Movie Review

  • Lorelei (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2022) The only thing better than a film that doesn’t go where you expect it to is a film that delivers a humane message in a genre that doesn’t often have them. In Lorelei’s opening minutes, viewers may think they’re in familiar territory as a tough guy (a credible Pablo Schreiber) is released from prison after a fifteen-year stint, and gradually labours to re-integrate into the community. If you’ve seen ex-con films before, you know the scenes: A less-than-sympathetic parole officer, old criminal acquaintances welcoming him back, a quick physical get-together with an old girlfriend (Jena Malone), a hard-headed boss reluctantly willing to give a chance to a parolee, but on the condition that if they make one mistake, then they’re out. The stakes are raised but not altered once our protagonist moves in with his ex/new girlfriend and starts taking care of her kids. At that point, we think we know where Lorelei is going: the temptation of an easy buck, a shady enterprise, a slight mistake, the cops closing in on someone who now has much to lose… but that’s not at all what happens. Our protagonist, despite a tough exterior and some mistakes along the way, proves to be quite a good step-father. The third act gets going when she leaves him with the kids, taking the film in a most unusual territory. The mini quest that forms the bulk of the film’s last minutes ends on a touch of grace that elevates the rest of a rather gritty working-class drama. The atmosphere of people living at the edge of poverty is rendered well, even if the script and dialogue can be rough at times. Still, Lorelei becomes quite a bit better than what you could expect from its opening minutes. It’s a modest success for writer-director Sabrina Doyle, and it’s going to be interesting to see what she does next.

  • The Harder They Fall (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Netflix Streaming, May 2022) I compile my lists of films to see from various sources, so you won’t be surprised to learn that the NAACP Image Awards are on my radar, and that seeing The Harder They Fall became a priority when it won this year’s award for Outstanding Motion Picture. It did not disappoint: A predominantly-black cast western directed with style and energy, it’s fun to watch even in its excesses. Pleasantly militant (as per the opening title cards: “While the events of this story are fictional… These. People. Existed.”), it peers at history to resuscitate black historical Western figures and has them go on an adventure as explosive as anything else in the genre. The ensemble cast is nothing short of terrific, with notables such as Jonathan Majors, Idris Elba, Zazie Beetz, Regina King, Delroy Lindo and Lakeith Stanfield holding their own on-screen. While the story is standard action western material, it’s given a kick in the pants thanks to writer-director Jeymes Samuel’s aggressive style, an incredible modern soundtrack, and several touches of well-placed humour. (The visit to “a white town” is visually very funny.)  A terrific sense of cool permeates everything in the film, as if every scene had been optimized to get viewers primed for more. Where The Harder They Fall loses me somewhat is in the excessive amount of violence and gore, none of it essential to the impact of the film and in fact even detrimental to it – I think the film could have been a more accessible PG-13 by removing the needless blood. Still, there’s no denying the appeal of the result – including a terrific hand-to-hand fight sequence featuring Beetz and King. It’s sure-fire entertainment for audiences willing to tolerate its gratuitous violence. The final shot promises a sequel – I’ll be there.

  • Seven Years Bad Luck (1921)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2022) Here’s a fun discovery for anyone who thinks they’ve rounded up silent-era comedy through the Chaplin/Keaton/Lloyd trio. Seven Years Bad Luck is the Hollywood debut of notable French comedian Max Linder, who here re-creates several of his routines for the American public. Quite a lot of it still works well a hundred years later – the opening mirror routine alone clearly anticipates the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup, his dandy character feels like the one Keaton would develop in a few films, and there’s a lot more after that. The film is a lot of fun (and at barely more than an hour, scarcely outstays its welcome) and ranks somewhere near mid-tier Keaton in terms of laughs. (It’s also in the public domain now, so there’s no excuse not to see it from its Wikipedia page.)  Reading about Linder explains why he remains a bit obscure – predating Chaplin/Keaton/Lloyd, he is their rough acknowledged inspiration… but his Hollywood career was short-lived and he committed suicide only a few years later. He has resurfaced as a notable silent-era comedian, but his work largely remains the province of connoisseurs. Seven Years Bad Luck is not only notable as a milestone in the history of movie comedy, it’s -more importantly- still quite fun to watch.

  • The Woman in the Window (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Netflix Streaming, May 2022) I’m probably overdosing on domestic thrillers at the moment, because I didn’t feel much except annoyance at The Woman in the Window. If you’re familiar with the subgenre, you already know the basics: a woman, alone, possibly drunk, almost certainly dysfunctional in some way, mysterious events, paranoia, certitude that someone is in danger, eventual threat to self. Fill in the blanks yourself. On paper, The Woman in the Window is promising: Amy Adams is rarely less than compelling, and having her surrounded by such notables as Gary Oldman, Anthony Mackie, Julianne Moore and Jennifer Jason Leigh is promising enough: Adding Joe Wright as director and Tracy Letts as screenwriter seems to be merely gilding the lily. And yet, and yet… the film lands with a thud. Oh, no, Adams plays an agoraphobic drunk who grows convinced she’s just seen a murder and, zzz…. Yeah, there’s no investment here. It’s a by-the-numbers exercise, with more dumb screenwriting tricks than is tolerable for a formulaic product such as this one. Everything about the film screams contrivances, artificiality and convenience. The early moments of the film take forever to get to where the story begins, and the final “twist” is laughable. As a result, The Woman in the Window feels dull-witted, laboriously executed and far less than rewarding in its impact. It gets worse once you dig into the film’s production and find out that the best-selling novel on which it’s based was written by a serial liar, fabulist and plagiarist, that the film’s first cut got disastrous reactions from test audiences and that most reviews were still not all that impressed (how bad was that first cut?). I suspect that The Woman in the Window will nonetheless annoy other viewers less than it annoyed me – a combination of decent actors, top-notch technical credentials and pandemic-friendly premise may outweigh jaded objections. Furthermore, I also suspect that the over-familiarity of the film may play as comforting material to audiences wanting safe expected thrills. If that’s you, well, there’s The Woman in the Window to stare at.

  • The Dig (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Netflix Streaming, May 2022) British but not necessarily well-mannered to a fault, director Simon Stone‘s The Dig juices up the true story of the Sutton Hoo major archeological discovery on a British estate into a tale of jurisdictional infighting, jealousy and passionate affairs. It’s an odd mix indeed, and I’m still not sure whether it works except on the most basic of terms. Part of my doubt has to do with an ultra-niche topic matter, and how it’s being sexed-up (by way of the novel on which the film is adapted) to include drama where there wasn’t in the first place. It does not help that the film is slow-paced to a fault: at 112 minutes, it spends a lot of time on establishing shots and building romantic tension. It’s hard to be against the result – heaven knows we could use more cerebrally-minded films that don’t go from one action sequence to another – but I would be exaggerating if I said that I’m all that enthusiastic about the result. Carey Mulligan, Ralph Fiennes and Lily James are cute, though: They dig, they find, they argue, they fill back the hole – cue the end title cards explaining what happened next. All right, then.

  • The Dark Past (1948)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2022) It’s perfectly understandable to have mixed feelings about The Dark Past – a film that most impresses with a novel approach, but then shows the limits of that approach. In what feels like a stage-bound noir, much of the film revolves around a hostage situation in which a dangerous criminal threatens a college psychology professor and his family at their isolated cabin. The most noteworthy bit of cast is obviously a young William Holden as the villain (!), facing off against the older Lee J. Cobb. The novelty of this film’s approach is in its reliance on psychiatry as a way out of the conflict – throughout the film, our protagonist develops his understanding of the villain’s psychology (including a few nightmares rendered in stylish negative image) and then, as a climax, performs a quick analytical session. Alas, this is where the film hits a hard limit – Hollywood oblige, a few minutes of discussions lead the villain to realize the errors of his ways, and the protagonist to declare, “He’s cured!’” — a declaration that even non-professionals will find problematic in the twenty-first century. But the film gets the happy ending it was looking for, all the way back to a framing device that feels like nothing more than propaganda for police psychiatrists. As I said – it’s fine to be impressed by The Dark Past’s willingness to reach for something other than a big climactic shoot-out, and not be impressed by the slap-dash way it’s executed.

  • Valley of the Sun (1942)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2022) There aren’t many straight-up dramas in Lucille Ball’s filmography and even fewer westerns – so if you find yourself asking why you’re watching as unremarkable a western as Valley of the Sun, tell yourself that this is it – Ball’s only Western. She is, predictably, somewhat wasted here – while the film does have elements of comedy that allow her to find a footing, the film isn’t built to her specifications and that shows. There are more interesting ideas to find in the film’s ususually-progressive-for-1942 treatment of its Native American characters – although there was a limit to how much credence a 1942 film could give to their revindications. A bit of action makes the film go by faster, but Valley of the Sun still feels long at 78 minutes. Some genre films tend to be for fans, and so it will take seasoned western aficionados to get the most out of this one.

  • Forty Little Mothers (1940)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2022) An awkward mixture of genres stops Forty Little Mothers from being completely successful, but it’s still worth a look. Much of the film rests on the shoulder of Eddie Cantor, in a far more dramatic vein than his earlier, lighter roles: Here, he plays a down-on-his-luck schoolteacher who finds an abandoned baby and decides to raise it himself rather than give it to an orphanage. That would be enough material for an entire drama, but then he gets a job at an all-girl school and has to content both with resentful schoolgirls (mad that he replaced their favourite teacher, and trying their best to get him fired) and hiding the baby from the school administrators, since he’s a boarder. The drama, fortunately, gets less overpowering when the girls become his biggest allies in raising the kid, and Forty Little Mothers goes for a more comic approach in its later half. Fortunately, it all ends well for everyone – including the baby and its mother. It’s regrettable that the film stuck so much to the drama, because director Busby Berkeley (best known for his musical choreography) is on firmer footing when shooting comedy. There’s quite a bit of delightful material involving the headmistress and her assistant, with a few glances and chuckles suggesting much naughtier material right under the surface. Alas, this was six years in the pre-Code era, and so the potential for something much more enjoyable remains unrealized. If you think you spot Veronica Lake and Virginia O’Brien in the background, you’re not wrong – MGM went deep in its roster of ingenues to fill up those forty schoolgirl roles. Too bad that Forty Little Mothers, as presented, seems a bit scattered between heart-wrenching drama and much lighter comedy – the film’s tone goes from one end of the spectrum to another, at the expense of a unified comic approach.

  • They Made Me a Criminal (1939)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2022) You won’t find that many drama films in director Busby Berkeley’s filmography – the man who defined kaleidoscopic dance routines in the 1930s was best used in musicals and light-hearted fare, but by 1939 his time at Warner Brothers was nearly up, and movie musicals were on the way out. As a result, he ended up directing drama They Made Me a Criminal in which a boxer, convinced he’d killed a man, goes in self-exile in the desert — where he finds redemption, romance, and purpose. It’s not that much of a plot (and this being before noir’s heyday, there’s a surprising restraint in dwelling on the fatalism of the character’s fate) but the film moves effectively even when it’s not that memorable. They Made Me a Criminal is perhaps more interesting behind the scenes as a film of beginnings and endings – an ending for Berkeley, who would move to MGM and find renewed success in the new glossy colour musicals that were about to define the studio’s glory days; and beginnings for the Dead End Kids that litter this film, since they would go on to become the East Side Kids and then the Bowery Boys. (Although this film won’t make converts to their brand of humour and malapropisms.)  There are many, many ways in which this film could have been better – leaning on the grimness of the story or conversely highlighting its humanistic aspect, or taking out the insufferable kids – but They Made Me a Criminal is not that unpleasant to watch. John Garfield gives plenty of dramatic energy to a role that could have been underwritten, and the time spent in the desert marks a change of pace if you’re jaded about the urban landscapes of 1930s Warners crime movies.

  • Nóz w wodzie [Knife in the Water] (1962)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2022) I’m watching early Roman Polanski films just so that I can clear up his filmography and be done with the (pedophile rapist fugitive) guy. His Polish debut feature, Knife in the Water, is not meant to be all that complex: A married couple picks up a hitchhiker on their way to a weekend sailing trip and tensions rise between the three characters in the hermetic setting as the husband begins a low-intensity bullying campaign toward the other man, the wife starts seducing him — and the hitchhiker, well, who cares, right? There’s an unrealistic tone built in the film from its very beginning, and that would explain why Knife in the Water is going to appeal a lot more to the arthouse crowd than anyone else – the pacing alone makes this almost unbearable to anyone looking for a conventional thriller, and the film isn’t all that interested in being a straight-up plotting exercise anyway. I can see the appeal: it’s crafted meticulously, it’s clearly adept in symbolism (even when it’s on the nose, such as the crossroads ending) and Polanski here may be slow, but he’s not wasteful. In the end, well, I’ve seen Knife in the Water and that’s that – no need to ever revisit it.

  • The Hindenburg (1975)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2022) As much as I like disaster movies, I just couldn’t get into The Hindenburg long enough to care. It’s quite possible that the project was doomed to failure from its inception—let us count the ways: The defining aspect of the Hindenburg tragedy is its final moments, while a defining characteristic of disaster movie is having a steady drip of jolts before, during and after the disaster to truly make a spectacle for viewers. There’s also the Nazi problem, in that the crew of the dirigible and many of its passengers were straight-up Nazis, and I’m not particularly inclined to cheer even for so-called good Nazis. There’s also the film’s very conscious decision to juice up the conspiracy theories surrounding the tragedy as a way to create even more drama. Then there are the execution flaws: shot in bland gray mid-1970s style, The Hindenburg’s sparse sets and spartan atmosphere may be historically accurate, but they suck all of the fun out of a transatlantic trip. Twenty-first century viewers looking at the film with the vantage point of decades’ worth of CGI perfection may not be ideally placed to criticize its visual effects, but it’s still a disconcerting decision to switch back to black-and-white in order to match the real historical footage of the catastrophe with what was re-created for the film. The decision to embrace conspiracy theories also, unfortunately, lessens the tragedy of the deaths – if someone was orchestrating it all, it carries a very different connotation than innocent people dying from a catastrophic accident. Having much of the early plot hinging on a pseudo-mystical premonition is more funny than evocative, and the actors seem stuck in Robert Wise’s automaton-like directing when humans are involved. A lot of work has clearly been done to re-create historical elements (the film got several Academy Awards nominations and wins, including Special Effects) but once again I go back to my first question – was the project ill-conceived from the start? Compounded by its tone-deaf execution, The Hindenburg ends up on the wrong side of the line separating fun from tiresome.

  • Warning (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2022) As someone who has read, reviewed and written science fiction for a long time, it bothers me to no end when people assume that, since it’s a speculative genre, it means that you can do anything and everything with it. The best SF works use strong and self-coherent logic, focus on specific themes and manage to keep a tonal unity between elements – on top of the usual requirements of genre fiction. So, when Warning arrives with its collection of dumb incoherent subplots and labels itself as science fiction, well, I get annoyed. The film often gives the feeling that writer-director Agata Alexander was satisfied to glue together a few half-baked ideas, visuals and characters and called it a film. An interwoven tapestry of subplots, Warning struggles to present a consistent film. Sometime it’s about an astronaut drifting in space, sometimes it’s about a woman left bereft by an overbearing digital assistant, sometimes it’s about a robot trying to find an owner. None of this is credible – characters act like caricatures, making redundant points but not being developed as interesting people. Even the film’s ideas feel trite at a time when you can get better material from YouTube. An ensemble of decent actors is featured in the many subplots, but even the best of them don’t have much to showcase. Worse of all, perhaps, is Warning’s complete lack of thematic or tonal unity – best demonstrated by the film’s final sequence in which a half-decent acceptance monologue from a man coming to grips with his own imminent death is instantly destroyed by a dumb final joke. There’s a point in which disappointment turns to loathing, and the only suspense in Warning is figuring out on which side of the line it will fall.

  • Truck Turner (1974)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2022) I’ve mentioned it before, but while most Blaxploitation film recommendations go to the early defining examples, my own viewing preference goes to the middle-period films of the subgenre – more technically proficient, they also better understood the tone that these films were going for. Truck Turner, featuring no less than Isaac Hayes, Yaphet Kotto and Nichelle Nichols, couldn’t be more blaxploitation if it tried – the protagonist is a bounty hunter who has to deal with unforeseen consequences after the death of a pimp. Hayes (who also composed the soundtrack) has a good screen presence as the protagonist, but it’s Nichols and her spectacular outfits that clearly steal the show. If you’re in-tune with Blaxploitation’s gritty lower-budgeted characteristics, you’ll find a lot to like here. It even ends on a somewhat unusually hopeful note. Truck Turner may not be that polished or sophisticated, but it moves its genre elements with some assurance, and includes a few amusing sequences in the mix (even if some of them, such as when our protagonist frames his girlfriend as a shoplifter to get her into custody and out of danger from their pursuers, may be a hard sell to modern audiences). Truck Turner delivers when people think “Blaxploitation” – it’s an honest example of the genre, and it will fit the bill if that’s what you’re looking for.

  • Riding the Bullet (2004)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, May 2022) If it wasn’t for writer-director Mick Garris, we would have far fewer Stephen King film adaptations since the 1990s. I have a fondness for the cat-craziness of his Sleepwalkers, and thought that his take on Desperation punched above its weight as a made-for-TV movie adaptation, but I hadn’t seen Riding the Bullet until now. Nominally the story of a road trip in which a young man goes back home to visit his sick mother, the film ends up being a hallucinatory succession of episodes as he hitch-hikes his way across Maine, experiencing mental health issues and supernatural occurrences along the way. Broadly faithful to King’s original novella, the film does run into the unfortunate issue of often feeling like a string of disconnected episodes, all trying to spook even when it doesn’t make sense. Still, Riding the Bullet is more than a succession of jump-scares, especially when it goes for ambitious flashbacks and sentimental themes. The limit of that approach, unfortunately, is that the focus of the story is often lost – it may be about a young aimless man’s self-harm tendencies, or it may be about a pact with the devil (an aspect more pronounced in the novella), or about taking care of aging parents, or something else – it feels like a few disconnected things stitched together. The result is still fun (and it’s a great deal more interesting than a monster-of-the-week horror movie), but Riding the Bullet remains the least interesting King adaptation from Garris.

  • Batman: Mask of the Phantasm (1993)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2022) Animated Batman movies are now commonplace, but in 1993, the idea of taking the character of the still-iconic Batman: The Animated Series to a feature film was reasonably novel. Fortunately, Batman: Mask of the Phantasm can still be watched without too much trouble today:  The effectiveness of series/film director Bruce Timm’s vision is still unquestionable, and the strong art direction makes even early-era CGI look really good. Blending Batman’s first year as a superhero with a years-later plotline in which Batman gets a more violent opponent plays with familiar themes, but the result is not that bad, and still interesting despite repeated overexposure of the character in popular media. I’m not overly fond of the film spending time on very familiar material, but suppose that not having Mark Hamill voice The Joker in a TAS-inspired film would have been unacceptable. To be honest, Mask of the Phantasm isn’t anything new, but it’s well made enough to have aged quite gracefully. It’s still worth a look for fans of the character, often more so than many of the later animated films.