Movie Review

  • To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before (2018)

    To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before (2018)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Netflix Streaming, December 2019) Much like teenagers, teenage romantic comedies can get attention through how they present themselves, but they ultimately pass or fail based on the strength of their character. So it is that the plot summary of To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before is catchy yet borderline inane (“Teen girl writes letter to crushes never intending to post them; they are posted.”) and yet the film succeeds because it’s got the characterization and finesse of execution that the premise requires. Lana Condor stars as an introvert high-schooler who suddenly finds herself the centre of attention when her crushes are revealed, and one of them suggests playing out the fantasy to make his not-quite-so-ex-girlfriend jealous. From that point on, the becoming-the-mask plot becomes crystal-clear … but the execution doesn’t drag. The characters are portrayed believably, Condor is very likable, the menagerie of supporting characters is decently handled and it ends on a satisfying note. (But don’t take anything for granted—as it’s based on a trilogy of novels, there are two more sequels planned.) The overall atmosphere is contemporary, sweet, cute, and borderline witty at times. While this isn’t my favourite teenage romance of the year (surprisingly enough, Love, Simon is edging out Blockers), it’s competently handled by director Susan Johnson, blends just enough novelty with tradition and does a lot of mileage out of a good lead performance. Nothing more is needed.

  • Take the Money and Run (1969)

    Take the Money and Run (1969)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (YouTube Streaming, December 2019) When it comes to Woody Allen’s “earlier, funnier movies,” you can’t get much earlier nor much funnier than Take the Money and Run, his first real directorial effort. (While he’s credited as director on What’s Up, Tiger Lily?, that was more of a rearrangement and creative re-dubbing of an existing feature.)  A then-innovative mockumentary featuring a singularly inept bank robber (Allen, obviously), it’s really an excuse for him to throw in as much silliness as possible in a single movie. The jokes start early and seldom let up—and there’s a lot of physical comedy as well. Even at this early point, it’s easy to see the future direction of Allen’s career—the mockumentary form reused in Zelig (or, more generally, the experimentation with form that would reoccur especially in the first half of his career) and the gag-a-minute pacing of his earlier-funnier films. Perhaps more importantly, Take the Money and Run’s best sustained sequence has to do with his talking about romantic relationships, a leitmotif which would form the backbone of his best movies. It’s all wonderfully silly—and contemporary viewers will be surprised to hear a rearrangement of “Soul Bossa Nova” (better known as the Austin Powers theme these days) on the soundtrack. Not particularly ambitious, Take the Money and Run is nonetheless quite successful—it still gets its laughs.

  • Tsubaki Sanjûrô [Sanjuro] (1962)

    Tsubaki Sanjûrô [Sanjuro] (1962)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Criterion Streaming, December 2019) While writer-director Akira Kurosawa’s Sanjuro is recognizably the sequel to his earlier Yojimbo, they don’t really feel like the same movie. While Yojimbo was a very long action epic starring Toshiro Mifune as a Ronin-with-no-name manipulating two criminal factions to their destruction in order to save a village, Sanjuro feels more like a lighthearted episode in which the same ronin-without-a-name cleans up a village from corruption using a crew of ten amusingly younger acolytes. Aside from an atonal ending, the tone is lighter, funnier, and more disposable. It’s also significantly shorter, which helps a bit. From the get-go, the protagonist is portrayed as a genius-level quasi-superhero, able to outthink and outmanoeuvre friends and foes alike. This does lend to Sanjuro an accessible atmosphere as a bit of a fantasy, while reinforcing the protagonist as the centrepiece of the film. Various episodes show how corruption is identified and removed, all leading to an ending where the protagonist goes back on the road, having completed his mission. That’s when Sanjuro takes a bit of a weird turn, ending on a final fight that is not only far more dramatic and suspenseful, but surprisingly bloody as well. (As the story goes, the blood-gushing machine malfunctioned and a torrent of fake blood splattered out—they kept it in the movie even despite how it didn’t fit with the rest of it.)  Still, the movie works just fine as “one more hit” for Yojimbo’s protagonist—and at barely more than an hour and a half, Sanjuro is admirably concise.

  • Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1995)

    Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1995)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Second Viewing, In French, On Cable TV, December 2019) I’m not a big fan of late-period Mel Brooks and Leslie Nielsen played in some remarkable stinkers outside of The Naked Gun series between 1990 and 2001. Given those biases, you can accurately predict my tepid reaction to Dracula: Dead and Loving It. An obvious spoof of the film adaptations of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, it strips down the plot to its barest essential, then adds gags as it goes. While the obvious inspiration is the 1931 Bela Lugosi film (“I never drink wine … oh, what the hell. Let me try it.”), there are obvious pokes here and there at 1922’s Nosferatu, 1967’s The Fearless Vampire Killers and 1992’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula. And while (as someone who’s seen those Dracula movies in the past year or so), there’s something intriguing in seeing the Dracula story boiled down to its essence before, I’m not so happy with the comedy aspect. Dracula: Dead and Loving It simply feels laborious most of the time. In Brooksian fashion, the humour is basic, but the worst part of it is that it’s usually telegraphed well in advance and keeps going long after the humour has faded away. Predictability and insistence are not qualities that mesh well with humour, and one of the big surprises of comparing this film with other spoof comedies is how it feels far less dense with jokes than the better examples of the form. (At least it’s better than the non-funny Friedberg/Seltzer spoofs of the 2000s, although that’s not saying much.)  Still, let’s allow for some leeway: As I’m checking quotes from the film, I’m finding that the movie is far funnier on the page in its original form than on the French dub—this doesn’t change my mind about the pacing and predictability of the film, but it gets an extra point or two for the actual jokes. The other thing is that despite the film’s low budget, there’s a pleasant Victorian atmosphere to the proceedings—the sets and costumes are nice and it surely helps that there’s a lot of cleavage on display from nearly every female character. Then there’s Leslie Nielsen (as Dracula) and Mel Brooks (as Van Helsing) trying to out-ham each other, which is not all that bad. Still, Dracula: Dead and Loving It feels like it squanders a lot of its assets—but, of course, it’s late-period Mel Brooks, so what did we expect?

  • Kumonosu-jô [Throne of Blood] (1957)

    Kumonosu-jô [Throne of Blood] (1957)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2019) Legendary writer-director Akira Kurosawa had a passion for Japanese history and so several of his films (and nearly all his best-known ones) take place deep in historical eras, allowing us to revisit a time and place not often seen outside Japanese cinema. Throne of Blood is very much in this tradition, although it’s more fantasy-focused than many of his other films. A localized adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, it transposes the story to feudal-era Japan, streamlines the action and spends a lot of time creating a foreboding atmosphere. The result is … impressive. From the first few moments, as two soldiers lost in the foggy woods encounter a witch capable of unsettling prophecies, it’s clear that this is not a straight historical re-enactment, and that the film will be as much a fable than a drama. Kurosawa stalwart (and screen legend) Toshiro Mifune once more gets the full spotlight in the lead warrior role, although Isuzu Yamada gives him some strong competition playing the equivalent of Lady Macbeth in unsettling makeup and steely resolve. The Shakespeare references and genre elements (choruses, prophecy, and a great final battle sequence) do much to keep the story accessible and interesting throughout—more so than many of Kurosawa’s other films. Frankly, it does still resonate as one of the best Macbeth adaptions I’ve seen to date, although that should be taken with a grain of salt given that straight Shakespeare adaptations usually bore me. Despite a few lengths, Throne of Blood has aged admirably well because it stands out of time: out of the 1950s for sure, but also out of its own chosen historical period by use of genre elements. It reaches for universality and largely attains it.

  • Look Who’s Talking Now (1993)

    Look Who’s Talking Now (1993)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, December 2019) There’s a point when series should just learn to call it quits before exhausting all audience goodwill, and Look Who’s Talking Now is clearly a second step too far for aa series that should have remained a first instalment. This time, the kids are grown-up and the dogs are talking. Kirstie Alley and John Travolta keep having problems, and the whole thing ends at Christmas. What else do you really need to know about the film? Maybe that its last half-hour drags on beyond belief, and that its lone spark of interest comes from a shared dream between the two leads. For fans of the lead actors, Travolta is suitably dashing and Alley looks great on top of some good comedy chops. Alas, the stunt casting of celebrity voices is completely lost in the French-language dub. Still, the use of kids and animals, and cheap seduction theatrics to tempt a character to adultery does smack of B-grade filmmaking—We’re so far down the copying of the original formula that it’s all feeling rote and familiar now. To be fair, Look Who’s Talking Now is about as good (or maybe even slightly better) than the second film—if you’ve toughed it out through the second movie, then you’re ready to tackle the third.

  • Screamers (1995)

    Screamers (1995)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Second Viewing, In French, On Cable TV, December 2019) If you’re not French-Canadian, you probably don’t know how Screamers was a minor sensation in French-Canada when it came out in 1995. After all, it had been produced in Québec at a time when few Hollywood productions made their way to La Belle Province, was financed by a Québec-based company, directed by a French-Canadian (Christian Duguay), largely crewed by Montréal-area people, and featured then-big-name star Roy Dupuis in a supporting role. For SF fans, it was noteworthy for featuring a script co-written by Dan O’Bannon from a Philip K. Dick story, which was still a bit of a novelty before the big wave of PKD-inspired Hollywood movies of the 2002–2012 decade. Alas, the disappointment was real when Screamers was released and wasn’t anything special. Twenty-five years later, the film has not improved. In fact, it’s now more obnoxious than ever considering that nearly everything in it bears the stamp of cheap mid-1990s filmmaking and has been remade much better by other movies. The dullness sets in early as the film features post-apocalyptic visuals on a planet ravaged by war and an enemy that passes itself as something else. Considering its Philip K. Dick pedigree, it’s no big surprise that the human characters may not be. Considering that it’s a cheap Science Fiction B-movie featuring monsters, it’s also not a surprise that the number of characters constantly dwindles on the way to the ending. Dour, downbeat, and relentlessly ugly, Screamers bears the hallmark of the worst of its filmmaking era. Late-analog effects stick out in a bad way, and a boring script doesn’t help. There are occasional flashes of competence, but those only recall better examples of the form. Roy Dupuis apparently dubs his own character on the French-language version, but that’s not a good thing considering how his French-Canadian accent keeps sticking out among more neutral mid-Atlantic voices. The result is just tedious, ugly, and exasperating. I saw Screamers on VHS in the mid-1990s, but had forgotten about it until now … and am now ready to forget about it once more.

  • Miracle on 34th Street (1994)

    Miracle on 34th Street (1994)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2019) If there’s a time for being sappy, nostalgic, and sentimental, then Christmas is it. Consequently, there’s no use getting mad at a Miracle on 34th Street remake being sappy, nostalgic, and sentimental: That’s the point of it. Polishing the 1940s original by giving it an antagonist, a slightly different ending and not obsessing so much about a character being a divorcee, this remake (penned by John Hughes) does a creditable job bringing the story forward nearly fifty years while keeping its core sentimentality. Briefly summarized, it’s about the judicial system trying to prove whether an old man is indeed Santa Claus—the answer is unsurprising, but it’s getting there that’s important. The Manhattan setting of duelling department stores is oddly comforting, although adding an explicit antagonist does nothing good to the story. I’m divided on the decision to replace the original’s, “bags of letters” resolution in favour of a more abstract “in God we trust” climax, but that may just be the separation-of-church-and-state rationalist in myself speaking—and rationalists need not apply to this movie. At least the acting credentials are fine—Richard Attenborough gets the role of a lifetime playing Santa (was that a spoiler?), while Elizabeth Perkins and Dylan McDermott make for a cute romantic lead. There’s something noteworthy in the film’s cinematography, in that it really does go for the full “soft Technicolor” mood of earlier eras, with characters being shot in diffuse light and strongly backlit to stand out. More accessible but less magical than the original film, this Miracle on 34th Street is fine—we can quibble on the details and its more markedly mercenary intention, but it still works relatively well, and completely understands what it’s trying to be.

  • Den of Thieves (2018)

    Den of Thieves (2018)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Netflix Streaming, December 2019) As someone who has spent the last few weeks playing through (and really enjoying) Grand Theft Auto V, I was perhaps better predisposed than most to enjoy this somewhat generic take on heist movies. Set in Los Angeles and featuring a crew of ex-military personnel planning very sophisticated robberies (sometime under cover of hostage taking), Den of Thieves inevitably brings back to mind such classics as Heat and Dog Day Afternoon, only to feel far more generic. It doesn’t help its case by making the law-and-order side of the characters feel as repellent as the criminals—Gerald Butler stars as a cowboy cop who open boasts that his gang wear badges, and isn’t above intimidating his soon-to-be ex-wife’s friends with a gratuitous psycho-cop routine. Whom to root for in this movie isn’t obvious, until the last few minutes make it clear that the film has a twist ending in mind. (Well, roughly the same twist ending than most heist movies have with a dash of a hidden mastermind thrown in.)  While slickly made with the latest in digital drone technology allowing for some impressive shots, Den of Thieves feels both too long and too short: Writer-director Christian Gudegast wastes time on things that won’t be really important (such as the protagonist’s rotten personal life), and yet feels too short by not developing what could be used to make stronger characters. The protagonist’s divorce arc takes all of three or four scenes and ends at the psycho-cop routine sometime in the second act. Why bother? If you settle on the film being too long, then it could have been recut to focus on the decent action sequences. For action junkies and GTAV enthusiasts, there’s always a thrill in seeing good live-action set-pieces, and if Den of Thieves doesn’t always know when to stop and condense, there is at least one sequence (the traffic-jam shootout) that I fully expect to be reused in the next Grand Theft Auto. Not every movie has to be a classic—some can simply go through the motions and still be satisfying if that’s the kind of thing you’re looking for, and that’s how I choose to assess Den of Thieves—Methadone to Heat’s pure heroin, but still good for most heist movie cravings.

  • The Innocents (1961)

    The Innocents (1961)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (YouTube Streaming, December 2019) Eerie, subtle, and ambiguous, The Innocents is almost a horror movie and almost not a horror movie at once. The opening sequences certainly feel comforting in their familiarity, as a woman (Deborah Kerr) is hired as a governess in a foreboding gothic mansion. The kids, as we find out, aren’t all right as they exhibit signs of maturity beyond their years, and a fascination with morbid or violent things. As the story slowly unfolds (this is meant to be an atmospheric film) and details about the mansion’s tragic back-story emerge, our viewpoint protagonist becomes convinced that a pair of ghosts are possessing the children to relive their doomed romance. But from the viewer’s perspective, things aren’t so clear—is she imagining all of this? This foundation for an inconclusive psychological horror movie being established, The Innocents doesn’t disappoint in its lack of resolution. While relatively daring back in 1961, this kind of thing is now commonplace, and perhaps the aspect of The Innocents that has best survived is the setting—the vast decaying mansion, the isolated surroundings, the macabre imagery all combine to give us a familiar but still-effective backdrop. The film is perhaps most noteworthy as a counterpoint to the kind of cheaper horror movies that was starting to emerge by the early 1960s—while it’s not as fresh as it was back then, it has aged better than many others.

  • Black Mirror: Bandersnatch (2018)

    Black Mirror: Bandersnatch (2018)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Netflix Streaming, December 2019) A novelty experience more than a proper movie, Black Mirror: Bandersnatch is an “interactive experience” where you, the viewer, make choices about what you’re seeing on-screen. The gimmick is less disruptive than you may think given a countdown timer and some judicious storytelling/technical choices, including decision paths that often double back on themselves, presenting new opportunities only if you’d gone through them before. Fortunately, form follows function in that Bandersnatch tells us about the psychotic breakdown (maybe) of an early-1980s computer programmer working on a piece of interactive fiction. Obvious yet weighty themes of free will, parallel universes and the illusion of control pepper the narrative, mirroring the work of the filmmakers and the experience of the viewers (in a very funny tangent, the viewer eventually gets the choice of telling the character that he’s in a Netflix offering, leading to the following clip breaking the fourth wall a few times over). It does work, although not as much as a movie than a rough thought-piece, perhaps not as fully realized as videogames have become. Still, Bandersnatch very much fits in the Black Mirror universe as it gets quite dark at times and there’s a delicious shudder of metafictional angst going through the piece. The 1980s setting is lovely—at some point, we even enter a lavishly detailed recreation of a record/bookstore. Acting-wise, Fionn Whitehead does a good job anchoring the piece, while Alice Lowe gets a warm part playing a psychiatrist, and Will Poulter is perhaps at his most sympathetic as a genius videogame developer. It’s far too early to say whether Bandersnatch will lead to follow-ups or whether those follow-ups will be better or worse: Bandersnatch does offer a decent 90–120 minutes of entertainment, but even the rather clever and seamless nature of the branching became repetitive toward the end, leading to exhaustion rather than satisfaction at closing the film. (For the record; I used a flowchart guide to get to the main endings, so I’m reasonably confident that I’ve seen much of the content.)  I do have substantial qualms about the future of Bandersnatch—it’s a form of entertainment closely linked to a specific proprietary platform with no way to make a compelling independent distribution mechanism, and it’s easy to imagine Bandersnatch disappearing in the future once Netflix goes bankrupt or gets tired of it. But such is the digital era: A movie can be re-recorded or transcoded, videogames can be run inside an emulator, but this kind of entertainment remains fixed for the moment.

  • Five Easy Pieces (1970)

    Five Easy Pieces (1970)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Criterion Streaming, December 2019) The most distinctive aspect of Five Easy Pieces is that it’s a pure undiluted example of New Hollywood filmmaking: Unlikable protagonist, aimless dialogue, not much plot, filthy sets and gritty cinematography all feature heavily here at the expense of just about any classical Hollywood virtue. Yeah, so I don’t really like New Hollywood, which I see as a necessary but transitory period between the restrictions of the Production Code era and the more entertainment-driven era of filmmaking that followed Star Wars. The best I can say about Five Easy Pieces is that it’s relatively short and, as such, doesn’t completely overstay its welcome despite trying really hard. Jack Nicholson deservedly stars as a manual labourer trying to escape the burden of his upper-class childhood as a musical prodigy. He rebels against … well, he rebels, anyway. He meets women, sleeps with them, or at least tries to get a breakfast according to his exacting preferences. Nothing works. He leaves. The end.  Relief.

  • Judgment at Nuremberg (1961)

    Judgment at Nuremberg (1961)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (YouTube Streaming, December 2019) There is a place and a time for everything, including slow-paced dramas dealing with heady questions of shared responsibilities and war crimes. What I’m getting at is that you should give yourself plenty of time to get into Judgment at Nuremberg—at a staggering three hours and eight minutes of mostly courtroom dialogue, it’s a long sit. But you do get a lot for your time—starting with an all-star cast that starts with Spencer Tracy, Burt Lancaster and Marlene Dietrich, all the way to one of William Shatner’s earliest prominent roles. This film is a debate of ideas, as the American occupation struggles with the prosecution of war crimes at a time when Germany is becoming a crucial Cold War playground, and the US can be accused of having inspired some of the Nazi rhetoric. The battle between lawyers gets to some crucial issues, not the least of which is assigning blame for atrocities. Perhaps the most affecting moment of the film comes from well-known material—starkly-presented footage of concentration camps shortly after liberation, with piles of corpses and bulldozers doing mass burials out of health concerns. (Those images aside, be careful about seeing the film as fact—while it’s adapted from real-life events, nearly all the characters are deliberately fictional and condensed from the proceedings.)  Judgment at Nuremberg doesn’t pull any punches in its topic or depiction—it’s cinema as consciously codifying right and wrong, dismissing feeble objections to the contrary. Despite good-faith efforts to make the film cinematic, there is a lot here that could play as a theatrical piece, including a lengthy summation-as-judgment from Tracy that can be seen as a template for director Stanley Kramer’s climactic sequence in the later Guess Who’s Coming for Dinner. The leisurely pace, repetitive material and fixed location doesn’t work against the film as much as you’d think, though: there’s a moral argument here, and it’s not as much about finding right or wrong as it’s about how to establish right in such overwhelming fashion that there can be no lingering doubt about it. Judgment at Nuremberg does amount to an admirable piece of cinema, as compelling today as it was in 1961. But give yourself plenty of time to immerse yourself in it.

  • A Simple Favor (2018)

    A Simple Favor (2018)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Video On-Demand, December 2019) Given Hollywood’s latest addiction to superhero fantasy, sequels, remake, prequels, reboots and rip-offs, please excuse me for a moment if I’m far too excited about an honest-to-goodness thriller with a black comedy attitude. Those aren’t rare, of course, but they’re far better than, say, a middling gender-swapped remake of a familiar franchise. So, in other news, here we have director Paul Feig trying his hand at a strongly plotted thriller after finding fame with R-rated comedies and the Ghostbusters reboot. It’s not a complete shift, as A Simple Favor has strong (perhaps too strong) comedy moments … but it’s a shift in tone closer to The Girl on the Train than to The Heat. Here, we have a perfectly-cast Anna Kendrick as a mommy vlogger, befriending a fellow but temperamentally opposed take-no-prisoners Mom with a corporate career played by Blake Lively. But that’s just the spark, as the plot gets going when the other moms disappear and our heroine goes sleuthing to reconcile a few details that don’t make sense. It gets far, far more complicated after that, but it’s good to keep some secrets. Suffice to say that there are twists and turns (at some point, a character screams, “Are you trying to Diabolique me?”, which was particularly funny given that I had watched that film only a few days earlier) and even if you can guess the crux of the third act’s twist, there’s enough plot left after that to keep things interesting. There’s an intriguingly modern edge to the vlogging angle, but otherwise this is a classic thriller, well handled although not immune to a few indulgent leaps into dark comedy. Feig may be falling back on too-familiar comfort material when he lets comedy leap to the forefront, especially late during the movie when we should be getting down to the action rather than the jokes. A Simple Favor is a fun and absorbing thriller—Kendrick and Lively have a good rapport, and both seem well suited to their character. The French songs that pepper the soundtrack are well-chosen (it helps if you understand the lyrics), the editing is taut and Feig seems to be having fun along the way. It all amounts to a very respectable domestic thriller, the kind of which we should see more often.

  • Jungfrukällan [The Virgin Spring] (1960)

    Jungfrukällan [The Virgin Spring] (1960)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Criterion Streaming, December 2019) There’s something almost hilariously weird in that Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring, a European art-house classic, has a plot similar to grindhouse nasty The Last House of the Left. In both cases, we have a daughter getting raped and killed by hooligans who happen to seek refuge at the house of the daughter’s parents—and the father exerting bloody revenge. One of these films is considered high art; the other one basic exploitation and the differences are illuminating. In Bergman’s version, the vengeance doesn’t right things, and some atonement will be required—as opposed to the revenge of later American version of the story. Still, for the unaware viewer, the slide from a typical Bergman medieval drama into genre-adjacent revenge territory can be surprising—I somehow didn’t remember the film’s narrative, and was as surprised as anyone else when the film got far more violent than its dull first few minutes suggest. The climactic sequence, with its drawn-out revenge against guilty and innocents alike, is not played like a vengeance fantasy and that may be our biggest clue as to what distinguishes the high and low versions of the same plot. Of course, the Bergman version does conclude on an elegiac note as the father promises to repent for the violence by building a church over the spring that emerged from under his daughter’s corpse—a far, far cry from the grandguignolesque 2009 remake of The Last House on the Left that concluded with a bad guy’s head exploding in a microwave. Somehow, I don’t think Bergman would have approved of that variation.