Movie Review

  • La terza madre [Mother of Tears] (2007)

    La terza madre [Mother of Tears] (2007)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, June 2021) It’s hardly controversial to state that not all of Dario Argento’s films are created equal, and that his early films are better-crafted than the ones made after (roughly) 1990. It does Mother of Tears no favours whatsoever that it sets itself up as the concluding instalment of a series launched by nothing less than Suspiria (a giallo that even a slasher-hater like myself can like) and Inferno — no film could possibly aspire to follow up those two opening films and get good reviews. Indeed, other than a few rare moments and an ambitious apocalyptic plot, there isn’t much in Mother of Tears to impress. The plotting is crazy, but the execution feels far less audacious. Even with Asia Argento in the lead role and Udo Kier hovering menacingly in a supporting role, the film struggles to capitalize on its own potential. It avoids failure with a few flourishes, but again the comparisons to earlier Argento are almost unbearable — what would the younger Argento have been able to do with the budget and digital effects required to do justice to this kind of wide-scale vision of horror? Tough to say, but we’re on somewhat firmer ground in calling Mother of Tears a disappointment made even worse by the unrealistic comparisons that it courts.

  • The Lusty Men (1952)

    The Lusty Men (1952)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, June 2021) Even as countless male leads of classic Hollywood have been forgotten or become undistinguishable from others, Robert Mitchum endures as an icon. His performance in director Nicholas Ray’s The Lusty Men will show you why. Playing a rodeo competitor who decides to retire but ends up partnering with a young man trying to save enough money to buy a house for him and his wife. Matters predictably escalate into full-blown drama, as the life of a rodeo competitor is dangerous, and few of the characters seem able to keep their hands to themselves. (I mean, it’s right there in the title.) Ray directs the film in a more naturalistic fashion than was usual in the 1950s, going for the raw authenticity of its hardscrabble characters. Real rodeo footage is integrated within the film, giving The Lusty Men a patina of authenticity as a modern-day western that now feels like a period piece. Mitchum delivers a good, even great performance here, helped along by the melancholy tone of the script and Ray’s careful directing process. While the result isn’t as flashy as the epic films that Hollywood was producing at the time, The Lusty Men has aged well and remains a high point in both Ray and Mitchum’s careers.

  • Mistress (1992)

    Mistress (1992)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, June 2021) Despite the self-aggrandizing nature of such projects, I love it when Hollywood makes a satire about itself. They don’t even have to be all that insightful — as a cinephile, I can appreciate the attempt to tell a joke. In Mistress, we follow a pair of past-their-prime director and producer as, out of the blue, a passion project long left abandoned has a chance of being revived. The only catch (as is the case in 1,000% of film projects) is financing, and the three investors interested in the project each want their mistress to be cast in a prominent role. Much of the film tracks how a purely artistic project ends up compromised by multiple overlapping contradictory requests — while it’s a comedy, the ending is unusually grim (well, not that grim) in that nothing comes out of it. Mistress is fun enough, but it punches above its weight due to some very good casting. Robert Wuhl and Martin Landau are likably pathetic as a bottom-feeding writer-director-producer pair trying their best to exist in a system that doesn’t care for them. Their will is tested by three investors, played by Robert de Niro, Danny Aiello and Eli Wallach in three strong performances. But as far as I’m concerned, the most memorable casting here is Sheryl Lee Ralph as a high-powered woman who’ll take advantage of a break but not let anyone walk over her. She does bring a lot of energy to what is, overall, a much more low-key affair. Mistress belongs to the kind of self-deprecating Hollywood comedy that’s probably equally funny and anger-inducing to insiders. Fittingly for a film aimed at professionals, the focus here is more on producing and financing than the shooting of the film itself. It’s watchable enough even today, although I suspect that it was probably released too close to The Player to make waves of its own upon release.

  • Nightfall (1956)

    Nightfall (1956)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, June 2021) Film noir is often considered a purely urban genre, firmly set in the dimly lit streets, small offices and nightclub backrooms of urban metropolises. That’s why it’s a surprise to see the late-genre entry Nightfall head for the wilds of Moose, Wyoming for much of duration. It starts and ends there, with a bag of money being in the middle of the action even as it travels to the city and involves a fashion model (Anne Bancroft!)  Then-veteran director Jacques Tourneur helms the result with some assurance, flipping back and forth between the past and present of the story, as he also goes from the white winter landscapes to the dark streets of the city. This late-period noir often teeters at the edge of other subgenres, but the darkness of the main character and the crime-centric plotting clearly bring it back home. Nightfall is an involving watch — it’s easy to root for the hero, to be captivated by the mystery of the money and remain seated until the cat-and-mouse between the protagonist and the hitmen hunting for cash is resolved. It’s not a bad pick if you’re in the mood for a solid yet slightly unusual noir.

  • Class of 1999 (1990)

    Class of 1999 (1990)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, June 2021) Younger readers may want to note that by 1990, American society had experienced nearly four decades of an uninterrupted rise in violent crimes. There are many explanations for this (the best being the neurological poisoning brought about by lead poisoning — yes, really) that neatly dovetail with the crest seen in 1990, followed by a gradual and real decrease in crime that continues to this day. But my point is: if 1990 filmmakers now sound unbelievably paranoid and grim about society falling apart, they had their reasons. With a touch of exaggeration, those fuelled films like Class of 1999, in which violent crime permeates every facet of American society, including its high schools. Taking the madness of Class of 1984 (only tangentially related by having both been directed by Mark L. Lester) one step further, this near-future nightmare presents schools as warzones controlled by gangs who must be cleaned by any means necessary. So, naturally the next logical step is to send three military robots disguised as teachers inside the school and start disciplining the rebellious youngsters. Given that one of the robots is played by the ever-beautiful Pam Grier, I’m not complaining at all. Although I do have, oh, huge issues with the rest of the film. Clearly meant as semi-trash exploitation, Class of 1999 is never meant to be taken seriously, especially not when the climax consists in having students escape, trap and destroy killer robots hunting them down throughout the school. (I rarely quote Wikipedia plot summaries, but this is wonderful: “While they look for Christie and the teachers, they soon learn of the real situation with the teachers. Ms. Connors’ arm becomes a flame thrower. Bryles’ arm becomes a missile launcher.”)  There’s some ironic fun in watching a film with concerned scientists watching a classroom altercation through 1990 “high-tech” displays, but let’s not confuse this film with anything traditionally successful. Class of 1999 belongs far more to the 1980s than the next decade, and should probably be approached more as a semi-effective B-grade picture than anything particularly worthwhile.

  • Beware the Gonzo (2010)

    Beware the Gonzo (2010)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, June 2021) “Buy the ticket, Take the Ride” once wrote literary idol Hunter S. Thompson. With a title like Beware the Gonzo (with a poster featuring the infamous clenched-fist logo so often associated with him), you could be expecting to buy a ticket to a Thompson-influenced ride… and you’d be largely wrong. Oh, there are traces of Thompson here and there in this tale about a rebellious high-school student newspaper exposing the status quo and allowing its characters to be as acerbic as they want. But the Thompson influence is thematic at best. So, having bought the ticket, what should we expect of the ride? Perhaps the most interesting thing about it would be seeing a few actors before they hit it big, specifically Ezra Miller and Zoe Kravitz as the lead couple brought together and torn apart by the film’s events. As a former high school paper editor (although we didn’t do journalism at all), I will always have a fond place in my heart for stories set in that milieu, no matter how disappointing they turn out to be. And while writer/director Bryan Goluboff ensures that Beware the Gonzo has too many good points to be a failure, it’s not anywhere near what it should be. Oh, I liked the rebellion of the protagonist, as he finds kindred outcasts in his preppy high school, then proceeds to reveal everyone’s secrets. There’s a pleasant energy to the second quarter of the film, as everything comes together nicely and the protagonist gets to score points against the school authorities and his bullies. But then… it becomes far more average. Now, you’ll either find the third-act turn (as in: revealed secrets hurt people) mature, wimpy or hypocritical, depending on how you feel about the freedom of the press, the responsibility of the bullhorn or how the film’s morality seems centred on the protagonist. Suffice to say that after the film’s hyper-melodramatic framing device, we end up in a place that has been thoroughly explored by many, many other high-school films, with a milquetoast conclusion that makes sure to offend no one. Gonzo? Hardly. Watchable? Somewhat. Thompson fans aren’t the only ones who should temper their expectations going into Beware the Gonzo: it’s slightly more interesting than most high-school movies, but it wastes a lot of potential on its way to the end.

  • American Exit (2019)

    American Exit (2019)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, June 2021) While it does have its interesting moments, American Exit can’t quite manage an entire engaging film with what it’s got, and even a surprising lead acting performance isn’t enough to keep our interest throughout. The setup, once it’s clarified, holds some promise as a dying man breaks a few rules in order to have one last road trip with his son, a journey during which he also hopes to complete one last illicit deal in order to secure his son’s future. Dane Cook, who got some well-deserved criticisms in earlier movies, successfully goes for drama here as the dying father. Udo Kier plays a heavy, while Levi Miller does well as the son. Alas, once past the setup, there isn’t much more left until the somewhat predictable and downbeat conclusion. Shot with an ugly yellow filter (to best represent Mexico, as the cliché goes), American Exit quickly becomes irritating to watch, with the constant colour palette making the experience even more repetitive than it should. Stuck between delivering a genre action film and a heartfelt character drama, writers/directors Tim McCann and Ingo Vollkammer can’t quite package everything into something that fulfills its potential. The pacing is off and there’s not much sense that American Exit builds toward something. Not a terrible thing, but you may not remember it the following week.

  • Jeruzalem (2015)

    Jeruzalem (2015)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, June 2021) A surprising number of horror films have to do with Americans travelling abroad and getting caught up in terrifying events. It would be tempting to call the entire subgenre intensely xenophobic, but Jeruzalem does have the distinction of being an Israeli production. Oh well — it’s not as if the film doesn’t have other distinctions. The first, occasionally groan-worthy, has much of the main plot of the film being filmed POV-style from a pair of smart glasses, which also provides opportunities for filling some of the backstory. The other, intermittently more interesting is that writers-directors Doron Paz and Yoav Paz take advantage of using Jerusalem as the backdrop to have a zombie(ish) invasion tied to the end of times — by the time the film ends, it goes really big. The result is not that good, but it avoids many of the problems in the overexposed found-footage/zombie genres. Anyone expecting a straight zombie film may be disappointed, though — there are a lot of biblical references in Jeruzalem, and a slow buildup to the action. There is a slow start and a bit of a lull in the third quarter, but the originality of the location and the more ambitious scale of the film do keep it distinctive.

  • Topkapi (1964)

    Topkapi (1964)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, June 2021) In my own developing history of Hollywood movies, I’ve earmarked the 1960s as the decade where Europe came to the rescue of American filmmaking: you can clearly feel the stagnation of post-studio-era Hollywood in the decade’s first years, and the energy of filmmaking being concentrated in censorship-busting Europe. Much of those lessons crossed the Atlantic during the decade and culminated in a 1967 crop of movies that changed everything. In this admittedly incomplete historical summary, Topkapi finds its place as one of the films that regurgitated the American heist film into something slightly grander, slightly more colourful (literally, in this case) and with a different sense of style. It certainly makes sense that Jules Dassin would be the director to do the transition — a successful Classic Hollywood director during the film noir age, Dassin was essentially exiled from the United States due to the McCarthy blacklist and re-established himself in Europe. By 1955, he was making the classic Rififi and already adapting the American style to the French palette. Topkapi feels like an extension of this work, going even farther even as other American movies such as Ocean’s Eleven were starting to digest his lessons from the earlier Rififi. An exotic and lighthearted heist film shot in glorious colour in Istanbul, Topkapi goes through the now-familiar motions of its subgenre: Assembling the specialized members of the crew (often by unfortunate happenstance), having them describe the heist, suffering from an execution that flies off in all directions, and wrapping things up in a bittersweet but amusing conclusion. There’s intra-group conflict, an alluring prize (a jewel-encrusted dagger), elaborate plans and freakish deviations getting bigger — in short, everything you’d want from that kind of film from a narrative perspective. It does help that Dassin knows what he’s doing behind a camera, and that he managed to bring together an impressive number of actors — with a lot of attention paid to Peter Ustinov’s bumbling hustler inadvertently brought into the plot (a role that earned him an Oscar), and Maximilian Schell as a master criminal having to deal with smaller fry. You can see bits and pieces of heist film DNA being put together here, most visibly the acrobatic tricks that would later be amplified in the first Mission: Impossible film. For twenty-first century viewers, the impact of all of this is curiously mixed: While impressive by mid-1960s standards, Topkapi suffers from being so successful and being imitated ever since. It’s fun to see where much of this started, or as part of an essential double feature with Rififi, but many viewers may shrug and ask about the hubbub if they compare it with its imitators. Still, it is a cinematic piece of history, and it’s still quite entertaining.

  • Fitzcarraldo (1982)

    Fitzcarraldo (1982)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, June 2021) There are a few films about which the story of the film’s production rivals and perhaps exceeds the narrative of the film itself. Most of the time, we’ll never suspect those stories (and it’s not as if the publicists will ever tell the whole thing). For Fitzcarraldo, though, the incredible is right there on the screen in the film’s showpiece sequence: A 300-ton steamboat being dragged up a mountain to the other side, from one river to another. In a pre-CGI era, you can feel the weight and effort of every shot in that sequence, especially as the hundreds of extras labour to clean-cut the side of the mountain, prepare the boat with timber supports and drag it all the way up. It’s a ten-minute sequence that almost raises as many questions as it answers, most notably what kind of director would ever think this was a viable way to shoot a movie. The answer could only be Werner Herzog, in telling the story (inspired by real events, although the real story is not nearly as insane as its recreation) of an opera-obsessed entrepreneur who hits upon a rubber-extraction scheme that hinges on a boat making an extreme portage between two rivers separated by a mountain. Deep up the Amazon, the entrepreneur (Klaus Kinski, suitably weird) finds the spot he’s been looking for and gets the natives working for him. As the frontier between fact and fiction blur, as Kinski and Herzog blend together, the real production set out to do what the characters do, stripping away trees from the mountainside, preparing the steamboat, pulling it up. Calling Fitzcarraldo a support mechanism for that extraordinary sequence is not much of a stretch — even if it feels a bit bloated as such. Utterly unforgettable if only for those ten minutes, Fitzcarraldo still ranks as a reference for cinephiles for a good reason — one of the most difficult move shoots in history. Just let me close with a delicious quote from Wikipedia’s article on the film: “Herzog says that one of the native chiefs offered, in all seriousness, to kill Kinski for him, but that he declined because he needed the actor to complete filming.”

  • Madea’s Tough Love (2015)

    Madea’s Tough Love (2015)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, June 2021) In my ongoing project to watch more of Tyler Perry’s filmography, I’ve been a bit too trigger-happy on the DVR recordings and that’s how I ended up with animated film Madea’s Tough Love on my to-watch list. To be clear — Madea’s Tough Love is and isn’t a Perry movie: He produced it, voices Madea and even plays her in the framing of live-action scenes, but someone else wrote and produced it. The intended audience of the film is a bit of a mess, as Madea ends up having to do community service and ends up taking over a community centre to save it from destruction. There are a lot of kid characters, but the tone (and Madea’s overall attitude as a disciplinarian) are more aimed at adults. Having the film being animated allows it to take flights of fancy in wilder sequences impossible to do well in live action, including a wild chase with hydraulic-powered cars. It’s all mildly amusing and perhaps revelatory about Madea’s character, but it’s still a blessing that the film clocks in at a slim 64 minutes: it doesn’t overstay its welcome even in its predictability. Still, I’m ready to get back to live-action Perry, even if it means enduring him in drag.

  • The Skeptic (2009)

    The Skeptic (2009)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, June 2021) Calling The Skeptic an old-school made-for-TV movie is more descriptive than insulting, although it accurately suggests that you shouldn’t expect much from the results. Apparently written by director Tennyson Bardwell in the 1980s, then shelved and shot in 2005 only to be sold a few years later for direct-to-video distribution, The Skeptic is a case study in small-scale, single-location horror with more eeriness than outright violence or gore. The basic story has a lawyer inheriting a “haunted house” even though he doesn’t believe in the supernatural, so you can expect the film to hover in that liminal zone where things can either be supernatural or psychological, depending on how much credence you place on hallucinations and coincidences. Tim Daly stars, but he’s not as interesting as Tom Arnold in a showy supporting role or Zoe Saldana as a psychic who may or may not be real. The script eventually works itself to a climax made of repressed memories and unbearable guilt. It’s all so… pedestrian. Indifferently directed and conventionally plotted, The Skeptic makes good use of the large house in which much of the action is set. Saldana is always a compelling performer, so that’s that. But as far as the film is concerned, it’s nothing special. There’s just enough to keep us interested and nothing more. A bit like the kind of stuff you’d catch late at night on cable.

  • The United States vs. Billie Holiday (2021)

    The United States vs. Billie Holiday (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, June 2021) While I didn’t dislike The United States vs. Billie Holiday, I would probably think more of it had I not seen Lady Sing the Blues recently (even if I found the film so overfamiliar as to be unmemorable), and if I didn’t know that much of the romantic narrative of the film is fictitious. Yes, there was a Billie Holiday. Yes, she was a singer, an activist and a drug user who died relatively early after numerous run-ins with the law. Those reasonably familiar portions of Holiday’s life are also in Lady Sing the Blues. What The United States vs. Billie Holiday specifically does is to tie her problems with the systemic racism of the American government, and create a romance between Holiday and the informer that kept feeding information about her to the FBI. The systemic racism is real, although caricatured for dramatic purposes, while the romance apparently isn’t. (Considering the tumultuous history of Holiday’s real romances, maybe some romantic fantasy and streamlining were in order.)  It does bother me when biographies don’t even pass the Wikipedia test (as in: read their subject’s Wikipedia and see if it contradicts the film) — this isn’t the twentieth century anymore, and audiences can fact-check those things well before the ending credits. There’s also a sense that, in between inventing a romance, dwelling on Holiday as an activist who becomes a victim of systemic racism, and focusing on drug abuse, the film doesn’t quite present a fractured portrait that ignores Holiday’s creative output to focus on her as a victim. Director Lee Daniels clearly has plenty to say, but we may have been a bit too selective along the way. Even in its examination of how 1960s activism was sabotaged by the American Government, the film is in a crowded company — even alongside other Oscar nominees! What The United States vs. Billie Holiday does have, to its advantage, is Andra Day in the title role — she doesn’t have the celebrity of Diana Ross in Holiday’s previous biopic, but her performance is better both as an actress and as a singer. The result is far from being unwatchable — its righteous indignation is effective and there are occasionally some nice set-pieces along the way. But there’s still a sense of missed opportunities in taking stock of what the film manages to accomplish… especially when Lady Sings the Blues isn’t exactly an obscure film even today.

  • Luca (2021)

    Luca (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Disney Streaming, June 2021) The not-so-secret secret to Pixar’s continued success is that despite working in a format often described as family films, their films usually manage to draw in the entire family. There are usually no target ages to Pixar movies — they’re bright and colourful and funny enough for the kids, but their narrative ambitions and levels of detail usually draw in adults without any trouble. So, when something like Luca slides across the table, obviously aimed at young boys and with narrative shortcuts so blatant as to challenge adult suspension of disbelief, it feels like a substantial disappointment. Not since The Good Dinosaur and Cars 2 has Pixar aimed so specifically at the younger set. You can protest that setting the story in the 1960s Italian Riviera is not a kid-friendly decision, and that the city of Portorosso is an obvious callout to Miyazaki’s similarly-set Porco Rosso, but that’s not particularly convincing when the narrative bones of the story feel so bare. Playing with a monster-to-human transformation whose specifics seem unusually reliant on plotting requirements, the plot feels too simple to satisfy. The details can be expansive and well-crafted, managing to keep adult audiences interested even when they’re not happy, but the film feels generic in a way that Pixar films usually don’t. Luca is not quite a failure, but it is near the bottom of the studio’s output — best shown to younger boys and tolerated by others. Wonderfully animated, charming but slight, it’s a disappointment. Still a good movie by anyone’s standards, but not quite what Pixar has been producing alongside Soul and Toy Story 4 and Outward.

  • Death Machine (1994)

    Death Machine (1994)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, June 2021) Some wariness is in order when approaching Death Machine. As a mid-1990s horror/SF film exploring cyberpunk themes and going for a snooze-inducing “military robots start killing people” plot, it’s the kind of film where you can reliably expect the worst. From a narrative standpoint, this is the usual claptrap of military scientists messing around with super-soldier technology going wrong in ways that no one except everyone could have anticipated. The aesthetic is firmly dark industrial, and the structure of the story won’t surprise anyone. This is seriously dull stuff, familiar even to those without an encyclopedic knowledge of SF films. In most ways, Death Machine can be ignored without fear of missing anything. On the other hand, there are a few things worth noting about it, if only for completists. Perhaps the most visible is that this was Stephen Norrington’s first film as a director, graduating from special effects work. Norrington would go on to deliver a solid genre hit in Blade (as well as, sigh, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen) but his skill and enthusiasm for integrating special effects with live action are already apparent here, with slightly better results than the norm for low-budget movies of that era. The other detail worth noting is an early appearance by Rachel Weisz in a minor role. Otherwise, the violence is excessive, and characters are named for fan-favourite references. While the result is intermittently interesting, much of Death Machine remains tedious. It’s a minor 1990s entry in the cyberpunk filmography — but don’t expect much more.