Movie Review

  • Kes (1969)

    Kes (1969)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Criterion Streaming, January 2020) Ugh, the curse of being a cinema completist. It means watching widely acclaimed films, such as this perennial mention in longer “best of all time” lists that completely fails at creating empathy, interest, entertainment or affection. That’s Kes for you—a neorealist examination of a poor young boy and his pet bird of prey. Coming from writer-director Ken Loach in the very late “kitchen sink” realism period of British film, it’s about as grimy, miserable and unromanticized as one can expect. Its saving grace (if you have the patience) is some profound social content taking aim at the ways the British lower class was being held down by the system, and everything related to that (but especially the public education system). An uplifting story about a boy and his pet this is most emphatically not—the ending is not meant to comfort you. So is Kes a good movie? Yes! Is it a great one? Probably! Did I want to escape its misery at every moment? For sure!

  • The Allnighter (1987)

    The Allnighter (1987)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, January 2020) I’m about this close to declaring a critical forfeit about The Allnighter, my reasoning being that this is really a movie produced for someone else entirely—female twentysomethings of the mid-1980s… and what do I really know about that? I ogled them at the time, and I suppose that I can still appreciate the big curly hair today. There have been silly movies for teens for decades and there will still be many of them in other decades as well—this just happens to be time-stamped 1987. As such, The Allnighter is a curiously tame “sex comedy” from the point of view of college girls as they go out to have the best night of their lives. There are a few references for celebrity trivia fans: Bangles singer Susanna Hoffs stars in a film directed by her mother, with a young Joan Cusack as a co-lead, and Pam Grier as a police officer in the inglorious phase of her career. It’s all more amiable than funny, and I think that this is one of those films enhanced by time rather than damaged by it: It’s a bubble-headed comedy, but it now has the atmosphere, colour and fashions of the 1980s going for it. The Allnighter is not essential viewing by any means, but not that objectionable either.

  • Sea of Love (1989)

    Sea of Love (1989)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2020) Prime-era Al Pacino is always a treat, and seeing him at work in a neo-noir thriller like Sea of Love is even better. It was a significant film in his career: the first after a four-year hiatus following a significant box-office bomb, it also set the stage for the grander-than-life hoo-ha Pacino streak that was further developed in his next few movies, lasted for the next ten-fifteen years and is still what we think about when we think about Pacino. As far as narrative goes, Sea of Love is simple, nearly archetypical stuff, what with Pacino playing a cop tracking down a serial killer preying on men posting Lonely Hearts classified ads, and then falling for the primary suspect. Violence and lust, with a bit of an unexpected ending to shake things up. Pacino’s quite good here—not quite as intense as later movies, and slightly forlorn around the edges by looking for love in all the wrong places. Ellen Barkin is surprisingly attractive here—and even looks like Helen Hunt at times. John Goodman is not bad in a supporting role, and there are a few more known names in the roster. While I’ll maintain that the 1990s were a golden age of sorts for mid-scale thrillers, you can see Sea of Love pointing the way, and bridging the gap between the 1980s neo-noir movement (plus the reactionary “killer women” streak of the late 1980s) and the later surge of suspense films. Sea of Love is not the best at anything, but it’s certainly watchable without effort, and as I said—Pacino plus neo-noir is a great mixture.

  • Without Love (1945)

    Without Love (1945)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2020) While Without Love may not be Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn’s finest comedy, it’s not without its share of high points. As a story of two bachelors who marry out of convenience and patriotic duty then truly begin to fall in love, this is not exactly the sharpest premise in the book. But all is in the details, and the pleasantness is largely to be found in small moments, lines of dialogue and seeing both Hepburn and Tracy play off each other. (One very funny scene has Hepburn sneezing in a diver’s helmet.) The setting is hopelessly dated in many ways: much of the plotting is propelled by World War II concerns, something the film inherits from its theatrical origins. For science nerds and theatre geeks in the audience, the film does throw in a few jokes about distracted scientists (which Tracy’s character is), and pre-famous Lucille Ball does show up in an early supporting role. Anyone who champions Hepburn as a sex-symbol should watch Without Love if only for the brief scene in which she turns up with loose curly hair. As for everyone else: the film is fun, funny and ping-pongs between characters who think they’re too intellectual to fall in love, then spend much of the film trying to deny it’s happening. The very abrupt ending is a bit of a surprise—it ends well, but an additional scene may not have hurt. On the other hand, that’s how they often wrapped things up back then—cut to the trailers, and on to the next short comedy.

  • Robin and Marian (1976)

    Robin and Marian (1976)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2020) There is a strong streak of melancholy running through Robin and Marian, a story about the last days of Robin Hood and Maid Marian. A romantic drama blended with a bit of medieval thrills, it’s a film about heroic icons aging into legend—he is back from a punishing crusade; she is now a nun. It’s also, perhaps more significantly for film buffs, a strange and intriguing paring between two screen legends: Sean Connery and Audrey Hepburn (in her first film in nine years). Connery looks like himself with the graying beard, but there’s something truly uncanny in seeing Hepburn with curly hair (and I say this as someone who usually finds nothing wrong at all with curly hair). But none of it is as surprising as a tragic climax that ties in merciful death for nearly everyone—this is meant as romantic tragedy, capping one last passionate moment between two characters that never made it work. As such, it does feel like the kind of film that could only be made in the New Hollywood era—a film that takes a chainsaw to a myth with one final tragic story. I didn’t like Robin and Marian all that much—but I have to admire its audacity.

  • Tom Sawyer (1973)

    Tom Sawyer (1973)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2020) There’s a straight correlation between the crash of the movie musical in the 1970s and that decade’s insistence in adapting known properties as downbeat musicals. This being said, I’m not sure that Tom Sawyer is worth my usual eyerolls and criticism of 1970s musicals—in adapting the classic Mark Twain novel as a musical comedy largely shot on location, it avoids becoming an overly reverent stuffy take on the source material, and keeps its tone as a pleasantly mild comedy. It’s not that distinguished, but it’s not terrible either and things could get much, much worse in 1970s musicals. Amusingly produced by none other than Reader’s Digest magazine, the film hops from one episode to another in adapting the novel, and strings along the upbeat songs to go with the narrative. Jodie Foster shows up in one of her earliest roles. This version of Tom Sawyer is not something that you’ll remember for a long time, but it’s still an interesting take on one of the most sacred novels in American literature.

  • The Arrival (1996)

    The Arrival (1996)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Second Viewing, On TV, January 2020) A perennial fixture on “underrated science fiction films of the 1990s” lists, The Arrival is still quite good a quarter of a century later. Charlie Sheen, yes, plays a goateed astrophysicist, double yes, who stumbles into a grand conspiracy after catching a radio signal from outer space… and then another one from Earth. It’s handled as a paranoid thriller, but with some real invention to it, and it features good set pieces, whether intellectual (building a listening network out of consumer satellite dishes) or action-driven (collapsing radio telescope!) I’m also quite fond of the opening shot and how it ties into the ultimate plot, which has aliens deliberately causing global warming in order to terraform Earth for their purposes—a little hook that seems even more interesting as of 2020. It’s all executed with slick competent assurance, with what now feels like a patina of mid-1990s era technology and filmmaking techniques. One day, we’ll need to figure out why writer-director David Twohy never became a more popular or prolific filmmaker. The first half of The Arrival, dominated by SF elements, is more intellectually interesting than the more conventional thriller-dominated second half — but the entire film still plays very well today. I first saw it when it was freshly out on video, but I’m very happy with a belated second viewing: it’s about as good as I remembered it.

  • Naughty Marietta (1935)

    Naughty Marietta (1935)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2020) While largely forgotten today, Jeanette MacDonald was a major musical star in the 1930s, and she made no less than eight films with co-star Nelson Eddy, the most memorable of those (for all sorts of bad reasons) being Rose-Marie. But their collaboration began with Naughty Marietta, a competent musical that sees her play a French princess fleeing an arranged marriage and trying to begin anew in New Orleans, with many adventures prior and during that flight to the United States. MacDonald’s specialty was operetta signing, and this film definitely plays into that strength with a number of musical scenes tailored for her vocal register. It’s all unobjectionable—a lot of music, of mushy French, of frilly costumes and some chemistry between MacDonald and Eddy. Naughty Marietta was a hit at the time (being nominated for a Best Picture Academy Award) and was more recently selected as part of the National Film Registry. But it’s not particularly distinctive or interesting—the better-than-average moments don’t really stand out, and they’re widely spaced between some very conventional material. Still, MacDonald can sing, that’s for sure.

  • Coogan’s Bluff (1968)

    Coogan’s Bluff (1968)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2020) I unintentionally built myself a hippies-as-seen-from-1968 double feature while watching I Love You Alice B. Toklas and Coogan’s Bluff back-to-back. My favourite is an easy pick—not only is Coogan’s Bluff far less annoying than the first film in this double bill, but it’s an interesting bridge between Clint Eastwood’s western roles and his Dirty Harry tough-guy persona. The transition from one to the other is nearly literal, as he plays an Arizona rural lawman travelling to Manhattan to extradite a fugitive. The film plays quite a bit with the clash of culture that this implies, with the staid and conservative protagonist confronting Manhattan as a den of crime and perversion, discovering the hippie subculture along the way. But Coogan’s Bluff is not so much a sociological study as a crime thriller, with Eastwood chasing down the escaped fugitive with detectorial savvy and two-fisted vigour. As a portrait of late-1960s New York City, it’s not bad—more clean-cut than the blaxploitation films that would pop up soon afterward, but still evocative at the street level. For Eastwood fans and film historians, Coogan’s Bluff is most notable for being the first collaboration between Eastwood (an actor often quick to tell directors what to do) and director Don Siegel, which would turn out to be the first of five films they would do together. It also definitely feels like a first draft of the kinds of characters that Eastwood would adopt as persona over the following two decades, and exactly the kind of meaner-tougher film that would dominate the 1970s. It still plays rather well now (although watch out for the blunt sexism), and gives viewers a prime-era Eastwood in late-1960s Manhattan.

    (Second viewing, On TV, November 2020) There are two things that I find interesting about Coogan’s Bluff, a contemporary crime thriller featuring Clint Eastwood as a tough Arizona lawman sent to New York City in order to capture a fugitive. The first being that this is a film that combines a very familiar Eastwood character (the laconic western gunslinger) with the late-sixties trend of trying to figure out the new shape of the society that changed during the decade. So it is that we have a typical Eastwood character taken out of westerns in order to figure out what to do with those punks, hippies, city slickers and women abusers. If you’re thinking that Eastwood revisited similar territory later on in later archetypical movies such as Dirty Harry, that brings us to the second interesting thing about Coogan’s bluff: that it was directed by Don Siegel. Siegel, of course, was one of the very few directors that Eastwood ever tolerated well, leading to four subsequent collaborations, including—you guessed it—the 1971 urban thriller exemplar Dirty Harry. There’s a city-mouse-in-the-city quality to Eastwood’s squinty trip to the decadent Big Apple that clearly plays on stereotypes that would grow even stronger in the gritty 1970s, and if Coogan’s Bluff keeps things a bit less dark than many of its imitators, it still plays on what would later become well-known tropes. But perhaps more significantly, it does appear like a crucial turning point for Eastwood, bridging two phases of his career as an actor, literally taking his persona from the Wild West to the Big City.

  • I Love You, Alice B. Toklas! (1968)

    I Love You, Alice B. Toklas! (1968)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2020) One of the advantages of watching movies, taking notes, but coming back to edit those notes into a coherent review months (even years!) later is that in that way you get a perspective that just wouldn’t apply for a review written immediately after. So it is that I can tell you with confidence, four years after the fact, that the title song of I Love You, Alice B. Toklas! is a formidable earworm — I can still hum the chorus despite not having heard it since watching the film. I didn’t say it’s a good song—just a memorable one, and that stands for the film as well. It’s representative of an era, obviously — Peter Sellers (ugh) plays a straight-laced lawyer who ends up discovering the hippie subculture through a free-spirited girl, and that’s how we get a near-documentary take on how America perceived hippies in the late 1960s. It’s sort-of-interesting from an anthropological point of view, but again that doesn’t make it good. While I don’t like Sellers all that much, he’s more tolerable than usual here as the disaffected young man who leaves his staid life behind to explore what the counterculture has to offer. Tellingly, the film has him eventually reject the hippie lifestyle, but not necessarily going back to his own personal conservatism. The comic setpiece of the film is an early variation on the now-cliché “unsuspecting people eat drug-laced brownies” trope — I’m not sure it’s the earliest such scene, but it’s played in such a straight way that it feels like it. But my problem with I Love You, Alice B. Toklas! is that, well, it’s that it’s an annoying film. It doesn’t quite glorify hippies (one of the protagonist’s third-act epiphanies is that the free-spirited girl is quite shallow) but it does look at them from a gawking point of view, and the character arc feels very conventional. It probably aged a bit better than it could have had the script been worse, but it has aged, and it has aged worse than other movies at the time that were either more serious or wilder about their approach to the counterculture. But the most annoying thing may be the earworm title song, which pops up far more often than you’d think, driving itself into your brain and becoming more inane every time. It’s annoying, and it transfers its annoyance to the film itself. In the end, I Love You, Alice B. Toklas! is best recommended to Sellers completists (those poor souls) and anyone curious about contemporary depictions of the hippie movement.

    (Second Viewing, On Cable TV, November 2020) I may have liked Peters Sellers at some point, but that was quickly damaged by his exasperating son-screen showboating, and then extinguished by the two biographies I have read/seen about him. Nearly every movie of his I see now carries the baggage of knowing far too much about him and the rampaging egomaniac that he was. For I Love You, Alice B. Toklas!, it doesn’t help that the film has aged poorly and ends on a conclusion fit to frustrate anyone. Sellers here plays a straight-laced Los Angeles lawyer who, inevitably enough, comes to be seduced by the wild, drug-taking, free-loving hippie subculture. Considering the date of the film, that should not be a big surprise—soon he dumps his fiancée at the altar, lets his hair grow long, opens his house to all sorts of groovy people and awaits the epiphany that he’s gone too far. But while the film presents thesis and antithesis, it skips out on the synthesis as it (as a product of its time), opines that the truth is somewhere else and ends at that point, irresponsibly letting his fiancée at the altar for a second time (where, one hopes, she’ll catch her final clue). Sellers once again indulges far too much on the creepy aging lothario angle, although he does keep the funny voices in check for once. While the look at 1960s counterculture can be intriguing, there really isn’t much in the film that feels particularly insightful or new—although comedy historians may note an early example of the “brownies eaten by unsuspecting straight-laced people” trope. It feels equally suffocating both in showing the mainstream and the counterculture, which I suppose is the point but at least could have outlined something else rather than quitting midway through. Plus, well, I don’t like Sellers in either short or long hair, leaving little else to say about the film. The title tune is admittedly catchy, although it remains to be seen whether it’s really catchy or simply drilled into our heads through endless repetition.

  • Idi i smotri [Come and See] (1985)

    Idi i smotri [Come and See] (1985)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2020) A regular title on Top-100 movie lists, Come and See is unabashedly about the horrors of war, specifically as seen through the eyes of kids forced to grow up too soon. Set during World War II, it follows a Soviet boy as he picks up a rifle and becomes a resistance fighter against the invading Nazis. One of the biggest ironies of the film is that while it’s hard to imagine a more justifiable scenario in which to fight than resisting Nazis, the film pulls absolutely no punches in highlighting that war is hell even in the most understandable of circumstances. What could have been a propaganda film turns into a resolutely anti-war statement. Writer-director Elem Klimov doesn’t flinch and barely provides release in the downbeat arc of the narrative: This brutal film steadily gets grimmer at every passing minute. As a piece of filmmaking, it’s quite an achievement— Come and See ends on a reverse-montage sequence that is still hailed as a landmark. Indeed, the film is such a definitive statement that Klimov never made another movie after this one. You can see why it ends up on so many best-movies lists. You should definitely see it. But maybe just once.

  • Night of the Lepus (1972)

    Night of the Lepus (1972)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2020) I’ve been waiting to see Night of the Lepus for the past twenty years, ever since a snippet of it was featured in The Matrix. Predictably, it doesn’t live up to the hype—unless you’re expecting a B-grade midnight-movie kind of thing, in which case it definitely has its moments. Riffing on very early-1970s ideas about overpopulation, director William F. Claxton’s film presents as evil antagonists nothing but… gigantic cuddly rabbits. It’s really amazing what a bit of ominously slow-motion macrography can do, although you’ll have to either reluctantly suspend your disbelief or just revel in the sheer absurdity of it all. Alas, rabbits aside (although there is really no Night of the Lepus with “rabbits aside”), the film isn’t that good. The first half is a bit dull, while the second half becomes only slightly more enjoyable on a pure camp level. Even today, you can imagine the midnight-movie crowd whooping it up at some of the most over-the-top sequences. Janet Leigh stars in this MGM production, which clearly fits it in the “Classic Hollywood stars stuck in 1970s B-grade horror movies from the studios’ dying gasps” genre. Despite its weaknesses, I almost recommend seeing Night of the Lepus—it’s gloriously stupid enough to offset most of its most lifeless moments. This being said, you almost have to know how to watch bad B-movies before tackling this one, because there’s no way it’s good in a traditional sense.

  • Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019)

    Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2020) That new Monsterverse series is really going in all directions. I was lukewarm on the Godzilla reboot, more enthusiastic about Kong Island, and am back to tepid positivity about Godzilla: King of the Monsters. This sequel goes for volume rather than quantity, leaving viewers exhausted by the end of it. Holding little back from the kaiju bestiary, it also multiplies the characters (most of them played by known actors) and goes for several set-pieces from the beginning of the film onward. It’s big-budget blockbuster filmmaking all right, but there’s an argument that it’s too much, goes on for too long and features too much stuff. It’s as if we skipped a movie between Godzilla and this—although you can argue that Godzilla: King of the Monsters is merely a step up to the Kong versus Godzilla film that the coda sets up. It’s not too clear where things are going otherwise—as much as I enjoy bits and pieces of the “Monarch” mythology being set up here in an attempt to make kaijus credible to twenty-first century audiences, it’s also clear that a lot of stuff is being made up as the films accumulate—it looks as if we’re going to explore the hollow earth next, which may or may not work. Acting-wise, the highlight is Bradley Whitford’s character, while Vera Farmiga as a mad scientist is not something I was expecting. On a happier note, Boston is the city that gets trashed this time around (including the John Hancock building): while I do like Boston a lot, it’s one of the few cities that could be improved by wiping it clean and redoing the street plan. That happy thought aside, Godzilla: King of the Monsters may end up being made stronger or weaker on the basis of its follow-up: a good development of the ideas here may rehabilitate it somewhat, while a bad one could make the film seem even less significant. And so it goes with those new franchises desperately downplaying the individual film aspect—you never know what you’re going to get, except in those cases where they get so bad that audiences stop flocking to them.

  • The Stuff (1985)

    The Stuff (1985)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, January 2020) If you’re familiar with writer-director Larry Cohen’s 1970s–1980s filmography, then The Stuff makes complete sense. Everyone else, though… be ready for a wild ride. Avowedly more satirical than horrifying, the movie revolves around a creamy-white substance oozing from the ground that is quickly marketed as America’s latest dessert sensation… until it turns people into mindless zombies. The commentary on consumerism may be a bit too obvious by now, but the B-movies goodness of seeing people consume and being consumed by the white stuff still remains a lot of fun. The Stuff squarely goes for the rich and still-untapped vein of what can be called social horror—in which everyone is doing things that are harmful to everyone. It also goes in places seldom seen in horror, such as industrial settings and possible complicity in the upper echelons of business. All good stuff, if you’ll pardon the expression. But even if The Stuff can remain a cult favourite, it’s still a bit too messy to be as effective as it could be. Even discounting the satirical intention, the plotting is messy and doesn’t sustain a lot of scrutiny. The zigzagging plot could have used some rigour, and the ending doesn’t quite knock it out of the park. Still, it’s memorable for more or less the right reasons: being dissatisfied with the narrative should not stop anyone from seeing The Stuff it its madcap glory.

  • Winchester ’73 (1950)

    Winchester ’73 (1950)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, January 2020) There’s something interesting in that the film credited with jump-starting James Stewart’s run of 1950s Westerns is one that thematically delves into one of the central symbols of the western: the gun. Titled for the gun, revolving around the gun, propelled by the gun, almost entirely focused on the gun, Winchester ’73 both plays on the attraction of the gun and comments on how crazy it is that such an object could lead to murderous passion. This tension serves the film well, especially since it also applies to the redefinition of James Stewart into a rougher, more disillusioned persona—perhaps reflecting the lasting echoes of a war that left no one innocent, perhaps simply acknowledging one of the phase transitions that actors with long careers must face. This ended up being the first of eight collaborations between director Anthony Mann and James Stewart, many of them westerns that started asking questions about the mythology of the west. The film may star Stewart, but the plot favours the gun—the protagonist wins it in a shooting contest early on, then spends the rest of the film trying to get it back from a thief and everyone else who wants the gun for themselves. It’s rich thematic material even if the film doesn’t quite have the sophistication (or the guts) to fully explore what it means. Still, what Winchester ’73 does for its time is quite remarkable. There’s a near-mystical quality given to the titular gun and to all guns in general, even the Native American characters lusting after them as much as the white characters. All of this is accomplished with a big budget and good production values, meaning that the film remains interesting even if you’re not interested in digging into its meaning. Stewart is also remarkable, taking on a darker role with relish. Opinions are split as to whether this or later movies are the best of the Mann/Stewart era, but even as a first effort Winchester ’73 is worth a look.