Movie Review

  • See No Evil, Hear No Evil (1989)

    See No Evil, Hear No Evil (1989)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2020) Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor made four movies together, and while the place of Silver Streak at the top of the list and Another You at the bottom are not up for debate, there’s some jockeying as to whether Stir Crazy or See No Evil, Hear No Evil gets the silver or the bronze. It certainly has the highest comic concept, as one protagonist can’t hear and the other can’t see—yet they must team up to resolve a murder. Considering that it’s a film that depends on exaggerated depiction of disability as a comic engine, it’s now inevitably divisive. The natural charm of Pryor and Wilder does work overtime to keep audiences sympathetic, but it doesn’t always work—the depiction of deafness is a major irritant. Still, See No Evil, Hear No Evil is amiable even when it’s not particularly funny, and the late-1980s depiction of New York City can be fun. Bonus points for a very early villainous appearance from a young (but not younger-looking) Kevin Spacey. In the end, Stir Crazy is probably still a bit better—although let’s not pretend that some of Pryor and Wilder’s moment-to-moment work here is anything short of comic genius.

  • À Fond [Full Speed] (2016)

    À Fond [Full Speed] (2016)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, March 2020) I had a look at French action comedy À Fond on a whim, and I glad I did. While the first act of the film is a bit tedious in setting up all of the plot elements that it will later require, it gets up to cruising speed along with its premise: While driving south for the holidays, a family is stuck in a fancy new all-electronic minivan that can’t turn off its cruise control… at 160 km/h. While the highway patrol quickly gets involved, there are a few things it can’t fix, such as a massive traffic jam. Of course, this wouldn’t be a comedy without about half a dozen secrets, misunderstandings, long-simmering tensions and accidental complications aboard the minivan. À fond is thankfully billed as a comedy, which does help in stretching a fifteen-minute premise into a 90-minute film. It also helps keep some tension under control, as it’s clear early on that this is the kind of comedy that, at worst, goes for a bit of slapstick and nothing more serious. The “comedy” remains one of reassurance rather than outright laugher—despite a few chuckles, À fond doesn’t go for the overly absurd and remains grounded throughout. As befit the subject matter, there are a few fun action scenes throughout, most of them seemingly without intrusive CGI. (The climax is another matter, but the safety concerns are understandable.) Jose Garcia anchors the film, but special notice goes to Charlotte Gabris as a pleasantly dim-witted hitchhiker unable to grasp even the fundamentals of the situation. The script is a tight tapestry of loaded setups all waiting to go off, and it’s perhaps a bit more realistic than one would expect—during the climax, I wondered if a certain grip would hold and immediately afterward the movie had a further action beat focused on that failure. French cinema is one of the most cheerfully audience-driven ones on the planet, and it’s reasonably entertaining movies like À fond that demonstrate it best.

  • Code 8 (2019)

    Code 8 (2019)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2020) I wasn’t expecting much from Code 8, but had to give it a chance given that it’s a Canadian Science Fiction movie likely to play for years in order to satisfy CanCon Cable TV requirements. Fortunately, my expectations were exceeded early on. While I didn’t quite believe in the premise of the film (in a parallel reality where some humans have shown supernatural powers for decades, a modern-day metropolis features them as an unwanted, marginalized minority tightly monitored by police), the first few minutes quickly ground Code 8 in a credible reality, and then set up a street-level crime thriller spiked with psi powers. Writer-director Jeff Chan’s refreshingly low-key approach works wonders: this isn’t about superheroes saving the world as much as downtrodden mutants trying to get ahead in a society terrified of them. The obvious parallels with the black American experience with police aren’t really played up, which does allow the film to breathe while not shackling itself to on-the-nose parallels. Robbie Amell is bland but likable as the protagonist, an electrically-gifted young man trying to save his sick mother and get away from the shadow of his dead criminal father. Sung Kang is a bit more interesting at the police officer chasing him, while Kyla Kane makes a bit of an impression as the moral lever of the film’s third act. Code 8 is unassuming and that proves to be one of its greatest assets: it never tries anything too ambitious, but it stays well within the limits of what it can deliver. This is partially illustrated by the script, stronger when dealing with the nitty-gritty of its protagonist’s situation, and substantially weaker when trying to grapple with the wider-scale machinations about organized crime in the city. Still, the story works, and even has a nicely bittersweet ending. I suspect that the film will be championed by a variety of viewers (those convinced that films can be crowdfunded; fans of the Arrow TV show; Canadian movie fans, etc.) but I’m just relieved that it’s a decent production, and a reasonably entertaining film on its own.

  • Major League (1989)

    Major League (1989)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, March 2020) There is nothing new in Major League, and that’s probably what explains its charm. Yet another baseball underdog comedy, this one features a calculating team owner who deliberately sets out to put together the worst players she can find in order to have an excuse to move the team to another city. This naturally strong comic premise leads to a collection of supporting oddballs and lead characters with overblown problems. The decision to go for an R rating allows the film to distinguish itself with plenty of spicy language and risqué situations. Still, Major League would have been better had it featured even a few surprises: as it is, it’s an underdog sports comedy that ends like you’d expect it to end, with all characters have resolved their issues along the way. Added fun comes from spotting actors who would become even bigger stars later on: the then-ascendant Charlie Sheen is quite good as the bespectacled “Wild Thing,” while Wesley Snipes, Dennis Haysbert and Rene Russo have good early roles. The humour can be coarse at times but never too gross or off-putting, which does help a lot in making this an approachable R-rated comedy. Major League plays familiar riffs and still does it reasonably well, and sometimes that’s all a movie needs to win.

  • Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969)

    Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2020) Mainstream Hollywood’s take on the sexual revolution of the 1960s gets one of its definitive examples in Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice. Writer-director Paul Mazursky takes on the radical openness of the time with his protagonists seeking enlightenment (or maybe just a sense of cool) through affairs and proposed swinging. But nothing quite goes as planned, which definitely keeps the film more interesting than a simple time capsule. A typical problem with 1960s films is that they often feel like watching your parents trying to goof off—we know it’s not going to hold and, in the meantime, it’s just embarrassing. Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, in its breathless embrace of free love and infidelity, occasionally runs into this problem. But keep watching because Mazursky eventually arrives at a conclusion that anticipates the post-hedonistic letdown of the 1970s. Or maybe the film is more about messy feelings than the attraction of free sex, and that works just as well. In addition to Mazursky’s welcome ambivalence about the whole thing, the film does benefit from a solid cast—with specific mentions to the ever-beautiful Natalie Wood and a pleasantly goofy Elliott Gould. While permeated by the smell of the 1960s, Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice has aged better than the average drama of the time: it doesn’t go for easy answers, moral characters or irony. It’s still definitely a period piece, but not an unbearable one.

  • Beyond the Black Rainbow (2010)

    Beyond the Black Rainbow (2010)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2020) I tried and failed to get to the end of Beyond the Black Rainbow a few years ago, but with the success of writer-director Panos Cosmatos’ Mandy and a vague sentiment of unfinished business, I went back to the film and… well, I finished it. The story is both obtuse and simplistic, what with a young woman trying to escape a failing research institute, a creepy facility founder, a killer entity trying to prevent her from leaving, and 1970s-inspired visuals. Still, the point of Beyond the Black Rainbow is not the plot as much as the atmosphere, as everything is from an alternate 1983 steeped in grainy psychedelic colours. The imagery is admittedly terrific (especially on the film’s somewhat low budget) and there are some interesting threads to pull if your thing is overanalyzing movies—the most promising of them being a repudiation of the kinds of things that a lesser film would have celebrated. But if upgrading my assessment of Beyond the Black Rainbow from “unwatchable” to “interesting” is a significant improvement, it’s not necessarily a recommendation. Or at least not for everyone: It may be that I’ve become a more tolerant viewer for artistic experiments in the past few years. At the very least, this is not a film for everyone at any given time.

  • Mon Oncle Antoine [My uncle Antoine] (1971)

    Mon Oncle Antoine [My uncle Antoine] (1971)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, March 2020) I don’t expect that most readers of this review will be as taken with Mon Oncle Antoine as French-Canadian viewers like myself are liable to be. From a purely objective perspective, this is a rouuuugh film. The fuzzy quality of the TV-ratio images is disappointing, the editing is slack, the shot-to-shot visual continuity isn’t always smooth, the acting isn’t always strong and that’s not even getting into the griminess of the visuals. A lot of this should be excused, as writer-director Claude Jutra was pioneering Québec-based location filmmaking at that time, and had to laboriously reinvent what was smooth filmmaking elsewhere. But it’s also true that Mon Oncle Antoine is not aiming for populist entertainment: it’s a conscious slice-of-life throwback to the Duplessis years as kitchen-table character drama set in a remote rural location. I can rattle off half a dozen French-Canadian historical films that are slicker, richer and more evocative of Québec’s history than this one—but Mon Oncle Antoine was there first. It’s absolutely not glorious in intent: Rather than take place on farms, in forests or in snowy rural Québec, it’s stuck in a dusty mining town, revolves around a dead body and embodies the quiet despair of ordinary people prevented from achieving even modest ambitions. Even the title character can’t stand his own life, which runs counter to a lot of rural mythologizing present in Québec filmmaking. It is, in other words, a slog to get through. But there’s a difference between what the film is and what it represents. Somehow hailed as a classic of Canadian cinema in multiple polls, it made a mark over at least a generation of filmmakers. That may be changing, though—Jutra himself was almost instantly disgraced in 2016 when his actions as a pederast came to light and led to the mass renaming of nearly everything bearing his name (including some of Canada’s most prestigious movie awards). Lately, probably due to Jutra’s erasure, the film itself hasn’t been as widely hailed—at the benefit of some of the other films I could rattle off. Which leaves me with something of a quandary when it comes to Mon Oncle Antoine. On one side, I’m not terribly impressed by the film itself and what it’s saying. On the other, well, what the film shows is very similar to the world in which my grandparents and parents lived—I can recognize the shabby rural houses, the colourful joual expressions and the utter lack of grandeur in the movie’s depiction of rural Québec. French-Canadian pride won’t let anyone else call this a terrible film—unless you’re going to come up with better alternatives.

  • Shoot to Kill (1988)

    Shoot to Kill (1988)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, March 2020) While Shoot to Kill doesn’t really manage to get above its B-movie intentions, it does have a few things going for it. The most obvious one is the setting, as this criminal chase thriller takes us far from the urban skyline of San Francisco all the way up north to the Rockies, eventually crossing the border into Canada and finally ending in Vancouver. The Canadian content doesn’t stop there, as Shoot to Kill is an early effort from Ottawa-born director Roger Spottiswoode. The unusual nature of the film’s setting is bolstered by interesting casting, whether it’s a rare late-career role of Sidney Poitier, Kirstie Alley looking her best, or Bart the Bear doing his usual thing. The least one can say is that Spottiswoode manages to put all of the ingredients together competently: Shoot to Kill moves forward steadily, does well with its budget and comfortably executes the buddy-movie thriller template it’s given. It’s certainly watchable, even if it falls into the glass-half-full-or-half-empty neverland of middle-of-the-road films that are both better and worse than they could have been.

  • Inside Daisy Clover (1965)

    Inside Daisy Clover (1965)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2020) My interest ebbed and flowed as I sat watching Inside Daisy Clover, a film that seems stuck between the shiny fairytale of 1950s Hollywood and the grim revisionist 1970s. I picked it based on the cast and premise: a drama featuring a young 1930s Hollywood starlet having trouble fitting in, featuring no less than Natalie Woods, Robert Redford and a young(er) Christopher Plummer in a deliciously evil role. Inside Daisy Clover certainly looks good on paper. But it doesn’t start out all that well, what with Woods beginning a film-long struggle with an unflattering hairstyle and the film touching upon an unpleasant blend of teenage alienation and a hard-luck struggle between daughter and mother. The premise starts from pure bubble-gum “poor girl becomes a movie star” to turn into an examination of the hidden darkness behind celebrity, but it somehow doesn’t quite manage to satisfy along the way. Some scenes are quite strong (such as a meta-musical moment in which the increasingly sad song is shot from behind the scenes of a movie shoot), and the ending becomes a bit of explosive dark comedy, but the way from this to that is both too grim and not grim enough to fully satisfy. (Or, if you’d prefer, camp and yet not camp enough.) At some point, I really started wondering how much of Inside Daisy Clover was explicitly meant to evoke Judy Garland (who was still alive at the time). Unusually enough for the mid-1960s, Robert Redford plays a bisexual character—but the film doesn’t get to explore his character as more than an additional burden on the heroine. Hence my opening assertion: the same movie made in the 1950s would have been more buoyant; the same movie in the 1970s would not have pulled its punches. In the meantime, what’s left in Inside Daisy Clover is of mild interest to fans of Hollywood movies about Hollywood, but simply falls apart as its own story.

  • A Night to Remember (1958)

    A Night to Remember (1958)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2020) It’s completely unfair to compare a film with another one made forty years later, but such is the luck of the draw for A Night to Remember, which has been and will continue to be compared to 1997’s Titanic. The comparison is fairer than most, though, given that the intent behind both movies is more or less the same: Illustrate the tragedy of the Titanic’s sinking by recreating as accurately as possible the event given the time’s technology, and dramatizing its biggest human conflicts through a mixture of real characters and ones meant to stand in for the ship’s inherent class issues. Titanic’s writer-director James Cameron explicitly acknowledged the influence of A Night to Remember, and even the most contrarian curmudgeon will acknowledge that the 1997 film was simply better in terms of technical polish, special effects, accuracy to what we now know about the disaster, and simple story structure. One can quibble forever about Cameron’s dialogue and sentimentalism, but then again compare it with A Night to Remember and the difference doesn’t seem so stark. But even acknowledging that A Night of Remember was outclassed by its spiritual remake is not necessarily diminishing director Roy Ward Baker’s considerable achievements at the time. While we now know more about the ship’s sinking than they did at the time, the rest of the film stands up reasonably well to real-life events, and the dramatic tension of the film keeps increasing throughout the period after the iceberg crash—relatively speaking, the film doesn’t take a long time to get there. Sure, the whole thing is imbued with 1950s melodrama, but up to a certain point that adds to the period charm of the film. Still, you have to have a special interest in vintage films in order to get the most out of A Night to Remember—anyone else looking for a suitable take on the topic matter would be best served by the later film, and anyone who has seen the 1997 film will find their viewing of the 1958 one constantly tested by comparisons.

  • Ruthless People (1986)

    Ruthless People (1986)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, March 2020) Considering that I have long been a steadfast fan of the Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker (ZAZ) spoof comedies (Airplane!, Top Secret!), it’s a bit of a surprise that I managed to wait this long to see their Ruthless People. There’s definitely a reason for that, however: Ruthless People, compared to other ZAZ movies, is known to operate on a very different comedic register. It’s not a visually intense spoof, is far from being as absurd on a gag-to-gag basis and is far more character-based. I hesitate to call it more realistic, however, considering the incredibly dense and twisted nature of its plotting as a “simple” kidnapping case soon reverses the usual good/bad character roles and leads to some strange alliances, twists and counter-plotting. Milquetoast Judge Reinhold and Helen Slater star as disgruntled employees who decide to take revenge by kidnapping the wife (Bette Midler) of their boss (Danny DeVito), but things very quickly take a turn for the weird when the boss actively attempts to provoke the kidnappers into killing his wife. This is all in the film’s first fifteen minutes, and there’s a lot left along the way, including the jarring introduction of a serial killer who eventually ends up becoming a comic prop. It’s both disappointing (if you’re expecting the usual ZAZ goofiness) and better than expectations when compared to other comic crime capers of the time. There’s a pleasant density of plot developments, DeVito is at his most darkly unhinged, and Bette Midler is the force of nature that she is in her better roles. On the other hand, this is not as distinctive as other ZAZ comedies, and in a post-Tarantino world it’s not quite as intriguing as it must have been at the time. Pair it with Throw Momma from the Train for a fun Danny DeVito dark comedy combo.

  • Always (1989)

    Always (1989)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, March 2020) In any examination of Steven Spielberg’s filmography, Always usually gets short thrift. There’s a two-hour-long Spielberg documentary out there that barely spends a few seconds on it, and it seldom pops up in any casual discussion of his work. There’s a good reason for that: standing awkwardly at the intersection between action movie, supernatural fantasy and romantic drama, Always is not ready for easy packaging. It’s also, perhaps understandably, a bit scattered in-between paying homage to its 1940s inspiration, delivering 1980s action sequences and trying to find a satisfying dramatic arc in a bone-simple story. Based on WW2 fighter pilot drama A Guy Named Joe (which shares much of the same awkwardness), Always updates the setting to modern-day firefighting bomber flyers, and kills off its lead character so that he becomes a ghost able to assist another pilot who grows closer to his ex-fiancée. There’s not a whole lot for the film to do beyond the grieving dramatic arc, and the second half of Always peters out into a far less interesting path to a predetermined conclusion. From a relatively strong start, the film progressively loses steam and doesn’t keep its most spectacular moments for the end. Still, there’s quite a bit to like in seeing how a veteran director like Spielberg tackles even substandard material. From the very first shot, we’re clearly in the hands of someone who likes to play with film narrative, and carefully composing his images to choose what the camera will or won’t show. Richard Dreyfuss is not bad in the lead role despite his typical 1980s arrogance, and Holly Hunter also does well as the female romantic lead. (Still, it’s John Goodman who shines in a comic supporting role.) Audrey Hepburn is an angelic vision in her last film role—she simply looks amazing at sixty. There’s a pair of good action flying sequences in the first half of the film, and the atmosphere of a firefighting camp is so vividly rendered that it’s a shame we couldn’t spend more time there. Still, Always makes a strong case for being Spielberg’s most ordinary, least distinctive film. It doesn’t have the glorious misfires of 1941, it’s not a kid’s film like The BFG, it’s not animated like The Adventures of Tintin—it’s just there, in all of its shortcomings, muddled execution and decreasing interest.

  • Cronos (1993)

    Cronos (1993)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, March 2020) Guillermo del Toro’s first feature-length film was Cronos and, well, that’s pretty much all you need to know about it. No, it’s not a polished as any of his later features. No, it’s not quite as baroque, or finely-controlled, or entertaining. It was, after all, shot in Mexico on a threadbare budget, from a young filmmaker who had many things to prove but not much pull in getting what he needed to execute his vision. But here’s the thing: Del Toro had a vision even at such an early stage. Cronos is slickly made even at its low budget—The visual density of the film’s images is particularly interesting. You can dissect it as an early work prefiguring del Toro’s entire subsequent career (including an improbable appearance from Ron Perlman), but it’s also easy to watch as its own little modest supernatural thriller in which an elderly antique dealer is gradually turned into a vampire. Unlike other horror filmmakers’ first efforts, Cronos is not a pure-horror film in execution: there’s some dramatic depth to it, some restraints on the exploitation side, and a clear artistic ambition at play. Cronos is interesting both by itself and as a proof of concept for some of the themes, tropes, filmmaking tics and gothic grandeur that del Toro would explore in other films.

  • What’s Up, Doc? (1972)

    What’s Up, Doc? (1972)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2020) There’s an adorable playfulness at work in writer-director Peter Bogdanovich’s What’s Up Doc? that makes it difficult to resist—and doubly difficult if you’re even casually aware of screwball comedies. Barbra Streisand and Ryan O’Neal star: he in a straight-laced role while she plays the anarchic Bugs Bunny figure turning his life into chaos. There are several broad acts to the film, from the first-act hotel farce to a fight sequence, a large-scale chase through San Francisco, an absurdly funny courtroom scene and then the romantic conclusion. It makes What’s Up, Doc? slightly episodic, but the energy and comedy are kept at a high pace throughout. (Then it eviscerates O’Neal’s own turn in Love Story in its final moments, which is always a plus.) While the film explicitly patterns itself on 1930s filmmaking, today’s audiences will see another kind of nostalgia in the film’s generous display of 1970s fashion. It all amounts to something very enjoyable to watch—perhaps not quite completely hilarious from beginning to end, but still a film that’s easy to like. I’m not sure Bogdanovich was ever looser, funnier or more crowd-pleasing than in putting together What’s Up, Doc?

  • The Skulls (2000)

    The Skulls (2000)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, March 2020) True to form for a Hollywood thriller, The Skulls takes the kernel of a good premise (behind the scenes at an Ivy School secret fraternity, à la Yale Skull and Bones) and then takes it to a ludicrous level that, ironically enough, makes it quite forgettable. Our protagonist’s bland everyman qualities ensure that the character isn’t quite as interesting as the antagonist (Paul Walker, in a pre-Fast/Furious starring role). The rest of it seems to steal from low-octane conspiracy thriller tropes without necessarily putting the pilfered ideas together in an interesting whole. Fairly bland directing from Rob Cohen doesn’t help the film stick in mind, although I suppose that twenty years later The Skulls is taking on a time-capsule kind of newfound relevance in chronicling Hollywood’s idea of cool at the dawn of the century. Still, there’s a feeling that, despite a fun premise, a director capable of much better, some interesting young actors and good production values, The Skulls simply isn’t fun enough or smart enough or wild enough to stick. Although I suppose that a true-life exposé of Ivy League secret societies would be even duller to watch.