Movie Review

  • Vamp (1986)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, November 2022) As far as horror comedies go, Vamp is not great, but good enough to be worth a look—especially if you’re looking for a Dusk till Dawn prototype. As a story of three college boys discovering that a local strip club is a front for a vampire coven, it’s an amiable enough film—but once Grace Jones makes her entrance in a showcase stripping sequence, well, there’s the reason to watch the film right there. The film’s comedy factor flags in its second half—as if, having come up with its best ideas early one, Vamp couldn’t quite figure out what to do next. But it’s also a kind of film where plotting doesn’t really matter once you take a dive deep into its alternate view of reality, where everything it out to bite you… at least until dawn. While it never reaches its potential and even wastes some of its best elements (namely Jones), Vamp stands as a pleasant, fun surprise in a sea of humourless 1980s vampire films. Satirical before it was the hip thing to do, it works just well enough to sustain a watch. Just remember to breathe whenever Jones is on-screen.

  • Akeelah and the Bee (2006)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2022) I definitely slept on Akeelah and the Bee when it first came out, but it’s never too late to sing the praises of a genuinely enjoyable film. In many ways, it pairs quite well with Denzel Washington’s The Great Debaters—they’re both stories of para-academic achievement featuring black casts, a traditional reverence for higher education, and clearly go for uplifting finales from very humble roots. They even both have wise mentor characters, in this case Laurence Fishburne (in a somewhat rare kindly turn) as a linguistic academician who is convinced to coach an eleven-year-old girl from a troubled family. Taking place in circa-2006 South Los Angeles (and beyond), there isn’t much in Akeelah and the Bee that feels particularly new or original (especially fifteen years later, and a spate of movies featuring young black heroines) but the charm of the film is in its execution—solid character work from Fishburne, a breakthrough role of sorts for Keke Palmer, straightforward helming from writer-director Doug Atchison, a good use of detail to evoke the world of competitive spelling, and a scope that draws in adults as much as younger audiences. It ends more or less like you’d expect, and that’s a further point in its favour.

  • The Mephisto Waltz (1971)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, November 2022) On paper, there’s some really good stuff at play in The Mephisto Waltz—body-switching between two men of different ages and artistic capabilities, satanic rituals, plotting counter-twists, Alan Alda, Jaqueline Bisset, and stylistic flourishes from director Paul Wendkos… really, this should be a better movie. Because it’s in the execution that the film falls flat, a victim of the worst excesses in early-1970s New Hollywood cinema—poor pacing, atonal structure, genre discomfort, overly dark cinematography, pedestrian dialogue and a baked-in indecision. It’s not bad, mind you—The Mephisto Waltz’s qualities stay its qualities. But in the end, the result is far more muddled than it ought to have been with those ingredients. But then again, those with more fondness than I have about early-1970s cinema may like it a lot more.

  • Prey (1977)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, November 2022) As far as low-budget horror films of the 1970s go, Prey definitely has a lot more going on than you’d expect. Yes, it does remain a shoddily shot, amateurishly edited, incomprehensibly written video nasty. On the other hand, it gleefully goes digging into psychosexual dynamics, as it features a couple of antagonistic lesbians whose isolated existence (in a vast country house) is disrupted by a tall mute stranger who ends up being a flesh-eating alien on a mission to investigate whether humans can make a tasty treat. Much of Prey thus has a strong symbolic component, what with the lesbian characters being threatened by a male intrusion. For such a dirt-cheap film, it carries some unexpected baggage that may make the entire thing less painful to take in. Still, let’s not kid ourselves: the film, as presented, is a tough watch—not just because of the gory violence and nihilistic ending, but the crude nature of the images and the shoestring production. (Fittingly, director Norman J. Warren would go on to make the higher-budgeted but much more reprehensible Inseminoid.) Still, I got much more out of Prey than I expected, and that does count for something.

  • Don’t Worry Darling (2022)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2022) So much has been written about the making of actress-turned-director Olivia Wilde’s Don’t Worry Darling (Celebrity drama! CELEBRITY DRAMA!) that it’s forgivable to forget that there is actually a movie to review in the middle of the tabloid gossip. But as it turns out, maybe there is a link between content and drama: the film goes so out of its way to portray a gendered dystopia in which all men are terrible that it’s hard to avoid noticing how Wilde’s frequent public declarations about the utopia of female-led filmmaking have turned out to be more complicated than anticipated. (Just to come clean on my reactionary bent: The greater inclusivity of movie directors is one of the best things that has happened to Hollywood in the past decade, but holy potatoes am I tired of the cheap grandstanding male-bashing.)  Considering my muted reaction to the overall result, it’s good that I actually have some very nice things to say about Wilde-the-director—her sense of style is not bad (and this is a project that allows her to stretch beyond the straightforward Booksmart): Berkeleyesque kaleidoscopes have seldom felt more foreboding. The bright setting of much of the film is rendered with pop, and she can effectively wring a sense of mystery and suspense out of the script’s set-pieces. This being said: Why did she have to pick such a terrible script? A very, very long build-up is foreboding in its certitude that the men are up to no good, but when the revelations drop, they make the film feel even dumber than it already is. The dystopia-behind-the-utopia is so fundamentally untenable that it defies even the simplest questions—the score-counting against men becomes even cheaper at that point, and nearly drowns the film along with it. Look—If you want to go Stepford Wives on the parallels between patriarchy and exploitative power structures, go wild: but make sure the genre material works before trying to build an allegory on top of it. Otherwise, well, we’re back to filmmaking basics: Chris Pine is very good as a cult leader (and so is Wilde!), while Harry Styles is surprisingly dull in a role that feels increasingly empty. Florence Pugh is not bad, it’s a fun surprise to see Dita van Teese play herself, while both Kiki Layne and Gemma Chan are underused. Some of the enigmatic sequences of Don’t Worry Darling, unfortunately, have no payoffs by the time the credits roll, and that further contributes to the feeling of the film being a hollow gesture. It’s going to be interesting to see Wilde’s next project, though—if nothing else, she once again has something to prove.

  • Crashing Hollywood (1938)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2022) I sweaaar that I already saw 1930 comedy Crashing Hollywood at some point in the past five years, but my notes don’t have any records of it. What probably happened is that I saw it, found it forgettable and obscure, thus skipped over jotting down a few notes. So, let’s do it right this time around: Crashing Hollywood is about a morally dubious couple that meet a screenwriter and decides to make writing movies their next racket. Trouble is: they’re so good at the form and representing crime that real-life criminals find themselves compelled to object in person. Given that the film runs for a scant 61 minutes, that’s about as much plot as director Lew Landers can sustain—and yet much of its interest lies in the depiction of Hollywood’s movie factory as it existed in the 1930s. Here, studio executives are madcap egomaniacs, the writers hold more power than directors, and there’s a strong strain of “gosh, wow, the movies!” running through it all. Filmed on location on the RKO lot, the film has a few treats to offer to movie buffs, and sports some fun comedy along the way. There were a lot of “plucky protagonists come to Hollywood” movies in the 1930s, but Crashing Hollywood does have enough to distinguish itself. It does (amazingly) drag after a while, though, and the handover between the first and last act is not particularly smooth. I just fear that I won’t remember much of it… so I may end up watching it again soon.

  • Suna no onna [Woman in the Dunes] (1964)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Criterion Streaming, November 2022) So here we are, in late fall, when tackling down the next few films in my “to watch before the end of the year” list takes precedence over crowd-pleasing entertainment. The next film on The List: Japanese surrealist drama Woman in the Dunes, in which a scientist is pushed into a giant sand pit where he meets a tormented woman and must serve the nearby villagers (who sent him down in the pit, and took away the ladder) by providing them with buckets of sand. Yes, really. I have enough problems relating to black-and-white Japanese films of the 1960s filled with action and spectacle that this arthouse special was a bit of an ordeal. It’s not so much the weird topic (I’ve seen much, much weirder), but the execution that takes its toll—specifically the almost unbearable two hours and a half it takes from beginning to end. There isn’t enough plot here to justify that running time, and that’s clearly an avowed feature of the film: Director Hiroshi Teshigahara (working from a screenplay by Kōbō Abe, adapting his own novel) clearly means this to be a slow-cinema kind of thing, a meditative experience that gives the viewer time enough to reflect on the allegorical nature of the film. But what will work splendidly well with other viewers just felt obnoxious to me—while I could appreciate some of the sandy cinematography, the rest of Woman in the Dunes didn’t give me any reason to play along with its symbolic games or social parables. At least, at the end of the credits, I can at least say I’ve seen it. One less film on the checklist…

  • Dora and the Lost City of Gold (2019)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On TV, November 2022) You can accurately gauge the age range of my daughter by the vehemence through which she refused to watch a movie about her former BFF Dora the Explorer. Of course, what she didn’t know is that this movie adaptation was more closely aimed at her age group (and up) than the pre-school “Swiper don’t swipe” set—In keeping with a number of adaptations of juvenile properties, the big-screen version of Dora and the Lost City of Gold had been noticeably aged into high school, and comes complete with plenty of one-liners showing awareness and embarrassment about the source material. This Dora is pitched as somewhere between a bright toddler and a sociable teen by virtue of having been homeschooled in the jungle: Much of the film’s first act is spent sending her back to school so she can collect the group of friends that will see her through her subsequent adventures tracking down a lost treasure and her missing parents. In my encroaching old age traditionalism, I’m not all that happy about the satirical/distanciation mechanism used here toward the source material: While I’m a sarcastic guy myself, I’m not sure there’s any inherent value in punching down at an innocent educational kid’s show. (Nor am I all that happy at the recent trend of taking innocuous fare and making it outright horrific—it smacks more of juvenilia than transgression. But that’s a topic for another time.)  Still, bringing Dora into teen comedy does make the result more entertaining: Dora and the Lost City of Gold is not that great of a movie, but there are a few chuckles here and there. Isabela Merced does rather well as the adorably cheerful Dora, with Michael Peña and Eva Longoria dropping by as Dora’s parents. (The other big names are Danny Trejo and Benicio del Toro, providing voices.)  The PG humour is broad and sometimes just a bit too insistent, but it works to make us forget that the budget is just a bit too limited to show a tween Indiana Jones. So, really, I take it back—Dora and the Lost City of Gold has just the right blend of self-awareness to make it work, and for once having an upbeat can-do heroine is really something to be celebrated. In fact, I may try once more to get my daughter to watch it.

  • St. Agatha (2018)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, November 2022) You can give a chance to St. Agatha on the sole basis that it’s helmed by Darren Lynn Bousman, a well-known director specializing in horror films. But for each Saw sequel in Bousman’s filmography, there’s another film of variable quality. He clearly knows what he’s doing from a directorial standpoint—even with a low budget, St. Agatha is handsomely packaged. Alas, Bousman works with the scripts he gets, and they’re not born equal. In this case, we’re in a 1950s convent where very strange things are afoot, especially as wayward young women in a family way are brought for assistance… and more. While the Catholic imagery is used to good spooky effect, the overall impact of the entire film is far less than exceptional: the “plot twists” aren’t surprising, the overall tone is far less fun than you’d expect, and the small scale of the horror isn’t counterbalanced by an exceptional execution. The slow burn of the film’s pacing doesn’t help, and neither does a decidedly restrained conclusion. At times, St. Agatha doesn’t do much to justify its own existence—it’s not clear why we should care, exactly, about anyone in the film or why it exists. It’s visually better than most of the dreck you’ll find in low-budget horror, sure, but that’s not saying all that much.

  • For Love or Money (1993)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, November 2022) By the early 1990s, Michael J. Fox was at the cruising speed of his career—privately aware of his Parkinson’s but able to carry on without it affecting his performances. It’s at that time that he took on a few unchallenging but lucrative roles playing heavily on his persona, and this is where For Love or Money comes in. There’s nothing strictly wrong with the film, but as it unspools the story of an ambitious ultra-competent hotel manager whose romantic and business plans are dashed by circumstances and an intimidating rival, there is nothing in the film that you won’t have already seen somewhere else. Fox and his co-star Gabrielle Anwar are quite engaging as the leads—Fox still channels his youthful charm and tempers with the confidence of a fixer who initially knows everything (anticipating his turn in Spin City), until the obstacles pile up and the facets of his character run against each other. The complications are predictable, and so are the ways in which they resolve themselves—all that’s left to contemplate is the execution. Here, director Barry Sonnenfeld (in his second film) does fine by most standards but underwhelms compared to the rest of his visually inventive filmography: If nothing else, For Love of Money feels comfortable: you’ll know where it is at any given moment, so you can skip over to the bathroom without missing much by the time you come back. Fox gives it his best, and the direction is competent. Shame that the film doesn’t really have anything new or unusual to offer.

  • The Man in the White Suit (1951)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (archive.org Streaming, November 2022) I don’t often question films for their premise (that’s part of suspension of disbelief, after all) but The Man in the White Suit seems so self-satisfied in its central satirical idea that I can’t help but push back a bit. A gentle British Science Fiction comedy meant as a star vehicle for Alec Guinness, it features a young scientist who makes a most remarkable invention: a white fabric that cannot be stained or damaged. So far so good—but as this is a fable, the plot inevitably escalates to a showdown between the inventor and a clothing establishment that will be put out of business by forever clothing. This leads to a comic climax in which the titular suit is destroyed and our protagonist left naked, with an envoi suggesting that “here we go again.”  You can certainly appreciate The Man in the White Suit at pure face value—a low-stakes comic romp featuring a young Guinness that hadn’t yet stultified into his later acting persona. You can even appreciate how it reflected the time and place from which it sprung—a WW2-devastated country still living in severe austerity, where the very idea of indestructible clothing felt wonderful and utopic. But I have, let’s say, a problem with the very idea on which the film is based. As many, many of us will unfortunately attest, from the perspective of 2022, our clothes don’t often wear out—they get outgrown by those of us still expanding in their later decades, they get replaced by clothing more appropriate to our evolving personas, or they simply get thrown away because fashion dictates it. The textile establishment depicted in this film, terrified by a lower demand for textiles, merely had to hire a PR firm to introduce fast fashion and we’d be back to where we started. It’s not much of an objection to a film meant to be taken lightly—but if you’re going to go for Science Fiction, then you also make yourself vulnerable to the nerds in the back-row nit-picking every possible detail for plausibility. Of course, we now have more than seventy years’ hindsight (and a few unfortunate periods of fashion excesses) on The Man in the White Suit, and that may be a bit too much strain to place on the film.

  • Ada (1961)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2022) If you’re just going down the list of Dean Martin films and expecting Ada to be another fun romp featuring the King of Cool in his debonair signing persona, then you’re in for quite a surprise. Sure, the film’s first few minutes will lull you into a sense of complacency: Martin is presented as the lead character: a hayseed bumpkin whose campaign to become governor is going well thanks to authentic plain-talk and a little bit of singing to go along with the guitar. But then things start to slip sideways as Susan Hayward’s character is introduced. She’s a saloon floozy meant as a diversion, but he takes a liking to her and before long they’re wedded—a move that upsets the powers-behind-the-throne expecting a document-signing simpleton doing their work as governor. The film’s shift from one character to another becomes more obvious as they move into the governor’s mansion and she starts poking at the machinations in which he’s supposed to meekly agree. By the time Ada ends, it’s clear that this was her story all along (as per, ahem, the title), and that Martin is just along for the ride. As American political films go, Ada (adapted from a novel) falls somewhere in the middle of the more idealistic or more cynical takes—it’s darker but not hopeless in depicting how ordinary people can fight back against the establishment. Now, Ada isn’t that good of a film: the script is sometimes rough, and the depiction of corruption can seem rote. It doesn’t quite manage the bridge the personal with the political in anything but the broadest sense, and the rug-pulling may annoy a few Martin fans expecting simpler fare. (Although it does bring credence to the idea that Martin was a more astute actor than many assume based on his lazier films.)  Still, I’ll take an interesting imperfect film over a slicker but emptier package, and that’s Ada for you—not the film you expect, and all the more unusual for it.

  • Undergods (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2022) If you accept that movies offer a vision, then the best that writer-director Chino Moya’s Undergods can manage is a fog. A dark, incoherent, deliberately off-putting Science Fiction anthology of very dark tales. But not tales with dark panache, no—rather the stories of a dying world moulded on Eastern Europe, perpetually shrouded in darkness and quotidian despair. Too grim to be comedy but too dull to be horror, Undergods settles for nothing much more than a blur of dark bland, as it barely manages to tell fourth-fifths of a story before blurting another lame and repetitive one. Much of the dour, unfocused nature of the film’s barely distinguishable episodes is made on purpose to trick reviewers into creating an interpretation of a film that doesn’t have much on its mind. But the stark bottom line is that Undergods is a mushy slurry of depressive mood without much in terms of narrative, character development or point. I can’t possibly imagine anyone recommending this film for any purpose.

  • CODA (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (YouTube Streaming, November 2022) If there’s one interesting trend in the last dozen Best Picture Academy Awards winners, it’s that most of them could be called “the film that should not have won” (all the way to the Moonlight/La-La Land kerfuffle). The other thing that characterizes a lot of them is an insistence on social themes—sometimes to the dismay of some watchers prone to screaming, “Message Movie!”  CODA, which most improbably walked away with the prize in 2022, fits the pattern of the decade: There are many reasons why it should not have won according to the old rules (it’s an exclusive release from a new Internet streaming platform; it’s a modestly budgeted small-scale film adapted from a foreign movie; it relies a lot on subtitles; etc.) and yet it does fit the new rules: it’s clearly a social-message movie, it offers leading roles to non-traditional actors, it offers a fresh glance at a marginalized group; it blends together at least three favourite subgenres of the academy; and it treats everything with a rather genial touch. Much of the plot focuses on a young woman, the only hearing member of a northeastern fishing family. (It’s adapted from a French film in which the characters are farmers, but this is more picturesque.)  As CODA goes on, strands of familiar subgenres are woven in: Our heroine is tired of being the interpreter between her family and the outside world; she is exasperated by the blue-collar hardscrabble of their lives and wants to pursue higher education in singing (an incomprehensible pursuit for her family), leading her to be inspired by a great teacher; the family gets tired of working for another and decides to go into business for themselves; and then there’s the miscellanea of being a teenager dealing with more-embarrassing-than-usual parents. It’s a lot, but fortunately, it’s handled with a deft touch—CODA is surprisingly funny, quite accessible and if not exactly suspenseful, then involving enough to want to watch what happens next. Academy award-winning deaf actor Troy Kotsur is quite good here, and Marlee Matlin is almost as good in a supporting role—and seeing her here brings to mind all the ways in which CODA seems substantially more mature in its look at deaf characters than the comparable Children of a Lesser God: for one thing, the film is comfortable using subtitles rather than having a character repeat verbatim the ASL dialogue for the hearing audience. The low stakes of the film allow writer-director Sian Heder to spend time building characters, even if the jumble of competing subplots can be tricky to navigate at times. I’m not going to suggest that CODA was my favourite or even the best of 2021’s films (after all, the Academy has also abandoned this goal in making its picks, going instead for movies meant to make everyone feel good about their choices) but it’s certainly watchable, unusual, and even a bit daring in how it presents something that feels new. As far as Best Picture Winners go, I don’t expect that CODA will be particularly remarkable (and the question of its streaming exclusivity does rankle), but neither will it embarrass the Academy.

  • The Chocolate War (1988)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2022) As a film reviewer, one of the big foundational questions about any movie is a plain simple “Why?”  As in—why was this film made? What compelled hundreds of people to do their part in bringing this story to the screen? For a surprising number of films, the question can be answered by, “It’s adapted from a best-selling novel.”  Such is the case with writer-director Keith Gordon’s The Chocolate War, a teenage drama set in a boarding school where much of the action revolves around… a chocolate fundraising effort. Of course, it’s not about selling chocolate—it’s about one young man’s rebellion against established order, against how a personal error (as in: buying far too many boxes of chocolate to sell) can lead to abuse in a system set up to reinforce existing power structures. It’s such an out-there concept that, yes, the “why” of the film boils down to—it’s based on a classic YA novel by Robert Cormier. Alas, if you think this is going to be funny, you’re mistaken: As dark as its setting in an austere Catholic boarding school where no fun is ever allowed, The Chocolate War offers little in terms of triumphs for the protagonist refusing to engage in chocolate-selling—and that’s after the novel’s original ending was revised to be lighter and more hopeful. It makes for a decent, but not overly engaging viewing experience: it’s very much a novel of awful people perpetuating the means through which they remain awful, and the refusal to lend a light touch to what could have been a satirical premise is the kind of thing that takes a toll, however justifiable it is. As boarding school dramas go, The Chocolate War also pales in comparison to contemporary heavyweights of the subgenre. Still—not bad: glum, dispiriting and dismaying in its social implications, but it clearly achieves its targets even after altering the events in the original novel.