Movie Review

  • I Kill Giants (2017)

    I Kill Giants (2017)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, November 2020) I am getting tired of the “imaginative protagonist escapes to imagined worlds because of a psychological trauma” trope, and this one is played to full effect in I Kill Giants. Our heroine is an eccentric, smart, lonely teenager who is having trouble coping with the terminal illness of her mother—in the absence of a father, the older sister is the one trying to keep the four siblings together, and she’s not able to do a good job of it. As a result, our protagonist escapes in fantasies in which she defends her small coastal town against giants come to destroy everything… among many other quirks of imagination that do absolutely nothing to endear her to her high-school classmates. The film plays a bit on the ambiguity between her fantasies and reality, so you can probably read the film both ways if you’re so inclined—but I think (counter-intuitively enough for me, given how prompt I am to reject any purely realistic interpretations) that the film is better if it’s entirely taking place in her mind. I Kill Giants does rest quite a bit on the lead performance of Madison Wolfe in the main role, with some assistance from Imogen Poots and Zoe Saldana in sympathetic adult role (with a small cameo from Jennifer Ehle). Special effects are used copiously to portray the protagonist’s inner mind. Part of my lack of enthusiasm for the result also comes from a too-close proximity with the very similar A Monster Calls—which at least lays its terminal illness cards on the table from the get-go, rather than treat it as some kind of mind-shaking plot twist. I still did not dislike the result, but that’s not quite the same thing as being ready to recommend it. I suppose that it will appeal to people looking for those kinds of liminal stories between reality and fantasy, with a strong melodramatic conclusion.

  • Alex & Emma (2003)

    Alex & Emma (2003)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, November 2020) I am an incredibly forgiving audience for movies discussing the craft of fiction writing, and it boggles my mind that Alex & Emma slipped under my radar for a good… ugh… seventeen years. At least it does offer a way to go back in time and see decent performances from the younger Kate Hudson and Luke Wilson. He is a writer with a severe writer’s block and gambling problem; she is a stenotypist hired to make him write a complete novel in thirty days. If he doesn’t write, he doesn’t get paid and he doesn’t pay back his gambling debt and he probably dies at some point. The stakes are thus established, and so is the basic ludicrousness of the premise: I know a lot of writers, and even those rare ones who use Dictaphones and voice recognition would rather stop writing (and maybe even die) than trust someone else to deliver a finished manuscript. Still, let’s give that one a bit of disbelief: There’s nothing less interesting than a writer typing away (or, most often, staring blankly into space as they plot and plan and try to find the right words), so having a writing partner is essential to having a movie… and a romantic plot. For he is writing a romance, and soon the parallels between their situation and the story being recreated on-screen predictably emerge. She pokes and prods and questions his choices; he changes his mind and so do the imaginary excerpts of the story—Since they play their avatars, Hudson ends up playing three or four different roles as he keeps changing the identity of her character. It’s an amiable, highly dramatized look at the life of novel writers: director Rob Reiner keeps things light and amusing until a predictably dramatic third act, and the film is easy enough to watch, with a few chuckles along the way. It’s not demanding watching, and that often doesn’t quite play smoothly enough: it’s not clear if he’s a talented writer, and it’s not clear if what he’s writing is meant to be serious or a simple potboiler. (It’s probably genre fiction, but that leads to further questions about his career that the film does a bad job explaining: it would make far better sense if he had half a dozen novels already published rather than just one.) Comparisons with Paris When It Sizzles are not at all complimentary—but then again, Hudson and Wilson are not Holden and Hepburn. Still, I liked Alex & Emma almost as much as I expected to: it’s a bit of fluff, but a bit of fluff in a domain that I like hearing about.

  • Getting to Know You (2020)

    Getting to Know You (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2020) There is filmmaking life in Ontario outside Toronto, and after seeing Sudbury become a minor film shooting metropolis in the field of Canadian Science Fiction, here we have Sault Ste. Marie acting as backdrop to intimate romantic comedy Getting to Know You. It starts in a quasi-theatrical fashion, as two travellers meet in an almost-empty hotel. He’s a prodigal son coming back to town for a high-school reunion, hoping to declare his long-lasting love for his hometown sweetheart; she’s a London-based photographer coming back to clean up her estranged dead brother’s house. After a first act almost entirely set in a hotel, the film opens up, and so do the characters: his plans to romance his sweetheart hilariously derail, she’s asked to play his wife and complications simply pile up the longer the two protagonists stay in a small town where everybody knows each other. It’s not headed toward an easy ending: Getting to Know You plays things on a low, almost melancholic key. There are quite a few moments of genuine comedy along the way, but the end of the film is more contemplative than triumphant, which is disappointing but not inappropriate. Natasha Little and Rupert Penry-Jones headline the film, which means that they are on-screen for nearly all of it. Writer-director Joan Carr-Wiggin doesn’t too badly—although the impression left by the first act of the film is a bit misleading and disjoints the film’s spatial unity (at least the story ends when they leave town). Still, it’s an amiable-enough film, significantly more interesting than the Hallmark romantic movies often shot elsewhere in non-Toronto Ontario.

  • Dark Waters (2019)

    Dark Waters (2019)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2020) Much in the same vein as the Oscar-winning Spotlight (which shares headliner Mark Ruffalo as he settles comfortably in older, heavier, gruffer, more cerebral roles), Dark Waters takes on a big target and humanizes the fight against it. This time, the story begins once a farmer brings evidence of severe animal poisoning to a lawyer used to argue on behalf of Dupont. But, intrigued by the story, he starts poking and prodding at the evidence, eventually unearthing, after a decade of work, an incredible corporate coverup of toxic material dumping. It’s easy to think of similar films (Erin Brockovich also comes to mind), but that doesn’t make them any less relevant every time: we need to vulgarize those stories to give an example of what can happen when the system works. It may work slowly and grind those involved in it (Dark Waters is merciless in describing the toll that such a vast undertaking can take—Anne Hathaway’s character seems included solely to work that angle), but it can work and effect change. The problem is keeping a light on it. Dark Waters, as befit its title, is not a light and colourful film: shot in muted, cold cinematography, it looks serious and important even before any dialogue is said. But it’s successful at summarizing a complex matter of biochemistry and law in a way that doesn’t insult viewers—it makes the complicated accessible, even if we often feel the invisible strings of dramatization work their magic. Ruffalo (who also co-produced the film) makes for a likable low-key protagonist, with some assistance from noted co-activist Tim Robbins (who gets a fine speech that may reconcile a few viewers with the necessary role of lawyers), Bill Pullman, Victor Garber and Bill Camp as the very down-to-earth farmer who initiated it all. I wasn’t expecting to like Dark Waters so much, but found myself steadily engrossed in it. It does have the heft of an important film, but it doesn’t lose track of its requirement to keep audiences interested.

  • I Am Greta (2020)

    I Am Greta (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2020) Perhaps the most amazing thing about sixteen-year-old Greta Thunberg’s rise to prominence as an outspoken environmentalist hasn’t been as much her full-throated interventions in the popular discourse, but seeing her opponents make fools of themselves by attacking her. With feature-length documentary I Am Greta, we get to spend a bit of time with her and her parents at the peak (so far) or her popularity, travelling from student protests in Oslo to New York City in a sailboat before addressing the United Nations. She gets ample time to address the camera in less structured settings, and we get to see some of the work that goes on in between those speeches. (Including, amusingly enough, her parents trying to hold her back a bit to make sure that she’s eaten enough and takes care of herself.) Even for casual followers of Thunberg, I Am Greta doesn’t break new ground or hold any striking revelations—she is her public persona, and the film is clearly not going to be anything less than fully sympathetic to her. Still, while I suspect that we are far from having heard the last from her, it’s a document of a particularly charged era in her life. Time will confirm how right she was and how misguided her opponents will continue to be.

  • Hullabaloo (1940)

    Hullabaloo (1940)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2020) I’ll admit it: I got suckered into watching Hullabaloo through a deceptive logline. It turns out that while “A radio star creates a national panic when he announces a Martian invasion” is part of the film’s plot, it’s nowhere near all of it. The film was also billed as a drama (probably thinking about the obvious inspiration of Orson Wells’ War of the Worlds broadcast), whereas it’s much closer to a musical comedy than anything else. Much of the show actually revolves around an eccentric radio personality (played with appropriate panache by Frank Morgan) desperately trying to stay relevant in a changing marketplace. He’s skilled at celebrity impressions (which are really the real people, dubbed over his voice), leading to an alien-invasion broadcast that’s a bit too successful for his own good—but there’s another half of the film to go at that point. The focus then shifts to his daughters from three different marriages, and we understand that he’s looking out for three alimony payments as his motivation… and that drives the rest of the film. It all ends suitably well, especially when his older daughter’s new beau takes up some of the most level-headed decisions. As usual, the fun of films like Hullabaloo is more in the historical details, small jokes and bit performances—I was really happy to see one of my favourite bit players for the era, Virginia O’Brien, have two small numbers singing her usual deadpan version of songs that had just been sung seriously by conventional performers. While I was deceived by Hullabaloo’s TV Guide description, I’m really happy with what I ended up watching in the end.

  • Jing Cheng 81 hao 2 [The House that Never Dies II] (2017)

    Jing Cheng 81 hao 2 [The House that Never Dies II] (2017)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2020) Sometimes, even a hackneyed story can be interesting when it’s executed differently, and that’s how Chinese film The House that Never Dies II can feel intriguing even as it crawls through the usual haunted house horror clichés. By its quality of being set in Beijing and playing with tropes from a Chinese perspective, it distinguishes itself from many other haunted house movies from the Hollywood factory. Still, this distinction merely raises the film to a watchable quality—and much of the interest revolves around individual scenes rather than the overall result: Far too long, even at scarcely more than 90 minutes, The House that Never Dies II loses itself by over-explaining historical information that should have been dealt with in the first film, and doesn’t manage to make much use out of the dual-timeline structure. It does better in terms of individual horror set-pieces, even if those are also somewhat similar to the American horror corpus. Still, it’s an interesting look at how other cultures can adapt (and, in many cases, imitate) classic Hollywood tropes.

  • Give a Girl a Break (1953)

    Give a Girl a Break (1953)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2020) There were a lot of Broadway musicals in the 1950s, and Give a Girl a Break was certainly one of them. It’s neither better nor worse than the norm—simply very much a typical musical of its period, with decent songs, fine dancing, a buoyant atmosphere and a perfunctory romance to anchor everything. As far as star power, you have Debbie Reynolds playing one of the three hopefuls competing for a top spot on an upcoming Broadway show after the lead actress walks out. She is being championed by a show gofer played by none other than Bob Fosse, but there are two other actresses and two other champions to contend with, and much of Give a Girl a Break consists in dancing and singing while they’re waiting for the final decision of which one of the three actresses will be picked for the role. Much of the film’s first half is formulaic, playing off Broadway backstage musical tropes without too much originality. Only “Nothing is impossible” breaks up the monotony a little bit. Things get more stylized and more interesting in the second half, the standout sequence being a balloon dance played backward. It’s a bit of a commentary on the film that the “contest” between the three would-be stars is a bit of a dud: the resolution is messy and everyone gets something nice for their trouble. But this isn’t about a character winning over the others: it’s about song and dance and the classic warm fuzzy feeling of a Broadway musical where nothing too serious is likely to happen. I happen to like the foundational elements of Broadway musicals and so quite liked Give a Girl a Break despite not finding all that much distinctive about the film.

  • Lady Be Good (1941)

    Lady Be Good (1941)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2020) Mashing together the comedy of remarriage with the Broadway retrospective, Lady Be Good may feel familiar, but it does have its share of good moments. From the framing device (as a woman recounts events to the divorce judge) on to Eleanor Powell’s anthology-worthy final dance number (as spectacular to film as it was to see, as shown in That’s Entertainment III), it’s a typical musical of the period, blending gentle romance with musical numbers often blatantly presented as part of a show. While Powell is billed as the lead, her presence here is closer to a supporting role, as much of the screentime goes to a couple of writers/composers with a complicated relationship, slipping in and out of marriage with an ease only seen in show business movies. Still, don’t feel too bad for Powell, as her two numbers are by far the standout of Lady Be Good: In the first, she tap-dances alongside a trained dog taking part in the routine—by the time it ends with the dog jumping on her and them falling onto a bed giggling, we feel much of the same exhilaration at the success of the routine. Her other big number goes to the tune of “Fascinating Rhythm,” and first includes tap-dancing alongside a deep succession of pianos, followed by a more freewheeling number that ends with her being flipped over head over heels eight times before making as many spins on herself and her grinning at the camera—it’s absolutely flawless. Other good numbers include a great dance routine by the Berry Brothers, and a cute short deadpan number from Virginia O’Brien taking on “Your Words and My Music” as only she could. (MGM was still figuring out what to do with her in 1940-41—her best numbers would come later.) The story itself is fine, the leads (Robert Young and Ann Sothern) are adequate despite being blander than they should, and Red Skelton pops up in a supporting role. There’s also a cute montage in which the song climbs the charts and spins off many versions, giving us a glimpse into the nature of pop music at the beginning of the 1940s.

  • The Big Store (1941)

    The Big Store (1941)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2020) Nearly every Marx Brothers film is worth a few laughs, but there are still clearly superior Marx films and then the others. While The Big Store is not one of their worst, it doesn’t rank as a particularly good one. Made during their MGM years, it features three of the brothers wreaking havoc in and on a department store, as Groucho plays a detective asked to uncover a plot against the owners. Everyone plays their part, including Margaret Dumont as the rich older lady pursued by a gold-digging Groucho. As usual for Marx films of the period, the plot serves as a way to hang the sketches, and to provide a break from the comedy with easily skippable musical numbers that borrow a lot from operettas and feature the featureless Tony Martin and Virginia Grey.  (Virginia O’Brien, as usual, is more distinctive with a monotone take on a lullaby.) Harpo plays the harp, Chico does his wiseguy and Groucho plays with words. For fans, the two standout sequences of the film are a demonstration of increasingly wilder beds popping out of the walls, and a final chase through the entire store that finely upholds the Marx Brothers’s tradition of visually anarchic movie climaxes. As with all of their movies, it’s worth a look and possibly a box-set purchase. But it’s not one of their best, and the MGM structure clearly differentiates between the fun scenes and the dull ones in between.

  • Camille (1936)

    Camille (1936)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2020) Firmly steeped in the tradition of 1930s romantic period melodramas, Camille never hesitates to go with the big dramatic guns—no subtlety is allowed here, and the ending milks everything out of its depressing nature. The main draw here is Greta Garbo as a 19th century Parisian belle, draped in the best costumes that Hollywood could muster at the time. She is, as is de rigueur for such heroines, both afflicted with a deadly disease and torn between two men. Adapted from Alexandre Dumas’s La Dame aux camélias (itself inspired by Dumas’ own courtship), the rest of the plot plays exactly as you would expect an old-school romantic tragedy to go. Lavishly produced, Camille still has a few things worth crowing about—the great sets, terrific costumes and a completely humourless Garbo in one of her most memorable performances being what anyone will remember from the film. It is, obviously, not for everyone—as an old-fashioned weepie, it almost plays to clichés all the way through. But it’s not exactly a painful film to watch, and it does help round out George Cukor’s early filmography.

  • Braddock: Missing in Action III (1988)

    Braddock: Missing in Action III (1988)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, November 2020) Chuck Norris once again heads over to south-eastern Asia in order to free up American PoWs in Braddock: Missing in Action III. As is often the case for third sequels of 1980s movies, the level of quality takes a nosedive here, although the opening sequence recreating the fall of the American Embassy in Hanoi is executed with decent production values. The big plot element of this third entry is giving a wife and child to the protagonist as a way to motivate him to head back in the country for more mayhem. It ends on a bridge between the two countries, something that would be echoed in many other later movies. Norris is equal to himself here, meaning that the beard goes hand in hand with the stoic attitude and not too much emotion in dealing with a long-lost wife and resentful son. You might as well watch the film if you’ve purchased the box set, if your streaming provider has it or if your TV channel somehow thinks a marathon of all three films is justified—it’s not that bad. But Braddock: Missing in Action III is really not worth tracking down for anyone but the most dedicated of Norris fans.

  • Targets (1968)

    Targets (1968)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2020) Aside from the content of the film itself, there’s a wistful quality in Targets that comes from seeing the beginning of a career and the end of another—this being Peter Bogdanovich’s first film, and Boris Karloff’s last starring role. The production history of the film has its quirks—it came from Roger Corman being owed two days of work by Karloff, and instructing then-young writer-director Bogdanovich to make a low-budget movie around this constraint. Taking advantage of the social turmoil of the time, Bogdanovich ended up building a clever twin-strand plot featuring an aging horror film actor and a young Vietnam veteran going on a murderous rampage. The intention is obviously to confront old horror and new monsters, and the ending does finally bring everything together. Targets can feel surprisingly modern at times—the idea of a random person just shooting people off the highway still unnerves, and the gritty handheld style of the film does echo far newer films. The result is worth a look, although it can feel like a drag at times—by shooting around Karloff’s schedule, Bogdanovich was inspired by creative constraints but wasn’t quite able to tie everything up in a completely seamless way. Still, Targets makes an interesting argument at the dawn of New Hollywood, and benefits from having an old-school star in the lead role.

  • Shall We Dance (2004)

    Shall We Dance (2004)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, November 2020) I haven’t seen the Japanese film on which Shall We Dance is based, but the American remake is, in a word, charming. It’s about a married man who starts attending dance classes in an effort to escape his increasingly boring life. The wife soon suspects something, and ends up hiring a private detective who’s amused to find out that the truth is not about adultery. There are additional shenanigans thanks to the other dancers, and a competition that consumes much of the third act, but the film is really about dancing in a way that has grown increasingly rare since the end of the golden era of musical comedies. (Fittingly, there’s a shout-out to The Band Wagon.) Richard Gere is quite likable in the lead, helped along with supporting performances from a motley crew of Susan Sarandon, a superb Jennifer Lopez, Bobby Cannavale and Richard Jenkins, with an unusually good turn from Nick Cannon in a supporting role and a very enjoyable performance from Stanley Tucci. I liked the unusual romantic angle of the film, with the main character interested but not exactly pursuing another romantic interest at the dance studio, providing inspiration for the other woman but ultimately returning even more strongly to his wife. The direction is unobtrusive most of the time, although it does let the actors show off some dance movies (including a surprisingly buff Tucci), and ends with a very nicely stylized epilogue. Shall We Dance is not supposed to be particularly deep or meaningful, but it’s pleasant enough to be watchable without effort, and pleasantly harkens back to an earlier tradition of dance movies.

  • New in Town (2009)

    New in Town (2009)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On TV, November 2020) It doesn’t take more than five minutes for New in Town to establish without ambiguity that it fully intends to follow the most obvious of romantic comedy formulas. As a young ambitious urban executive (Renee Zellweger, at the end of her pouty-squinty period) is transplanted from Miami to Minnesota to take over an underperforming manufacturing plan, she meets-cute the union shop steward and falls under the irresistible spell of the local community. You can write the rest of the script yourself, so little surprise does it contain—at one point, you can scream, “show me the tapioca!” and be richly rewarded by a close-up of said tapioca bowl in a fridge. It’s that kind of film. The same film produced ten years later could have gone political, but this one seems content with spouting off feel-good homilies about small towns, the heartwarming nature of tough winters and the evils of hands-on corporate ownership. Zellweger is not bad in the lead role, although Siobhan Fallon Hogan has a plum role here as the voice of the locals, and Harry Connick Jr. plays the love interest with a decent amount of charm. Don’t get your hopes up in hoping for a militant union film, though — this one scrupulously avoids anything beyond the usual bromides of dubious corporate overlords versus hardworking Midwestern folks… and only the strict minimum at that. New in Town wears its adherence to formula as a badge of honour, so it’s not really clever or insightful to point out how predictable it can be—the real fun of the film is in the set-pieces (such as how to survive being stuck in a snowstorm), the atmosphere of a small snowbound town (it was shot near Winnipeg, Canada) and some of the expected plot points. It’s perhaps best seen as cinematic wallpaper—something to put in the background, fit to be picked up ever few minutes as the film plays on a strictly predictable schedule.