Movie Review

  • Agnes of God (1985)

    Agnes of God (1985)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2019) There are films that you hear about, forget and rediscover later. The title “Agnes of God” did remind me of something, but didn’t know what exactly. I still recorded it without knowing why. It’s while watching it that I realized that I had completely forgotten the film’s strong Montréal connections: helmed by Canadian-born directing chameleon Norman Jewison, the film is not only set in Montréal with recognizable French-Canadian accents everywhere in the background, but it’s clearly, visibly shot in Montréal with its mid-1980s city logos and cars and slushy winters. Meg Tilly is quite good here in the title role, especially considering that we never see anything but her face and hands. Elsewhere in the cast, both Anne Bancroft (as a mother superior) and Jane Fonda (as a hard-driven psychiatrist) get great roles. All the Anglophone actors can be easily spotted by the fact that their French is phonetically pronounced mush. Narratively, the ambiguous ending is a forgone conclusion the moment the film sets up its characters—we know it’s going to end up with a could-it-be-rational-or-could-it-be-not, in order to make everyone happy (it’s the default conclusion of any religious-or-reality movie). Still, the journey is interesting, and it’s worth noting that the three lead performances in the film are all from women—the men are supporting characters at best. Despite a muddy yet predictable conclusion and a somewhat esoteric and difficult subject matter, Agnes of God is frequently interesting—for the acting, for the setting, sometimes for the drama itself. I’m not sure I’m going to forget it again.

  • UFO (2018)

    UFO (2018)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2019) I’m not a sympathetic viewer for undigested ufology, but UFO’s main strength lies somewhere else, somewhere I’m more than willing to follow: A scientific procedural thriller, in which an incredibly bright mathematics university student pulls at the thinnest threads in order to figure out a scientific mystery. Writer-director Ryan Eslinger turns in quite a cerebral film, with no action and arguably no antagonist either. But it’s a clever suspense movie in which the question is whether the protagonist will figure out the mystery, with equations and conceptual breakthroughs being what he needs to get there. Alex Sharp turns in a Miles-Tellerish lead performance (that’s a compliment) as the obsessed student, with some assistance by Gillian Anderson and David Strathairn. The low budget of the film is used effectively by a script that knows that its strength lies elsewhere than big-budget spectacle filmmaking. I quite enjoyed it despite my misgivings about presenting this as a true-ish story—it’s best to ignore the weak woo-woo attempts to link it to “real” events and enjoy it as a purely fictional thriller. In that light, it reminded me not only of my own computer science university days, but of the pleasure I got then from reading hard-SF short stories tackling first contact from a mathematical-as-universal-language perspective. I really can’t claim that I completely followed all of UFO’s heady concepts, but I knew enough to follow along and to appreciate that the film doesn’t treat its audience as idiots. There’s some noticeable but clever foreshadowing throughout, and I enjoyed it quite a bit more than the more ambitious but also more pretentious wave of low-budget Science Fiction that we’ve seen lately. Hard-SF readers should get quite a kick out of it.

  • Badlands (1973)

    Badlands (1973)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2019) There were a surprising number of high-profile “romantic criminal couple on the run” movies during the New Hollywood period, with seemingly everyone (including Spielberg!) taking a shot at it. Badlands is Terrence Malick’s debut feature and it fully embraces the subgenre, while being perhaps a bit more entertaining for Malick completists than the impression left by his later features would suggest. A summary of the story sounds like genre material: a girl meets a guy who ends up killing his dad and then go on the run together, killing more people along the way. From Gun Crazy to Bonnie and Clyde to Natural Born Killer (and others!), this is an American archetype. But Malick makes everything sophisticated rather than trashy by using voiceovers and a kind of languid pacing that never abandons the small-town atmosphere even as the bodies pile up. Badlands spends a lot of time in rural America in ways rarely seen in other movies, adding credible 1950s details in ways that stick in mind, whether it’s recording physical records at coin-operated machines or filling up a car from leaking gas stations. Sissy Spacek and Martin Sheen both star, with Sheen looking uncannily like his sons would two decades later. I really expected to dislike the film, based on my reactions to later Malick films, overall lack of appreciation for New Hollywood and familiarity with the subgenre… but I didn’t. It eventually won me over slightly, thanks to the period detail and flourishes such as a climactic car chase. It certainly helps that Badlands isn’t as bleak as other films of the subgenre, most of which can’t be bothered to be more imaginative than to have their leading couple go down in a hail of bullets. Malick is definitely after something else here, and the film thrives on that intention.

  • Rachel, Rachel (1968)

    Rachel, Rachel (1968)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2019) Oof: It’s not because films are nominated for an Academy Award that they’re worth a look. Case in point: The grating, annoying, irritating Rachel, Rachel—a story of a small-town mid-1930s spinster rediscovering herself that ends up being more boring than anything else. Sadly directed by Paul Newman, with his wife Joanne Woodward in the lead role and their daughter playing the heroine at a younger age. I’m not necessarily claiming nepotism here—Woodward was hailed for tackling a difficult role, won a Golden Globe and was nominated for an Academy Award. But keep in mind that Rachel, Rachel is a product of the late 1960s, a time more concerned with gleefully pushing the limits left unguarded by the end of the Production Code and audiences thirsting for neorealism. While it worked at the time, it hasn’t necessarily aged well. It’s not a bad film, but it feels slow, long and dull. The herky-jerky flashbacks anticipate more modern non-chronological technique and grammar, but feel like unpleasant experiments to twenty-first century audiences—the added padding on a small story feels more grating than enlightening, with an inexplicable slowness to everything. But Rachel, Rachel remains in the pantheon of Academy Award-nominated movies, so there’s that.

  • The Year of Living Dangerously (1982)

    The Year of Living Dangerously (1982)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2019) There are a few movies that make more sense when measured against an entire corpus, and while I’m not calling The Year of Living Dangerously an incomplete movie by itself, it does get much of its power when you oppose it to a corpus of adventure films in which a westerner performs heroics in a foreign country, either saving others or having an impact on the events. Here, we get a very young Mel Gibson as an Australian journalist assigned to Indonesia in the months leading to the 1965 attempted coup, learning about the dangerous country, befriending an eccentric character, falling for an English embassy worker, and trying to do his job during a volatile situation. Gibson is fine, Sigourney Weaver is quite good as the British woman but it’s Linda Hunt who steals the movie (and won an Academy Award) as an Asian male—an impressive transformation that adds much to the character. The Year of Living Dangerously may sound like a dull foreign drama, but it works wonders in immediately capturing viewers in its opening moments, thanks to an enigmatic character narrating and taking harsh notes on the protagonist. The atmosphere carries much of the film’s midsection despite a few lulls, with director Peter Weir doing well at showing how much our protagonist is still a neophyte at his job, how far out of his element he is and how he ends up paying for his mistakes. That starkly comes into play during the film’s last act, as the white saviour stereotype is completely defeated in the Graham Greene tradition. Our lead spends much of the film’s climactic events completely unable to do anything, unable to report on the biggest story of his career and having to abandon everything in order to make it out alive. It’s a measure of the film’s success that the film isn’t all that depressing despite the downbeat material, but your mileage may vary—you may have to be exasperated with an entirely different kind of film in order to get the most out of The Year of Living Dangerously.

  • Auntie Mame (1958)

    Auntie Mame (1958)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2019) Late-1950s comedy Auntie Mame is a bit of an odd duck to me. Its helter-skelter structure and narrative certainly reflect its eventful origins—first a novel in 1955, then a play in 1956, followed by this film (and then later as a Broadway musical in 1966 that led to another movie in 1974—whew!) The key of Auntie Mame isn’t the plot, though: it’s an eccentric character study featuring Rosalind Russell in a powerhouse late-career performance. Compared to her, it’s fine if the rest of the film pales a bit. Still, the weirdness is often conscious and sometimes not. It feels harmlessly eccentric at first, with a young boy being taken in by a socialite aunt whose main talent appears to be giving lavish parties in her large apartment. But then it goes on to become darker (all the way to tackling prejudices), only to win viewers back by the time the finale rolls by. There’s a new thing every ten minutes which sounds exciting but often lends a disconnected feeling to the proceedings. In many ways, Auntie Mamie often feels like a different kind of film than it is—the multi-decade plot is more akin to serious family epic dramas, whereas the bright Cinerama cinematography and overall tone seem to belong to a musical even if it never bursts in song and dance—and then there’s the theatrical scene transitions. Fortunately, Russell is formidable as a formidable character (with Peggy Cass also having a short but likable turn), which helps to ground everything on a central focus. Eventually, her performance coheres to go beyond the “quirky character” to demonstrate the kindness and determination of the woman behind the eccentricities. But it does occur to me that Auntie Mame is the kind of film that may appreciate considerably on a second viewing, once you know what to expect.

  • New Wave: Dare to be Different (2017)

    New Wave: Dare to be Different (2017)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2019) Hey, how about a documentary focusing on telling us the story of a … radio station? Well, yes: before almost all of the radio market got swallowed in innocuous and predefined mass-market segments, there was a place for distinctive voices on-air. So it is that New Wave: Dare to be Different is the story of former Long Island radio station WLIR, which enjoyed a few years of popularity and respectability in the early 1980s by playing New Wave British music for the New York City market well before other American stations. It’s a film with many, many dozens of talking heads combined with blurry eighties-era footage, all telling the story of a rebellious radio station flouting the rules of the industry and introducing a new era of music for an influential NYC audience. In discussing the operations and influences of a long-closed radio station, New Wave is liable to make you nostalgic for an era that you never experienced first-hand (…or almost: my own experience with high-school radio was roughly congruent with the end of WLIR. But I’ve said too much already.)  WLIR had its zenith in the heyday of radio, playing music, launching careers and having foreign rock bands (including U2!) over for visits and performances.   Going bigger than WLIR, the documentary becomes an excuse for talking about New Wave music’s influence in America. As you can expect, the music is nothing less than terrific and its performers also contribute to the story of WLIR, with a few rousing interventions from Billy Idol. Director Ellen Goldfarb touches upon cultural, social, technological changes and their associated scenes (including fashions) linked to New Wave. It’s a documentary at its best when it delves into the fun of the station at its heyday, with DJs, fans and musicians fondly reminiscing about the time. Pair a viewing of New Wave with the fictional Pirate Radio for an evening of rebel rock radio.

  • Blue Steel (1990)

    Blue Steel (1990)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, March 2019) Try as I might, I can’t really find any truly compelling reason to recommend Blue Steel despite some half-promising elements. Probably the best reason remains that it’s a police thriller directed by a woman (the legendary Kathryn Bigelow) at a time when there weren’t that many of them, and seeing the better-than-average stylistic sheen she can give to the result. On the other hand, well, there’s everything else. An over-the-top criminal thriller in which a rookie police agent (Jamie Lee Curtis, not stepping too far away from her then-Scream Queen persona) discovers she’s dating a serial killer, the film unapologetically goes from thriller to slasher horror. It sits at an awkward point in late-1980s tropes and execution (intrusive score, slap-dash motivations, use of genre conventions trumping realism or even elementary logic) that magnify the issues inherent in the result. Some elements are lazily developed—the antagonist doesn’t appear to have any deeper motivations than just being crazy and while the cast features some names that would become famous (Richard Jenkins, Elizabeth Peña, Tom Sizemore), they don’t really have anything interesting to do. There may be some ironic material in the film’s obsession with guns and gender-role reversal, but it’s not developed particularly well. For Bigelow herself, the film is eclipsed by her later titles, not leaving much in Blue Steel for cinephiles to investigate unless they’re completionists.

  • Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971)

    Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2019) It’s not rare for the imitations to be left in the dust of history even as the groundbreaking work they’re copying endures for generations. That should be a lesson for Hollywood studios, but … yeah, never mind. A good case in point, however, is Bedknobs and Broomsticks—a mildly forgotten Walt Disney live-action picture that seems to be taking most of its selling points from the example set by Mary Poppins: A whimsical kid’s movie, adapted from books written by a British author; integrating songs and mixed live-action/animated numbers… The comparisons aren’t accidental: Bedknobs and Broomsticks was the backup plan throughout Mary Poppins’ early production history in case their first choice didn’t pan out, and the work invested in that early project was eventually resurrected for this later take. The story is a bit messy on several levels—conceptually, it’s a blend of two different books, so it stands to reason that the film itself can feel disconnected as it goes from one big special-effects showcase to another, leaving more traditional aspects (such as acting) relegated to a supporting element. The high production values certain shows—not only was the film nominated for five technical/music Academy Awards back then (winning the Special Effects category) but it can still be watched with a certain interest. Director Robert Stevenson handles an appreciable volume of special effects, and some of the set-piece sequences (Knights fighting Nazis?) still work rather well. Bedknobs and Broomsticks definitely labours in the shadow of Mary Poppins even fifty years later, but it does have one advantage of the underdog: you’re far less likely to have already seen it.

  • The Way We Were (1973)

    The Way We Were (1973)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2019) The New Hollywood of the early 1970s was so depressing that even its romances were doomed to death or divorce. A prominent case in point: The Way We Were, a multi-decade chronicle of the love story between two characters (played by Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford) throughout their hook-ups, breakups, and intervening ups and down. While there’s nothing conceptually wrong with that premise, the execution is severely underwhelming. Under director Sidney Lumet, the film feels like a mosaic of scenes set years apart, not really building on anything nor proposing a coherent dramatic arc other than “they won’t end up together.” There are some vexing narrative decisions that undermine anyone’s attempt to suspend disbelief or in sympathizing with the characters. For instance, much is made of the female lead’s political activism… but the plot doesn’t present an interesting antithesis despite a rich historical potential. Streisand and Redford do look good, but their characterization isn’t particularly deep other than becoming incarnated arguments. Where the film does a bit better by virtue of being a big-budget production is in looking back at a few decades of American history, showing in retrospect what could not be shown on-screen during the Production Code years—including the impact of the blacklist on Hollywood. It’s not particularly dismissive of The Way We Were, but that’s more out of resignation for the nature of the films at the time. I’m not volunteering to see it again any time soon, though.

  • The Last Waltz (1978)

    The Last Waltz (1978)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2019) Being in a rock band is cool and all, but who can claim to be cool enough to have a documentary about them directed by Martin Scorsese? Well, The Band is that cool enough, and they even get street credentials from roping in post-Mean Streets Scorsese before he became The Scorsese. Watching The Last Waltz, for me, is a bit of a strange experience as I know practically nothing about The Band itself (who does, these days?), and am so free to appreciate the film and the music itself without any prior emotional attachment. Much of the documentary is structured along the lines of the group’s last concert (with their original line-up, it should be said), intercut between interview footage with band members and a few testimonials. The audience barely figures in the film—it’s all about the band itself, special guests and the performances. Fortunately, the music itself is up to the weight placed on it. There have been other concert films since then, some of them also from Scorsese, so the newness effect of The Last Waltz is diminished compared to 1976. Still, everything is very well handled, with good music and interesting interviews even if you’re not familiar with The Band.

  • Cat People (1942)

    Cat People (1942)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2019) One of the particularities of investigating horror films of classic Hollywood is appreciating how some of them could do much with very little—using atmosphere, cinematography, and subtlety to achieve interest without buckets of blood and gore. The Hays Code prohibited such overt material, and some producers found ways around the restrictions. Writer-producer Val Lewton was one of the best at it, and he found in director Jacques Tourneur a kindred spirit. Cat People was their first collaboration, and it shows an interesting intent to play on a semi-psychological register, with a woman (Simone Simon, convincingly feline) convinced that she turns into a panther when aroused. The romance that follows with a man skeptical of the claim is punctuated by strange events and (predictably) doesn’t end well. I won’t try to exaggerate the subtlety of the film—not when some of the dialogue is on-the-nose to the point of obviousness. Some of the material is simply weird (who stuffs a cat in a box?), but the black-and-white cinematography is quite nice and the plotting is devoid of nonsense enough to fit in 73 minutes. There are layers to it all, though—a take on female sexuality that was good enough to be remade more permissive decades later, some oneiric symbolism and direction that’s not entirely figurative. I quite liked Cat People, but keep in mind that I watched it with a cat on my lap.

  • Der blaue Engel [The Blue Angel] (1930)

    Der blaue Engel [The Blue Angel] (1930)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2019) Anyone getting pulled into serious film history will eventually watch films not for their entertainment value, but because of their historical importance, however loosely defined that can be. In the case of The Blue Angel, the film is most often cited as being important for being the first German full-length sound picture, and perhaps more importantly featuring Marlene Dietrich in her first big-screen role. Much has also been written about the very close relationship between Dietrich and director Josef von Sternberg—there’s clearly a near-voyeuristic quality to the film as it captures her cabaret act. It’s all meant to be sexy, but for a very narrow definition of it—and since I’m neither a big fan of Dietrich nor the androgynous look she often sported, the effect is somewhat lost. It doesn’t help that The Blue Angel plays like a warning against the siren call of her appeal—our poor protagonist goes from being a respected teacher to a miserable cuckolded cabaret clown throughout the entire film. I found Dietrich far more interesting in the later Shanghai Run, or the much later Witness for the Prosecution, but hey—this is an imposed viewing. I’m not any fonder of the film’s mortally slow pacing, in which roughly a minute’s worth of plot takes ten minutes to complete—the film may have been with sound, but it kept the pacing problems of the silent era. None of this was helped by a terrible viewing experience: the film I watched had major, major sound issues, with sound interruptions and major crackling issues to the point where I muted the film. When I turned it back on later during the film, the broadcast was entirely silent. I’d normally blame the broadcast, but this was on Turner Classic Movies, which takes great care to show movies in the best available format. No matter where or how or why, I didn’t get much out of The Blue Angel other than a sense that I could cross it off my list and be done with it.

  • Captain Marvel (2019)

    Captain Marvel (2019)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In Theaters, March 2019) At this stage of the Marvel Cinematic Universe business model, we’re all converts to the Marvel episodic paradigm—to the point where I will reliably show up to theatres despite the inconvenience, just to be ready for the next Big Episode in the series. As a result, the episodic effect also helps weaker episodes in attracting people in theatres. Captain Marvel, compared to other MCU films, is just about average—it’s nicely made without being exceptional at this stage of the series, providing just enough unpredictability to keep things interesting. There are a number of subverted assumptions here: our origin story drops us in media res, with an alien discovering that she’s really human rather than the usual other way around. Even for comic book fans, there are surprises: The Skrull shapeshifting menace is dealt with expeditiously (this time around, at least). Even for the MCU, there’s a bit of a surprise in how the film is set in the nineties, featuring characters in their younger selves (that digital de-aging effect for Samuel L. Jackson is occasionally eerie, but soon becomes unnoticeable) and plugging jokes directly in the mythology of the series so far. (The explanation for Fury losing an eye was a let-down, though.)  Much has been said about this being the first Marvel film to star a female character (they all forgot about Elektra, but that’s fine: everyone including the cast and crew of Elektra have forgotten about Elektra) and the film does make use of a slightly different kind of super-heroism without beating it senseless — Brie Larson’s not bad, but a bit bland: Lashana Lynch is more interesting. Captain Marvel’s clearly defined three acts are variably interesting: the opening segment is too focused on cosmic elements and hazy direction to be fully engaging, but things pick up once we’re back crashing on circa-nineties Earth through the roof of a Blockbuster.   (I’m now old enough that “my” nineties nostalgia is now a thing, and I’m not as horrified by that as I had imagined.)  The third act begins once everyone’s back into space and it doesn’t quite fully realize its promise despite coming a fair way along. I fully expect Goose to be a supporting character in a future MCU film. More than that, though, I do expect to be there, in theatres, whenever the next MCU episode comes rolling along.

  • My Girl (1991)

    My Girl (1991)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, March 2019) There’s a reason why My Girl remains a bit of a traumatic film for an entire generation of viewers, and that reason will become blindingly obvious to even the least observant viewer by the time the film hits its third act. (Spoilers ahead, obviously!)  It does start innocently enough, for quirky values of “innocent”—here we have baby-faced Macaulay Culkin, fresh off his breakout hit Home Alone, playing the friend to our protagonist, a cute 11-year-old girl (Anna Chlumsky) with a widowed dad (Dan Aykroyd, quite likable), a funeral parlour as a home, a senile grandma and a writer’s soul. It takes place in the 1960s, further fostering a false sense of nostalgia for a simpler time (“Nixon renominated”) bolstered by the small-town setting of the film. We’ve seen enough of those coming-of-age films to understand that there’s no way anything will go wrong in such a setting, right? And then, well, then … the bees strike hard and kill one of the main characters, shocking a generation of kids (no, seriously; search for “my girl trauma”) and making this film into something else entirely—an approachable discussion of death and grieving, or maybe a bid for relevance ensuring that we still reference My Girl when so many other family movies from the early 1990s have been forgotten to time. The bait-and-switch (but is it, with the foreshadowing?) is something—coming-of-age comedy one moment, heavy drama the next, with a sequence nothing short of horrifying as the linchpin between both. There are films I regret not seeing in theatres when they came out, but My Girl isn’t one of them—I’m rather glad I’m seeing it now than at an impressionable age.