Movie Review

  • The Ides of March (2011)

    The Ides of March (2011)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, October 2011) As with many backroom political thrillers, The Ides of March tells the story of how a young political wunderkind loses his illusions while working for a star candidate.  If you’ve read Joe Klein/Anonymous’s Primary Colors or seen 1996’s City Hall, you have a rough idea of how this works.  But familiarity isn’t necessarily a bad thing, especially as the similitudes taper off toward the end, and the result is a convincing look at the way American politics can work.  Ryan Gosling’s portrayal of a genius-level political operative makes for a sympathetic hero, and he more than holds his own against such notables as George Clooney, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Paul Giamatti.  (It’s one of the film’s interesting choices to use a star Clooney as a superstar candidate, character-actor darlings Hoffman and Giamatti as seasoned professionals and Gosling as an up-and-comer –a good example of Hollywood typecasting working as casting.)  Perhaps the best thing about The Ides of March is its pitch-perfect portrayal of the political process at the primary stage –the ground-level organizing, the dirty tricks, the high-level negotiations in dismal settings.  Director Clooney does a fine job as portraying the grey nature of mid-March winter in Cincinnati, and the film quickly becomes a must-see for American political junkies, who won’t cringe too much at the film’s faithfulness to reality as we know it.  It almost goes without saying that, despite being loosely based on a play loosely based on the Howard Dean campaign, The Ides of March is best interpreted as a what-if rather than an allegory of anything that really happened recently: despite the political in-jokes, if best to appreciate the actors working as character rather than caricatures.  It’s unclear whether the film will have much of a wide appeal beyond left-leaning politicos: like many political thrillers, it ends at a funeral, but unlike many it doesn’t feature a single raised gun, conspiracy or assassination attempt.  It’s this nominal adherence to a plausible version of reality (with a side-order of capable performances) that makes The Ides of March works well despite familiar ideas and a low-key presentation.  Sometimes, you don’t need car chases and explosions to have a thrilling time.

  • Gnomeo & Juliet (2011)

    Gnomeo & Juliet (2011)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On cable TV, October 2011) I’m not sure what kind of warped creative process ends up proposing a comedy take-off on “Romeo and Juliet” starring garden gnomes and featuring the music of Elton John, but when it leads to amusing trifles such as Gnomeo & Juliet, it’s hard to second-guess the filmmakers.  A second-tier animated feature aimed at kids but amusing to adults, it’s a fast-paced romantic comedy with enough action sequences and musical interludes to satisfy just about every constituency out there.  The pun-filled dialogue may occasionally earn a few groans, but there are a few good Shakespeare-related gags here and there (I’m particularly fond of “Out, out! Damn spot!”) to satisfy the classics-spotter.  The animation is fine, and some of the creature design is lovely.  Gnomeo & Juliet isn’t too demanding if you don’t focus on the in-jokes hidden in freeze-frames, and the entire family is likely to have a bit of fun along the way.  Oh, and don’t worry: The original “Romeo and Juliet” ending has been altered for maximum comedy.

  • The Room (2003)

    The Room (2003)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, October 2003) I didn’t want to see Tommy Wisseau’s The Room as much as I was morbidly curious about it.  Having recently acquired some kind of cult notoriety as one of the worst movies ever made, The Room has spawned a few Internet memes and toured the continent in special audience-participation screenings à la Rocky Horror Picture Show.  Alas, the first thing that comes to mind while watching The Room is that we don’t have the cult classics we used to have.  Amateurish and incompetent in nearly every facet of moviemaking, The Room has the feel of a vanity project gone horribly wrong, possibly thanks to a producer/writer/director/actor (Wisseau) unable to tell between good and bad, and unwilling to listen to saner heads.  Pick an aspect of movies, and The Room sucks at it.  The premise presupposes entities without recognizable human emotions.  Dialogues feel like the first draft of a first student project.  The tone of the film changes from one line to another.  The direction is flat.  The acting is uncontrolled, starting from Wisseau’s constant ha-has.  Even the scene blocking is worse than the average local theater company.  The pacing grinds to a halt whenever it hits one of the four too-lengthy soft-core love scenes.  Subplots are raised and then never mentioned again.  Whatever nice things one may say about the stock San Francisco exteriors are destroyed by their tone-deaf usage as scene transitions.  And so on.  The issue here isn’t that the film is terrible: I’m sure that there are plenty of other terrible movies buried away somewhere.  The real wonder here is The Room’s unexplainable notoriety as an Internet phenomenon.  Granted, the so-bad-it’s-good crowd self-selects itself out of any kind of artistic rationale.  Still, the fairest way to describe the movie is dull: I started watching it with the best of intentions, and eventually idly started surfing the web as the rest of the movie played without too much surprise or variance in quality.  At least I can now place “You are tearing me apart, Lisa!” or “Oh, hi Mark” in their proper, incomprehensible context.  Given that Wisseau is riding the film’s newfound popularity as an incompetent comedy by showing it in theaters, those of you still convinced that The Room can’t be missed will have trouble renting it or even buying it online; all I can say is that this is the universe’s way of telling you that you’re better off doing something else.

  • Drive (2011)

    Drive (2011)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, September 2011) Every so often, genre thriller fans are asked to confront moody art-house versions of familiar crime stories.  Here we have a stunt driver / mechanic moonlighting as a getaway driver.  He meets a single mother and her son; gets embroiled in a heist when her husband gets out of prison; is forced to defend himself once the heist turns bad and he ends up with a lot of money that other people have acquired in ways that would get everyone killed.  Having read (and re-read) James Sallis’ thin novel on which the film is based, I can say that the adaptation is both loose and faithful: The plot is there, the motivations are entirely different but the mood is just as laconic and borderline pretentious.  There are fewer details in the film about the protagonist’s life as a stuntman, but the details surrounding the main plot are far better developed (in particular “Irene”, much more fully rounded from the novel’s “Irena”).  Still, the film itself feels stuck in-between genre conventions and dramatic pretention: The languid pacing alone is a tough sell to thriller audiences: Drive often feels like lengthy silences loosely connected together and the editing seems happy to linger on characters as they stare wordlessly into space to the sound of eighties-inspired music.  Ryan Gosling’s nameless character is either a straightforward revenge-driven hero, or an enigma without dialogue; I had certainly imagined a scrappier protagonist from the novel.  Meanwhile, art-house audiences may not feel entirely with the Grand Theft Auto-inspired subject matter, or with the unnecessary flashes of extreme gore.  Director Nicolas Winding Refn is far more interested in dramatic beats than action sequences, which gives a particular off-beat flavour to the film’s more intense moments: they likely won’t satisfy action junkies, but they do bring something unusual to the table in terms of visual presentation.  (The opening pre-credit sequence is remarkable.)  Los Angeles itself gets to shine either through glorious night-time helicopter shots, or through the presentation of seedy run-down apartments in which the characters live.  This kind of in-between location comes to define the rest of the picture as well, and if there’s enough interesting material in Drive to warrant a look for those who enjoy style clashes, the film itself may be a bit too self-involved to be fully successful.  Cut fifteen minutes of the film, and we’ll see again.

  • Apollo 18 (2011)

    Apollo 18 (2011)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theatres, September 2011)  As a certified space exploration geek, I have to admit that as much as I don’t like the conspiracy-mongering mockumentary intent of Apollo 18, the notion of a secret mission to the moon does hit a sweet spot somewhere in my brain.  I’m unaccountably fascinated by stories blending hard-SF with horror (see Event Horizon, Blood Moon, etc.) and Apollo 18 adds another layer of interest by choosing to show its story using found footage.  Unfortunately, interesting doesn’t always go hand-in-hand with good and as the film ended after merely 85 minutes, I felt as if I had spent more time second-guessing the director’s choices rather than enjoying the film itself.  The biggest problem, obviously, is the script: From the pedestrian lines of dialogue, the mortally slow first act, the lack of twists and turns (save for one unexpected lunar lander), ridiculous threat and a conclusion that ends like most found footage horror movies have done since The Blair Witch Project, this is a thin, weak and predictable film.  Even in terms of secret space program science-fiction, it has fewer good things running for it than the first ten minutes of Transformers 3: Dark of the Moon (and I don’t praise the Transformers series lightly)  But even allowing for a script that’s more promising than well-executed, it’s really the film’s pseudo-documentary approach that kills it.  The opening and closing title cards are annoying in their insistence that What you saw was real (yeah, like anyone could miss a secret mission to the Moon), and the subjective-camera thing becomes a problem more than an advantage: It places a filter on the experience of the film that a more conventional direction would have eliminated.  (It doesn’t help that by the final five minutes, we’re seeing camera angles that can’t exist, and that the conclusion makes it impossible to answer the question “Where did they get the footage from?”)  So, yes, don’t be surprised to find yourself constantly wishing for the film to have been made another way.  It makes Apollo 18 a curiosity, perhaps even a marginal recommendation for SF/horror fans, but certainly not a good film for the ages.  Parts of it are ingenious, though, and there aren’t that many other films with a cast list of merely three people.

  • Contagion (2011)

    Contagion (2011)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, September 2011) There are many things to admire about Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion, but the one that sticks in mind is his attempt to tell a story about something that’s basically unstoryable.  Modern-day epidemics do not lend themselves to the kind of heroics best shown on-screen: They involve many people doing their job, they turn into public policy debates, they don’t spare the righteous or punish the guilty, they peter out rather than climax and they present a diffuse threat rather than a clear antagonist.  Faced with those constraints, most movies about epidemics crank it up to zombies (28 Days Later, etc), borrow from science-fiction (The Andromeda Strain), or can’t help but throw in car chases and explosions (Outbreak).  No such narrative sleigh-of-hand here, as Contagion keeps to a fairly realistic depiction of a massively contagious and highly deadly epidemic.  Hopping all around the globe, bringing together half a dozen narrative strands, Contagion adopts a quasi-documentary look without forgetting to indulge in the occasional spectacle of a world gone wrong.  It doesn’t take that many shots of people touching things to let the film unnerve viewers, and Soderbergh’s assured direction does the rest.  Among other not-so-subtle touches, he not only kills off two characters played by Oscar-winning actresses, but has a graphic autopsy scene featuring the head of one of them.  Much of the script feels reasonably credible, with enough technobabble to set the tone.  Of course, trying to tell an unstoryable story eventually takes its toll.  Not every subplot is equally compelling (The second half of Marion Cotillard’s trip to China feels dull, whereas Jude Law’s character is annoying enough to create resentment when he escapes death) and the third act gradually diffuses itself as the epidemic runs its course.  Soderbergh’s tendency to tell a story in selective bits and pieces can occasionally be frustrating, given the potential here for a slicker film.  (Although the anti-chronological coda is a nice ironic touch.)  But given the film’s success in so many areas, in telling a familiar story in a way that sticks closer to the real world, Contagion ends up being a modest success; it’s perhaps Soderbergh’s most accomplished melding of art-house instincts in the service of broadly popular entertainment.  Amusingly for a filmmaker who’s been known to push for day-and-date direct distribution, at a time where movie theater attendance is dropping and video stores are closing, there may be no better argument for internet streaming/downloading that seeing Contagion and indulging in a bit of paranoia at the thought of human contact.

  • Un Prophète (2009)

    Un Prophète (2009)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, September 2011) A lengthy but rarely uninteresting sit at nearly two hours and a half, Un Prophète is essentially a look at the life of a young Arab man during his year-long incarceration in a French prison.  It plays out quite a bit more entertainingly that a simple statement of the premise will suggest, though: Within moments, our protagonist is manipulated by a bunch of Corsican prisonners into murdering an incarcerated witness, and the protection he earns in this fashion propels the rest of the action.  Part of the film’s pleasure is seeing the quasi-defenseless protagonist, ably played by Tahar Rahim, grow into a wheeler, schemer and eventually win over his opponents.  After a few disjointed minutes in which the quasi-documentary cinematography calls attention to itself, the film’s narrative arc progresses along nicely, adding and removing threats as it advances.  It makes for compelling viewing, especially as the film moves away from its initially bleak and uncompromising tone to a somewhat more hopeful conclusion.  Less happily, the film occasionally indulges into a bit of magical realism in which reality is bent to ghostly advice and artful foreshadowing (hence the title) –much hidden depth is suggested by the film’s artful flourishes, but it does take away from the more reality-based bulk of the film.  Still, that’s not enough to take away much of the impact of this big, full, engrossing film: Un prophète is a look at a reality most will hopefully never experience, but it’s also a terrific story about someone working with the cards he’s been given.  Most disturbing, perhaps, is the non-judgement of the camera –the criminal as a hero, obviously, with the disappearance of his ghostly conscience a minor loss when he manages to work the system to his end.  The final images of the film suggest that a happy life will never be possible, and that he will always be followed no matter how he tries to escape.  Deservedly nominated for an Oscar, Un Prophete offers a dazzling mix of allegory, thematic depth and pure old-fashioned storytelling.  It’s worth the sit.

  • Tropa de Elite [Elite Squad] (2007)

    Tropa de Elite [Elite Squad] (2007)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, September 2011) It’s really unfair to compare Elite Squad to City of God, given the latter’s well-deserved reputation as one of the best films of its time.  But the comparisons go beyond the fact that both movie come from contemporary Brazil: Both of them, after all, have been written by the same screenwriter, and if City of God was more interested in the criminal and bystanders, Elite Squad takes a look at the elite police forces fighting to clean up the corrupted mess that is modern-day Rio de Janeiro.  But don’t think for a second that the focus on the police forces makes for a kinder, gentler film: Even the protagonist seldom hesitate to gun down suspects, torture persons of interest or indulge in a bit of gratuitous cruelty.  Unusually structured, the film is narrated by a retiring police officer as he tries to pick a successor from two promising, but uneven recruits.  Wagner Moura is sympathetic as the narrator, but it’s André Ramiro who captures the film with a performance that sees him go from a good-natured intellectual to a revenge-driven warrior.  The solid script may skip over some of the transitional states, but it opens with an effective bit of structure, and ends at the perfect moment.  The cinematography lushly captures the moden favelas, and a few action sequences help lift this dramatic thriller into more exciting territory without necessarily sacrificing the themes of the film to a purely action-driven film.  A pretty good example of why even populist filmgoers should pay attention to world cinema, Elite Squad is a fascinating look in a very different culture where crime and punishment play out differently.  It’s a damning indiction of police corruption and the endless cycle of violence that seems to grip the area, but mostly it’s an entertaining police drama with a heavy dose of moral relativism.  The picture never bother to punish transgressions, in part because it’s so difficult to see who never goes beyond moral decency.

  • Super Troopers (2001)

    Super Troopers (2001)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, September 2011) I watched this while in the mood for some dumb silliness, and got what I wanted: Super Troopers’s big comic premise is to transpose frat-boy antics onto a police context: Bored patrolmen playing head games with motorists, dumb policemen flying off in a rage, duelling corps trying to one-up each other.  There really isn’t much more to this film.  On the other hand, well, it does manage to be sporadically funny … and ten years later, Super Troopers still live on in internet pop culture in a series of memes and in-jokes. (“meow”, “mother of god” and “enhance –just print it” are the three that come up from time to time)  Anything with even the slightest bit of pop-culture relevance after ten years is worth a quick look.  The Broken Lizard comedy troupe that conceived Super Troopers is uneven: writer/director Jay Chandrasekhar is very funny, but many of the other either struggle to make an impression, or make a negative one.  Production notes suggest that the budget of the film was ridiculously low, but it doesn’t show too much: while this is a low-budget film, its lack of funding doesn’t feel all that obtrusive.  Perhaps the best thing about Super Troopers is that, for all of its self-indulgence in showcasing a comedy group in a deliberately dumb setting, it’s decently structured and, as a result, survives without too much trouble even a decade later.  Small praise, but we can all remember far dumber comedies that are nigh-unwatchable even with the best viewers’ intentions.

  • Oldeuboi [Oldboy] (2003)

    Oldeuboi [Oldboy] (2003)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, September 2011) I really should have seen Oldboy earlier: Not only had it gotten widespread praise everywhere I looked, but I should know more about a popular director like Park Chan-wook.  Oh well; there’s a time for everything, including watching Oldboy.  From the get-go, we’re in interesting territory.  Much like Quentin Tarantino, Chan-wook can’t help but play around with the grammar of cinema, and even the more familiar moments of the story have a cinephile kick to them.  Not that there are many familiar moments, given the unusual premise: A seemingly ordinary man is held prisoner in a room for fifteen years, then abruptly released and encouraged to seek vengeance.  The identity of the captor is a brief mystery as he quickly reveals himself to ask the hero to find out why he’s been held fifteen years.  It’s easy to see why Oldboy got so much praise, with its mysteries upon mysteries, with a stylish sense of storytelling and a conclusion that upends the vengeance motif.  Slickly executed and filled with odd little moments, this is a movie whose foreign origins make even better, as we’re plunged in contemporary South Korea for a thriller that would play just as effectively anywhere else.  If, at times, it’s hard to differentiate between cultural barriers and the film’s elliptical sense of storytelling, it wraps up decently and doesn’t leave too many loose ends lying around.  (On the other hand, the plot does get more and more far-fetched as it progresses, but given the premise, that’s to be expected.)  Oldboy does live up to its great reviews; don’t wait as long as I did to see it.

  • The Debt (2010)

    The Debt (2010)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, September 2011) Fall is the season of the serious thriller, and it’s hard to get more serious than the drama-heavy The Debt, an English-language remake of an Israeli film that looks at the price of vengeance.  Here, the story hops between 1960s Berlin and the 1990s as three characters, then and now, deal with a botched mission in trying to bring back a war criminal to justice.  It doesn’t take a long time to figure out that the story of the 1960s as told by the 90s characters has a few serious gaps; it takes longer to understand that its conclusion is a lie and that the consequences of that lie are still very much in play thirty years later.  Directed without much levity, The Debt is good for a few suspense sequences, a look at a fallible Mossad and a structure that plays out over thirty years.  Helen Mirren makes for a capable senior secret agent, whereas Jessica Chastain ably plays her, thirty years earlier.  Otherwise, the film is unobjectionable: Solidly directed, competently acted and professionally executed, it’s a serious thriller that works better than most other suspense movies in theater.  Sadly, it doesn’t quite shine –for all of its potential in setting a story across two time periods, it sometimes feel as if The Debt is timid in bringing all of its threads together, or playing off the ironic possibilities of its bifurcated structure.  It’s not much of a criticism, but then again it’s hard to express exactly what’s missing when one feels that something is missing.  It may be better to rejoice in the return of the serious thriller after an empty summer.

  • Flammen & Citronen [Flame & Citron] (2008)

    Flammen & Citronen [Flame & Citron] (2008)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, September 2011) It would have been so easy to take the basic premise of this film and make a big schlocky over-the-top action movie out of it: After all, what better than two distinctive assassins working together to kill Nazis during occupied WW2 Denmark to inspire gunfights, car chases and explosions?  In fact, for short moments, it’s possible to mistake Flammen & Citronen for such an action movie.  There’s gunplay, car chases and maybe an explosion or two.  But make no mistake: As it advances, the film gets grimmer and grimmer, as it becomes obvious that the resistance is being exploited, that the Nazis may not all be worth a bullet in the head, and as the two lead characters fall in increasingly desperate circumstances.  Sooner or later, their actions doom them to an inglorious end.  Still, Flammen & Citronen does deliver in terms of entertainment, and the downbeat ending fits with the ambiguous thematic aspirations of the script.  (It’s also faithful to the true story that inspired the film.)  As a look at World War 2 from a different perspective than the Anglo-Saxon (or French) one, Flammen & Citronen is an entry on par to the Dutch Zwartboek / Black Book.  (Even though Verhoeven’s film feels more polished, the pair makes for a splendid double feature.)  The production values of the film as impressive, and the recreation of the era is believable.  Thure Lindhardt and Mads Mikkelsen are fine in the title roles, but WW2 cinephiles will have more fun spotting Christian Berkel in yet another Nazi role.  Flammen & Citronen got practically no play in North America, but it’s a world-class piece of cinema; anyone who thinks that there’s nothing more to say about World War 2 may want to have a look at this one.

  • Zwartboek [Black Book] (2006)

    Zwartboek [Black Book] (2006)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, August 2011) For a director who helped re-shape American popular cinema with four solid hits and one legendary failure in-between 1987’s Robocop and 1997’s Starship Troopers, Paul Verhoeven has been really quiet since the artistic failure of Hollow Man in 2000.  To see his only film since then, you’d have to find  Zwartboek, a World War 2 thriller in which a beautiful young Netherlander woman is stuck between the occupying Nazi forces and the local resistance movement during the last few days of the war.  While, at first, Zwartboek seems to be just another resistance film, the increasingly messy tangle of allegiances makes for a far more interesting narrative, and a striking statement on what happens after victory is obtained: Accounts are settled, resentment surfaces as aggression and accusations are more effective than doubt.  Produced with what feels like a decent budget by Netherlander standards, Zwartboek convincingly re-creates the period, and features more than decent production values.  There are even a few chases and explosions to reassure us that, yes, it’s that Paul Verhoeven.  But much of the film belongs to the actors, starting with Carice van Houten playing a merciless role as the heroine.  (WW2 cinephiles will also recognize Christian Berkel from other similar movies as Valkyrie, Downfall and Inglourious Basterds, among many others.)  Amusingly for a film featuring an unusual non-Anglo-Saxon viewpoint on WW2, Canadians get a fairly good portrait as the liberators toward the end of the story.  Weaker points include a framing device that robs the film of a bit of suspense, and a clunky first act that seems to run around in coincidental circles, meeting everyone twice in the small universe of The Hague.  Still, while the film’s solid European origins clearly show in the amount of casual nudity and the last act’s lack of moral certitudes, the overall result is an entertaining film that more than holds up to anything else in the world.

  • Best Worst Movie (2009)

    Best Worst Movie (2009)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On cable TV, August 2011) A documentary about the revival of Troll 2 as a cult movie favourite by its grown-up child actor Michael Stephenson, Best Worst Movie is most interesting when it touches upon the lives of actors twenty years later.  It wisely focuses on George Hardy, who shelved his acting ambitions to become a dentist and discovers to his surprise that the film has grown in popularity since its financially disastrous release.  Going from his quiet Midwestern life to the film festival circuit, Hardy acts as the audience’s stand-in as he discovers the peculiar nature of cult movie aficionados.  Best Worst Movie eventually ends up speaking to nearly every major contributor to Troll 2, showing us a bittersweet diversity of fates: From a New York Times bestselling author to a self-admitted failure, a reformed mental patient, a bitter delusional director and an actress whose hard life has left her unhinged from reality, the aftermath of a low-budget film proves fascinating to explore.  At a time where film geeks can learn nearly everything about a film after its release on DVD, Best Worst Movie takes the long view and asks where minor actors can be found twenty years after a disreputable low-budget effort.  (Some of them, still working in the industry, conveniently leave Troll 2 out of their resume.)  There’s a dramatic arc of sorts to the film as Hardy briefly flirts with the idea of a revived acting career, then hits a wall at two major conventions and realizes how little he has to regret as a successful member of his community.  A cult movie success doesn’t necessarily translate into broader horizons, and few seem to miss that point as completely as Troll 2 director Claudio Fragasso, who mistakes the trash-movie following for his earlier film as a repudiation of the critics’ savaging. (Admittedly, he may be self-consciously playing an Italian-director archetype here.)  Best Worst Movie is an entertaining, not-always-funny trip through the underworld of cinema; the so-bad-it’s-good upside-down universe of horror cult films, the not-so-triumphant aftermath of lives after “being in a movie” and the unsettling realization that most bad movies never get even an affectionate cult revival, but slink away from mind without a single trace in popular culture.  Despite the occasional laughs in Best Worst Movie, there’s enough in here to inspire sober reflection.  I suppose that a more dispassionate filmmaker may have been able to dig a bit deeper in the issues raised by Troll 2’s cult revival; on the other hand, Michael Stephenson got access to nearly everyone of consequence, and the resulting film is far more affectionate about its subject than you may expect.

  • Ice Quake (2010)

    Ice Quake (2010)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On cable TV, August 2011) There isn’t much to be said about Ice Quake besides “made-for-TV science-fiction disaster movie”.  From that curt description, everyone should understand that the film’s low-budget doesn’t allow it to match its own ambition.  A small number of cookie-cutter characters, truncated action sequences, slap-dash special effects, stupid science, straightforward plotting and surprise-less drama quickly follow.  Still, compared to the standards set by previous “Syfy Channel Specials”, Ice Quake is a bit better than most.  The quality of the images is fairly nice: some Alaskan stock footage helps, but there are a few BC location sequences that are pretty in their own right.  Thanks to the actors (including Brendan Fehr), the characters are somewhat sympathetic despite the ham-fisted screenwriting.  More significantly, the film dares to attempt things like snow-bound location shooting, snowmobile stunts, CGI helicopter sequences and a kind of disaster (methane build-up, released in super-frozen geysers) that hasn’t yet been overused on film.  It doesn’t really achieve complete success, but the attempt is ambitious and the level of quality could have been far worse.  For hard-SF fans, the plot to the film is in the comforting template of scientists seeing a problem, understanding a problem and resolving the problem (also see: the joined-at-the-hip Movie Network/Super Écran made-for-TV disaster film Metal Tornado).  The Christmas theme should play big around the holidays.  Don’t expect much, and you just may be not entirely disappointed.