Movie Review

  • Superman: Red Son (2020)

    Superman: Red Son (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, December 2020) As someone who really enjoyed the graphic novel that Superman: Red Son adapts, I was really curious to see how faithful the film would be. Red Son, after all, is a parallel universe (“Elseworld,” in DC parlance) story that starts with the “what if” of Kal-El landing in Soviet Russia rather than the United States. How would someone like Superman be shaped by the larger cultural and political forces surrounding him? It doesn’t take long for his idealistic nature to come to the fore, and be disgusted by a country that can’t even provide for its citizens. Much of Red Son’s attraction comes after, as Superman sets out to acquire and consolidate power in service of the utopia he imagines for his comrades – essentially becoming dictator in order to improve everyone’s lives. If alternate takes can do one thing, it’s to allow characters to behave in ways that their primary incarnation wouldn’t, and so here we are reminded of Superman’s scientific genius, but discover his political craftiness as well. The other main draw of Red Son has to be the equally alternate takes on familiar characters, as most of the main players of the DC Universe pop up in sometimes very different roles. (To any fan of the comic book: Yes, we get Batman in a Russian hat. That is all.) The movie, as expected, does tone down some of Mark Millar’s comic book material– but it arguably delivers a more conventionally satisfying ending, so there’s room to argue about the choices made here. Still, it’s a story for adults, and one that manages to make a lot of mileage by confronting Superman with social issues that the main Superman would never be allowed to tackle. As such, it’s really not a bad entry in the animated DCU – certainly more substantial than many of the minor episodic material that we’ve seen from Warner Animation Studios lately, and a bold expansion of what those movies can do.

  • Fractured (2019)

    Fractured (2019)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Netflix Streaming, December 2020) I have overdosed on movies that end up taking place in the protagonist’s insane mind. And if that’s a spoiler for Fractured, well, I’m not really sorry – the film tries to go for a psychological thriller but makes so many mistakes along the way that it settles for something very close to “it was all a dream” with a very dark coda. Nominally the story of a father who, after an accident, brings his wounded daughter to the hospital only to be told later on that she never existed, it’s a remarkably humourless film shot in cold dark blue cinematography and blurry nightmarish images. Sam Worthington does what he can in a role that asks him to look either confused or angry, but he can’t fight against a script that seems to go some tired ideas in exasperating fashion. I am a bit fascinated by director Brad Anderson: Looking at his filmography, I can find some movies that I considered terrific (The Machinist) and others that I found abominable (The Vanishing on 7th Street) – and right now, I’m so incredibly tired of Fractured’s biggest “idea” that I’m shoving it in the second category. I may or may not be wrong about this – I suspect that had I come to the film under different circumstances, in a different mood or under a different astrological configuration, I may have liked it more. But right now? No. The protagonist is crazy, anything can happen and there are no rules. Why should I respect a film like that?

  • Velvet Buzzsaw (2019)

    Velvet Buzzsaw (2019)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Netflix Streaming, December 2020) I’m weirdly interested in the modern art market: the intersection of art and irrational investment is almost too weird to be true, but the dollar figures speak from themselves. For writer-director Dan Gilroy, it was perhaps the most logical follow-up to Nightcrawler’s local news insanity. In Velvet Buzzsaw, Jake Gyllenhaal plays an art critic who becomes involved in the posthumous discovery of an outsider artist, and who realizes far too late that the work is cursed in lethal ways. Unfortunately, there are two films in Velvet Buzzsaw and one is far more successful than the other. The satirical look at the modern art industry is on-target and could have sustained the film on its own: The complex ecology of artists, critics, gallery owners, investors, museum curators, “investment consultants” and assistants to all of these is very well portrayed, and the film isn’t afraid to blend whimsy with satire – seeing the protagonist having an opinion on every-single-thing never stops being funny, but the script’s fast-paced rhythm manages to skewer nearly everyone in sight. (By the time a gory murder scene is hilariously misinterpreted as an installation, I was cackling aloud.) Weirdly enough, though, the story’s steady and complete slide into horror is not as successful – and I say that as someone who’s far friendlier to genre material than most, and who often shoves liminal works into a supernatural interpretation. What bothered me most is a common failing of non-horror writers who decide to tackle the genre: an absence of clear rules as to what we’re dealing with. The horror in Velvet Buzzsaw is more expressionist than logical: There are no limits to what demonic possession can or cannot do, and that gives an arbitrary quality to the narrative when even smart characters can’t adequately anticipate and protect themselves against fatality. Maybe that’s part of the point, but I don’t think so – while I can appreciate an ironic finale as much as anyone (and Velvet Buzzsaw has a really good one that ties back into its title), there’s a mushy dreamlike quality to the third act of the film that could have been much improved had it been overlaid on a coherent foundation: when everything is a dream, the stakes are lowered, and when the plan is to kill everyone but the bespectacled assistant (a very cute Natalia Dyer), then the horror remains a joke. Gilroy being Gilroy and friendly with half of Hollywood, the talent assembled here often outstrips the material: Nightcrawler star Gyllenhaal can’t do any wrong here, Gilroy’s wife Rene Russo is well cast as a galley owner, Zawe Ashton makes a good impression as an assistant and John Malkovich has a superfluous but enjoyable turn as a cranky artist. I may be disappointed by Velvet Buzzsaw’s uneven control over its material, but I did like the result quite a bit despite its imperfections: it’s funny, dark, smart, fast-paced and as visually interesting as some of the pieces it showcases.

  • Sense, Sensibility & Snowmen (2019)

    Sense, Sensibility & Snowmen (2019)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, December 2020) It’s December, and Christmas movies have invaded the airwaves. Movies that would never get any airtime at any other time of the year now get a few scheduled showings at prime-time hours, sometimes on several channels. They’re usually low-budget features made to formula, with only the barest of distinctions to allow viewers to remember if they’ve already seen it. But Christmas romantic comedies can be fun even when they’re mediocre: no one gets killed, nihilism is the furthest thing from the film’s goals and everyone looks cute. (Even though female leads of Christmas romantic comedies are never too attractive – something about being relatable, probably.) If I had to see at least one Christmas romantic comedy this year, I let myself be drawn in by Sense, Sensibility & Snowmen – surely the Jane Austen-inspired title suggested a more literate movie, right? Well, no. Aside from a few character names, there really isn’t much here drawn from classical literature – the bait-and-switch is clearly within the realm of false promises. Here, we have a woman having trouble sticking to a job, then meeting a handsome client in time to organize his Christmas party. The rest of the plot is as predictable as it’s irrelevant – it’s about the two leads walking in the Christmas market together, being antagonistic until they’re not, suffering through the usual mistaken-intentions subplots and reconciling on the evening of the 24th of December. Despite the blatantly misleading title, Sense, Sensibility & Snowmen is not a terrible film – but I say that having done something else while hearing-more-than-watching it.

  • The Mexican Spitfire’s Baby (1941)

    The Mexican Spitfire’s Baby (1941)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2020) To be fair, there’s a really good idea at the heart of The Mexican Spitfire’s Baby, the fourth instalment in an eight-film series where the last seven films are as identical as they are interchangeable. Here, the misleading title sets up the film’s big joke: That when the titular Mexican Spitfire (Lupe Velez, equal to herself) and her featureless husband decide to adopt a French war orphan, they end up with a comely 20-year-old. Once again, the series’ usual comic engines then take over: Leon Errol once again does double duty as likable Uncle Matt and pompous Lord Epping, Velez screams incomprehensible Spanish, attempts to deal with the beautiful war orphan lead to the usual threats of divorce, and so on. While the film’s premise may be different, it soon degenerates into more or less the same kind of comic mayhem as the other films in the series, complete with a too-quick ending. Those waiting for a Mexican Spitfire newborn will have to wait (more or less) until the eighth and last instalment for the series to conclude on the impending arrival of a stork. Until then, The Mexican Spitfire’s Baby is pretty much the baseline standard for a series that took pride in reiterating the exact same formula.

  • It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955)

    It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2020) Many low-budget creature features were made in the 1950s and not many of them are worth watching today as anything more than examples of the Cold War obsessions of the time. It Came from Beneath the Sea would, at first glance, seem to belong to that category: a low-budget monster film taking what’s become a bit of a cliché (radioactivity creates a monstrous life-form!) and running with it until the spectacular climax. But there are at least two things that make it worth a look. First, a quasi-documentary approach in the first half of the film that gives it a nice 1950s techno-thriller feel: it’s not entirely silly, and the film’s cooperation with the military ensures at least a patina of realism on the result. The second reason becomes more obvious once the tentacle monster reaches San Francisco in time for the climax: Ray Harryhausen’s spectacular stop-motion work, doing its best with an “octopus” limited to six arms due to a limited budget. Taken together, those two advantages take an already adequate film to something worth watching if you’re looking in the corpus of the 1950s creature features.

  • The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer (2003)

    The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer (2003)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, December 2020) As far as made-for-TV horror movies go, The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer doesn’t do too badly at all. Hampered by a low budget, it can’t quite deliver on its gothic vision of a haunted mansion and a twisted relationship between an oil magnate and a shy woman. The inspiration from the Winchester Mystery House is obvious and welcome, but the film goes a bit further. Adapted from a tie-in novel complementing the Rose Red TV series imagined by Stephen King, it’s chiefly an origin story and a work of atmosphere: if you’re expecting a complete narrative, you’ll be disappointed and have to head over to the TV series. Still, it’s not a bad film if you’re not expecting much: there aren’t that many surprises and you’ll have to be patient in order to let the atmosphere work its magic despite a too-modest budget. Directed by Craig R. Baxley, The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer is handled with some subtlety rather than out-and-out horror, making it a welcome oddity still.

  • Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town (1970)

    Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town (1970)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, December 2020) Not being a native Anglophone, I find myself with curious blind spots when it comes to “childhood classics that everyone knows.” I’m making an effort to catch up on some of it, though, and Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town popped up on the list given the TV Channel December schedules. It did immediately remind me of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer in that it, too, is a stop-motion short animation film with a delightfully tactile feel, as the felt-made characters are moved around with physical presence. I had a big smile during the first few moments, as an immediately recognizable animated Fred Astaire (also voiced by him) plays the narrator of the piece. Running at an hour-long length, it features a fair amount of plot, certainly more than the 30-minute specials: the film is an origin story for Santa Claus, with plenty of original material to go by. It’s a fun special, and I can certainly understand how it’s now been broadcast for fifty years.

  • Christmas in Connecticut (1945)

    Christmas in Connecticut (1945)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2020) One of the central tenets of my evolving Grand Unified Theory of Christmas Movies is that for one to succeed, it must simultaneously depend on Christmas and yet be interesting outside of it. In other words, farther away from quantum uncertainty: The plot must be made possible by Christmas, yet be interesting enough to be watchable anytime from January to November. On those two metrics, Christmas in Connecticut succeeds admirably: It features a comic premise in which a single childless columnist having never set foot outside Manhattan is forced to pretend to be the exemplary rural housewife of her columns due to a Christmas publicity stunt. At the same time, it quickly becomes the kind of farce that’s well worth watching at any time of the year. It certainly helps that it features Barbara Stanwyck at her funniest, with capable character actors such as S.Z. Sakall and Sydney Greenstreet to keep things funny even when she’s not on-screen. The complications, deceptions and convoluted plans pile up as quickly as the romantic tension between the protagonist and a war hero targeted by the charade, leading to a climax in which everything is revealed. As a comedy, it’s quite good enough to satisfy even without the Christmas element, but removing it would make the film collapse under its own contradictions. (If the lesson here is that Christmastime makes people behave irrationally, well, I think that’s my point.) The depth of Hollywood Christmas movies is such that I hadn’t seriously looked at Christmas in Connecticut before this year, but now that I have, I can see it become a season favourite.

  • The Undertaker and His Pals (1966)

    The Undertaker and His Pals (1966)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2020) You can see anything on TCM Underground… from the best of cult cinema to the dregs of cinematic history. The Undertaker and His Pals certainly feels like the latter, being an ultra-low-budget attempt to tell a story about women being partially butchered for restaurant meat and the undertaker making money off the rest of the corpse. It’s meant to be a comedy, as evidenced by victims being selected by their last names and the resulting heavy-handed puns (e.g.: “Lamb is on the menu”) But such dark comedy is excruciatingly difficult to pull off even in the most skilled hands (Eating Raoul was terrific, but that’s about it for cannibalistic restaurant comedies) and writer-director T.L.P. Swicegood is far, faaar from being a skilled hand. The comedy is tasteless to the point of feeling alien, the horror material is garbage and the half-hearted investigation plot makes little sense. It doesn’t help that from a technical quality, the film is execrably put together, with inconsistent colours, sound, directing style and acting. It’s terrible in the worst ways – bad enough to avoid recommendation, without any of the qualities that would lead anyone to take a curious peek. Struggling to find something nice to say about the film, I draw a blank. The photo-of-the-sailor gag in the opening sequence is funny? Sally Frei looks cute? The entire thing is weird? I’m out. While I can imagine some so-bad-it’s-good movie reviewers having fun with The Undertaker and His Pals, I’m not going to give it any more attention or time.

  • The Highwaymen (2019)

    The Highwaymen (2019)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Netflix Streaming, December 2020) There’s an intriguing duality of purpose to The Highwaymen’s premise – not only portraying a historical tale of 1930s policemen on the hunt for criminals, but perhaps more significantly offering the law enforcement side of Bonnie and Clyde as the two lead characters hunt down the folk heroes that inspired the landmark 1967 film. Better yet is finding out that the film features none other than Kevin Costner and Woody Harrelson as the dogged Texas Rangers that tracked down the outlaws. Unfortunately for that casting coup, the film itself proves to be… merely adequate. The big-budget historical recreation is convincing, and there’s certainly a sense that the film is trying to stick closely to a hybrid between real-life crime history and the familiarity offered by the Warren Beatty film. Alas, this kind of approach to the material often results in a leaden atmosphere, and The Highwaymen often feels laborious – an excerpt of history that has to be learned rather than a thriller to enjoy. The reverence with which the topic is handled prevents a zippier approach, and while there is nothing specifically wrong in the result, The Highwaymen doesn’t manage to unshackle itself from historical fact – and probably never intended to.

  • Polar (2019)

    Polar (2019)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Netflix Streaming, December 2020) Circa-2020 cinema has a number of issues, but the one that sticks into my craw is the sharp uptick in psychopathic gory comedy in the past few years. There’s now a constant stream of R-rated comedies that seem eager to supplement their funny gags with gag-inducing violence, and the blending of the two isn’t complementary as much as it’s indicative of some deep-rooted psychopathy from the filmmakers. While I think that there’s a place for gore and comedy in films such as the John Wick series, or in Zombieland: Double Tap, it’s all about tone, and movies that can’t control their tone end up feeling like mental ward escapees. There’s no need to figure limb amputation as a comic device in The Spy Who Dumped Me, for instance, or to spoil what could have been a decent enough action film in Polar with a near-intolerable amount of gore, death and gratuitous meanness. Mads Mikkelsen stars as an assassin about to retire from “Damocles,” an organization employing hitmen for the highest bidders. But HR problems are about to catch up with him once Damocles realizes the savings they could make by eliminating him before he cashes his pension. This goofy opening sequence drives much of the tone of Polar’s imagined universe, except badly: Compared to the far more successful worldbuilding of the John Wick series, Polar can’t keep its stories straight nor be disciplined about how it’s going to go about it. Even the opening sequence sets a discordant tone with its off-kilter proportions of violence and comedy: There’s too little comedy for too much violence, and Polar doesn’t feel as edgy as pathetic in the way it indulges teenage conceptions of what an R-rated film should contain. It doesn’t help that the story goes in overtime to tie itself up in unnecessary knots, further proving the unreality of its universe. Director Jonas Åkerlund does have a keen instinct for fluidly moving narratives (although there’s a big, big lull in the third quarter), but he would be better served by better scripts. In parallel, I sure hope that everyone soon burns out on extreme violence in otherwise adequate films – there’s a race to the bottom there that I don’t want to see, as comedies now rival old-school horror movies for the number of exposed innards.

  • The Hunt (2020)

    The Hunt (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2020) There are two movies duelling it out in The Hunt, and while one of them is a decent horror thriller featuring a capable heroine and two solid acting performances, it has the misfortune of being wrapped in a dumb argumentative take on American politics that feels designed to exasperate everyone. The best part of the film isn’t the dip into the familiar “rich people hunting protagonists” trope – Ready or Not did it far more successfully, and The Hunt isn’t interested in being subtle about its politics. No, The Hunt is at its best when it plays with viewers’ expectations: The first half-hour has a clever structure in which we jump from one protagonist to another, convinced that they’re worth cheering for until they inevitably get killed by the hunters. The film arguably gets better once it finally reveals its real heroine, a whip-smart veteran fighting to escape death, and understands what has led her to this place. On a strict execution basis, The Hunt doesn’t do any better than during its action sequences, with tight editing and suspense compensating for an excessive level of violence. Alas, the film takes a sharp and noticeable nosedive once it reveals its secrets and engages with political material: the script’s biggest idea is in making its antagonists a bunch of frustrated, ostracized left-wingers taking revenge on their right-wing online critics. While we can understand the desire to tweak expectations, it simply doesn’t work and makes the film feel like a puerile “both sides!” argument. (The film was famously delayed for months once uninformed online pundits got hold of the film’s premise, lending it undeserved gravity.) Fortunately, the film does have a late-third-act resurgence once its protagonist, played by Betty Gilpin (in a terrific performance) goes toe-to-toe with Hilary Swank during a vicious, well-paced hand-to-hand combat that trashes most of a kitchen. It’s almost enough to forgive a terrible script that outstays its welcome the longer it doesn’t delve into its suspense set-pieces. Unfortunately, they’re not quite enough to overcome the film’s real and unpleasant flaws: I can’t bring myself to recommend The Hunt even for curiosity’s sake, so stupid does it sound when it’s trying to grapple with more complex ideas.

  • Impractical Jokers: The Movie (2020)

    Impractical Jokers: The Movie (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2020) Considering that “Impractical Joker” is a TV show with eight seasons broadcast on a channel unavailable in Canada, watching Impractical Jokers: The Movie is doing it on hard mode, with no idea of the TV show’s premise, its creators or their comic style. Fortunately, there’s just enough hand-holding to set things straight, with an added (fictional narrative) about the four protagonists having a chance to impress Paula Abdul twenty-five years after a disastrous 1990s encounter. The main draw of Impractical Jokes is that it’s a set of candid camera comedy bits, albeit ones where the cast gets to act the fool more often than the audience, usually by doing crazy dumb dares under the bemused sight of civilians inside a solid scripted framework. That takes care of most of my issues with candid-camera-style comedy, but I was still surprised to realize that the film had me laughing a few times. Featuring Paula Abdul (one of my early-1990s celebrity crushes) helps a lot, but the comic energy of the lead quatuor does the rest: It’s not sophisticated comedy (and the low budget often shows), but it gets its laughs. As the group makes its way down the east coast from New York to Miami, the film has a basic road-movie narrative energy and manages to frame its candid challenges in a well-paced fashion. I would probably have a lot more to say about Impractical Jokers: The Movie if I was a fan of the show, but as an introduction it’s not too bad.

  • Two Girls and a Sailor (1944)

    Two Girls and a Sailor (1944)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2020) A surprising number of WW2 MGM musicals were made primarily to be shown to troops. As such, they were collages of artists in the studio’s stable, with a plot optimized to get as many numbers on-screen as possible without it seeming like a clip show. Two Girls and a Sailor borrows a plot lifted from The Broadway Melody and updates it with elements familiar to viewers of Hollywood Canteen and Stage Door Canteen. Here, we have two sisters headed to Broadway, but falling into all sorts of romantic and professional complications. But the script (nominated for an Academy Award, amazingly enough) is really a backdrop to the musical numbers once the film gets underway. Everyone will have their favourites – for myself, the number one performance remains Virginia O’Brien’s hilarious rendition of “Take it Easy,” taking her unflappable comic singing gimmick to another level by miming nearly falling asleep during her performance. Close seconds include a capture of Jimmy Durante singing his famous “Inka Dinka Doo,” Gracie Allen having fun with “Concerto for index Finger” (it’s exactly what it claims to be) and the superb Lena Horne crooning “Paper Doll” like only she could. Two Girls and a Sailor works better considered as an anthology film of the time’s entertainers coming in for a number or two. It’s fun, albeit best considered in bit pieces rather than a full course.