Movie Review

  • The Chronicles of Riddick: Dark Fury (2004)

    The Chronicles of Riddick: Dark Fury (2004)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2013) Even setting the bar low for a direct-to-video animated feature meant to bridge between two movies in a series (Pitch Black and The Chronicles of Riddick), there really isn’t much to say about Dark Fury: Narration-wise, it’s almost completely useless as a bridge between the two films, and doesn’t do much considered by itself: it’s a standard “hero kills a few more things in-between bigger adventures” plot, stretched over 35 minutes. Visually, I’m not a fan of Peter Chung’s anime-inspired aesthetics -extended limbs and all- and the blending of 2D with 3D elements feels amateurish at time. Dark Fury just lies there, inert, as a sop for fans of the character and the hope of delivering a pre-manufactured franchise to the masses.

  • Anna Karenina (2012)

    Anna Karenina (2012)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Video On-demand, March 2013) Director Joe Wright has always shown tendencies toward stylistic show-boating, and the first half-hour of Anna Karenina is crammed with directorial flourishes as the film moves in-between interior sets and a larger theatrical stage. As a way to freshly present an oft-told story (Tolstoy’s novel has been adapted to the big screen at least 12 times until now), it’s not a bad choice –except that there seems to be little rhyme or reason to the device, and it seems to be half-abandoned as the film progresses.  While viewers who like a bit of cinematic flourish may be pleased by the way Wright plays along with conventions, it does obscure the story and turns the film into something it’s not meant to be. It also obscures the good work done by the actors, including Keira Knightley in the titular role and Jude Law as her despairing husband. (Meanwhile, Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s mustache steals the show for none-so-positive reasons.)  The costumes are sumptuous and the visuals occasionally evoke a nicely idealized view of 19th century Russian aristocracy, but the self-conscious artificiality of the film’s presentation work at undercutting the impact of those.  As a take on familiar material, this 2012 version of Anna Karenina isn’t ugly to look at… but it’s quite a bit abstract when it starts messing with the way movies are presented, and that may not necessarily work at a romantic drama’s advantage.

  • Lincoln (2012)

    Lincoln (2012)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Video On-demand, March 2013) In the stream of critical adulation for Lincoln, mark me down as undecided: Maybe it’s because I’m not American, but this presidential biography feels flat, dark and dull compared to the material’s potential. I am not objecting to the film’s initial refusal to bow to the mythology of the character: some of Lincoln’s best moments come in presenting the president as a canny politician rather than a heroic folk-figure. Unfortunately, Lincoln gets more self-important as it advances, yet still feels unnecessarily dull throughout. The dark cinematography doesn’t help things, and while the film is not bad at building a political thriller about the passing of a bill rather than a fully satisfying portrait of a historical figure, it still feels overblown for what it tries to do. At least Daniel Day-Lewis is exceptional as Lincoln, presenting a solid portrayal that manages to combine both Lincoln’s historical importance with a sense of the man behind the myth.  (The supporting cast is also very strong, with special mention to Tommy Lee Jones’ Thaddeus Stevens)  Still, Lincoln fails to fully satisfying: Perhaps too long, perhaps too leisurely, perhaps too ordinary for a film signed by Steven Spielberg.

  • The Amazing Spider-Man (2012)

    The Amazing Spider-Man (2012)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2013) Here is the key to this film’s seemingly-pointless existence: A long time ago, before it took ownership of its characters’ movies rights (a process that eventually led to The Avengers), Marvel sold the rights to the Spider-Man character to Fox studios, with a clause saying that movies about the character had to be produced every few years, otherwise the rights would revert to Marvel.  Combine that with the fact that the original cast members of the Spider-Man trilogy have all gone out of contract and into a much higher income profile and you get a perfect excuse for a reboot, whether you like the idea or not.  Ten years is a long time when it comes to the teenage audiences at which the Spider-Man films are aimed.  So it is that The Amazing Spider-Man is nearly a plot-beat-per-plot-beat rethread of 2002’s Spider-Man.  You’d think that modern audiences, familiarized with superheroes through fifteen years’ worth of such films, could be spared another origins story… but no.  Still, a reboot may be a disappointment, but it’s not necessarily a substantial knock against the finished film: it’s all about the execution, and a deft take on familiar ideas can outshine plodding originality most of the time.  Sadly, the biggest problem with The Amazing Spider-Man is that it can’t be trusted to present a satisfying version of the Spider-Man mythology.  It doesn’t do much with the expected elements of the Spider-Man origins story, and by strongly suggesting that non-nerdy Peter Parker is meant to become Spider-Man, it seriously undermines one of the charms of the everyman character.  This, added to evidence of late tampering with the script (as in: the trailers show more than what’s in the finished film) and the obvious non-resolution of enough plot-lines to point the way to a film trilogy, make The Amazing Spider-Man such a disappointing experience.  Oh, it’s not as if the film is worthless: The two lead actors are better than the previous trilogy’s lead actors even when they’re not given equally-good material (poor Emma Stone doesn’t have much to do than show off her knees), director Marc Webb has a good eye and the wall-to-wall special effects show how much the industry has improved in ten years.  This Spider-Man has better quips (one of the characteristics that establish him as a distinct alter-ego from Peter Parker), Rhys Ifans is intriguing as the mad-scientist villain and the film is slickly-made.  Still, from a storytelling standpoint, it seems as if all the worst choices were made in the service of a mechanically-conceived piece of pop-culture merchandizing.  It’s entertaining enough, but it could have been so much better…

  • Men in Black 3 (2012)

    Men in Black 3 (2012)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2013) Nobody was asking for a third Men in Black installment after the disaster that was 2002’s second film, but here we are: Will Smith wants another box-office hit, and this is the best franchise he’s got.  To be fair, the Men in Black concept is still strong: it’s a great framework through which to combine humor, gadgets, action, special effects and the occasional bit of awe at the strangeness of the universe.  When it clicks, Men in Black 3 is able to touch upon all of those strengths.  Alas, it doesn’t always do so, and whatever strong points it has often seem accidental thanks to the ego of a few of the people involved.  Let’s start with elements of the premise, which sees both lead characters reprise the same character dynamics despite a ten-year gap: Will Smith is still playing his character (heck, his entire screen persona) as a mid-twenties smart-ass, which wears increasingly thin for someone in his mid-forties.  Does it make sense that his character (still single) should still have the same relationship with his job partner a decade later?  Who knows: at least it sets up a laborious series of scenes all reminding us that Tommy Lee Jones’ character is emotionless.  After a surprisingly gory opening sequence and some obnoxious flaying around, Men in Black 3 finally hits its stride when it sends its protagonist back in time: Milking the era for a few Mad-Men-in-Black jokes, it also has fun reconceptualising the MIB agency in an earlier time.  Josh Brolin makes for a droll younger Tommy Lee Jones, while some of the considerations surrounding the improbability of even the most mundane events are good for a bit of sci-fi pop-philosophy.  The time-traveling elements are used in a manner that is both ingenious and nonsensical (don’t be surprised if your suspension of disbelief snaps at a crucial junction, because it really doesn’t make sense even with a neuralizer.)  It doesn’t help that Barry Sonnenfeld is at his usual inconsistent best: While he can handle comic set-pieces and great visuals with a deft touch, he’s all-too-often likely to include head-scratching diversions and meaningless details good only for making us wonder why.  Tallying the pluses against the minuses, we end up with a film that’s generally better than its predecessor, with enough high points (and an absence of truly bad points) to make it worth a look.  It’s not a complete success, but it’s quite a bit better than anyone was expecting given the film’s troubled production history and decade-distant awful predecessor.  See it as a buffet, and take only the parts that you like.

  • This is 40 (2012)

    This is 40 (2012)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Video on-demand, March 2013) Aimless character-driven comedy about the humanity of relationship makes for a nice change of pace from a diet of highly-plotted action-driven special-effects extravaganza, and you couldn’t ask for more amiable actors than Paul Rudd and Leslie Mann as lead protagonists.  This is 40 aims to provide a warts-and-all look at the dynamics of an established marriage, and it doesn’t take a lot to see echoes of universal experience in the sometimes-horrid thoughts expressed here.  Still, it’s about sticking together no matter how difficult circumstances can be, and it helps that the dialogue is both cutting and revealing.  There is a lot of depth to the ensemble cast, with particularly challenging roles for Albert Brooks and John Lithgow as polar-opposite grand-dads.  Everyone is playing their part in a very relaxed fashion, which may explain how and why such a seemingly plot-less film can sustain attention for so long.  Where the film falters is in its coda, which wraps up too quickly without giving decent send-offs to the myriad subplots introduced throughout the picture.  Still, this is a film about moments, not dramatic arcs: Writer/Director Judd Apatow’s been mining the less-romantic aspects of romance throughout this career, and This is 40 fits squarely in this niche. 

  • Cosmopolis (2012)

    Cosmopolis (2012)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Video on-demand, March 2013) The kindest thing one can say about Cospomolis is that after more than a decade spent in the wilderness of criminal realism, it’s good to see writer/director David Cronenberg go back (even partially) to weirdness and his longstanding preoccupation with the dehumanization of modern society.  From the first few highly-stylised moments, it’s obvious that Cosmopolis is not going to be your average plot-driven thriller.  Our protagonist may be a rich businessman driving around with the simple goal of getting a haircut, but the artificiality of the film is underlined at every second through fake visuals, elliptical dialogue obviously copied-and-pasted from Don Delillo’s short source novel and performances so devoid of normal emotion to make us question whether we’re truly seeing humans on-screen.  For Robert Pattinson, this isn’t a good break from the Twilight series: His performance demands such a sense of detachment that we don’t get anything resembling emotion from him, and so no perceptible shift away from a hundred-years-old dispassionate vampire.  (This is called typecasting.)  It’s a film built to dwell upon the artificiality of life among the elite and it sort-of-works, but it sure feels like it takes a long time to make its points about the coldness of technology, capitalism and/or driving around in circles.  It offers mildly thoughtful material, a few nude scenes, unexplainable plot points and an atmosphere that’s quite unlike any other film in recent memory.  As a thriller, it’s a flat one-thing-after-another framework on which to hang ideas and intercutting monologues (the characters speak a lot but rarely respond to each other) –it’s a lot more interesting as a high-concept film with strung-together sound-bites.  Still, it’s not uninteresting to watch even as an art-house experiment, and as would befit an intellectual thought-piece, a few lines may even stick in mind once the film’s performances fade away.

  • The Help (2011)

    The Help (2011)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2013) There’s a small stroke of genius in the way The Help takes a big social issue such as culturally-ingrained racism and looks at it from a very domestic perspective.  Isn’t it a very real human tragedy to think that poor black mothers spent more time raising privileged white children than their own kids, helping perpetuate the established order?  Doesn’t it drive the point home more effectively than broad social demonstrations?  Isn’t Bryce Dallas Howard simply repulsive as the evil-in-a-sundress homemaker who considers “the help” as nothing more than disposable property?  The Help is noteworthy in that it’s a female-driven film that managed to break the box-office: a welcome change of pace from the usual bang-bang entertainment that drives summer blockbuster crowds.  A large part of this success has to be attributed to the way the film genially approaches its subject: Nearly all of the lead cast is female, and makes no apologies in the way it presents itself as a southern dramatic comedy of manners.  While the film may earn a few knocks for presenting racism from a white perspective (as in: “Here’s the white girl to help those poor black people tell their story of woe”), there’s no doubt that outspoken matrons Octavia Spencer and Viola Davis earn the spotlight away from southern belles Emma Stone and Jessica Chastain.  While younger male viewers may not appreciate the kind of storytelling that The Help is built on, it’s easy to see that the film is effective at what it does, and that the emotional weight of the film goes beyond its older and wiser target audience.  As a result, The Help manages some serious cross-over impact, charming even audiences outside its marketing category.  It’s sweet without being too cloying, and it’s got a few memorable stories in its bag of folk tales.  It’s surprisingly effective at discussing the emotional side of child-rearing, and wrings some real emotion from its premise.  The soundtrack is occasionally terrific, and the sense of southern culture (tempered by the real recognition of its racist enablement) is spectacular.  It’s well worth a look, even for viewers who may not feel as if they material calls to them.

  • Peepers (2010)

    Peepers (2010)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2013) I have a natural quasi-home-grown sympathy for low-budget movies produced in Montréal, and some affinity with people who like to see naked female bodies but even so –as a comedy about organized voyeurs, Peepers is dull.  The central concept has potential: A group of enthusiastic peepers see their organized hobby disrupted as an academic invades their favourite rooftops.  But the execution simply goes nowhere, most of the characters remaining sad-sack losers until the meaningless end of the film.  It’s really too bad given that as an exploration of a weird subculture at the edges of acceptable kink, there’s some good material in there, especially when the academic discovers the principles of gentlemanly peeping.  Thankfully, Peepers does not tease with its subject matter: as befits a film about voyeurism, there is ample nudity on display (where else but in Montréal could this be possible?), helping to draw viewers into the thrill of sightseeing without frustrating them with unfulfilled promises.  What’s more unfortunate is that the film goes nowhere with the concept.  The pacing is slack, there’s little sense of place (crucial for a film about location, location, location) and the film ends without resolving half the dramatic arcs set up throughout the script.  Most of the male characters (at the notable exception of Christian Paul’s hilariously unflappable Gogo) are the kind of obnoxious socially-retarded geeks that never rise to their potential.  The female characters all float above their male counterparts, whether it’s Janine Theriault’s obsessive academic, Holly O’Brien’s scene-stealing acerbic voice of reason or Quinn O’Neill’s sweetly vulnerable quasi-cameo.  There’s a good film to be made from Peepers’ raw material, but what we get isn’t it.  At best, it’s an unremarkable effort that’s not too sure what it wants to do, or even give significant growth to its main characters.

  • Hitchcock (2012)

    Hitchcock (2012)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Video on Demand, March 2013)  More than thirty years after Alfred Hitchcock’s death, the influence of the director over the thriller genre still reigns supreme, so it makes sense that a biography would seek to present the man to a contemporary audience.  Taking the making of Psycho as its narrative hook, Hitchcock stars a heavily made-up Anthony Hopkins as the celebrated director, stuffing a romantic comedy and a study of Hitchcock’s entire career and quirks into a handily convenient narrative.  If you’re wondering about the fidelity of the film to real events or even its literary inspiration (Stephen Rebello’s Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho), you may as well avoid digging too deep: Hitchcock is a heavily-fictionalized take loosely inspired by real events, but the film’s romantic theme is nowhere to be found in the book (where Hitchcock’s wife, Alma Reville, barely gets a role and Danny Huston’s Whitfield Cook is not even mentioned), and nearly every scene contains material that only makes sense if you’re aware of Hitchchock’s legacy.  It does feel a bit artificial and pat, exactly as if the screenwriters were cramming everything worth saying about the director into a comic film covering a small part of his life, and including a modern take on spousal collaborations just to provide a romantic arc to the film.  But such are the conveniences of dramatized biographies, after all: the point isn’t in faithfully presenting reality as much as it is to provide an entertaining capsule summary of a complex person.  In this regard, Hitchcock fares better: The script feels as if every detail is in its place, the humor is used effectively (“That’s why they call me ‘The Master of Suspense’”) and its structure is clearly meant to leave viewers elated at the success of Psycho, Hitchcock and his renewed sense of matrimonial partnership.  There are a few clever sequences here and there, whether it’s Hitchcock listening to his audience’s reaction, or the way the mechanics of filmmaking are brought to life.  Not everything works –the interludes in which Hitchcock converses with his fantasy of a murderer are distracting and suggest a fantastical quality to the film that it did not need.  Still, as filmmaking homages go, this is straight-up Hollywood: The actors are all doing good work (Other than Hopkins-as-Hitchcock, Hellen Mirren is remarkable as Alma Reville), the cinematography is clean and everything wraps up neatly.  Who cares, then, if Hitchcock takes frequent liberties with historical events?

  • House at the End of the Street (2012)

    House at the End of the Street (2012)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Video On-demand, March 2013) For a straightforward low-budget woman-in-peril thriller, House at the End of the Street isn’t too bad: There are a few narrative curveballs, the lead actress is compelling and the brisk pacing forgives a lot of other issues.  Few people outside the Ottawa area will care that the film was shot in the neighborhood, but plenty will see the film because it stars a then-little-known Jennifer Lawrence.  Fortunately, Lawrence has what it takes to play a plucky teenager in danger: her performance is compelling as she holds her own alongside Elizabeth Shue.  The rural setting is good enough for a few chills, and after a clumsy start, the direction builds a decent sense of tension as each suspense set-piece is put together.  It wouldn’t be fair to overhype House at the End of the Street as anything more than a run-of-the-mill thriller, especially during its first act, but it’s quite a bit better than its savage critical reception may have suggested.  If nothing else, it shows Jennifer Lawrence running around looking scared in the classic tradition of exploitation thrillers.

  • [REC]³: Génesis (2012)

    [REC]³: Génesis (2012)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2013) The original Rec was a small horror gem straight from Spain; follow-up Rec 2 was a flawed but intriguing expansion of the original.  This Rec 3, unfortunately, is a very thin retread of a familiar idea with little material to fill even its short running time.  Taking place at a lavish wedding, Rec 3 first flirts with the idea of keeping the subjective-camera experience of its predecessors before ditching the idea out of practical concerns.  This leads to a lengthy introductory sequence that builds to… nothing much, as the clearly-identifiable menace of the first few minutes is instantly nullified by a swarm of jumping zombies.  (You’ll understand when you’ll see it.  Probably even laugh at the absurdity of it.)  The Catholic mythology that was so weak in the second film is layered on even more thickly here, and yet Rec 3 doesn’t do anything particularly new with the ideas of the series so far (it may actually back-track on some things), making it an oddly generic take on the material.  Still, there is about ten minutes’ worth of really good drama toward the end of the film, as the groom-and-bride have to measure their romantic relationship against a zombie infection: Once the bride (Leticia Dolera, better as the film goes on) takes a chainsaw in her own hands, the fan-service of the strong imagery becomes enjoyable and the thematic subtext of doomed love finally has something original to say.  Sadly, this late burst of energy doesn’t last long: Rec 3 soon ends on the usual nihilistic tone of zombie films, and ten minutes’ worth of good material can’t really sustain even a short 80-minutes total running time.

  • Iron Sky (2012)

    Iron Sky (2012)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2013) I was really hoping that this film would be good.  After all, this is (more or less) the same crew of filmmakers that got their start producing sci-fi parody series Star Wreck in a converted apartment.  To see them ascend to the lower rungs of the B-movie world with Iron Sky is a bit of a triumph for DIY filmmakers; a proof that sci-fi fans with enough drive and talent can end up involved in pro-level filmmaking.  And for a few minutes at a time, Iron Sky is an impressive piece of work.  The special-effects in the film are top-notch, and the ludicrous premise of Nazis hiding in a base on the far side of the moon is good for a few conceptual chuckles.  Sadly, the best moments of Iron Sky are ruined as soon as characters start talking, or when the script starts mugging for laughs.  To put it bluntly, Iron Sky falls into the age-old trap of presenting a bad script with good special effects.  But the bad script isn’t just bad in Hollywood’s charmingly “dumb and generic” way: it’s actively bad in that it’s riddled with dated humor (Sarah Palin jokes in 2012, really?), incoherence, on-the-nose dialogue, meaningless moments and unacceptable racial stereotypes.  (For a film that congratulates itself on laughing at Nazis, Iron Sky has perhaps the single worst jive-talking black character I’ve seen in a looong time.)  The dumb moments extend to a parody of the “Mad Hitler” Internet meme inserted without much grace, extend to a lack of narrative connectivity as events jump all over the place without being connected smoothly, and go all the way to a downer of an ending that flies in the face of the film’s comedy until then.  Not even Julia Dietze as a repentant Nazi schoolteacher can make up for those low points.  To be fair, though, the special effects are very nice, and the film’s most amusing moments come in the last act as a terrestrial fleet of spacecrafts go fighting it out over the Moon, facing an iPod-powered Nazi death machine.  There’s enough here to make a viewing worthwhile (especially to SF fans, special effects geeks or DIY filmmakers looking for inspiration) but Iron Sky simply should have been much, much better than this.

  • Cleanskin (2012)

    Cleanskin (2012)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2013) There is a curious tension at work during Cleanskin, a British thriller opposing ideological terrorists and the special operatives chasing them down.  While the film may indulge in a series of excessively violent episodes in which covert operatives are cleared kill terrorists by any means necessary, it’s also willing to allow itself a lengthy series of flashbacks to explain how a politically-motivated student can take up terrorism as a cause.  At times, Cleanskin shows terrible mistakes by government agents before taking a late-film turn into conspiracy theories.  Does this mean that the film is complex, or merely incoherent?  There’s no right answer if viewers are willing to view the film solely as a genre exercise, where “might makes right” isn’t incompatible with vaguely leftish good sentiments.  What’s more certain is that Sean Bean turns in an efficient performance as an Afghanistan veteran pressed into service as a ruthless killer; the film gets weaker the longer it spends away from him, such as in the interminable flashback scenes explaining the life history of the lead terrorist.  (The other noteworthy performance in the film belongs to Silas Carson, who brings bone-chilling menace to a relatively minor role.)  It does seem, at time, that Cleanskin is trying to be a mean-and-lean action thriller with shoot-‘em-down villains even as it tries to bring ambiguity and complexity in a more dramatic framework.  It doesn’t entirely work if only for pacing reasons: Just as the film seems to accelerate on a thriller level, it stops dead for half an hour of dramatic background that doesn’t do much but muddy the waters.  While there is a lot to admire in the final result, there is also a bit too much in the final mix.  For a film that is so good at being without frills, the added fat just takes away from what could have been a truly better thriller.

  • Freerunner (2011)

    Freerunner (2011)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2013) There’s an underappreciated movie genre out there that, for lack of a better expression, I’ll call the “cool subculture home movie” genre, in which low-budget filmmakers team up with a group of talented young people specializing in something cool/dangerous.  Examples include 2002’s Extreme Heist / Wicked Game (stunt-people decide to make their own movie), 2003’s Quattro Noza / Streets of Legend (L.A. street-racers decide to make their own movie) and now Freerunner (Parkour enthusiasts decide to make their own movie).  All of those films are terrible in so many ways, but some of them have one or two cool moments.  So it is that Freerunner is nearly unwatchable for its first half-hour: atrocious jittery camerawork, dull actors, bland screenwriting, annoying characters, washed-out cinematography and tepid pacing all combine to send viewers lower and lower in the cinematic scale of mediocrity.  The free-running stunts that should have been impressive to see are made boring by a camera that can’t seem to sit still for a single moment.  The lead character’s difficulties are uninteresting.  And the film courts self-parody by lingering far too long on Rebecca Da Costa during a hum-drum singing performance that has nothing to do with the rest of the film.  No one would be blamed for stopping the film at that point.  But thirty-five minutes in, something truly deranged happens, as the free-runners are captured, equipped with exploding collars and thrust in the middle of a deadly game show for rich sadists.  Casey Durkin provides Freerunner’s best moments as she explains the rules of the game in front of a non-shaky camera, then gratuitously exposes herself while saying “enjoy looking at those [breasts], boys, because they’re the last most of you are likely to see”.  Hilarious… although by that time it’s easy to be desperate for nudity and cheap jokes as a way out of the film’s morass.  Despite the ultra-low-budget filmmaking, terrible screenwriting, and uninspired direction, Freerunner has enough of a spark after that to keep viewers interested, although it never rises above the level of a bad film.  As a parkour stunt demonstration, the occasional moments of cool are sabotaged by the direction and careless disregard for physics.  The plot developments are botched, and the characters are dull enough as to disappear without trace from the story once they are too-graphically dispatched.  It’s still a terrible and unpleasant film, at its best when it goes for blatant exposition and bottom-drawer humor.  Even as a “cool subculture home movie”, it fails at its own objective.  Watch District B13 again, instead.