Movie Review

  • Target Number One (2020)

    Target Number One (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2021) I doubt that anyone will care, but in the interest of full disclosure, I’ll include my standard disclaimer that writer-director Daniel Roby is the only working filmmaker with whom I’ve had brief personal contact, back when I did the first version of his first film’s web site thanks to a common acquaintance. You’d expect me to be a bit softer on his work than others, so the irony here is that the thing I dislike most about Target Number One is very much the directorial decision to overuse the shakycam approach, providing so much cinema-verité that it borders on nausea. Fortunately, there’s more to the film than that: A fictional exposé of a Canadian cause célèbre in which elements of the RCMP essentially framed a small-time junkie for drug dealing in order to justify their operational budget, Target Number One presents a true story in a mild thriller-style, yet avoids most of the overdone clichés of the genre. Save for one sequence toward the end, there isn’t much gunplay or car chases — just a banal series of meetings between RCMP officers, informants, and our unlucky protagonist. In parallel, noted Canadian investigative journalist Victor Malarek sniffs a story and starts digging despite the personal costs of his quixotic quest. There’s an unmistakable Canadian stamp to the result — the young junkie at the centre of the action is French Canadian, and one of the rare pleasures of the results is a credible depiction of the Canadian linguistic duality and how it works in practice, much like Roby’s previous Funkytown. Taking on the RCMP is a big target, but the film does a credible job in showing how official corruption can find its roots in humdrum banality rather than caricatural evil. Shot with decent-enough means for a Canadian film, Target Number One goes from British Columbia to Thailand, and features no less than John Hartnett as Malarek. As a thriller, it has an unusual restraint. That does translate into a few lengths that take the film’s running time over two hours, and a climax inspired by real-life events that’s messier than any film would prefer. Still, for Roby, it’s a clear step up in a career that gets more and more interesting at every stage — and considering the number of French-Canadian directors breaking into Hollywood, I’m not just saying that to be nice.

  • Wonder Wheel (2017)

    Wonder Wheel (2017)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On TV, February 2021) While Woody Allen’s life has long been shrouded in controversy, there was a definite shift in public opinion against him during 2017’s #MeToo movement, as tolerance for his numerous personal relationships with younger women became unacceptable to a much wider audience. In that chronology, Wonder Wheel may be the last of the pre-controversy Allen movies and also the last with plausible deniability from casual fans. (Meanwhile, everyone who watched Manhattan in theatres is left thinking, “Hey, we knew there was something off with the guy back in the 1970s!”)  It’s also likely to be one of Allen’s last “normal” films — he’s 85, just wrote a controversial autobiography and is going to be scrutinized forever, so it’s unlikely that he’s going to go back to his past production rhythm that led to a very long uninterrupted streak of annual movies. For better or for worse, Wonder Wheel is unmistakably a Woody Allen film: While it starts in a nostalgic vein reminiscent of Radio Days by taking us back to 1950s Coney Island, the lighthearted autobiographical bent soon becomes a lead-in to a more dramatic tale of adultery and jealousy à la Café Society, then of criminal intention à la Irrational Man. In other words, we’re in familiar territory well beyond the Windsor typeface and jazz music. While the spectacular opening shot of Coney Island beach shows that even Allen can use CGI to draw a historical tableau, much of the film is in his usual low-key style, with a character providing a running narration to tie together the scenes without having to shoot the connective plotting material. Acting-wise, it’s a typically gifted ensemble: Justin Timberlake as the dreamy beach monitor moonlighting as an author and narrator, Kate Winslet as the tortured lead, the ever-cute Juno Temple as the object of temptation and Jim Belushi in an unusually effective dramatic role. Think the worst of Allen-the-man (I do!), but as a filmmaker he’s long been able to deliver something interesting, even on full autopilot. The story does show signs of not quite being a coherent whole, with far too many digressions before getting to a quick finale, but it’s still watchable enough. This being said, the meta-narrative surrounding the movie is more interesting: While Allen may be on the verge of being disgraced out of the industry (his two subsequent films have been haphazardly distributed following Amazon’s decision to break their five-film contract), it may be time to start looking at his body of work as near-finite. I’m still not sure how I feel about that—I’ve had trouble enjoying many of his films on their own merits, but he was a major filmmaker for a very long time and even his steady-as-it-goes output away from the high points of the 1970s–1980s has been consistently interesting as long as you go along with his specific blend of nostalgia, philosophy, crime and strong actor showcases. We may come to look at Wonder Wheel as the last of the films he made within the American film industry, and that’s something perhaps more interesting than what the film is about.

  • Play or Die (2019)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, February 2021) When some genres go bad, they truly turn rancid. Horror, alas, is one of those genres — there seems to be no limit to how low horror can go when it’s incompetently handled. I suppose that within a genre often showing the worst of what humanity has to offer, bad horror can become undistinguishable from actual psychopathy. Fortunately, Play or Die manages to avoid that last final rung on the badness scale — but that only barely excuses how a dull escape room dark mystery turns to gory torture horror to eventually end up in incompetent storytelling by the time the climax rolls by. The opening of the film does have a kernel of interest, as a computer-based mystery has an estranged couple reuniting to solve it. This holds up for a few minutes before people are captured and tortured in increasingly gory ways, clearly pandering to the horror crowd after a more restrained opening. But wait, there’s more! Because just as we’re settling for the climax, here come a few more narrative curveballs, as we discover that the protagonist and antagonist are the same (what?) and that it’s all a big sadistic plan to get back together with his girlfriend (what?) and that this is all explained by a horrifying childhood at the hands of a domineering mother that is shown at length just as the climax rolls by (what?), especially her murder at the other end of a screwdriver, which she considers to be her son’s rite of passage (what?)  In other words — the ending self-destructs in somewhat spectacular fashion, not being beholden to any specific rule for good screenwriting, like economy of character, good structure or foreshadowing. The film, co-written and directed by Jacques Kluger, is reportedly adapted from Puzzle, a novel by Frank Thilliez, so maybe the source material is to blame — although I can’t find a good plot summary of the book to judge. [June 2025: French Wikipedia provides the plot summary and while the screenwriters aren’t innocent, they’re not blameless either.] Still, no matter who screwed up, Play or Die is simply a failure — so many people should have intervened to make this a better film, but then again this is horror: the worst instincts of horror creators often operate on a very different wavelength as more casual viewers, while leaving everyone looking embarrassed when they turn bad.

  • Indiscreet (1958)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2021) There’s a freshness of approach in Indiscreet that makes it one of Cary Grant’s most satisfying late-career films. At the time, the fifty-something Grant was branching out in producing his own films, and starting to struggle with the growing age gulf between him and his on-screen love interests. What makes Indiscreet special in the middle of such films as Houseboat and Charade is that it’s a romance between two middle-aged protagonists —and an age difference of merely eleven years between Grant and co-star Ingrid Bergman, practically insignificant by Hollywood standards. (By comparison, Grant/Hepburn was fourteen years, Grant/Day was seventeen years, and Grant/Loren was twenty years —not that they all played their age.)  This meeting-of-equals of the characters (him a respected economist, her a well-known actress) gives Indiscreet a level of maturity not often seen in romantic comedies of the time, as both of them have ghosts to exorcise before committing to each other. To be fair, I found Indiscreet’s first half more classically interesting than the second — the process in which both characters cautiously choose to enter a relationship and have fun in its early days (all the way to a synchronized split-screen scene, said to be the first film to do so) is more interesting than the increasingly contrived complications keeping them apart in the second half. Grant is his usual smooth self here, with Bergman looking as radiant as she usually does. As directed by Stanley Donen, the film is a bit lighter on laughs than you’d maybe expect, but it remains mostly lighthearted throughout, as the obvious exception of the climactic sequence in which everything seems lost (but isn’t). Indiscreet remains a good example of how polished the Cary Grant persona was at that point of his career (he simply has to appear for the characters to go “wow!”), and without the lingering problematic implications of him being involved with much younger co-stars.

  • The Truth About Charlie (2002)

    The Truth About Charlie (2002)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, February 2021) I never bothered watching The Truth About Charlie at any point in the past eighteen years, discouraged by its lousy reviews and having missed it during its period of maximum hype. But having seen Charade (the 1963 film of which this is a remake) was enough to get me curious—and being reminded that Thandie Newton starred in the film didn’t hurt either—Mark Wahlberg is no Cary Grant, but I’d probably think a few seconds before choosing between Newton and Audrey Hepburn. Surprisingly enough, the remade script doesn’t mess all that much with the premise of the original: we still have a newlywed coming back to Paris to discover her husband gone and their apartment empty. We still have a mysterious stranger claiming to help despite being allied with three dangerous people. We still have the stamp thing and an American embassy official. It’s more in the directing style that The Truth About Charlie distinguishes itself from Charade — and really not in a good way. Director Jonathan Demme throws in a flurry of circa-2002 stylistic quirks, plus many more of his own (such as the staring-at-the-camera dialogue shots) and the result isn’t dynamic as much as it’s intensely irritating. While the basics of the narrative are still there, they’re made less comprehensible by the showy direction and the elided connective material. It gets worse once you realize that little of the film’s stylistic excesses really serve the thriller — a lot of them are actively distracting from the narrative, and some of them (such as Charles Aznavour showing up to sing) remain completely unexplainable — I happen to think that featuring New Wave director Agnès Varda in a small strange role is Very Significant in figuring out that there’s nothing to figure out. Tim Robbins is fine in the Walter Matthau role, Wahlberg is miscast and Newton is always a delight, but the film around them struggles to keep a coherent tone or even clearly presents its narrative. I suppose that remaking an intensely watchable suspense film as an arthouse experiment is more interesting than simply aping it verbatim, but it completely misses the point of why people loved the film so much in the first place: I’m not sure anyone ever watched the original Charade (which, to be fair, does have its moments of first-act weirdness) and thought, “You know, what this movie needs is more incomprehensible stuff.”

  • Carnival of Souls (1998)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, February 2021) Being a movie critic is all about keeping a flimsy veneer of civility over intensely fascistic opinions about how movies should be made or marketed. Crown a movie reviewer absolute despot and they’ll probably enact a humane progressive science-based policy agenda — but first, Hollywood is going to Get it in the teeth. One of my first acts as King of It All would be to discourage remakes and forbid them if they’re going to make a mockery of their original inspiration. I will even provide this 1998 remake of Carnival of Souls as evidence. I won’t try to convince anyone that the original film was a slick and polished production — In fact, it’s the opposite: a slapdash low-budget effort that, by sheer happenstance and dreamlike luck, happened to produce a compelling mixture of oneiric horror and enigmatic visuals. But the 1998 Carnival of Souls is not worthy of sharing the same title as the original — in an effort to make sense of a senseless inspiration, this remake adds a completely new (and dull) narrative about a woman chased by the spirit of a murderous clown. It ends as a dreamlike fun fair, which is roughly the extent of the films’ similarities. The strengths of this remake are a few and superficial: Having a coherent plot is nice, but not when it’s a tiresome accumulation of “Anything can happen! Boo!” moments that betray a lack of confidence in the material (a justified lack of confidence, but a lack of confidence nonetheless). Acting-wise, it’s a mixed bag: Lead actress Bobbie Phillips is very cute here, but comedian Larry Miller is misused as a murderous clown. The showy style of the film is dull, and Adam Grossman’s slapdash direction doesn’t do much to raise already struggling material. No wonder if the no-budget original continues to be respected and seen today, while this remake struggles in cultural oblivion, now only caught late at night on specialized French-Canadian cable horror channels. On second thoughts, I may not enact my anti-remake policy once I’m King of It All — but I may let the producers be exposed to public ridicule.

  • Palm Springs (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Amazon Streaming, February 2021) By now, I must have seen nearly a dozen time-loop science fiction movies. Groundhog Day remains the best of them all, but I’ve come to appreciate their many alternate takes on similar material — after all, it’s the kind of science-fiction device that has nearly everyone pondering what they’d do in similar situations, and screenwriters finding unusual variations on the basic concept. So let us dispense with easy comparisons when it comes to Palm Springs and take it for what it has to offer. As a profane romantic comedy, Palm Springs starts years into the male lead’s life in a time loop. Stuck in a Palm Springs hotel for the wedding of a distant friend of his girlfriend, he has burnt out his suicidal tendencies, gone over his attempts to improve himself or the lives of others and settled for a life of effortless hedonism, lounging by the pool and putting in the minimum effort to make it to the next day. But things change once he accidentally brings in someone else in the loop and starts developing a meaningful relationship day after day. There’s a rich thematic parallel here with the idea of a developing/decaying relationship here, especially as the two leads come to be the only “real” people in their lives. But don’t fret: Director Max Barbakow (working from a story he co-wrote with Andy Siara) ensures that his film’s rich philosophical material doesn’t take over its silly comedy and vulgar language. Andy Samberg proves to be uncommonly good here as the primary looper, even though Cristin Milioti is the revelation here as the always-compelling female lead brought into the time loop and not settling for a pat resignation. (J. K. Simmons also gets a few great sequences, but I won’t spoil them.)  The mixture of science-fiction justifications, irreverent comedy, honest romance and comic nihilism ends up creating a very compelling result, and one that has enough to distinguish itself on its own terms.

  • Sky Murder (1940)

    Sky Murder (1940)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2021) My not-so-secret reason to watch Sky Murder was to get a glimpse of Virginia O’Brien’s screen debut, and I got exactly that: she shows up as part of a group of models and doesn’t get any discernible dialogue other than group screaming, but she’s there all right for the first half of the film. Of course, Virginia O’Brien is not the point of the film — Sky Murder is the third and final film in a series of mysteries featuring Walter Pidgeon as the then-popular literary hero Nick Carter. The plot has to do with subversive villains plotting attacks within the United States, and showing their hands too early by murdering someone aboard a charter plane in which Carter (and the models) are also present. After much screaming and another murder attempt, Carter gets on the case in a narrative that would feel familiar to any action movie fan: Chases, explosions, spies, high-stake gambits and villain unmasking are all part of the routine for Carter, and Pidgeon does carry the role with authority. It’s relatively easy to deduce that this is a film in the series by the way the protagonist moves around the screen, fully established and self-confident that audiences are watching. For a 72-minute film, Sky Murder features a steady series of sensational episodes, comic relief, romantic interests, perfidious antagonists (all of them caught by the police) and steadfast allies. It’s fun to watch, even though it won’t fool anyone into thinking that this was a high-class production. I’m now curious enough to seek out the other Carter movies — with any luck, TCM will run a marathon sometime soon.

  • What a Blonde (1945)

    What a Blonde (1945)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2021) I watched What a Blonde solely for the fact that Leon Errol played the lead character, and wasn’t disappointed… even though the film doesn’t have that much more to offer. Errol, a noted vaudevillian, was in the middle of a successful motion-picture late career by the time he starred in What a Blonde, sometime between the end of the Mexican Spitfire series and the beginning of the Joe Palooka films. His twitchy rubber-faced antics are a great addition to the screwball comedy of What a Blonde — what with a line of chorus girls moving into a lingerie tycoon’s mansion and creating plenty of comic havoc. The film does hinge on the real rationing efforts underway toward the end of WW2 in America: much of the plot engine runs on the notion that even a millionaire couldn’t get enough gas to get around. Cue the dancing girls, brought in the mansion to secure enough gas coupons and incidentally create as many wacky incidents until the film barely inches its way past feature-film length. It’s not refined comedy, and Errol was not the most subtle of comedians. But it’s funny enough, and if you’re an Errol fan, it’s exactly what you think you’ll get from a film of his.

  • Onward (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Disney Streaming, February 2021) After nearly a decade in the trenches of one sequel after another, Pixar’s current slate of films seems to be on an upswing. Now that the latest Toy Story is out of the door, the next few films are a return to original concepts, and with the Soul/Onward combo for 2020, it looks as if the studio is once again free of its corporate obligations. Now, Onward is not the strongest of the two: Rather than deal with grand concepts of life and personalities as Soul did, this film is a suburban fantasy (or rather: a suburban story set in a modernized fantasy world) featuring two brothers coming to grips with their long-departed father. Thanks to a bit of magic, the metaphorical becomes literal, as the two teenagers go on a quest to restore the body of their father for a single day. This being a world in which magic had been displaced by technology, our elf-heroes drive a minivan painted with a unicorn and defy bike-riding fairies on their quest to retrieve a magical gem. There’s a manticore involved. As usual for Pixar, the visual polish of the result is up to the very detailed invention of its world: nearly every frame crams a joke or an interesting detail, made even more credible with Pixar’s style of combining a hyperreal setting with stylized characters. The emotional core of the film is strong, helping it breeze past the finishing line without too much trouble. By itself, Onward is decent enough, although it doesn’t quite match the brilliance of other Pixar films. Still, that’s an honourable result: Even a middle-of-the-pack Pixar outclasses other films, and it’s good to see them go back to original stories rather than churn out another line of toys for their Disney overlords.

  • Her Highness and the Bellboy (1945)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2021) As far as old-school Hollywood romantic fantasies go, Her Highness and the Bellboy is both typical and innocuous, as it embraces the very American notion of class mobility in the core of its narrative. It features a princess falling for a bellboy already pining for a bedridden invalid, but don’t worry given that everything is going to turn out all right for everyone. The casting is perhaps more interesting than the premise, as the role is the Highness is held by none other than Hedy Lamarr (in a relatively rare comic role), while the Bellboy is played by a very likable Robert Walker — while June Allyson transforms the role of a crippled ex-dancer into more than just clichés. (Don’t worry — there’s eventually another man to round up this love triangle.)  Production values for the film are fine without being spectacular — after all, this is mostly a studio-set film featuring a small number of characters: no need to go all-out on the Manhattan location shooting. It gives Her Highness and the Bellboy perhaps more of a sitcom feeling than it should, but that’s the nature of the story: a straightforward narrative, enough time for comic subplots and a big romantic finale upholding anti-monarchic ideals. It’s pretty much exactly what anyone would expect, and that’s its biggest strength.

  • The Thrill of It All (1963)

    The Thrill of It All (1963)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2021) The life of a cinephile can be unpredictable: A few weeks ago, I was surprised to learn that no less serious filmmaker as director Norman Jewison had, early in his career, directed a romantic comedy like Send Me No Flowers. But it wasn’t the only Jewison romcom! Now here we are, taking in its immediate predecessor, the Doris Day/James Garner romantic comedy The Thrill of It All. Curiously enough, it’s a film with some clear social relevance today, as the satirical script (by Carl Reiner) is focused on a housewife who comes to be offered a lucrative contract lending her authenticity to a series of advertisements for a national brand… much to the dismay of her husband. There’s only one small step from there to the influencer lifestyle of today, with tensions within couples where the influencer suddenly becomes more famous than the other partner. While Day and Garner are terrific and often very funny in their roles, the film’s worst moments have to do with the male character demonstrating a mile-wide raw streak of fragile masculinity in the face of a more successful partner, intentionally putting her down in a twisted-logic kind of attention-seeking. This behaviour does make the third quarter of the film more difficult to get through than expected — if you want to skip from the car plunging into the pool to another car getting stuck in traffic, that may be best to avoid the whole unpleasantness. Still, it’s hard to resist Garner’s early-1960s squared-jawed charm, and Day is, as usual, the leading partner when it comes to comic timing. The film’s best satirical material is in wrestling with the nature of television advertisements, while Day proves game to do just about any indignity asked of her. For Jewison, The Thrill of It all is yet another example of his incredible variety as a director in a career that spanned five decades. The result is not entirely likable, but it’s well worth a look.

  • Bachelor in Paradise (1961)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2021) If you believe the movies, Americans woke up in the 1960s and starting to notice all sorts of new phenomena around them. What is that sex thing? ask the movies of the time. The truth is somewhat less revelatory — it’s the movies that unshackled themselves from a prudish reflection of American society, and it had to be done in a very gradual way, as so not to shock the masses. A first step along the way were the cute sex comedies of the early 1960s, in which the films barely hinted at naughtiness — which, to be fair, was a step up from the previous decade. It’s in the vein that Bachelor in Paradise features Bob Hope as a salacious best-selling playboy author who infiltrates a suburban community in the hopes of researching a new book. While over there, he’s confronted by the prejudices of neighbourhood gossip queens, especially when he, a single eligible bachelor, finds himself surrounded by lovelorn housewives. As usual for films of the time, Bachelor in Paradise is as interesting for its unspoken presumptions and period detail than for the elements of its narrative. The sequence set inside a grocery store is a fascinating throwback to how people shopped at the time, while the various social taboos being broken are often more revelatory of 1961 American than the filmmakers would care to admit. Bob Hope does make for a funny protagonist — and seeing Lana Turner as his romantic foil doesn’t hurt, even though I find Turner more generic than many other commentators. (I rather would have liked Paula Prentiss in the role, but that would have broken her expected on-screen pairing with Jim Hutton.)  While Bachelor in Paradise remains quaintly sexist, is not built for social commentary and pales in comparison of more groundbreaking films later in the decade, it’s intriguing, cute, charming, and quite a bit of fun to watch even today.

  • Crossing Delancey (1988)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2021) Practically forgotten but certainly charming, Crossing Delaney takes us in Manhattan’s Jewish community to tell us about the romantic troubles of its heroine, a thirtysomething bookseller who gets pressured by her family to find a husband to the point of dealing with a marriage broker. Headlined by the rather adorable Amy Irving, Crossing Delancey is a refreshingly low-key romantic comedy taking place in hesitations and self-doubts, community expectations and a willingness to improve one’s lot. There are no flashy gestures, no clear antagonist and no overly evil character: the conclusion rests on which character is better than the others and willing to take a chance. The atmosphere of Jewish intellectual Manhattan is credibly portrayed, and the film does a lot with what feels like a limited budget. Crossing Delancey is not a flashy film, but it’s heartwarming and cute enough to be worth a look wherever you can find it.

  • Borat Subsequent Moviefilm: Delivery of Prodigious Bribe to American Regime for Make Benefit Once Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Amazon Streaming, February 2021) Ho boy, here we go again. I really wasn’t a fan of the first Borat, and its sequel Borat Subsequent Moviefilm often simply repeats the humiliation comedy of its predecessor. There isn’t anything all that funny seeing ordinary people squirm and try to be polite in the face of provocative shock humour from Sacha Baron Cohen — if comedy is at its best when it’s punching up, this seems like hitting down at ordinary people who don’t deserve the aggravation. (I don’t entirely buy the argument that people are exposed as racist or idiots by his antics — I can too easily imagine anyone smiling and nodding in the face of obvious lunacy until the weirdness goes away.)  Borat Subsequent Moviefilm is at its weakest when Cohen and his sidekick Maria Bakalova go around freaking the mundanes. Fortunately, there’s more to it. There’s a narrative, for instance, and some of the best laughs of the film are to be found in the framing device that brilliantly makes Borat patient zero of the COVID-19 Pandemic. The film simply gets more laughs when it sticks to a plot (even when the plot is obviously retrofitted around the documentary footage). But there’s another factor at play too: Far more politically engaged than its predecessor, Borat Subsequent Moviefilm fearlessly goes after worthy targets. I may not be fond of Cohen making fun of ordinary Americans but when he mocks the entire CPAC? Every single one of those people deserves it. Qanon morons? Worth it. Rudy Giuliani? You can argue that Cohen is merely broadcasting Giuliani’s buffoonish public persona. There’s also an admirable daredevilish streak to Cohen’s method here — putting himself in a situation that no one else would envy in order to get a laugh, and trying to make a sequel to one of the most instantly recognizable comic characters of the past twenty years. I’m still not all that happy with the overall result, but Borat Subsequent Moviefilm is not about comfort: it’s meant to be irritating by design, and there’s some inherent panache in that.