Movie Review

  • The Power (1968)

    The Power (1968)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2019) It just takes a few moments in producer George Pal’s The Power, as the title pulses in unison with a heartbeat, to realize that we’re headed into weird science-fiction thriller territory. The strangeness soon intensifies as a government man walks into a respectable-looking laboratory in which human endurance tests push volunteers to their frontiers of pain … for space science! (This is unnerving, but never actually portrayed as evil. Nor is our sadistic scientist portrayed as anything but the story’s hero. And you won’t believe the set design. But let’s move on.)  But for sheer plotting contrivances, wait a few minutes as a conference begins and an overly dramatic scientist states that a questionnaire has revealed the existence of a super-powered human sitting around the table. Even a convincing demonstration of power doesn’t bring the audience closer to guessing who’s the superhuman. Of course, this wouldn’t be a horror/SF hybrid without superpowers being used for evil, and soon the nature of reality takes a turn (in a rather charming late-1960s way) as the bodies start piling up. I shouldn’t be too hard on the story, which is adapted from a Frank M. Robinson genre SF novel. But this little-known movie adaptation takes things in uncanny directions, with eerie moments sandwiched between inelegant exposition and classic suspense movie thrills. It doesn’t make a shred of sense (why would a super-smart person, even evil, let himself be detected, let alone go on increasingly baroque ways of killing off everyone around him?) but there are a few good moments along the way. Heck, we even get to attend a swinging sixties party in between the chills and thrills. And ho boy, what about that cimbalom score. A surprisingly normal-looking George Hamilton (by later super-suntanned standards) stars as a dashing scientist, with some assistance from bouffant-coiffed Susanne Pleshette at a scientist used as love interest and a dapper-thin Michael Rennie as a government agent. There are dozens of ways The Power could have been made differently—funnier, scarier, smarter, more believable. But none of those more restrained way would have had the dash of craziness that the result does. The last few minutes are an audibly delightful mixture of the entire film’s highlights mixed with proto-psychedelic imagery and a plot twist that explains a few things. Good movie? Not really. Worth a look? Almost certainly … but you must expect some weird stuff by late-1960s MGM standards—it’s no accident this one landed in 1968, just as Hollywood was beginning to stretch its muscles in terms of what it could be doing outside the constraints of traditional filmmaking.

  • Made in Paris (1966)

    Made in Paris (1966)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2019) Those who maintain that movie musicals are about style more than actually singing and dancing should be comforted by Made in Paris, a nearly obscure mid-1960s MGM film that has a minimal amount of music and dance, but pretty much the same attitude shared by the musical genre. The messy script has our New York-based heroine heading off to Paris to be pursued by three suitors, only to end unconvincingly not with the devastatingly charming French fashion designer, nor the cynical American journalist, but her boss (whom she’d previously bashed over the head with a frying pan after him getting a bit handsy) having crossed the Atlantic to win her back. I’m spoiling the ending because it’s best to be prepared for its unsatisfying nature, but also to make the point that the best reason to watch the film is Ann-Margret’s bubbly performance as a feisty redhead—it’s as is Amy Adams or Isla Fisher had travelled in time to end up in a cute 1960s musical with go-go dancing and enough haute couture to make any gal cry. Playing off no less than Louis Jourdan, Richard Crenna and Chad Everett, Ann-Margret is a redheaded tornado of joy here, and the film is an absolute must-see to anyone already charmed by her leading role in Viva Las Vegas and other movies of the period. Made in Paris is clunky, but she’s quite wonderful in the middle of it all, and she compensates for many other missteps.

  • State of the Union (1948)

    State of the Union (1948)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2019) The main draw for State of the Union is that it’s another Tracy/Hepburn pairing. There’s a good reason why it’s not usually considered one of the most popular of their films, though: as a Frank Capra political drama featuring both of them as an estranged, nearly divorced couple, it doesn’t have the feel-good comic legacy than many of their movies do—except for Sea of Grass or Keeper of the Flame, which I like but are this close to downbeat.  The chosen tone for most of the film isn’t the kind of stuff that makes for fond memories. If you’re familiar with other Frank Capra movies delving into American politics, you can already see the shape of the plot as a down-to-earth businessman is convinced to run for president by his insanely ambitious girlfriend (Angela Lansbury, in a surprisingly detestable role that prefigures her turn in The Manchurian Candidate). Of course, our hero will see the light of American democracy and send the vultures away. Still, the fun of the movie is getting there, the political aligning with the personal as Spencer Tracy rediscovers his morals and boots the bad girlfriend away in order to reconcile with the virtuous Katharine Hepburn. That’s how it goes, and even knowing it doesn’t tarnish the heartfelt way the film makes his point. American politics circa 2019 aren’t exactly the purest, warmest, incorruptible they’ve ever been—and it’s at times like these that movies such as State of the Union can remind us of some good old-fashioned basic values. Now that we’ve established that political junkies will like the film’s timeless message, what about Tracy/Hepburn shippers? Well, State of the Union is average when it comes to the romance—Hepburn doesn’t come in until the second act, and while the dramatic arc of reconciliation does offer something different from their other movies, it’s not quite the fizzy feel-good material of their highlights. The film does have its comic moments, but it’s far more interested in its dramatic points. As a viewer, its success will depend on whether you like Capra’s straightforward and sentimental paean to democratic ideals. I happen to like it a lot, but I can see the rough spots during which the film gets overtly preachy—even if I happen to agree.

  • Le dernier métro [The Last Metro] (1980)

    Le dernier métro [The Last Metro] (1980)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2019) Distinctive for being one of writer-director François Truffaut’s last movies, Le dernier metro takes us backstage in Nazi-occupied Paris, as the story draws a love triangle between a theatrical actor who moonlights as a Resistance member, his opposite leading lady who owns the theatre, and her Jewish husband hiding underneath the stage. Executed with clever period detail, Le dernier métro borrows from theatrical lore, Nazi occupation atmosphere and romantic suspense to deliver a film that’s as rich as it’s long at 131 minutes. Featuring no less than Catherine Deneuve and Gérard Depardieu at their youngish peaks, feeling as if it misses an entire third act, the film culminates in a scene that straddles dreams and the theatrical stage, with a lack of a dramatic finale that weirdly plays in the film’s favour. Le dernier métro may not be one of Truffaut’s top-tier film, but it’s good enough to be worth a look, knowing that it’s not going to play out conventionally.

  • Eating Raoul (1982)

    Eating Raoul (1982)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2019) Dark comedy is a tricky balance of elements, and for every dark comedy I liked, I can name you two others I didn’t—it takes a lot of skill to balance the grimness with the laughs, and many people who try only sound like complete psychopaths at the end of the process. But the alchemy holds in Eating Raoul, as singular a film as it’s possible to image. Writer-director Paul Bartel not only cooked up the script and made it happen, he also stars as half of the couple that are the film’s protagonists: Intelligent, likable, off-beat, asexual, poor and amoral, they eventually cook up a scheme to kill off “rich perverts” by posing as sex workers and luring marks to their deaths. The scheme soon spins out of control, but the joke of the film is that its eccentric characters are the heroes of the story, and no temporary disagreement is going to tear them apart. It goes all the way to the dark extreme suggested by the title, but somehow never loses its verve or its utterly deadpan humour (a more appropriate expression than most here—there’s even a joke about having separate frying pans for murder and for cooking). It’s remarkable that the film remains funny without being cloyingly comic: this is a film made for a specific audience that can learn to get the jokes rather than have them explained to them. Much of the credit for the film’s success goes to Bartel as a performer—overweight, balding, not all that photogenic, but likable all the less—and the pinup-worthy Mary Woronov as his partner in crime. On paper, Eating Raoul sounds like a repulsive mess—but on-screen, it quietly works wonders. It’s quite an achievement—and a terrific film as well.

  • Ice Station Zebra (1968)

    Ice Station Zebra (1968)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2019) Some movies pass into legend solely based on their fandom, and so one of the most interesting facts about Ice Station Zebra is how it was billionaire Howard Hugues’s favourite movie when he was in his reclusive phase—so much so that he took advantage of owning a local TV station by calling them to request that the film be shown in a loop all night long. (Later, he set himself up a private movie theatre and reportedly ran the film 150 times in the final months before his death.) Crazily enough, you can see in the film some of what may have attracted him to it. Adapted from an Alistair MacLean novel, Ice Station Zebra could justifiably be called a forerunner of the modern techno-thriller genre: Predicated on a high-tech plot device (a top-secret capsule from a satellite having crash-landed in the Arctic) and bolstered by good old-fashioned cold-war thriller elements (Americans vs. the Soviets, racing in submarines to retrieve the capsule), it blends the environmental hazards of polar conditions with human traitors and time-ticking suspense. It’s a high-octane thriller even by modern standards, and having a cast of big names (Rock Hudson, Ernest Borgnine and Patrick McGoohan) as headliners only helps. Shot in luscious 70 mm with then-terrific special effects, there’s a crispness to the cinematography (even on TV!) that does betray is studio-bound production. It’s hard to avoid thinking that if Howard Hugues had stayed in the movie business without going crazy, he probably would have gravitated to engineering-heavy big-thrill films such as Ice Station Zebra. Would an elderly Hugues have enjoyed things like The Hunt for Red October? Almost certainly. And while the movie will never attract as famous a fan again, you can have a look and see what the fuss was about.

  • Trois couleurs: rouge [Three colours: Red] (1994)

    Trois couleurs: rouge [Three colours: Red] (1994)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, September 2019) Third entry in Krzysztof Kieślowski’s “Three colours” trilogy, Rouge is almost certainly the most complex and least describable of them. It’s about a woman, yes, and an eavesdropping judge, sure, and yet so much more that you can’t really slot it into one of the archetypical movie plots. It’s almost easier to talk about its themes than its plot elements: it’s about coincidence and philosophy and interconnectedness and privacy and happenstance and many other things as well. As red-tinged as its title, it eventually pulls together characters from previous films in the trilogy in short appearances. Carefully crafted, it’s enigmatic and sustains scrutiny, although you may be forgiven for not thinking that it’s all that much fun—this isn’t about entertainment at much as cinema-as-art, yet not quite so inaccessible as many other movies with similar objectives. Rouge is a good cap to a highly rated trilogy, and absorbing viewing as long as you’re willing to give it enough time and undivided attention.

  • Hitchcock/Truffaut (2015)

    Hitchcock/Truffaut (2015)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, September 2019) After watching Hitchcock/Truffaut and seeing a few of François Truffaut’s best-known movies, I think I’ve got a new name for the old “what celebrities, dead or alive, would you like to have over for a dinner party?”: I really would have liked to talk filmmaking with Truffaut. One fascinating footnote in his biography is the way he idolized Hitchcock as a young man, all the way to interviewing the English director at length in order to write a book about him. The book was published in 1966, but Hitchcock/Truffaut describes the five days Truffaut spent with Hitchcock in order to tell us how those interviews came to be, and how they influenced both filmmakers. The meeting between the two (indeed, their friendship that would last until Hitchcock’s death) is the stuff that is almost too true for cinephiles, and this documentary really illustrates it well. Using photos, movie clips, interview footage, highlighted documents and audio recordings of the interviews, the film explains how the two filmmakers met, the insights that Truffaut got from Hitchcock about his films and the growing rapport between the two. I don’t expect most audiences to make much of the film, especially if they’re not already fans of either one of the directors. There’s some awkward sound editing in the final product—silences and cuts probably reflecting the original, but feeling disruptive to the flow of the film. It naturally spends more time on some of Hitchcock’s best-known films, specifically Vertigo (which I should re-watch at some point) and Psycho. Still, the appeal here is seeing two titans of cinema (even though Truffaut was still a rookie director at the time) have the kind of high-level chat only possible between two people fluent in cinematic language. It’s quite inspiring, oddly likable and makes Truffaut looking incredibly likable as a star-struck fanboy until the interview begins and he’s back in his film-critic persona with unlimited access to a major director.

  • Death Race: Beyond Anarchy (2018)

    Death Race: Beyond Anarchy (2018)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, September 2019) If you’re keeping score at home, Death Race: Beyond Anarchy is the sixth Death Race movie, and the fourth in the modern rebooted series. But even missing a few instalments isn’t that much of a problem in approaching Beyond Anarchy, so loosely does it not care about overall continuity. The rebooted series is only about one thing, after all: a series of movies in which cars race and do battle with one another. The convoluted nature of the rebooted series means that this is the first sequel to the 2008 reboot (the other ones were prequels), but this matters far less than you’d think—it’s still the same thing, except that this one cranks up the nudity. Although, comparing what I’ve seen to what’s being cited as evidence for the film’s rating, I’m sure that what I saw on TV was edited down to something between PG-13 and R. Even in its edited version, however, Beyond Anarchy is not uplifting cinema. Taking place deep in dystopia, it features excessive violence, swearing so pervasive that it attains meaninglessness, women treated as objects and an overall nihilism that nullifies the film’s stakes. If you’re looking for name actors, there’s Danny Trejo doing the strict minimum (which is still more enjoyable than the rest of the other actors combined), and Danny Glover slumming it up. But the film’s greatest sin is that even the action itself isn’t anything special—the ending sequence is a bit better than the rest, but that’s not a lot to save the film from pointlessness. At this stage, you know that they’re going to make more sequels until the premise has been wrung dry … but how will anyone tell?

  • Overboard (1987)

    Overboard (1987)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On TV, September 2019) You don’t have to go back all that far in time to find movies with premises that seem unacceptable by today’s standards. With Overboard, for instance, we have a man taking revenge over a rich woman by making her believe that she’s his wife after she suffers a comprehensive case of amnesia. There are complications, and the film tries its best to not make it extra-creepy, but that’s still a film based on an extended series of lies passing itself off as a comedy. (Significantly enough, when the film was remade in 2018, the genders were swapped, and several other details were added to make less creepy.)  You can either take the premise as-is, or have a hard time with the film. If you’re the forgiving suspension-of-reality type, you’ll find that the result is a middle-of-the-road 1980s comedy, albeit once with the great good sense of having husband-and-wife Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell in the lead roles, leading to quite a bit more chemistry than usual. Considering the average nature of the film and its humour, it’s a good thing that at least the lead performances are watchable. The belligerent romantic tension works within the premise of the film, although there’s a layer of discomfort that’s also built into it. Overboard is not exactly an essential, not exactly a dud, just a film that gives its actors just enough slack to pull the film on their own shoulders.

  • Sabotage (1936)

    Sabotage (1936)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2019) You can make a good case that Sabotage was the film in which Hitchcock’s talent as a filmmaker came into focus. While he had, at the time, more than a decade’s experience in directing, this is the film that encapsulates a lot of what his later movies would be about. Yes, The 39 Steps and The Man Who Knew Too Much both precede it, but Sabotage has one of the first of Hitchcock’s classic illustrations of how to create suspense, with a boy unwittingly carrying a bomb onto a bus and the audience knowing that it’s about to explode. The overall story is a sordid tale of a deep-cover foreign agent creating deadly chaos in London, reinforced by the drama of his English wife suddenly discovering who he truly is. Several touches show Hitchcock perfecting the various aspects of his direction that would soon see him recruited by Hollywood—the oddball details, the touches of dark humour, the domestic concerns crashing into criminal ones. Hitchcock may not have been all that good at titles (Sabotage was accompanied by Saboteur a few years later), but he already knew how to put together a well-crafted movie back then. While it’s going to be of most interest to Hitchcock completists, Sabotage holds up better than many of its contemporaries.

  • Willow (1988)

    Willow (1988)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Blu Ray, September 2019) I’m aware that Willow has its fans—if you were a fantasy fan of the right age in 1988, Willow was supposed to be a genre-defining event, a bit of hype that was helped along with having George Lucas as the film’s screenwriter. The intent was to deliver a fantasy equivalent to Star Wars (you can recognize themes running through both), working from an archetypical plot executed through state-of-the-art technology. The result, well, isn’t quite as successful. Drawn-out, dull, repetitive, predictable, it’s somewhat balanced with a great lead performance by Warwick Davis, some oddly likable bits of worldbuilding, Val Kilmer in a breakout role, and some digital special effects that, in retrospect, demonstrate the road to even more sophisticated CGI. Watching the film as a middle-aged man, I can’t quite say that it has aged well—the film’s young target audience is obvious, and part of the point of fantasy stories is the immersion that the sometimes-dicey special effects break. For every good thing that makes us like Willow, there’s at least one other bad thing pulling us farther away. Clearly, I’m far too old to watch it as intended.

  • Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970)

    Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Second Viewing, Hoopla Steaming, September 2019) I have vivid memories of watching this film as a kid, and being unsettled by the idea of a supercomputer taking over humanity. If anything, re-watching the film as an adult is not necessarily any less disquieting—The Forbin Project takes an almost gleeful amount of time and details to explain how this new supercomputer is invulnerable, impossible to stop and impossible to starve. There is an effective plot beat early in the movie (“There is another system”) that should prepare you for the nightmare ahead, as the film runs through the steps required for the computer to complete its enslavement of humanity, with our heroes being unable to stop it. The paranoia here is top-notch, and the matter-of-fact direction from Joseph Sargent barely represses the growing hysteria of the situation as any human countermoves are detected and deactivated. The now-primitive technology from 1970 paradoxically makes the film more interesting these days, as it creates a near-allegorical atmosphere that would be surely punctured by any modern remake. There is some interesting material for contemplation in having the computer’s motives being somewhat benevolent despite its harsh methods. I’m not entirely happy by the ending, not as much for its downbeat nature (which follows where the film has been heading all the time) but for its lack of final conflict, or strong coda—especially for techno-horror, where you can have a gut-punch denouement. Still, I quite like the result: Colossus: The Forbin Project is a gloriously nasty nightmare of a film, and one that still manages to unsettle even fifty years and several fundamental technological advances later.

  • The Black Hole (1979)

    The Black Hole (1979)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Second Viewing, On Cable TV, September 2019) I distinctly remember seeing trailers for The Black Hole on TV—it’s hard to forget the spectacular “meteorite heading for the heroes” shot that capped it off. Viewing the film as an adult is something else—It’s a film with a strong split personality, both aimed at kids with cute robots and terrible logic, but also a dark and nightmarish Science Fiction drama that almost literally ends in hell. (“Event Horizon for kids” strikes far too close to the truth to be a joke description.) As a result, The Black Hole can feel like a schizophrenic experience: a special effects showcase (they aged better than you’d expect), a summer blockbuster clearly taking aim at Star Wars’s success, a horror-lite story with easily guessable “twists,” and a good old-fashioned space adventure. In the middle of so much stuff, the cast doesn’t get enough attention, what with names such as Maximillian Schell, Robert Forster, Anthony Perkins, Yvette Mimieux and Ernest Borgnine—what kind of movie was this? There is stuff in there that is so clearly of the 1970s that watching them today feels alien—I mean: a robot shooting gallery, ESP with robots, a quote-spewing robot? If you haven’t seen The Black Hole in a while, have another look at it. If you haven’t seen it yet, do it now, and strap yourself in for a wild mixture of elements that you wouldn’t necessarily put in the same movie.

  • Dune (1984)

    Dune (1984)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Second or Third Viewing, On Blu Ray, September 2019) At least two generations of Science Fiction fans have now commented at length on David Lynch’s Dune, and it’s easy to take cheap shots at the result. As an adaptation to one of the most widely read, widely known best-selling SF novels of all time, this is a film that sets itself up for failure: There’s no way a mere two-hours-and-seventeen-minute film could do justice to a densely packed 500-page novel that launched a mythology that barely fits on a single shelf. That holds even true considering how inwardly focused the novel can be, with complex conspiracies, duelling factions, sweeping galactic events and subtleties on top of subtleties. In fact, considering the nature of the source material, I’d say that Lynch’s version does quite well with what it brings to the screen. The special effects are not particularly good by today’s standards (and there are a lot of them), but the set design and costumes remain effective, and the sheer ambition of the film does create some amount of sympathy. Of course, I’m not exactly looking at Dune without a healthy dose of nostalgic wonder—I watched the film once or twice as a teenager and I credit it with what was necessary to read the novel. (It’s a great novel, one of my favourites, but it’s not a bad idea to have pictures in your mind to understand who’s who and what’s what.)  If the film seems a bit crazy and over-the-top as a middle-aged adult, it’s a good kind of crazy and over-the-top. Even when it doesn’t quite succeed, when it looks silly, when it clearly bites off more than it can chew, it’s still wonderfully ambitious. The cast is an amazing mixture of generations of actors (I mean: super-young Virginia Madsen alongside super-old José Ferrer, with various pop-culture icons such as Sting, Patrick Stewart, Sean Young, Kyle MacLachlan and Linda Hunt? That’s wild.) That remains interesting even when the film gets caught up in the mechanics of the plot and gadgets it shows on-screen. Dune escapes the question of whether it’s good or bad—it’s a good thing that it exists, flaws and all.