Movie Review

Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954)

Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On Cable TV, December 2019) I’m not sure about others, but in my mind Creature from the Black Lagoon’s Gill-man is one of the major Universal monsters. An often forgotten or maligned one, but still part of the line-up. (I suspect that its aquatic nature means that he’s not as reusable as Frankenstein, Wolfman, Dracula, or the Mummy in the popular imagination, but that’s how it goes.)  What’s perhaps more interesting is that his introduction took place twenty-three years after the first Universal Monsters, in a very different environment for horror. The 1950s were nothing like the 1930s—the fantastic was getting more commonplace even outside the core audience for horror, and an entire slew of monster movies emerged during that decade to reflect various Cold War anxieties. As a result, it does feel slightly different—but it’s clearly among the best of those 1950s monster movies, playing off themes of unrequited romance and a somewhat sympathetic monster. There’s a clear line going from Creature from the Black Lagoon to 2017’s Oscar-winning The Shape of Water, perhaps reflecting the nature of empathy throughout decades. The film’s production values are not bad, especially when you get to the underwater sequences that present obvious acting and plot progression challenges when straight-up dialogue isn’t possible. It remains essential viewing for anyone interested in the origins of lasting cultural icons, but it’s also, thankfully, an entertaining film in its own right.

Cyrano de Bergerac (1990)

Cyrano de Bergerac (1990)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On TV, December 2019) Twenty-first century Gérard Depardieu may not strike anyone as an ideal Cyrano Bergerac—what could an overweight old actor with a scandalous past have to do with a dashing figure known for his wit, grace, charm, and sword-fighting abilities? The point of Cyrano is that he’s an ideal figure if it wasn’t for his unusually pronounced nose and the story keeps revolving around that idea. But peak-era circa-1990 Depardieu is not the figure we know thirty years later—his performance here is a good part of the reason why I consider this to be the finest adaptation (so far) of Cyrano de Bergerac on the big screen. As far as I’m concerned, Cyrano is part of the classics—you don’t judge an adaptation of it on its plot or characters, but on the way it brings them to life. On that measure, writer-director Jean-Paul Rappeneau does well—helped along by Depardieu’s earnest take on the character, a strong visual sense and some great historical recreation. As much as I like Steve Martin’s Cyrano-adjacent comedic take Roxanne, this is the real deal right here, and it’s played as the romantic tragedy that it is.

Brightburn (2019)

Brightburn (2019)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On Cable TV, December 2019) Oh, yuck to Brightburn. I’ll be the first one to say that the commercial dominance of the superhero film is a creative dead-end, that it harms movies more than it benefits them, and that the sooner we get to something else the better off we’ll be. But that doesn’t mean that we need to extend the genre into an even worse one. The concept of blending super-powerful characters with kid/slasher horror is something that raises my hackles from the get-go, and nothing in Brightburn’s gleefully sadistic execution changes my mind about. Simply put, this is a film that wonders what would have happened if the Superman origins story (super-powerful alien crash-lands as a baby in Kansas, is raised by human parents) had led to a psychopathic character unable to be stopped by anyone. The result of this isn’t in doubt? Well, prepare to spend 90 minutes being reminded over and over of this obvious conclusion, except with enough gore and blood to make it even more obvious. Just in case you hadn’t figured it out. Of course, it’s unfair to compare Brightburn to a superhero film turned to horror—it’s far more honest to see the project (produced by famously gore-friendly filmmaker James Gunn) as a horror film looking to superheroes in its escalation of violence. Much of the structure of the film is borrowed from those hateful killer-kid movies, in which a child goes around killing playmates and adults while no one can believe that the adorable little cherubs could be capable of so much evil. Except that this time, our killer-kid can smash people with cars and punch holes in their heads with laser beams. The only bit of dramatic tension is about the killer-kid’s parents attempting to strangle baby-Hitler in the crib (so to speak), but since this is a sadistic film, you can probably imagine how that turns out. So yeah: yuck to that movie, and let’s hope that its existence is enough to stop other similar projects from taking off. No matter my growing antipathy to superhero film domination, I’m even less sympathetic to gore-filled horror films. I look forward to an era where I don’t have to check my humanity at the door before peeking at the newest film releases.

Watchmen, Season 1 (2019)

Watchmen, Season 1 (2019)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On Cable TV, December 2019) Like nearly everyone with knowledge of the Watchmen comic book run of the late 1980s, I was not convinced of the necessity of a TV series adaptation at all. Watchmen is a singular work of comic-book genius—it doesn’t need to be transformed into an ongoing multimedia franchise of adaptations and follow-ups. But the critical response to the TV show was highly positive, and I ended up with a day in which I could run through the entire thing in a single marathon. My conclusion? I’m pleasantly surprised. Acting as a sequel and remake but also striking out in directions that the original comic never could have anticipated, Watchmen ends up being a powerful statement about American-specific racism, the dubious use of superheroes, the dangers of vigilantism and the opportunities of personal empowerment in a very literal sense. With a bit of retrospect, it’s a show that popularized interest in the 1921 Tulsa race massacre—something I hate myself for not knowing beforehand. But it’s a show that also tapped into very contemporary issues: no one would have expected the original Watchmen run to be such a rich springboard from which to talk about American racism. Blending American history with the aftermath of the Watchmen mythology is one of the surprises of the series—the quality of the production and the writing being one of them. One segment is worth singling out as a particularly fine piece of television: penultimate episode eight, “A God Walks into Abar,” which jumps around in non-chronological segments that finally bring everything together for a spectacular climax. Show-runner Damon Lindelof is a divisive creator, but his work here is nothing short of exceptional, delivering a complex, slick, provocative and quite entertaining piece of prestige TV that’s not afraid of not being overly slavish to its source material. Consider me convinced of the project’s reason for existing.

Alexis Zorbas [Zorba the Greek] (1964)

Alexis Zorbas [Zorba the Greek] (1964)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On Cable TV, December 2019) You can say that Zorba the Greek gets a lot of mileage out of opposing a prim shy Englishman (Alan Bates) to an earthy, lusty, boisterous Greek (Anthony Quinn), but that’s only half-true. It gets as much mileage out of opposing a formidable character (Quinn as the titular Zorba) to a plot that goes in various directions, many of them so melodramatic that they lose their tragic edge. Much of the story takes place in a small Cretan village where our two protagonists are working on a mining project, a village where casual violence and savage behaviour seem to be the norm. The Englishman isn’t ready for such a place; Zorba does better but even he can be defeated by so much traditional madness. But Quinn overpowers the picture as Zorba—his career-defining performance is easily more compelling than the plot, to the point where you can ask if the plot is strong enough for the character. I’m not entirely convinced by the results: the most memorable scene of Zorba the Greek is an unbearably tragic death that would send most characters (and viewers) running away from that bloodthirsty village, but here it’s one more thing on the way of many more things just as bad. Quinn makes the most out of his character, but the film itself leaves disappointed, not quite making a point, not quite delivering a satisfying ending, not quite playing in a specific tonal registry. It remains a landmark of mid-1960s cinema, but it hasn’t aged all that well—the “rural savages” angle smacks of bigotry more than opposing modern values to traditional ones. Plus, well, Irene Papas is so cute that what happens to her leaves a bitter taste—not to mention the end of Lila Kedrova’s performance as well.

The Last Temptation of Christ (1988)

The Last Temptation of Christ (1988)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(In French, On TV, December 2019) I’m old enough to remember the furor accompanying the release of The Last Temptation of Christ—the controversy, the editorials, the protests. Of course, with some distance, it’s yet another demonstration of why you can’t trust conservatives when they create their own moral panic—the film ends up being a powerful examination of the subtleties of faith by presenting a compellingly human portrait of Jesus Christ. Written by Paul Schrader and directed by Martin Scorsese (both devout Christians, as further demonstrated by their later films), the film dares to take a non-mythological look at the character of Jesus Christ, balancing his own human desires with the fate that awaits him as God’s emissary/sacrifice. It’s a surprisingly realistic take on a familiar story, bringing a considerable amount of dramatic tension to something that’s often glossed about in religious teachings. It’s a film that makes the essential point that faith is hard—it’s not supposed to be easy, it’s meant to clash against human desires and it requires sacrifice. As someone raised Catholic before turning to atheism, I found considerable power and depth to what The Last Temptation of Christ attempts to do—and in daring to consider a tainted portrait of Jesus, the film ends up being approachable to a wider variety of audiences than the ready-made audience for religious-themed films. I have no trouble watching The Last Temptation of Christ next to Jesus Christ, Superstar and then The Greatest Story Ever Told—all of those have something to say.

Men in Black: International (2019)

Men in Black: International (2019)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On Cable TV, December 2019) As much as it pains me as a movie critic to recognize that someone else (I forget who) said it best, the biggest problem with Men in Black: International is that it takes a blue-collar premise and tries to make it glamorous globetrotting. This shouldn’t be much of a revelation—after all, much of the humour of the first film boiled down to the sight of two policemen being confronted to the hidden wonders of the universe and taking a decidedly jaded approach to it all. The sequels faltered when they went too big, and Men in Black: International again stumbles when it expands the mythology of the series into international espionage intrigue—this is not what the series is about, and the laughs get increasingly distant the more you get away from the initial core idea. I’ll give it one thing, though: the absence of Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones isn’t that big of a deal when they’re replaced by Chris Hemsworth and Tessa Thompson. (Regular readers of these reviews know how much I like Thompson, so I won’t dwell on it again. Much.) The decision to take the series out of New York City to a country-hopping series of episodes isn’t as compelling, though, and ties into the film losing the focus of the series. None of this would necessarily be fatal if the execution had been up to par, but unfortunately it isn’t—the plot is basic by espionage standards (since that’s the standard that the film is going for) and the identity of the mole being hunted throughout the film is absurdly, insultingly easy to guess well ahead of time. The jokes frequently fall flat, and even the magnetic charm of the lead actors can’t save the film from falling flat. There’s quite a bit of dashed expectations here—the series was uneven—but even low expectations wouldn’t have saved Men in Black: International from the constant disappointment of the film being unable to make good use of its potential. Some behind-the-scenes drama may explain the dismal result (through a bad case of producer interference) but the damage is done and doesn’t care about production problems: the film as available is more forgettable than anything else once you throw in the lead actors and that’s a clear step down from even the divisive second and third instalments. Save the world, stop the sequels.

The Crowd Roars (1932)

The Crowd Roars (1932)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On Cable TV, December 2019) There’s a blend of familiarity and strangeness at play in The Crowd Roars that I find quite interesting. On the familiar side, this is a racing film, and it’s directed by Howard Hawks. You get much of what we’ve come to expect from both Hawks (action, tough men and articulate women) and from car racing films. The dramatic arc is intensely melodramatic, but we know where we are and there aren’t many surprises along the way. But there’s an alien quality to The Crowd Roars that makes it interesting as well. As one of the first sound films to look at auto racing, it reflects the rougher, sometimes fatal nature of such events—different cars, different attitudes toward accidents as well. It’s clear that the film comes from a Pre-Code time when the grammar of racing sequences was still being defined—there’s some surprisingly good racing footage here, as well as some jarring rear-projection work that does not do any favours to the actors. James Cagney stars as a borderline-unlikable protagonist, but he doesn’t quite fit the role and isn’t as intense here as other films of the era. Ann Dvorak and Joan Blondell are more interesting as the romantic interests (spurned by the men!)  Hawks’ work here is decent but not overly impressive: he gets the importance of thrilling audiences, but his interest in the film doesn’t seem to extend to the dramatic moments. The Crowd Roar is not an essential film—in many ways, it feels like the kind of material that Warner Brothers churned out by obligation at the time. But it does present an interesting glimpse into racing at the dawn of the 1930s, perhaps the best we have captured on film. Given this, it may be worth a particular look for those interested in cars and their portrayal in Hollywood history.

Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood (2017)

Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood (2017)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On Cable TV, December 2019) Our understanding of Hollywood keeps changing over time, thanks to tell-all autobiographies that inform us about what really went on behind the scenes. The farther Hollywood chroniclers got from the glamour journalism meant to protect the studios’ investments, the closer they got to a fairer understanding of the era, affairs and abuse included. But for all of the richness that modern scholarship has accumulated about Golden-age Hollywood, it’s not a bad thing to keep a critical mind about the latest batch of revelations. Numerous anecdotes in even the most candid autobiographies have been disproven as fantasies, and now that most of the stars of the studio system have died, there’s still an appetite for anything new and salacious, no matter if it fits with everything else we know. Decades after the end of the Classic Hollywood era, any new revelation risks being mythology rather than fact. At the same time, there also seems to be a yearning from traditionally marginalized groups to reclaim some old-school stars that, in some cases, goes far beyond the evidence available. I am, in other words, quite skeptical of some of the assertions in Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood. Adapted from a book by Scotty Bowers, who apparently acted as a pimp to the stars from the 1940s to the 1980s, this is a documentary full of salacious revelations about plenty of celebrities, most of them safely dead and unable to sue. According to Bowers, nearly everyone slept with nearly everyone, and the bigger the name the bigger the pansexual appetite. It’s all lewdly entertaining, but since I’m working on my own history of Hollywood I am desperately looking for a fact-check. After too much time spent googling around, I’m not exactly finding any—at best, some people vouch for Bowers as someone who lived an interesting life and had true stories to tell, but I have not been able to find any work of serious scholarship that corroborates or confirms some of his newest assertions. Most of the reviews of the film or the book faithfully repeat the assertions without confirmation, treating this as gossip more than historical documentation. (In fact, I’m finding more than a few LGBTQ scholars not being convinced by the assertions made here.)  Note that I am not discounting all of Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood—I do think that Bowers was a first-hand witness to a hidden aspect of Hollywood history, and that there is still a lot of work figuring out what really happened. But I’d be wary of weaving most of the specific assertions into the official history of the times: We’re not going much beyond he-said-he-repeated, and extraordinary assertions require extraordinary corroboration.

Shazam! (2019)

Shazam! (2019)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On Cable TV, December 2019) Either I need to take a break from watching superhero movies or Hollywood need to take a break from making them, because watching Shazam was a singularly average experience. Even as I recognize that we’ve reached the degenerate stage of superhero movies—essentially, we’re just being served increasingly ludicrous variations on a theme—and can recognize what Shazam! is going for, it found it very difficult to work myself up to what it was showing me. OK, so it’s a standard superhero origin story, except with a kid being given a superhero’s body, an adoptive family helping, and a supervillain miffed because he’s not pure at heart. With humour. And a Philadelphia setting. In the DC universe. Aaaand, so what? In what may be a case study in excessive crankiness, I just feel jaded by having seen so many of those movies that by now, even well-crafted, slightly off-beat takes such as Shazam leaves me cold—I feel as if I’ve used my share of 2019 “oh, a variation on a familiar theme” indulgence on Captain Marvel and I’ve got no more to give. (On the other hand, I now understand those who essentially turned in the same review after seeing Captain Marvel.)  I’m not saying that there’s anything wrong with the execution of Shazam: director David F. Sandberg graduates to the blockbuster leagues with this film, with a likable Zachary Levi and a wasted Mark Strong in the duelling leads. The back-story, in the modern tradition of superhero films, does get convoluted at times for no good reason. The good news, I suppose, is that Shazam avoids the usual dark tones and dark colour palette of the DCU (although it does get surprisingly sombre at times), saving it from outright rejection. Too long at nearly two hours and a quarter, Shazam ends up as a perfectly average example of the contemporary superhero film, and so I suspect that reactions will largely depend on how exasperated (or delighted) you are at the genre at this specific moment.

Forever Young (1992)

Forever Young (1992)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(In French, On TV, December 2019) Here’s a confession, dear reader: Whenever I see “Forever Young,” I hear the chorus of the Interactive dance music cover version of the Alphaville song on a repeat loop. This has nothing to do with Forever Young the movie (except to brand me as someone who listened to a lot of dance music in the mid-nineties), although at the time I would have wished for a little bit of synth pop to break the film out of its staid execution. Featuring Mel Gibson, Forever Young is, in a few words, about a 1940s test pilot getting cryogenically frozen, forgotten, and then accidentally revived in 1992. Don’t ask how that works.  Once past the prologue, you can insert roughly 45 minutes of fish-out-of-water jokes in between the protagonist’s quest to find what happened, the scientists who took care of him, and eventually his long-lost love. Bits and pieces may have influenced the MCU’s Captain America arc. The one big whopper here is a cryogenic process that merely delays the aging process, meaning that our protagonist ages visibly in spurts, allowing Gibson to showcase elderly makeup, and the screenplay to have a ticking clock that it eventually abandons once it has shoehorned one last big climax. Bland and manipulative, Forever Young does have early-1990s Gibson and Jamie Lee Curtis going for it, but the science-fantasy material isn’t as bad as the bland screenwriting impulses that it enables. I have just seen and reviewed the movie, and yet it’s still the song that remains in my mind when I see Forever Young.

Les 12 travaux d’Astérix [The Twelve Tasks of Asterix] (1976)

Les 12 travaux d’Astérix [The Twelve Tasks of Asterix] (1976)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(Fifth, sixth or seventh viewing, On Cable TV, December 2019) I must have seen Les 12 travaux d’Astérix half a dozen times before I was twenty, so it was odd to revisit it a quarter of a century later, going through some eerily familiar beats and jokes. A holiday classic in French Canada, this adaptation of the Astérix and Obélix comic book series may be rough around the edges and unfortunately far too racist/sexist for its own good, but it does nail the tone of the characters and still packs plenty of laughs along the way. It also features one of my favourite sequences in animation in “La Maison qui rend fou,” a madcap take on bureaucracy gone wild. I’m not sure how well it would play with audiences unfamiliar with it (the animation is rather crude at times) and I certainly would not recommend watching it in anything other than the original French—but I did laugh a few times, and even the episodic structure of the twelve tasks works in the film’s favour as it becomes an excuse to try different kinds of comedy and animation styles. There is a strong self-awareness to the humour, as the characters constantly work their way out of impossible situations by cutting the Gordian knot and forcing their way out of trouble through sheer obstinacy. In other words, it still feels rather fresh and unpredictable even more than forty-five years later, and plays to adult audiences (re: the Naughty Island sequence) as much as the kids. In other words, there’s a reason why Les 12 travaux d’Astérix still faithfully plays on French-Canadian channels, more than once, every holiday period.

The Christmas Chronicles (2018)

The Christmas Chronicles (2018)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(Netflix Streaming, December 2019) There are some casting calls that justify an entire movie, and I can easily imagine someone at Netflix going “Kurt Russell as Santa Claus? Here’s your budget!”  While The Christmas Chronicles is, at best, a serviceable take on Christmas movies, Russell remains the star attraction here as a gruff no-nonsense Claus explaining how it all works to our two young heroes. Easily recalling Christmas wishes for anyone over the age of four, his Claus rocks a tune, bemoans the portrayal of Santa as fat and jolly, steals a sports car (with the film missing an opportunity to use Brian Seltzer’s “Santa’s Got a Hot Rod”) and isn’t above a few subterfuges in order to teach his charges a lesson in Christmas cheer. Benefiting from mid-budget production values, The Christmas Chronicles turns terminally cute in its last half with the introduction of CGI elves as likable as they are handy (or terrifying) with power tools. It’s generally enjoyable viewing, with a lighthearted self-aware tone throughout and a love for logistical explanations that rivals Arthur Christmas and The Santa Clause. In short, it’s the kind of Christmas movie that household members may watch once they’ve seen plenty of other Christmas movies. Plus, it’s on Netflix, meaning that it’s going to be right there for many subscribers. I’ve seen much, much worse. Plus: having Kurt Russell as Santa means that you also get none other than Goldie Hawn in a late cameo as Mrs. Claus.

Suspiria (2018)

Suspiria (2018)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(Google Play Streaming, December 2019) As someone who doesn’t like slasher movies and isn’t always convinced by giallo, I still found quite a bit to like in Dario Argento’s original 1977 Suspiria but wasn’t too sure how to approach Luca Guadagnino’s 2018 remake. As it turns out, it looks as if Guadagnino didn’t know either, because there are very few commonalities between the two movies besides the titles and premise of a young dancer joining a foreign dance company that secretly hides a convent of witches. Whereas the original’s best trait was its exuberant use of colour, this remake takes place in 1977 wintertime Berlin, with a corresponding muted quasi-monochrome colour palette. The camera is shy, the style restrained, the music almost forgettable … leading us to wonder why we’re watching this Suspiria. While the film eventually does work itself up to two frantic sequences (a superbly edited dance sequence in which the protagonist psychically inflicts grotesque contortions and physical harm to another dancer, and a conclusion featuring the highest number of exploding heads since the Kingsman finale), much of the movie is slow-moving dullness, even though there is an interesting plot once you cut away the extraneous material that bloats this film up to two hours and a half. Writer-director Guadagnino is clearly enjoying his own games here (what with Tilda Swinton playing three characters, including some you’ll never guess without reading about the film) but it remains to be seen whether the audience will follow—I thought that the 1977 Berlin framing device was near-useless even in its Nazi-of-course thematic implications. Refocus on the snappy retelling of a dancer infiltrating a coven and maybe we’d have something more attuned to my own preferences. Fortunately, I don’t get to decide how movies are made—but I do get to decide my own reaction to it, and I choose to be disappointed by this Suspiria “remake.”  The high points of the film and slightly more interesting take on “innocent thrown to the witches” premise ensure that it’s certainly not a wasted opportunity, but it’s not the film that it could have been.

Kimi no na wa. [Your Name] (2016)

Kimi no na wa. [Your Name] (2016)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(Google Play Streaming, December 2019) I haven’t kept up with the current state of Japanese animation as much as I’d liked, so when I saw Your Name pop up as a featured recommendation, I saw it as a good way to get back into it. Fortunately, it’s a decent choice: what starts out like a body-switching comedy soon goes beyond the obvious, and then on to an apocalyptic race against time featuring temporal star-crossed lovers. Even knowing or guessing what’s coming doesn’t diminish the increasing effectiveness of the story as our teenage heroes try to fight the universe in saving a few hundred people … and then go against the capricious nature of the plot to reunite. There’s a lot of cleverness in the way the film moves forward in an unreliable universe that does its best to erase the minds of its protagonists. I particularly enjoyed the way the film quickly went past other body-switching clichés, with resourceful protagonists doing their best to work within the quirks of their situation. The often-tricky transition from silly teenage romantic comedy to heavier young-adult science-fiction drama is handled with some skill, leading to concluding scenes far more powerful than one could have imagined after the film’s first twenty minutes. In short, I understand the hype about Your Name now, and I can see why it attracted so much critical and popular attention. The animation is nothing short of superb (which, like it or not, can be an obstacle with some older animation), and the care with which writer-director Makoto Shinkai sets up his film is enough to make sentiment overpower cold plotting logic—I mean; surely the clever protagonist should have noticed being three years apart given their resourcefulness? But it doesn’t matter—the film survives that nitpick admirably well. Romance, after all, does require some suspension of disbelief as much as Science Fiction.