Movie Review

Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991)

Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(Second Viewing, On Blu-ray, December 2019) There will always be a very special place in my heart for Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, for reasons almost entirely unconnected to its quality as a movie—it was the first movie I decided to go see in theatres, along with a bunch of friends. Given that I saw maybe a handful movies in theatres before I was sixteen (growing up lower-middle-class in a small Eastern Ontario town with the nearest movie theatre twenty kilometres away meant that I only started “going to the movies” once I had my driver’s license), I will always consider Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country the movie at which point I started seeing new releases in theatres rather than on TV. At the time, my love for Star Trek ensured that I would assess the movie as terrific—but as it turns out, writer-director Nicholas Meyer’s work still holds up as one of the best of the Trek movies. It’s not quite as tight as The Wrath of Khan nor as funny as The Voyage Home, the plot has its dubious moments, and it’s often far too obvious about its humour, its Shakespearian references or links to circa-1990s geopolitics, but The Undiscovered Country is about as good as TOS Trek ever gets—there’s some good material here between the characters, core values of the series and movie-grade production values (despite some dated early-1990s CGI) to make this a very decent swan song for the Original Crew. The plot blends series-altering changes, a murder mystery, galactic politics, humour, courtroom drama, a prison break, a rather good space battle with a triumphant finale and some welcome character evolution in having Sulu captain his own ship. The core trio of the series (William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, Kelley Deforest) takes a bit too much space, but there are a few guest stars such as Christopher Plummer (hamming it up Shakespeare-style) and Iman to keep things interesting. To modern viewers, I suspect that the film will feel a bit stodgy—compared to modern aesthetics (as demonstrated by the 2009 Star Trek reboot, for instance), it does feel a bit stage-bound, a bit made-for-TV especially now that TV often has higher production values. Still, for those who were sixteen in 1991, I still found a lot to like in this revisit to The Undiscovered Country.

Delicatessen (1991)

Delicatessen (1991)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(Criterion Streaming, December 2019) To fans of writer-director Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s later movies, his debut feature Delicatessen is an early but very familiar demonstration of his unique talents. From the get-go, it’s obvious that the visual polish of the story will be astonishing—it not only takes place in a fantastical setting, but Jeunet’s predilection for unpredictable directing—hopping from closeups to slow revelations of the scene, expressionistic depictions and visual jokes. There is also, crucially, a refusal to stick to an expected tone. For a movie whose plot is based on accepted cannibalism, Delicatessen is far funnier, far more sentimental, and quite a bit less repulsive as one would expect. Jeunet doesn’t forget who’s the hero to cheer for and who’s the villain to hiss at, and with Dominique Pinon playing an earnest young man moving into an apartment building where new guests are often butchered and sold to other tenants, we have a moral centre to cheer for. It also helps that Marie-Laure Dougnac couldn’t possibly be cuter as the young woman who ends up taking a liking to the hero. Strange visuals are backed by an equally important attention paid to the soundscape of the film. From the first twenty minutes, two primarily sound-driven sequences affirm that this is the kind of movie that benefits from a keen ear. The result is weird, highly enjoyable, often spectacular. Delicatessen has aged admirably well, or perhaps not at all—the advantage of Jeunet’s off-beat but polished approach is it stands out of time, feeling as fresh in 1991 as in 2019. It’s quite a movie, and it’s almost essential viewing to anyone with a yearning for a complete audio-visual movie experience.

Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (1989)

Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (1989)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(Second Viewing, On Blu-ray, December 2019) I’m not going to pretend that Star Trek has always been smart or good, but Star Trek V: The Final Frontier plumbs the depths of the series. Very few things work in this very episodic instalment. At the time, real-world factors such as a budget cut, a writer’s strike, a special effects house unable to deliver and the heavy-handed influence of William Shatner in the director’s chair meant that the project was already off to a rocky start. But that’s downplaying the wobbly foundation of the film in a script with an inane premise (let’s go see… God?) and keeps compounding this nonstarter mistake with one dumb sequence after another. Never mind the surprisingly unconvincing special effects—watching the film, I kept being reminded how stupid the whole thing was through one false note every few minutes. This is the movie that has Pioneer 10 used as target practice by a cartoonishly evil Klingon, an ensign carrying a circa-1989 laser printer on the bridge, flirting between Uhura and Scotty, Uhura doing a half-naked fan dance to distract enemies, Scotty knocking himself out on a very visible beam somehow in the middle of a corridor … it just doesn’t stop. Those may be minor issues, but the point is that the overall story of Star Trek V, with its complete lack of thematic foreshadowing of the search for God announced more midway through, just makes it impossible to like the film either at a high or low level. Even the halfway-interesting moments (such as the unusually dramatic scene between McCoy and his father) are in no way earned by the rest of the film and feel either pretentious or hilarious. (And I won’t even discuss the comic relief.) As an individual movie, Star Trek V was bad enough that it has been essentially ignored by its follow-ups: the central idea of going “to the centre of the galaxy” in a blink blatantly flies in the face of later-Trek positing an entire series on being too far from home. Even the use of the various alien races seems drastically off-key, with little to distinguish the Vulcans from the Romulans from the overly typed Klingons. It’s just a mess, and it clearly shows the even=good/odd=bad pattern of the early Trek series. I will, however, reluctantly concede one thing: As irritating as Star Trek V can be, it perversely kept my interest throughout, which is more than I can say about later instalments such as Insurrection or Nemesis.

Legend (1985)

Legend (1985)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(Cineplex Streaming, December 2019) Coming toward the end of the 1980s fantasy boom, Legend has the hallmarks of a Ridley Scott production: The story is serviceable at best, but the visual polish of the film is almost enough to make us forget about the narrative. Tom Cruise stars as a young man searching for a princess (Mia Sara, unremarkable) that has been kidnapped by a demon (Tim Curry, intensely remarkable). Clearly executed with a fairy-tale tone, the film is first about images and secondarily about everything else: the characters are usually archetypical (with a few twists), the dialogue is out of fantasy central, and the episodic structure gets stronger the closer we get to getting things done. Still, it’s worth a look for anyone looking at the way 1980s fantasy films were able to work around practical special effects limitations, or how Curry can chew scenery with big horns, or how a rather young Tom Cruise did in such a production.

The Dark Crystal (1982)

The Dark Crystal (1982)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On Blu-ray, December 2019) Over the years, The Dark Crystal has developed a reputation that probably outstrips its actual value. As part of the early -1980s fantasy boom, it does earn points for trying to do something different and more original than simply filing off the numbers from a fairytale or simply reusing the tropes of heroic fantasy. Here we have a substantial amount of worldbuilding, a sympathetic hero at the opposite end of the muscle-bound Conan, and some interesting variations on the classic light-versus-dark fantasy ur-plot. By betting on puppet-driven actors (there isn’t a single human character here, although from time to time we do feel a jarring feeling in watching actors in suits), writer-director Jim Henson is able to be more ambitious about his world and the characters in it. Additionally, it’s easy to develop an odd kind of affection for the puppet characters of the film, as toothy as their fluffy exterior may not suggest they are. The story itself is nothing special, although it does conclude with an interesting fusion between light and dark rather than outright confrontation. No, the fun of The Dark Crystal is in the visuals, the originality and the sense of comfort that even its peculiar vision offers. It has aged remarkably well in this CGI age, mostly because it has chosen to be stylized from the get-go rather than try to approximate realism with special effects that it could never achieve at the time. The vision on-screen is the one they were aiming for, and the result (along with a less macho take on fantasy) is still quite charming.

The King of Comedy (1982)

The King of Comedy (1982)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(Google Play Streaming, December 2019) The tricky paradox of dark comedy is that you can manage to handle everything perfectly from a technical viewpoint, only to have audiences shrug and dismiss the result. It’s part of the deal—dark comedy pushes people out of their comfort zone and they don’t have to like it. That’s how I feel after watching The King of Comedy: I can’t fault director Martin Scorsese’s work here—he gets the material’s ironic darkness, executes it as well as it can be, and delivers a pretty good New York City movie as part of it. Robert de Niro is at his iconoclastic best as a psychopathic loser who hatches a plan to get his spot on a major TV show. Jerry Lewis and Sandra Bernhard also do well in the other main roles. But at the end, The King of Comedy plays its cards: the audience feels their heart sink as they realize that the psychopath is actually pretty funny, and that he gets rewarded for his actions. That may be just a bit too much to take, and perhaps just as dispiriting now than it was forty years ago. Great movie—but I’ll use my reviewer’s right to shrug and dismiss the result.

Cool Runnings (1993)

Cool Runnings (1993)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(In French, On TV, December 2019) There’s one theory of comedy that states that it comes from the surprise of matching two disparate ideas, and if you agree with that then it’s easy to see why Cool Runnings is amusing even from its premise. What if tropical Jamaica decided to field a bobsled team at the Winter Olympics? It’s not that ridiculous a premise (Jamaica has often competed in the winter Olympics, albeit not competitively—but you can see how athletes can adapt their physical abilities to other sports if they can train where there’s ice and snow) but such nuances are not the kind of material that Cool Runnings goes for—it will spend the strict minimum amount of time to justify its premise (loosely inspired by real-life events) and no more. Far more of a comedy than a sports movie, this is not about the Jamaican team winning against impossible odds, but never giving up all the way to an honourable finish. Helmed according to a strictly competent formula by Jon Turteltaub, the film hits its targets and makes good use of its element. The Jamaican atmosphere is convincing, and the use of reggae music does pleasantly permeate the film. As a Canadian, I was surprisingly pleased by many specific elements of the film. True to its inspiration, it takes place at the 1988 Calgary Olympic games, leading to the curiously nostalgic sight of an old-school Coles airport bookstore. John Candy also stars as a disgraced coach in one of his last films, leading further Canadian credentials to the results. While Cool Runnings is very much in the safe mainstream comedy film tradition, it does everything right, is funny when it counts and has the good sense to go for uplifting underdog inspiration as its climax. Not a great film, but one that can be watched easily enough by the entire family.

Eighth Grade (2018)

Eighth Grade (2018)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(Netflix Streaming, December 2019) To be unusually candid, I see Eighth Grade as a horror film rather than a coming-of-age drama, and it has everything to do with being a father who will have to confront the issues raised by the film within a few too-short years. I wouldn’t want to romanticize growing up in a small Eastern-Ontario town in the 1980s, but I don’t quite feel that the urban 2020s are going to be any easier. Yes, there’s more diversity, awareness and acceptable role models. On the other hand, we now have social media reflecting the worst of human impulses, teens aspiring to meet dangerous expectations, easily accessible depictions of sex, violence and abuse … it’s enough to make any parent feel inadequate despite trying our best. Few would have expected young comedian turned writer-director Bo Burnham (who rose to prominence on YouTube) to deliver a nuanced, sensitive, heart-wrenching take on the topic but here we are: Eighth Grade is the film of the moment when it comes to depicting modern eighth graders. They have access to the most extensive set of tools ever assembled for self-expression, but they can be bullied through their phones, manipulated into dangerous behaviour and terrified to the point of debilitating anxiety and depression. As excruciatingly uncomfortable as Eighth Grade can be to watch (remember me calling it a horror film?), at least it’s ultimately a sweet, kind-hearted film. Its very likable heroine (an uncommonly natural performance from Elsie Fisher) eventually makes it through, taking correct decision when her back is against the wall—the not-so-fun part are the events that drive her to that position. It does an amazing job at being of the moment: if you believe (as I do) that creators often get stuck on a specific year and spend the rest of their careers harkening back to that time, it’s refreshing to see a perspective that fully integrates the world as it feels right now, and not as something like “the 1980s, with cell phones.”  I may not want to see Eighth Grade again, but I probably will—it’s a tough world out there, and my daughter is going to need all the help I can give her.

Gallipoli (1981)

Gallipoli (1981)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(Google Play Streaming, December 2019) It’s important for a variety of perspectives and people to be reflected in cinema, and that also goes for war films—considering the inherent propaganda in depicting armed conflict and the difficulty of understanding such massive undertakings as a battle, it’s essential to diversify. I don’t think, for instance, that Hollywood would have ever tackled World War I in the same way Australian filmmaker Peter Weir does in Gallipoli, for instance. The film focuses on two friends who find themselves acting as couriers during the battle of Gallipoli. A surprising portion deals with pre-war adventures for the protagonists, giving a credible peek into life in rural Australia in the 1910s—another topic unlikely to be portrayed in Hollywood. But the point of the film is the crucible that war becomes for those young men, and the large-scale (pre-digital) depiction of the fighting at Gallipoli. In the vein of most 1970s war film, it has an unapologetically anti-war tone, with loss of innocence (not to mention loss of life) being a major component, along with a critique of British command. A young Mel Gibson is quite good in one of the lead roles, offering a more modern counterpart to lead Mark Lee’s more idealistic character. I’m not a big fan of some jarring moments in the soundtrack incorporating synth-based music alongside a more orchestral score, but that’s a common-enough complaint for movies of the time. Fortunately, it doesn’t affect much of Gallipoli, which remains not only an interesting war film but also a top pick in the Australian movie pantheon even decades later.

Excalibur (1981)

Excalibur (1981)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(Google Play Streaming, December 2019) Coming at the intersection of Arthurian legend and the early-1980s fantasy film boom, Excalibur chooses to hold nothing back in presenting the knights of the round table in a decidedly fantastic context. Helmed by John Boorman, the film goes for maximal rule of cool—even limited by the special technology of the time, it’s meant to be spectacular with shiny armoured suits, grander-than-life soliloquies and a strong magical element. The cinematography makes great use of its Irish location, and the local casting means that this is not only one of Liam Neeson’s earliest screen credits, but also an early big-screen showcase for Gabriel Byrne, Ciarán Hinds and Patrick Stewart. Nigel Terry does well as Arthur and so does Nicol Williamson as Merlin, but it’s Helen Mirren who looks simply spectacular as Morgana Le Fay, eclipsing even Cherie Lunghi as Guenevere. The result is more impressive as a collection of nice scenes and images than a coherent plot—although my lack of enthusiasm for the Arthurian myth-making may be showing here. Still, I had a reasonably good time watching Excalibur in its overblown grandeur—it has its own strengths that manage to overcome many of its limitations.

Outlaw King (2018)

Outlaw King (2018)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(Netflix Streaming, December 2019) There are days when watching even a decent historical film is simply too much, and Outlaw King had the bad luck to land on such a day. I tried getting interested in this fictionalized retelling of Robert the Bruce’s history, but it just didn’t work. Grimy, realistic, dirty and unpleasant to a fault, this is a film thanks spends quite a bit of time setting up and then showing medieval-era battles … which end up being somewhat anachronic. Chris Pine is not bad in the least role, but the film around him is heavy to the point of choking almost any vitality out of it. Normally, I’d float the idea of a re-watch sometime in the future, but my interest in such a thing is roughly negative at this point, especially considering the two-and-a-half-hour length of the result. There’s little in Outlaw King that breaks out of the generic brown-and-blue feeling of similar historical epics, even if you’re in a better mood.

Altered States (1980)

Altered States (1980)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(Google Play Streaming, December 2019) As someone who watches way too many movies, one of the best things I can say after seeing one is “Wow, that was weird.”  It doesn’t always link with quality, but it does correlate with memorability. Altered States is one weird movie, especially seen outside its 1980s sociocultural context. Circa-2020 society has plenty of issues, but it does feel as if we’re less likely to believe woo-woo parasciences than in 1980, and Altered States depends on taking these things seriously in order to work. There’s plenty of psychobabble as the film sets up a premise in which American academic parapsychologists start messing with isolation tanks and take heroic quantities of drugs in order to unlock other states of consciousness. This being a thriller, it goes without saying that the efforts are successful and homicidal as one of the characters physically regresses to an earlier species and naturally starts murdering people. The final act is a trip put on film as hallucinogenic visions (as executed by dated special effects shots) represent how the protagonist is slipping in and out of reality, endangering his family along the way. It’s bonkers, and it’s that crazy quality that makes the film compelling even as not a single word of it is credible. According to legend, director Ken Russell and screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky clashed during the film’s production (to the point of Chayefsky being credited under a pseudonym), and this tension can be seen in the contrast between the script’s earnestness and the wild colourful direction. If wild movies aren’t your thing, consider that the film has early roles for William Hurt and Drew Barrymore, as well as a turn for Bob Balaban. Altered States is not good Science Fiction: In the biz, we’d call it “not even wrong” for its delirious depiction of science and scientists at work. But it’s an over-the-top hallucination and as such is likely to stick in mind far longer than more sedate works of the period.

The Gods Must Be Crazy (1980)

The Gods Must Be Crazy (1980)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(Second Viewing, Facebook Streaming, December 2019) I have very dim memories of watching The Gods Must Be Crazy as a kid, but good enough to remember the opening premise (a bottle thrown from a plane falls in a primitive desert tribe, but causes so much strife that one person is asked to get rid of it) and its final image (throwing the bottle down an Oceanside cliff) but very little of everything in between. As it happens, there’s an entire other film in between those moments, and much of the fun in re-watching the film was in uncovering something entirely new. Featuring an awkward biologist, a kidnapped schoolteacher and fleeing revolutionaries, the middle of the film is a bush farce that makes comedy out of unlikely elements and some more comedy out of classically inspired gags and situations that seem to come from a screwball film. It’s not quite as funny as I (hazily) remembered it, but there are a few good moments in it, and the sense of newness from the South African landscape is still novel enough to be interesting. Upon release in the early 1980s, the film attracted some deserved critical commentary for its depiction of its Bushmen characters and how it emerged from Apartheid-dominated South Africa. While the political situation in South Africa has improved and isn’t the hot-button issue that it was, there is still an uncomfortable dimension in the film’s representation of Bushmen as comic characters—it can be difficult to figure out if it’s meant to be caricatural or condescending or if there was any way for the film to proceed with its premise without offending someone along the way. Still, The Gods Must be Crazy is still different enough forty years later to be an interesting viewing experience.

The Message (1976)

The Message (1976)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(archive.org streaming, December 2019) Some movies are not simply movies—events get attached to them whether the filmmakers want it or not. You can watch The Message as a film about early Islamic history, designed as an old-fashioned epic not too dissimilar to westerns or Hollywood-on-the-Tiber biblical epics. It has vast battle sequences and stilted dramatic scenes, but it scrupulously avoids any on-screen depiction of Muhammad and some other central figures. The desert clearly takes centre stage as a backdrop. The result can be interesting when there is some action, dull when there isn’t, and familiar like many epic films are. As a movie, it’s a mixed bag. But then you start looking into the film’s production and release, and that’s when things take a turn for the fascinating. The film was led by a director, Moustapha Akkad, who wanted to popularize Mohammad’s life for western audiences, was financed by the governments of Morocco and Libya (i.e.: Muammar al-Gaddafi), was retitled at the very last minute due to a threatening phone call, and its American premiere contributed to a 1977 hostage-taking incident in Washington, DC, in which two were killed. Just to show you how weird history is, future infamous DC Mayor Marion Barry was wounded during the attack and one of the hostages was the father to David Simon, who would later go on to create The Wire. Amazing. Of course, we’re now so far away from The Message as to be trivial, but that’s the point: The film is far less interesting than the events that surrounded it. That happens.

Mandy (2018)

Mandy (2018)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(Google Play Streaming, December 2019) Even if Nicolas Cage has proven his capacity to turn in good dramatic performances, he is a megastar because of his uncanny ability to do justice to grander-than-life characters, chewing scenery like the best of them. There’s no doubt that his tax problems have led him to a spiral of smaller, duller roles in recent years, but occasionally, he gets projects like Mandy in which he can showcase the kind of typical performances that ensure his immortality. But Mandy isn’t your typical movie: Blending a revenge story with a highly stylized cinematography in which not a single frame has not been heavily colour-corrected, it’s a quasi-unique film in today’s landscape. Nodding to the 1980s almost as much as in his previous Beyond the Black Rainbow, writer-director Panos Cosmatos concocts a genre story with quasi-supernatural elements that unleash Cage. The story has something to do with a logger taking revenge on a hippie cult after they murder his wife (Andrea Riseborough as the titular Mandy), but the point is in the purpled-hued phantasmagoric imagery, the fantasy art featured in the film and the nightmarish odyssey that the main character takes to exact his revenge. Battling leather-clad demonic bikers, crafting a battle-axe and befriending a tiger, the protagonist reaches an apex of sort during a chainsaw duel featuring a ludicrous blade measurement contest. It ends, as it should, with him bathed in blood. There’s a cross-genre sensibility found in Mandy that brands it as a cult favourite in the making—time will tell if it has staying power, but this is probably the best Cage performance and his best movie in years.