avalon, Burgess Meredith, Peter Lawford, Cesar Romero, Slim Pickens and Mickey Rooney – some of these actors in featured roles, others in cameos. This is a big-budget comedy from beginning to end, with decent production values and an end-credit sequence that is not only illustrated, but sung through (!) with relevant lyrics. Alas, comedy isn’t universal, and there’s a reason why Skidoo is often regarded as the worst in Preminger’s filmography: it’s awkward and reactionary, two words that seldom applied to Preminger’s earlier films. But let’s face it: he wasn’t much of a comedian, and he was definitely too old (in his mid-sixties) to reflect anything but bemusement at youth culture and the promotion of LSD as world-peace instrument. The result, ironically, doesn’t reflex late-1960s youth culture as much as it feels like a contemporary parody of the late 1960s. Yes, I would argue that Skidoo has aged rather well in this regard: it’s probably funnier now with ironic distance than it was upon release. That doesn’t make it a great movie still – but I can think of a few good reasons why it’s worth a look for anyone even remotely aware and interested in late-1960s Hollywood and how it was trying to figure out the social changes that were underway. The result? Unique.

  • Dementia 13 (1963)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, June 2022) Even Oscar-winning directors have to start somewhere, and so Dementia 13’s claim to fame remains being Francis Ford Coppola’s mainstream directing debut (after a few sexploitation films made-to-order for Roger Corman). As such, it’s a surprisingly self-assured genre horror film, with psychological thriller elements overlaid on top of a familiar psycho-killer proto-slasher plot template. What impresses most, however, is the quality of the images and the dreamlike Gothic atmosphere. Produced on a low budget, Dementia 13 often plays fast and loose with continuity and the refinements required for a seamless narrative experience – too often, the result skips from one strong image or sequence to another without bothering to paper over the transitions and the plot turns. Still, Dementia 13 is interesting in its own right, and a great deal more respectable than similar films from the Corman school. It clearly affirms Coppola’s origins in genre work (making such films as his later Bram Stoker’s Dracula less surprising) and makes for a perfectly respectable novice entry in a far more distinguished filmography.

  • Creepozoids (1987)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, June 2022) If I asked you to picture a low-budget 1980s monster movie set in a post-apocalyptic research facility, chances are really good that you’ll end up imagining something much like Creepozoids. This isn’t a badge of quality as much as an assurance of obviousness: the film seldom deviates from the easiest, most conventional path. The paper-thin plot has a bunch of WW3 survivors finding shelter from acid rain in an intact research facility. But that’s really just an excuse for gathering a bunch of disposable characters together in an enclosed set for one shower scene, and a bunch of death sequences. The violence escalates along with the gooey special effects, as our characters run down the same corridor set multiple times. Not much of it has any internal consistency or credible drama – the narrative logic of the film is to rip everything off from Alien, without caring much about whether it’s justified in-between the deaths. The staging is terrible and the shrieks make no sense (boy, that giant rat sequence!), but what else could we be asking for? Noted VHS-era pornstar (and occasional mainstream guest) Ashlyn Gere shows up in a minor role – or rather: as minor as a film with six actors can have. First-time writer-director David DeCoteau would go on to have a long and too-prolific career as a purveyor of low-budget schlock. Creepozoids is terrible no matter how you look at it, but if it has one saving grace, it’s being almost exactly what we imagine a bad Sci-Fi horror film from the late 1987s to feel like. If you’re so intent on being a cinephile to experience the worst alongside the best…

  • Crush (2013)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, June 2022) You could retitle Crush as “Tweenager’s first stalker thriller” and you wouldn’t be too far off the mark: recasting some very familiar tropes in a high-school context, it makes about as much sense as the Fatal Attraction-inspired films of previous decades. In the aspirational tradition of high-school films, the actors not only look thirty, but they act in ways that would be far more appropriate to post-college young people. Yet so it goes! Our protagonist is a popular soccer jock (but artistically sensitive!) who figures out that there’s a violent stalker in his life when anyone who shows a bit of romantic or flirting interest in him gets attacked. (It’s not much of a mystery when Crush’s DVD cover features the stalker, but who looks at DVD covers these days?)  The plotting is absurd if you don’t buy into the film’s cartoonish stalker character, but then again this is a film about genre thrills, not neo-realistic drama among high school kids. It’s pretty much what you’d expect from a violent teenage thriller – not good, not subtle, but forthright about its low ambitions and executed by director Malik Bader with a certain degree of formal professionalism, even despite a nonsensical script. Leigh Whannell (otherwise famous as a horror writer-director) shows up briefly in a secondary role. Everyone else in the cast is cute, interchangeable and disposable. Crush will only be successful among undemanding audiences – everyone else has already seen most of it before even starting to watch.