Movie Review

  • Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood (2017)

    Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood (2017)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2019) Our understanding of Hollywood keeps changing over time, thanks to tell-all autobiographies that inform us about what really went on behind the scenes. The farther Hollywood chroniclers got from the glamour journalism meant to protect the studios’ investments, the closer they got to a fairer understanding of the era, affairs and abuse included. But for all of the richness that modern scholarship has accumulated about Golden-age Hollywood, it’s not a bad thing to keep a critical mind about the latest batch of revelations. Numerous anecdotes in even the most candid autobiographies have been disproven as fantasies, and now that most of the stars of the studio system have died, there’s still an appetite for anything new and salacious, no matter if it fits with everything else we know. Decades after the end of the Classic Hollywood era, any new revelation risks being mythology rather than fact. At the same time, there also seems to be a yearning from traditionally marginalized groups to reclaim some old-school stars that, in some cases, goes far beyond the evidence available. I am, in other words, quite skeptical of some of the assertions in Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood. Adapted from a book by Scotty Bowers, who apparently acted as a pimp to the stars from the 1940s to the 1980s, this is a documentary full of salacious revelations about plenty of celebrities, most of them safely dead and unable to sue. According to Bowers, nearly everyone slept with nearly everyone, and the bigger the name the bigger the pansexual appetite. It’s all lewdly entertaining, but since I’m working on my own history of Hollywood I am desperately looking for a fact-check. After too much time spent googling around, I’m not exactly finding any—at best, some people vouch for Bowers as someone who lived an interesting life and had true stories to tell, but I have not been able to find any work of serious scholarship that corroborates or confirms some of his newest assertions. Most of the reviews of the film or the book faithfully repeat the assertions without confirmation, treating this as gossip more than historical documentation. (In fact, I’m finding more than a few LGBTQ scholars not being convinced by the assertions made here.)  Note that I am not discounting all of Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood—I do think that Bowers was a first-hand witness to a hidden aspect of Hollywood history, and that there is still a lot of work figuring out what really happened. But I’d be wary of weaving most of the specific assertions into the official history of the times: We’re not going much beyond he-said-he-repeated, and extraordinary assertions require extraordinary corroboration.

  • Shazam! (2019)

    Shazam! (2019)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2019) Either I need to take a break from watching superhero movies or Hollywood need to take a break from making them, because watching Shazam was a singularly average experience. Even as I recognize that we’ve reached the degenerate stage of superhero movies—essentially, we’re just being served increasingly ludicrous variations on a theme—and can recognize what Shazam! is going for, it found it very difficult to work myself up to what it was showing me. OK, so it’s a standard superhero origin story, except with a kid being given a superhero’s body, an adoptive family helping, and a supervillain miffed because he’s not pure at heart. With humour. And a Philadelphia setting. In the DC universe. Aaaand, so what? In what may be a case study in excessive crankiness, I just feel jaded by having seen so many of those movies that by now, even well-crafted, slightly off-beat takes such as Shazam leaves me cold—I feel as if I’ve used my share of 2019 “oh, a variation on a familiar theme” indulgence on Captain Marvel and I’ve got no more to give. (On the other hand, I now understand those who essentially turned in the same review after seeing Captain Marvel.)  I’m not saying that there’s anything wrong with the execution of Shazam: director David F. Sandberg graduates to the blockbuster leagues with this film, with a likable Zachary Levi and a wasted Mark Strong in the duelling leads. The back-story, in the modern tradition of superhero films, does get convoluted at times for no good reason. The good news, I suppose, is that Shazam avoids the usual dark tones and dark colour palette of the DCU (although it does get surprisingly sombre at times), saving it from outright rejection. Too long at nearly two hours and a quarter, Shazam ends up as a perfectly average example of the contemporary superhero film, and so I suspect that reactions will largely depend on how exasperated (or delighted) you are at the genre at this specific moment.

  • Forever Young (1992)

    Forever Young (1992)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On TV, December 2019) Here’s a confession, dear reader: Whenever I see “Forever Young,” I hear the chorus of the Interactive dance music cover version of the Alphaville song on a repeat loop. This has nothing to do with Forever Young the movie (except to brand me as someone who listened to a lot of dance music in the mid-nineties), although at the time I would have wished for a little bit of synth pop to break the film out of its staid execution. Featuring Mel Gibson, Forever Young is, in a few words, about a 1940s test pilot getting cryogenically frozen, forgotten, and then accidentally revived in 1992. Don’t ask how that works.  Once past the prologue, you can insert roughly 45 minutes of fish-out-of-water jokes in between the protagonist’s quest to find what happened, the scientists who took care of him, and eventually his long-lost love. Bits and pieces may have influenced the MCU’s Captain America arc. The one big whopper here is a cryogenic process that merely delays the aging process, meaning that our protagonist ages visibly in spurts, allowing Gibson to showcase elderly makeup, and the screenplay to have a ticking clock that it eventually abandons once it has shoehorned one last big climax. Bland and manipulative, Forever Young does have early-1990s Gibson and Jamie Lee Curtis going for it, but the science-fantasy material isn’t as bad as the bland screenwriting impulses that it enables. I have just seen and reviewed the movie, and yet it’s still the song that remains in my mind when I see Forever Young.

  • Les 12 travaux d’Astérix [The Twelve Tasks of Asterix] (1976)

    Les 12 travaux d’Astérix [The Twelve Tasks of Asterix] (1976)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Fifth, sixth or seventh viewing, On Cable TV, December 2019) I must have seen Les 12 travaux d’Astérix half a dozen times before I was twenty, so it was odd to revisit it a quarter of a century later, going through some eerily familiar beats and jokes. A holiday classic in French Canada, this adaptation of the Astérix and Obélix comic book series may be rough around the edges and unfortunately far too racist/sexist for its own good, but it does nail the tone of the characters and still packs plenty of laughs along the way. It also features one of my favourite sequences in animation in “La Maison qui rend fou,” a madcap take on bureaucracy gone wild. I’m not sure how well it would play with audiences unfamiliar with it (the animation is rather crude at times) and I certainly would not recommend watching it in anything other than the original French—but I did laugh a few times, and even the episodic structure of the twelve tasks works in the film’s favour as it becomes an excuse to try different kinds of comedy and animation styles. There is a strong self-awareness to the humour, as the characters constantly work their way out of impossible situations by cutting the Gordian knot and forcing their way out of trouble through sheer obstinacy. In other words, it still feels rather fresh and unpredictable even more than forty-five years later, and plays to adult audiences (re: the Naughty Island sequence) as much as the kids. In other words, there’s a reason why Les 12 travaux d’Astérix still faithfully plays on French-Canadian channels, more than once, every holiday period.

  • The Christmas Chronicles (2018)

    The Christmas Chronicles (2018)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Netflix Streaming, December 2019) There are some casting calls that justify an entire movie, and I can easily imagine someone at Netflix going “Kurt Russell as Santa Claus? Here’s your budget!”  While The Christmas Chronicles is, at best, a serviceable take on Christmas movies, Russell remains the star attraction here as a gruff no-nonsense Claus explaining how it all works to our two young heroes. Easily recalling Christmas wishes for anyone over the age of four, his Claus rocks a tune, bemoans the portrayal of Santa as fat and jolly, steals a sports car (with the film missing an opportunity to use Brian Seltzer’s “Santa’s Got a Hot Rod”) and isn’t above a few subterfuges in order to teach his charges a lesson in Christmas cheer. Benefiting from mid-budget production values, The Christmas Chronicles turns terminally cute in its last half with the introduction of CGI elves as likable as they are handy (or terrifying) with power tools. It’s generally enjoyable viewing, with a lighthearted self-aware tone throughout and a love for logistical explanations that rivals Arthur Christmas and The Santa Clause. In short, it’s the kind of Christmas movie that household members may watch once they’ve seen plenty of other Christmas movies. Plus, it’s on Netflix, meaning that it’s going to be right there for many subscribers. I’ve seen much, much worse. Plus: having Kurt Russell as Santa means that you also get none other than Goldie Hawn in a late cameo as Mrs. Claus.

  • Suspiria (2018)

    Suspiria (2018)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Google Play Streaming, December 2019) As someone who doesn’t like slasher movies and isn’t always convinced by giallo, I still found quite a bit to like in Dario Argento’s original 1977 Suspiria but wasn’t too sure how to approach Luca Guadagnino’s 2018 remake. As it turns out, it looks as if Guadagnino didn’t know either, because there are very few commonalities between the two movies besides the titles and premise of a young dancer joining a foreign dance company that secretly hides a convent of witches. Whereas the original’s best trait was its exuberant use of colour, this remake takes place in 1977 wintertime Berlin, with a corresponding muted quasi-monochrome colour palette. The camera is shy, the style restrained, the music almost forgettable … leading us to wonder why we’re watching this Suspiria. While the film eventually does work itself up to two frantic sequences (a superbly edited dance sequence in which the protagonist psychically inflicts grotesque contortions and physical harm to another dancer, and a conclusion featuring the highest number of exploding heads since the Kingsman finale), much of the movie is slow-moving dullness, even though there is an interesting plot once you cut away the extraneous material that bloats this film up to two hours and a half. Writer-director Guadagnino is clearly enjoying his own games here (what with Tilda Swinton playing three characters, including some you’ll never guess without reading about the film) but it remains to be seen whether the audience will follow—I thought that the 1977 Berlin framing device was near-useless even in its Nazi-of-course thematic implications. Refocus on the snappy retelling of a dancer infiltrating a coven and maybe we’d have something more attuned to my own preferences. Fortunately, I don’t get to decide how movies are made—but I do get to decide my own reaction to it, and I choose to be disappointed by this Suspiria “remake.”  The high points of the film and slightly more interesting take on “innocent thrown to the witches” premise ensure that it’s certainly not a wasted opportunity, but it’s not the film that it could have been.

  • Kimi no na wa. [Your Name] (2016)

    Kimi no na wa. [Your Name] (2016)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Google Play Streaming, December 2019) I haven’t kept up with the current state of Japanese animation as much as I’d liked, so when I saw Your Name pop up as a featured recommendation, I saw it as a good way to get back into it. Fortunately, it’s a decent choice: what starts out like a body-switching comedy soon goes beyond the obvious, and then on to an apocalyptic race against time featuring temporal star-crossed lovers. Even knowing or guessing what’s coming doesn’t diminish the increasing effectiveness of the story as our teenage heroes try to fight the universe in saving a few hundred people … and then go against the capricious nature of the plot to reunite. There’s a lot of cleverness in the way the film moves forward in an unreliable universe that does its best to erase the minds of its protagonists. I particularly enjoyed the way the film quickly went past other body-switching clichés, with resourceful protagonists doing their best to work within the quirks of their situation. The often-tricky transition from silly teenage romantic comedy to heavier young-adult science-fiction drama is handled with some skill, leading to concluding scenes far more powerful than one could have imagined after the film’s first twenty minutes. In short, I understand the hype about Your Name now, and I can see why it attracted so much critical and popular attention. The animation is nothing short of superb (which, like it or not, can be an obstacle with some older animation), and the care with which writer-director Makoto Shinkai sets up his film is enough to make sentiment overpower cold plotting logic—I mean; surely the clever protagonist should have noticed being three years apart given their resourcefulness? But it doesn’t matter—the film survives that nitpick admirably well. Romance, after all, does require some suspension of disbelief as much as Science Fiction.

  • Adrift (2018)

    Adrift (2018)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Netflix Streaming, December 2019) I am (appropriately enough) of two minds about Adrift—on the one hand, it’s an inspiring (true-ish) story of survival in a hostile environment, as a woman finds herself adrift on a small damaged sailboat in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, with a near-useless companion for company. On the other hand, we’ve seen pretty much the same thing already with All is Lost, and combining that with a Fight Club-type twist isn’t quite nearly enough to patch things up. Good special effects and an able performance from Shailene Woodley (who must have enjoyed the opportunity to break out of her YA dystopian persona), plus slick directing from Baltasar Kormákur, do mean that the film goes by smoothly and convincingly recreates the harrowing conditions of the ordeal. Still, the narrative sleight-of-hand (which becomes obvious if you’re paying close attention) does smack of audience deception and an attempt to add more juice to a story that may or may not have needed any. Even when it’s desperately flashing back and forth in an attempt to keep audiences invested in between the sappy romance and the far more involving survival story, there’s a bit of desperation to Adrift, almost as if it wasn’t entirely confident in its own material. Fortunately, Woodley is there to save the day and carry it home.

  • Manbiki kazoku [Shoplifters] (2018)

    Manbiki kazoku [Shoplifters] (2018)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Netflix Streaming, December 2019) At a time when big-budget American cinema is often reduced to formula-scripted blockbuster entertainment, it can be interesting to go see that the medium can do in other countries. Shoplifters is almost defiantly unusual in how it approaches its own characters and story—featuring a reconstituted family of grifters and low-level thieves struggling to make a living in low-class conditions. It’s quirky, unusual in how it advances its story and oddly sympathetic at times. There are a few big secrets lurking behind the façade of the characters as presented in the first few minutes, but the core sentiment of the film remains—a family by choice, loving and united even if not exactly a model for anyone else. The ending, alas, gets worse and worse for everyone—this isn’t meant to be a heartwarming film. Writer-director Hirokazu Koreeda has his own outlook on life and the result is a humanistic vision of being poor in money, yet being rich in relationships. It’s almost as good as a novel, and presented in an understated way that leaves us to make conclusions. I particularly liked the unglamorous performances from Lily Franky and Sakura Ando as the leaders of the family. While Shoplifters does feel a bit too long, there are a few engaging subplots going on with the ensemble cast. The film earned a lot of western attention when it made the Academy Awards shortlist in early 2019, and we can see why.

  • How it Ends (2018)

    How it Ends (2018)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Netflix Streaming, December 2019) The post-apocalyptic road trip is a surprisingly long-lived tradition in American fiction (especially written), helped by the vast expanses of the continental United States highway system and a built-in dramatic device in motivating the trip across dangerous distances. At its best, How it Ends clearly exploits this tradition, heightening its drama with two lead characters united by a thin single thread and giving us a few disaster-filled thrills along the way. Despite the film’s modest budget and consequent limitations, director David M. Rosenthal throws in a few effective visuals here and there, and the growing suspense of knowing whether the bickering characters will achieve their goal (even on a quest more likely to be quixotic than reasonable) is familiar but effective. Forest Whitaker adds a lot of gravitas to the quest, while Theo James eventually develops into a likable character. Roughly two thirds of the way in How it Ends, I even started thinking that this was quite enjoyable in its chosen genre, despite several annoying flaws and dumb decisions along the way. The inclusion of a Native American character (Grace Dove, perhaps the best thing about the film) felt like a solid decision, the episodic structure of the film still felt fresh and the mystery of the catastrophe having struck America was still unfolding. Then the last act rolled in and the film nosedived. (There will be spoilers for the rest of this review because you can’t talk about what’s wrong with the film without digging into it.)  I wasn’t really expecting the film to offer a definitive explanation about its catastrophe—obviously inspired by The Road except far from being as meaningful, How it Ends just throws too many things on-screen to make sense and I would have been satisfied with a trite “Aliens!”—but this is the least of the film’s problems. Not only does it jettison a likable character two thirds of the way through, it introduces a new character fifteen minutes after the resolution of the main quest narrative and fifteen minutes before the actual end of the movie, effectively adding an extra act to a film that didn’t need one. It’s not a fun act either, darkly hinting at the protagonist’s fiancée having been seduced by a romantic rival and holy cats we didn’t need that stuff at that point in the film. This is the final touch that highlights all the nagging annoyances with the film—How it Ends overplays most of its cards and ends up satisfying no one with an open-ended ending.   In the tradition of movies that don’t stick their landing, it puts the rest of the film in question—the way society collapses within twenty-four hours after the Internet stops working and the government can’t be bothered to reassure the population. (Well, this may be the most realistic part of the movie—although I note that once more Canada is offered as an answer. The film was filmed in Winnipeg, something most clearly seen in a scene with a train sporting Canadian National livery.)  The lack of characterization becomes far more important once the post-apocalyptic quest is dismissed and we dive into character drama. I originally thought that something may have happened during the production of the film, but checking reviews of the original script (which was a Black List favourite for 2010) suggests that the flaws of the film were baked in from the beginning. How it Ends makes some elementary blunders for no clear reason, and shoots itself in the gut when a simpler, cleaner approach would have managed to keep things together.

  • Leave No Trace (2018)

    Leave No Trace (2018)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Netflix Streaming, December 2019) So … take Captain Fantastic, remove most of the memorable characters, much of the fun dialogue, all the humour and the entire trip/clash south of the Northwestern Forest and you have a good idea of what’s left in Leave No Traces. Revolving around a father and daughter living a life far away from civilization in a Portland-area forest, this is a movie about a veteran’s inability to fit in society … and the growing rift between him and his teenage daughter who is longing for connections. It’s not much of a plot, and so the film is told in lengthy, sparse camera setups, with society acting as an intruder, opponent and seducer to the characters. Ben Foster plays the traumatized, ill-fitting veteran, while Thomasin McKenzie has a more interesting role as a 13-year-old increasingly unhappy with his father’s make-no-roots, leave-no-traces approach to life. It’s a quiet film, too quiet for me (I’d rather re-watch Captain Fantastic for a similar take) but decent enough in its chosen approach. Ultimately, though, I suspect that I will have a hard time recalling any of the film in a few weeks from now.

  • Hunter Killer (2018)

    Hunter Killer (2018)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Netflix Streaming, December 2019) As a quick look through this web site will reveal, I spent a substantial part of the 1990s and 2000s reading military techno-thrillers (including many submarine thrillers) and I have kept a lingering affection for the subgenre, even if it hasn’t been particularly served well on the big screen. There’s usually one submarine thriller every year or two, and I probably saw all of them. Lately, both Phantom and Black Sea had their issues, but neither were the kind of slam-bang contemporary military thriller that the genre deserved. Hunter Killer, on the other hand, is almost exactly what I was looking for: A slick movie version of those submarine technothrillers, blending military valour with pulse-pounding action sequences in the service of a plot riffing off today’s headlines. (Well, maybe yesterday’s headlines: The US president here is a competent blonde woman while the Russian president is a likable and humane statesman. But nobody would believe the current reality in fiction.)  The crux of the plot has to do with a coup in Russia, and American forces lending a hand through a submarine crew in the water and Special Forces operatives on land. Gerald Butler stars as an unorthodox sub captain, the kind of square-jawed hero so prevalent in those kinds of novels. A capable cast of supporting characters (Gary Oldman is unrecognizable as always, but also Michael Nyqvist, Common, Linda Cardellini and Toby Stephens) helps flesh out a cheerfully plot-driven film, which has a major submarine battle in the firth thirty minutes and then goes on to other, bigger action sequences. It’s all familiar and cool and highly enjoyable thanks to Donovan Marsh’s direction, even though I suspect that people without my accumulated baggage of experience with the subgenre may not react so positively. As for me, though, I got almost exactly what I was looking for in that kind of movie. Butler has earned quite a bit of critical scorn for his choices, but in most of his recent films (Den of Thieves, Geostorm, the Has Fallen series), I find that he’s playing a very kind of specific role in a very specific sub-genre, and that he’s pretty much perfect for what the filmmakers are looking for. I can’t guarantee that other viewers will find in Hunter Killer the same kinds of thrills that I did, but I’m surprisingly happy that it exists, and that it brings to the big screen the kind of expansive thrillers that I like.

  • The Invitation (2015)

    The Invitation (2015)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Netflix Streaming, December 2019) Despite the film’s slow burn, it doesn’t take a long time to realize that The Invitation is not going to be a fun kind of film. As it opens with our protagonists making their way to an isolated Los Angeles home and hitting a coyote, the sombre way the protagonist puts the animal out of its misery sets the glum tone for the rest of the film. It doesn’t get any better despite a few forced cheers: Our protagonist is being invited back to his ex-house by his ex-wife, years after the death of their son. Other friends are also invited, but strange clues accumulate: one of them is missing, the door remains locked and the windows are blocked by iron railings. Then they’re showing a video in which a cult celebrates the death of one of their own. By the time the protagonist screams DON’T DRINK THE WINE, we’re well past the point when all guests should have left en masse. Going from sombre drama to a more exciting thriller, The Invitation nonetheless stays attached to its characters far more than the average thriller. By the time the expected deaths pile up, it’s a slightly different kind of thriller than we expect. (Although we can understand the moronic characters a bit better for not leaving, this isn’t a blanket excuse for them not doing so.)  Shot with a low budget featuring generally lesser-known actors, it does let director Karyn Kusama play a bit with the form, although not (maybe regrettably) committing to either a horror or revenge fantasy third act. There is a bit of a chill in the film’s last shot, but it does feel like an implausible afterthought rather than something with wider implications. I still enjoyed The Invitation, but wouldn’t exactly bring myself to recommending it.

  • Free Solo (2018)

    Free Solo (2018)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Google Play Streaming, December 2019) Exhilarating and revelatory, Free Solo is about one man and one mission: rock climber Alex Honnold and his 2017 quest to climb Yellowstone’s El Capitan 900-meter-high mountain with his bare hands—no rope, no safety net. It sounds crazy enough and the film not only underscores what fantastic feat of human strength this is, but also demonstrates, through painful practice runs, how dangerous some specific moments of the endeavour can be. Beyond the climb, we also get a glimpse at Honnold himself—his geeky personality, his budding relationship with a girlfriend understandably concerned for his life (as other alpinists die during the making of the feature) and his drive to go against the mountain itself. While the footage captured for the documentary is magnificent (drones have really opened the possibilities offered to low-budget filmmakers, although the best footage is captured by fellow climbers tethered not too far away), there is an added complication in having the cameramen discuss their concerns that their very presence may cause additional problems for Honnold. It’s the portrait of an outsized ambition, certainly, but also a gradual change in character for the man at the centre of the documentary—at one point, he begins and abandons a climb, feeling that it’s not the right time. (It’s a move that earns the strong approval of everyone else, some of them saying that this reinforced their belief in his sense of safety.) The last twenty minutes of the film detail the successful ascent, we viewers having been adequately prepared for the dangerous steps of the process, with our relief mirroring the one of Honnold’s companions. A neatly wrapped package making a difficult sport accessible to lay viewers, Free Solo deservedly earned an Oscar for best feature documentary, and it has the white-knuckle thrills to show why.

  • Star Trek: First Contact (1996)

    Star Trek: First Contact (1996)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Second Viewing, On Blu-ray, December 2019) I first saw Star Trek: First Contact in theatres on opening night, in melodramatic circumstances sitting next to a girl I liked and a guy who I thought liked the girl I liked. (She, on the other hand, didn’t like either of us, which is pretty much all you need to know.)  I thought the movie was quite good, and it’s a relief to revisit the same film decades later under far less trying emotional circumstance to find out that it has held up decently well in the interim. Generally regarded as the best TNG Trek movie and deservedly so despite the underwhelming competition, First Contact plays on two of Trek’s biggest power chords, bringing together the Borg and time travel for an adventure that takes us back to First Contact between humans and Vulcans, and the Borg taking over the Enterprise. There’s a nice blend between hard-core body horror and comic relief in the result, with separate plotlines striking a surprisingly complementary tone throughout. The film is more action-packed than previous instalments, and even gives us a large-scale Federation-versus Borg space battle to begin with. Patrick Stewart has a plum role as a Jean-Luc Picard almost going mad with revenge, and he shows off his muscles in the film’s action climax. Most of the characters are used effectively (including Marina Sirtis and Gates McFadden), and First Contact is a good big-screen take on the Enterprise-D/E crew. While I still have several issues with the details of the plot or the sad situation of post-WW3 Earth at the time, the overall result is worth a look and ends up being the last Trek movie (and even-numbered one) worth watching between 1996 and the 2009 reboot.