Movie Review

  • L’uccello dalle piume di cristallo [The Bird with the Crystal Plumage] (1970)

    L’uccello dalle piume di cristallo [The Bird with the Crystal Plumage] (1970)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, November 2020) I was pretty sure that I didn’t like giallo, but as I made my way through Dario Argento’s debut feature The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, it struck me that I didn’t dislike the genre as much as I thought I did. In fact, giallo looks much better when placed next to the slasher horror that it inspired in the Halloween/Friday-the-13th/Black Christmas tradition. Argento’s debut feature predates all of this, obviously: Working in 1970, Argento was more clearly inspired by classic horror—albeit with more bright-red blood. Where this film does well, as is usually the case with giallo, is presented a much-heightened vision of standard horror thrills. Exuberant with colours, unusual camera angles, subjective viewpoints and an aggressive soundtrack, giallo is usually far more interesting than the stories it portrays—although there too, there are plenty of opportunities for being wilder than more staid thrillers. The Bird with the Crystal Plumage does have a familiar base premise—an innocent man investigating a murder in a foreign location, something that would pop up again later in Argento’s career in films such as Deep Red—but it adds a few striking wrinkles to it. The result is quite watchable: still effective in its stylish excess, and benefiting from a generally solid script. It also unlocked the key to giallo as far as I’m concerned, as a far more interesting stylistic variant on the usually dull slasher films that would follow.

  • Un condamné à mort s’est échappé ou Le vent souffle où il veut (1956)

    Un condamné à mort s’est échappé ou Le vent souffle où il veut (1956)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Criterion Streaming, November 2020) I have said some very dismissive things about writer-director Robert Bresson in past reviews, but Un condamné à mort s’est échappé makes me want to walk back some of that commentary. Bresson’s typically sparse and detached style ends up being a near-ideal match for this topic matter here, as he intensely studies every twitch and action standing between a French Resistance leader and his escape from a Nazi prison during WW2. Bresson, working from a real-life memoir, himself knew what he was talking about, having himself been imprisoned by Nazi authorities during WW2. His quiet, drawn-out approach works well here, maintaining the suspense of the ongoing escape, and relying on a meta-tapestry of thrills (that is: the threat of being shot, the evil of the Nazis, the patriotic meaning of La Resistance) outside of what he is showing on-screen. It’s a clever film, stripped of the histrionics of not-dissimilar movies such as The Great Escape but effective in its own way. The film’s world is the prison—it ends as soon as the lead character is no longer in it. Sometimes a director’s idiosyncratic approach proves to be irritating until it’s applied to the right context, and that’s how I feel about Bresson here—I can’t stand much of his filmography, but it happens to be the exact right fit for the topic matter here, and the result is without a doubt not only my favourite film of his, but an essential French film of the 1950s.

  • Hot Air (2018)

    Hot Air (2018)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2020) Considering the United States currently charged political climate, fomented by shameless media outlets for which truth takes a backseat to profits, it’s almost inevitable that we would get Hot Air, a dramatic comedy featuring a blowhard conservative radio personality challenged by the unexpected arrival of a hitherto estranged but very progressive teenage niece. The two best things going for the film are its lead acting duo—Taylor Russell is very likable as the niece, but it’s Steve Coogan who gets most of the attention at the radio host: he looks the part, but clearly wants to puncture the façade presented here. Much of Hot Air does poke at the “man who learns better” trope, while not going too emotional about it. The highlight of the film is a long screed from host to public that nods toward Network and does have its moments (among them “You elect a deranged conman just to see what happens!”) but does strip hollow the contradiction between the film’s premise and its execution. To put it simply, Hot Air wants to play with political divisions, but stops short of being political about it: it’s all platitudes and homilies disarming any attempt at taking a true position on its premise. It misdirects and brings the focus to personal epiphanies, while ignoring the uglier political climate in which it’s supposed to take place. The show goes on and still the film tries to make us believe in a context that no longer exists in American culture: Anyone outside US borders will recognize that the political conversation going on since 2016 isn’t between feel-good mushy notions of liberalism versus conservatism, but reason against full-blown authoritarian craziness. Your average American right-wing radio host appealing to a crazed base has nothing to do with the one played by Coogan here, and so Hot Air seems to be trivializing its topic to the point of having nothing to say—which would be completely acceptable for many kinds of films, but not one that explicitly courts audiences with a political premise. I may be part of the problem in ringing a five-bell alarm over what’s happening right now and wishing for more substantial denunciations of a toxic right-wing, but the current situation is not tenable, and I can point to hundreds of thousands of excess deaths to prove my point. Oh, I still liked Hot Air—Cooghan and Russell and Neve Campbell are giving it what they’ve got, and the film does everything that it wants to do in its carefully delimited audience-friendly way. But right now, in the gaslit interregnum between Presidents 45 and 46, I’m more irritated at anyone still claiming to be on the fence.

  • Superintelligence (2020)

    Superintelligence (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2020) It only took “Melissa McCarthy in a Ben Falcone film” to bring any expectations regarding Superintelligence down to a manageable level. The McCarthy/Falcone duo, married in real life, has a dismal track record on-screen: their movies are usually designed to showcase McCarthy’s increasingly overexposed comic persona, making everything secondary to sustained riffs on the same themes. Superintelligence, to its credit, takes a toned-down variation of this approach to the idea of hard-takeoff Artificial Intelligence, pitting “the most ordinary woman in the world” (McCarthy) against an AI pondering what to do with humanity. As a science-fictional plot device, “innocent decides the fate of humanity by their behaviour” is well-worn material—but as a Science Fiction critic on an extended sabbatical, I find quite a lot of value in seeing a comic take on the material, more as a marker of what a mainstream audience can be expected to absorb. Clearly, we’re at a point where few would be surprised to accept that an AI would be able to learn everything from us from our online behaviour, and reach us through the connected devices in our houses. Of course, Superintelligence sweetens/dumbs down the concept: this isn’t The Forbin Project, and so the AI is incarnated by the voice and occasional presence from James Corden, adding further comedy (some of it dubious) to the proceedings. The biggest ironic criticism that one can level at Superintelligence is that for a McCarthy/Falcone production, almost literally any actress in the world could have played McCarthy’s role—it doesn’t really rely on her persona, and, in fact, may be harmed by it. McCarthy as “the most ordinary woman in the world” is a boring waste of talent, even within the script’s expected infantilization of challenging ideas. The ending is never in doubt, nor are any of the subplot strands. Still, the film gets a few chuckles, and makes an exemplary case of how once-nerdy ideas get continuously absorbed in the mainstream until they become literally just jokes in service of an actress looking for a star vehicle. I didn’t dislike Superintelligence as much as I expected to, but it does remain a very safe, very mainstream comedy, almost to the point of being duller than anyone would have anticipated.

  • Action Point (2018)

    Action Point (2018)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On TV, November 2020) It’s a great and terrible thing that, a few months ago, I watched Class Action Park, the documentary about the infamous 1970s–1990s New Jersey amusement and water park called “Action Park.” The documentary itself is terrific, based on events almost too ludicrous to be real. But it also knocks the wind away from any hook that comedy Action Point may have. Clearly inspired by Action Park, this Johnny Knoxville pain-fest relocates from New Jersey to inland California, and knocks production values down a few notches in portraying a run-down amusement park resorting to dangerous stunts in order to stay solvent. With Knoxville (of Jackass fame) at the helm, this means one dangerous stunt after another, regardless of whether they make sense. (The squirrel nuts sequence is a particularly blatant example, but by no means the only one.) There’s an attempt at emotional resonance awkwardly jammed in the works, but the highlights of the film are the cringe-inducing stunts—anyone with empathetic responses to pain will not have a good time here. Knoxville does make a good lead, however—although his attempts at playing older (literally—much of the film is a flashback story from grandfather to granddaughter) make everything feel even more dangerous than the carefree days of 2001 and the first Jackass movie. Action Point is often too blunt and crass to be funny, even though a few jokes land here and there. But the biggest knock against it is that it simply doesn’t even equal to the real thing—try watching Class Action Park and even the documentary will feel more dangerous and darkly funny than even this fictional take on it.

  • Nitro Rush (2016)

    Nitro Rush (2016)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On TV, November 2020) I wasn’t all that fond of the first Nitro film—despite good technical production values and the ambition to deliver something akin to the Fast and Furious series in a French-Canadian context, the film erred by going ludicrously melodramatic and not quite understanding the balance between pathos and action. The sequel isn’t quite as atonal, but it still suffers from many of the issues of the original. Guillaume Lemay-Thivierge is back in action as a man with a substantial potential for violence, escaping from prison to go rescue his now-grown son from the influence of a crime gang selling fatal drugs. There’s a little bit more to this, however—As the script dumbly chooses to conceal (despite it being obvious from the start), he’s really working to infiltrate the gang. Nitro Rush is far better once it gets down to the nitty-gritty of its action sequences, swapping the urban jungle of Montréal for the rural backwoods of Québec as the characters try to sneak into a synthetic drug lab in the middle of nowhere. A car testing sequence is awkwardly inserted in the middle of the film to remind us that the first film was heavily in nitro-powered racing, but otherwise the pickup truck is the vehicle of choice here (including a rather good shot in which a pickup races to turn on a rural road). Technical credentials are unusually good for a French-Canadian film: slick direction and capable cinematography do much to paper over the dubious choices made in the script, which pits criminals against criminals and relies on protagonist-centred morality as a substitute for actual moral values. As a film, Nitro Rush is watchable—not quite so irritating as its predecessor, but not quite as ambitious on the action either. Lemay-Thivierge is not bad, but even the conclusion’s promise of further adventures is not really enticing considering that the series has been a half-misfire so far.

  • La morte negli occhi del gatto [Seven Deaths in the Cat’s Eye] (1973)

    La morte negli occhi del gatto [Seven Deaths in the Cat’s Eye] (1973)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On TV, November 2020) Giallo goes gothic (as if it wasn’t already) in Seven Deaths in the Cat’s Eye, a serial murder mystery heading for a castle in the Scottish Highlands and its fog-shrouded surroundings. The castle, handily enough, comes with a sinister backstory, hidden passages, a dungeon and an ominous ginger-haired cat that conveniently witnesses every murder that takes place over the film’s running time. (It’s what you should expect from the film’s title!) Stylish, but in a way that’s a bit different from the usual urban giallo excesses, Seven Deaths in the Cat’s Eye feels more interesting than many of its contemporaries… and compares relatively well to newer films in the same vein. The international cast is intriguing and even stars noted French singer Serge Gainsbourg, no doubt because of having his longtime companion Jane Birkin in the lead role. Technically, the film is rough around the edges (something magnified, I suspect, by the muddy dubbed version I’ve seen) and the reliance on atmosphere means that the plot doesn’t seem to move forward until the very end. Still, I expected worse and got something a bit more attuned to my own haunted-house tastes than the usual giallo genre that this film belongs to. Not a bad result for an impulse watch.

  • Hana-bi [Fireworks] (1997)

    Hana-bi [Fireworks] (1997)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2020) There’s a stoic restraint to Fireworks that clearly helps make it a critical favourite—an overstuffed tale of a policeman turning to crime as his life implodes, it could have been executed with emotional histrionics, but deliberately chooses to go the other way and understate things until the somewhat grim end. In cinema history, commentators have noted that this choice was all the more surprising given that it was the film that helped writer-director Takeshi Kitano move away from his previous persona as comedian “Beat Takeshi” to a more serious filmmaking reputation. While Kitano denied the conscious influence, Fireworks certainly bring to mind the austere French school of cinema, along the lines of Melville and Bresson. It’s deliberate… and it won’t work for all audiences. At times, Fireworks seems intent on frustrating those used to a more conventional style: it obfuscates the timeline, skips over action beats and downplays everything until we’re left with a contemplative take on dramatic events. It does succeed at its ambitions, but those may not be the ones that viewers would expect—there’s a particularly perverse irony in how you could take the film’s plot summary, give it to another director, and end up with an action-packed crime movie. But that’s not the film that Fireworks tries to be.

  • The Wind and the Lion (1975)

    The Wind and the Lion (1975)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2020) A tale of a president and an outlaw, The Wind and the Lion is unconventional—an adventure story about the rescue of a western woman from the Moroccan rebel who kidnapped her, but also a character portrait of that cultured rebel (played by Sean Connery) but also, half a world away, of Teddy Roosevelt in his eccentric glory, as the kidnapping hopes to upset geopolitics. Clearly a passion project from writer-director John Milius, this adaptation of the 1904 Perdicaris affair is deeply unconventional and, at times, a bit messy. My interest varied from scene to scene—while Connery is his usual compelling self, his storyline is often far too lengthy to be wholly interesting. Meanwhile, I couldn’t get enough of Brian Keith’s brilliantly oddball Theodore Roosevelt as he lives and reacts to the developing situation: much of his behaviour is of public records, but it’s fun to see it portrayed on-screen. The reconstitution benefits from a decent budget, and the film does have a few marquee sequences—perhaps most interesting being a scene in which troops march down the streets of Tangiers and intervene in the conflict in a rather surprising fashion. Still, the result feels quite uneven, with high highs and dull lows. The Wind and the Lion is more interesting than usual, but not necessarily successful.

  • Jessabelle (2014)

    Jessabelle (2014)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2020) There’s clearly something about the bayous of Louisiana that attracts horror filmmakers, and it’s easy to understand why: any place with trees and no ground seems innately spooky to anyone not used to it. Trotting ground similar to The Skeleton Key, Jessabelle also heads to the bayou and a twisted story of possession from the grave, with anyone’s identities not safe from change. Sarah Snook stars as a young disabled woman who discovers spookier and spookier evidence of past supernatural shenanigans as she moves into her estranged father’s house. Jessabelle is not a particularly sophisticated horror film, but it does keep trying. Taking advantage of its Louisiana atmosphere (including some swimming in the bayou), it also goes for ominous videotapes, twisted family histories and disability-specific scares. Snook is up to her usual standards here, often outshining the ordinary material. Jessabelle could have been better, but it does have its high points, and it ends on a somewhat intense note that forgives a lot of preceding silliness.

  • Kong tian lie [Sky Hunter] (2017)

    Kong tian lie [Sky Hunter] (2017)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, November 2020) If the United States can have their proudly blunt Top Gun, we’d be churlish to deny China the fun of having its own Sky Hunter. The story ought to feel familiar, what with three pilot friends being brought in (or not) to the Chinese Air Force’s elite “Sky Hunter” unit, and being at the right place once terrorists from a fictional nation take Chinese hostages. The script is a big messy piece of nonsense (who knew that flying helicopters and fighters was a similar skillset?), but it’s put together competently, and believability is not quite as crucial once we see the footage. For western viewers, there’s some weirdness in seeing “enemy” planes being flown by the heroes—The J-11 (very similar to the Russian Sukhoi Su-27) is prominently featured, as are the J-20 latest-generation stealth fighter and Y-20 airlifter. Things quickly head into fantasy land once it gets into the nitty-gritty of its geopolitical tensions, with most villains speaking English even as they play stereotypical terrorists. (This being said, the film isn’t quite as anti-American as you’d think—the inevitable establishing scene between our hero pilots and the intruding American reconnaissance plan is handled with some humour, and one notes that the film features music by Hans Zimmer and shot some material in the United States.) Actress Fan Bingbing may be most recognizable to American audiences given her supporting roles in a few Hollywood movies. The special effects are better than average for Chinese movies, where quantity often takes over quality—and it does lead to a few visually interesting scenes, especially in establishing the film’s framing device. Production values are clearly high, and while the film clearly wants to make China’s military irresistibly cool (whoever designed that star-fox unit logo deserves a raise!), it clearly borrows from the Hollywood box of tricks to achieve its objectives. Sky Hunter, despite a familiar plot, certainly ends up being an interesting viewing experience: It portrays a non-American air force with a great deal of sympathy and competence, and transposes the experience of cheering for heroes onto a different framework. It’s better executed and more engaging than many other Chinese films, and fun enough to watch on its own terms.

  • 2 Lava 2 Lantula! (2016)

    2 Lava 2 Lantula! (2016)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On TV, November 2020) It’s a good thing that I was expecting so little of 2 Lava 2 Lantula!—my expectation being somewhere underneath the sub-basement floor, I managed to be slightly surprised by the results. Oh, it’s nowhere near a good movie—the dialogue is terrible and the production values are abysmal. The story (lava tarantulas invade Miami!) has a grandiose panache that is constantly sabotaged by the bargain-bin special effects that don’t even aspire to half-plausibility. A somewhat heavyset Steve Gutenberg returns to headline this sequel to Lavalantula as a veteran actor in low-budget film who has to rescue his adopted daughter from the volcanic arachnoid menace. It all scales up to a building-sized lavalantula threatening downtown Miami, but they clearly didn’t save their SFX budget for the finale either. It’s awful, but at least it has some kind of energy running through it: This Syfy production is equal to the repellent reputation of its house brand, but the script somehow shoehorns a half-dozen references to much better movies, explicitly jokes about low-budget film limitations and seems more willing than most of its contemporaries in going as crazy as its last cent of budget will allow. It’s clearly not refined cinema, but it works better than you’d expect even from a film aping the lessons of the first Sharknado. I’m not recommending it, but I’m here to testify that you won’t hate yourself as much as you’d expect if you do sit through it.

  • Solomon and Sheba (1959)

    Solomon and Sheba (1959)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, November 2020) A film can do everything according to the rules and still fall flat, and that’s the way I feel about King Vidor’s Solomon and Sheba, a historical epic that clearly plays by all of the rules of 1950s epic movies yet fails to make a strong impression. Oh, it does have its qualities—Yul Brynner with hair (as Solomon), George Sanders in a minor role, and the incomparably named Gina Lollobrigida (as the queen of Sheba), huge armies clashing in the desert, and a scene with the well-known judgment of Solomon, and the rest of what audiences expected from movie epics over what they could see on household TVs. But compared to other epics, Solomon and Sheba feels somewhat generic—compressing decades of filmmaking in one all-available present, this film appears without much distinction nor grandeur beyond Brynner playing a king. Things get somewhat more interesting once you start reading about the film’s production—the newness of shooting a historical epic in Spain (rather than the more common choice of Italy at the time) pales in comparison to the behind-the-scenes drama that surrounded Tyrone Power‘s sudden death two-third of the way through, and his replacement by Brynner. Very little (if any) of this backstage turmoil shows up on the screen, though, and the result, unfortunately enough, is Yet Another Epic rather than something distinctive in its own right.

  • Bardelys the Magnificent (1926)

    Bardelys the Magnificent (1926)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2020) There are two movies melded into one in Bardelys the Magnificent—first, a rather amusing depiction of an incorrigible cad of a marquis with well-practised methods to seduce as many women as he can lay eyes on. It’s not a bad introduction at all, and it feels more amusing than many other silent movies. But as one of the Marquis’ romances turns serious, so does the plot—and then the film moves into its second gear as a pure swashbuckler, complete with sword-fighting and rope-swinging. There have been many other better swashbucklers in Hollywood history, but Bardelys the Magnificent does have its slight charms—I’m not claiming it as essential, though, and it’s perhaps most appropriate for those with some liking for the form and a substantial tolerance for the limitations of silent cinema.

  • Here Come the Waves (1944)

    Here Come the Waves (1944)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Second Viewing, On Cable TV, November 2020) The advantage of a film having, say, Bing Crosby as a headliner is that it can coast on his charm for a long time. Fortunately, Here Come the Waves does have a bit more than that in its assets, including a spirited double performance from Betty Hutton as twin sisters crushing hard on a crooner (Bing, obviously). As with many wartime movies, it’s meant to showcase a very specific section of the military service—in this case, the Navy Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service (WAVES)—along with a big helping of musical numbers. The standout song here is probably “Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive,” which, alas, is performed in blackface. That blemish aside, Here Come the Waves is an innocuous, almost unremarkable WW2 musical. There isn’t anything memorable about the result even despite the easy charm of Crosby or the way Hutton acquits herself well in two roles with a fair amount of interaction. It doesn’t do much to impress, but it’s watchable enough, with a few good jokes and musical numbers. Anyone compiling a list of which branches of the US military forces were covered by which WW2 film (it’s a long list) should make a note of Here Come the Waves even if it’s not exactly a very realistic portrayal.