Movie Review

  • Heaven Can Wait (1943)

    Heaven Can Wait (1943)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, September 2019) I started watching Heaven Can Wait reluctantly, convinced that it was going to be the original that led to the 1978’s Heaven Can Wait remake (which I really don’t like). But the Heaven can Wait original is called Here Comes Mr. Jordan and this is a completely different film. It ends up being a comedy by none other than Ernst Lubitsch, featuring Don Ameche recounting his life to the Devil in order to be admitted in Hell. As with most of Lubitsch’s films, it features a rather good script (adapted from a theatrical play, hence the strong dialogue) filled with clever touches, and an unobtrusive directing style that makes it absorbing viewing. Gene Tierney holds the female lead, with ample chemistry with Ameche when it counts. It’s a film made by people aware that there’s a jaded audience on the other side of the screen, eager to be seduced by a film but having been disappointed before. As a result, it feels as if Heaven Can Wait is constantly nodding at its audience, comforting them when it wants to and surprising them in other ways. It’s quite a likable movie, and it’s one of many that affirms Lubitsch’s strong touch on the material he directed.

  • Two Lovers and a Bear (2016)

    Two Lovers and a Bear (2016)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2019) After seeing Kim Nguyen’s poetic Le Marais and then his techno-thriller-ish The Hummingbird Project, I was curious as to how a filmmaker could go from one to the other. It turns out that Two Lovers and a Bear holds part of the answer—or, at least, mixes a harsh reality with suspense mechanisms with an oneiric sensibility that occasionally turns the film into something quite different. There is some built-in interest in the premise, which follows two young people madly in love with each other in Canada’s deep, deep north—the kind of arctic-circle north that scares even Canadians that live in the kind of climate that scares Americans. Humans are not meant to live that far north without considerable assistance, and nearly everything there is measured against the imperatives of temperature and distance to the south where it’s not always frozen. Our two titular lovers are played by Dane DeHaan and Tatiana Maslany—it goes without saying that Maslany acts circles around DeHaan, but the climate suits him: he’s not nearly as annoying nor emotionally distant here than in many other movies. As for the bear, well, the bear is an imaginary companion that only speaks to him, not her. When they are convinced that a stalker is threatening her, they strike out southward, getting stuck in a blizzard and eventually discovering an abandoned military base that can act as shelter. But the stalker is as imaginary as the bear—and if it’s not clear enough from the get-go that these are not emotionally healthy characters, they then burn their sole shelter to make a point. The rest of the film barrels toward its tragic but romantic conclusion, with intrusions of the fantastic into reality that, to me, act as a bridge between Nguyen’s earlier work and the somewhat more realistic nature of his latest film. I can’t say that I really enjoyed Two Lovers and a Bear: I didn’t like the characters, the ending, the undisciplined blend of genres. But it did hold my attention, and there were a few moments that were particularly successful. Suddenly, I’m far more interested in Nguyen’s filmography: I can gather a sense of direction from it, and I hope that his next project will keep going even further in that direction.

  • Smultronstället [Wild Strawberries] (1957)

    Smultronstället [Wild Strawberries] (1957)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Criterion Streaming, September 2019) While I’ve managed to remain interested in some of Ingmar Bergman’s movies, my default assessment toward them remains that of the prototypical European art-house film: long, dull, definitely not aimed at me. Wild Strawberries doesn’t escape that assessment—it’s the story of an older man on a road trip, using the time on the road and stops on the way to reflect on his life and loves. Running on nostalgia for the character’s past, it’s a series of episodes as secondary characters board the car, they make a few stops, and everything he experiences lead him to reflect even more intently on his past. I don’t dislike the results (the film does score more than a few good moments), but I’m not exactly amazed either—it’s a fine film, but one that will speak louder to others. I strongly suspect that I like it more now than I would had I seen it twenty years ago, and will like it even more in twenty years. But for now, Wild Strawberries feels like middle-of-the-road Bergman to me, reusing familiar tools to deliver something that appeals to his own sensibilities. A success by that metric, but not necessarily a guaranteed good time for audiences.

  • La Dolce Vita [The Good Life] (1960)

    La Dolce Vita [The Good Life] (1960)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, September 2019) At nearly three hours of a nearly plotless movie about a nearly unlikable protagonist, writer-director Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita can be a trying viewing experience. It’s a collage of scenes with minimal narrative connective tissue, a lot of supporting characters that come and go without resolution, a decidedly depressing outlook on the search for meaning and enough ambiguity and loose ends to frustrate anyone who thinks that cinema is a primarily story-driven art form. That used to describe me almost perfectly a few years ago, but I’ve grown far more relaxed in my outlook for a while, striving to find pleasure even in movies that would have exasperated me not too long ago. La Dolce Vita does manage to remain interesting despite having been made into cliché—much of what it did to shock audiences back in 1960 (it was banned in a few countries) has been remade, redone, and re-examined (often far more interestingly, sometimes even by Fellini himself). We’re not exactly shocked anymore by a protagonist going from woman to woman, adventure to adventure, excess after excess in search of existential fulfillment. We’re not so shocked by backless dresses, form-fitting bras or prudish stripteases filmed to avoid showing nudity. There are scores of meandering films chronicling a few days in the life of an erring protagonist. But La Dolce Vita remains the ur-example of the form for a reason—it’s at its best when it jumps the bounds of strict Italian neorealism to spend some time in Fellini’s expressionist imagination. It features an impressive number of striking women: Anita Ekberg certainly makes an impression as a movie star in the film’s most purely enjoyable moment. But above all, La Dolce Vita features Marcello Mastroianni, world-class-cool despite playing a borderline reprehensible character. We can coast a long time on Mastrantonio’s charm and the odd visuals that the film throws at us in the middle of the protagonist’s search for meaning. It doesn’t really lead anywhere but a melancholic sense of missed opportunities, but it’s an interesting trip. This being said: I’ve seen the film, all 174 minutes of it. I don’t need to do so again anytime soon.

  • Majo no takkyûbin [Kiki’s Delivery Service] (1989)

    Majo no takkyûbin [Kiki’s Delivery Service] (1989)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, September 2019) Oh, what a lovely film. Kiki’s Delivery Service’s comforting, joyful tone starts early on as a thirteen-year-old girl, witch from birth, decides that now is the time to leave for her year away from home in learning how to become an adult. The departure is curiously drama-free (it’s clearly a film made for kids in that the occasion is portrayed as an adventure rather than an anxious white-knuckle event for her parents) and that sets the tone of a film without antagonists other that the protagonist’s own self-doubts. The pleasantness extends to the film’s redefinition of what it is to be a witch, keeping the flying broom and the black cat (hilariously snarky), but completely erasing any of the negative connotations of the term by western standards. Much of Kiki’s Delivery Service is a simple slice-of-life adventure in which nothing terrible happens, our protagonist discovering a few life lessons along the way and events reaching a spectacular conclusion when a gentle disaster threatens her new city. Hayao Miyazaki’s touch has seldom been gentler than here—the character design of companion Jiji is particularly cute, even for an animal as overrepresented in fiction as a black cat. It’s a very different viewing experience, and a truly enjoyable one. Nearly everybody in the film is quite nice and it all feels like one big friendly hug.

  • Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex * But Were Afraid to Ask (1972)

    Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex * But Were Afraid to Ask (1972)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, September 2019) Time advances and leaves some things behind—watching writer-director Woody Allen’s Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex * But Were Afraid to Ask feels like a relic of an earlier era. Very loosely adapted from a then-bestselling sex advice book (the only material kept being the questions, answered by comic sketches penned by Allen), it’s an anthology film with the typical strengths and weaknesses of the form. Much of the subject matter has gone from shocking to boring in half a century flat, leaving only such things as humour and acting to keep the thing afloat. Fans of Allen’s nebbish persona will get a few treats along the way—the opening segment has him anachronistically riffing as a court jester with designs on the queen, while a later quite amusing segment has him face off against a mad sex research scientist and then a gigantic disembodied breast. Easily at its best when it’s at its most absurd, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex * But Were Afraid to Ask hits a comic highlight in a sequence describing the inner workings of a male body during a one-night stand (featuring Burt Reynolds in what’s possibly his weirdest cameo), or when it lets Gene Wilder work through a bestiality premise to its dumbest conclusion. Much of the rest of the film, alas, is just dull. A sketch about a TV show based on fetishism must have felt old even back in 1972, while another about exhibitionism feels like a single joke extended over several long minutes. There’s a cross-dressing sequence that fails to get a single smile—the conflation between cross-dressing and homosexuality has aged poorly. Despite those misfires, this is one of Allen’s “earlier, funnier movies,” and it does give a glimpse at Allen’s glib genius, his madcap imagination (long since abandoned) and his most likable screen persona. This being said, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex * But Were Afraid to Ask does remain more vulnerable than most of Allen’s early films to our changing perception of Allen as a highly problematic figure when it comes to sexual relationships—even if the age difference between him and his other co-stars such as Lynn Redgrave here is a “mere” eight years or so. Some things do age poorly … like Allen himself.

  • The Name of the Rose (1986)

    The Name of the Rose (1986)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, September 2019) It’s been decades since I’ve read Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose and I certainly didn’t understand much of it at the time—it’s the kind of novel with so much depth that it obscures its own narrative strengths through an excess of detail. Fortunately, writer-director Jean-Jacques Annaud’s film adaptation wisely knows what to keep and what to simplify. The result is a surprisingly engaging story of murder, inquisition, books, sex, and hidden labyrinths set in a fourteenth-century monastery … featuring a medieval version of Sherlock Holmes. Sean Connery is splendid as the protagonist, a contemporary mind stuck in the dark ages, whose gravelly wisdom only breaks into giddiness within a library. (Ah, a character after my own heart!)  A still-impressive support cast rounds The Name of the Rose, with Michael Lonsdale and F. Murray Abraham being their usual selves, and early but substantial roles for both Christian Slater and Ron Perlman. Still, it’s the plot that takes centre stage, what with a murder investigation conducted very much against the leaders of the abbey, and a merciless inquisitor taking matters in his own hands. It’s a heady mixture, and the film never gets any better than when the characters break into a hidden library broken up in a maze. Annaud may have stripped much of the extraneous meta-semiotic material, but enough cleverness remains to make The Name of the Rose a superior thriller—more ambitious, decidedly more atmospheric and certainly more interesting than most.

  • Help! (1965)

    Help! (1965)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, September 2019) History suggests that The Beatles were high during a substantial portion of Help!’s production, which may explain why the film seems to stumble during its execution, circling its concept without reliably hitting its marks. It also serves to explain the bizarre sense of humour, a blend of non sequiturs and deadpan—history tells us the script is from The Goon Show alumni, but to modern viewers it will feel a lot like pre-weaponized Monty Python. The plot (and there’s one) has to do with murderous cultists pursuing Ringo Starr for the ring that’s stuck on his finger, but never mind that: This being from The Beatles, the highlights are musical interludes that feel like pre-MTV music videos, with the group goofing around as hard as they can. My favourite part of the film is probably the on-screen text adding contextual information and added jokes—the intermission alone is also very funny. Compared to A Hard Day’s Night, Help! feels very different: Not quite about the people’s idea of The Beatles and more about themselves. The budget is clearly higher and the script considerably less coherent—although that kind of anything-goes humour can have its charm as well. (The scene in which the Beatles record a song in the middle of a field, protected by a ring of tanks, is special.)  In keeping with the times, there’s quite a bit of Bond parody made even funnier by Bond saying that he didn’t like The Beatles in the previous year’s Goldfinger. The editing can be lighting-fast at times, helping the film stay remarkably interesting while still being dated in its references to the mid-1960s. It’s all goofy fun, but it’s clear why A Hard Day’s Night holds up better and is more often shown these days.

  • The Ghost and Mr. Chicken (1966)

    The Ghost and Mr. Chicken (1966)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2019) I’ve been watching so many great (or at least respectable) 1960s movies lately that an impulse viewing of The Ghost and Mr. Chicken (motivated by no other reason that the title was similar to The Ghost and Mrs. Muir) brought me back to some kind of more reasonable assessment of the period—let’s face it: the 1960s weren’t all French New Wave and New Hollywood: there were plenty of crude B-grade (or worse) stinkers in the mix. So it is that The Ghost and Mr. Chicken is far closer to mediocre zero-effort filmmaking: pedestrian direction, lame jokes, unlikable protagonist (Don Rickles isn’t for everyone, I guess) and very predictable plotting in the Scooby-Doo vein. (Of course, it wasn’t supernatural… OR WAS IT?!?)  Even using the old favourite “spend a night in a haunted house!” premise doesn’t do much to raise any interest in the final result. There’s little artistic intent here nor skillful execution in The Ghost and Mr. Chicken—just a cheap comic star vehicle that falls almost completely flat if you’re not already a fan of the actor being featured.

  • Jules et Jim (1962)

    Jules et Jim (1962)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Criterion Streaming, September 2019) Those who hold long-seated stereotypes about the French Nouvelle Vague as a talky genre in which characters chat ad nauseam about love and life are likely to walk away from Jules et Jim with their entire worldview confirmed. Much of the story is about a tragic romantic triangle set before, during and after World War I, anchored by a woman (Jeanne Moreau) and the titular Jules and Jim—one French, the other German. While the film is very, very talky and melodramatic, it’s also fluid and unexpectedly funny at times—writer-director François Truffaut blends several film techniques and interesting dialogue to make this a far more entertaining experience than the genre stereotypes and downer ending would suggest. There’s some interest in seeing how the sweep of history can affect some intimate relationships, and how the tension between the three characters constantly pushes and pulls at them. Truffaut is one of my favourite New Wave directors for a reason—Aside from my muted reaction to Les 400 coups, he’s usually able to find something interesting in nearly anything he touches, and Jules et Jim would be a far lesser film without his specific touch.

  • Fantasia 2000 (1999)

    Fantasia 2000 (1999)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, September 2019) The original Fantasia was planned to be an annual event—according to Disney’s vision for the film, it would regularly incorporate new segments and be shown around the country in slightly altered fashion, evolving throughout the years. This did not come to pass (World War II nearly bankrupted the studio and derailed most of their plans), but it does provide a bit of historical context to the Fantasia 2000 reboot, which keeps the famous “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” from the original while introducing new animated segments focused on musical numbers. One of those films that work equally as well as an audiovisual spectacle and as musical accompaniment, Fantasia 2000 is about as accessible as classical music gets, with a little bit of jazz thrown in. As you can expect from a film with eight segments, the quality is variable— “Rhapsody in Blue” is terrific with its nostalgic depiction of an urban area, while the most striking thing about “Symphony No. 5” is how incredibly dated the CGI looks. Indeed, if there’s a point of comparison between this Fantasia sequel and the original, it’s how much of the sequel is irremediably dated by its reliance on CGI—the eighty-year-old original, meanwhile, hasn’t aged nearly as much. Still, you do have the option to look away from the screen and still enjoy the music, so at least the Fantasia 2000 has that going for it. I still enjoyed it quite a bit—as a way to experience some great music, it’s worth at least a listen.

  • Summer Stock (1950)

    Summer Stock (1950)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2019) In the context of Judy Garland’s career, Summer Stock is often best known as her final MGM film and the one in which she inaugurated the tuxedo/fedora/nylons outfit that she would use as a trademark in her later years. But for those (such as myself) who don’t particularly like Garland, Summer Stock is best seen as solid MGM musical from the early 1950s, using the studio’s expertise to transform something fairly ordinary into a few remarkable set-pieces. Gene Kelly is the bigger draw here, as he plays a theatrical director who arrives with his troupe on a farm where he convinces the owner (Garland) that they will compensate for the imposition by doing chores while rehearsing their next show. Having found an excuse to blend the Broadway musical with a rural setting, Summer Stock quickly gets going in combining the two: One number has a red tractor as a centrepiece, while an anthology-worth piece has Gene Kelly dancing around with a newspaper and creaky boards. “Get Happy” would turn out to be Garland’s late-career standard number, but the film is bigger than her: The atmosphere is upbeat, the dance numbers are colourful and while the film is overshadowed by much-better musicals at around the same time (Singin’ in the Rain on one side, Easter Weekend on the other), it’s still a fun watch for any musical fan. This is Kelly and Garland doing what they do best, and their on-screen smiles are contagious.

  • Der letzte Mann [The Last Laugh] (1924)

    Der letzte Mann [The Last Laugh] (1924)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (YouTube Streaming, September 2019) At this point, having seen most of the best-known movies of the 1920s, I’ll cheerfully recognize that almost all the movies I’m seeing from the decade are an obligation born out of a sense of historical duty. While I still have a few Buster Keaton movies to look forward to, most of the non-comic, non-fantastical films of the 1920s are simply unpleasant to watch. Overlong, overacted, technically primitive and usually of dodgy picture quality, they exasperate more than their enlighten or entertain. I’ve seen the best, I’m in no real hurry to see the rest—although I’ll forever defend Man with a Movie Camera as an essential. In other words, I was dreading The Last Laugh. While it’s refreshingly short at 90 minutes compared to many of its contemporaries, it’s also intimate and low-key, focusing on what happens to an ordinary man after he gets fired from his prestigious job. F. W. Murnau directs, which explain why I sought it out—and you can clearly see how, on a technical and storytelling level, the result is significantly better than most other movies of its time. The camera movements alone are audacious, clearly ahead of its time. There is a great metafiction twist in the film’s sole title card announcing an intentional departure from reality, the screenwriter intruding to provide a happy ending. All of this certainly helps make the film better than expected … without quite overturning my current reluctance toward silent cinema. But if this was among the most audacious of what was attempted then and it only raises mild interest, I’m not looking forward to the rest.

  • Bel Canto (2018)

    Bel Canto (2018)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2019) Stockholm syndrome is a terrible thing, especially if you’re not a part of it. In Bel Canto, an American opera soprano is asked to perform at an opulent private residence in South America. But just as she’s performing, a terrorist group swoops onto the estate and take the dignitaries hostage. What follows is a standoff during which captors and their prisoners begin to understand each other. Nice idea, bolstered by capable actors: With Julianne Moore as the singer, Ken Watanabe as a rich industrialist and Christopher Lambert as an ambassador, the film is clearly going for more than a suspense thriller—music is everywhere in the film, and having the singer teach a hostage taker about her craft is meant to show shared humanity between the two groups. Clearly, the point here is to show the growing empathy even as we know that it can’t end well. It’s a laudable goal … and it utterly fails. By the time the brutish government enforcers swooped on the ground of the estate to kill as many terrorists as possible, I was cheering every death, with the added satisfaction that it meant that the film would soon end. Even at a bit more than 90 minutes, Bel Canto feels too slow—obviously, it’s less than a thriller and more of a drama. In the experienced hands of director Paul Weitz, it’s meant to be a prestige production … but that doesn’t save it from ennui, and when it can’t manage to convince its viewers of empathy toward the terrorists, then everything is lost.

  • Welcome to Marwen (2018)

    Welcome to Marwen (2018)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2019) At a time when we expect nearly everything coming out of Hollywood to be clinically designed, focus-tested and meticulously engineered for mass appeal, there’s something almost refreshing in seeing as expensive a misfire as Welcome to Marwen. Based on a true story presented in the documentary Marwencol, it fictionalizes how the survivor of an assault (Mark Hogancamp, played by Steve Carell) handles his own mental therapy by taking pictures of dolls set in an invented WW2 village, playing out his obsessions in fictional scenarios. That, in itself, would be a rich premise and at times director Robert Zemeckis really gives it everything he’s got—the best moments in the film are those in which we nearly-seamlessly switch from reality to fantasy, from the bland real life of the protagonist to the colourful fantasy he has imagined for himself. It’s in those moments that we sense Zemeckis having a lot of fun and understand why he took on such a technically demanding edge-of-the-envelope project. Unfortunately, there’s the rest of the movie to consider: A movie in which the protagonist indulges in deeply creepy behaviour toward the women in his life and isn’t called on it. Even allowing for the limitations of adapting a true and painful story on-screen, Welcome to Marwen is remarkably mawkish, depressing and uneasy at times—the film may be too exuberant in its fantasy sequences that it drags down its more putatively realistic moments. The result feels like a bit misguided expensive mess—admirable when it does show us something we haven’t seen in a movie before, but unpleasant when it spends too much time with its own protagonist’s life. There’s also a weird anti-medication message toward the end that I’m not entirely comfortable with. While I do have a fondness for big-budget bombs (which Welcome to Marwen most assuredly was, even threatening Zemeckis’ career at the moment) and don’t regret having watched this even in less-than-ideal circumstances (a bad night’s sleep leading to dawn movie-watching, if you must know), there is definitely something off in this ambitious project, and I really wish it could have been fixed at the script stage rather than being compounded throughout the entire production.