Movie Review

  • Tijuana Jackson: Purpose Over Prison (2018)

    Tijuana Jackson: Purpose Over Prison (2018)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2021) I’m perplexed by Tijuana Jackson: Purpose Over Prison, but I suspect that I’m missing a huge chunk of the context that would make the film as funny as it’s intended to be. Nominally the story of an ex-con trying his best to become a life coach, the film seems to be relying on something else as its entry point to the character — there’s apparently a whole series of sketches about the character that I haven’t seen, so that may explain it. But there’s also a social component to the film that I can’t grasp — the film’s portrayal of an ex-con’s attempt to go straight leads to a number of jokes that escaped me, or simply weren’t all that funny in the first place. I wasn’t particularly fond of the found-footage conceit either — it feels old and dated without offering much in terms of payoff, even though Shannon Dang is not bad as the student whose short film becomes more complex by the day. Romany Malco is likable enough in the title role, while Regina Hall does her usual good job as his ex-girlfriend/current parole officer. After a while, the film becomes significantly better — the early throat-clearing is completed, and the film can be free to explore its themes of rehabilitation and life-coach satire, and develop its lived-in atmosphere of how many Americans live near the poverty line with the odds stacked against them. Fortunately, this is a comedy and the ending does wrap things up well enough. Still, I can’t say what I enjoyed Tijuana Jackson a lot — it ends up being watchable, but the nagging feeling of missing about half the context remains annoying throughout.

  • The Three Caballeros (1944)

    The Three Caballeros (1944)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Disney Streaming, February 2021) Considering the difficulties that World War II created for Disney Animation, it’s a near-miracle that a production as polished as The Three Caballeros would emerge from the company’s war years. Conceived as a homage to South America, the film loosely arranges its musical sketches (each one focused on a region of South America) around a loose conceit of having Donald Duck unwrap presents and become friends with other birds. I must have seen this film during childhood or (most likely) read hand-me-down books based on it, because parts of a few sketches felt very familiar — most notably the opening segment with “The Cold-Blooded Penguin.”  White the animation is quite good, perhaps the most noteworthy technical aspect of the production are the numerous and lengthy segments integrating live action with the animation, including Aurora “Sister of Carmen” Miranda signing up a storm with the animated birds. What must have been a fun opening of the cultural frontier to American audiences back in 1942 is now preceded by a cultural sensitivity warning on the Disney streaming service, warning us about the stereotypes to come. It doesn’t feel that bad or offensive, but then again, I’m not in the audience best placed to judge. You can still see in The Three Callaberos the legacy of Disney’s early “Silly Symphonies” shorts blending music and animation — while the result is not among the top tier (maybe not even the second tier) of Disney’s animated movies, it’s still fun enough to watch and even better to listen to.

  • Friday Foster (1975)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2021) Pam Grier is worth a watch even in the most terrible of movies, but Friday Foster greatly exceeded my expectations. A proud product of the blaxploitation era, this is a film that doesn’t even try to hide what it’s built for — Pam Grier in a shower, showing ample side nudity before being attacked by a knife-wielding hitman? Check. A random fashion show showcasing beautiful black women? Check. An activist plot dealing with the en masse assassination of black politicians by white agitators? Check. Friday Foster knows what it’s about, and it’s not afraid to show it. The steady forward pacing feels suitably modern, even as the mid-1970s atmosphere can’t be denied, and the great cast (Yaphet Kotto, Carl Weathers, Scatman Crothers, even Eartha Kitt in a too-small role) is a lot of fun. Still, the film’s single best asset is Grier in a role almost tailored to her strengths as an action heroine. For all of her reputation as an icon, Grier didn’t star in that many movies during the 1970s and Friday Foster was the last of the “classics” she did for American Picture International. It’s also a role that gives her a little bit more to do than running and shooting: she gets to play mom, photographer, investigator, seducer and sex symbol. It’s not exactly what we’d consider a well-rounded leading role these days, but it was still a noticeable step up for black female actors establishing a viable popular cinema for black audiences. What’s more, the thematic concerns of the film run a bit deeper than many of its contemporaries, notably in postulating a deliberate attack against black political leadership. I’m not going to pretend that Friday Foster is a great movie, but as a late-blaxploitation film, it’s fun and almost impossible to stop watching once it gets going. Grier still gets most of the credit, but the rest of the film almost meets her at level.

  • The Island (1980)

    The Island (1980)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, February 2021) Michael Caine’s career is so long and varied that his filmography has anything and everything in it, from the best to the worst. Fortunately, he’s usually charismatic enough to make even the terrible films somewhat watchable, and it’s that spirit that does sustain The Island through its dodgier moments. Caine here plays a journalist who, while investigating the Bermuda Triangle (remember that?), discovers a long-lost colony of pirates cut off from the world but with a steady job of hijacking ships. The ludicrousness of the concept can’t readily be assigned to the usual studio meddling — the screenplay is by novelist Peter Benchley adapting his own novel. But if the result is too contrived to be believable, the entire thing has its rewards — notably a climactic sequence in which a teeth-clenching Caine machine-guns an entire crew of pirates. It’s not much, but it’s an anthology moment for his fans. Otherwise, director Michael Ritchie’s The Island is forgettable early-1980s fluff, not entirely sure of its tone (horror or thriller?) and too far-fetched to be taken seriously.

  • Yolanda and the Thief (1945)

    Yolanda and the Thief (1945)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2021) The farther down I get in Fred Astaire’s filmography, the more I understand why they’re not his more popular films. On paper, there should be plenty to like about Yolanda and the Thief:  It’s a 1940s colour musical featuring Astaire as a con artist making his way to a fictional Latin American country and hatching a scheme to seduce an heiress. Alas, the limits of the film become more apparent once you realize that he intends to do so by posing as her guardian angel. Such shaky narrative hooks may have worked with a more interesting execution, but they just compound the problem that Yolanda and the Thief is one of the least interesting Astaire films I’ve seen so far. Despite the gorgeous (and self-conscious) colour cinematography and expansive direction from Vincente Minelli, the film itself doesn’t seem to have the light touch and humour of other Astaire films — it’s weighed down by its own ambitious dance numbers, ironically leaving less for Astaire himself to do. Considering that Astaire is his single best asset, it almost leaves him stranded in the middle of his own film. He’s usually not bad playing a cad, but an outright thief preying upon the devout may be a step too far. It doesn’t help that Lucille Bremer is bland in the lead role—I usually like redheads a lot, but she doesn’t do much here as she should—perhaps illustrating the lack of that elusive “star quality” we all talk about. (Bremer retired from Hollywood shortly thereafter.)  Yolanda and the Thief is at its most remarkable when it delves into surreal fantasy sequences, most notably a long ballet sequence that anticipates similar film-stopping flights of fancy as The Red Shoes or An American in Paris a few years later. It’s something to see all right, but is it an Astaire kind of film? The substantially lower number of dance sequences doesn’t help, nor does the substantially less humorous narrative. But, well, it’s still another Astaire film — and one of the weirdest on record. It’s worth seeing, but don’t be in a hurry.

  • Bright Road (1953)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2021) February is a great month for catching up on movies of interest to black audiences, as Black History Month dictates programming on the better channels. So it is that I ended up watching Bright Road, more out of interest for Dorothy Dandridge and Harry Belafonte than anything else. Truth be told, I had a hard time staying interested in the film — it’s a rural teacher’s fantasy, as our protagonist (Dandridge) fights for the redemption and future of a rebellious boy in an Alabama elementary school. The film’s biggest problem is that it feels a lot like an entire lineage of inspiring teacher films, and that I’m not too keen to spend all that much time in the rural deep south. Still, the film does come alive when Dandridge is on-screen, and even more so when Bellafonte (in his first feature film appearance) shows up to share a few dialogue scenes and sing a little. Morally, the film is an admirable paean to the value of education, even in the most desperate circumstances. I also found it interesting to see the film mostly absent of racial tension — black stories can also be told without constantly being about racism, and this film manages to say something different. It does end on a triumphant mark that makes the entire film feel better. Bright Road is a film that eventually stands up on its own — but it may be worth watching as a double-bill with Sounder once in a while.

  • Native Son aka Sangre Negra (1951)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2021) One of the most vexing questions for film noir fans is why the genre, despite its strong urban roots, featured almost no black characters: even film historians once had to dig an embarrassingly long time to find even the odd exceptions. Native Son is one of those exceptions, and it affirms the rule almost by itself — While the film is an adaptation of a novel by American author Richard Wright (who also co-wrote the screenplay and starred as its protagonist despite being about twice too old), it ended up being produced in Argentina by French director Pierre Chenal. In other words, the filmmakers had to leave the US to portray a very American tale of racism and noir nihilism. While there are constant elements of social drama here, it’s difficult to interpret the main narrative as anything but pure dark undiluted noir: The story gets going when a black young man hired as a chauffeur to a wealthy white woman gets involved with her and—as befit the genre—lets a series of mistakes escalate in the accidental death of his white employer, bringing down the city’s police force on him. That’s already grim, but then it gets much, much worse as more things go wrong. You won’t be surprised at how the film ends, but so it goes when the fatalism of film noir grinds down even its likable protagonists. Age aside, Wright’s performance is raw to the point of being showy — he’s obviously not a trained actor and there are no other strong performers to hold him aloft when he slips. The low-budget production is not spectacular, although Argentine-passing-as-Chicago is not as big of a problem as you’d think. While Native Son’s technical credentials won’t wow anyone, the film itself is still remarkable: it’s an exemplary film noir in concept, and the fact that it features a black protagonist hounded by white police force gives it an impact that sadly remains intact. The story behind the film’s censorship and recent restoration doesn’t reflect all that well on its lasting impact on cultural history, but it does reaffirm that we’re living in an amazing age for cinephiles, when such fascinating films are once again made widely available in their best possible shape.

  • Take a Giant Step (1959)

    Take a Giant Step (1959)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2021) It’s fascinating to go back in movie history and discover works that anticipate trends of later decades. While stories of black teenagers coming of age are now commonplace, there were virtually unknown in 1959, at least from mainstream movie studios. That makes Take a Giant Step all the more fascinating, even despite some clumsiness and a performance from young lead actor Johnny Nash that could be best qualified as earnest — it’s interesting by later, more naturalistic standards, but it does feel overly modern in a film that is otherwise pure 1950s filmmaking. There’s a lot to like in the way the film intelligently dissects pervasive racism even in so-called progressive environments, as a young black teenager in a northern US city gradually realizes that his coming-of-age also means being far more vulnerable to discrimination and isolation. Various characters all have a take on what this means, and the young protagonist’s quest lies in trying to fit the pieces together. Ruby Dee turns in a very likable performance as a housekeeper, as does Estelle Hemsley as the elderly voice of reason. Still, it’s the film’s willingness to engage in issues that still continues to impress 60 years later, more than the film’s lower-end production values or the varying acting style clashing in the film. While Burt Lancaster does not appear in the film, he was one of its producers who managed to bring Take a Giant Step from stage to film, and apparently had a hand in selecting Nash for the role — further cementing his reputation as an iconoclast in a leading man’s persona.

  • The Affairs of Martha (1942)

    The Affairs of Martha (1942)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2021) While I’m reasonably happy with The Affairs of Martha, I can’t help but think that this is a film that leaves a lot of material on the table, and I can’t help but wonder how much better it could have been had it been made twenty years later. The premise itself is fun but unfulfilled: What if the elite set of Long Island starting fretting about the announcement of a tell-all book written by an unnamed servant girl of theirs? Much of the film’s comic potential is explored early on, as both the upper-class gets concerned, and the comfortable servant class also finds the development alarming. (“I’ve spent years getting my employer where I want her!” complains one of the veterans of the trade.)  There’s some bite to the opening moments, but it doesn’t really go anywhere — soon enough, the romantic comedy gets underway and nearly forgets about the opening premise. To be fair, the romantic complications that pile up do make for a serviceable film: as an heir to an upper-class family comes back from an expedition with a fiancée in tow, his previous marriage to a servant (the unknown author of the tell-all book!) comes back to make a mess of everyone’s plans. It pretty much ends up like you’d like to, but the class-division aspect takes a much smaller role than announced by the opening minutes. (Especially when the servant doesn’t have anything bad to say about her experience!)  Still, Marsha Hunt is lovely as Martha, Richard Carlson makes for a likable romantic lead, and there’s a lot to like about Virginia Weidler’s performance as a bratty too-smart teenager. (This was a kind of role that Weidler played a lot during her short Hollywood career, and you can look at her turn in The Philadelphia Story as another exemplary instance of that persona.)  The film doesn’t overstay its welcome despite shifting gears early on. The one strangely amusing note here is noticing that the film is an early effort from Jules Dassin, who would become far better known for hard-edged noir thriller in the late 1940s and then (due to the Hollywood Blacklist) be exiled in France, where he’d become famous for legendary crime thrillers. You can find distant echoes of The Affairs of Martha in more modern class-concerned fare such as The Devil Wears Prada or The Nanny Diaries, but I still think that it missed an opportunity to be far more striking.

  • Hélas pour moi (1993)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2021) I had a surprisingly good time watching Hélas pour moi, but that came from an early decision to declare narrative bankruptcy on the film. Anything billed as a “poetic drama” in its log-line is usually a lost cause anyway — the only reason why I had a look at the result was because it was a late effort by writer/director Jean-Luc Godard. It only takes a few minutes into the film to realize that it’s not going to be understandable in any kind of conventional sense: it’s a film that plays on emotions, impressions, visual flourishes and allusions to philosophy and classical literature. Title cards separating the film in chapters or offering odd bits of narration only make the entire film feel even more hermetic if you’re not the director. Over time, I’ve come to make peace with the idea of film as an artistic expression of individual filmmakers (although the inherent elitism of film production costs leading to a class of film gatekeepers still rankles me), even if that does not mean that I’ll like the result. As the languid, pretentious, consciously self-absorbed nature of Hélas pour moi became obvious, I stopped trying to make sense of the film and let it wash over me. To be fair, there’s plenty to look at even if you’re not attempting to make sense of it — a young and trim Gérard Depardieu is the film’s headliner, but Laurence Masliah looks absolutely terrific here at times (the sequence in which she is introduced, off-focus to better feature her wild red mane is just… wow) and Aude Amiot looks nice as well. Are watching French girls a substitute for a strong narrative? Yes, if that’s all the film has. Still, Hélas pour moi does have a few good moments: thanks to Godard’s veteran eye, parts of the film can be appreciated even if you refuse to try to make sense of it. (I was tempted at times to see the film as a parody of a pretentious arthouse film, but it wasn’t worth the effort.)  I’m far, far from recommending the result, but it’s possible to find something to appreciate in nearly anything if you’re creative enough.

  • The Devil All the Time (2020)

    The Devil All the Time (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Netflix Streaming, February 2021) There are films that land with a thud no matter the quality of the casting, the amount of sex and violence, or the high production values that you can throw at it, and such is the case for The Devil All the Time. Much of the problem is that writer-director Antonio Campos takes you forcefully to an ugly place and, at 139 minutes, keeps you there far longer than anyone would be willing to tolerate. Set in 1950s rural America, it’s a film that delights in the kinds of backwoods horrors best forgotten, and their accumulation looks more like a frenzied attempt to up the exploitation content than deliver a satisfying story. Apparently, rural Ohio is awash in insane preachers, rapists, ritual sacrifices, suicides and serial killers. But wait, there’s more, such as excruciatingly gritty cinematography that, for better but mostly for worse, lets you feel as if you’re stuck there for the duration. A rather good cast (including Tom Holland, Robert Pattinson, Sebastian Stan, Jason Clarke and Mia Wasikowska — with Pattinson being the most remarkable) can’t make the film any more likable. I’m not sure if the film really aims to be a backwoods Americana crime epic, but the result is just excruciating when it’s not simply too dull for words. The Devil All the Time proves to be an unusually descriptive title, especially if you focus on how long the entire thing feels.

  • Rage in Heaven (1941)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2021) You can argue that Rage in Heaven is a film noir, but I see just as much kinship here with the domestic thriller subgenre of the 1940s, especially as a woman gets frightened by an increasingly unstable husband. But there’s more — a framing device that takes us to a French mental hospital, a subplot involving a family steel mill and a third act that’s all about a psychopath framing his romantic rival even in death. It’s a lot of stuff to fit in 85 minutes, and what holds the film together is more the casting than the plot. It’s tough to resist any 1940s film with Ingrid Bergman, and Rage in Heaven does pair her with a rather rare good-guy turn from George Saunders, while Robert Montgomery is a bit of an odd fit as an insanely jealous psychopath. The plot is lurid enough to be entertaining — but it’s not credible and that does harm the result. While Rage in Heaven is interesting enough, it’s a scattered film and one that probably should have been tightened up in production, or reworked entirely.

  • Night Terrors (1993)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, February 2021) The downfall of writer-director Tobe Hooper remains one of the sad stories of horror filmmaking (“drugs” are often mentioned as a contributing factor), and you can take a look at featureless films such as Night Terrors to show how quickly he fell off the map after his early successes. Nominally a horror film in which a woman is swept up into a cult led by a descendant of the Marquis de Sade, the result can never quite find its footing despite decent production values and concepts that could have led to more. Setting the film in the Middle East doesn’t add as much as you’d think, and the parallel historical timelines don’t lead anywhere. Robert Englund in the lead role(s) doesn’t have much to do (Sade ends up feeling like a pretentious emo guy rather than a force for erotic horror), and the lighthearted touch shown by Hooper in earlier projects is nowhere to be found. The result is an intensely generic and forgettable 1990s horror film that barely deserves any discussion except as one of many illustrations of how far Hooper had fallen.

  • The Pawnbroker (1964)

    The Pawnbroker (1964)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2021) Part of the way Hollywood movies changed during the 1960s was a turn from the grandiose to the mundane, focusing on small personal stories rather than grand sweeping spectacles. The other part of the change was being able to portray America closer to what it was rather than the bowdlerized version imposed by the Production code. You can see both of those tendencies at work in The Pawnbroker, a rather intimate take on post-WW2 trauma, as seen through the eyes and actions of a Harlem pawnbroker revealed to be a concentration camp survivor. His detachment from everyone around him is what gets hashed out over the course of the film in a series of small sequences and confrontations. What does make director Sydney Lumet’s film feel slightly more modern is a relatively true-to-life portrayal of the neighbourhood in which the story takes place: As pointed out by various film historians, The Pawnbroker features things we now take as commonplace — a diversity of ethnic characters with different agendas (fittingly for its upper Manhattan setting); a confirmed homosexual character; artistically-justified nudity (apparently a first); and a portrayal of the horrors of Nazi concentration camps. Rod Steiger got nominated for a Best Actor Academy Award for his portrayal of a man with strong internal conflicts, but much of the interest of The Pawnbroker goes to the supporting cast of characters, each with short but striking roles giving a good amount of credibility to the film’s setting. It’s not a spectacular film — most of the conflict is internal until a climax that lets the tension erupt outwardly. While not a fun watch, it does act as a turning point of sorts for those who want to track the ways in which late-1960s Hollywood was an entirely different place than early-1960s Hollywood.

  • The Scalphunters (1968)

    The Scalphunters (1968)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, February 2021) The civil rights movement finally makes its way to the western genre in The Scalphunters, a film based on the relationship between a badly-educated white trapper and an escaped black slave as they confront Native Americans and scalp-hunters. Burt Lancaster once again stars in a film that pokes at his own image as a leading man — his character isn’t particularly smart, and he obviously starts out as a complete racist before learning better. Ossie Davis has a more likable role as a well-read runaway slave heading to Mexico but being treated as property by everyone he encounters, white or native. Telly Savalas (the only bald man in 1960s Hollywood!) rounds up the headliners as an antagonist to them both. The Scalphunters isn’t as preachy as many of its contemporaries, with enough humour and action to keep the lulls low. The sunny landscape is more serviceable than spectacular, but those were the 1960s — audiences knew what the west looked like, and focused more on what else the genre could do than show widescreen vistas. The Scalphunters, typically for a film directed by Sydney Pollack, was very much a film of its moments, using the western tropes to work out current events of the time.