Movie Review

  • Of Human Bondage (1946)

    Of Human Bondage (1946)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2020) In retrospect, it wasn’t such an idea to watch all three filmed adaptations (1934, 1946 and 1964) of W. Somerset Maugham’s novel Of Human Bondage back-to-back-to-back. Not so much because they all blend together (they all have their own particularities) but because their story is so trite that a triple dose of it can be overdoing it. This second version is probably the worst of the three—or at least the least interesting. It does crank up the melodrama, but doesn’t quite manage to catch up to the grandeur of the first adaptation—although it’s probably a bit more accessible, taking into account twelve years of improved filmmaking and decreased stiffness from the actors. This being said, it’s also the weakest from a cinematographic standpoint: Even when broadcast on TCM—known to use the highest-quality copies available—, this Of Human Bondage suffers from high-contrast cinematography, with details being absorbed in the overwhelming blackness of the picture. Story-wise, the film also suffers (read: is made boring) from having been made at the nadir of the Hays Code era—it’s remarkably tamer than its pre-Code forebear or post-Code successor. This 1946 version is nowhere as essential as the first film’s star-launching role for Bette Davis nor as relatively modern as the 1964 version…, which is another way of saying that’s probably not worth watching unless you’re really going to be a completist.

  • Of Human Bondage (1934)

    Of Human Bondage (1934)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2020) In retrospect, it wasn’t such an idea to watch all three filmed adaptations (1934, 1946 and 1964) of W. Somerset Maugham’s novel Of Human Bondage back-to-back-to-back. Not so much because they all blend together (they all have their own particularities) but because their story is so trite that a triple dose of it can be overdoing it. This first version is probably the best—or at least the most interesting. Casting makes it worthwhile: With Bette Davis’s star-making role here, the film becomes a showcase for both her (in a shrill, somewhat unpleasant role) and for co-star Leslie Howard—although we know who’s the biggest star here. The film’s most striking moment is simply seeing Davis in full frame, her big eyes staring at the camera and showing where the Kim Carnes song comes from. Other than that, this Of Human Bondage does manage to make good use of its pre-Code status by showing a destructive love affair between two flawed individuals. It does have the qualities of 1930s prestige productions: Despite the restrained camera techniques, rough technical qualities and acting styles, the sets and costumes are lush, and the brightly-lit cinematography does have its own charms. The antagonistic romance between the two leads is interesting, and the literary origins of the story are never too far away. (Although the film, like its later remakes, does occlude a lot of detail from the original novel in the interest of focus and length.) Even today, the film is best remembered for offering Davis a plum role that would define her persona—she was at her best playing devious, often unlikable characters and she gets a good dose of that here. Given that the film is in the public domain, who can even watch it from the film’s Wikipedia page.

  • McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971)

    McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2020) In retrospect, it makes sense that the western genre—for years the stereotypical Hollywood exemplar, would have been one of the most deconstructed genres by the 1970s. New Hollywood was eager to show how different it was from the old one, and in that context it’s not surprising to see Robert Altman squarely taking on the genre in McCabe & Mrs. Miller. Though technically a western, it’s almost at the opposite end of the usual Western iconography. It’s set deep in a forest in snowy cold northwestern American, with flawed characters unable to resist the corrupt business interests against them. Visually, nearly every optical trick in the cinematographic art is used to give a distressed look to the film: Washed-out colour, rainbow highlights, hazy soft focus and so on. It’s all gritty and dirty and colour-muted like many 1970s films, which viewers are liable to love or hate. To be fair, the period recreation is a lavish representation of a western work camp—it’s just the way it’s captured that’s liable to make some viewers crazy. Warren Beatty is quite good as McCabe (it’s a kind of role he’d often play in his career, all the way to the tragic conclusion), while Julie Christie is also remarkable as the other half of the lead sort-of-couple. Even with nearly fifty years of subsequent Western deconstruction, there is still something in McCabe & Mrs. Miller that feels unique—perhaps because no one else since has dared to be so resolutely indifferent to audience expectations. The early 1970s were another time entirely in Hollywood history, for better or for worse.

  • The Chapman Report (1962)

    The Chapman Report (1962)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2020) Expectations are a dangerous thing, especially when we’ve been conditioned by later movies to assume a certain style or tone given plot summaries. Considering the spate of 1960s sex comedies exploring the loosened mores of mainstream America, you would be more than forgiven for thinking that The Chapman Report, revolving as it does around academics researching the sexual habits of average Americans, would be a silly farce. Something light and perhaps naughty, if dozens of later movies are any guide. But light and naughty are exactly what it is not: This is an early-1960s movie that clearly shows signs of being stuck in the 1950s—from the opening few minutes, it’s clear that this will be an earnest drama about characters coping with sexual permissiveness and how it can ruin their lives. As our sex researchers become entangled with their volunteer subjects, the heavy relationship drama becomes increasingly suffocating. Even on those terms, it becomes long, turgid and so incredibly dull that I had to make a conscious effort to remember why I had recorded it—because it’s from director George Cukor, far better known for his Classic Hollywood lighthearted comedies. But 1960s Cukor wasn’t as nimble at 1930s Cukor—his growing misanthropy is reflected in the high-contrast colour cinematography, with entire character’s clothing disappearing in the deep blacks of the background. It’s essential to remind ourselves that The Chapman Report was daringly made for an audience still tittering uncomfortably over the Kinsey Report on human sexuality (obviously the inspiration for the film)—it’s almost inevitable that the film would become abnormally boring to today’s far more sophisticated audiences. It certainly doesn’t help that the film is far more analytical than emotional, putting an atmosphere of dishonesty over something that could have been animated by honest emotions. (There are far more restrained movies from the Hays Code that are more heartfelt than this one, and much of it has to do with real emotions being used rather than couching it in quasi-legal dramatic analysis.) Ah well—I didn’t expect all Cukor movies to be worth my time, but The Chapman Report is particularly disappointing.

  • Thoroughly Modern Millie (1967)

    Thoroughly Modern Millie (1967)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2020) Common wisdom has it that the 1960s were terrible years for the movie musical, but I don’t quite agree with that—the overly serious 1970s were far worse, and there are plenty of enjoyable 1960s musicals to be watched now… even if the box-office receipts at the time were less than the studios expected. Thoroughly Modern Millie is a particularly fun and weird take on the genre. It’s a sixties-style musical set in the 1920s, with a flapper protagonist played by Julie Andrews. (I’m not a big fan of Andrews, and was particularly amused to find that the opening makeover number makes her less attractive and closer to her persona at each step.) Despite my own reservations about Andrews (legend has it that Mary Tyler Moore was intended to be the film’s lead until Andrews signed up, at which point the film was recentred around her and made into a musical), the result is a fun farce with inventive musical numbers. I quite liked the xylophone dancing in “Jazz Baby,” or the entire “Tapioca” number, which best showcases the exuberant filmmaking of the movie. Going well beyond musical numbers, there are flashy scene transitions through irises in/out, title cards to tell us what the heroine thinks as she looks at the audience and a lot of practical comic effects (such as an apple deflating). The twice-stylized 1960s execution and 1920s setting make for a doubly interesting viewing experience. As a farce, it’s probably a bit too long for its own good at more than two hours and a half (weariness sets in the second half), and the easy Asian stereotypes have not aged well at all. Still, it’s cute and fun most of the time—I would have preferred Mary Tyler Moore than the androgynous Andrews as a heroine (while keeping Stockard Channing as the film’s MVP), but Thoroughly Modern Millie remains a fun farce, amply earning a spot on a list of good 1960s musicals.

  • Soapdish (1991)

    Soapdish (1991)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, February 2020) I wasn’t expecting much of Soapdish, a comedy revolving around the world of daytime soap operas. But much to my surprise, the film proved far more interesting than I expected, and got a few good laughs out of me. Sally Fields does well as an aging actress obsessed by her age, and convinced that the staff of the show is working against her. As it turns out, she’s not wrong—everyone around her despises her diva behaviour, and the showrunner sets a plan in motion to get her to quit. This goes through an old ex-flame of hers, a washed-up actor (Kevin Kline, hilarious) rescued from the tragedy of overacting in dinner theatre. Robert Downey Jr. is not exactly the best choice as the showrunner (at least not compared to his later persona) but he does get a few of the movie’s best lines, often delivered halfway to the camera at the end of his scenes. Whoopi Goldberg also gets a few choice lines (although, checking the quotes of the film, I realize that Soapdish is far funnier in English than the French dub). For someone my age, seeing Leeza Gibbons show up as herself is a welcome sight, almost outdone by Teri Hatcher as a self-aware sexpot. Hollywood does love to talk about itself, and using soaps as a satirical playground does offer it some plausible deniability. The script does occasionally teeter between comedy and drama, but much of the drama eventually reveals itself to be a mere setup for further comedy. The big third-act twist is a lot of fun, and it speaks to the success of the film that I didn’t bother anticipating it despite ample evidence pointing to its nature. The score is very catchy, with Latin influence and a main melody fit for humming. The one thing that hasn’t aged all that well is one late-movie transphobic joke—to be clear, having a character revealed as a transsexual (or transvestite—the film isn’t too clear about that and that’s an issue in itself) is not necessarily a problem: but having characters react as if it’s the worst thing in the world is what feels so terrible. Still, the rest of the film is far funnier than I would have expected, and Soapdish will score high on the rewatch desirability index.

  • Silverado (1985)

    Silverado (1985)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, February 2020) By now, even the tiny number of Westerns that I’ve seen (compared to the entire corpus) is enough to last me a lifetime, or at least establish clear eras in Hollywood Westerns. There’s the innocent period (until 1939’s Stagecoach) where Westerns were cheap and easy to shoot in Hollywood’s backyard. There’s the heroic period (1940s–1950s), which shaped the myths of the genre, followed by the revisionist period (1960s–1970s), which did everything it could to question the heroic era of Westerns. By the 1980s, however, anything could happen in those now-rare Western films—movies that either celebrated or condemned the genre. Silverado, thirty seconds in, clearly announces its filiation to a more classical idea of westerns, although one that consciously exploits the iconography of the heroic period. As the opening shootout of the film ends and our protagonist opens the door of the dark cabin in which it took place, the camera crosses the threshold and the image expands to the limits of the widescreen frame to take in a gorgeous look at the American west in its most iconic glory. The credit sequence follows the protagonist by framing him against picture-perfect western backdrops and sets the tone for a film that reconstructs a fun kind of western, filled with good and bad guys shooting it out over cattle rights and revenge over past transgressions. Writer-director Lawrence Kasdan clearly wants to have a blast doing this film, and so Silverado never lets an occasion go to feature power chords, striking images and self-aware dialogue—or all three, such as when Danny Glover’s character holds up two rifles and says, “This oughta do.” Silverado manages to walk a fine line in recreating classic westerns with gusto yet without falling into the excesses that many imitators would adopt—it’s got action but few obviously over-the-top scenes; it doesn’t take itself too seriously without being a parody; and it finds an entertaining balance between drama and action. The story is very familiar, but it’s really a vehicle for Kasdan to show off that he could direct a straight-up western, and that works well enough. Special mention should be made of the ensemble cast, which features many actors what would become much bigger a few years later: Kevin Kline is a perfect example of civility in an uncivilized world (only topped by an unrecognizably bearded John Cleese as a merciless sheriff), Linda Hunt is a welcome bit of eccentricity, Jeff Goldblum pops up a few times, and a then-unknown Kevin Costner is a revelation here as a cocky gunslinger. Silverado ends up being a pleasant surprise: an unrepentant western not interested in critiquing the genre as much as in playing according to its rules. In many ways (including the gorgeous cinematography), it does feel like a more modern 1990s film. But no matter when it’s from, it’s still quite a bit of fun to watch today.

  • Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986)

    Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On TV, February 2020) Some movies are gritty, but Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer is grimy. Shot with an ultra-low budget, it certainly looks like it, with terrible cinematography, a handful of actors, and a sordid subject matter overcompensating for a multitude of other issues. Michael Rooker shows up at the titular Henry, who—as announced—spends the movie killing people. If you squint, you may pretend that this is a character study — but really, it’s not much more than an exploitation film with an appetite for gore. I’ll give it something, though: the atmosphere of the movie, being this close to cinema-verité, can often be unnerving. Henry is painted as such an irremediable monster that everyone in the film can be (and becomes) a target. It doesn’t make for a pleasant viewing experience, but it’s more effective than most of the horror movies out there that play safely with familiar genre elements. I still don’t like Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer and would gladly never see it again, but it gets quite a bit of mileage out of limited means—for better or for worse.

  • Ma (2019)

    Ma (2019)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2020) I’m happy that Octavia Spencer can have a career in which she can play a murderous woman-child who goes psycho on a bunch of teenagers, but on the other hand… Ma is thin gruel for a talented actress, even if she just wants to have some fun once in a while. While there are a few interesting elements in this story about a middle-aged woman befriending and then stalking teenage protagonists, Ma is the kind of movie that comes and goes without leaving much of a trace. It’s a Blumhouse special, meaning high profit margins on a high-concept but ultimately familiar premise. Competently made but often too timid for its own sake (although I do like the relatively upbeat finale over the rumoured original script), Ma is too often too bland for its own good. The great antagonist meets barely sketched-in protagonists and the Midwest small-town horror atmosphere doesn’t bring anything new. While I’m not that happy about the attempts to explain the roots of the antagonist’s madness, even I have to admit that the film would be poorer and less meaningful without it. Still, this is a lower-end horror movie and it feels like it. Ma will do the job is this is the kind of thing you’re looking for, and it’s a surprisingly good turn to show off Spencer’s range, but otherwise there are far better horror movies out there.

  • Yentl (1983)

    Yentl (1983)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Criterion Streaming, January 2020) So, Barbra Streisand dressing up as a boy is… curiously sexy? I didn’t have that on my list of expectations in tackling Yentl. [August 2020: Oh, and now there’s Seth Rogen making the same joke in An American Pickle…] It’s a surprising film in many ways—as the story of a Jewish girl who crossdresses in order to gain an education reserved for men in 1904 Poland, you would be right to expect a fairly maudlin tale with little entertainment to it. But the result, co-written and directed by Streisand herself, is a lot more than the pat drama you could expect—it’s got humour, intensity, musical numbers (although not that memorable), a pivotal revelation scene, a young Mandy Patinkin and what feels like an education in Jewish culture. Plus, Streisand is looking far too attractive with short hair, although I’ll note that since Streisand remained a significant screen beauty from the mid-1960s to well into the 1990s, it’s not that unexpected of a turn here. No, the real surprise is that Yentl is surprisingly watchable—far lighter on its feel than you’d expect for a labour of love fifteen years in the making, and yet dense with thematic material. I don’t exactly love it, but I found it far more interesting than I expected.

  • Shivers (1975)

    Shivers (1975)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Criterion Streaming, January 2020) I would expect a mid-1970s horror film to be fairly tame, but that’s not a word to apply to writer-director David Cronenberg’s early-effort Shivers. Narratively, it’s basic horror stuff—scientific experiments, parasites, violently-sex-obsessed victims, gruesome deaths, an epidemic raging out of control: We’ve seen all of this before and since then. But Cronenberg tackles this project with youthful energy, and the film is far more aggressive in its execution than you’d think, even with unconvincing special-effects work and muddy nighttime cinematography. For Cronenberg fans, it’s an opportunity to see him work with the raw materials that he would later refine: the off-putting sexual content, the gory body horror, the sense of a normal situation terrifyingly turning out of control. It’s a bit of a laugh to see such a horror film explicitly set in Montréal (specifically on L’île des soeurs), with very typically 1970s Quebecker background actors. So, Shivers may or may not be familiar, but it’s rather well done for its budget class and technical limitations of the time. Not essential viewing (except for Cronenberg fans and anyone interested in tax-shelter-era Canadian exploitation films) but still watchable.

  • The Curse of La Llorona (2018)

    The Curse of La Llorona (2018)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2020) Slick, overproduced and yet so, so underwhelming, The Curse of La Llorona is about as ordinary a horror movie can be when it’s the result of dozens of other movies blended together. Mixing ethnic folk horror with demonic possession, evil-fighting priests and child endangerment (plus a single mother as hero!), it still can’t make any of those surefire elements spark. Plenty of jump scares from director Michael Chaves can’t compensate for a lacklustre script and rote elements. The only thing that mildly works is the ethnic atmosphere of Mexican folklore that set up La Llorona, but don’t expect too much here either—although I’m told the movie did good business in Latin communities. Linda Cardellini is wasted here and can’t rescue the film on her own. At least the images are clear, crisp and clean—but that’s not much of a comfort when they don’t show anything of much value. It’s a bit sad to see “The Conjuring universe” get less and less interesting at every successive movie in the series, but what else do you expect? The real horror villains are always the Hollywood studio executives.

  • The Ultimate Warrior (1975)

    The Ultimate Warrior (1975)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Criterion Streaming, January 2020) Some movies just can’t quite reach their potential, even when that potential is modest. Considering that The Ultimate Warrior is a dystopian 1970s thriller featuring Yul Brynner as the titular character and Max von Sydow as the leader of a band in post-apocalyptic Manhattan, you could at least expect something. The Ultimate Warrior came after the high-energy first wave of blaxploitation movies where action started being shot relatively well, even the idea of a modest exploitation thriller promises a lot more than what this film is able to offer. Seemingly shot on a mixture of a dirtied backlot and dusty subway interiors, the film is a chore to watch—uninteresting, trite and meaningless. Writer-director Robert Clouse (who did direct action landmark Enter the Dragon!) can’t get much out of the normally solid Brynner with his threadbare plot and indifferent direction. The Ultimate Warrior was somehow selected by the Criterion Streaming folks as representative of dystopian 1970s Science Fiction, but absolutely not essential.

  • Blade of Grass (1971)

    Blade of Grass (1971)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Criterion Streaming, January 2020) I have a budding thesis that Hollywood SF grew up roughly at the same time as American civilization became aware of its mortality. It’s probably nonsense, but movies like Blade of Grass almost make the case for me (even if it’s a British movie)—as environmentalism became mainstream thanks to a string of horrifying events like Love Canal and, oh, rivers catching on fire, you also had movies considering the possibility of dystopian environmental collapse. Films like Blade of Grass go all-out on the catastrophe, to the point where humans are fated to extinction on a planet without any living plants left. The narrative has a band of survivors making their way from London to a possibly mythical farm out in the northern part of the country. Multiple deadly events occur before the ending, in an all-dancing parade of downbeat plotting, violence and humans being terrible to each other. This is clearly not fun viewing for the entire family, and my opening thesis may have been born out of sheer desperation in trying to escape the nightmarish world of the film. Still, there may be something to it—the post-WW2 years were characterized by the adult themes of noir, war movies emerged from the Vietnam defeat with a far more war-is-hell attitude, and while the 1970s saw SF become more than a genre for kids right about the time that prophecies of doom became commonplace thanks to the environmentalism espoused by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) and the gloomy overpopulation predictions of the Club of Rome (1968). Doesn’t it also hold true for people as well? Maybe you grow up when you realize that you’re going to die.

  • Rollerball (1975)

    Rollerball (1975)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Criterion Streaming, January 2020) For viewers like me, raised on the notion that Rollerball was just this dumb dystopian movie about some fantasy sports, actually watching the film is in order. Not the remake: The original one, with James Caan somehow playing an elite world-famous athlete. Because there’s a lot more in the margins of the film than you’d ever expect: Darkly funny, perceptive stuff that adds so much depth to it that you’ll regret ever thinking it was a silly film. (But that’s OK: You can blame the remake.) With chameleonic director Norman Jewison at the helm, how could it be silly? Jewison has done many movies, and if some of them weren’t as good as others, none were stupid. So it is that Rollerball, beyond the brutal roller-skate sport, quickly starts sketching the bread-and-game nature of the event in a society dedicated to social control. The film draws a merciless portrait of the rich (down to them burning down a tree for fun) and of information control—one of the best throwaway lines has an entire century having been accidentally deleted from the computer memory banks now holding all knowledge. Now, I wouldn’t necessarily want to portray Rollerball as this underrated classic—it’s got more depth than you may expect from the marketing, but it’s no masterpiece of dystopia. Even the more generous commentators won’t be too sure whether the added material is just fluff around the Rollerball raison d’être of the movie, or if the Rollerball is the hook to talk about the then-fashionable idea of a dystopian future. But I was surprised—I wasn’t expecting much, and got something somewhat better than expected. The final tally is a Science Fiction film of the mid-1970s that’s not quite as depressing or childish as many of its contemporaries. That’s already not too bad—see it with Soylent Green for a change of pace.

    (Second viewing, Criterion Streaming, June 2020) I’m not sure why I returned to Rollerball after only a few months, but here we are, and the film does hold up to a fresh revisit. Much of it isn’t as satirical as it must have been intended at the time: corporate anthems and violent manufactured sports are a thing of reality, and it’s enough to make anyone wonder why we’re not seeing as many science fiction films actually attempting to anticipate a future (either as satire or realism) these days. What is worth a look is the film’s pre-Star Wars approach to SF in a 1970s context: The OCR computer font is a dead giveaway, but so are the social issues tackled here. It’s also not shy at all about its social themes—they’re explicitly discussed in the film by the characters themselves, and reinforced by the decadent aristocracy changing the rules on whims advantaging them. The blend of such commentary with action sequences is the film’s notable trait (and Jewison’s direction certainly changes during the rollerball scenes), although it may weaken the film is other ways, the flash outshining the substance. Rollerball could have been better, but it’s still surprisingly good.