Movie Review

  • La casa sperduta nel parco [The House on the Edge of the Park] (1980)

    La casa sperduta nel parco [The House on the Edge of the Park] (1980)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On TV, May 2020) Ugh, do I have to talk about The House on the Edge of the Park? It’s the kind of grimy low-budget exploitation film that quickly gets on my nerves: a home invasion that turns murderous. It’s clearly an exploitation film, and an ugly one at that. There is no fun to be had here—not in the gory violent torture, not in director Ruggero Deodato’s nihilistic tone, and not even in the nudity given that it’s always followed by something much worse. (See that straight razor on the poster? Yeah.) While it delves more deeply and frequently into eroticism than most other home invasion movies, it’s a misplaced fixation that is really not to the best of effect. There’s a twist at the end, but I don’t really care. Italian horror circa 1980 could be dynamic and inventive, or it could be stomach-churning and depressing. The House on the Edge of the Park clearly belongs to the second category.

  • Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing (1955)

    Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing (1955)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, May 2020) To say that Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing is okay may not seem like a ringing endorsement, but compared to what it could have been, it’s almost a complete triumph. Consider that it’s a romance between an American journalist and a Eurasian woman in the late 1940s, as seen from mid-1950s America. Plus, it features all-Caucasian Jennifer Jones playing a character of mixed ethnicity through heavy makeup that she herself disliked. (The film’s production history is rich in anecdotes about how Jones did not get along with anyone on set, least of all co-star William Holden.) Also consider that the film dealt directly with adultery (well, “they’re separated” degrees of adultery) and interracial relationship in the waning years of the Production Code (a special dispensation was obtained, almost solely because the story was adapted from a popular novel). There are all sorts of ways in which Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing could have gone as wrong as other films of the time and… it didn’t. The sensible treatment of cross-ethnicity romance was somewhat daring for its time, and doesn’t feel all that terrible nowadays. What it does feel like is an overwrought romantic drama, but that’s not such a bad thing: it still feels romantic, and it still feels important. It’s easy to see why the film was nominated for eight Academy Awards (snagging three for song, score and costume design)—including some splendid colour cinematography of mid-1950s Hong Kong. Could it have been better? Absolutely, and that would be near-certain for any contemporary remake. Could it have been worse? Also, yes—this film is held together almost entirely by its sympathy for both of its lead characters.

  • Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines or How I Flew from London to Paris in 25 hours 11 minutes (1965)

    Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines or How I Flew from London to Paris in 25 hours 11 minutes (1965)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, May 2020) We’re unlikely to ever see another epic comedy quite like Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines and that’s too bad: Comedies are now low-to-medium-budget propositions (when Hollywood bothers doing a comedy in the first place) and so we’ll never see the mixture of lavish practical gags, stunts, widescreen cinematography and expansive scope that characterizes this film. The premise is simple—an international race from London to Paris at the dawn of the aviation age—but the execution is absolutely maximalist, with rickety contraptions somehow making it into the air and spectacularly colliding with other things, either airborne or on the ground. (Chances are good that you’ve seen bits and pieces of the film’s opening montage in other contexts, as it presents the goofy machines that people tried at the heroic age of aviation.) The running time nearly reaches two hours and a half and the international cast is large (and stereotypical; your mileage will vary as with the film’s sexism. ). It still looks visually gorgeous today by virtue of having been shot in 65 mm, even though not much of this was obvious on the standard-definition channel I was watching. It’s not without equals: Its sequel Monte Carlo or Bust! in 1969 or The Great Race, also made in 1965, touches upon similar epic comedy material, but neither have the grandiose nature of seeing comedy flying in the air. The stunts are obviously the point of it all. Generally absorbing despite a few lulls and all in good fun, Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines is quite unlike any film made lately, and it will make you wish for a revival of epic comedies.

  • The Slumber Party Massacre (1982)

    The Slumber Party Massacre (1982)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On TV, May 2020) While The Slumber Party Massacre remains notable in the 1980s slasher film canon for being one of the few written and directed by women, you would be hard-pressed to identify how this has led to a different kind of film. Coming in at a time when the slasher was firmly established and on its way of crashing, this film mechanically executes the characteristics of the genre, with meaningless gory murders every 5–10 minutes and as many opportunities it gets to show naked girls dressing after sleep, taking showers or putting pyjamas during their titular slumber party. Despite its female writer and director, the film is as guilty of lecherous male gaze (sometimes ridiculously so, as per the slow pan during the shower scene) as anyone else—director Amy Jones was playing the game like everyone else, even if she did have a penetrating insight on the genre by giving the psycho killer a big throbbing drill as signature weapon. It’s not even playing the whodunit card—an escaped murderer is mentioned early in the film and the rest is played straight. While the film occasionally has doses of dark humour (the film opens with misleading screaming, features a character watching a horror film while someone else is getting killed, etc.), this is really not the comedy that some people pretend. In most ways, this is exactly what people talk about when they talk about early-1980s slashers: At this point in the craze, everyone knew exactly what to do to give the audience what it wanted. At least, The Slumber Party Massacre is mercifully short at 77 minutes—and executed well by the standards of the genre.

  • The Trouble with Harry (1955)

    The Trouble with Harry (1955)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, May 2020) Alfred Hitchcock’s idea of a comedy isn’t the same as everyone else’s, and so The Trouble with Harry is all about what happens when a small New England community finds a dead body in the woods and tries to figure out what to do with it. In this film, a romantic subplot is given equal importance than an opening sequence in which nobody reacts in any conventional way at the presence of a corpse that several people they know may have murdered. It does have a bit of a pacing issue in its second half, partially redeemed by the pleasant climax of a group of people coming together to solve a problem. As darkly whimsical as Hitchcock could best be, The Trouble with Harry is as much a departure from his usual thrillers as it is a reaffirmation of his core strengths.

  • Ilsa the Tigress of Siberia (1977)

    Ilsa the Tigress of Siberia (1977)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, May 2020) One day, I’ll learn not to let curiosity get the better of me. After all, curiosity is almost the only reason to watch Ilsa the Tigress of Siberia after suffering through the first instalments of the exploitation series. I say almost, because of two things: Dyanne Thorne’s sizable assets, and the film’s explicit Canadian content. None of those things are respectable or even justifiable, but at least they offer something more than mindless sequel viewing inertia. Considering that the film was shot in Canada, the Siberian location is a low-budget narrative choice. But the film does explicitly make its way to Montréal by the second half. The nudity here is more blatant than in the previous instalments, but it’s unfortunately always followed by gory violence. Canadian content includes snowmobile jousting and death by a snowblower, but don’t imagine a more entertaining film than it is—Ilsa the Tigress of Siberia remains a cheap, dull, obnoxious, sordid exploitation film—hardly even funny, let alone exciting.

  • Little Man Tate (1991)

    Little Man Tate (1991)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On TV, May 2020) There’s a striking appropriateness in how Jodie Foster, a child prodigy herself, not only chose to direct gifted-child drama Little Man Tate, but also plays the role of the averagely intelligent mother trying to steer her child through the isolation of genius. Alas, that’s probably the most interesting thing about the film, which ends up being a predictable middle-ground kind of drama going for a middle-ground kind of sentiment. It reinforces unfortunate prejudices about gifted kids, settles for bland “it’s not how smart you are but how you use it” sentiments acceptable to the masses, and runs through a long list of known tropes about its topic. In many ways, Little Man Tate feels like the kind of smaller actor-driven films that Hollywood studios used to grant as favours to their box-office workhorses: something almost gone from the cinema landscape these days.

  • How Stella Got Her Groove Back (1998)

    How Stella Got Her Groove Back (1998)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, May 2020) Anyone who thinks that How Stella Got Her Groove Back is a one-quadrant romantic comedy solely destined to older black women is missing one thing—late-1990s Angela Basset was the complete package for all other three quadrants—simply a joy to watch given her versatility, precision in her acting choices, and devastating gorgeousness. The film knows it and wastes no effort in reinforcing it—she sports at least half a dozen hairstyles through the film and looks amazing in all of them. The story is also designed to let her go from one peak to another—she hits all of the right notes as the narrative takes her all the way from a tight-haired power broker to a lovelorn single mother to a grieving friend to a woman in limbo to, finally, affirming her own desires in their complexity. Refreshingly, the twenty-year-gap between the protagonist and her younger lover (a breakthrough role for Taye Diggs) is honestly dealt with. While there are no real surprises here (she does get her groove back: relief!), it’s a likable film even when it’s balanced on a bad idea. Add Whoopi Goldberg and Regina King and I’m disappointed I watched the film on a grainy standard-resolution channel. Obviously, your mileage may depend based on how you feel about Basset.

  • In the Good Old Summertime (1949)

    In the Good Old Summertime (1949)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2020) Given how much I like Ernst Lubitsch’s The Shop Around the Corner and Buster Keaton and MGM musicals, I should like musical remake In the Good Old Summertime a lot more than the mild liking that I’ve got for it. Compared to everyone else, I’m the curmudgeon going “yeah, but it’s not as good as it could have been.” I strongly suspect that what sets me apart is my lack of affection for Judy Garland in general. Alas, this is a film revolves around Garland, presuming that everyone finds her irresistible. I don’t dislike her—not here, anyway (her decline had begun but wasn’t completely apparent, and there’s a scene early in this film where she lets her hair down and looks remarkably good). On the other hand, the film does put her front and centre of the plot, in which two feuding colleagues strike up an epistolary romance as audiences wait during the entire film for the truth to come out. Updating the time and place from a 1930s leather shop in Vienna to a 1900s musical instrument store in Chicago, In the Good Old Summertime cranks up the singing (inevitable, with Garland around) and dials down the sophisticated comedy in favour of more obvious gags. While I miss Lubitsch’s touch, it’s compensated somewhat by having Buster Keaton make a return to the screen after a long break: he not only designed gags for the movie, but parlayed one complex piece of physical comedy (the split-second destruction of a violin) into an acting role as a klutzy clerk. Elsewhere in the cast, Van Johnson is a decent lead, S. Z. Sakall has a typically good turn and this is technically Liza Minelli’s screen debut—as a three-year-old appropriately cast as Garland’s daughter. While I’m not bowled over by In the Good Old Summertime, it’s generally sympathetic and likable, a decent watch, and it features a few good moments. Just ignore me, as I rant in the corner about wanting more Lubitsch and James Stewart and Buster Keaton.

  • The Private Life of Henry VIII. (1933)

    The Private Life of Henry VIII. (1933)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2020) Alexander Korda was a foreign-born British film producer who sought glory in many ways, and not necessarily his own personal glory. His filmography is packed with movies that extolled British virtues and crowd-pleasing entertainment that revitalized British cinema itself. He believed that movies could effectively influence minds, and he got an early reward for this belief in The Private Life of Henry VIII when that film triumphed at the box office, and won the first-even Academy Awards given to a non-American film. Later on, the uncouth and gluttonous portrait of Henry VIII as depicted in the film became, unfairly, how newer generations began to perceive the historical character. It certainly helped that the king was played by none of that Charles Laughton, looking quite young at times: it became his breakout role and the one that won him an Oscar. Surprisingly enough, this is a black-and-white historical epic that has aged far better than you’d expect—it’s often a gentle comedy even in the opening credits, as one character is said to be of no interest in being a “respectable lady.” The irreverent touches of humour continue throughout the film, with some moments playing in a very iconoclastic fashion. Better than expected, The Private Life of Henry VIII gets a few honest laughs: the chicken-eating scene is funny, as is the divorce negotiation sequence. The humour partly comes from the early matter of love and marriage in a royal context, partly from the court’s difficulties in adjusting to a difficult king, and also partly because of Laughton’s performance itself. Far less stuffy than a history lesson, The Private Life of Henry VIII clearly reached its audience and continues to do so—but be wary of thinking that this is a historically accurate film.

  • The Lives of a Bengal Lancer (1935)

    The Lives of a Bengal Lancer (1935)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2020) Taken by itself and in isolation, The Lives of a Bengal Lancer is a decent adventure film. It features Cary Cooper and others as British Empire soldiers sent to a remote outpost in India, where they get to smack down rebels, talk back to superiors and pick up a massive machine gun to mow down attackers. As a boys’ adventure is faraway land, it’s competently executed (albeit shot in the hills around Los Angeles), decently acted and scripted with an eye toward thrilling viewers. The problem begins when looking at the film’s legacy, or interrogating it from a modern perspective. The Lives of a Bengal Lancer was rewarded by good box-office results, lauded by numerous Oscar nominations, and provided Cooper with a steady paycheque playing that kind of character in that kind of movie for several years. So far so good, except—it was so convincing in its articulation of colonialism that it became one of Hitler’s favourite films, and spawned a subgenre of British Imperial adventure films—some of them horrifyingly racist (i.e.: Gunga Din). For a time, Hollywood became a more effective proponent of British conquest than the British film industry itself and that can all be traced back to this film. Looking at it with modern lens does it no favours either—it’s plodding and naïve, especially if you start questioning the foundations of what the film has to say about the presence of its English-speaking characters in such faraway lands. Clearly, the 1930s were a different time and the ability to appreciate films like The Lives of a Bengal Lancer requires a higher suspension of empathy than others.

  • Riot Girls (2019)

    Riot Girls (2019)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2020) Every film depends on some amount of contrivance in setting up its premise, but those contrivances are more clearly seen in some movies than others. As a low-budget Canadian post-apocalyptic film, Riot Girls never manages to get past the “but why?” stage of contemplating its reason to exist. Having a post-apocalyptic setting following a disease that wiped out much of the adult population may be interesting (although if COVID-19 could do something nice for us, it would be to get rid of the entire post-apocalyptic genre altogether), but by the time the film clearly spells out a slobs-versus-snobs (or rather punks-versus-jocks) teenage rift in a small BC town, it’s hard to avoid thinking that this is a joke and that we’re not getting it. There’s an obvious fakery at play here that becomes difficult to take seriously, even if director Jovanka Vuckovic’s intention was to deliver something to be consumed without too much thought. For instance, it doesn`t take long to start noticing the conspicuous absence of anyone under ten—having teenagers take care of orphaned infants and toddlers wouldn’t have been as cool or funny as what it’s going for. If it’s trying to be a comedy, it’s not particularly good at it: the gore and swearing and girl-punk music all feel very juvenile. What’s more, Riot Girls muddies its message by setting up an Orwellian regime in the jock world to be brought down, erring far more on laughable caricature than meaningful plotting—which, once again, just falls flat considering the rest of the film’s lack of humour. Meanwhile, the slob punks are… dying? Maybe. We don’t know—rigour and worldbuilding are really not this film’s favourite things. Missed opportunities all around, considering that Riot Girls has serious problems maintaining any basic suspension of disbelief.

  • Cannibal Ferox (1980)

    Cannibal Ferox (1980)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, May 2020) There is such a clear kinship between Cannibal Ferox and Cannibal Holocaust that the two movies share a subgenre (cannibal horror, obviously), a plot premise (first-world young people go exploring the lost tribes of the Amazon), a clear intention (disgust viewers with gory effects) and an overall appreciation (Yuck.) No one will be surprised to find out that the true narrative is one of characters slowly being killed in gory ways. There really isn’t a whole lot of difference between the two—in both movies, there’s a little bit of first-world irony (here, one of the characters heads out to the wilds to prove her theory that cannibalism is a myth—while that’s probably the case in reality, she clearly doesn’t know the movie genre in which she’s stuck), some nature footage that quickly turns to horror once real-life animal abuse sets in and a nearly-everybody-dies-horribly ending with exposed internal organs. Even when the film is “effective,” it’s only in disgusting viewers. Cannibal Ferox’s violence against animals is particularly hard to watch, not so much when animals are at each other’s throats (oh, a cute tiger, oh a cute monkey, UH-OH THE TIGER IS EATING THE MONKEY!!) than when the filmmakers are clearly abusing or killing animals. In comparisons, the human gore effects are nausea-inducing but clearly within the realm of practical special effects. There was, unaccountably, a true wave of Italian cannibal horror movies around 1980, and I’m only watching tripe as Cannibal Ferox to round up my movie education. I would welcome any opportunity to never watch or even think about it again.

  • Westworld, Season 3 (2020)

    Westworld, Season 3 (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2020) Obviously, Westworld could never stay confined to the park for more than a few seasons, and so this third season of the series boldly takes us to the outside world, with androids not only exploring it but also changing it irremediably. It’s a bold move, introducing a new main character (played by Aaron Paul) and taking up the issues of control versus self-determination into a wider context. The production design of this third season is exceptional, credibly presenting (through shooting in modern East Asian cities) a future vision of 2040s Los Angeles with automated cars, mood-showing T-shirts and oppressive social control. Wait, where did all of that come from? Yes, that’s where Westworld is showing its seams. Down to the new visual motifs of this season, we’re presented with so many new elements in exploring this future that there’s reason to believe that half of it is being made up as the series goes along rather than being part of a coherent plan. There’s little in the first two seasons to suggest Rehoboam the all-controlling AI, except as a thematic counterpart to the morality plays taking place in the parks. As a result, much of this Season 3 feels half-rushed, half-indulgent. Even though the first two seasons’ ten-episode plans had plenty of fat to trim, this eight-episode series still couldn’t keep the series’ worst pseudo-profound moralism at bay. There’s no baseline depiction of the world under Rehoboam—our sole significant new character is an underclass, which doesn’t give us a good yardstick to judge the philosophical conflict taking place in this third season. It probably doesn’t help that I have somewhat significant differences with the series’ morality so far. I’ve been Team Maeve since the beginning; I see Delores as a villain despite a last-minute contrition; I have trouble seeing Serac as a monster despite the series’ insistence that I should; and most of all, I am terribly unhappy with the series’ “light the match, burn everything up, let the survivors choose” approach to global revolution and eventual human extinction event—the best way to effect social change is to coopt the comfortable middle class, but I’ve given up on the series taking such a reasonable technocratic approach when it can play with its characters becoming gunslingers, ninjas and social revolutionaries. But, of course, we’re midway through a six-season arc with no way of knowing where it’s going (except for increasingly loud hints of an apocalypse coming up). At least there’s enough to keep us interested on a micro level. Everyone is turning in decent work on the acting front (although I’ve never been much of an Aaron Paul fan), and there’s something quietly amusing in the way the series’ actors are constantly given different personalities to play. Still, some character arcs (maybe even the season as a whole) feel like throat-clearing and seat warming before later events. While Thandie Newton is a constant delight, her character seems a caricature of previous seasons. Jeffrey Wright’s Bernard also seems to be biding his time until there’s a real role for him to play, and Ed Harris’s William seems increasingly contrived. This season was clearly all about Rachel Evan Wood’s Dolores, but this is wearing thin when you could reliably predict that none of her many enemies would manage to stop her before The Plan was revealed. The series has good ideas and set-pieces (Williams’s self-therapy session being one of them), even though its reach often exceeds its grasp—the “genre” drug sequence didn’t quite match its potential. Still, and this is significant, Westworld remains insanely ambitious and daring for a flagship cable TV show—It could have contrived a way to remain in the park, but chose a vastly riskier route. I may not love the results as much as I did in previous seasons, but I’m still on-board to see where it takes us next.

  • Chakushin ari [One Missed Call] (2003)

    Chakushin ari [One Missed Call] (2003)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, May 2020) While Japanese Horror scored some notable hits in the 1990s (most of them eventually remade in Hollywood, with only The Ring being particularly good), it’s a stretch to suggest that One Missed Call is among the best of them—even if it was remade in America a few years later. It’s all the more confounding that the film is from notorious iconoclast director Takashi Miike, whose other movies span the range from amateurish to utterly grotesque. One Missed Call plays like a very basic attempt to play on the usual tropes of J-horror—the pale girl with long unkempt black hair, the use of modern technology to motivate a scary story (this time, teenagers receiving audio or video of their death two days later and transmitting death through their contact lists), an insane asylum setting, complex family trauma, and the like. While it does veer into some media satire, there really isn’t much else to say—there’s a sense that we’ve seen all of this in much better ways since then, no matter if it was inspired by this film or not. What doesn’t help is the third act losing its way through Munchausen-by-proxy family drama and plot twists that seem to ground what was a Science-Fictional initial premise far too deeply in reality. But that, too, is a frequent trope of J-horror: Starting with a banger of a premise, and eventually dismantling through a trite “explanation“ that only serves to make the entire film less effective.