Movie Review

  • Pocahontas (1995)

    Pocahontas (1995)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, March 2018) Discussing Pocahontas is … complicated. There are different levels of racism, and not killing others is only the first step in a very long ladder. The recent resurgence of racism in popular (North-) American discourse is a discouraging reminder that a lot of people get stuck halfway in the ladder, pointing to unimaginable cruelty below them as proof of their enlightenment, but only so far as it doesn’t really change anything for them. (With my own white privilege, I’m stuck 2/3 of the way.) Where I’m going with this in discussing a Disney movie is that while Pocahontas is a visible attempt to ennoble and represent Native Americans in a kids-friendly format, it does carry along a number of vexing issues. Anyone who knows anything about the history of race relations from the moment Europeans set foot in North America may be put off by the rewriting of history, the inclusion of magical talking animals, the sexualization of Pocahontas as a tall thin supermodel, or the almost-mystical link between Native Americans and nature. Even on a surface level, the film is problematic: My own daughter was not amused by the film’s more sombre moments (“Savages” may have all sorts of lofty intentions, but its irony and dramatic counterpoint is completely lost on the pre-school set) and the film never became a household favourite like other Disney films. The portrayal of hate in the film, even from characters who are obviously wrong and evil, is troubling to an extent that more fantasy-based antagonists aren’t. Sure, the film is PG-rated and aimed at older audiences. But that’s part of the problem: Pocahontas is dragged in different directions by cute animals, soaring paean to nature, racist antagonists, impossibly virtuous leads, and the result feels scattered. This is even more frustrating given that everyone involved in the film’s conception must have had the best of intention in condemning hate. Still, it doesn’t work as well, and in a far more sensitive 2018 it’s easier to see why. Too bad, because from a technical level, the film is nothing short of terrific: 2D animation was seldom better, and Disney clearly brought in top talent in terms of musical numbers and voice acting. Alas, little of these matters when there is clearly something off with Pocahontas. I wonder how a more modern treatment would deal with these issues … and if it’s possible to tell anything close to this story without annoying someone somewhere.

  • All about Eve (1950)

    All about Eve (1950)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2018) There’s a deliciously impish quality to All about Eve that becomes apparent only a few moments in the movie, and remains the film’s best quality throughout. It’s a cynical look at showbusiness, triangulated between actors, writers and critics. Writer/director Joseph L. Mankiewicz can use rich material in his exploration of the dirty side of theatrical showbusiness, and his actors, in-between Bette Davis, Anne Baxter and George Sanders, are all up to the challenges of his vision. (Plus, a small role for Marilyn Monroe.)  All about Eve has a lot to say about fame, acting, age and even a touch of closeted homosexuality. It does so with considerable wit—the film is good throughout, but it improves sharply whenever George Sanders shows up as a waspy critic acting as an impish narrator. The film still plays exceptionally well today: showbusiness hasn’t changed much, and much of the film doesn’t deal in easily dated artifacts … although some of the social conventions have thankfully moved on. A bit like contemporary Sunset Blvd, All about Eve is a film built on wit and a great script, so it’s no surprise that it would stay so engaging sixty-five years later.

  • On the Waterfront (1954)

    On the Waterfront (1954)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2018) It took me a long time to warm up to On the Waterfront. At first, it felt like a chore of a self-imposed viewing. Taking place low down the social ladder in the working neighborhoods around the port, it talks about corruption, coercion and trying to do the right thing when you’re going to be punished for it. Marlon Brando became famous largely thanks to this film (“I coulda been a contender!”), and it’s easy to understand why—compared to other actors in other films of the time, he feels more real, more alive than most of them. Other standout performances include Karl Malden as a tough priest, and a first appearance by Eva Marie Saint. Still, the film is a grim slog for much of its duration—but it gets much better toward the end, as On the Waterfront finally comes into focus and achieves maximum dramatic intensity. The final ten minutes are riveting, which is a good place for a film to conclude. 

  • Charade (1963)

    Charade (1963)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2018) It does take a while before Charade comes into focus. It begins strangely, with a contrived meet-cute at a ski resort in the Alps that turns into an even stranger succession of events once the heroine comes back to Paris to find out that her husband has died, a large amount of money is missing, and three strangers really hated her ex-husband. The artificiality of the setup is almost overpowering, and even the comforting presences of Audrey Hepburn as the widow and Cary Grant as a mysterious free agent aren’t quite enough to unpack the heavy-handed setup. But as the deaths and double-crosses being to pile up, Charade does acquire a nice velocity, and even answers the questions raised in the first act. Hepburn is adorable as the endangered heroine, despite being too young for the role. Meanwhile, Grant is terrific as someone who may or may not be friendly—he’s occasionally very funny (ha, that shower scene!), and his last grimace of self-revelation at the very end is like seeing a split-second callback to the classic comedies early in his career. Also noteworthy as supporting roles for Walter Matthau, George Kennedy and James Coburn. Great scores and visual design by Henry Mancini and Saul Bass round up an impressive crew. Surprisingly not directed by Alfred Hitchcock, Charade is increasingly endearing the longer it goes on, and satisfyingly blends romance, comedy and suspense. It’s well worth watching. Just make sure to give it more than thirty minutes to make sense.

  • The Beguiled (2017)

    The Beguiled (2017)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2018) By now, Sofia Coppola’s female-centric, soft gauze, slow-pacing, contemplative style almost defies parody. But it happens to be the correct approach for this remake of The Beguiled, in which a wounded soldier comes to rest at an isolated house entirely peopled by women. The presence of a man in an otherwise all-female environment is a recipe for disaster, and the film follows this to the expected conclusion. Hugh Jackman is featured as the soldier, but he’s outclassed by Nicole Kidman, Kirsten Dunst, and Elle Fanning. It’s not much of a story, but it’s deliberately told with plenty of atmosphere. It may not be to everyone’s liking, but it’s competent and daring enough to create discussions as to who, if anyone, was in the right here. I’d like to have more to say about it, but The Beguiled is the kind of film that can only be taken in, not picked apart.

  • Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017)

    Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2018) Like most, I was very skeptical of yet another attempt to reboot the Spider-Man series. Only the idea that Marvel Studio was the creative force behind Spider-Man: Homecoming (and the affirmation that the film would fit within the MCU) kept me hopeful. As it happens, this new integrated take on the character is completely successful. Indeed coming back home to the character’s spiritual and physical origins, Homecoming manages a fresh take on an overexposed character, seamlessly blending him with the rest of the superhero universe and also taking on the Marvel house style honed to perfection over the past ten years. While I liked Andree Garfield a lot as Spider-Man, Tom Holland brings the required wide-eyed naiveté to the character, making the relationship with father-surrogate Tony Stark even more interesting. Strong action sequences and a credible villain (leading to an honestly surprising moment midway through the film where Peter Parker and Spider-Man’s identities come crashing together) do much to make the film fun, but so do the de-rigueur touches of humour and self-conscious goofiness. By choosing to depict a looser, funnier, younger Spider-Man, the MCU creative team has found a terrific antidote to the increasingly dour direction the character was taking, and the result is irresistibly fun. The integration even works at the story level, as the film deals with the fallout of having alien invasions and superheroes running around; the MCU is maturing nicely as it grows older. Veteran actors such as Robert Downey Jr., Marisa Tomei and Michael Keaton are used expertly to ground the film, while among the high-school crowd, Zendaya is remarkable despite having nearly nothing to do (at least until the sequel.) Homecoming adds up to a surprisingly entertaining movie, even more so given the low expectations. Once again, Marvel Studio defies the odds.

  • A Man for All Seasons (1966)

    A Man for All Seasons (1966)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2018) Holy dullness incarnate… Not all Best Picture Oscar winners are created equal, and if some are offensive and others have successfully baited the Academy for feel-good recognition, some are dull and few are duller than Fred Zinnemann’s A Man for All Seasons. An intensely specialized drama set in King Henry VIII’s time, this is nothing more than a theatre play filmed indifferently, and doomed to excruciating lengths if you’re not a fan of historical pieces made with as little flair as possible. The portrait of Sir Thomas More as a quasi-perfect person faced with a difficult choice, A Man for All Seasons is intense in costumes, religious quandaries, matter of states and despite everything it’s remarkably boring. I’m not a good public for period pieces to begin with (especially those who use old English), and this film left me colder than I would have thought possible. As with other underwhelming Oscar Winners (and there’s a long list of those), the best I can do is sigh, scratch A Man for All Seasons off the list and say that I don’t have to watch it again.

  • Cimarron (1931)

    Cimarron (1931)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2018) As one of the earliest Best Picture Oscar winners, Cimarron remains a quasi-mandatory viewing experience for film buffs, and comparative lists are quick to bury it to the bottom of the Best Picture winners. I went into the film with low expectations, and was surprised to find out that I rather liked much of the movie. My appreciation has its limits, of course—the film is casually racist, long, lopsided in its structure by accelerating toward the end and making the motivations of its characters increasingly nebulous … and so on. But there is a sweep and a scope to the film’s central premise (adapted from an epic novel): the development of a place (and a family) from the initial land rush to a then-modern city. It does start with an impressive sequence, a re-creation of the 1889 Oklahoma Land Rush in all of its crazy glory. Then we’re off to understand our putative protagonist, who ends up becoming a pillar of the community after being beaten to the plot of land he wanted for himself. Various episodic shenanigans take place until, in a bizarre third act, the protagonist disappears from the story and leaves his wife to fend off for herself. Spanning forty years, Cimarron is at its best when it portrays its characters civilizing their own community, banding together to create some peace and order. Alas, even in that most noble portrait, the film has some serious issues in bringing everything together and tightening up its story. At least the wild-west visuals are interesting, Richard Dix is fine as the protagonist, Estelle Taylor is still eye-catching decades later and Irene Dunne makes an impression as the dramatic burden of the film falls on her shoulders toward the end. Watching old movies can turn into an anthropologic expedition—especially during the tumultuous thirties, as movies acquired more or less the same basic cinematographic grammar used today but to portray a significantly different time. So it is that I’m rather happy to have seen Cimarron—It’s memorable, was made with high production values for the time and carries to the present day a time capsule of things both admirable and reprehensible about how American saw themselves back then.

  • Grand Hotel (1932)

    Grand Hotel (1932)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2018)  The thirties were a decade when Hollywood perfected the grammar and sales pitch of cinema, with Grand Hotel earning a minor place in history for two innovations: on an artistic level, pioneering the use of a 360-degree lobby set that allowed the camera to be pointed in any direction, and commercially for bringing together as many movie stars as the (comparatively large) budget would allow. It netted Grand Hotel a Best Picture Oscar back in 1933, but today the result has visibly aged. While the script still holds some interest by bringing together a bunch of vignettes that sometimes interact, much of the film is shot as a theatre piece, the lobby sequences being an exception that highlight the more traditional nature of the rest of the film. As far as star power is concerned, modern viewers can still enjoy the presences of Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford as well as Lionel and John Barrymore—even as reminders of why they were or became superstars. While the Berlin setting of the film may strike some as odd considering Hollywood’s insularity and the whole World War II unpleasantness a few years later, it’s worth noting that at the time, Hollywood was filled with German expats, that Berlin was a world-class city and the best-selling source novel spoke for itself. Also: this was the depression, and a bit of gentle European exoticism couldn’t hurt the movie-watching masses. Grand Hotel will forever live on as a Best Picture winner, and as a representative of the Hollywood machine as it was revving up in the early thirties, it’s a master class in itself.

  • The Fox and the Hound (1981)

    The Fox and the Hound (1981)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, March 2018) Watching a lot of classic Disney animation movies, I’m actually struck at how a lot of them aren’t classic at all. This is particularly true in the fallow period between Disney’s Golden age and its renaissance. While I will always passionately defend The Aristocats, there are many other movies of the era that I’ll leave to sink on their own demerits. So it is with The Fox and the Hound, which is certainly not bad but ends up being a depressing shade of bland once everything is said and done. On one level it is a Disney animal movie. On the other hand, there won’t be too many lunchboxes made of this rather depressing acknowledgment that foxes and dogs aren’t made to be friends. The film occasionally punches hard for younger audiences, and it doesn’t exactly end on the most optimistic of notes. This, in turns, gives a rather sombre quality to much of what comes before, including a lot of material between anthropomorphized animal characters. The animation isn’t bad, and the script is built acceptably, but The Fox and the Hound simply doesn’t have anything (a song, a sequence, a character, a princess) to set it apart. It’s no surprise if the film doesn’t enjoy anything like the enduring popularity of other Disney productions of the time. It can be watched readily enough, but it can’t be remembered longer than necessary.

  • Peter Rabbit (2018)

    Peter Rabbit (2018)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, in theatres, March 2018) Considering that I’m reading Beatrix Potter’s stories to my daughter these days, I should be outraged that the screen adaptation of her Peter Rabbit tales pretty much makes a mockery of the original. Peter Rabbit features a petulant mischief-maker, all the animal characters have radically different personalities from the book, the tone has gone from pastoral whimsies to modern slapstick, and Potter herself is portrayed as an artist with a kooky side. Much of the plot has become a romantic triangle between Potter, a clumsy suitor and Peter Rabbit. The film has been put through the homogenization process that makes the result feel a lot like your usual live action talking-animal kids movie à la Beverly Hills Chihuahua or The Smurfs. And yet, and yet … it may be my residual liking for writer/director Will Gluck’s first few movies and overall sense of humour, but I found Peter Rabbit surprisingly easy to like. I’m not that fond of the film’s lowest-denominator approach to physical humour (some of the gags are just dumb, and other cross the line into things I rather would have cut), but it’s a high-energy film, and once you distance yourself from the Potter mythos, it’s just about slightly better than comparable kids’ films. It all converges to an expectedly sweet conclusion, and many of the peripheral characters have one or two good scenes. The special effects are as good as we can expect from state-of-the-art Sony Pictures Animation, and the pacing of the film is such that it flies by. No, I may not consider Peter Rabbit a true respectful Potter adaptation … but I like it all the same, despite the warts and the dumb stuff.

  • The Great Dictator (1940)

    The Great Dictator (1940)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2018) Charlie Chaplin is most closely associated with the silent film era, so it’s interesting to see the ways through which he approached The Great Dictator, a full feature film in which he speaks … and carries a heck of a message. Famously made to criticize Hitler, the film is filled with Nazi imagery, depicting of life under a fascist regime and a strong message against tyranny. It works both at the micro and the macro level, leveraging small injustices in an effort to talk about bigger ones. Chaplin also manages to deliver a fiercely political statement with the confines of an often-silly comedy. (And if you think that being against authoritarianism isn’t much a political statement, you may want to pay attention to news coming out of the United States these days.)  There are numerous comic set pieces, made even more remarkable for the film’s position in history in laughing at a situation whose true horrifying nature would only be revealed in later years. It all amounts to a film that’s fun to watch for the jokes, and fascinating to contemplate for the context surrounding the jokes. A classic for a reason, The Great Dictator is an impressive achievement.

  • Funny Girl (1968)

    Funny Girl (1968)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2018) The best reason to see Funny Girl was and remains Barbra Streisand—for all of her diva reputation, here she is at the beginning of her career with the chance to play a few decades’ worth of a character through early success and later heartbreak. In taking on a star-making debut role loosely based on Fanny Brice’s life, Streisand gets to be funny and attractive, then increasingly embittered by a bad marriage even as her fame grows. Most of all, Streisand gets to sing in a musical that becomes a showcase for a broad range of talents, from light-hearted to dramatic. It’s quite a performance, and it should charm even though who have grown dubious of post-fame Streisand. The great Omar Sharif shows up in a key role as her no-good husband—the story here is rather standard, but Streisand’s performance elevates it. Funny Girl is also notable in that while it was made in the twilight years of the big Hollywood musical (and during the big upheaval that brought New Hollywood to the forefront), it doesn’t suffer all that much from the encroaching bitterness that killed off the genre in the 1970s—while the second half of the film is significantly less amusing than the first, the transition is accomplished gradually, and much of the first half is actually quite funny. William Wyler’s direction is fine—with some standout sequences such as the last scene of Act One. Still, this is Streisand’s show and she remains the single best reason to watch Funny Girl even today.

  • The Dirty Dozen (1967)

    The Dirty Dozen (1967)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2018) Frankly, I thought that I would have enjoyed The Dirty Dozen quite a bit more than I did. Part of it may have been shaped by modern expectations—in modern Hollywood, movies based on the premise of bringing together hardened criminals for a suicide mission are meticulously polished to ensure that the criminals aren’t too bad, or that they meet a morally suitable comeuppance. Our heroes have been unjustly convicted, or operate according to a sympathetic code of honour that may not meet official approval. Their adventures, first in training and then in combat, are calculated to meet focus group approval. But The Dirty Dozen, having been forged in the years following the breakdown of the chaste Hayes Code, is significantly rougher and grittier than the modern ideal. The dirty dozen members are in for reprehensible conduct, not pseudo-criminal malfeasance. The attitude of the film, as Hollywood was pushing the limits of what was acceptable in terms of violence, also permeates everything. While tame by contemporary standards of gore, The Dirty Dozen nonetheless feels … dirty. There are a lot of characters, and they’re often short-changed by the film’s juggling of roles. This being said, The Dirty Dozen is also a showcase of actors: In between Lee Marvin, Ernest Borgnine, Charles Bronson, John Cassavetes, George Kennedy and an impossibly young Donald Sutherland (among many others), there are a lot of familiar faces here, and that has its own appeal. If you can go along with the film’s disreputable atmosphere, it remains a competent war film … but it may be difficult to do so.

  • Dumbo (1941)

    Dumbo (1941)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, March 2018) As with many classic-era Disney movies, Dumbo is sufficiently well-known as to appear safe and obvious from childhood memories: It’s a movie about a flying elephant, what else is there to say? But a good look at the film from beginning to end does have a few surprises. The biggest one is almost certainly the pre-psychedelic Pink Elephant sequence, a small triumph of animation craft that quickly devolves in a hallucinatory, nightmarish blend of melting blank faces and other indescribable moments. Coming a few minutes after a heartbreaking sequence in which Dumbo’s mother is taken away, it does push the boundaries of what we consider to be appropriate for kids these days. This leads to a sequence with black crows that now seems saddled with racist language, and then to an ending so abrupt that the film seems to be missing another act entirely. This is all interesting, as is the contemporary depiction of an early-forties circus. It may not, however, match with the derivative representation of Dumbo from the Disney Corporation. But that’s all right—as long as you properly vet the film before watching it with your kids.