Movie Review

  • Sien lui yau wan II: Yan gaan dou [A Chinese Ghost Story II] (1990)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, May 2022) I remembered just enough of the first Chinese Ghost Story to be looking forward to the sequel… and I remembered correctly: Anyone looking for a charmingly low-tech film very much in the Evil Dead vein could do much worse than have a look at this fog-drenched maximalist take on fantasy film. This second instalment goes wide in presenting an ensemble cast fighting against demons and imperial soldiers, with plenty of wire-enhanced fighting, wild monstrous creatures and some memorable set-pieces. Director Ching Siu-tung has a lot of fun staging the mayhem, and star Leslie Cheung makes for a great protagonist. The romantic content of the first film (hastily summarized in the sequel’s first few seconds) is clearly toned down in favour of demonic sword-fighting, and that’s fine – it’s enough of a departure to be distinctive. Now, I’m clearly catching only a fraction of A Chinese Ghost Story II’s allusion to Chinese mythology – but the result is high-energy enough that I don’t care all that much. (Although keeping an eye on the Wikipedia plot summary may help keep your bearings.)  This is old-school horror fun with plenty of comedy to soften the blow, and enough fun with the camera (almost a character by itself) to still wow more than thirty years later.

  • Händler der vier Jahreszeiten [The Merchant of Four Seasons] (1972)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2022) Ugh, Rainer Werner Fassbinder.  I’ll watch his films to complete his filmography, but I’m not promising that I’ll enjoy them. While I did like The Merchant of Four Seasons more than usual for his films, it was often out of a sense of fascination for the weird choices he makes throughout it all. The story of a fruit cart merchant who struggles to provide for his family soon spins into melodramatic extremes as he beats his wife, she cheats on him, he ends up hiring the man who slept with her, both of them start plotting against our protagonist, and things escalate from there. It’s filled with curious filmmaking choices– even allowing for the restrained nature of German films, the actors here seem content in delivering flat line-readings in what could appear like a parody of melodramatic acting. In other words, while I found something interesting in The Merchant of Four Seasons, it was a sense of fascination with how it was turning out than any real immersion in the film’s reality. Compared to my flatter-than-flat reaction to other Fassbinder films, that’s almost an improvement.

  • Aces High (1976)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2022) If you want to talk about movies as crude time-travel devices, then Aces High gets you two trips for the price of one: As per topic matter, it travels to World War I, specifically the barracks hosting the English pilots going to the front in their rickety planes. The very specific tone of the film (which borrows its plot from the classic Journey’s End) is dictated by the fighting conditions it describes, with a pilot’s life expectancy being measured in days rather than weeks. With that kind of turnover, there’s a curious mixture of gallows humour and deliberate detachment amongst the pilots brought back in this frat-house-like atmosphere. The second bit of time-travel is in going back to the very specific flavour of 1970s British filmmaking, especially as it relates to war films. While the British film industry’s shift from war-is-an-adventure to war-is-hell was more gradual and mannered than the American abrupt-face throughout the accumulating toll of the Vietnam War, there was such a shift and Aces High is clearly about the butchery of World War I, albeit in a clipped, nearly ironic way. It’s also a chance to see such actors as Malcolm McDowell and Christopher Plummer early in their careers. Working in a pre-digital age where the only way to get aerial footage was either shooting it, or reusing footage shot for other films, Aces High does both – fans of The Blue Max should recognize a few shots. It amounts to an interesting film – the focus on the barracks antics is original enough, and the way the film approaches its anti-war message is affecting without being too clumsy. There’s a long list of World War I films, and while Aces High isn’t necessarily mandatory, it’s not a bad pick.

  • The Loveless (1981)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2022) The best reasons to watch The Loveless today are that it’s the debut of (co-)director Kathryn Bigelow, and that it features a very young Willem Dafoe in a lead role as a biker terrorizing a small town near Daytona. Otherwise, the film is a deconstructive 1980s look at the 1950s, with the bikers not quite being terrors and the upstanding citizens not necessarily being so upstanding. The ending is not bad, in a rather glum way, but it does take a long time to get there: Stuck in small-town America with nowhere to go, The Loveless feels longer than its 85-minute running time. Dafoe makes an impression, though, and so does Marin Kanter as the complex female lead. The sense-of-place is middling at best – this is a low-budget film, after all, and whatever couldn’t be covered through period cars and timeless vistas of small-town America exceeded the production design envelope. The result isn’t too far away from downbeat New Hollywood — Fans of outlaw films may appreciate the slightly different spin eventually provided to the film, but no one will be blamed for not being that enthusiastic about the result.

  • The Last Dinosaur (1977)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, May 2022) The best moment in The Last Dinosaur comes early on, as the film uses a scrapbook to establish its larger-than-life protagonist, a big-game hunter who happens to be a billionaire whose company has discovered a long-lost Antarctic valley where dinosaurs roam. After that, the film can’t help but steadily slide into mediocrity and boredom, albeit not without quirky moments along the way. This being a Rankin/Bass co-production with a Japanese special-effects company, there’s a very odd blend of slap-dash scripting with man-in-suit 1970s visual effects. You can wince because of the casual sexism related to the female characters (although there’s a bit of role reversal when the “easy seduction” of a character is revealed to be a cold-blooded ruse from the seduced) or the unconvincing special effects, but The Last Dinosaur steadily loses interest the longer it goes on and our hunter aims for the biggest target of his life. The film deservedly ended up as a made-for-TV title (even if it wasn’t made for TV) and, even then, probably felt dated in its depiction of a hunter billionaire as a hero. There is a title song over the credits, though, if that’s the kind of thing that can make it better.

  • Two on a Guillotine (1965)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2022) Aw, yeah, another haunted-house story: In order to inherit a fortune, the daughter of a murderous crackpot magician must remain in his creepy booby-trapped house for a full week. Lovely premise, especially for someone like me who can’t get enough “spend the night in the haunted house” stories. The first third of Two on a Guillotine has a nice quasi-William Castle quality, as low-budget filmmakers use cleverness to compensate for deficient production values. I particularly liked the reading of the will theatrically staged at the Hollywood Bowl (something that even the characters find over-the-top), and Dean Jones’s turn as a sarcastic reporter who volunteers to help our heroine make it through the ordeal. Unfortunately, the film takes a dive after that promising opening – while it generally remains watchable until its dramatic ending, Two on a Guillotine can’t quite recapture the banter and the flashiness of its opening. In the end, it degrades into a very standard-issue haunted house thriller, not quite taking full advantage of its opportunities. That’s too bad… but this is hardly the first haunted house thriller to run out of steam after a promising opening. Don’t expect too much and you should be fine.

  • Retro Puppet Master (1999)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, May 2022) Writer-director-producer Charles Band and his Full Moon Pictures studio are known for low-budget films, but if there’s something else that keeps popping up in their filmography, it’s puppets. Puppet antagonists. Puppet supporting characters. An entire thirteen-film Puppet Master series, of which Retro Puppet Master is the seventh. Band did not technically direct Retro Puppet Master (long-time acolyte David DeCoteau did, but that’s not much of a distinction) but his stamp is everywhere on the film. You can recognize the hallmarks of the Full Moon Pictures’ low-budget style everywhere in the production, what with its meandering plot, unconvincing period production values, low-grade actors (including Greg Sestero, eventually made famous by his involvement in The Room) and, obviously, a lot of puppets. No Full Moon films are good, but some of them squeak by on rough charm and quasi-accidental enjoyment. Retro Puppet Master is not one of them – it just limps along with a self-involved plot that doesn’t manage to become interesting, and is clearly part of a cult following for the Puppet Master series. Maybe that’s you, in which case – have fun. Otherwise, there are better movies out there and, more crucially, better Charles Band movies as well.

  • Together (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2022) I’m not sure how I feel about the inevitable wave of Covid lockdown movies that have started making their way everywhere. On the one hand, it was an extraordinary dramatic experience widely shared– we all have our stories of lockdown and how we (and others) reacted to it, and someone somewhere –possibly with a few years’ worth of hindsight—will eventually figure out how to use this in a way that will resonate. On the other hand, well, it may be too soon yet – we may be out of lockdown, or they may become semi-annual occurrences. We’re all tired of the isolation and not eager to go back to it, even for the time of a film. Plus, not to put too fine a point on it —we’ve lived through so many video-chats, so is there anything more than that to say? It doesn’t help that the lockdown movies we’ve seen so far have often been too basic to be interesting – I did like Lockdown because it used the times as a springboard to an unusual heist film, but Safer at Home was flat-out too dumb to be good. Now here is Together to deliver an earnest, stripped-down, almost documentary look at the acute phase of the lockdown, through the lenses of an unhappily married couple clearly not thrilled to be stuck with each other for a long time. James McAvoy and Sharon Horgan star, the first using his Scottish accent to a degree seldom seen in other roles.   As for the form of the film, much of it plays out as a confessional between the two lead characters and the camera, even if who the camera is supposed to be isn’t too clear, and disintegrates over the course of the film. In terms of content, the film feels like an articulate expression of how most of us felt through the experience – trying to come to grips with this, with the additional burdens of life taking place in trying times (here, the death of a parent in a hospice) and how we related to those unable to lock down safely in order to provide essential services. It’s all earnest, sometimes a bit too much so: as if the film was bringing us back there rather than illuminating what happened. In the end, Together feels like it achieves its objectives in recording the event, but not much more than that – it obviously doesn’t have perspective and can’t quite go beyond the obvious, but perhaps that’s enough for now – anything else will need to time to process.

  • Drunk Bus (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2022) On paper, there isn’t much to excite in Drunk Bus’ premise – this is hardly the first film in which we’re asked to commiserate with an aimless twentysomething suffering from a breakup, stuck in a dead-end job and having trouble making new friends. But a few elements make the execution of that premise far more interesting than expected. An unusual job – driving the campus loop bus during winter nights, as inebriated students try to go back home—provides a chilly but distinctive visual identity to the film. While Charlie Tahan is clearly the protagonist of the film, Pineapple Tangaroa is nothing short of remarkable in a supporting role, playing a tattooed pierced Samoan street poet hired as bodyguard to the diminutive protagonist. (The film’s production history also suggests that he’s playing himself in a semi-autobiographical film.)  The plot isn’t quite as important as the ensemble of quirky supporting characters, wacky night-in-the-life-of events and a very specific sense of humour from directors John Carlucci and Brandon LaGanke. Drunk Bus is not an earth-shaking film, but it operates in a subgenre where greatness is unnecessary – merely being watchable, enjoyable and original is enough — a bar that it easily clears.

  • The Humans (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2022) Ugh, what an ordeal. But that’s probably the reaction expected of The Humans’ filmmakers. Taking the notion of a secrets-filled Thanksgiving family get-together to its creepiest manifestation, the film begins as a middle-class family from Pennsylvania gathers at their youngest daughter’s newest apartment, in a semi-dilapidated Manhattan apartment building. While there’s little in the subject matter of the film to evoke horror, the setting does most of the work in making the film repugnant: dimly lit hallways with flickering lights, creaking dripping pipes, power outages and disquieting noises from the urban jungle all combine to make the film feel far darker than warrants its subject matter. Writer-director Stephen Karam positively delights in shooting it all like a film where the first brutal murder is only thirty seconds away, with distant long-shots meant to deemphasize the humanity of characters stuck in an alien environment that doesn’t care about them. Absent the setting, the film plays like a far more traditional Thanksgiving family demolition derby: Everyone’s got a secret or two, and we get to hear it all by the end of the film. A few familiar names pop up on the cast list: most notably Amy Schumer in a decidedly serious role and Richard Jenkins maintaining a façade of civility on a character with much to atone for. So, does it work? I expect it may on audiences who fear the intrusion of genre upon drama – The Humans is all build-up and no payoff (especially for those hoping for a psycho killer to put this entire irritating family out of their misery) and there’s an audience for that kind of material even if I can’t understand why. For genre fans, however, The Humans is all that’s wrong with pretentious arthouse drama movies convinced they don’t have to be conventional. I mean – they’re not wrong: there’s nothing forcing filmmakers to stick to a solid three-act structure with a satisfying denouement. But then again, nothing forces the audience to like the result either. But if your idea of a fun time is a dysfunctional Thanksgiving dinner with unlikable characters in a run-down apartment, well, The Humans is for you.

  • Mad Holiday (1936)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2022) Hollywood history is littered with passable films that work rather well but don’t leave any lasting memories. Mad Holiday, caught in-passing from a rare TCM broadcast because I have a fondness for films about films, is a good example of the form – it’s practically obscure today, not exactly a good movie and yet you can watch it and feel as if you’ve gotten a decent deal for your time. (It also clocks in at 71 minutes, which helps make it feel like time not wasted.)  It features Edmund Lowe as an actor tired of being pigeonholed as a detective in a popular series of mystery movies (Mad Holiday opens by depicting the conclusion of his most recent film, then switching to off-camera complaints by the actor), who decides to go on a cruise to clear his mind. Alas, trouble follows – and our fake detective must become a real detective, uneasily allied with the author of the mystery novels he dislikes so much. Zasu Pitts shows up in a familiar ditzy role. Otherwise, though, Mad Holiday is competent in the way the Hollywood studios were getting by the 1930s in churning out acceptable entertainment to fill theatre screens. It’s mildly entertaining, the dialogue isn’t too bad, heroine Elissa Landi is quite cute, and it crams a surprising amount of plot in its short running time. (Some of this breakneck pacing is very intentional, as it prevents viewers from thinking too much about what’s happening. For modern audiences, it will distract from the regrettable yellowface depiction of an Asian character.)  Having an actor team up with the author of the novels he’s bringing to the screen is just metafictional enough to be interesting, and director George B. Seitz’s style is unobtrusive enough. No one will ever recommend Mad Holidays as a good example of anything, but it can certainly be watched well enough, which is a distinction we can’t necessarily give to much-better-known films.

  • This Is the Night (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2022) There’s plenty to admire in the idea of a filmmaker using the medium to deliver a semi-autobiographical period piece – it’s common enough in written fiction, but films are expensive enough to produce that it takes clout to be able to swing such a project. So, if writer-director James DeMonaco -fresh off the box-office returns of a few Purge movies- wants to take us back to 1982 Staten Island for a low-stake day-in-the-life coming-of-age family drama, the least we can do is being open-minded about it. Alas, there’s a limit to the amount of indulgence we can give to what This is the Night becomes. There is, certainly, a good sense of time and place to this take on May 28, 1982 – not so coincidentally the opening night of Rocky III, a cultural event which seems to bring the Italian-American borough to a frenzy. It’s against that landmark that the family drama is set, with overlapping stories about the male members of the Dedea family:  The youngest son has teen-movie issues with a crush and public humiliation; the older son has gender-conformity problems; and the father struggles to keep the mob at bay when his restaurant is in financial trouble. (The family also features a mom, played by Naomie Watts, but her only role is to be supportive of her elder son’s coming-out.)  This is not unpromising material, but various decisions made during the execution of This is the Night limit its effectiveness, starting with using such a milquetoast film as Rocky III as a cornerstone. Blending genres from silly implausible teen comedy to attempted sensitive trans-coming-out drama (in 1982 – but this film is hardly unique in imposing modern sensibilities to period pieces) doesn’t work on a tonal level, let alone confronted with the triumphant machismo of the milieu in which the story takes place. The movie’s screenwriting is often more puzzling than effective, with implausible scenes building on top of each other until there’s no mistaking DeMonaco’s overwhelming contrivances. Putting it bluntly, there are plenty of examples to show that while DeMonaco can deliver a commercial horror script, he doesn’t have the subtlety, sensitivity or wit to carry out something that doesn’t rest on a wildly implausible premise and a very indulgent teenage audience. But, hey, Frank Grillo gets to beat up a guy in the course of a single night so, at least, This is the Night isn’t too far away from DeMonaco’s Purge comfort zone. It isn’t a terrible film, but it fails at being good and ends up somewhere in suspicious mediocrity. There’s a much better movie to be made out of many of the bits and pieces brought together here, but it’s not going to come from DeMonaco himself.

  • The In-Laws (2003)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On TV, May 2022) One of the problems of having been an active cinephile throughout the 2000s (evidence of which is freely available elsewhere on this site) is that it was difficult, in the moment, to identify what was so characteristic during the decade – it’s harder than you think to identify fads from lasting innovation, and so the elements that make us associate film to a specific era. Until you see a film much later than that era, of course. So it is that The In-Laws now feel irremediably dated to the early 2000s, with a fake gloss, dubious stylistic choices made easy by the technology of the time, and a slap-dash approach to plotting that assumes a very decade-specific kind of stupidity from its audience. A remake of the quirky 1979 Alan Alda/Peter Falk vehicle, this version features Michael Douglas as a loose-cannon CIA agent, and Albert Brooks as the milquetoast in-law who suddenly gets drawn into comic international schemes. From the opening “action” scene, featuring very dubious action sequences and -more crucially- the use of “Live and Let Die” that creates Bond comparisons that the film can’t sustain, The In-Laws is in trouble: It’s polished and expansive, but not that funny, the action isn’t that good and the result feels useless. While Douglas and Brooks are well cast (perhaps too much so – Douglas can’t help but be cool and credible, while Brooks can’t help but be neurotic and terrified), the rest of the film is silly rather than amusing, and the plot mechanics are intensely predictable. An overlong ending proves that the film has overstayed its welcome. Perhaps most damning of all, twenty years later, is realizing that this was a wholly unremarkable mainstream Hollywood release at the time – so unremarkable that it didn’t seem like the kind of thing I had to watch at the time. Hence one doubt in revisiting a decade I actively lived through: maybe it’s not quite as good as I remembered it.

  • The Green Knight (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Amazon Streaming, April 2022) I don’t particularly like The Green Knight, but I like what it’s trying to do. That isn’t a paradox: I don’t have any specific fondness for Arthurian legends, I don’t care all that much about gritty fantasy, and I can think of plenty of more interesting genres than oneiric fantasy. On the other hand, I am supportive, almost by default, of any film that doesn’t go for the post-Lord of the Rings paradigm of fantasy films. Writer-director David Lowery does have a short but interesting career so far, with films spanning everything from family fare (Pete’s Dragon) to gentle thriller (The Old Man and the Gun) to more esoteric material (A Ghost Story). The Green Knight is closer to that last film, with enigmatic material, elliptic sequences, an unclear delineation between reality and fantasy, and a refusal to play the material like most other films. It’s bold enough to portray the protagonist’s death before literally changing direction and showing up how he avoids it. It gets gross with bodily fluids, presents a vision of medieval life that’s gritty to the point of unpleasantness, questions heroism and finally cuts right before either triumph or tragedy. There isn’t another film quite like The Green Knight, and that’s a good thing regardless or whether I enjoyed the (overlong, obtuse, ornery) result. What it boils down to is: This is a very A24 production, and it’s going to make some people really happy and others really angry and others kind of appreciative even if they recognize it’s not for them. The surest way to recognize a jaded movie reviewer is to ask them whether they prefer slick-but-familiar fare, or unsuccessful-but-audacious material. Anyone who answers the later will find much to admire (but not necessarily like) in The Green Knight.

  • Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2022) The influence of What Happened to Baby Jane? and the resulting boom in psycho-biddy thrillers is obvious in Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte – once again, Bette Davis (with support from elderly classical Hollywood stars such as Olivia de Havilland, Joseph Cotton and Mary Astor) plays in a gothic thriller, this time heading to the American South in a vast and coveted mansion for a story reaching a few decades earlier and weaving a big web of deception. Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte is interesting in the ways those kinds of films are supposed to be interesting, but there’s a feeling that it’s aping better movies, and adding a layer of hagsploitation that feels more exploitative than worthwhile. It’s not bad, but it feels redundant – maybe I’d like it more if I had let more time elapse between it and its most obvious inspirations.