Movie Review

  • Year One (2009)

    Year One (2009)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Crackle Streaming, May 2017) If Hollywood history has proven anything, it’s that nothing is safe from its vulgar lowbrow comic premises. Here, Year One uses prehistory as an excuse to let Jack Black and Michael Cera go wild with their usual comic persona, from cavemen to old-testament riffs. The anachronisms are the point of much of the humour, but the juvenile nature of most jokes doesn’t allow Year One to fly high. Still, what’s maybe most impressive about the film are the number of known actors willing to ham it up for such a vapid film: Whether you’re talking seasoned comedians like Paul Rudd, David Cross, Oliver Platt and Hank Azaria, or it-girls such as Olivia Wilde and Juno Temple, Year One is heavy in small cameo roles. This may give the impression that the film is better than it is, though, which isn’t the case. Depending on your reaction to Cera and Black’s screen persona, Year One either feels like a chore or a slog. (Black’s shtick is more overly offensive than Cera’s, but an entire film built on Cera tics would be unbearably dull.) Year One probably works best as one of those films you let play on background while doing other things. It’s not as if you’re going to miss anything crucial if you don’t happen to pay attention at every time, and it’s not as if you’re going to feel guilty about missing a few moments of the film if you have to leave the room for a while.

  • Glory (1989)

    Glory (1989)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2017) Blending a war movie with judicious social progressivism seems almost de rigueur these days, but I gather that it wasn’t as obvious in 1989, when Glory came out with a relatively groundbreaking depiction of an African-American battalion during the Civil War. As you’d expect from this kind of hybridization, Glory spends its time either indulging in the usual plot mechanics of a military training story, in-between describing the plight of its heroes on social issues. Nearly thirty years later, it’s not quite so innovative, but it’s made well enough to remain mildly interesting. (I suspect that, like all movies specifically dedicated to American social history, it’s going to be more relevant to American viewers.) Matthew Broderick stars as the military commander of the group, but the film’s most interesting performance goes to Denzel Washington, as a surly but ultimately honourable black soldier; Morgan Freeman and Andre Braugher are also featured prominently. The familiarity of the film can lull viewers in a comfortable daze, but the finale of the film does much to elevate it—spent in sand rather than the usual open field battlegrounds of Civil War movies, it’s also unusually bleak in how it adheres to historical fact. Glory may not be fun or fresh especially today, but it’s solid and respectable.

  • Fifty Shades Darker (2017)

    Fifty Shades Darker (2017)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Video on-Demand, May 2017) The Fifty Shades trilogy keeps going with this second instalment and the results as just as dull as viewers of the first film can imagine. While the BDSM content has been toned down in favour of a far more conventional romance, Fifty Shades Darker still plays like a direct-to-video romantic thriller enlivened by more explicit than usual sex scenes. It’s remarkably boring, especially as the plot is so threadbare. Stalkers, ex-lovers, etc.: how ordinary. Dakota Johnson is, to her credit, still the best thing about the movie: her acting runs circles over the impassible Jamie Dornan, and she will probably have a career after this series wraps up. Kim Basinger also has a decent small role, but otherwise there isn’t much to say. There’s quite a bit of wish fulfillment in the way the film lingers in high-priced sets and gadgets. There’s even a bit of sunshine when the two characters take a sailboat out for a day. Roughly half a dozen sex scenes interrupt the dull story for even duller moments—the recurring “panties removal” motif is interesting, but not much else. Otherwise, the film does spend quite a bit of time short-looping its dramatic developments (the boss is lecherous? Wait two scenes and he’ll be gone. Christian Gray disappears after a helicopter accident? Wait two scenes and he’ll be back) while spending its last fifteen minutes setting up its third instalment. We know it’s coming. There’s nothing we can do about it.

  • Brothers (2009)

    Brothers (2009)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On TV, May 2017) Let me tell you what a bad trailer is: A bad trailer spoils the movie so thoroughly that you can anticipate how it ends even eight years later. Now, I can’t account for the quirkiness of my brain given that it forgets when I’ve put my car keys while remembering a decade-old trailer for a mostly-forgotten movie, but the point is: I sat down to watch Brothers and kept waiting for that police confrontation scene … which comes at the end. It doesn’t help that the film is frankly dull, dealing with two brothers and what happens when one of them comforts the wife of the other while he’s missing and presumed dead in Afghanistan. You’d think that the question of whether the brother sleeps with the wife would be an interesting one, but Brothers is so limp and tedious that it’s a let-down when he doesn’t. From a narrative standpoint, there isn’t much to Brothers, making it feel even longer as the same plotlines are laboriously developed. It does fare batter as an acting showcase, given how it features Tobey Maguire in one of his most animated performances, the always-reliable Jake Gylenhaal as the problematic brother, and Nathalie Portman in a down-to-earth performance. Fans of straight-up drama will appreciate, although others may start eyeing their watches not long into the movie.

  • Tombstone (1993)

    Tombstone (1993)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, May 2017) In an ideal world, I would be writing my impressions about Tombstone in a perfect vacuum, untainted by any later film or experience. In this world, however, I waited two weeks before jotting down this capsule review … after seeing the similar Wyatt Earp. I’m unlikely to be the only one to draw comparisons between the two, as both movies came out in 1993–1994 and have been linked ever since. While Wyatt Earp tries to give a whole-life portrait of Earp, Tombstone focuses on the events immediately preceding and following the shootout at O.K. Corral. But more crucially, Wyatt Earp is dour and interminable, whereas Tombstone does have Kurt Russell with a glorious moustache shouting “You tell ’em I’m coming … and hell’s coming with me, you hear? Hell’s coming with me!” That’s everything you need to know about both movies. Game over. Go home, Kevin Costner, you’re playing a drunk. More seriously, though: While Tombstone is the better of both Earp movies, it’s hardly a perfect film. While Russell, Val Kilmer (as Doc Holliday) and Sam Elliott (among many others) make a good impression, the film does take a while to find its footing: it’s only after some tedious throat-clearing and mismatched scenes that Tombstone realizes that it can have fun with its story and truly gets going. At times, it seems as if the film (wrongly) assumes that its viewers are familiar with the O.K. Corral shootout: there seems to be some connecting narrative tissue missing, some subplots disappear into nothingness and there’s an argument to be made that the shootout is the climax—anything that follows becomes less and less interesting and isn’t shot with the same amount of intensity. Looking at the comparison between Tombstone and Wyatt Earp once more highlights that Tombstone is better because it’s more fun—so maybe had it been even more fun it would have been even better? A shorter, even more focused, even less historically accurate version may have been a stronger movie. I suspect that had Tombstone been made a few years after Wyatt Earp, it would have been quite different.

  • Star Wars (1977)

    Star Wars (1977)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Seventh or eighth viewing, On Blu-ray, May 2017) Well, well, well… Star Wars. The original. A fixture of my childhood, to the point where I long thought of the movie as review-proof: what would I possibly say about a film I watched every time it played on TV when I was a boy? I last saw it in theatres when it was re-released in 1997, and before then in the mid-nineties in a campus theatre with a bunch of animation students enthusiastic about the 1993 Definitive collection laserdisc, and before that nearly every broadcast on Radio Canada… But as I sat down to celebrate the 40th anniversary “May the Fourth” to watch the latest 2011 Blu-ray release of the 1977 film, I realized that there is, actually, quite a bit to say about Star Wars from a critical perspective. I’m not seven anymore, and the flaws of the film are more glaring than I expected. The story is simplistic. George Lucas’s dialogue, other than some oft-quoted lines, is frankly terrible. Carrie Fisher, Mark Hamill and Harrison Ford have charm, but they were not gifted actors at the time (they got better, or more accurately grew more comfortable with their chosen screen persona). The universe is bare-bones and at time nonsensical. The special effects are all over the place, a flaw actually magnified by the hodgepodge of changes made to the film through the years, most notably in inserting now-dated CGI in the 1997 version of the film. The results clash, all the way to the overwhelming grain of 1977 film stock being blurred with 1997 digital makeup. The Blu-ray transfer of the film may be too good—much of the low-budget origins of the film clearly show, and harming the look of the film isn’t a good thing given that its substance is so lacking as well. Now, I still do like Star Wars—but I’ve become less and less of an uncritical fan over the years, and refreshing my memory of the first instalment does nothing to reverse the tendency. What may remain from Star Wars eventually is not much more than the launchpad of a much bigger and deeper shared universe. I’ll be watching the original trilogy in the next few months to officially log my reviews along the way (I saw them all last before I started keeping track of reviews), but I’m not going to be surprised if I end up re-evaluating the prequel trilogy based on my adjusted impressions of the three original films.

  • JFK (1991)

    JFK (1991)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, May 2017) As someone who’s almost viciously opposed to conspiracy theories, I’m about as far as you can imagine from being someone predisposed to like JFK. As a self-conscious “counter-myth” to the official conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald killed Kennedy, JFK multiplies outlandish claims and plot in order to present a messy version of history in which powerful interests conspired to kill a sitting president. From a substance perspective, JFK often feels like a big ball of nonsense, spitting in all directions and actively introducing bad ideas in the discourse. But the big surprise is that despite all of this, I really liked the movie. It is, in many ways, a triumph of execution. Much of it has to do with its hyperactive style of editing, which feels very modern even twenty-five years later. It’s even more remarkable in that contrarily to much of the rapid-fire digital editing since then, JFK’s editing makes sense both from a content and container perspective: it’s often used to fake documentary proof, distinguish between periods, introduce flashbacks (sometimes even flashbacks within flashbacks) and peer into the characters’ minds … and it almost always makes sense. Acting credentials as solid, with a solid Kevin Costner in the lead, and various supporting roles played by such surprising names as Kevin Bacon, Tommy Lee Jones (in a very atypical role), Donald Sutherland, Gary Oldman and many others who are not always instantly recognizable in their roles. It all culminates in a barnstormer of a speech that will leave even conspiracy-skeptics cheering for truth and untainted democracy. For a three-hour film, JFK flies by and impresses even as a propaganda piece. It’s kind of amazing, actually, that such a piece of firebrand cinema would be so closely associated with major studio Warner Brothers. The years have been kind to JFK, even though its theory seems increasingly dubious (twenty-five years later, and no deathbed confessions…), its craft seems just as solid now as ever … and perhaps a bit less disorienting as it must have been then.

  • Bridget Jones’s Baby (2016)

    Bridget Jones’s Baby (2016)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2017) I really liked the first Bridget Jones’s Diary, but as someone who believes that romantic comedies should never have sequels, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason didn’t impress as much, and I’m even less enthusiastic about Bridget Jones’s Baby. This third film of the series has additional issues in that it takes place much, much later—so late, in fact, that what was adorably goofball behaviour by Bridget Jones in her twenties now seems a bit sad and unbecoming to someone in her forties. The youthful charm of the character has worn extremely thin and reviving a romantic triangle (involving uncertain paternity, no less) in that context seems more desperate than amusing. Those objections duly noted (and acknowledging that Zellweger, in growing older, seems to have become far more generic an actress), Bridget Jones’s Baby remains a mildly enjoyable piece of romantic comedy. The plot cheats are egregious, the humiliation comedy gets old, the ultimate issue is rarely in doubt. But parts of it are fun, the script is intermittently self-aware, Colin Firth is dependably good, Ed Sheeran shows up in a cute cameo and Zellweger can still pull at masculine protective heartstrings. On the other hand, let’s not pretend that this third entry in the series does anything but coast on the merits of its predecessors, and is likely destined to “third movie in the series bundle” status within a few years, never to be sold as anything but part of the DVD set. I’d ask the series to stop now before Bridget Jones’s Toddler, but I’m really not confident that anyone will listen.

  • The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2015)

    The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2015)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, April 2017) Perhaps the biggest surprise of The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is how neatly it follows-up on the first film. Despite a few new characters and situations, subplots are carried through, the tone is consistent and nearly every character gets a role to play in the sequel. The film picks up not too long after the first, which means that you can see the two film back-to-back and it will feel like a whole. The portrait of India is pleasantly complicated as the story goes a bit beyond the surface impressions of the first film. Judy Dench once again takes on a substantial role, but the ensemble cast does give substantial characters to Maggie Smith (continuing a solid character arc), Bill Nighy (charming in a role that could have been irritating), Dev Patel and, newly introduced in the series, Richard Gere. While The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is slightly more formulaic than the already schematic original (all the way to climaxing at a wedding), it’s a decent-enough follow-up to the first film—those who were charmed by the first Exotic Marigold Hotel are likely to feel just as pleased with this one.

  • Unleashed (2005)

    Unleashed (2005)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Crackle Streaming, April 2017) Some things are difficult to appreciate until they’re gone, and as a cinephile I do rather miss the steady stream of Asian-influenced martial arts action movies of the early 2000s. Following the success of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (exploiting a trend a decade in the making through the home video market), American theatres received a steady stream of Asian action movies for a few years, and it was easy to believe that it would go on forever. Except that it didn’t, and today you’d be hard-pressed to find any of those movies at the multiplex. Interestingly, this may make then-overlooked movies more interesting to watch today. I’d given a miss to Unleashed at the time, but seeing it today probably makes it look a bit better than I would have felt back then. Not that the movie is particularly bad in itself: Jet Li stars as a gifted fighter raised like an attack dog by a London criminal, and Unleashed predictably follows what happens once he’s adopted by a kindly blind man and his daughter. You can write the rest of the story yourself and wouldn’t be far off from the result (Luc Besson actually scripted the movie and it’s a slightly above average script for him). But the point of the film (despite a performance by Morgan Freeman as the blind man) isn’t the story or the action as much as it’s the action sequences directed by Louis Leterrier and performed by Jet Li. The camera moves well, captures the action nicely and does allow for the grittiness of the premise to be counter-balanced by the comfort found by the hero with his new family. Bob Hoskins also turns up in a memorable loan shark role. While Unleashed isn’t a classic for the ages, it holds up generally well. Twelver years later, it also has the advantage of looking more original than it did back then.

  • Die Hard with a Vengeance (1995)

    Die Hard with a Vengeance (1995)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Third viewing, On DVD, April 2017) I first saw Die Hard with a Vengeance on opening day, and I’m pretty sure I saw it again on DVD ten or fifteen years ago. But I can’t find a mention of it on this site, so here we go: I really, really like the first two-third of this film. It open on the iconic “Summer in the City” soundtrack of a bustling mid-nineties Manhattan before starting to blow stuff up. Then it’s a wild ride through the city, accumulating brain-teasers, going through cheeky overdone action sequences and letting Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson do what they do best. John McTiernan’s direction is exceptionally good and there’s a sense of fun, joy and movement to the story. Every cinephile imprints on the movies of younger years, and mid-to-late nineties action cinema is the standard against which I will forever measure others. Die Hard With a Vengeance’s first two acts is good, solid, highly enjoyable moviemaking. I like it a lot, and I had forgotten just enough details about the movie to be charmed all over again. It’s also a beautiful wide-screen homage to New York City in its multiplicities of glories. Then … the film leaves Manhattan and loses quite a bit of steam. While the script is always big on coincidences, they get actively outrageous by the time our two main characters meet again upstate. By the time we’re on a boat, the film settles down to a far more conventional beat, and the tacked-on ending at the border feels more superfluous than anything else. Still, two-third of a great movie followed by a third of an okay one is better than the average. Contemporary viewers will notice that both Trump and Clinton are name-checked (the latter as a likely “forty third president”), and that a few moments eerily echo the events of 9/11.

  • The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2011)

    The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2011)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2017) Ensemble romantic comedies are a dime a dozen, but few of them tackle the topic of retiree romance as well as The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. While I don’t entirely buy the premise (pensioners moving from Britain to India for their last few years), it does make for a clever way to put familiar characters in new situations. As they navigate the unfamiliarity of modern India, our cast of character grows from their new surroundings, we viewers get a good dose of exoticism and various subplots are left free to develop. A good ensemble casts helps—While Judy Dench and Tom Wilkinson are the standouts here, Bill Nighy manages to make a weak-willed character sympathetic and Maggie Smith gets the difficult role of a stone-cold racist changing her ways after immersion in a foreign culture. Dev Patel also gets a good role as the young Indian man trying to hold a plan together despite the actions of his western guests. Colorful, sympathetic and gently upholding admirable values, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is the kind of pleasant surprise that British cinema does so well. It’s not spectacular, but it works well enough.

  • The Killing Fields (1984)

    The Killing Fields (1984)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2017) I wish I could like The Killing Fields a bit more than I do. It is, after all, serious filmmaking the sorts of which are rarely attempted nowadays—a depiction of the rise of the Pol Pot regime in 1970s Cambodia, and the heroic efforts of a good man in trying to escape the nightmare. It’s an effective gateway to a history lesson, an intriguing look at a specific time and a place and a harrowing experience. Non-actor Haing S. Ngor delivers a terrific performance that required him to re-create several of his real-life experiences at the time, while John Malkovich pops up in a secondary role as an intense photographer. But a few things don’t work as well. There’s a strange shift of protagonists between the two halves of the film, as the focus goes from a western journalist to a Cambodian escapee as the film advances. It goes without saying that much of the film’s second half, as a story of oppression and dangerous escape, is filled with uncomfortable moments, human cruelty and tragic death. Finally, there’s the role held by the western journalist who’s supposed to be our entry character into the story—he spends much of the second half wracked by guilt, ineffectively trying to help his friend stuck behind enemy lines. Trading the white saviour narrative (since he’s unable to affect the events, and in fact his friend is the one who engineers and succeeds in his escape) for an extended white-guilt sequence doesn’t strike me as an improvement, but on the other hand this is a 1984 film and it does get points for tackling the topic at the time, in a way that does allow (save for an overdone reunion at the end) for the non-white character to be presented as an equal. On the other hand, maybe it could have been fairer to let that character be the hero of the entire film, rather than a supporting one in the first half? Still, despite those issues, The Killing Field does end up a decent film. It’s harsh and rough and can be a lot to take, especially for those relatively unfamiliar with the atrocities of Pol Pot’s Year Zero.

  • Lights Out (2016)

    Lights Out (2016)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2017) While Lights Out isn’t a great horror movie and isn’t likely to become much of a reference, it is competently executed and reasonably good for an avowed genre effort. The mythology may not make much sense and the film often struggles to get out of rote narrative elements, but the direction (by first-timer David Sandberg) is effective and the film doesn’t overstay its welcome at barely 81 minutes. The best sequence, should anyone ask, has to do with the boyfriend character (a type usually doomed to third-act death) thinking fast and using his car key fob to good effect. The ending also has an impact, featuring the always-good Maria Bello. This isn’t the first time that “monster only seen in darkness” has been used, but the less said about Darkness Falls the better. Lights Out has a better chance to be remembered as a worthwhile if unspectacular horror film—especially if Sandberg goes on to bigger and better things. It should be noted that Lights Out, with its emphasis on sight, has a clear kinship with other sense-centric horror movies of the moment such as Hush and Don’t Breathe: an intriguing mini-trend in barely nine months.

  • Life (1999)

    Life (1999)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2017) There is a big risky gamble at the heart of Life—the idea that you’d be able to create comedy out of a dramatic, even tragic premise: two innocent young men condemned for life in prison. Featuring Eddie Murphy and Martin Lawrence, no less. How do these clashes of sensibility would play out? As it turns out, much of Life is indeed dragged in all directions. At the macro-level, it’s a sad story, but at the micro-level, it’s Murphy and Lawrence insulting themselves with R-rated profanity-laden dialogue. It’s dumb and sad and funny and silly and weighty in random measures. The production values are fine, and there are two or three sequences that float above the rest—the dream nightclub sequence is particularly well-handled, for instance. During much of its duration, Life feels unfocused, but it does attaint some of its sought-after poignancy late in its running time, as the impact of time becomes more visible on the characters. It’s at that point when we remember what life in prison can mean, and the opportunities stolen from the characters. Even Lawrence isn’t annoying during that segment, making this the high point of his acting career so far. It’s a brief, but affecting moment … and then the film kind of squanders it by going through the motions of resolving long-held conflicts, allowing the characters one last devious plan and ending on an improbable happy ending. Even in concluding, Life does try to have it several ways at once, and feels a bit weaker for attempting it. While the film is worth a look, it may be more for studying its flaws that appreciating its qualities.