Movie Review

  • Handsome Harry (2009)

    Handsome Harry (2009)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, June 2012)  As far as low-key low-budget dramas go, Handsome Harry is about as representative as it gets.  The cinematography is washed-out, the scenes drag on, the pacing is slow and the silences are numerous.  As a man sets out to re-acquaint himself with old navy buddies in a search for truth and absolution, the film is a series of staged set-pieces allowing actors to play against each other.  Steve Buscemi is announced as a headliner, but he’s on-screen for less than two minutes: the real star of the film is Jamey Sheridan, turning in a great performance as the conflicted lead of the film.  Surrounding him are a few other actors doing their best, which turns into a formulaic series of conversations in which things quickly turn wrong.  Still, the film’s not unpleasant to watch, and even the lengthy third act isn’t enough to spoil things.  Handsome Harry probably could have been a bit better, a bit snappier and a bit more memorable with a few tweaks, a bigger budget and a faster-paced third act, but what’s on-screen isn’t too bad already, and the actors all do a fine job.

  • The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1 (2011)

    The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1 (2011)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, June 2012) It’s easy to be dismissive of the entire Twilight series as pop-culture fluff for teenage audiences, but the continued appeal of the franchise hints at something deeper than marketing brainwash.  While Breaking Dawn is widely acknowledged as the weakest novel in Stephenie Meyer’s series, it does continue the “romantic fears thinly transposed in fantasy terms” trend of the series so far, what with the heroine getting married, having sex and getting pregnant.  The pregnancy is terrifying enough without the addition of dueling vampires and werewolves, but that’s the kind of series this is.  After the relatively sedate and well-handled Eclipse, which was just good enough to escape ridicule, this first half of the fourth novel renews with insanity and unintentional laughter.  The birthing scene is about as well-handled as the material can be, meaning that the most ludicrous scene in the movie is the following battle between the vampires and the teddy-wolves: the CGI of the wolves is noticeably bad throughout the film, and it’s never as bad as when they’re thrown around by vampires.  The “imprinting” thing is also very… special.  Otherwise, the film plays on the same register aimed at fans of the series: The leads’ acting abilities are still as limited as ever (Kristen Stewart glowers; Robert Pattinson broods and Taylor Lautner growls), the pacing is deadly slow and the quirks of the series just sound dumb to anyone who’s not emotionally invested in the plot.  It’s made a bit more colorful due to the Brazilian honeymoon, and the more adult-oriented plot completely escapes high-school now that Bella is an unemployed pregnant newlywed.  The film still works by fits and starts, although some choices (the editing of the wedding speeches, for instance) seem jarring given the series’ demonstrated lack of interest in directorial showmanship.  Something that may not affect people who see the film without close captioning is the jarring atonality of the endless song lyrics displayed on-screen.  Oh well; if nothing else, Breaking Dawn, Part 1 feels far more self-contained than anyone would have expected from a “Part 1”: The immediate dramatic arc is more or less settled by the time the film ends, with only slight cliffhanger elements.  As for the rest, well, it’s a fair bet that no one will see this film completely cold: you will get what you expect from it.

  • The Avengers (2012)

    The Avengers (2012)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, June 2012)  As much as I loathe superlatives in my movie reviews, there’s a good case for considering The Avengers as the best superhero comic-book movie adaptation ever made.  While other adaptations have been better movies or been more interesting, The Avengers seems to be the first film to successfully manage the transposition of superhero comic books, in all their flawed qualities, onto the big screen.  It doesn’t try to be a parody, an exploration of deeper themes using superheroes (like Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies) or an action movie with incidental superpowers: It’s a committed attempt to recreate the Marvel comic-book experience in live action, and it works about as well as this kind of storytelling can work.  Protagonists fighting short inconsequential bouts among themselves?  Yup.  Alien menace from outer space, curiously concentrated around an urban area?  Indeed.  A lot of witty banter as the heroes band together as a team?  Absolutely.  Canny writer/director Joss Whedon has added plenty of humor, attitude and special effects to minimize the exasperating nature of fanboy-driven plotting and the result is curiously enjoyable even for people who haven’t dedicated their reading lives to following the intricate mythology of the Marvel universe.  The Avengers, for Marvel Studio, is the crowning success of four years and five movies’ worth of scene-setting: it seemed like an insane gamble in 2008, but it pay off handsomely here as the headliners start interacting with each other.  Robert Downey Jr. is still a star as Tony Stark, but Mark Ruffalo also does fine work as the best incarnation of Bruce Banner/The Hulk on-screen so far.  It’s true that the villain is a bit weak, and that the first half-hour drags until all the pieces are assembled, but the third act fight through New York City is the brightly-lit action set-piece many superhero movies promised but never delivered until now.  Still, the film is seldom as good as when the actors are talking amongst themselves, and it’s this attention to characterization that makes The Avengers work despite its limited aims as a super-hero comics adaptation.  It doesn’t try to do anything else, but it’s really good at what it does.

  • Prometheus (2012)

    Prometheus (2012)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, June 2012) It’s almost too bad that I didn’t write this review right after stepping out of the movie theatre, because once you let its beautiful visuals fade away, Prometheus gets worse the longer you think about it.  Let’s get a few things out of the way: Yes, Prometheus is a Ridley Scott SF movie set in the universe of Scott’s 1979 Alien, but no, it’s not a coherent addition to the mythology: Thematically, the film is very different from the Alien series, but it’s really the muddled script that doesn’t really care about making all the parts fit together.  It’s still a monster movie in the most classical sense (explorer discover a terrible threat, almost everyone is killed, etc.) but as far as monster movie go, few have the amount of visual polish and technical expertise than Prometheus enjoys.  Visually, the film is stunning, with complex special effects well-used to create a state-of-the-art vision of the future on an alien planet.  You can revel in the ways the film has advanced far beyond the now-primitive effects in Alien, or reflect at how thirty years have changed our expectations of what the future will look like.  Scott is a gifted filmmaker, and Prometheus’ high notes come when he’s able to use all the tools at his disposal to explore fear, wonder or awe.  There is a terrific medical-intervention sequence at the three-quarter-mark that is as good as any of the thrills delivered by the Alien series, and a lesser director could have blown it by lack of expertise.  Scott’s moviemaking skill makes it easy to watch the film and let it wow you… unfortunately, the effect wears off as soon as you start asking questions.  In terms of SF ideas and concepts, there’s little in Prometheus that hasn’t been picked clean in written SF by the 1970s, and few writers have ever felt the need to revisit those issues in the same pretentious ham-fisted ways than Scott does here.  Basic fact-based objections to the panspermia theory are, in the movie, swept away with a simple declaration of faith, and it’s not the rumors about a more theologically-charged director’s cut of the film that will save Prometheus from charges of muddled thinking.  But never mind thematic issues when it’s the plotting nuts-and-bolts of the film that don’t make sense.  Characters are moved around like puppets, making the same dumb decisions as their counterparts in B-grade schlock monster-movies and dying in various ways that seem inconsistent with how smart they’re supposed to be.  All the good actors in the film (Michael Fassbender is particularly effective as the de-rigueur android) can’t compensate from an undercooked script that doesn’t seem to care that we’ve seen that monster-movie stuff play out dozens of time since 1979.  It makes for a curious viewing experience: Impeccably executed, but from a weak script that blends pseudo-profoundness with idiot plotting.  It’s still well worth a look for the visuals and the atmosphere, but even measured against its own intentions, Prometheus is ultimately a disappointing mess.

  • The Mask (1994)

    The Mask (1994)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Second Viewing, On Cable TV, June 2012) Now that The Mask is nearly old enough to vote, what can be said about the best of Jim Carrey’s three big breakout hits of 1994?  Mostly that it has aged better than anyone would expect.  Oh, sure, the 1994-era CGI is noticeable: There are numerous times where the live-action Mask is replaced by CGI enhancements, and from today’s perspective, the lack of fluidity of the seams are far more easily perceived today.  What hasn’t aged, on the other hand, is Carrey’s exhilarating rubber-faced performance as the unleashed id of The Mask –a green-faced transposition of Tex Avery cartoons.  The Mask is still a compelling character, and even the overused one-liners that everyone remembers are still amusing in context.  On a tonal level, though, The Mask has a number of problems: At its best (such as during its riotous “Hey Pachuco!” musical number), it’s a jazzy and harmless cartoon –at its worst, it’s a mash-up between violence and stupidity.  One could argue, for instance, that the silliness of The Mask should revolve around its masked character rather than in the idiot-plotting universe surrounding him.  There are also problems in the way some of the violence is handled too blatantly (although, reading about some deleted scenes, it could have been worse.)  Also worth noting is Cameron Diaz’s first big-screen performance: she looks amazingly good here, and she holds her own against an unleashed Carrey.  The thematic underpinning of the film are more than highlighted (the mask as self, the Tex Avery comics), but the film’s silliness doesn’t require a lot of subtext.  See it for Carrey and Diaz… and the Mask.

  • Game of Thrones, Season 2 (2012)

    Game of Thrones, Season 2 (2012)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April-June 2011)  The first season of Game of Thrones was an astonishing adaptation of a long and complex epic fantasy novel into an easy-to-digest, well-produced, well-written ten-hours TV series.  The second season may not be as groundbreaking, but it, too, manages to adapt a lengthy novel with a cast of hundreds into a fairly successful series of episodes.  This time around, though, the changes from George R.R. Martin’s source text are more apparent: Sometimes for cost, sometimes for dramatic balance, sometimes to exploit the talents of the series’ actors, and sometimes to keep fans happy.  The result is, despite a few noteworthy weak moments, generally successful.  The War of the Five Kings is successfully brought to life despite the limited budget of the series, and the ninth episode, “Blackwater” is noteworthy for dispensing with the story’s multiplicity of subplots to focus exclusively on a spectacular military engagement.  The story adds many more characters, but nearly everyone turns in some distinctive work: Peter Dinklage is up to the standards set by his Emmy-winning first-season work, but there’s also some fine work by Maisie Williams as Arya and Lena Headley as Cersei.  Story-wise, many subplots hidden in the novel are shown onscreen, Arya’s travels are successfully condensed (something that led to the addition of a few gripping all-new scenes) and Theon’s inner conflicts are made more obvious while Daenerys’ time in Quarth is clumsily altered for greater dramatic suspense.  These alterations to the original text are enough to keep readers engrossed in the series, even as they serve to adapt the original material on-screen.  It’s unclear whether Game of Thrones will be able to juggle all of the extra subplots to be introduced in the next season, but the adaptation so far is amazingly faithful within the constraints of the production.  On to Season 3!

  • Haywire (2011)

    Haywire (2011)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On-demand video, June 2012) Director Steven Soderbergh likes to tinker with established formulas and he also seems to be increasingly fond of casting coups.  This explains why Haywire is a lot like his previous The Girlfriend Experience in casting a non-professional actress in the leading role –this time, martial artist Gina Carano as the tough heroine of this revenge film.  Small touches everywhere make it clear that this is an artful take on a stock exploitation premise: The rhythm of the film is a bit slower than most revenge thrillers, the script makes use of a half-hearted framing device; the direction tries to avoid most of the prevailing action clichés.  But it’s Carano’s odd performance that sets the film apart: she’s both unpolished and convincing in ways that leap out of the usual Hollywood mode.  She’s not from the same acting schools as other female performers, and Soderbergh seems perfectly happy to indulge in the rough edges of her acting.  It makes for a thriller that’s less slick and perhaps a bit more intriguing than similar offerings such as Colombiana or any of the half-dozen female-assassins films of the past decade.  The script could have been polished to a more accessible whole (the dialogue seems self-consciously cryptic at times), but Haywire is definitely a Soderbergh film in how it refuses to take the safe, broadly-accessible choices.  Viewers coming in with set expectations of a run-of-the-mill thriller may find themselves bewildered by what makes it on-screen.  On the other hand, viewers with some appreciation for genre experiments will, much like last year’s Hanna, find intriguing things in the result even as the film doesn’t succeed in being conventionally entertaining.

  • The Grey (2011)

    The Grey (2011)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On-demand video, June 2012) We don’t see that many men-against-nature survival thrillers nowadays, but something like The Grey can be powerful enough to last us a while, especially when it takes a standard action-movie premise and turns it into an excuse to discuss existentialist themes.  From the first few moments, it’s obvious that the trailers promising a B-grade survival thriller have been telling us only part of the story, because The Grey soon turns contemplative about humankind’s willingness to live and die.  Liam Neeson is superb in a lead role that echoes the Liamsploitation of Taken and Unknown but also makes use of his gravitas to lend further dramatic weight to the result.  As half a dozen blue-collar oil workers find themselves stranded in Alaska following a plane crash, they have to figure out how to survive their harsh environment, and the pack of wolves that start hunting them.  As you can expect, a lot of people die in this film, not necessarily in the order we’d expect them to fall (the script is fond of giving characters some depth right before they exit) and certainly not gloriously.  The tone is grim, but to its credit it’s grim throughout: the ending, which may have felt bleak in other circumstances, here feels fully justified.  This isn’t a film we may have expected from writer/director Joe Carnahan after the enjoyably simple-minded combo of Smokin’ Aces and The A-Team: You have to go back to 2002’s Narc in order to find something similarly hefty in his filmography.  The Grey actually manages to combine both thrills and thoughts, putting some solid thematic content within a thriller framework.  It works pretty well, and you do (eventually) get to see Neeson punch a wolf in the face.

  • Killer Elite (2011)

    Killer Elite (2011)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, sometime around May 2012) It’s surprising to see how quickly a film can affirm its dull unspectacular barely-exciting nature. So it is that Killer Elite takes us back to 1970s England in order to present a semi-thrilling story something supposedly based on true events. But never mind that last part; the only thing inspired by true event seems to be the serious rainy atmosphere in which the entire film is bathed. While Robert De Niro, Jason Statham and Clive Owen are a spectacular union of tough-guy heroes, Killer Elite doesn’t seem interested in most of them: De Niro is barely on-screen for fifteen minutes, Owen is hampered in a bad-guy role while Statham plays nothing more (or less) than his usual screen persona. Still, the script doesn’t give any of them much to do. The directing is competent but unspectacular, and that goes for Killer Elite in general. The script gets needlessly complicated by the end, and it’s really the actors who carry the film to the finish line. I had to go back and review my year-end notes in order to realize that I hadn’t actually reviewed Killer Elite upon initially viewing it, and I’ll let that speak for itself.

  • The Number 23 (2007)

    The Number 23 (2007)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2012) Despite ample evidence to the contrary, Jim Carrey is still primarily perceived as a comedian, and part of the appeal of psychological thriller The Number 23 is seeing him headline a fairly grim tale of obsession and death.  As an ordinary guy suddenly fascinated by a book explaining the numerological intricacies of the number 23, Carrey does well –especially when the film take a meta-fictional bent and start presenting both the character’s reality and the heightened fiction that he reads.  The Number 23 is never more enjoyable than when it’s weird without explanations, going from reality to fiction to increasing paranoia.  When comes the moment for the movie to lay down its cards and tie everything together, you can hear the creaks of the tortured storytelling (in which characters do bizarre things for no better reason than to look suspicious later on), the disappointment of threads being tied up and the lousiest plot cheats come up again.  Still, the film feels underrated: Ably directed by Joel Schumacher, it has a potent visual kick, a strong directing style and some stylish cinematography.  Carrey is believable in the lead role (though not distinctive enough to be worth the rumored 23 million dollars he was paid for it), while Virginia Madsen and Danny Huston provide able supporting work.  The plotting certainly isn’t airtight (the boy’s age doesn’t match the chronology), but the film makes a compelling case for itself as a visual piece of work.  Schumacher may have burned out spectacularly after Batman & Robin, but he has since been turning in some interesting niche movies, from Tigerland to Trespass and now The Number 23.

  • The Hunger Games (2012)

    The Hunger Games (2012)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, May 2012)  Massively hyped as The Next Big Thing in teen pop-culture, The Hunger Games generally lives up to its billing as a decent piece of filmmaking.  It’s hardly perfect, but it keeps getting better as it goes on: Viewers will have to make it past the drab cinematography of the first section of the film and a premise that doesn’t sustain a moment’s scrutiny to start enjoying the film.  Jennifer Lawrence is remarkable in the lead role (the first few minutes suggest the same self-sufficient Appalachian character she played in Winter’s Bone) but director Gary Ross’s work is a bit shaky at first.  The Hunger Games only gets going on the way to Capitol, and then in the wilderness where the teenage protagonists start killing each other off.  The script has its moments (as well as its anti-moments, such as blatant game manipulation that would send Games audiences in a righteous rage) but don’t expect much more than competence in this middle-of-the-road adaptation.  Lead character Katniss comes across as more admirable than most film heroines, tapping into that same hunger for positive female role models that helped the book become such a success.  Compared to the book, however, The Hunger Games comes across as a bit less disturbing (no mentions of the enslaved Avox, no hints as to the Wolf Mutts’ origins, fewer injuries to the participants, mere slight ambiguity as to Katniss’ true feelings for Peeta) and seems to err in trying to replace Katniss’ clipped narration with exposition-heavy scenes featuring third parties.  Still, the result isn’t too bad once you can make it past the dreary first section and the dubious premise.  Woody Harrelson turns in another winning performance as an over-the-hill champion, and the film finds a certain rhythm once the game gets underway.  The film lags a bit toward the end (and makes sure that Katniss doesn’t really kill anyone in cold blood) but who really care?  Preordained to be a mass pop-culture phenomenon from day one, The Hunger Games has the good luck of being actually watchable even by people who don’t buy into the central premise.

  • Straw Dogs (2011)

    Straw Dogs (2011)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2012) Some movies are unpleasant not matter how well they are executed, and this remake of Sam Pekinpah’s rural thriller certainly ranks high on the unease-meter.  From the beginning, as two young urbanites uneasily settle down in rural Mississippi alongside the unrefined locals, it’s obvious that things won’t get any better.  The good-old-boys network is bad to the bone; the young intellectual has no idea on how to get along; and there’s enough resentment between the wife and her ex-boyfriend to spark a cycle of increasing viciousness.  It gets uglier and uglier until there’s no other way out than extreme violence.  It’s meant to be unsettling –the suggestion may be that some violence can’t be met by anything but violence is enough to hang over what could have been a routine home-invasion thriller.  But Straw Dogs’s messages may be mixed in the way it dwells at lengths over the abuse and the response: at some point (most notably during a lengthy rape sequence), it’s not too clear whether it condemns or revels into what’s happening on-screen.  The male protagonist’s character arc is about shedding more and more moral inhibition until he’s able to meet his aggressors effectively.  But critic-turned director Rod Lurie’s treatment of the violence, especially during the last bloody fifteen minutes, is much closer to a schlock B-movie than to a notional exploration of issues.  It helps, a bit, that the film features some glorious Southern-USA cinematography (who wouldn’t want to own that house?) and that good actors are there to lend some more gravitas to a straightforward film.  It doesn’t, however, make the film any easier to watch, or leave viewers with fulfilled expectations.  Straw Dogs may look good, but it feels ugly… and yet not in a memorable way.

  • Elle s’appelait Sarah [Sarah’s Key] (2010)

    Elle s’appelait Sarah [Sarah’s Key] (2010)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On-demand Video, April 2012) I’ve had my fill of World-War-2 holocaust dramas, and my expectations about any new one tend to run low: The same themes, the same over-examined period of history, often the same maudlin excesses.  What else is new?  And yet, Elle s’appelait Sarah manages to do a few unusual things.  It tackles the French collaboration in the deportation of its Jewish citizen, it splits its drama between 1942 and its consequences as seen from 2009; and it remains resolutely unsentimental about the impact of the war.  It’s certainly not a cheery film, and the way in which at least one character dies is fit to give nightmares.  But the film itself is well-executed, capably played and directed with some finesse.  The split-era story is meshed more cleverly than you’d except at first, and the theme of self-deception is handled effectively.  It’s a bit long, mind you, and the lack of happy endings is bound to grate.  Still, the result manages to distinguish itself after years of Oscar-baiting films all revolving about this or that aspect of WW2 and/or the Holocaust.  That’s quite a bit more than anyone would expect.

  • Warrior (2011)

    Warrior (2011)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2012) Being neither a fan of combat movies nor family drama, the most remarkable thing about Warrior is how well it managed to keep my attention.  After a shaky first fifteen minutes, the stakes become clearer: These are two brothers from a broken family picking up Mixed Martial Arts and eventually facing off in the ring.  The story isn’t much more complicated than this (and the repetitive third act contains very few surprises), but the film itself is well-made, with strong performances to lure viewers in.  Nick Nolte earned an Oscar nomination for his role and Joel Edgerton turns out a strong performance as a family man forced to return to the ring in desperate circumstances.  Still, it may be Tom Hardy who gets the thankless role of the younger brother cast adrift in his own isolation.  It all amounts to a fairly predictable, but well-executed story, one that doesn’t suffer as much as you’d think from an improbable sequence of contrivances.  There isn’t much to say about the grainy cinematography (except that some shots of Atlantic City look pretty nice), but the direction is a straight-ahead affair.  Heavily slathered in the usual Americana sauce (family, military, sports), Warrior takes itself a bit seriously, but in doing so manages to avoid many of the traps that a less-earnest approach to the same subject would have encountered.  It’s manipulative, of course, but baldly so.  It’s arguably best seen as a double-bill with The Fighter.

  • From Prada to Nada (2011)

    From Prada to Nada (2011)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2012) Nearly everything about From Prada to Nada‘s marketing (title, poster, premise) can lead anyone to expect a sub-par brainless comedy not far away from superficial dreck such as The Hottie and the Nottie.  The surprise is in finding out that this is a textured look at Los Angeles’ Latino community based on Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility.  It starts on a rough note, as two sisters are expelled from their house after the death of their insolvent father.  Forced to an exile in East L.A., they find that… oh, let’s face it: surprising plotting really isn’t one of From Prada to Nada‘s strong points. This romantic comedy is almost entirely predictable even if you haven’t read Austen, and much of the charm of the film lies in how well it hits the expected plot points.  Camilla Belle is adorable as the sensible sister, and while it take a while for Alexa Vega’s Lindsey Lohan-lookalike to develop some audience sympathy, events eventually manage to win her over to the audience’s side.   Otherwise, the real strength of the film is in its upbeat look at the South Californian Mexican-American sub-culture (The fact that the Latina protagonists don’t initially speak Spanish is one of the film’s running gags.)  The dialogue isn’t anything special, the jokes are lazy, the character are stock figures and the direction is rarely inspired, but the film is nonetheless quite a bit warmer than expected.  Austen fans will like the flavour given to this adaptation, while those looking for a middle-of-the-road romantic comedy won’t be too disappointed.