Movie Review

  • Island in the Sun (1957)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2022) There are many reasons why Island in the Sun is interesting, but far fewer to call it good. Oh, it’s certainly respectable: As a prestige picture adapting a well-known novel to the screen, it comes with a mixture of pedigree, dramatic ambition and production means. For contemporary audiences, the most noteworthy thing about the film is how progressive it feels compared to other 1950s dramas—it talks about race relations and interracial relationships in a fictitious Caribbean setting, and isn’t afraid to go for high melodrama to make its points. The multi-stranded plot makes good use of its ensemble cast, and a generous amount of on-location shooting lets the colour cinematography of the film escape from studio sets. For celebrity watchers, the film has an embarrassingly rich cast: everyone from James Mason (playing his usual blend of malice and panache) to Harry Belafonte (terrific!) to Joan Fontaine to Joan Collins to Dorothy Dandridge and the always-entertaining John Williams in a minor but showy role. Beyond racial issues, Island in the Sun also acknowledges matters of class and wealth, with a few set-pieces of populist unrest. Reading about the film’s controversial reception is unsurprising, but it reflects its complexity compared to many of the blander 1950s social-issue dramas. All of this clearly combines to make Island in the Sun a minor recommendation in looking at 1950s cinema, and a film that’s still watchable for many good reasons. On the other hand, it doesn’t quite cross the frontier separating interest to enjoyment—it often feels ponderous and limited, with morals that don’t feel coherent, as it makes a point of its anti-racism but goes soft on marital rape. Watching Dandridge deal with a complex but stunted dramatic role is a sheer waste of talent—especially considering how few movies she made as a leading actress. The warnings attached to Island in the Sun may be lighted than others of the time, but they’re still there—and perhaps it’s best to be forewarned that it’s not going to be enjoyable as much as it’s going to be interesting.

  • Fear of Dancing (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, November 2022) I don’t really want to be too hard on Fear of Dancing’s writer-director Michael Allcock, but really: This is a film about the fear of dancing and that’s that. I’ll dress it up a bit: the formal name for fear of dancing is chorophobia and while some people don’t have it, some other people clearly do. Allcock travels around the world from Toronto to Africa in a quest to understand, well, fear of dancing. But how much of a documentary can you do on that? What if you get to interview Stephen Fry and the result is merely quite interesting? I should be a natural audience for this film—I only dance when no one’s looking, and somehow ended up in a place in life where an unwillingness to dance has zero impact on my life. But I gamely failed to be anything but mildly interested by Fear of Dancing. Parts of it appeared unbearably obvious, while other moments felt incredibly overdone. The climactic sequences (in which Allcock dances by himself on an isolated beach, away from his camera crew, wearing VR goggles, and then dances with a high-school crush) led to a big shrug—or was it my shoulders telling the rest of my body to dance? Ah well—not all documentaries are winners.

  • McLaren (2017)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2022) While the McLaren name remains dominant in the auto racing world, comparatively little is known nowadays about the founder of the company Bruce McLaren—a New Zealander who improbably became one of the top racing car drivers in the world, and the founder of the illustrious car company that still bears his name. In documentary McLaren, director Roger Donaldson captures recollections from the aging men and women who were there during his brief moments of fame—the pilots, friends and engineers who worked with him as the company created racing cars and earned notice by winning. McLaren died in a track car crash in the early 1970s and so the film has a lot to do in order to find historical footage, talk to interview subjects, re-create a few sequences through animation, and even stage a few historical re-creations of key moments in McLaren’s life. It’s rather good, although interest may be heightened or tempered by one’s affection for car racing. Some of the best moments happen in covering the Mosport Can-Am era with its gloriously over-the-top cars. A decently well-made film, McLaren is both a tribute, but also a time machine back to a time when auto racing changed radically: Watching the cars McLaren drives at the beginning and the end of his career illustrated just how quickly things changed throughout the 1960s. Combined with the portrait of a short but fascinating life, it makes the film worth a look for those interested in the topic matter.

  • Bigger Than Life (1956)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2022) Digging into Hollywood’s back catalogue can be weird at times—you can find socially conscious films well before it became acceptable or fashionable to discuss those topics, except that this high-minded intention is often undermined by a sensationalist, less-than credible execution. So it is that Bigger Than Life delves, in 1956, into the topic of painkiller addiction, but then goes on to make its main character an unbalanced murdering psychopath due to a rare interaction between cortisone and his body chemistry. Director Nicholas Ray was doing good work for the time here—even if a modern view on the film will more readily see the melodramatic plotting, overdone drama and naïve treatment of its topic. On the other hand, well, we have Walter Matthau beating up James Mason (even throwing him through stair rails!) to prevent Mason’s character from murdering his wife and child, so that’s something. (Of note for Matthau fans: In Bigger Than Life, his third feature film, he beats up James Mason; in King Creole, his sixth, he gets beaten up by Elvis Presley. I’m sure you didn’t expect that.)  More seriously, though, Ray couldn’t have found a better lead actor than Mason—the English legend’s smooth voice and refined manners allow him to switch from hero to villain on a dime, and that’s what he ends up doing here as the drugs take over. The scene in which he puts down a parent at a PTA meeting is simply delicious, and plays into an overhanging suggestion that the nuclear family was a sham even in the 1950s. Mason is good enough, in fact, that he makes it much easier to ignore the script’s ham-fisted “drugs will make you a psychopath” thrust—if anyone’s going to go crazy, Mason makes it supremely entertaining. The result is… fair, although I suspect that I was interested in Bigger than Life for reasons that didn’t have much to do with Ray’s original intent. But, you know, that’s still a perfectly valid way to enjoy a film.

  • Christiane F. —Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo (1981)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (YouTube Streaming, November 2022) I don’t often watch movies without subtitles in languages that I can’t understand, but Christiane F. —Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo presented a special case: It was the remaining pick in one of my list of must-see movies, and it was impossible to locate a version with English subtitles or dubbing. So… I treated it like opera. I grabbed the programme (in this case, the film’s Wikipedia entry), thoroughly absorbed the plot and then watched it without obsessing about understanding the dialogue. Surprisingly, it worked… but then again, Christiane F. has a very specific appeal. The story of a young teenager falling through the drug-filled netherworld of late-1970s Berlin, Christiane F. becomes this near-hallucinatory accumulation of grime, filth and decay. The portrait of nighttime Berlin feels proto-cyberpunk, as its leads fall lower and lower in search of a score, and come to exist solely when the sun is out. For many viewers, the film will have another significant appeal: it features none other than David Bowie as an object of fascination by the heroine (through a soundtrack dominated by Bowie songs) and then with a concert sequence in which Bowie plays himself. Given all of this, I could understand (without understanding much German) how, plot-wise, there isn’t anything here that we haven’t seen in other sad stories of teenage drug addiction: from a dull middle-class existence to living in flop-houses, soliciting strangers for sex and seeing friends die with needles in their arms. It’s all adapted from a true story that becomes even more fascinating after the film’s release, as the real Christiane F. never quite became clean, and (as of 2013) was unrepentant about it. Still, back to the movie—it’s still remarkably effective on a visual and atmospheric level. It’s probably less hard-hitting now than it was about its subject matter, but that’s really the viewers’ fault for getting jaded about teenage drug addiction. No matter the language, Christiane F. still speaks clearly about it.

  • The Great Diamond Robbery (1954)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2022) There isn’t much worth highlighting in The Great Diamond Robbery except, perhaps, that it’s the last of Red Skelton’s MGM films. The story is a blend of diamond trade comedy, criminal capers, romances and abandoned-child tropes. Skelton is subdued here—still in his usual mode, but a bit older (hence less able to play young clueless romantic lead), a bit less invested in the manic energy of it. Biographers will note that he was in the process of transitioning to a long-running TV show at the time—and his kind of comedy was clearly, perhaps belatedly, hitting its expiration date in the movie world. The film meanders in between too many subplots, finding its way too late in its mere 70 minutes. Cara Williams looks nice as the love interest, but much of the rest of the production feels like the contractual obligation that it was, with MGM eagerly shoving him out the door even as Skelton was eyeing greener pastures. Despite a title that promises much, you can classify The Great Diamond Robbery as “interesting” for Skelton completists, while being bland and featureless for anyone else.

  • Buffy Sainte-Marie: Carry It On (2022)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2022) There’s been a fascinating third (fourth?) act to singer-activist Buffy Sainte-Marie’s life over the past twenty-five years or so. After a number of lower-visibility years, she re-emerged as a legendary figure of sorts, her history being more relevant to a more socially conscious age embracing First Nations figures. In Canada, she has been claimed as a national treasure—which seems a bit limiting, considering how her life and career spanned both Canada and the United States. Tribute shows, lifetime achievement awards, renewed media attention, well-received activism, and a stamp issue complete with a collector’s framed blow-up (which I bought as a gift) are all evidence of her new stature despite/because having been marginalized from the United States musical mainstream after (we’re told) government intervention. Buffy Sainte-Marie: Carry It On is a fully authorized portrait of the artist’s career and her life now. The tone will be a familiar one for fans of collaborative biopics: She gets to narrate much of the material, and the film focuses on her story as told by herself. She goes have a striking screen presence: She looks amazing at eighty (!), and her ability to get us to listen remains exceptional. Then there’s her record, which speaks for itself—from participating in the legendary Manhattan mid-1960s folk scene to more radical activism that got her banned from airplay lists, from being a recurring Sesame Street guest to winning an Academy Award for writing “Up Where We Belong,” to innovating in matters of electronic music production and being an accomplished visual artist: It’s a lot! Now, still speaking her mind sixty years after emerging on the international scene, the film offers us a portrait of nothing less than a First Nation elder: wise and serene, but not complacent. It’s a really good overview if you accept the limits of what a fully authorized tribute can do: for instance, there’s a rather less-than-convincing moment in which a guest tries to excuse some bad business decisions by claiming that she wasn’t trying to do the same thing as everyone else. (That bit may have been better left as an outtake.)  Sainte-Marie was eclipsed by many of her contemporaries, but anyone can now argue that she’s far better placed than them—still alive, revered and generous in passing her wisdom to younger generations. This film is one of the main exhibits. [December 2024:  Ooof, this review has not aged well at all, considering the December 2023 CBC exposé that demolished Sainte-Marie as a pretendian, and no serious rebuttals in the year since then. I’m leaving it up anyway—although, in retrospect, I should have listened more closely to my “but what’s her specific link to indigenous ancestry?” alarm that chimed dimly as I watched the documentary. For a reviewer, it’s useful to be humbled from time to time.]

  • The Town That Dreaded Sundown (1976)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, November 2022) Seemingly custom-made to annoy me, The Town That Dreaded Sundown combines nearly everything that I dislike in cinema—a slasher, a New Hollywood muddle, a wide-open ending that eschews conclusion, a dirty neo-realistic (read: low-budget) approach, a script that’s less of a story than a string of death sequences, bland actors and a faux-historical approach that can’t disguise its exploitative intent. Director Charles B. Pierce’s film is not strictly unwatchable, but it’s not pleasant either: while it’s historically noteworthy as a minor horror classic, there’s very little here that hasn’t already been remade much better by other movies. Some moments are downright awkward, with ill-placed comedy grotesquely out-of-place—tell-tale signs of an independent low-budget production that wasn’t really working with the best talent in the industry. All in all, you probably know if you’re going to like this from the description alone; grimy low-end 1970s proto-slasher set in Texarkana. Some viewers live for this stuff; I can live perfectly well without it.

  • The Decks Ran Red (1958)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2022) The James Mason vehicle thriller The Decks Ran Red may not be all that well known today, but it does have a few things going for it. I could say that the first is Mason’s good-guy performance as a cargo ship captain dealing with murderous mutineers, but I won’t lie: I only had eyes for Dorothy Dandridge in a supporting turn as the ship’s sole female presence. It’s an ungrateful role—she’s ethnically miscast as a Polynesian woman brought aboard the ship as a stewardess because she’s the wife of the new cook, and spends much of her time being threatened by the mutineers—but it’s not as if we’ve got a large number of substantial Dandridge roles available to us, so I’ll take it (especially given how the character has a full arc and a moment of triumph). The Decks Ran Red itself isn’t much more than a straight-ahead thriller, albeit with the claustrophobia of being stuck at sea with a bunch of criminals who see murder as a profitable enterprise. Mason is pleasantly heroic here: the film isn’t particularly interested in subtlety, so it’s not as if the captain is provoking the mutiny by his actions. By the time he comes aboard, the villains (led by a suitably gruff Damien Broderick) have already figured out their murder-sabotage-and-salvage scheme: but the rotten rascals hadn’t planned on everyone fighting back. It all culminates into an extended fight aboard the ship, and an unusual climax with a ship headed for a lifeboat. Shot in spare, more realistic style than many other thrillers of the time, The Decks Ran Red can’t be called a great film… but it’s a surprisingly decent one, and it can boast of three great screen presences in its cast.

  • The Dustwalker (2019)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, November 2022) Unfortunately for some independent filmmakers armed with the best of intentions, sometimes the only response to 90 minutes of mayhem and violence is a middling shrug and an encouraging “okay”? I won’t try to pretend that if I, from my perch as an unknown and irrelevant film critic, somehow managed to produce a feature-length horror movie taking place in a local small town, I’d be pleased as punch. And there is some interest to The Dustwalker’s depiction of alien/zombie horror in a small rural Australian town—if only for the local colour. For what’s clearly a low-budget production, this is an acceptable film: nothing is particularly impressive, but it’s reasonably engaging if you’re willing to play along with it. The slow burn of the film’s first hour is either promising or exasperating, but the last half-hour goes a bit wild, which will either play as a good payoff or accumulating nonsense. The Dustwalker, in other words, is a film that teeters on the edge of being enough or not enough. It can’t just be dismissed as being terrible, but it doesn’t have enough to make it anywhere close to a likable low-budget effort. It generally sputters in place until the end. No amount of satisfaction for the filmmakers translates into real viewing enjoyment. So, to writer-director Sandra Sciberras: “Okay?” and better luck next time. To viewers: make sure you’re in a generous mood.

  • Pitfall (1948)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2022) If you subscribe to the (accurate) theory that film noir is a style more than a set of plot elements, then Pitfall makes for an intriguing entry in the genre, both at the heart of its thematic concerns and at the periphery of what we think about when we think noir. It does, at first glance, include everything we’d expect from a noir: an ordinary man seduced into a tailspin of temptations; a femme fatale to lead the protagonist astray; a criminal element to add danger; and a jaundiced outlook that the post-WW2 social order was a façade hiding underlying rot. But the mixture of elements is not what we’d expect—writer/director André de Toth spends a lot of time detailing the tawdry affair between its all-American protagonist (Dick Powell, once again finely straddling the line between matinee idol and dark anti-hero) and a criminal’s girlfriend (the timelessly beautiful Lizabeth Scott)-an affair apparently born out of boredom and cheap thrills. (Raymond Burr also has a good turn as an element of chaos.)  The criminal element of the film remains until the end, but it’s definitely subservient to the examination of a suburban man going astray—and the surprisingly amoral conclusion does not deliver a definitive punishment for the wayward husband… while having a great deal of sympathy for the femme fatale. Long underrated as “merely an ordinary noir,” Pitfall has undergone a renewed uptick of interest in the past decade—another example of great movies in Hollywood history just waiting to be rediscovered with today’s sensibilities.

  • Ground War (2018)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, November 2022) All nature is wholesome, right? Right? Having a gold course next door is far better than another skyscraper or a highway, right? Right?? Well, as writer-director Andrew Nisker’s Ground War suggests, maybe it’s not so simple. Maybe the incredible effort to keep carefully manicured greens requires so many dangerous chemicals that it’s not worth it. The driving thread through Nisker’s film is a very personal quest: Why did his father die of Hodgkin’s Lymphoma when he was so healthy, when he spent so much time exercising on gold courses? Nisker’s questions take him deep beyond the façade of “natural” golf courses, in a world where harmful (but not illegal!) pesticides are used by the bucketful, and where industry representatives clam up very quickly when anyone asks questions about carcinogens and the heightened risk of deadly disease. It also takes us into the world of environmental activism—how Canada is slightly (but not much) better than the United States thanks to stricter laws. How some people will deliberately avoid stepping on golf grounds for their knowledge of how many harmful products are used in the pursuit of perfect lawns. Don’t be surprised, after seeing this film, to hope for a rewilding of golf courses, for stricter regulations, and for no longer seeing the neighbourhood school’s athletic field so benignly. This should not be such a new message, nor is Ground War all that finely crafted. And yet, it lingers.

  • Crimes of the Future (2022)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2022) In at least one way, Crimes of the Future is the film that David Cronenberg fans never came to expect: a frank return to the filmmaker’s early body-horror themes (the first since 1999’s Existenz), executed with modern refinements. Many, perhaps out of a sense of anticipated familiarity, have called it a return to form. I’m not so sure, largely because I started chuckling at the film early on and never stopped. While the narrative takes place in a science-fictional future, the extent of the film’s extrapolation hilariously boils down to “What kind of future would be best suited for Cronenberg’s body-horror obsessions?”  The result makes no sense except in the context of this specific film: humans have developed mutations that have them grow additional organs, who (thanks to the same mutations) can and are extracted casually in gruesome spectacles. Biotechnology runs rampant, which is a good excuse for creepy biomechanical furniture. People are mean and violent to each other in fairly casual fashion (to the point of executing others through not one, but two drill-bits through the head—why?) and the entire world seems to be pretty comfortable living a Cronenberg body-horror lifestyle. Yes, Crimes of the Future is deeply weird. No, it’s not believable in the slightest: there’s a sense of grand-guignol desperation to please fans, just to throw body horror in their faces without much regard to themes or sustained argument. The off-the-wall eroticism is intriguing (if not arousing—and that includes a lot of casual nudity) yet the result feels meaningless—a parade of dulled horrors, a comfortable attempt at shocking the mundanes that ends up being pretentious, glum, easy and worse of all—boring.

  • Escape Room: Tournament of Champions (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Amazon Streaming, November 2022) Looking at my notes, I was sort-of-pleasantly surprised by the first Escape Room film: It had its moments, some slick production values and, by structuring itself episodically in very different environments, was able to score a few highs and sweep away its lows. The overall framing device wasn’t anything new (dark web online betting again? Oh boy!) but the chance to see Taylor Russell once again dealing with devilishly overengineered traps was once again too sweet to miss. Alas, sequel Escape Room: Tournament of Champions seems to prove the theory of diminishing returns—While it has a few engaging moments (the best being the first two escape rooms) and a dynamic, colourful style that brings to mind a slicker, not-so-grungy Saw series, it’s unable to surprise, not always clever, and finds itself locked in a conceptual trap of its own. By pivoting into what’s being built as an ongoing series, this second Escape Room announces itself as being limited by design: there will never be an escape for the characters (except through death), the conspiracy will never be defeated and the only thing left to focus on are the set-pieces. Russell remains a compelling presence throughout, especially since few of the supporting players show signs of life—but the point here are the escape rooms rather than characters or compelling plot. Here too, the going is uneven: The first and second set-pieces (the subway car and the bank) are engaging because the film takes the time to establish sane rules and escalate them, with an appropriate amount of friction and loud music to raise the tension. The other sequences get more convoluted, more hurried and borderline nonsensical (the acid rain thing is too stupid for words), making the film progressively less interesting. And let’s not talk about the overarching story, because Tournament of Champions only scores surprises, not twists: The entry of the participants into the new escape rooms makes no sense yet is incredibly predictable (to the point of being exasperated at the film taking this long to come clean)—the same goes for the not-surprising-at-all “twist” at the end of the film. The revival of a character thought dead at the end of the first film counts as a surprise because it’s from left field, but then they go on to fumble what they could have done with it. So, yeah—Tournament of Champions’ few good moments don’t make up for the worse ones nor the brain-dead predictability of a series that now seems headed for the franchise factory. We may get a few interesting over-engineered escape-room sequences in the next few instalments, but don’t expect it to be good ever again.

  • Heilstätten [Haunted Hospital] (2018)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, November 2022) Found-footage horror movie set in an abandoned asylum—nothing else to see here, next! Well, not quite. While I was, indeed, bored by the strong familiarity of Haunted Hospital, there is a cool bit roughly five minutes before the end that makes it just a tiny bit better. It doesn’t justify watching the film unless a found-footage haunted asylum film is exactly what you’re looking for no matter the quality, but at least it’s better than nothing. Writer-director     Michael David Pate’s Haunted Hospital doesn’t make a good first impression, as it features online influencers heading to a haunted abandoned hospital just to see what could happen (and rake in some sweet views)—isn’t it interesting that “the dumbest motivation we could find for stupid acts” is now synonymous with “attention-seeking influencers”? As Haunted Hospital goes on, there’s little here we haven’t already seen—spooky stuff, bickering leads, shaky-cam nausea and low-end production values. Even the twist, frankly, isn’t that original (nor sensical)… but it looks far better in comparison with what came before it. Look, filmmakers, I know that the temptation to resurrect found-footage films through influencer-bashing is strong, but I implore you: You’re stronger than that. Resist!