Movie Review

  • The Making of a Legend: Gone with the Wind (1988)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2022) If you ever wanted to learn everything about the making of Gone with the Wind, well, I guess you could pick up a book. But if you’re in a hurry and thirsty for audiovisual material, then The Making of a Legend: Gone with the Wind should do it. A largely chronological retelling of the film’s production from novel to casting to shooting to reception, it’s a documentary that only highlights how much of a colossal undertaking Gone with the Wind was to shoot, the numerous problems that popped up during production (including three directors themselves directed by producer David Selznick) and the impact it had on Hollywood. By the time the film ends, you’ll feel as if any film deserved a making-of, it’s Gone with the Wind—not only because it remains the all-time box-office champ (adjusted for inflation) never to be dethroned, but because it was such a dramatic production. Coming from late 1980s TV production pedigree, there’s no denying that The Making of a Legend looks rough around its standard-definition edges and classic production techniques. On the other hand, it benefits from a few first-hand recollections of the making of the film, something that would be impossible to get from a documentary made today. Tons of archival footage is wisely used here, including rare test footage, and it all helps make this feel like the definitive documentary about Gone with the Wind, never to be dethroned.

  • The Spiral Staircase (1946)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2022) Horror film historians are in for a treat (of sort) in The Spiral Staircase, considering how it was a relatively well-financed RKO studio production that happens to rely on slasher-like elements decades before the genre was codified. A blend of film noir cinematography and horror plotting, The Spiral Staircase goes for Gothic thrills, as it pits a mute girl against a killer preying on disabled victims inside a vast Vermont estate. Directed by Robert Siodmak (no stranger to horror), adapted from a gothic novel, it really goes for the elements of what we now know as slasher horror: multiple deaths, creepy surroundings, a mystery surrounding the killer, and so on in a mere 84 minutes. Some sub-tropes are unformed—there’s no “final girl” last stand, for instance, and that’s the kind of stuff that does make the film interesting to experience. Dorothy McGuire does well as the female lead, with plenty of thrills and chills along the way. The restrained nature of the film (considering its production during the heyday of the restrictive Production Code) largely means that the murdering is done stylistically rather than gorily, which may come as a relief and a further point of distinction for many viewers. It does make one imagine an alternate Hollywood history in which slashers would have taken a far different stylistic path…

  • The Prizefighter and the Lady (1933)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2022) Classic Hollywood movies are exceptionally good at two things that are well illustrated in The Prizefighter and the Lady. For one thing, older movies can be instructive in illustrating the passing of fame: You can be famous enough one year that they make a movie about you, and then completely forgotten decades later (except by Hollywood nerds). And yet Hollywood will also teach you that there is nothing new under the sun—that the formulas that work now have been in use for generations. So it is that The Prizefighter and the Lady is a boxing film that happens to start a true-life boxing champion (Max Baer, much better as an actor than you’d expect, fighting other champion Primo Carnera in a climactic bout that prefigures their real-life fight the following year) and it goes for boxing movie clichés with the same gusto as Rocky would decades later. It’s quite standard, although the film does benefit from the great Myrna Loy as the titular lady, a gangster’s moll who makes things even more interesting. Some of the boxing sequences, under the successive tutelage of directors Howard Hawks (who left the production early on) and W. S. Van Dyke, still have some punch to them. It’s not much of a movie, but it still works and that, when you get down to it, is what still counts about Classic Hollywood.

  • Yeti— Il gigante del 20° secolo [Yeti: Giant of the 20th Century] (1977)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, August 2022) Wow. I mean: Wow. Italian piece of no-budget trash cinema Yeti: Giant of the 20th Century would have been an unbearable watch if it wasn’t for one fundamental aspect of it: It takes place in Canada, and specifically features stock footage of late-1970s Toronto. That makes it almost endlessly fascinating, especially for someone who recently returned to Toronto after a decade-long absence: The underdeveloped downtown! The police cars! The Canadian crowds! It’s a bother that you have to push the film aside to have a look at the historical footage, but there you go: I had quite a bit of fun taking a look at Toronto-the-Good as it existed a few decades ago. The rest of the film? Utter garbage ripping off King Kong in an attempt to relocate it to then-modern Toronto. Lazily conceived, badly executed (although a few shots do suggest some kind of budget) and most of all dull, Yeti: Giant of the 20th Century is probably good for three minutes of Toronto stock footage. Fast-forward the rest.

  • Teen Spirit (2018)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, August 2022) Every era has its inspiring myths giving hope against reason, and for some reason “winning a talent contest leading to fame and fortune” seems to endure despite ample evidence to the fantasy of it. (Seriously, how many “American Idol” contestants have become celebrities?)  But they’re nice stories and they make tidy films and Teen Spirit goes full bore on the most obvious version of it. At times, it overplays its hand—witness the intensely depressing first half-hour of the film, in which the miserable existence to be escaped through fame is described a bit too well and too glumly: As our heroine is introduced in her dead-end life with an oppressive family and an existence in the middle of Nowhere, UK (specifically the Isle of Wright), viewers will want to get out of there much sooner than she does. (Hey, there’s the fast-forward button…) Things improve, slightly, once she heads over to London and the typical sell-your-soul-to-the-devil stuff starts. While the devil happens to be played in this case by the always-fetching Rebecca Hall, she doesn’t leave much of an impression here, as she merely walks in and out of frame a few times. Anyway—our heroine wins, the end. There’s nothing much more to it, and perhaps one day we’ll ask the right questions about pretending something so patently improbable that it probably has a negative influence on its audience.

  • American Underdog (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, August 2022) My biggest problem with football movies is that I’m not an American, I don’t like football and let’s face it, I don’t even understand the rules of the game. So, there’s this entire subgenre of movies that I don’t really care for, even when they jump up and down to be more than the standard underdog story. (On the other hand? I really liked Friday Night Lights and Any Given Sunday.)  With a title like American Underdog, at least this 2021 film wears its allegiances proudly. It revolves around the true-life story of Kurt Warner, an unlikely football star who followed a very unusual path to sports stardom. As a piece of Americana, this film is more evocative than most—it combines dreams of an unattainable ideal as measured against crushing disappointment, dead-end jobs, hard work and a fairytale ending. Most football fans will learn nothing new from Warner’s well-known story—although considering that it’s more than twenty years old at this point, some newer fans may pick up a few things. There’s little to say about the execution by directors Jon Erwin and Andrew Erwin—it’s up to the standards of the moment in nearly every technical aspect, with the screenwriting trending toward the tried-and-true formula. Even I could feel the rush of excitement at improbable success.

  • The Secret Garden (1993)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, August 2022) I didn’t particularly like The Secret Garden, but it’s more accurate to say that it left me cold than to pretend that I found fault with it. Simply put, it’s a film made for other, much-younger audiences. As an old-school Hollywood buff, I was curious to see how the film would compare to its earlier 1949 adaptation—one that’s often best known for being a black-and-white film with striking Technicolor sequences to reinforce some of its wondrous themes. But this version is from 1993, a time when showing much of a film made for younger audiences in black-and-white would have been commercial suicide. So, there’s little in director Agnieszka Holland’s version to make it as distinctive as its earlier version was. But what it lacks in punch makes up for consistency, because it’s competently executed from beginning to end, charting the gradual awakening of a family when given access to a quasi-magical garden. It’s all rather well done, even if the lack of energy and visual distinction may leave a few curmudgeonly sorts such as myself feeling as if The Secret Garden plays it far too safe. Oh well—not all movies are required to cater to me, and righteously so—imagine how dull it would be if they did.

  • Subway (1985)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, August 2022) I’m not convinced that Subway isn’t a Science Fiction film. It’s shot so bizarrely, featuring such extreme characters in an alien environment that it still feels like SF. Of course, being an early creation from writer-director Luc Besson helps contribute to that impression—Besson’s quotidian can feel otherworldly, and that impression is magnified here. Anyway: Set in mid-1980s Paris, Subway begins with a car chase that lands its protagonist (a wild-haired, manic yet taciturn Christophe Lambert) underground, pursued by an attractive woman (Isabelle Adjani, striking) and some less attractive hoodlums working for the woman’s husband. Finding refuge amongst the metro’s colourful punk inhabitants and strange passageways, the film largely takes place in darkness or starkly artificial light. Visually and atmospherically, it’s quite a striking film: some of its early moments are quite memorable, and the accumulation of weirdness (such as a drumming Jean Reno or an athletic roller skater) makes an impression. Where Subway falters, inevitably, is in its plotting, or rather its inability to put its striking elements in the service of an equally striking narrative. Still, the film itself is more than its plot—it’s a bold piece of cinema, an early calling card for Besson and everyone else involved.

  • Judy (2019)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On TV, August 2022) As someone who has become a bit of a classic Hollywood buff over the past decade, I was both looking forward and dreading Judy. The story of Judy Garland, after all, is one of the most powerful object lessons in Hollywood child exploitation. As a teenage star whose actions were controlled by the then-dominant MGM movie studio, Garland soon found herself trapped in a cycle of fame, drugs, neglect and unhealthy romantic relationships, torpedoing her career through substance abuse, chronic lateness and unreliability. She aged more quickly and visibly than virtually any other Hollywood star—to the point that any film of hers past the mid-1940s is often difficult to watch given that she looks a decade or two older than her real age. Judy picks her story up in 1968, less than a year before her death—she’s having trouble finding a place to stay with her kids, and one string of gigs in London looks like an ideal way to get her life back on track. Meanwhile, flashbacks (featuring the adorable Darci Shaw as younger Garland) detail the abuse and influence of MGM in her life. In the film’s latter-day chronology, Garland is played by Renee Zellweger, and this is one instance where Zellweger’s weird physical transformation over the 2010s serves her well: she looks too thin, too wrinkled, too battered and so a far better fit for Garland than Bridget-Jones-era Zellweger could have been. (I’m not convinced Zellweger deserved the Best Actress Oscar for her performance, but Hollywood loves both a comeback story and a celebration of its past glories, so that feels more understandable than most.)  While the screenplay does a credible job at dramatizing and compressing Garland’s issues in a short period of time plus flashbacks, there are times when it slips inelegantly—as much as paying homage to Garland’s gay audience was a good idea, the film stops dead in its tracks for a highlighted pro-gay-love message that seems to diverge from its own themes. Other moments aren’t necessarily more subtle, but that comes with trying to give a dramatic structure to events that didn’t necessarily have one. While the rage in biographies in the moment is to take a specific period in time as indicative of an entire life, anyone can make a good case that Judy Garland deserved a full-life treatment—the compromise here isn’t necessarily satisfying. But what it doesn’t get in moments, Judy generally succeeds in aggregate: it’s a story about a little lost girl who could have had a much better life away from the spotlight of fame.

  • Just Wright (2010)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, August 2022) It’s great good fun to see Paula Patton and Queen Latifah duke it out as roommates-turned-romantic rivals in Just Wright, and in (predictably) seeing Latifah come out on top. This isn’t much of a romantic comedy—although the emphasis on Latifah being a physical therapist to an injured basketball player does make the film distinctive. It’s all slickly directed by Sanaa Hamri even when the script takes a few convenient shortcuts and keeps the suspense going for no good reason. There’s interesting character development between the film’s two female leads here—they start out as friendly roommates early on when Patton plays a gold-digger to men in which Latifah has no interest, but they soon turn rivals when the flaws of one of them (quickly compounded by other problems) threaten the other. If you think that Patton’s character self-evaporates quickly from the film at the mid-point, just wait: the third act is predicated on her return. Common plays a likable basketball player, but it’s not his movie: it’s Latifah’s. (Pam Grier also pops up briefly as the protagonist’s mom.)  Analyzing the film more deeply would miss the point of this being a consciously formulaic romantic comedy—Just Wright hits its targets, delivers everything in clean style and leaves viewers smiling. All done.

  • Mother (1996)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, August 2022) I keep watching James L. Brooks films thinking that I should enjoy them more, and Mother is not an exception to this feeling. While writer-director-actor Brooks takes on more difficult material than others, and often goes for sly irony over easier ways of making people laugh, Mother feels like many of his other films in that it fails to satisfy. It already starts on a shaky note, as a freshly divorced Science Fiction writer drives from Los Angeles to San Fransico to regroup at his mother’s place. (Amusingly enough, the driving montage is set to a remake of Simon and Garfunkel’s “Miss Robinson” with on-the-nose plot-reflecting lyrics.) Except that he doesn’t like her, and she often doesn’t think all that highly of him. Brooks and Debbie Reynolds have some fun playing off a dysfunctional mother/son relationship, and that’s much of Mother for you: bickering over trivial details like the detestable petty characters they are, until it’s time for the climax. When that climax comes, it almost feels like an insult: he discovers she once was an aspiring writer; he understands she dislikes him because he reminds her of her dashed literary aspirations and having had their epiphany, they part as new friends. If that’s a bit not enough for you, let’s just say that the film plays this absolutely straight, and adds in an adoring fan of the writer as a romantic envoi. And Brooks is supposed to be a wry, subtle writer? Have I missed anything? Watchable yet kind of infuriating, Mother strikes me as too much of the dumbest Hollywood pap. Strike another “I don’t think so” in Brook’s filmography.

  • Jumping the Broom (2011)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, August 2022) As much as I’ve come to enjoy low-budget BET original all-black romances for their imperfections, there are times when I hunger for something a bit more polished, with better actors and production values. In this regard, at least Jumping the Broom delivers—taking place in picturesque Martha’s Vineyard (well, Blue Rocks, Nova Scotia) and featuring notable actors such as Paula Patton, Angela Bassett, Loretta Devine, Mike Epps and Meagan Good. The film also benefits from a script that’s noticeably more ambitious and tightly written than the sometimes-amateurish writing found on BET. Much of the plot revolves around the class differences between a groom of humble origins and a bride coming from a moneyed background. But nothing is permanent, and Jumping the Broom has a bit of fun in taking apart the illusions of the richer characters over the course of a contentious destination wedding. The earthiness of some working-class characters (most notably the best friends played by Devine and Tasha Smith) clashes well with the pretensions of the upper-class ones. As the title of the film suggests, there’s a more ambitious than usual flavour to the discussions of how blackness may or may not intersect with money and authenticity—especially as it becomes obvious that some rich characters are floating on nothing. There’s some visual quality to the work from director Salim Akil, and the script usually overcomes its weaker moments with some deft character work. Not all plot threads are tied up gracefully (the revelation that one partner has enough secret funds to stay rich is the stuff that normally splits couples) but if you follow in the intended spirit of fun that the film wants you to have, then Jumping the Broom is a good-enough romantic comedy.

  • Sweet as Maple Syrup (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, August 2022) As much as I have a high tolerance for made-for-TV romantic comedies set in the world of food, there’s something about Sweet as Maple Syrup that just rubbed me wrong. I strongly suspect that knowing more than the average squirrel about maple syrup production doesn’t help—as a French Canadian not too removed from le terroir, I have spent some time in maple syrup cabanes, and absorbed the basics of how it’s made. To say that the film has a moronic take on it is putting it mildly. But what could have been tolerable with a decent script is made much worse by the way the film goes about its romantic comedy business. OK, the basics: A woman who has recently taken on her parents’ maple syrup production facility becomes increasingly concerned when the spring maple sap doesn’t flow, and asks a visiting arboriculturist for help. Now—anyone who has even looked at a maple tree knows that weather is the single biggest determinant of maple sap production: if it’s freezing at night and above freezing during the day, the sap moves around and that’s how you get the maple water that you collect and boil into syrup. But in this film, the characters scratch their heads and wonder if nutrients, speaking softly to the tree or whatever mumbo-jumbo is to blame. Weather is never mentioned. Now, this would be completely irrelevant to the success for the film if it had something else going for it. But even when it comes to its basic structural building blocks, Sweet as Maple Syrup (which was, ironically, produced in Quebec by noted director Caroline Labrèche) falls flat. The male lead character claims to be able to help despite having never seen a maple tree before (he’s from Arizona and should have stayed there), and more horrifyingly despite liking table syrup better than maple syrup. With such a Sirop de poteau-loving psychopath in the lead, the film doesn’t have a chance, especially when it mishandles the usual plot progression of such romantic comedies. The characters are all painfully stupid—there’s a bit where the protagonist should understand what happened to the night’s sap and she just painfully panics even as viewers can guess what’s about to happen next. There’s something about familiarity breeding contempt, and Sweet as Maple Syrup certainly invites the expression: the technical details about maple syrup production are the most visible blunders of the film, but they help sink something that wasn’t any good to begin with.

  • The Whole Truth (2016)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, August 2022) I was looking forward to The Whole Truth because of its eclectic casting. You wouldn’t necessarily expect a throwback to the Grisham-inspired courtroom dramas of the 1990s to feature Keanu Reeves as a slick defence attorney, or Renee Zelwegger as a grieving widow, or Jim Belushi as the murder victim (in flashbacks) or Gugu Mbatha-Raw as an eager co-counsel. But wait: The casting gets increasingly inexplainable as the film steadily gets more ludicrous—what could possess all of those actors to take on such weak material? But don’t fret—you get an hour’s worth of unremarkable but not yet silly material to tolerate before it all goes to waste. What’s obvious early on is that, even as a Grisham-lite legal thriller, The Whole Truth is weak stuff: the film is visually unremarkable, Reeves can’t pull off the gravitas required of the role, and the entire murder case doesn’t feel particularly compelling. Much is made of the lead attorney’s excellence, even if it becomes increasingly obvious that much of the cast of character seems to exist in small social circles. Mbatha-Raw has some good material early on as a truth detector, but she gets increasingly sidelined (then evacuated) for no good reason. But the film keeps the worse for the end, as the resolution of the murder case hinges on a terrifying case of conflict of interest that only makes sense in thrillers eager to value shock over plausibility. Except that there isn’t much shock to get either—it just feels like another arbitrary decision in a film crammed with them. Director Courtney Hunt doesn’t bring much to the convoluted script, and all of this explains why The Whole Truth has sunk into obscurity even despite its cast. Unearthing it in 2022 only confirms how much it deserves to be forgotten.

  • There’s No Business Like Show Business (1954)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, August 2022) Coming from the waning years of the Golden Hollywood musical, There’s No Business Like Show Business remains just as divisive today as it ever was. In an attempt to compete with television, movies went BIG by the mid-1950s, and this was as much of a razzle-dazzler as anything else. Consciously putting then-incandescent Marilyn Monroe front and centre alongside Donald O’Connor (weird pairing, but eh…), it artlessly crammed its musical numbers as Broadway pieces in the middle of a multi-year narrative about a showbiz family. It’s generally recognized that the film is better whenever Monroe is on-screen—although the impact of that will depend on how much you think of Monroe as a sex-symbol. (I prefer Monroe as a comedienne, and there’s little of that to be found here.)  For all of the impacts of numbers such as “Heat Wave,” however, Monroe remains in a supporting part, and you can feel the film trying to realign itself her way rather than spend more time on the rest of the cast. While There’s No Business Like Show Business is not a bad musical—the lavishness of the production alone prevents that—, it does miss a spark or something extra to truly become compelling. Monroe’s contribution isn’t that spark, and neither is O’Connor in a role that doesn’t seem to suit him all that well. It ends up being a thoroughly mixed bag of a film, and one that feels laboured most of the time. But some people love it! At least the glam still has an aura.