Movie Review

  • Night Train (2009)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, August 2022) There’s a difference between stylized and stylish—the first being an intention, the second being a compliment. Low-budget filmmaking often relies on stylization: in order to present something on-screen without breaking the budget, filmmakers often resort to functional CGI, visual shortcuts and even screenplay tricks. At times, Night Train relies far too heavily on those stylized elements, not quite making it to the “stylish” honorific. Much of the story is set on a train speeding through an endless winter forest landscape—cold and snowy on the outside, warm and cozy on the inside. Wait, did I say cozy? Well, as cozy as can be a near-empty passenger wagon with a dead body inside and three other people looking at each other suspiciously. What could have been a closed-room murder mystery, however, turns out to be something far wilder. Writer-director Brian King has something less realistic yet far more frustrating in mind, as a magical box comes to take a dominant place during the rest of the film. While the action stays on the train and clearly relies on cut-rate CGI for its exterior scenes, the film’s few characters mean that King can get a few name actors: In-between Steve Zahn, Danny Glover and Leelee Sobieski, the film does have a well-known cast for 2009. (As showbusiness goes, all three have experienced a significant career decline since then, with Sobieski even retiring from acting to focus on family and visual art.)  Night Train does try to do much with its small cast and mysterious supernatural forces. Some of it even works—seeing the attractive Sobieski gradually go from frumpy tuque-wearing bespectacled nerd to devil-crazed femme fatale is one of the film’s highlights. But in the end, as the gratuitously downbeat ending is nailed into place, there’s a feeling that the film fails to justify its existence, and that the corners cut in order to make the story fit into the budget aren’t in the service of something particularly worthwhile. The story definitely has lulls stretched to feature-film length, and an additional character may have enlivened a few things. I’m not happy about the use of a mystery-box plot device (especially given the undefinable nature of its mysterious content) but it’s certainly not the worst problem I have with the result. To be fair, the film does have enough going for it to make it a marginal pick—Sobieski is striking, Glover brings his usual calm intensity to the proceedings, and the supernatural plot device makes the film more than yet another monster film. The stylization attempt is interesting—but I don’t think that Night Train is successful enough to qualify as stylish rather than contrived.

  • It Happened at the World’s Fair (1963)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, August 2022) The expression “Clearly a film of its time” strikes both ways for It Happened at the World’s Fair—it would be difficult to imagine it being remade today without being emptied of what makes it special. For one thing, it’s an Elvis film—Elvis Presley here plays a clean-cut young American man (what else?) who’s happiest piloting a small plane or romancing girls (or, in the case of the film’s first remarkable stunt sequence, both at once) but is so unthreatening that an old man sees nothing wrong to ask him to take care of a young girl for a few days. Then there’s the fact that the film takes place at the Seattle World Fair, a uniquely 1962 event. But it’s the Elvis aspect that makes this a film uniquely preserved in time—the ten songs he sings (some of them likable, few of them memorable), the unthreatening womanizing, the sense that there won’t be any serious drama at any time in the film. Another piece of time-capsule history is Kurt Russell’s first movie role as a shun-kicking boy. (Russell would, of course, play Elvis a few decades later, and use his experience meeting The King to record a Presley tribute piece for TCM.)  It Happened at the World’s Fair is never taken seriously, and it’s not that good of a film either: It feels like a second-tier musical running on nostalgic charm more than anything looking like filmmaking craft. The script is serviceable and doesn’t take into account unexpected chemistry (to wit—the early throwaway love interest meant to show Elvis’s character’s good-natured womanizing ends up being far more interesting than the putative female co-lead of the film) or anything like directorial flair from Norman Taurog. But Elvis vehicles are what they are—and this one has the benefit of colourful early-1960s pop-optimism to add to the actor/singer’s undeniable charm. Many Elvis historians agree that It Happened at the World’s Fair is middle-of-the-pack Elvis cinema, and it’s watchable enough as such. But trying to even imagine such a film remade today is an exercise in futility.

  • Banco à Bangkok pour OSS 117 [Shadow of Evil] (1964)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, August 2022) Much was made, when French filmmakers resurrected the OSS 117 series as comedies starring Jean Dujardin, of how the remake explicitly parodied the misogyny, bigotry and parochial values of the first series of OSS 177 adventures. Alas, I couldn’t help but find out by myself just how bad those original films were by watching the first four of them. Rather than give you a few intensely repetitive reviews of that original series films, let me stuff everything in a discussion of Banco à Bangkok pour OSS 117. Let’s get the basics out of the way: Adapted from a series of French spy novels, the film is clearly part of the Bondsploitation movement of the mid-1960s, as everyone was churning out movies that tried (and failed) to recapture the charm of the first James Bond films. While it’s technically the second in the first OSS-117 film series, it’s the first to clearly ape Bond, the first to go outside France, the first shot in colour with a decent budget, and as such the one that has perhaps best endured until today. As with Bond, there’s an obvious intention to shoot in exotic locations, to feature a dastardly over-the-top super-villain, and to make the protagonist an utter charmer. But there’s a thin line between charm and smarminess, and lead actor Kerwin Mathews is badly served by a script that would get his character branded as a villain today—while working with good intentions (that is—if you’re into imperialism), his dialogue alone is worthy of an antagonist. (The pick-up lines he repeatedly uses are horrifying.)  Since it takes place in Thailand, you don’t get any points for guessing the off-putting way the film positions itself as above the native population. There’s a bizarre lack of self-assurance in the way the series hedges its bets by presenting its character as both French and American—trying to play to the French audiences while being unable to conceive that a purely French secret agent could be just as interesting. Still, there are limits to how much OSS-117 can ape Bond: director André Hunebelle turns in a rather dull thriller that can’t do much with the screenplay’s slow pacing. Some shots of mid-1960s Thailand are still evocative whenever the protagonist is unseen and unheard, but little of this manages to make this retrograde film feel any better. If you’re looking for a review of the next three titles in the series, simply swap Thailand for Brazil, Japan and Tunisia, because the same comments apply. This is a series that is best forgotten to the passages of time—and if you thought Jean Dujardin was intolerably over-the-top in the comic remake, you really should not go back to the originals.

  • Dangerous Mission (1954)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, August 2022) You could reasonably argue that Dangerous Mission is a film that’s interesting in spite of itself—a strange blend of one good casting choice, a demonstration of proto-action-movie mechanics, and an example of how far thrillers have come in execution. Part of the film’s mixed impression has to do with how ambitious it was in the first place. Not only was it shot in colour at a time where mid-range thrillers usually weren’t, it was also created for the first wave of 3D movies, and set itself up for greater scrutiny by largely taking place in outdoors setting—the Glacier National Park. Twenty-first century viewers will not be convinced by any of it—the fakeness of the studio shooting clashes with the actual exteriors and the technical stiffness of the production is the kind of thing that calls attention to itself after fifty years of much-superior production techniques. (And I’m not even going to touch the stereotypical portrayal of the Native American character.)  One thing does work rather well, though, and it’s the presence of Vincent Price as a character who—SURPRISE!—turns out to be a villain tracking the female protagonist—he’s far more interesting with his silky-voiced villainy than the bland federal agent played by Victor Mature, or the adequate Piper Laurie as the witness-on-the-run. The premise of the film still generally holds up—there’s something inherently fascinating in setting a thriller in a lodge in the middle of nowhere. But this early Irwin Allen production, directed by Louis King, simply doesn’t have what it takes to do justice to what it intends to do, and the years have not been kind to the result. (Never mind not having access to the 3D version of the film.) Dangerous Mission is not terrible, but it’s often disappointing, far more so than many other urban-set black-and-white thrillers of the time that knew how to work within their limitations.

  • The Lost Continent (1968)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, August 2022) Holy moly, what a weird movie. The plot for The Lost Continent starts out ordinarily enough (indeed, the biggest knock against the film is how long it takes until it gets to something interesting) but once it starts getting strange, it doesn’t stop until the end. Sure, the opening half-hour has an ensemble cast of tramp steamer passengers and crew bickering as a way to develop characters. But the fun starts once their ship gets stranded in the Sargasso Sea, and they discover themselves marooned alongside centuries of ships… and their crew. From that point on, The Lost Continent’s weirdness gets cranked up to eleven. Our characters then have to deal with sentient carnivorous seaweed, a cult of descendants from generations of marooned sailors, suits made of helium balloons to cross the seaweed, a cargo of white phosphorus, a giant crab, an equally giant octopus and much more. No, it’s not a good movie—but more than many more, it begs attention just to see what else writer-director Michael Carreras will throw in. Also, the unusually buxom Dana Gillespie makes quite an impression. All of this comes from Hammer Films—a studio that knew exploitation genre pictures, but never made anything quite like this before. The Lost Continent remains a delirious fever dream of a film once it dispenses with its overlong prologue: nothing respectable, but certainly unforgettable.

  • Batman: Bad Blood (2016)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, August 2022) As I write this, Warner Brothers is having almost comical difficulties creating a slate of decent live-action “DC Extended Universe” (DCEU) films from DC Comics superheroes, with rare successes being overshadowed by baffling decisions and no evidence of any intelligence at the strategic level. Meanwhile, of course, there’s a growing corpus of perfectly serviceable animated movies that are able to present a vast shared universe of DC superheroes. Batman: Bad Blood manages to touch upon material that can’t even be brought forward with the current state of the DCEU: Batman not as a loner, but as the central character of an extended group of family and friends. (The closest we got to that idea being explored in cinema was… The Lego Batman Film, and a few other animated films.)  This brings a welcome spin on a character portrayed very differently in live-action films, and shows just how much the animated wing of the DC superhero movies is able to riffle through some deep-cut mythology in order to bring something interesting on-screen. Now, I won’t try to argue that the film is that good—the dialogue is ordinary, the cinematography is average and it’s too short with too many characters to allow for anything beyond a cursory plot. (In that way, you can at least say that it’s faithful to the comic book arcs.) Nonetheless, Batman: Bad Blood is watchable enough—especially for fans of the extended Batman cast of characters that rarely make it to live-action movies before they’re rebooted in favour of yet another origin story. What’s less fun, of course, is that those animated films are made with low ambitions—it would be interesting to see one with the budget and running time attempt something as ambitious as some of the Elseworld one-shots.

  • A Case of You (2013)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On TV, August 2022) I will systematically watch any movie featuring a writer protagonist, but I don’t have to like all of it. Contrarily to most of my well-adjusted novelist friends, who are able to write from their imagination as creative professionals, most movie authors can’t write anything outside their own personal experience, uniformly suffer from writer’s block and exhibit a wide variety of neuroses. Justin Long’s character in A Case of You (a film he co-wrote) doesn’t stray far from the clichés, even if the film is less about his limits as a writer than being unable to be true to himself in wooing a barista he has a crush on. Much of the film consists of him “hilariously” moulding himself into a different person in order to fit her social media profile preferences, establishing a web of lies over an indistinct core personality. At least the film does eventually confront the issue—although this being a romantic comedy, it eventually works out in the end just because we’re supposed to find those characters likable. The film does a lot of mileage on the likability of its lead, whether it’s Long himself or Evan Rachel Wood as the barista. It’s also sort-of-fun to see actors such as Sam Rockwell, Brendan Fraser, Vince Vaughn or Peter Dinklage in smaller roles—at least it keeps our interest in the middle of some mediocre material. While A Case of You wants to be a hip young-people romantic comedy (as evidenced by its Brooklyn setting, putative age of its characters and pervasive use of social media), it’s surprisingly dull at how it goes about it. The dialogue doesn’t fly particularly high, the protagonist’s insecurities drag on for far too long, and everything comes across as both too cutesy, contrived and obnoxious. Sure, the result is watchable—but there’s a lot of potential left on the table, as the film goes for clichés that seem incompatible with its indie sensibilities. Once, just once, I’d like to see the portrayal of a writer as a seasoned professional, approaching writing as a job that doesn’t require ripping off his own life. But that wouldn’t be within the scope of A Case of You.

  • Narrow Margin (1990)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, August 2022) I will never fail to mention when a Hollywood film heads to Canada for an extended period of time, and Narrow Margin frankly surprised me by spending nearly all of its running time on a long train journey in the wilds of Western Canada. The thin but effective plot has a Los Angeles district attorney (Gene Hackman) reinventing himself as an action hero to protect a witness who could bring down a mob boss. The wrinkle here is that she’s hiding in a cabin “in Canada” and mob enforcers are doing their best to kill her. One escape from a cabin shoot-out later, the two are aboard a VIA Rail train heading to Vancouver on an overnight trip, with heroes and villains trying their best to best each other in a confined space. A rather more thrillerish version of Silver Bullet, this Peter Hyams film works better than I expected. The simple plot allows for a succession of suspense set-pieces, with a nice twist and some good action sequences. The film feels proud of its Canadian setting, and the confined settings work well in creating suspense. Anne Archer looks quite cute in curly red hair, while Hackman is only slightly ridiculous as an improvised action hero. The cinematography (also from Hyams) takes full advantage of the train rolling through the Canadian wilderness, and I liked the way a 1990 film managed to re-create the romance of classic Hollywood trains of earlier decades. (The film is a remake of a 1952 film, but doesn’t feel too much like it.)  In other words, Narrow Margin is the kind of solid but not overly spectacular thriller that may be forgotten in time but still manages to satisfy upon discovery.

  • Absolute Beginners (1986)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, August 2022) There was a point, maybe halfway through Absolute Beginner, where I couldn’t believe I had never heard about the film before—after all, it felt like a missing link in the history of musicals, a bold mid-1980s British take on the form that was as unafraid to lean into the strengths of the genre as the MGM classics did. Socially conscious in discussing racism in late-1950s London, it also features none other than David Bowie in a devilishly seductive villainous role. There’s a dynamic quality to some of the film’s visual inventiveness, and some of the sequences are frankly anthology-worthy. What becomes more obvious in the second half, however, is how uneven the result can be. The tone and results are more scattered than one would wish for, and Absolute Beginner as a whole suffers from the difference between its peaks and valleys. Some subplots don’t really go anywhere, and the ending falls flat. The film’s production history suggests that there was a constant tug-of-war about the film’s execution and that explains a lot. Still, there are some undeniable high points here, whether it’s director Julien Temple’s ability to render the poppy atmosphere of the dawn of the rock-and-roll age, or some of the musical numbers—watch a clip of “That’s Motivation” for an idea of how genius some of the film’s moments can be. So, while Absolute Beginners is good and a minor reference in musical history (in an otherwise disappointing decade), it really missed what it could have been with more care, rewrites and ambitious artistic intentions.

  • Lost Transmissions (2019)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, August 2022) I’ll forever support the right of filmmakers to go for bleak depressing subject matters, but I’m not forced to like the result, and for all that I may be tempted to praise writer-director Katharine O’Brien for her unsentimental look at mental illness in the context of the music industry, Lost Transmission is a long and unfulfilling slog. Despite taking place in Los Angeles, it showcases the city in dull overcast cinematography, sucking the joy out of its setting as much as its lead character suffers from unmedicated schizophrenia. Props go to Simon Pegg for a dramatic role opposite of the charismatic, likable comic characters he usually plays—it’s not much of a stretch considering the charm he can show during the character’s manic episodes, but the interest of his performance comes when he takes apart his own life without understanding why. Juno Temple also features as a woman unexplainably trying to help him out, while Alexandra Daddario is a two-scene wonder as a thoroughly unlikable music diva. There’s something interesting in Lost Transmissions’ unglamorous treatment of its subject matter, or its depiction of the underbelly of the L.A. music scene. But the result falls short of most expectations: the film simply goes on until it ends without much of a resolution, not being any easier to watch at any point before then.

  • Whistling in Dixie (1942)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, August 2022) Red Skelton remains a divisive comedian, and Whistling in Dixie finds him doing what he did best—for better or for worse. The second film in a trilogy of “Whistling” amateur sleuth comedies featuring him as a radio writer/actor known for criminal mysteries, it leaves the New York City area of the first and third films. A trip down south for his wedding gets sidetracked when there’s a mystery to solve at a military academy with a Confederate past. Skelton is clearly in his element here, blending irreverence and zingers while the rest of the cast does their best not to stand in the way of his showboating. It’s a watchable but not overly impressive affair until the third-act climax, in which Skelton’s physical comedy skills are showcased in a long and crazy barn fight sequence featuring two twin brothers (one evil, one reformed) and a cavalcade of physical gags. Ann Rutherford is always worth a look, but Rags Ragland isn’t always tolerable as the twins. Whistling in Dixie is not that good, but it’s decent enough to watch, and the climactic sequence makes up for a multitude of duller moments.

  • Sole Survivor (1984)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, August 2022) There’s something almost interesting in Sole Survivor, especially during its first half, where it’s not clear what kind of horror film it’s trying to be. As the sole survivor of a plane crash gets disturbing visions and near-death incidents, then people around her die, it’s almost exciting to find a proto-Final Destination premise that goes beyond the slasher and monster-feature clichés. Are we in existential horror in which Death itself is the antagonist? There’s a delicious moment in which it’s possible. Alas, the film then goes into a much weirder and less satisfying direction: zombies. No, seriously—people come back from the dead and start killing others. Hmm. How did we get here? Writer-director Thom Eberhardt’s Sole Survivor still has some power if you don’t focus too much on its mechanics—the dreary phantasmagorical atmosphere is the kind of thing that horror fans will like even if the narrative doesn’t work, and you can’t deny the slightly-more ambitious goals of the film at a time when American horror wasn’t being particularly daring. However, the pacing is a bit slow, a stronger narrative might have helped and it constantly feels as if the film is just walking by a much stronger concept in its rush to get to its zombies. Sole Survivor is not necessarily a must-see, but it probably has one or two things that will be appreciated by jaded horror fans diving back in history.

  • The Musketeer (2001)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, August 2022) Every era gets the Three Musketeers film adaptation that they deserve, and so the early 2000s were about personal heroics and wire-fu action sequences. Directed by Peter Hyams (still a solid action director at the time, albeit definitely losing his touch), this version of Dumas’ d’Artagnan cycle differs from others in three main ways: it focuses on D’Artagnan to the comical downplaying of the other musketeers, creates an action villain out of Richelieu’s shadow and integrates some 1990s Hong Kong action movie clichés into the inevitable action sequences. (Alas, this is only fully realized in the wild ending action scene set in a ladder-laden warehouse—the rest of The Musketeer is more sedate.)  Digital production techniques are also used to give a more convincing sheen to the historical re-creation, although it doesn’t compare to the work later overseen by Paul W. S. Anderson in his steampunk 2011 version of the same source material. You would think that Hyams plus Hong Kong wire-work plus the innate appeal of Dumas’s novel would inevitably lead to something at least mildly enjoyable… but no. The result is both dull and incoherent, briefly coming to life in its final action sequence, which is far too late to five a good overall impression. Justin Chamber is a dud as d’Artagnan, although some of the cast around him (Tim Roth, Stephen Rea, Mena Suvari, Catherine Deneuve) does have some appeal. It seems amazing that a film would do so little with what it had at its disposal, but there you go—it’s neither the most faithful, the most fun, the most spectacular or the most well-rounded version of the Dumas novel. If you see The Musketeer somewhere and must see it, fast-forward to the final action sequence and you will have experienced the best that the film has to offer.

  • Les Anges gardiens [Guardian Angels] (1995)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, August 2022) If I have one persistent complaint about French-language cinema (European or Canadian), it’s that it seems to have a specific problem keeping a consistent tone. Maybe it’s a mark of amateurism compared to the decades of accumulated Hollywood screenwriting experience. Maybe the French language is inherently more volatile than English (note: I don’t seriously believe this). Maybe the audiences don’t care as much. But Les anges gardiens certainly brings credence to my theory—it starts as a Hong Kong gangster action comedy before becoming a supernatural good-versus-evil-angels farce, and that barely hints at the way the film abruptly swerves from one emotional register to another, even landing into something like a poor-little-girl-lost maudlin moment toward the end. This being said, it’s not completely frustrating to watch. Committed performances from Gerard Depardieu and Christian Clavier (anticipating their collaboration on two Asterix/Obelix films) as, respectively, a nightclub owner and a Catholic priest elevate the material, and there’s a surprising abundance of special effects (not all of them equally successful), large-scale stunts and decent action sequences. The film was a massive box-office success in France upon release, but reviews weren’t so kind. There’s certainly a feeling that the script could have used a lot of tightening up to feel like more than two collections of semi-related sequences glued together: the lack of tonal control bleeds into a lack of crisp plot progression, and digressions that feel as if they go nowhere, inflating the film’s running time for no reason. (For the record—I liked the first half a lot better than the second.)  Les anges gardiens is lively and not unwatchable, but you can feel the potential left unrealized.

  • The Guilt Trip (2012)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On TV, August 2022) Seth Rogen and Barbra Streisand make for a weird pairing, but that’s exactly what The Guilt Trip is built on—cramming both actors in the confines of a tiny rental car for a cross-country trip. There’s a bit of narrative scaffolding involving Rogen’s character pitching a new kind of cleaning product to mega-retailers (most of them mentioned by their instantly recognizable names), but really that’s just an excuse for a milquetoast mother/son bonding narrative through various adventures and overly-long episodic set-pieces. It’s watchable without being particularly involving—you can recognize how The Guilt Trip sets up those deep personal arcs, but caring about them is another matter entirely. It’s clearly more fun to watch both lead actors in their moment-to-moment interactions, playing off the clash of generations (even if there’s forty years between them—Streisand clearly playing younger than her age) with a light side order of snob/slob conflict. It’s not funny as much as it’s familiar—you can see the jokes coming from a state away, and the film’s tendency to lengthen its episodes for no good purpose doesn’t help. I suppose it’s fun to see Streisand come out of semi-retirement to grace audiences with another lead performance (and the film isn’t quite as heavy on her prima donna quirks) but the result is hardly something that only she could have played. I suppose that The Guilt Trip does hit its target, though—the ideal public is halfway between Rogen and Streisand, which is admittedly an unusual mid-point but one that goes for comfort and mild gags more than anything overly outrageous or sophisticated.